Columbia (Rsttoftrftp mtijeCttpofJJmtgork THE LIBRARIES fat €pcd)0 of €!|titcl) Qistatg €biteb b|> 3o!)n fiilton, JD.JD., ££.£) ©oL U. <£en fepocfa of £#ure$ jgisfovg THE POST-APOSTOLIC AGE BY LUCIUS WATERMAN, D.D. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENRY CODMAN POTTER, D.D., LL.D. BISHOP OF NEW YORK CfaxkB JlcttBtier'e Jions MDCCCXCVIII • * • » • t* Copyright, 1898 By Charles Scribner's Sons INTRODUCTION. The demand for the series of volumes of which this is one is an interesting witness to an interest- ing and significant situation. Church histories have been hitherto of chief if not of exclusive interest to scholars ; and even within this narrow circle the demand for merely ecclesiastical histories has been narrower still. But if our age has brought nothing else with it, it has brought an instinct of historic inquiry which has, happily, largely freed itself from partisan or ecclesiastical bias, and which has learned to read and to tell the story of the Christian cen- turies in a larger spirit and with a more candid ut- terance. To this end the whole tendency of modern schol- arship, with its more critical and more independent methods, has happily contributed ; and side by side with the growth of a spirit of frank and fearless in- quiry, there has grown up among educated people a more intelligent judgment of historical facts, and more hearty appreciation of every endeavor to as- certain them. It is in such a temper and with such an aim, I venture to think, that the following pages have been written ; and I believe they will vindicate the wisdom and accuracy of their author's method, and 278015 vi Introduction. his sincere and candid purpose to seek and to tell the truth. There are elements in the situation at the close of the nineteenth century which would seem to make them opportune. The constant enlargement or the area of our knowledge is among the most important, of these. The curious and interesting history of the discovery of Versions of the Gospels has its analogy in kindred discoveries such as the *' Teaching of the Twelve, " which have both wid- ened the area of historic fact and incident, and confirmed upon a surer foundation much that we already knew. In addition to the treasures of Eusebius, Tacitus and Suetonius, of Bingham, Ne- ander, Vitringa and Routh, more recent scholarship has enriched us with the work of Bunsen, ScharT, Reuss, Ritschl, Lightfoot and Westcott ; and has made the task of the student who would write the history of the second of the Christian centuries at once more interesting and less difficult by bringing into clearer light the forces and influences which, at work in the Apostolic age, projected themselves with such irresistible force into the age which im- mediately followed it. Again ; an element in the present situation which makes such a work as this a timely one is the eman- cipation of scholarship from the domination of mere ecclesiasticism. It cannot be denied that a good deal of Church history has been written with some- thing of the art of the hired advocate ; and those traditions of indirectness, of suppression, of perver- sion, or of deliberate mutilation, which have been Introduction. vii a dominant note in almost all Latin methods of dealing with the history of Christianity, and espe- cially with anything that concerned the claims or authority of the Church, have practically vitiated the worth of much that has come down to us as Church history. No better sign has appeared of the dawn of a new era than the change, in these re- spects, in the methods of all but a very limited and insignificant group of Christian scholars ; and the growth of a worthier aim, in this respect, is one of the most cheering signs of the times. Still another aspect of our better learning which makes this task a timely one, is the inter-relation and mutual inter-action, in the progress of early Christianity, of forces which it is common to dis- tinguish as respectively sacred or secular, upon each other. That the Christianity of the second century was affected by the civilization of the second cen- tury is not less true than that morals and con- duct between A. D. 100 and A. D. 200 were in- fluenced by the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. The proportions in each case were undoubtedly enormously different ; but Athens and Rome made themselves felt in the unfolding of the new religion, even as the new religion thrilled and transformed those to whom it came. To trace this mutual in- ter-action, and to recognize its consequences is one of the tasks which it has been reserved for our time adequately to perform. It will constrain us to readjust, it may be, our estimates both of men and of events ; and best of all, it will chasten our often extravagant estimates whether of the acts of indi- viii Introduction. viduals or of the decrees of ecclesiastical councils, to a degree which cannot but issue in the triumph of truth over ignorance, prejudice and partisanship. Best of all, a history of the earlier ages of the Church's life written in such a spirit and with such advantages as I have indicated, cannot but contrib- ute to the restoration of its essential unity upon the basis of essential facts. The enormous audac- ity which in our generation has added new dog- mas to the historic creeds of Christendom, and the very novel claims of authority under which this has been done, have awakened a far wider challenge of Ultramontanism, even among its own followers, than its leaders have been willing to recognize. These cite it before the bar of history, and to that bar it must go. Nor, as de Pressense has reminded us, has the subject a lesser interest for those who disown the claims of the " Roman Obedience. " " Before them also there are serious questions for solution both in the domain of theology and in that of the Church. There is not a single religious party which does not feel the need either of confirmation or of transfor- mation. All the Churches born of the great move- ment of the sixteenth century are passing through a time of crisis. They are all asking themselves, though from various standpoints, whether the Ref- ormation does not need to be continued and devel- oped. Aspiration toward the Church of the future is becoming more general, more ardent. But for all who admit the divine origin of Christianity the Church of the future has its type and its ideal in Introduction. ix that great past which goes back not three, but eighteen centuries. To cultivate a growing knowl- edge of this, in order to attain to a growing con- formity to it, is the task of the Church of to-day. " 1 Toward the accomplishment of that task, I ven- ture to believe, the work of my friend the author of this volume will not unworthily contribute. Henry C. Potter. Diocesan House, New York, July, 1898. 1 De Presseiise. The Apostolic Age, p. 9. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. When I told a thoughtful man in my congrega- tion that I was going to write a book of Church History, his answer was, " Then I hope you'll make it interesting." I am sorry to acid that he uttered that word of hope in an unhopeful tone of voice. My friend ha3 seemed to be interested in my preach- ing. He did not think it likely that he could be moved to any interest in any history of the Church. My mind has gone back to that incident many times. What a gain it would be, if we could get Christian men generally to think of the Church here on earth as the Mystical Body of our Lord, in which He dwells and works, and joys and suffers, and thus to learn to read with sympathetic interest the story of the fortunes and misfortunes of that Body, the training, through virtues and faults, of that Bride that Jesus Christ is preparing for Himself ! I have had in mind also a certain " Ladies' His- torical Club " well known to me, made up of women, intelligent and studious, who inform themselves with honest ambition and hard work in the history of England and America, but feel no shame that they know almost nothing of the history of the Church, and that what they do know they generally know wrong. They think, for instance, of " the Catholic Church " as a corrupt outgrowth from original Christianity, with a " Pope " at the head of it, and xi xii Preface. of the early bishops of Rome as " Popes," which last is exactly as unhistorical as it would be to call Queen Elizabeth ''Empress of India." Surely the Kingdom of God has influenced the development of humanity more profoundly than even the British Empire. Christian history is quite as necessary to education as English history. I make bold to say, therefore, that in Chapter II. of this book I have had such " Clubs " particularly in mind. They do not as a rule read Greek, but they do read original authorities in good translations, rather than know nothing of original authorities at all. If such organizations could be induced to put Church His- tory into their programmes, they would read (in translation at least) Barnabas and the Teaching, Clement, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp. They would read books on both sides of some of the great historical controversies, and gradually make up their own minds. Then whichever way they settled their convictions, I should never say again that what they knew, they knew wrong, for whether their opinions were mine, or the opposite of mine, they would be worthy of respect. A reviewer in the London " Guardian" has twice suggested lately that a historian's business is to un- roll his facts like the pictures of a panorama, — so, at least I have understood the criticism, — and not come before the curtain to lecture on them. This advice I have wished to lay to heart. Yet there are persons who are so little accustomed to visiting panoramas of this kind that the movements of the figures would be unintelligible, and so uninteresting, to them, un- Preface. xiii less some one came forward to explain a little here and there. If I have put my own views of the his- tory before the history itself more than the interests of the audience that I had in my eye required, it is a crime of which I hope that I may live to repent. For those readers, in particular, who have never trodden this way before, I have tried to be an honest guide, fairly indicating to them the places where an- other might guide them altogether different^. At least, I have taken special pains to point this out in dealing with the origins of the Christian Ministry. In every historical study different men are found taking different views. In the latter part of this volume there seemed to be much less need of re- minder concerning such differences than in the earlier. A few additional suggestions may be made here. (1) A critical friend thinks the note on p. 79 wholly unfair to a distinguished scholar, "as most unrepre- sentative of the average cogency of his argumenta- tion." My critic is a man better entitled to be heard than I am. Therefore I give his view, as it is a question of fairness to a person. I should not have written the note, if I had not felt deeply — and I feel still— that the book in question is a vicious example of what I venture to call " the unhistorical imagina- tion," all the way through. (2) A note on p. 27 requires correction. The Fathers sometimes speak of a Divine Table, where they have in mind the sacramental provision and not at all a material structure ; but I have noted two more quotations, one from Origen, and one additional one from xiv Preface. Dionysius of Alexandria, where " Divine Table " or " Holy Table " seems to be plainly used of the Altar in a Christian Church. (3) In Chapter X. a refer- ence should have been given to a book which I have found valuable, though I cannot always follow it, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, by Rev. Charles Bigg, being the Bampton Lectures for 1886. Apart from the fact that no student can ever write a history that all other students will agree with in detail, I dare not hope that I have accom- plished my task without some inaccuracies, whether of ignorance or of carelessness, which would be obvious even to myself, if pointed out. It would be a singular favor to me if any reader who detects such would kindly give me the benefit of his fuller knowledge. And still more I should be glad to know it, if ever any one should find help or value in this volume which should make him think of the author as a friend. Lucius Waterman. Laconia, N. H., Sept. /, 1898. CONTENTS. PAGE CHAP. I.— The Character and Boundaries of the Post-Apostolic Age — Its Beginning — Its Terminal Point.— The Chief Difficulties.— When Corruption En- tered. — Its Special Purity 1 CHAP. II.— Sources of History for the Beginnings of the Post- Apostolic Age. — The Purpose of Eusebius. — Qualifications of Eusebius. — The Letter of Barnabas. — The Anti-Jewish Party. — Barnabas's Allegorism. — The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.— A Eucharistic Frag- ment. — Jewish Tone of Didache. — St. Clement not the Consul.— Was St. Clement a Bishop ?— Does 3 St. John Refer to this Quarrel? — Qualities of St. Clement's Letter. — St. Clement's Three Characteristics. — The Shepherd of Hennas.— The Prophets of the First Days.— Hermas, the Brother of Pius.— Ignatius of Antioch.— Date of Ignatius. — His Character. — Ignatian Phrases and Figures. — A Medical Man and Musical. — The Passion for Unity. — Mutual Duties of Bishop and Church. — Lost Writings of Papias 13 CHAP. III.— The Historic Episcopate— Rival Theo- ries in Modern Times. — Opinion in Third Century. — Apostles Numerous in New Testament. — Protestant Feeling about Episcopacy. — Apostles Chosen as Eye-wit- nesses. — Grounds for the Non-Episcopalian View. — New Forms of Non-Episcopalian View. — Theory of Dr. Hatch. — Theory of M. Reville. — Presbyters not Bishops at all. — Dr. McGiffert's View. — Acts and Pastoral Epistles Forgeries 61 CHAP. IV. — The Historic Episcopate — The Witnesses Called. — Eusebian Lists of Early Bishops. — Apostles in the Didache. — Prophets called Chief Priests. — St. Clement's Ambiguity. — A Bishop Offers Sacrifice. — High-priests, Priests, and Levites Now. — In the Mind of Jesus Christ. — Presbyters Called Successors of Apos- tles. — Apart from These, No Church 85 Chap. V. — The Church and the Empire — I. Persecu- tions and Apologists, to the Death of St. Poly- carp. — Causes of Dislike for Christians. — Witchcraft XV xvl Contents. PAGE and Immorality Charged. — The State Jealous of a Higher Law. — Causes of Danger to Christians. — First Account of Christian Worship. — The Decision of Trajan. — An Age of Apologists. — Quadratus Historical, not Metaphysical. — Story of Barlaam and Josaphat. — Aristides not in Bondage to the Letter.— The Character of Christians. — The Rescript of Hadriau. — Severity of the Autonines. — The Faith not Changed in Transmission. — Let Search be Made for Polycarp ! — Points of Likeness to the Lord's Death.— The Death of St. Polycarp 105 CHAP. VI. — The Church and the Empire — II. Perse- cutions and Apologists, from the Death of St. Polycarp to the Accession of Commodus. — Justin Finds a Better Philosophy. — Christians not to be Con- demned for a Name. — Justin's Argument Continued.— How Christians Were Regenerated. — The Food called a Eucharist. — The Regular Sunday Morning Service. — An Example of Roman Justice. — The First Christian Book in the Latin Tongue. — A Roman's View of Martyrdom. — Apologies Become Numerous. — The Persecution of Lyons and Vienne. — Vettius Becomes a Paraclete of the Christians. — Martyrdom is Witness-Bearing. — Christian Endurance a Puzzle to the Heathen. — Signs Following Them That Believe. — Persecution Followed by Reaction, 141 CHAP. VII.— The Church's Rivals— Ebionism and Gnosticism. — Ebionism, the Jews' Distortion of Chris- tianity. — The Nazarenes. — The Pharisaic Ebionites. — A Heretic Does Great Service as a Translator. — The Original Essene Society. — Departures of Essenic Ebionism from 'Essenism. — Danger that Men Will Look for Grace Irre- sistible. — The Pseudo-Clementine Story. — Ebionite Warnings Against a False Apostle. — Effect of the For- geries on Public Opinion. — Rationalism vs. Traditional- ism.— The Creator of the World not the True God.— The Gnostic View of iEons. — Gnostic Contrast of Pneumatic and Psychic. — Nicolas the Deacon. — Marcion of Pontus. — Lesson of Gnosticism for Nineteenth Century .... 175 CHAP. VIII. — Three Interior Strifes — The Paschal Question — Montanism — Sabellianism. — The Quar- todeciman Controversy. — Our Easter Rule not Apostolic. — Polycarp and Anicetus Agree to Differ. — The Testimony of Claudius Apolinarius. — Another Fragment from Claudius. — Directions from Rome not Binding. — Victor's Attempt at Wholesale Excommunication. — Festal Epis- tles Sent from Alexandria. — Characteristics of the Phry- gians. — Prophesy ings Attractive to the Phrygian Tem- per. — Was the Christian Revelation Final ?— The Pro- phesyings Ascribed to Evil Spirits. — Montanist Leaders Appeal for Recognition. — The Partial Successes of Mon- Contents. xvii PAGE tanism. — The First Martyrs of North Africa. — The First Vision of Perpetua. — Perpetua's Vision of the Unsaved Soul. — Saturus's Vision of Paradise. — Montanists not yet Separated from the Church. — Martyrs Triumph over Pain and Fear. — A Wise Bishop May Be More than a Constant Martyr. — Meaning of Name Monarchianism. — Heretical View of a Modal Trinity. — Noetus Introduces Monarch- ianism at Rome. — Roman Authorities Led Astray by Praxeas 208 CHAP. IX.— Early Theologians of the West— Ire n,eus — Tertullian — Hippolytus— Irenseus, the Con- servative and Peace-Maker. — The Book Against All Heresies. — Honorable Meaning of Tradition in Irenseus. — Must All Churches Agree With Rome? — Non-Roman Visitors Make Roman Tradition. — Belief of Irenseus in Infant Regeneration. — Modern Eucharistic Theories. — The Language of Irenseus not Modern. — My Body, — that is, the Figure of My Body. — Views Generally Held, but not Necessary. — Quotations from the Elders in Irenseus. — Evil Heredity of the Church of Carthage. — Tertullian's Character and Gifts. — Tertullian as an Apologist. — The New Note of Triumph. — On the Pre- scription of Heretics. — Tertullian's Statement of the Rule of Faith. — Tertullian not Definitely Separated from the Church. — Tertullian Witnessing to Christian Usages. — Tertullian on Treatment of Post-Baptismal-Sin. — Fast- ing in the Post-Apostolic Church. — Low Idea of Mar- riage in Early Centuries. — May a Lay Priesthood Offer Alone? — Hippolytus Probably a Bishop-Coadjutor. — The Quarrel about Doctrine in the Roman Church. — The Quarrel about Discipline in the Roman Church. — The Scandal concerning St. Callistus. — Did Christians Choose an Embezzler as Bishop ? — The Roman Bishops Did not Go to Extremes 258 CHAP. X.— Early Theologians of the East — The School of Alexandria — Clement — Origen. — The Divine Apathy. — The Logos in Philo. — The Catechetical School. — Clement of Alexandria. — Clement Really Ortho- dox. — Clement's Writings. — Clement's Advance upon Philo. — Faults of Clement's Theology. — Origen's charac- ter. — Origen's Unsparing Toil. — Origen's Friendships. — Origen a Traditionalist. — Origen both Allegorical and Literal. — The Phrase, "Eternal Generation." — Origen's Doctrine of Man. — Origen's Personal History. — Narcissus of Jerusalem. — Origen's First Stay in Csesarea. — Origen's Ordination. — Was Origen Condemned as a Heretic? — Origen's Burial-place 317 CHAP. XI. — The Church and the Empire from Com- modus to Diocletian— Cyprian and His Times. — xviii Contents. PAGE Roman Citizenship Given to all Freemen. — The Decian PersecutioD. — Chief Victims under Valerian. — Self-sacri- fice and Self-will. — The Pope of Carthage. — Cyprian Avoids the Persecution. — Sacriflcati, Thurificati, Libellatici. — Cyprian's Feeling about Martyrs and Confessors. — The Schism of Felicissimus. — Cyprian Suppresses Informa- tion. — Novation and Novatus. — Novatianist Idea of the Church. — The Church Must be One. — Cyprian's Idea of the Episcopate. — A Forger Enlarges Cyprian. — Can Bad Men Do God's Works? — Infant and Clinic Baptisms. — Bespondere NataWbus. — Our Dead not Lost. — Stephen Be- comes Bishop of Rome. — An Appeal from Gaul. — Begin- ning of the Re-Baptism Controversy. — Three Views of What is Baptism. — The Fifth Council of Carthage. — Stephen Excommunicates Himself. — Large Allowance of Wide Difference. — The Church Rejects Cyprian's View. — Cyprian's Belief in Heavenly Signs. — Cyprian's Arrest and Trial. — Cyprian's Death and Glorification. — Cy- prian's Lesson for To-day 360 CHAP. XII. — The Foety Yeaes' Rest, and the Tenth Wave. — Dionysius Opposes Chiliasm. — Misunderstand- ings as to the use of Words. — Stories of Gregory Thau- maturgus. — St. Firmilian of Csesarea. — Heresy and Depo- sition of Paul. — The Word Homo-ousios. — Vitality of the Armenian Church. — The Divine Call to the Ascetic Life. — The Career of St. Anthony. — Arnobius and Lactantius. — The Diocletian Persecution. — The Vision of Constau- tine 422 CHAP. XIII.— Last Woeds of Some Woekings of the Chuech's Mind in the Post-Apostolic Age.— The Change from Custom to Canon. — What was Included in the Faith?— The Faith Fixed, Theology Free.— The Doctrine of Confirmation. — Cyprian on the Laying on of Hands. — Doctrine of Eucharist as Sacrifice. — Justin and Irenseus on Sacrifice. — The Alexandrians on Sacrifice. — Early Views of the Sabbath Idea. — The Early Lord's Day no Sabbath. — Canon of Scripture not Settled Early. — Early Christian Liturgies. — Contents of an Ancient Liturgy. — Liturgies Point to Common Model. — The Creed not Said in Early Liturgies. — Lord's Prayer Called a Form of Consecration. — Are Forms in the Didache Liturgical?— The Church is Christ's After All . 447 THE POST-APOSTOLIC AGE. CHAPTER I. THE CHARACTER AND BOUNDARIES OF THE POST- APOSTOLIC AGE. HE Post- Apostolic Age " is a good name for that period in the history of the Church of Christ which covers the second and third centuries of the Christian Era. The boundaries of the period shall be defined more closely in a moment. Let us begin with a word about the natural differ- ence between an age that was Apostolic and an age that was Post-Apostolic. The Church in every age must have leadership. Men cannot live without leaders, Where do such leaders come from ? They grow; they are evolved. But those who believe in the supernatural origin of Christianity and the Deity of the Christ, cannot regard our Lord Jesus as a leader that merely grew up naturally out of the con- ditions of His day, nor can they regard His original Apostles, nor yet St. Paul, as naturally evolved into the positions they came to occupy, merely by force of their own gifts and the operation of circumstances. Their gifts had a great deal to do with their great work. Their circumstances shaped their careers very A 1 The Post- Apostolic Age. largely,. ; But an. overruling, providence did far more. Historical evolution is indeed a great fact. Even the hurnan, .na'cure of our Blessed Lord was prepared for Him largely by a process of evolution under providential law, working through long ages before He was born. No doubt of that. But the chief truth of His Being was that He came down from heaven, bringing a new force into the world. So when He chose His Apostles, He chose such men as had by natural growth certain qualities that He wanted for the first leaders of His future Church, but then also He gave them some very special en- dowments in addition, and more particularly He so sent them to their work that the Church could not help feeling that they were a gift from Him much rather than a growth from itself. The same may be said of St. Matthias, providentially selected to fill the place of Judas, and again of St. Paul. While any of those first leaders remained alive and active, the Church must have felt that it was at least partially under a leadership that was in a peculiar sense let down from heaven. From the time that the last of those Apostles died, the Church must have felt that its leadership was in a new way its own, evolved out of itself, grown up out of the earth. The Church believed profoundly that its leaders who were or- dained as presbyters or bishops at any period had supernatural powers conferred upon them from heaven, but it must have felt a great difference be- tween leaders chosen and trained for it by Jesus Christ and leaders chosen and trained by itself. The Church, going from the Apostolic Age to the Its Beginning. Post-Apostolic, probably felt its own freedom and its own responsibility somewhat as a boy going from home for the first time, to enter college, feels his. Nearly up to the death of the last of the Apostles, Christians must have felt, " All our great questions are decided for us." After that turning-point was passed, Christians would feel, " Now we decide all our questions ourselves." Naturally also some self- confident souls would have rejoiced greatly in this new liberty, and some anxious souls would have shrunk from it as long as possible. In some Churches the Post-Apostolic period would practically begin as soon as there was no longer any likelihood of such a thing as that one of the original Apostles should ever visit their city, and in others the new conditions might not be much felt until there arose to leader- ship young men who had no personal recollections of any of the Twelve nor of St. Paul. Thus the general date for the beginning of the Post-Apostolic Age would be about A. D. 100, St. John the Evangelist being the last survivor of the Apostles named by our Lord, and dying at Ephesus in extreme old age, in the third year of the Emperor Trajan, who came to the throne in A. D. 98. But some churches — that of the great city of Rome, for example, — may well have begun to enter upon the Post-Apostolic lines of thought and practice as early as A. D. 70, just after the martyrdom of St. Paul, and others may have been so slow to face new emer- gencies as hardly to reach the Post- Apostolic charac- ter before A. D. 120. What distinguished the Post-Apostolic Age from The Post- Apostolic Age. that which went before it was the Church's new in- dependence and free self-government. Our period is distinguished from that which came after it by another great change of external pressure, and that change has a very definite date indeed. The date most commonly assigned for the beginning of a third period in Church History is A. D. 325, the date of the Council of Nicsea. But while that next period is well called " the period of the Ecumenical Coun- cils," of which this of Nicsea was first, it got its prevailing character from another cause altogether. In the second and third centuries the Christian re- ligion was persecuted. In the fourth and fifth and sixth centuries the Christian religion was fashion- able. The change was tremendous, of course, and it came suddenly, when a new emperor, Constantine, made up his mind that the Christian society was so large and strong and had such an influence over its members, that to make friends with it and patronize it was the best possible means of securing a loyal upholding of the Roman Empire in its decay. Con- stantine believed, no doubt, that the Christian re- ligion was the true religion, but there is equally no doubt that he thought it was going to be a great piece of good policy for him to appear as its friend and protector. From the time that he did so the world began to pour into the Church, partly from policy, without any conversion, partly from love of going with the crowd, with not more than half-con- version, and lo ! the Church's life and character were suddenly and profoundly changed. Few transitions from one age to another are really sudden and clear- Its Terminal Point. cut. One period melts into another, as dawn passes into clay. We have recognized that in allowing the beginnings of the Post-Apostolic Age to be set down as belonging anywhere from A. D. 70 to A. D. 120. But the end of our period and the definite beginning of a very different one may be assigned to the year when Constantine published his Edict of Toleration, the Edict of Milan, A. D. 313. That edict did not in words promise anything more than simple tolera- tion, with full legal protection for liberty and prop- erty, whether of individual Christians, or of the Church ; but a report got out that the Emperor was to be a supporter of Christianity, and ere long the rumor became a certainty, and the Church passed at one bound from bloody persecution to fashion and favor. It may help us to study intelligently our own period, the Post-Apostolic Age, if we make here a brief comparison of the three periods, the Apostolic, the Post-Apostolic, and that of the Ecumenical Councils. In the Apostolic Age the great work of the Church was t@ convert as many Jews as possible, while holding the door carefully open for the heathen, or as the technical phrase is, "the Gen- tiles," to come in. Great as was the glory and duty of the Christian Church as a universal missionary to all men everywhere, the first and most particular business of the Christian Church of the first century was to save from loss as many Jews as possible, the special people who had been brought into covenant with God already as members of the Church under the Mosaic dispensation. The question how far the 6 The Post- Apostolic Age. Jewish nation and Church could be carried over into the new covenant and the new life had to be settled in a very few years. Till near the end of the first century it must have been easier to make a Christian out of a religious-minded Jew than out of a heathen man. Before the Church had gone far into the sec- ond century, it must have become much harder to convert a Jew than a heathen. The felt opposition of Judaism and Christianity had come to be hard- ened into the most bitter and passionate of all preju- dices. In the first age, then, the chief work of the Church had been to save as much as possible of the Jewish nation, ere it was too late. Correspondingly, the Church's great danger was that of allowing Judaism to narrow our Lord's generous plan of sal- vation into something too much after the Mosaic order. The Church's chief conflict was with Juda- izers, eager to impose upon all Christians, even the converts coming in from heathenism, such Mosaic laws as those of Circumcision and the Sabbath. 1 When our period begins, that work had been done, and that difficulty on the whole wisely met. In the Post-Apostolic Age, therefore, the Church settles down to its enormous task of converting the world. The question how much of the older Church of God could be carried over into the new, and that other question, how far the new Church was to be like the old, — how much, in fact, of the older Church's stock in trade was worth taking over into the new business, were settled beyond reopening. Anti- 1 For discussion of the Sunday observance of the early Church, see p. 456. The Chief Difficulties. Christian Judaism was henceforth the most hopeless of all fields of work. The Church's great business was the conversion of the heathen. Its danger and difficulty were of two kinds. First, there was perse- cution. We must read the story of it later. At present, it is enough to say that the Church was often in danger of losing such members as seemingly it could least afford to lose, and did lose a great many, and of course, it looked as if the Church's progress was sorely hindered. As a matter of fact, it may be doubted if the Church ever had a more prosperous period as regards real growth in holy power than this when it was suffering frequent and sometimes awful persecution. " The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church." The Church of this second period was profoundly affected by persecution, but probably it gained many more con- verts than it lost, and more holiness also, by the tre- mendous experience of martyrdom. Much more dangerous to the Church at this time was the at- tempt — there were really a host of them, as we shall see — to rival the new religion by the discovery of another, still more attractive to the mind of the day. Imagine forty or fifty forms of what is known as " Christian Science " sweeping over the world of our day and drawing much people after them, so as to be a serious hindrance to the endeavors of the Christian Kingdom to get a hearing. Then you will have some slight idea of what the various forms of Gnosti- cism were to the Christian Church of the second century. We shall have to notice some few at- tempts to make the Church different from what 8 The Post- Apostolic Age. Christ made it, by reforming it in a Puritan direc- tion, making it narrower and more severe in its dis- cipline than it had been ; but these were compara- tively small movements. Mostly the strife of this age was to show men that the Christian religion had a claim on them and an exclusive authority, because it was a revelation from God. Hence it was very much an age of published claims and proofs, in fact, of Apologetics, in that older meaning of the word which carries no thought of having, in our modern speech, anything to apologize for, but simply and solely having an answer to give to any man that is ready to make a reasonable enquiry concerning the truth. It was also an age of forming a theology, that is, of putting Christian truths into an orderly form, so as to show that they go together and make a harmonious fabric, not merely a confused heap, and so as to show also that while some of them surpassed human reason utterly, as for example, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and could never by human reason l have been established, yet none of the Christian truths contradicted human reason, or necessarily antagonized the methods then current among philosophical students. But of all this we shall have more in our later chapters. The chief point now is that the Church's great struggle in this age was to persuade men to accept Apostolic Christi- anity as the one true religion, emphasized by the death of Jesus Christ and sanctioned by His resur- 1 Yet it should be observed that Plato, greatest of Greek philoso- phers, did reason out for himself the idea that the Unity of the Perfect Being could uot be a solitary and loveless unity. When Corruption Entered. rection. The point of difference between this and the next age is that Arianism and later heresies pro- fessed themselves to be each the full flower of truth, blooming in new brightness on the Catholic stem, and interpreting in new forms what had always been the heart of the Christian creeds. They found Apostolic Christianity in possession of the field, and their only way to get a hearing was to claim to speak with the true voice of Apostolic Christianity. But in the Post-Apostolic Age, Christianity had not yet been granted a patent, as it were, on its device in the way of a universal religion. It was still possible for men to suppose that they could throw Christ's teaching, or what they liked of it, into whatsoever form best pleased them, and offer it to the w T orld under the name of Christianity, or under any other name, for that matter, with as good a chance of ac- ceptance as those could expect to have who were called Christians and referred themselves to. Apos- tolic founders, and were beginning to be known as the Catholic Church. All this is in marked contrast with the conditions of the third period of the Church's life, the Age of the Councils (A. D. 313-681). I have mentioned that period chiefly to emphasize a certain important distinction. Men say that the Primitive Church be- came corrupted very rapidly. Quite true. But they fail to distinguish the point where the main stream of corrupting influence poured in. That was just at the beginning of the third period, when Christianity ceased to be persecuted and suddenly became popu- lar. Under Constantine's government it did not pay 10 The Post- Apostolic Age. any longer to be known as a heathen. It might pos- sibly pay to be known as a Christian. In a short time the Church came to have five times as many members as it had numbered under persecuting Dio- cletian. 1 Then these multitudes of new-made Chris- tians naturally wanted to adapt their Christianity as much as possible to their own tastes. The Church's work took a new form. It was to convert nominal Christians into real ones. The Church's danger and difficulty were quite other than they had been. In the Age of the Councils the chief danger was world- liness making Christ's religion something other than Christ gave. The chief difficulty was to resist the pressure for getting rid of mystery in religious be- lief, for relaxing discipline, for making light of sin, for requiring less of spiritual life. Then, also, it be- came a much more serious task for the Church to resist the reactions that were necessarily provoked by such evils, and would mend them, or end them, in the Puritan fashion, by limiting the Church's work of grace to such persons as were already highly sanctified, or could profess to be so. To sum up all, the first period of the Church, the Apostolic Age, is a period of immaturity and prep- aration, — one might almost say, of infancy. The third period, that of the Councils, is one of much 1 There is reason for estimating the Christian population of Rome about A. D. 250 at fifty thousand, which would be as low as five per cent, of the whole number of inhabitants. Near the end of the next century, the Christian population of Antioch was one- half of the whole, a proportion ten times as great. The accession of Constantine comes just about halfway between these two points. That the Church's membership was multiplied by fire within fifty years after that accession would seem to be a reasonably low esti- mate. Its Special Purity. 11 corruption, though also, thank God, one of noble and greatly effectual resistance to corruptions. The sec- ond period, the period described in this volume, is — not the best, surely, in the Church's story. One who really believes in the power of the indwelling Life of Jesus Christ as a leaven and in the guiding of the Holy Ghost must certainly regard the Church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a far better Church than the Church of the second and third. Not the best, then, but — the purest of all that the Church has known. It will show us, in the serious judgment of the writer of these lines, the thought and purpose of our Saviour Jesus Christ, less modified by the natural thoughts and feelings of the men who are trying to assimilate His thoughts, than any following age. Many earnest souls to-day are not only filled full with the prejudices of Post-Refor- mation thought in its nineteenth century Protestant form, but accept them uncritically as if they were fixed standards of Divine Truth. Such will feel a shock in reading of some of the thoughts and prac- tices of the Church of the very first century after the Apostles, the Church of the pupils of St. John. Will they not suffer an affectionate exhortation from their brother, the writer of these lines, that they con- demn not hastily these very early witnesses of the Master's mind? In the sixteenth century the Church needed reforming sorely, and God's providence sup- plied the need. Possibly our forefathers who were engaged in that honorable undertaking, may some- times have thrown out with the rubbish, inadvert- ently, jewels which the Church had been wont to 12 The Post- Apostolic Age. wear when the Apostolic teaching was still ringing in her ears, and when some of her sons were of those who had learned their religion from men that had been companions of Jesus Christ in the flesh. The theology which resulted from an honest attempt of martyrs and confessors to understand what they re- ceived almost directly from Jesus Christ, may seem as likely to be sound and true as a theology which resulted from the attempt to reform a deeply corrupted Christianity, and got its shape largely by way of reaction from the very corruption which it essayed to remove. CHAPTER II. SOURCES OF HISTORY FOR THE BEGINNINGS OF THE POST-APOSTOLIC AGE. OW do you know?" It is a charac- teristic enquiry of childhood, but it is a natural demand of maturer intelli- gences, too. Students of history may well wonder sometimes where histor- ical writers get their information, and why different books tell the story in so irreconcilably different ways. The first half of the Post- Apostolic Age is one of the periods in which scholars have found it hardest to agree on their facts. It may be particu- larly useful, therefore, to have some idea where they go to get them, and how they get such a wide differ- ence in their results. The subject is large enough to fill several volumes of this size. In a single chapter, it will be understood, only a glimpse of it can be given. We shall here take account of the earliest Church History that has come down to us, and of the few works of Christian writers that seem to belong to what we may call " the transition per- iod " of the Post-Apostolic Church, anywhere from 75 to 125 A. D. I. Eusebius. For a short period, of only two hundred years, it would, of course, be particularly interesting and helpful to have a history of the time 13 14 The Post- Apostolic Age. written by a man who had lived within it himself, — a man of learning and of a laborious habit, and who had access to good libraries, writing just after the period closed. All this we have, most happily, in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, bishop of Cses- area in Palestine. The place of Eusebius in history is most interesting. He died A. D. 339, having been bishop of Csesarea, the metropolis of Palestine, for about twenty-five years. He is so precise in cutting off certain persons and events as belonging to " our own times," that we are enabled to fix the year of his birth at 260 or very near that date. He was, then, a man of fifty years when our period comes to a close. Nearly one-fourth of this Post-Apostolic Age of ours was covered by his span of life, when he sat down to write the story of it. His history shows signs of having been written just after the turning-point when Constantine's Edict of Tolera- tion, and still more his well-known favorable attitude toward Christianity had begun to give thoughtful ob- servers a feeling that the Church was entering upon a new life. 1 In this view the book is, in Bishop West- cott's words (quoted in Bishop Lightfoot's Article, Eusebius of Gsesarea^ Dictionary of Christian Biog- raphy, Vol. II. p. 323), " the last great literary monu- ment of the period which it describes. It belongs not only in substance, but also in theological charac- 1 There are ten books of the History. The tenth was written within the limits of the years 323 and 325, in which last year the work was published, if one can use such a phrase. When there were no printing-presses, publishing a book meant only announc- ing that it was done and allowing professional scribes to begin to make copies of it for sale. The Purpose of Eusebius. 15 ter, to the Ante-Nicene Age. It gathers up and ex- presses in a form anterior to the age of dogmatic definition the experience, the feelings, the hopes, of a body which had just accomplished its sovereign suc- cess, and was conscious of its inward strength." It will be interesting to note what such a man thought it worth while to write about in a Church History. Here is his own statement, the opening paragraph of his great work. 1 " It is my purpose to write an account of the suc- cessions of the holy Apostles, as well as of the times which have elapsed from the days of our Saviour to our own ; and to relate the many important events which are said to have occurred in the history of the Church ; and to mention those who have governed and presided over the Church in the most prominent parishes, 2 and those who in each generation have pro- claimed the divine word either orally or in writing. It is my purpose also to give the names and number and times of those who through love of innovation have run into the greatest errors, and proclaiming them- selves discoverers of knowledge falsely called, 3 have like fierce wolves unmercifully devastated the flock of Christ. It is my intention, moreover, to recount 'The translation is that of Doctor A. C. McGiffert, of the Union Theological Seminary. His edition of Eusebius, contained in Vol. I. (Second Series), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Chris- tian Literature Co., is so much the best that can be recommended to the student, that it becomes necessary to say so, in spite of its being an advertisement for the publishers of this volume. 2 Parish, as here used, stands for bishopric, for what would now be called a diocese. Diocese in the first three Christian centuries meant a minor province of the Roman Empire, and later a group of provinces. 3 Eusebius is here quoting 1 Tim. vi. 20. The reference is to the Gnostics. 16 The Post- Apostolic Age. the misfortunes which immediately came upon the whole Jewish nation in consequence of their plots against our Saviour, and to record the ways and the times in which the divine word has been attacked hy the Gentiles, and to describe the character of those who at various periods have contended for it in the face of blood and of tortures, as well as the confessions 1 which have been made in our own days, and finally the gracious and kindly succor which our Saviour has afforded them all. Since I propose to write of all these things, I shall commence my work with the beginning of the dispensation of our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ." To show (1) the continuity of the Church by show- ing in a few leading cities the continuity of its chief ministry as a succession of Apostles, to furnish (2) a series of noteworthy dates so as to show how events were connected together, to give (3) some account of the most distinguished rulers, preachers, and writers in the Church, to point out (4) the chief heresies that had antagonized the faith of Christ, to make clear (5) how Jewish rejection of Jesus of Nazareth had been followed by God's rejection of the Jewish peo- ple, and finally, to show (6) how, on the other hand, Christianity, even more awfully persecuted, had yet been upheld and delivered and proved to be an ob- ject of God's favor, — to tell all this, and to trace it all from the Incarnation as the only root from which such a history could grow, was the plan of Eusebins, and a truly philosophical plan. How far was he 1 Confession was a technical term for the act of confessing Christ before persecutors, where the suffering fell short of death. Qualifications of Eusebius. 17 capable of carrying it out? Well, certainly he had one great qualification. He was a man of extraor- dinarily wide knowledge. He knew books, and he knew the world and men. His personal history lies mostly outside our period, but it may be men- tioned here that he became one of the most intimate friends and trusted counselors of the first Christian Emperor. Constantine was a man of affairs. A book-worm could have gained no such hold on him. Eusebius represents the type of the Christian minis- ter who is truly religious and truly devoted to the work of his calling, but is always a man of affairs too, a man of the world to his finger-tips. Such a man is not apt to be particularly credulous. He may, indeed, if he has not literary training, be a bad sifter of evidence, and so an untrustworthy historian. But Eusebius had literary training from his youth. To begin with, he was a really eminent scholar. Then his chief teacher, a presbyter of Caesarea named Pamphilus, was a man of wealth and scholarship combined, and had gathered the richest collection of writings of interest to a Christian that that age could show. Another remarkable library had been formed at Jerusalem by the bishop, Alexander, in the first half of the third century (between the years 213 and 251), and Eusebius tells us that he himself gathered some of his materials there. Certainly he had a wealth of material. We must also credit him with a good deal of ability in using it. He is very careful in distinguishing what he feels sure of from what he is ready to give only with such an introduc- tion as " Some say," or " The story goes," or " It B 18 The Post-Apostolic Age. is reported." He must have the credit of being a really critical historian. The infidel Gibbon flings one of his most careless sneers at the honesty of Euse- bius, but a more careful study of the charges against him on this ground has caused them to be dismissed as worthless by some of the most competent scholars of our day. It is a noteworthy fact that while Euse- bius was deeply suspected of unorthodoxy amid the confusions of the controversy against Arianism, and while his name was for that cause detestable in the eyes of many of the Church's scholars, no historical student in the next two centuries essayed to rewrite the history of the Ante-Nicene Church, and do it bet- ter. There were continuations of Eusebius in plenty. Socrates, Sozomen, Philostorgius, Theodore t, — all these tried their hand at rival versions of the later history. Not one ventured to try whether Eusebius could not be improved upon. His book represents the very best scholarship and the very highest power of realizing its own history that the Church possessed at the close of the Post-Apostolic period. II. The Apostolic Fathers. Eusebius, then, is of immense value for our earlier history. Curiously enough, he is of less value for the history of the times nearer to his own, for he knew but little Latin and but little about the Latin-speaking Churches, as of North Africa and Italy and Gaul, and when he had not books to go by, he was sometimes misin- formed, and sometimes missed hearing of things that were very interesting. We must pass now to con- sider our other authorities for the early part of the Post-Apostolic Age, the books which were written by The Letter of Barnabas. 19 men living in that very time, and which throw much light upon the development of the Church in their day. These writers are commonly grouped to- gether as The Apostolic Fathers. Doubtless, the name was given originally with the idea that all the persons whose writings were thus collected belonged to what we might call the second generation of Christian teachers, — that is, were converts made by some of the original Apostles, or had at least received Christian instruction from such. That these writers had received such Apostolic teaching is in most cases probable, but not to be proven. The name is now commonly applied to all Christian writers out- side the canon of the New Testament, whose compo- sitions can be dated earlier than A. D. 125. The writings which may fairly be reckoned under this head are (1) The Letter of Barnabas, (2) The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, (3) The Letter of Clement of Rome, (4) The Shepherd of Hennas, (5) The Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and (6) The Letter of Poly- carp. 1. The Letter of Barnabas is not a great book, but it has raised a great deal of discussion. A succes- sion of eminent scholars of the early Church, — Clement of Alexandria (circa A. D. 180-200), Origen, who succeeded Clement as teacher of the theological school at Alexandria, our historian Eusebius, the learned Jerome, — all these say that it is a letter of Barnabas, the Apostle, once the com- panion of St. Paul. There is no trace of any dif- ferent opinion in the early Church. The present writer feels no doubt that it is really so. In that 20 The Post- Apostolic Age. view this letter would belong entirely to the history of the Apostolic Age, but it must be acknowledged that almost all modern scholars set the ancient testi- mony aside. It is a very poor letter, and therefore, they say, it must be entirely sub-Apostolic. Their confidence that when once a man was made an Apostle he could not say foolish things, is really touching, but one hardly knows on what it is founded. But this is riot all. If («) it had been written by a Levite, it is argued, it would not have made great blunders about the Temple ritual. If (h) it had been written by an Apostle, it would have been received by the Church as part of its inspired Scripture. If (c) it had been written by the " son of exhortation " — that, rather than "son of consolation," is Barnabas's surname given by fellow-Apostles, — it would have been eloquent. If (cl) it had been written by one who had been matched as an Apostle with St. Paul, it would have been wise. But it should be observed («) that a man might have grown old as a Levite, and yet never have done any official service in the Temple in his life. As to (6), the ancient Church was sure that this book was written by the Apostle Barnabas, 1 and yet did not receive it as a work marked by divine inspiration. That everything written by an Apostle must be the result of a special inspiration, is pure modern assumption. The ancient Church did not think so. Many find in 1 Cor. v. 9 and 2 Cor. vii. 8, indications of two letters of St. *It could not have been written by some other Barnabas, for Barnabas was not then a personal name, but only a complimentary title given to this one eminent Christian. The Anti- Jewish Party. 21 Paul not preserved by the Church as canonical, and certainly St. John wrote a letter to some Church (see 3 John 9) which was neither preserved nor even respected. Then as to (c) and ((/), experience shows that men may be most moving public speakers, yet very ineffective writers, and hardly to be described as thinkers at all. " Barnabas and Paul " are mated in the Acts, but they were not well matched, and so far from it that they could not permanently work to- gether. If the Apostle Barnabas had a fine, impress- ive presence, a warm, generous heart, a great gift of speech, and a singularly small share of brains, he would be a most natural person, such as most of us have known, and equally consistent with the narrative of the Acts and with the facts of this curious letter which bears his name. The letter itself does not tell us much about the early Church, but it shows something of the thoughts and feelings of the extreme anti-Jewish party. 1 That party hated everything Jewish. They were fiercely unwilling, as we shall see, to keep their Easter at the same time with the Jewish Passover. They de- spised the Temple and its services, which their great leader, St. Paul, always honored. They could see no good in the Jewish Scriptures even, unless they could turn them all into meanings that the Jews themselves 1 The last time that Barnabas appears before us in the New Testament (Gal. ii. 13), he is classed with Judaizers, — even Bar- nabas teas carried away with their dissimulation (R. V.). But the "even " shows that Barnabas had been on the liberal side at first, and if he was the man of feeling rather than of thought that we have supposed him to be, nothing would be more natural than that after St. Paul's rebuke had brought him out of a false posi- tion, he should go plunging to the opposite extreme. 22 The Post- Apostolic Aye. had never dreamed of. Here again St. Paul was their leader. He certainly saw mystical meanings in Old Testament stories, as we may observe in Gal. iv. But here again they left St. Paul behind, both because they gave up the study of the literal mean- ing as unprofitable, and because they ran wild in their notions of the spiritual meaning. Two brief extracts will suffice to show Barnabas at his worst and again at his best. He is at his worst in Chapter X., discoursing on the prohibition of certain kinds of food in the Old Testa- ment : " Moses spoke with a mystical reference. For this reason he named the swine as much as to say, Thou shalt not join tlryself to men who resemble swine. For when they live in pleasure, they forget their Lord ; but when they come to want they acknowl- edge the Lord. And the swine, when it has eaten, does not acknowledge its master; but when it is hungry, it cries out, and on receiving food is quiet again. Neither shalt thou eat, says he, the eagle nor the hawk, nor the kite, nor the raven. Thou shalt not join thyself, he means, to such men as know not how to procure food for themselves by labor and sweat, but seize on that of others in their iniquity, and al- though wearing an aspect of simplicity, are on the watch to plunder others. So these birds, while they sit idle, enquire how they may devour the flesh of others, proving themselves pests by their wickedness. And thou shalt not eat the lamprey, or the polypus, or the cuttle-fish. He means, Thou shalt not join thy- self to, or be like, such men as are ungodly to the Barnabas 's Allegorism. 23 end, and are condemned to death. In like manner as those fishes, alone accursed, float in the deep, not swimming like the rest, but make their abode in the mud which lies at the bottom." l In Chapter XVI. we have our writer at his best. He is not fair to God's elder church, and he ignores a great truth, that God does in all ages bring His Presence to bear on men at some times and in some places more than at other times and in other places, but he has a noble and true thought in him, worthy of a " son of exhortation." 44 Moreover, I will also tell you concerning the Temple how the wretched (Jews), wandering in error, trusted not in God Himself, but in the Tem- ple as being the House of God. For almost after the manner of the Gentiles they worshipped Him in the Temple. 2 But learn how the Lord speaks when abolishing it : Who hath meted the heaven ivith a span, or the earth with his palm f Have not If [Isa. xl. 12.] Thus saith the Lord: Heaven is My throne, and the- earth My footstool: what kind of house will ye build to Me f or what is the place of My rest? [Isa. lxvi. 1.] Ye perceive that their hope is vain. Moreover, 1 If this seems to any modern reader too absurd to have been produced by a man who had worked in company with St. Paul, it may be observed that Clement of Alexandria, writing a hundred years later, repeats this very line of interpretation, and yet Clement of Alexandria was probably the greatest Christian scholar and most distinguished teacher of his day. 2 Barnabas's word rendered "worshipped" is literally "they hallowed Him off." Perhaps it means, " they localized His Pres- ence in the Temple so much in their idea of things, that practi- cally they left no place for Him in the world of men's common life. They shut Him up in the Temple almost as much as the heathen do their gods." 24 The Post- Apostolic Age, He says again, Behold, they ivho have cast doiun this Temple, even they shall build it up again} It has so happened. For through their going to war it was destroyed by their enemies, and now they, as the servants of their enemies, shall rebuild it. 2 .... Let us enquire, then, if there is still a temple of God. There is — where He Himself declared that He would make it and finish it. For it is written, It shall come to pass when the week is completed, the Temple of God shall he built in glory in the Name of the Lord. 3 I find, therefore, that a temple does exist. Learn then how it shall be built in the Name of the Lord. Be- fore we believed in God, the habitation of our heart was corrupt and weak, as being indeed like a temple made with hands. For it was full of idolatry, and was a habitation of demons, through our doing such things as were opposed to God. But it shall be built, observe ye, in the Name of the Lord, in order that the Temple of the Lord may be built in glory. How? Learn. Having received the forgiveness of sins, and placed our trust in the Name of the Lord, we have become new creatures formed again from the beginning. Wherefore in our habitation God 1 This is a misquotation of Isa. xlix. 17, which was given in the Greek version called the Septuagint as Thou shalt soon be built up by those by whom thou wast destroyed. 2 This should be rather, "the very servants of their enemies shall rebuild it," or possibly, " they and the servants," etc. In either reading the meaning is, as presently appears, that men converted to tbe faith and worship of the Christian Church are built into a spiritual temple, and are themselves builders of such a temple, though they be servauts of a great heathen empire. 3 It is hardly worth while to refer as editors do, to Daniel ix. 24, 27, and Haggai ii. 9. More probably Barnabas had read such a passage in some apocryphal book. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. 25 truly dwells in us. How? His word of faith; His calling of promise , the wisdom of the statutes ; the commands of the doctrine; He Himself prophesying in us; He Himself dwelling in us, opening to us who were enslaved by death, the doors of the Temple, that is, the mouth j 1 and by giving us repentance He intro- duced us into the incorruptible Temple. He, then, who wishes to be saved looks not to man, but to Him who dwelleth in him and speaketh in him, amazed at never having either heard Him utter such words with His mouth, nor himself desired to hear them. This is the spiritual Temple built for the Lord." It remains to note concerning the date of this lit- tle tract, that it refers to the destruction of Jerusa- lem, and must, therefore, have been written after A. D. 70. The language used seems to imply that it was not long after. Bishop Lightfoot, who thinks the Apostle Barnabas cannot have been the writer, still dates it somewhere between 70 and 79. We shall refer to it again in connection with the subjects of Baptism and the Sabbath. 2. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. This is a curious little book with a curious story. In 1873 a learned ecclesiastic of the Greek Church, Philotheos Bryennios, then Bishop of Serrse in Macedonia, but residing in Constantinople, was examining some old manuscripts preserved in the library of the Monas- tery of the Holy Sepulchre. Among them he found, to his surprise and joy, one that contained the entire 1 Barnabas calls the mouth the door of that Temple which every Christian man's body is made to be, and then passes at once to the incorruptible body, the Church. 26 The Post-Apostolic Age. letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, of which the closing chapters had been missing for some centuries, and several other copies of ancient writ- ings, one of them bearing the title, The Teaching of the Tivelve Apostles. Reading ancient manuscripts is hard work, even for a scholar accustomed to such tasks, and it was not till five years after that Bishop Bryennios examined the Teaching^ or as it is some- times called, by its Greek name, the Didache^ enough to realize that this also was a treasure, being a sort of Church Manual illustrating the Christian life of the first century. The Teaching was not published till 1883, and scholarship has not had time to say its last word about a good many questions connected with it. If pretty generally we follow the judgment of Doctor Salmon, of Trinity College, Dublin, au- thor of the article on the Teaching in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, we shall be following a good guide. The book does not profess to come from the origi- nal Apostles, but to give such teaching and direction as they would have approved, just as the title of the Apostles' Creed was not intended to imply that the first Apostles ever heard that form of words. It begins with six chapters intended as an instruction in practical Christian living for persons preparing for baptism, — Catechumens ', persons in process of be- ing catechised, was the Church's technical term for such,- — and then it has chapters on the form of bap- tism, on fasting and prayer, on forms of devotion to be used at the Holy Communion, on the treatment due to Christian teachers, on the observance of the A Eucharistic Fragment. 27 Lord's Day, on the choice of good men for the work of the ministry, and on the Second Coming of our Lord. For an example of its contents we may take Chapters IX. and X., containing devotions to be used by the congregation at the Holy Communion. That service, by the way, was almost invariably spoken of by primitive Christians as " the Eucharist," — which means the Thanksgiving or Thank-offering, and the same word will be used henceforth in this book. It is a curious fact that the Eucharist is not spoken of as " the Lord's Supper " by any Christian writing of the first three centuries, though some- times it is called " the Mystical Supper," 1 and there are but three examples of calling a Christian Altar a " table " in the same period. Nobody would have objected to such language, but it was not the kind of language which the Post-Apostolic Age did actu- ally inherit from the Apostolic. Concerning the curious notion that the forms which we are about to give constitute a "liturgy," — that is, are given for the minister to use as sufficient forms for the "bless- ing " of the bread and the cup of the Eucharist, see p. 481. "Now as regards the Eucharist, give thanks after this manner : first for the cup : ' We give thanks to Thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David, Thy servant, which Thou hast made known unto us 1 "Mystical Supper," by Dionysius the Great, Bishop of Alex- andria, A. D. 254, who also speaks of a communicant as "stand- ing at the Holy Table," and "shrinking from approaching the Table"; "Mystical Divine Supper," by Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus, A. D. 220, in his commentary on Prov. ix. 2, where also the Altar is called " the Mystical Divine Table." 28 The 'Post- Apostolic Age. through Jesus, Thy Servant. To Thee be the glory forever.' And for the broken bread : 4 We give thanks to Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which Thou hast made known unto us through Jesus, Thy Servant. To Thee be the glory forever. As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, and gathered together became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom, for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever.' "But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, except those baptized into the Name of the Lord ; for as regards this also the Lord has said : ' Give not that which is holy to the dogs.' "Now after being filled, give thanks after this manner : * We thank Thee, Holy Father, for Thy Holy Name, which Thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and im- mortality, which Thou hast made known to us through Jesus, Thy Servant. To Thee be the glory forever. Thou, O Almighty Master, didst make all things for thy Name's sake ; Thou gavest food and drink to men for enjo} r ment, that they might give thanks to Thee ; but to us Thou didst freely give spiritual food and drink and eternal life through Thy Servant. Before all things we give thanks to Thee that Thou art mighty. To Thee be the glory forever. Remember, O Lord, Thy Church, to deliver her from all evil, and to perfect her in Thy love ; and gather her together from the four winds, sancti- fied for Thy Kingdom which Thou didst prepare for her : for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Jewish Tone of Didache. 29 Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Ho- sanna to the God of David. If any one is holy, let him come. If any one is not holy, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen.' " But permit the prophets to give thanks as much as they will." The writer was plainly one who loved the Scrip- ture utterances concerning God's "Vine," and who loved to think of " the True Vine " as truly a " Vine of David " also. He belonged to that school in the Church to which Jewish traditions were a pride and joy, and to be of Jewish descent a peculiar honor. "Hosanna to the God of David,"— " God " can hardly be an error for " Son " in the manuscript, as some editors would call it — comes readily from his lips, and " Jesus, Thy servant," is a natural phrase from a man of Jewish atmosphere, to whom Isaiah's prophecies about " the Lord's servant " 1 would be traditionally dear. Anti- Jewish Christians leaned away from such phrases, as too little honoring to the Divine Lord. Hence the mistake of making over this very phrase, " Thy Servant Jesus," into " Thy Child Jesus" in versions of Acts iii. 13, 26, and iv. 27, 30, a mistake which goes back sixteen cen- turies at least. The Jewish tone of this book and the allusion to corn scattered over the hills make it seem likely that it was written in mountainous Palestine. Its date is assigned by most English scholars, as by Bishop 'Isa. xlii. 1; xliii. 10; xlix. 5, 6; lii. 13; liii. 11, and cf. a most valuable note on the phrase in the Sjyeaker's Commentary, called in America the Bible Commentary, at the end of Isa. xli. 30 The Post- Apostolic Age. Lightfoot, to the last quarter of the first century. Doctor Salmon would date it about 120, and Professor Harnack, the leading German authority, between 130 and 165, but these scholars agree in thinking that we have here a first century book, worked over with ad- ditions by a later hand. All agree that the Teaching gives a picture of Church life more characteristic of the first Christian century than of the second, Har- nack even declaring that its general view comes nearer to the picture presented by the Epistles to the Corinthians than even to that of the Epistle to the Ephesians in our New Testaments. If it was first written in the second century, it must have been in some rustic community that lagged behind the age. It may be added that the opening chapters of the Teaching and the closing chapters of Barnabas seem to be drawn from a common source, probably a pop- ular Jewish manual of pre-Christian date. 3. The Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corin- thians. We come now to a noble monument of early Christian thought and feeling, described by Bishop Lightfoot as the most important writing, outside of the volume of Holy Scripture, produced in the first century. It is a letter from " the Church of God which sojourneth at Rome to the Church of God which sojourneth at Corinth." So it describes itself in its opening words, and no reference is anywhere made to any individual authorship ; but abundant testimony ascribes it to Clement, a chief minister of the Church at Rome, and the weight of scholarship is extraordinarily agreed as to its date. A. D. 96 cannot be more than a few months out of the way. St. Clement not the Consul. 31 We must introduce, as briefly as we may, the writer, the circumstances of his writing, and the writing itself (a) The writer bears the name of Clement, in Latin, Clemens, and he wrote when the Emperor Domitian (Titus Flavins Domitianus) had just been waging a bitter persecution against the Christians of Rome. History tells us that in the last year of Domitian's life his own cousin, Titus Flavins Cle- mens, fresh from the honors of a consulship, and his cousin's wife, Flavia Domitilla, were convicted on a charge of atheism, having embraced certain Jewish superstitions, and were condemned, the consul Clem- ent to death, and Domitilla to banishment. The sus- picion that these were really Christian converts, found in the very highest circle of wealth and social station, has been greatly confirmed within the last fifty years by the discovery of an ancient Christian burial-place granted to Christian uses by Flavia Domitilla herself. It has been a fascinating sug- gestion to some that the consul Clement of the im- perial house was the distinguished Christian who wrote this letter in the name of the Christians of the Roman city. There are fatal objections to such a theory. The Church was never so unworldly as to keep no record of the fact that among its writers was one of the imperial family, nor so unheavenly as to forget his martyrdom. More probably the consul was not a martyr at all, but simply a man who through his wife had been drawn near enough to the new religion to give a jealous tyrant an excuse for removing a rival that stood too near the throne. Clement, the writer, has not the literary qualities 32 The Post- Apostolic Age. that would be likely to belong to a noble Roman, educated under the first masters of the day. On the other hand, he has a familiar knowledge of the Old Testament, which seems to point to a Jewish origin. And yet it seems particularly likely that the Jew boy derived his name from the noble Roman house. Lightfoot's conjecture lias great probability, that he was a freed man, or at most a freedman's son, either he or his father having been once a slave in the household of the Clements. That would account for his noble name and make a very natural story. It was by way of Jews that Christianity found its way to Gentiles in almost every city, we may be sure. It found its readiest way of advance in the hearts of the oppressed and the poor. Rich men of those days held slaves in enormous number and of every nationality. Finally, it was a common thing to find slaves filling positions that required a large share of education and general culture, and as to the social feeling of the Church we may note that the Roman writer, Hermas, of whom we shall be hearing presently, describes himself as having been a slave, and yet he seems to have been an elder brother of Pius, who about A. D. 140 succeeded to the bishop- ric of Rome. That Clement, the writer, was, in the speech of to-day, " a gentleman," is beyond a doubt. That his family had within a few years known the hard discipline of slavery, is highly probable. So much for what he was in himself. What was he to the Church in Rome ? All Christian tradition says, its bishop. Modern scholars are divided about that, some being very unwilling to acknowledge that Was St. Clement a Bishop? 33 there were any bishops in the modern sense in any Christian cities of Europe at so early a day. Ire- nseus, who visited Rome about A. D. 175, gives a list of the bishops of that see down to his time. 44 Linus, Anencletus, Clemens, Evarestus," it begins, aiid that same list is given by all Eastern writers who deal with the subject. But there is another tradition, which grew up at Rome, and prevailed there too, which makes the first names to be 44 Linus, Clemens, Cletus, Anacletus, Evarestus." 44 Plainly," say the objectors, 44 there were no bishops at the beginning, and so different people made up their imaginary successions differently." It seems hard to believe that in 175 the Roman Christians supposed that government by a single ecclesiastic, 44 Monarchical Episcopacy," had existed among them for over a century, when really it had been introduced among them less than fifty years before, and Lightfoot has shown in a masterly way how the later list is to be accounted for with all its blundering. It is noteworthy, also, that even after the order of the later list had become the thoroughly accepted tradition at Rome, the commemoration of the faithful dead in the Liturgy continued still, as it continues to this daj^, to make mention of the Apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, and the rest, and then of 44 Linus, Cletus, Clemens," showing that the tradition known to Irenseus had been embodied in the Roman Church's Prayer Book too long when the blundering correction was made, — probably about A. D. 234, — for the Church to be willing to change the familiar form of prayer. c 34 The Post- Apostolic Aye. (b) As for the circumstances of Clement's writ- ing, the occasion of his letter was a church quarrel. Clement speaks of it as a " detestable and unholy sedition," and as one "which a few headstrong and unruly persons have kindled," but with gentle tact he does not go into particulars. That would have been very informing for us, but at Corinth it would only have given the opposition a handle for saying that he had here or there misstated the case. Clement is as disappointing as he was wise in his vagueness. We can just make out that the trouble was an uprising of a very few leading laymen against the authority of the clergy, "the presbyters," 1 and then, incidentally, that he lays the whole trouble to jealousy, and that in his examples he brings in three illustrations of the union of faith and hospitality, Abraham, Lot, and Raha, as if somehow a question of entertaining brethren from abroad had come into this difficulty. May it not be that we have here the very case 1 Cf. chapter xlvii. "Take up the Epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle. What wrote he first unto you iu the beginning of the Gospel? Of a truth he charged you in the Spirit concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because that even then ye had made parties. Yet that making of parties brought less sin upon you, for ye were partisans of Apostles that were highly reputed, and of a man approved iu their sight. But now mark ye who they are that have perverted you and diminished the glory of your renowned love for the brotherhood. It is shameful, dearly beloved, yes, utterly shameful, and unworthy of your conduct in Christ, that it should be reported that the very ancient Church of the Corinthians, for the sake of one or two persons, maketh sedition against its presbyters." Chapter lvii. "Ye, therefore, that laid the foundation of the sedition, submit yourselves unto the presbyters, and receive chastisement and repentance, bending the knees of your heart. . . . It is better for you to be found little in the flock of Christ, and to have your name on God's roll, than to be had in exceeding honor, and yet be cast out from the hope of Him," Does 3 St. John Refer to this Quarrel? 35 about which St. John wrote his third Epistle ? In St. Paul's time there lived at Corinth a rich Chris- tian bearing the Roman name of Caius, — we read it in the Greek form Gains, in our version, — who en- tertained traveling brethren so generously that St. Paul writes of him to the Romans (Rom. xvi. 23), "Gaius, mine host, and of the whole Church, saluteth you." St. John writes (nearly forty years after, to be sure) to a prominent Christian named Caius, evidently living in one of the centres of Church work, and apparently a very old man, like St. John himself, for St. John writes in a brotherly, rather than fatherly, tone, and seems tenderly solicitous about his friend's health, who is noted for his hos- pitality " to the brethren, and that, strangers," as we ought to read in 3 St. John 5, or "toward them that are brethren, and strangers withal." Is this the same Caius of Corinth? It is certainly possible. Then we have one Diotrephes, " who loveth to have the preeminence," who refuses hospitality to Chris- tian missionaries, declines to recognize the authority of St. John writing somewhat to the church, and even " casts out of the Church " any persons who do receive St. John's representatives. How could Diotrephes cast brethren out of the Church ? Some have thought him a bad specimen of diocesan bishop of the new order, tyrannical and self-willed. More probably he was a purse-proud layman, who gave his great house for a Christian meeting-place, and then refused admission there to any who ventured to dif- fer seriously from him in Church policy. Such an one might be " had in exceeding honor," in St. 36 The Post- Apostolic Age. Clement's words, while really he ought to have been " little in the flock of Christ, 1 ' and was in serious danger of being " cast out from the hope of Him." But of course, any attempt to make out Diotrephes a Corinthian is pure conjecture. One thing, how- ever, is quite certain. St. John was living over across the iEgean Sea at Ephesus, when this trouble was going on at Corinth, whether his letter to Caius refers to it, or no. Why did he not settle it at once, without waiting for the Church of the Ro- mans to give any views on the subject? Plainty, because he couldn't. Whatever the trouble at Corinth may have been, it manifestly included an attempt of leading laymen to get a larger share of local self-government than was generally approved in the Church, and incidentally a refusal to submit to any direction coming from the one survivor of the original Apostles. It would seem pretty plain that even in those early days there were two parties in the Church, one party magnifying the authority of the clergy (and particularly of the Apostles or Bishops, as we shall see presently in the letters of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch), and devoted to the idea of one great world-wide organization, "the Catholic Church," to which each particular group of Christians should carefully subordinate itself, the other party, perhaps far-sighted enough to see a danger to Christian liberty in such an organization, perhaps only disinclined to personal subordination, but either way eager to minimize clerical authority and to exalt local independence. It was the party of clerical authority and high organization that pre- Qualities of St. Clement's Letter. 37 vailed. It will be shown in a later chapter (IV.) that they claimed divine authority for their ideas. The opposition has left no written records. We can only guess whether they would have attempted to show that this was a mistake. As one whose sym- pathies are strongly with Clement and Ignatius, the present writer allows himself to say again that St. John was certainly living at this time. We cannot say whether he would have sanctioned all the argu- ments of Clement, or all the impassioned exhorta- tions of Ignatius. But if he was not on their side in the main, the absence of any particular reference to him in their writings is unaccountable. As an opponent, he would have been thrown in their faces constantly, and they would have had to show how they could excuse themselves for departing from his policy. (c) We come now to the qualities of the writing itself. It has been suggested already that it was wise and tactful. Written to urge upon the Church of Corinth the authority of the clerical body, and that in case of any difference of judgment between clergy and laity as to the government of the Church, the laity should of course submit, it does not put forward the writer's personality, or any clerical authority whatever, but addresses the Christian body at Corinth with the voice of the Church of the Ro- mans, the whole Christian Church of the world's chief city pronouncing thus unitedly against the novelty of government by the people in the Church. 1 1 The writer of this volume takes the liberty of saying here that he himself rejoices greatly in the "way in which the responsi- 38 The Post- Apostolic Age. Of course such a voice was the only one that the Corinthian malecontents would listen to. There was no use in writing to them, "I, the Roman Bishop, think thus and so." " The whole Church of the Romans assures you that it holds submission to the presbyters to be a duty," was the sort of state- ment that would have weight. That Clement put that kind of thing strongly, the quotations already made will show. It is right to note, because such language sounds so very strongly in modern ears, that he was not putting forward a new scheme, but repeating the phraseology of the New Testament. One must not make too much of the fact that the title "Bishop" means "overseer." It did not al- ways mean very much in those days. But St. Paul speaks of the clergy as " those who are over you " in his very first letter (1 Thess. v. 12), and as " rul- ing " in one of his very last (1 Tim. v. 17. Cf. iii. 5, where " ruling well " in one's family can alone prepare for " taking care " of the Church). And another word for " ruling " is used in Heb. xiii. 7, 17, 24, and the writer of that letter exhorts his read- ers to " obey them that have the rule," and to be submissive to their wish. Some further quotations will be given in Chapter IV. We may add here a notice of three characteristics of Clement as a writer, specialty remarked by Bishop bility of government in the Church of Christ has actually broad- ened down from Apostles or bishops to synods including presby- ters, and again to such assemblies as include a representation of the faithful laity. He regards it as a most healthy and providen- tial growth. Only he is quite sure that the Church did not begin so, and could not healthily have begun so. St. Clements Three Characteristics. 39 Liglitfoot. They are comprehensiveness, a deep sense of order, and a strong man's careful moderation. Comprehensiveness is shown not only in quotations, sometimes evidently made from memory, and copious quotations too, from all parts of the Old Testament in the Septuagint Greek version, and from St. Paul's Epistles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, St. James, and 1 St. Peter, but much more in the way in which Clem- ent shows himself to have grasped the different modes of thought of the New Testament writers and har- monized them all in his own theology. He held St. Paul's doctrine of faith and St. James's doctrine of works in happy balance. It may be added, that while he quotes from the first three Gospels, it is not clear that he knew any writing of St. John. Probably such had not had time to reach him. The sense of order was, of course, particularly drawn out by the nature of the argument on which Clement was engaged. Still it appears plainly that his was a mind naturally open to deep impressions of the order and beauty of natural law. He had not actual sci- ence enough to save him from believing in the curi- ous fable of the phoenix, living five hundred years, then entering the fire to be burned up, and rising from its ashes to a new lease of life, yet he had the heart of the modern scientific student in him. He loved the study of the reign of law. But nobler still was his third quality, his love of obedience to law, what Bishop Liglitfoot calls his " moderation, " his deep sense of the value of self-restraint. He not only preaches moderation, but one feels his practice of it in these lines. " Intense moderation " is one of 40 The Post- Apostolic Age. his phrases, and a fine one for a man called to unite opposing parties and lead them to a common victory. It remains only to notice that this Roman Bishop's letter was written in Greek, not in Latin. "The Church of Rome, and most, if not all the Churches of the West," says Dean Milman {Latin Christianity, Book L, Chapter i.), " were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their language was Greek, their organization Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures Greek ; and many vestiges and traditions show that their ritual, their Liturgy, was Greek." Bishop Westcott {Canon of the New Testament, pp. 215, etc.) holds that the Rome of those days was so much a Greek city that the poorer part of the popu- lation were largely of Greek descent and mostly Greek in speech. Not before the middle of the third century did Rome come to be the centre of a charac- teristically Latin Christianity. 4. The Shepherd of Hennas. Does anybody now read Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress? One who had it among the joys of his boyhood must feel a gentle pity for the children of the twentieth century, if they are not to have the same. Surely, the elders will remember it. It was a book of books among Protestant readers for two centuries from the time when it was written by a tinker turned preacher, while he was in jail for preachings which were against the law. Well, very much such a book was this volume called The Shepherd, written by a man named Hennas, an ex-slave, and not a presbyter, but apparently a gifted lay-exhorter in the Church at Rome. The story itself is not a bit like Bunj^an's. The Shepherd of Hermas. 41 The likeness is simply in this, that both books teach large portions of Christian truth in the form of alle- gory, and with a long, continuous narrative on which the allegorical details are strung, and that both met a want and achieved an immense popularity in spite of having some things that were objectionable in their teaching in the eyes of careful theologians. Another point of resemblance is that both writers were of the Puritan temper, filled with bitterness because of the Church's corruption and worldliness, and trusting much to a severe external discipline to save her. The work of Hermas is divided into three books, of Visions, Commandments, and Parables, the last two being commonly quoted under the titles of Mandates and Similitudes. In the Visions he sees a woman to whom he had once been a slave, complaining against him in heaven because of evil thoughts which he had had. Later he sees an aged woman of majestic appearance, who proves to be the Church, her snowy hair indicating that she has existed from all eternity in the mind of God. He learns many things from her, but at first he cannot remember them after the visions are over. After much fasting and prayer the visions become more clear. Then in the last of them a shepherd appears to him, — "the Shepherd to whose care thou wast committed," Hermas is told. It is apparently a vision of our Lord Jesus Christ that is meant to be conveyed, but the only description that the Shepherd will give of Himself is that He is sent to be an Angel of repentance while there is yet time. It is this Shepherd who gives title to the whole work, 42 The Post- Apostolic Age. and it is He who makes known to Hermas the twelve Commandments and ten Parables which make up the two remaining books. Here arises a question of some difficulty. Was all this strange story a piece of self-delusion, a piece of knavish imposture, or simply a religious novel, like that Pilgrim's Progress to which we have compared it? This last is perhaps the most common view, but it seems the least historical. For two hundred years the Shepherd was read in Christian Churches in parts of the East along with the New Testament. It is found copied along with the Divine Scriptures in our oldest manuscript of the New Testament, the famous Codex Sinaiticus. Clement of Alexandria, a learned and strong man, writing his Stromata, or Miscellanies, about A. D. 195, quotes " the Power that spake to Hermas by revelation " as speaking " divinely." The still greater Alexandrine scholar, Origen, thought it was inspired, though he knew that some opposed such a view. In the West, Ire- nseus quotes it as a " Scripture." We may well fol- low the brilliant Irish scholar, Doctor Salmon, and the German, Zahn, in the idea that Hermas really had strange dreams, especially after much fasting and praying, and that he wrote them down very honestly and believed in them profoundly. Also, we need not think him a mere fool. The Church had enjoyed an outburst of supernatural powers, powers sorely needed for her new work. Think of it ! She started on her way with no New Testament books yet written, no commentaries on any of the Old Testament books, no prayer-books, no hymn- The Prophets of the First Days. 4S books, and more than all these, no snch inherited habits of thought as Ave Christians of to-day are born into. Then God raised up "prophets" in the Christian order, and they prayed and preached and taught and sang, or at any rate produced " spiritual songs " for the Church to sing as soon as she found her voice, and all this they did by inspirations more special than we can easily appreciate. Many a stream of religious thought or feeling that flows down to our day looking so natural that we simply cannot imagine Christian people not thinking thus and thus, or feeling so and so, is really an outcome of that wonderful work of the Spirit of God, speaking to the rock of Jewish hearts or heathen hearts that now were quarried out of their darkness and built up into a Temple of God through Jesus Christ. When did those strange fountains begin to fail? Just as soon as the Church's natural powers had grown up enough to take what they had given and go on with- out them, doubtless. How far that process had gone in the days of Hernias, we cannot tell. He seems to have thought sincerely that he was a man of super- natural gifts. It is well-nigh certain that he had known such men, and many of them. It would be rash to say that because his writings are not of eter- nal value, therefore they could not have been a supernatural gift to the Church in the day of them. God does give the Church much help in every age through men whom God does not keep perfectly safe from error. Hernias seems to be just on the border- line between the inspired " prophets " of the New Testament, who did not always show good judg- 44 The Post- Apostolic Age. ment, to be sure, or use good behavior, according to Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and the fanatic and conceited Christians of later da} r s, who indulge in many undisciplined fancies and count thern all to be deliverances of the Holy Ghost. We have said that the Church took Hermas seri- ously. Certainly he took himself seriously. It comes out in the way in which lie mixes in his visions his own troubles and the Church's needs. An impostor would have written only what he wanted to impress on the Church's mind, with per- haps some compliments for himself. Hermas, like all dreamers, dreams about his own affairs, his scold- ing wife, and his unruly and ungrateful children, and his wasted property, as well as about the condi- tions of the Church, which he made heartily his own concern too. There was more of himself in his dreams than he thought there was, but doubtless God gave them to him in a very real sense, and made them useful to the Church, also. If, then, we take him for an honest man, telling truly of dreams which he had really dreamed, what is his date and the setting of his life ? He gives us one clear indi- cation. He was told in a vision to make two copies of his book, and give one to Grapte, presumably a deaconess, and one to Clement, who would send it to the Churches abroad. This Clement can hardly be other than the one whose letter to a foreign Church had already won such honor, and who as bishop (though Hermas never speaks of any one being bishop,) of the Roman Church would naturally pass judgment on the claims of persons professing to be Hernias, the Brother of Pius. 45 prophets, and also send out anything that was thought worthy to be sent abroad, as bearing the stamp of the Roman Christians' approval. We con- clude, then, that Hernias wrote before the death of Clement, or but little after, and that Clement, or his successor, Evarestus, really did send out this book with the commendation of the Church at Rome. How natural that while his dreams were regarded by all as God-given, his book seems to have had more vogue in the East, where no one knew him, than in Rome, where people knew him well. It should be said, however, that there is an old bit of manuscript, known from the scholar who found it in an Italian monastery library as the Muratorian Fragment^ which distinctly says that the Shepherd " was written very lately, in our own times, in the city of Rome, by Hermas, when his brother, the bishop Pius, was occupying the chair of the Church of the city of Rome." This manuscript fragment is from a copy made by an extraordinarily blundering scribe, and it seems to represent a very bad transla- tion into Latin from a Greek original, which may have been written — Doctor Salmon gives reason for thinking so (Article Hermas, Dictionary of Chris- tian Biography) — some sixty years after the death of Pius, which must be placed about A. D. 153. If " sixty years since " does not seem to us " very lately," it should be noted that Eusebius speaks of events that happened more than sixty years before he was writing as "in our own times," and that Ireneeus tells of the Revelation of St. John as being seen "almost in our own times, in the reign of Domitian," meaning be- 46 The Post- Apostolic Age. tween eighty and ninety years before he wrote. At that distance of time the writer of the Greek state- ment may have made a mistake, or it may well be that he really wrote " by Hermas vjhose brother Pius, 1 ' not at all " by Hermas when his brother Pius," " was occupying the chair." Perhaps the two men were brothers, but the book of one forty }^ears earlier than the bishopric of the other. Perhaps the writer of the statement simply blundered. One thing is cer- tain. The credit of Hermas ran down remarkably in the Western Church soon after this writing of some influential scholar was put forth. The Church of the decade A. D. 210-220 seems to have become persuaded that a book which had been honored as containing real revelations given before A. D. 100, was really a work of fiction written some fifty years later. Which opinion are we to follow ? Surely the book never could have obtained its early credit, and been quoted by Irenseus as " Scripture," if it was really a work of fiction, written within one generation before the visit of Irenseus to Rome. And cer- tainly if the book did first appear after A. D. 140, no Church was going to believe that a man had been bidden in a heavenly vision to go to Clement, forty years after Clement was dead. We may place Her- mas about A. D. 100, with Zahn, and Salmon, and our own Doctor Schaff, though a greater number of scholars are still on the side of the later date. 5. The Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch . These are seven letters written by Ignatius, Bishop of the great city of Antioch in Syria, while he was on his way to Rome to suffer a martyr's death, having been con- Ignatius of Antioch. 47 denmed to be thrown to the wild beasts in the Fla- vian Amphitheatre, known to us as the Colosseum. His guards had conveyed him to Smyrna by a road that led through the cities of Laodicea, Philadelphia and Sardis, and at Philadelphia at any rate he was allowed to address the Christians in a religious as- sembly, and to receive kindness from them. At Smyrna there was, apparently, some considerable stay. Here the Christians and their bishop, Poly- carp, a great name also, showed abounding love and respect for Christ's martyr on his way to glory. Here also he received delegates from three cities lying on another road, the great Church of Ephesus sending its bishop, Onesimus, a deacon, and three other persons, Magnesia its bishop, Damas, youthful, but most admirable, with two presbyters and a dea- con, and the more distant Tralles its bishop, Poly- bius, alone. From Smyrna, therefore, Ignatius dic- tated letters of thanks and solemn exhortation to each of these Churches, as well as a letter to the Church in Rome, chiefly concerned with an impas- sioned entreaty not to attempt anything towards se- curing his escape from death, and so to endanger his crown. Passing on then to Troas, his last stopping- place on Asiatic soil, he dictated to the Ephesian deacon, Burrhus, who had been commissioned to go with him and be a helper to him in the name of the two Churches of Ephesus and Smyrna, three more letters, one to the Church in Philadelphia, one to that of Smyrna, and one to the saintly Polycarp. By a letter of Polycarp's we know that Ignatius was taken to Philippi, was lovingly received there by the 48 The Post- Apostolic Age. Church, which wrote to Poly carp to beg for copies of any letters written by the martyr, and was joined by a group of Christians condemned, like himself, to die. The story of the remaining journey and of the matyrdom itself comes to us in forms quite too late and legendary to be of any value ; but it was a popular story, so popular that a somewhat unortho- dox writer in the latter part of the fourth century, wishing to impress certain views of his own upon the Church of his day, took up the letters of Igna- tius and rewrote them with large additions, adding six letters made entirely out of his own head besides, and published the whole collection as the work of the martyr. The forgery never made much way in the East, but in the West it was very popular before the Reformation, and the genuine form of the letters was lost to view. Hence came a long and bitter controversy among Post-Reformation scholars, espe- cially after the rediscovery of the letters in the shorter edition. Which was the genuine form of the Ignatian writings ? Was any reliance to be placed on any form of what had been so manifestly a play- thing of pious forgery ? The discovery and publica- tion in 1845 of a Syriac copy of the letters, contain- ing only three, and those in much briefer form, seemed for a while to point to the view that here at last we had the genuine Ignatius, but Bishop Light- foot's great edition, published in 1885, is now gener- ally accepted as putting an end to controversy, and establishing what he calls " the middle form," the " Short Greek " edition of the letters, as a genuine Date of Ignatius. His Character. 49 product of the first quarter of the second century. Twenty years ago it was quite the fashion of eminent scholars to say that it was entirely uncertain what Ignatius really wrote. To-day quotations may be made securely from the Lightfoot text. The story of the martyrdom, we have said, is worthless. All that we know of the man we must draw from the letters themselves and from that of Polycarp of Smyrna, save for the scanty notices in Eusebius, who tells us that Ignatius was the second Bishop of Antioch, and in his " Chronicle " notes the martyrdom in a sort of appendix to his treatment of the four-year period A. D. 103-106. Possibly Euse- bius himself did not regard that date as more than somewhere about right. Lightfoot would place the story anywhere between one hundred and one hun- dred and eighteen. Professor Harnack, whose great influence had long held down the balance of scholar- ship on the side of a date twenty years later than Lightfoot's latest, has lately pronounced in favor of one "not later than A. D. 125." Such a combina- tion of scholars will go far to fix scholarly opinion. But the man is what one may call a vivid char- acter. In his letters he cannot be hid. In Clement of Rome we have a strong man using all his power to keep himself patient and gentle, well balanced and therefore moderate. In Ignatius of Antioch we have a strong man rushing into action, giving him- self out on every side, greatly admiring self-restraint in others, as when he writes of the Bishop of Tralles that " his gentleness is power," but not very much practising it. Clement is cool and calm. Ignatius 50 The Post- Apostolic Age. is dashing and fiery. The very name suggested to some in later days the Latin word ignis, " a fire." The derivation is absurd enough, but the suggestion is delightfully appropriate. In his personal char- acter he was a man of passionate devotion, a man to whom Jesus Christ is intensely real. " Nothing visi- ble is good," he writes to the Roman Christians, speaking of his feeling that his own Christian char- acter will not be safe till he himself is no more seen. " Nothing visible is good. For our God, Jesus Christ, being in the Father is more plainly visible." The invisible Saviour is to him more manifest than any of " the things which do appear." There appears in him also a passionate self-depreciation. He is "the least" of the Christians at Antioch. He is "one born out of due time," like Saint Paul. He goes to his martyrdom with trembling joy, assured that if no powerful friends intercede for him at Rome, if God allows him to suffer for the testimony of Jesus, it will be a sign that in spite of all that is past, he is a man accepted. Making all allowance for Oriental fervor and the tendency to imitate St. Paul, we may feel with Lightfoot that there really had been, as with St. Paul, " something violent, dangerous, and unusual in his spiritual nativity." " His was one of those broken natures, out of which, as Zahn has truly said, God's heroes are made. If not a persecutor of Christ, if not a foe to Christ, as seems probable, he had at least been for a consider- able portion of his life an alien from Christ. Like St. Paul, like Augustine, like Francis Xavier, like Luther, like John Bunyan, he could not forget that Iynatian Phrases and Figures. 51 his had been a dislocated life ; and the memory of the catastrophe which had shattered his former self, filled him with awe and thanksgiving, and fanned the fervor of his devotion to a white heat." A vivid character we have called him, and he writes vividly. He is one of the most quotable of men. He has phrases that are like the sudden light- ing of a room. Such, I think, are his description of the Church in Rome, the world's great secular cap- ital, as "having the presidency of love," and of the bishop of Tralles, as one "whose demeanor is a great lesson, and his gentleness is power." Such are these that follow : " Near the sword, near to God " ; " Christianity is a thing of might, whensoever it is hated by the world " ; " He that truly possesseth the word of Jesus is able also to hearken unto His silence"; "Mark the seasons. Look for Him that is above every season " ; " Bear all men, as the Lord beareth thee." His letters abound in metaphors, and not merely of the common stock either. His eager mind seems to have turned everything he saw to good account, to illustrate the Christian life and warfare. He writes to exhort Polycarp to firmness, and his word is " Stand like an anvil when it is smitten." False teachers are described as " sowing the seed " of their pernicious doctrine, which again is likened to " noxious herbs." True Christians are "branches of the Cross, 1 and their fruit imperish- 1 Early Christians thought of the Cross as a tree (cf. 1 St. Peter ii. 24), because the Greek tongue used one word for "wood," "a tree," or "a timber." They loved to find the Cross in the " tree planted by the waterside " of Ps. i. and in the tree of Exodus xv. 25, which made the waters of Ma rah sweet. 52 The Post- Apostolic Age. able." He sees a festival procession on its way to some heathen temple, and it suggests to him a de- scription of the Church to which he is writing, as " companions in the way, carrying your God and your shrines [he was writing to Ephesus, where the making of little shrines was a great trade, we know, fifty years before, and he means that each Christian's body is a shrine more precious than a heathen crafts- man can understand], your Christ and your holy things, being arrayed from head to foot in the com- mandments of Jesus Christ." Again, he writes to the Romans, " I am God's wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of beasts, that I may be found pure bread of Christ." In the same letter he plays on words with the same spirit of looking everywhere for ma- terial for a Christian thought. He would have the Roman Christians sing praise to God, for vouchsafing that the bishop of Syria should be found in the West [in Greek, "the setting land"], having summoned him from the East [in Greek, " the sunrise-land." Cf. our "Occident" and " Orient"]. It is good to set from the world unto God, that I may rise unto Him." Two groups of the illustrations of Ignatius de- serve special attention. In five of the seven letters are found eleven illustrations drawn from medical practice, and two more that may have had that origin. None of them are such as might not have been thought of by a man who had never studied medicine, but the number and the variety of them makes me think that there was some special reason why this many-sided man, who found in the world A Medical Man and Musical. 53 bo many symbols of spiritual facts and forces, found more in the lines most familiar to a medical man than in any other. One may suspect that he was once a physician of the body, like St. Luke, before ever he knew the healing of the soul. Again, there are in four of the seven letters six musical illustrations, of which we will read two, as they occur together in chapter four of the letter to the Ephesian Church. 44 So then it becometh you to run in harmony with the mind of the bishop, which thing also ye do. For your honorable presbytery, which is worthy of God, is attuned to the bishop, even as its strings to a lyre. Therefore in your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. And do ye, each and all, form yourselves into a chorus, that being harmo- nious in concord, and taking the keynote of God, ye may as the result of unity sing with one voice through Jesus Christ unto the Father." l The figure of the lyre and its strings may have been a commonplace. No one could have written that carefully exact passage about the chorus, taking its pitch from God, unless he were somewhat of a musician. There is a legend that our Ignatius had *I commonly use Bishop Lightfoot's admirable translation. Here I must depart from it, for be gives "in unison," where I have felt obliged to say "as the result of unity." The great bishop of Durham seems not to have known that when people were singing in harmony, they could not be singing in unison. Certainly Ignatius's figure of a chorus singing different notes but making a beautiful aud agreeable result, is a nobler illustration of diverse views and diverse temperaments held together in the unity of the Spirit, than the picture of a chorus all singing the very same notes would be. The music of the Church Catholic is harmony, the music of those who differ, yet agree. Unison-sing- ing is the music of a mere sect, or section, consisting of people who happen to think alike. 54 The Post- Apostolic Age. a heavenly vision of angels singing in responsive choirs, and that he at once introduced antiphonal chanting into his Church at Antioch, from which it spread over the Christian world. Such singing was no new thing in the Church when Ignatius died. The Roman governor Pliny heard of it in Bithynia, in 112, as a custom of a still earlier day. Heathens and Jews had used it before Christianity was born. Still some one must have been the first to adapt it to Christian use, and Ignatius had the restless energy which makes men innovators. At any rate he may safely be set down as the first known patron of Church music. It is plain that his emotional nature was particularly impressible through that divine art. 1 We have given large room to this intense Igna- tius, but we have yet to bring in his two chief in- tensities after all. They were his passion for mar- tyrdom and his passion for the unity of the Church. (1) Of the passion for martyrdom we need only note that it is there. " I dread your very love," he writes to the Romans, "lest it do me an injury." He is so afraid that they will get a pardon for him, or a commutation of his death-sentence. "I exhort you, be ye not an unseasonable kindness to me. Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through them I can attain unto God." This passion has been called " exaggerated," but surely it is lovable. It is not a 'When Tbeodoret in his Church History, written about A. D. 440, ascribed the introduction of antiphonal singing to Diodore and Flavian, laymen of Antioch, about A. D. 350, he must have been relying on a story of something which they really did for the improvement of such music, with an appended statement that it was first introduced in that city. The Passion for Unity. 55 passion of arrogance, reaching after a great place in the Kingdom. It is a passion of gratitude, of devo- tion, of humility. " Though I desire to suffer," he writes to the Trallians, "I know not if I am worthy." It is in the same spirit that he says to the Romans again, " If ye be silent and leave me alone, I am a word of God ; but if ye desire my flesh, then shall I be again a mere cry." He feels that all his preaching past has been comparatively poor and unfruitful, " the voice of one crying," no more, but if he becomes a martyr, that will be a preaching effective to the last degree. Surely he was right. Martyrs' deaths have always been fruitful of new life in the Church, and a man has a right to be glad if he sees a prospect before him that he will be sown as the seed of a divine harvest. (2) Ignatius longed for martyrdom, largely be- cause the Church's very life was endangered, and he felt that the deaths of some of her most valued sons would add vastly to her power. The same condi- tions of danger and conflict inspired in him his other great passion, the passion for unity. He felt that a house divided against itself must fall. He had the Lord's own word for it, and it was the dictate of sanctified common-sense as well. And yet the wills and affections of sinful men are unruly, and the Church on earth always consists of sinful men gath- ered around the Divine Head. In St. Paul's day there was real danger that the Church of Corinth would go to pieces. In Ignatius's day he saw the same danger everywhere. If the early Church had been taught the modern theory, that denominational 56 The Post- Apostolic Aye. rivalry is a good thing, it would have been divided hopelessly before the end of the first century. Ig- natius believed that such division was as bad as " desertion in the face of the enemy," a crime whose penalty is death. Nothing short of careful reading of the letters as a whole will give an adequate idea of the way in which unity is dwelt on all through. " It is therefore profitable for you to be in blameless unit}^, that ye may also be partakers of God always " (Eph. iv.). " I sing the praise of the Churches, and I pray that there may be in them union of the flesh and of the spirit, which are Jesus Christ's, our never- failing life, a union of faith and love, which is above all things, and what is more than all, a union with Jesus and the Father " (Magnes. i.). " He that is within the sanctuary is clean ; but he that is without the sanctuaiy is not clean, — that is, he that doeth aught without the bishop and presbytery and deacons, this man is not clean in his conscience " (Trail, vii.). " Shun divisions as the beginning of evils. Do ye all follow your bishop, as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles, and to the deacons pay respect, as to God's commandment. Let no man do aught of things pertaining to the Church apart from the bishop. Let that be held a valid Eucharist which is under the bishop or one to whom he shall have committed it. Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be ; even as where Jesus may be, there is the Catholic Church. 1 ir This is the first appearance of this phrase in Christian litera- ture. Lightfoot translates "universal" rather than "Catholic," on the ground that the phrase was not yet technical. See his in- teresting note. Mutual Duties of Bishop and Church. 57 It is not lawful apart from the bishop to baptize, or hold a love-feast ; but whatever he shall approve, this is well-pleasing also to God ; that everything which ye do may be sure and valid " (Smyrn. viii.). It is the natural outgrowth of this feeling of the overpowering necessity for unity, that Ignatius should be as intense in preaching submission to leadership, and ultimately to one leader, the bishop, as the responsible head of each Church. The Church's unity is to Ignatius an arch, of which the bishop is the keystone. Displace that uniting force of central authority, and the whole structure of God's Temple on earth is endangered. So he writes to Polycarp, " Have a care for unity, than which nothing is better " ; and then, as illustrating the method of this unity, " Let nothing be done without thy consent ; neither do thou anything without the consent of God " (Pol. i., iv.). It would be grossly unfair to Ignatius not to point out that he has a doc- trine of unity for the bishop too. Not only must he do nothing " without the consent of God," but he must consult his presbyters and consider the wishes of his people. The relation of bishop and diocese is like the relation of husband and wife. Bishop, clergy, and laity must consult together freely, con- sider one another fully, give up to one another gen- erously. Only, when there is a question of the common good, and a difference of judgment which cannot be resolved, some final authority must decide. The modern view says, " The majority." Ignatius says, " The divinely appointed head." He can hardly find words too strong. " Be obedient to the 58 The Post- Apostolic Age. bishop and to one another, as Jesus Christ was to the Father, and as the Apostles were to Christ and to the Father, that there may be union both of flesh and spirit" (Magnes. xii.). "When ye are obedi- ent to the bishop as to Jesus Christ, it is evident to me that ye are living not after men, but after Jesus Christ " (Trail, ii.). " As many as are of God and of Jesus Christ, they are with the bishop." . . . " It was the preaching of the Spirit, who spake on this wise : Do nothing without the bishop " (Philad. iii. 7.). One wonders what Ignatius would have said, if he could have been told that a time was coming when the Church would be so strong that it would be thought wiser to have many divisions of it, all inde- pendent Churches, each aiming at a catholic exten- sion over the others' ground. He speaks of himself in quaint phrase as "a man composed unto union." Let that be our last thought of the martyr bishop, as we pass on our way. 6. With the letters of Ignatius is most closely connected The Epistle of St.. Polycarp to the Philip- pians. We have seen that the Church of Philippi sent a letter to Polycarp asking for copies of any letters written by Ignatius. That letter is lost, but we possess the bishop of Smyrna's reply. It is a good practical exhortation, without very much that is notable in it save its earnestness. An exhortation to obey the presbyters and deacons makes it prob- able that Philippi had not at that time a local bishop. There is mention of a presbyter, Valens, and his wife, as having disgraced the Christian name by Lost Writings of Papias. 59 some sin springing from the evil root of love of money. " Be ye, therefore, yourselves also sober therein," is his charitable comment, "and hold not such as enemies [he seems to have 2 Thess. iii. 15 in his mind], but restore them as frail and erring members, that ye may save the whole body of you." With this is often printed the letter of the Church of Smyrna to the Church of Philomelium, giving an account of St. Polycarp's noble death, but that be- longs to the middle of the second century and to a later chapter of this book. We have now taken a view of Eusebius's Ecclesi- astical History and of all the Christian writings that have come down to us which any scholars of repute now date between 75 and 125. It may be interest- ing to mention the few little scraps of the writings of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, once a pupil of St. John the Evangelist, who wrote an Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, and who being a " Chiliast," which is something like a modern " Adventist," got the reputation in later times of being " a man of slen- der intelligence," losing credit so much that very little of his has come down to us, and again the so- called Second Epistle of St. Clement of Rome, which is neither Clement's nor an Epistle, but the first Christian sermon which has come to us, being prob- ably a homily delivered in the Corinthian Church about the middle of the second century, and so highly esteemed that it was copied into a manuscript along with the real letter of Clement, to be read in Church, as that was, from time to time; but these fall outside of our limit, and do not throw light oft our 60 The Post-AjDostolic Age. early questions. There is also a Letter to Diognetus, which is often printed among the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, but it is probably to be dated as late as 170 or thereabouts, and though a fine state- ment in defense of Christianity, it has no place here. The object of this chapter has been to make the chief sources for the history of the Post- Apostolic Church in the period most critically important and most clouded by controversy, familiar enough to be some- thing more than mere names, when anywhere the reader encounters a quotation from any of them. CHAPTER III. THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE: RIVAL THEORIES IN MODERN TIMES. IN the Apostolic Age the Church was gov- erned by Apostles. In the Post-Apostolic Age the Church was governed by bishops. Hence arises a question. Did the Church begin with governing itself in some other manner, as the first Apostles passed away, and then gradually develop this one of leaving almost all gov- ernmental authority in the hands of officers called bishops, and finally like its new plan so well as to adopt it universally? Or did the first Apostles, foreseeing that they must soon pass away, devise this scheme of government and leave it as a legacy of wisdom to the Church ? Or again, was it part of the original plan of our Lord Jesus Christ? Christian scholars are much divided in opinion about this matter. We will first look at the two chief theories now held by men of leadership, and then we will call the early witnesses, who lived while the change was going on, and see what they say about it. For the sake of having a convenient label by which to refer to these two theories, we will call them "The Third Century View" and "the Post- Reformation (non-Episcopal) View." 61 62 The Post- Apostolic Age. I. The Third Century View. In the middle of the third century the general opinion of the Church about its own history was that when our Lord con- stituted apostles for the governing of His Church, He meant that office to last till the end of time. It was supposed that when He said to the Eleven, " Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," that was a precise promise of the continu- ance of their body as a body of trustees to whom a certain ministry was committed, until His coming again, and that the only serious changes made in the Church's ministry in passing from the Apostolic Age were two, — (1) the change in method of work from itinerant governors, exercising authority wherever they might feel called to go, to local governors, ex- ercising authority only in some one city and its im- mediate neighborhood, and correspondingly (2) a change of title from apostle, which means " mes- senger," or very nearly, "itinerant minister," to bishop, which means "overseer." According to this view there were a great many apostles — it had come to be quite a common office — before the close of the Apostolic Age, and as the number multiplied, it came to be thought best to assign particular apostles to particular fields of work, and have an understand- ing that while all governing power resided in the corporation of the apostles taken together, yet for purposes of administration each apostle would be left responsible for cultivating some small portions of the vineyard without interference from others. Then the name of the governing officer was changed from " apostle " to " bishop," a title which in earlier Opinion in Third Century. 63 times had been given to the second order of the ministry, so that in the New Testament it is always equivalent to "presbyter," which means "elder." A learned bishop, Theodoret of Cyrus, writing (about A. D. 450) a commentary on 1 Timothy iii. 1, puts it in this way : "At that time they called the same persons presbyters and bishops ; but those who are now called bishops they called apostles. But as time went on, the name of the apostleship was left for those who were truly apostles, but they gave the name of bishop to those who were formerly called apostles." Returning now to the third century, we may embody the general idea of that age about bishops in two quotations from great leaders of the Church. We draw one quotation from Asia Minor and one from North Africa. Firmilian, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, mentions the Apostles and goes on to speak of " the bishops who succeeded them by vicarious ordination" [Ante-Nicene Chris- tian Library, V. 394]. That curious phrase "vica- rious ordination" can only be understood as mean- ing " ordination into the place of the Apostles." In like manner Cyprian, the martyr-bishop of Carthage, quotes our Lord's words to St. Peter : " Upon this rock I will build My Church," as describing " the honor of a bishop [Cyprian manifestly assumes that honor given to apostles in the New Testament be- longs equally to bishops in his day] and the order of His Church," and goes on thus: "Hence, through the changes of times and successions, the ordering of bishops and the plan of the Church flow onwards, so that the Church is founded upon the bishops, and 64 The Post- Apostolic Age. every act of the Church is controlled by these same rulers" [Ante-Nicene Christian Library, V. 305]. Of course, the Church about A. D. 250 might be in error about its own history of one hundred and fifty years before. These quotations are given simply to illustrate what the Church in the third century actually thought. It may, however, be proper to in- troduce here a few considerations, often overlooked, which do give more or less support to this view of the continuity of the apostolic office under a new name. 1. Contrary to the commonly received opinion of to-day, our Lord seems to have interested Himself in matters of organization. How do we know? Thus. There are four lists of the Twelve Apostles in the New Testament,— St. Matt. x. 2-4 ; St. Mark iii. 16-19; St. Luke vi. 14-16; Acts i. 13. No two lists give the names in the same order, though the last two were written by the same man, and yet, on the other hand, the names run always in three groups of four, and no name ever strays out of its own par- ticular group. Further, the first name in each group is invariable. This can hardly be a matter of acci- dent. Evidently the first Apostles were organized into three groups, with Simon Peter as the head of the first, Philip as the head of the second, and James, the son of Alphseus, as the head of the third. The following table will illustrate these statements. Tak- ing St. Matthew's list as our standard of comparison, and following the Westcott and Hort Text, we have the numbers running thus (the invariable heads of groups are indicated by Roman numerals) : A'postles Numerous in New Testament. 65 St. Matt. I, 2, 3, 4; V, 6, 7, 8 ; IX, 10, 11, 12. St. Mark I, 3, 4, 2; V, 6, 8, 7 ; IX, 10, 11, 12. St. Luke I, 2, 3, 4 ; V, 6, 8, 7 ; IX, 11, 10, 12. Acts I, 4, 3, 2; -V, 7, 6, 8; IX, 11, 10 [— ]. That our Lord never paid any attention to such mat- ters should hardly be maintained. 2. There are some signs that apostles became numerous in the New Testament period. Besides the original Twelve, we have (13) Matthias, (14) Paul, (15) Barnabas, (16) James, the Lord's brother, 1 (17) Silas, 2 not to include Andronicus and Junias [not Junia, as in the King James version of Rom. xvi. 7], of whom the cautious and impartial Lightfoot says, " On the most natural interpretation " they " are distinguished members of the apostulate," and one or two others that might be named. It should be added that the Church could never have had any serious trouble from " false apostles" [2 Cor. xi. 13; Rev. ii. 2], unless the number of persons really holding the apostolic office had become indefinitely large. Perhaps Eusebius may have been wrong when he wrote (Ecclesiastical History i. 12), "there were many others who were called apostles, in imita- J Cf. Gal. i. 19, ii. 9 ; Acts xv. 13, with John vii. 5 and 1 Cor. xv. 7. It will appear that our Lord's " brethren " did cot believe on Him six months before His death. One of them, James, be- came afterwards a chief apostle, and is reckoned by Eusebius and other Church historians as first bishop of Jerusalem in the sense of local presidency. He was the man chiefly known to St. Paul as "James," and therefore the appearance recorded in 1 Cor. xv. 7, was probably an appearance to him, finding him sceptical, yet forcing conviction upon him, so that from an opponent he became a believer. 2 Cf. 1 Thess. i. 1 and ii. 6, "Paul and Silvauus" . . ., and again, "we . . . Apostles." E 66 The Post-Apostolic Age. tion of the Twelve " ; but when we find Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, iv. 17), speaking of his name- sake of Rome as "the apostle, Clement," it does seem like a bit of genuine tradition from a time, a century earlier, when for a time the same man might be called "apostle" or "bishop" in the Church. 3. In the Revelation (i., ii., iii.), we find certain persons called by the title of " angels " of Churches. They seem to be Church officers having an apostolic fulness of authority, for they are held responsible by our Lord for the general condition of the Churches under their superintendence, yet no such title is known to Church History. It means the same thing as " apostle," and yet it is not " apostle." Accord- ing to the present theory, this Revelation was sent from God just as the Church was beginning to adapt the apostolic office to new conditions under a new name, laying aside the title given by our Lord Him- self. At such a time our Lord speaks from heaven and sends messages and warnings to some of these localized apostles, now ceasing to be called apostles. By giving them directions concerning their work in the new method, He recognizes and sanctions the new method. By changing His own name for their office and yet using a word of similar meaning, He acknowledges them as holding the same office which He instituted, and yet indicates His willingness that His own title for it should be disused. 4. The Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus seem to point to such a superintendence of the Churches of Ephesus and its neighborhood and Protestant Feeling about Episcopacy . 67 of Crete, respectively, as we now call Episcopal, by men not of the number of the original apostles. IT. The Post-Reformation {non- Episcopal) View. Views are very apt to rise out of feelings. After the Reformation there grew up many bodies of Christians who had no episcopate. Some thought- ful leaders regretted the loss, 1 but they felt that they were called of God to organize into new Churches large groups of Christians who had been unright- eously excluded from Church fellowship by the or- ganizations already existing. If neither episcopal oversight nor episcopal ordination was to be had, they must do without them. Hence they read their Church History with a prejudice. The papacy was a human invention which had passed itself off as divine. Why not the episcopacy also? A great many things had been supposed to be proved by "tradition," and the tradition had now been found 'The great Lutheran Confession of Augsburg says concerning bishops, (pars ii., art. vii.), "The Churches ought necessarily, and jure divino, to obey thern." . . . " The bishops might easily retain the obedience that is due them, if they would not press men to observe traditions which cannot be observed with a good conscience." So the Defense of the Confession said, "We here again wish to testify that we will gladly preserve the ecclesiasti- cal and canonical polity, if only the bishops will cease to behave cruelly toward our Churches." So Melaucthon said, "I see what a Church we shall have, if we overthrow the ecclesiastical polity." So John Calvin in a book On the Necessity of Reforming the Church declares that "If they will show us a hierarchy wherein the bishops are so above others that they refuse not to be under Christ, there is no anathema that they will not be worthy of, if there shall be any such, who will not observe it with entire obedi- ence." Whatever the faults and failures of the actual governors of the Church at that period, the greatest leaders of the Conti- nental Reformation still thought that an episcopal government would be an instrument of great value in the hands of a reformed Church. 68 The Post- Apostolic Age. to be as worthless as any old wives' gossip. It was easy to form a habit of assuming that any testimony of antiquity that one did not like was one of these corrupt traditions, representing only a careless, or an ignorant, departure from the principles of the New Testament. It is a great glory of modern Prote's- tant scholarship that it has for some years been pa- tiently investigating the Church's records and revis- ing its former conclusions on a more truly historical basis. It now accepts a great deal of historical tes- timony which it used to set aside. Whereas fifty years ago non -Episcopalian scholars of eminence would say, " There is no proof of the existence of monarchical episcopacy before the beginning of the third century," they now say, " Monarchical episco- pacy did not get a foothold at Rome till about A. D. 140, having probably been introduced in Asia Minor some years earlier." That learned Presby- terian scholar, the late Doctor SchafT, held it proved that a number of Churches in Asia Minor had dio- cesan bishops A. D. 115 or earlier, taking this as the date of the martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch. Then as to the general body of the Church he says, " It is matter of fact that the episcopal form of government was universally established in the Eastern and West- ern Church as early as the middle of the second cen- tury " [Church History, ii. 144]. We are certainly drawing nearer to an agreement about our facts. It may be set down as a point conceded in modern schol- arship that the very beginnings of diocesan episco- pacy belong to the first quarter of the second cen- tury or perhaps to the last years of the first century. Apostles Chosen as Eye-witnesses. 69 But wherever the beginnings of Episcopal govern- ment may be dated, it is the general theory of non- Episcopalian scholars that bishops are certainly not apostles under another name, but ministers of a totally different order and origin, gradually trans- formed from mere presiding officers in a council of their equals into real governors having a distinct office of their own. This theory points to the words used at the election of Matthias (Acts i. 21, 22), as showing that the very idea of an apostle was that of one who had been a companion of the Lord Jesus from the beginning of His ministry, and who could therefore be an irresistible witness to the fact of His resurrection from the grave. St. Paul had not this qualification, but then he had the heavenly vision which caused his conversion, and that is held to be equivalent. Of course, another explanation is at least possible. St. Peter may simply have meant that while there were many Christian believers, otherwise well-gifted, who had also known our Lord closely before His death, and had personally seen Him after His" resurrection, a new apostle must by all means be selected from among such, and may also have looked forward quite clearly to a conferring of the apostolic office upon men without that qualifi- cation twenty and thirty and forty }^ears later. Bat many careful scholars maintain positively that it is here defined in Hoty Scripture as part of the es- sential qualification of an apostle that he be thus a personal, independent witness of the fact of the res- urrection of our Lord. In that case, it is plain, the apostolic office could not have lasted long. 70 The Post- Apostolic Aye. Doctor Schaff suggests for supporting consider- ations as favoring his view that bishops of the second century are not apostles renamed, but presbyters transformed : (1) " The undeniable identity of presbyters and bishops in the New Testament." This is so far from being " undeniable " that it is stoutly denied by some of the latest scholars on Doctor Schaffs side. On the other side, however, it is always maintained as a plain fact of history. It does not seem impos- sible that if a certain order of the ministry had two titles, one of them might be borrowed after a while to mean something else. For instance the English " Curate" means of old a minister in responsible charge, having " cure " of souls. It means now, al- most invariably, an assistant-minister not in responsi- ble charge. To change the meaning of a word is sometimes easier than to revolutionize a form of gov- ernment. The question is, which did happen about the end of the first Christian century. (2) " Later, at the close of the first, and even in the second century, the two terms are still used in like manner for the same office." Non -Episcopalian scholars are apt to speak of a " confusion " in the use of these words lasting to the time of Ireneeus (about A. D. 175), who frequently speaks of bishops as "elders." Let it be observed, however, (a) that even if there was a confusion, that would not settle the question how the confusion came about, (b) that there is no example of calling a presbyter " bishop " after the death of St. John, un- less it be that the Teachiny of the Twelve Apostles and Grounds for the Non- Episcopalian View. 71 Hennas are to be dated in the second century [and the cases in Hernias may be cases of reference to the later kind of bishop after all], and (c) that in call- ing diocesan bishops " elders " there was never any confusion at all. " Elder " has always been used freely in Greek, Latin, and English, for older men and men of an older day. And even in the more technical sense the highest ecclesiasticism holds a bishop to be an " elder " too, even as St. Peter was, when he wrote, " The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder" (1 Peter v. 1). Surely there was no confusion in his mind between the dis- tinct offices of the presbyter and the Apostle. (3) " The express testimony of the learned Jerome that the Churches originally, before divi- sions arose through the instigation of Satan, were governed by the common council of the presbyters, and not till a later period was one of the presbyters placed at the head, to watch over the Church and suppress schisms. He traces the difference of the office simply to 'ecclesiastical 'custom, as distinct from divine institution." Jerome was a learned man, but not an impartial one. His views were very much colored by his feelings, and at one time in his life it was a joy to him to make light of bishops. But did he know? Certain it is that he was born about two hundred and fifty years after the critical time that we are thinking about, and that Eusebius, a hundred years nearer the events, and quite as learned and scholarly in historical lines, was just as confident on the other side. We can hardly accept either of them as a final authority. 72 The Post- Apostolic Age. (4) " The custom of the Church of Alexandria, where from the Evangelist Mark down to the middle of the third century, the twelve presbyters elected one of their number president and called him bishop." This is a story told in one of Jerome's letters, and also by Eutychius, a patriarch of Alex- andria, writing a history in the tenth century. If this custom really violated what most people consid- ered to be Church principles in the third century, why do we hear of no quarrel about it ? Probably it did not. Eutychius says that in that same period there was no bishop in all Egypt outside of Alex- andria. Now the Church was strong in Egypt. Probably, the present writer has thought, those " twelve elders " were men who had been ordained to that office in the Church which ma}^ be called Apostolic or Episcopal, — twelve k ' elders " of the lower rank could not have sufficed for the great city of Alexandria in the middle of the third century, when Rome had forty - six ! — and who governed the Egyptian Churches from Alexan- dria in reverent imitation of an earlier twelve governing from Jerusalem. When their presiding officer died, they would elect another from among themselves and call him preeminently the bishop of Alexandria. This explanation supposes that Jerome had somewhat misunderstood, or misused, the story of a state of things which had come to an end a hundred years before his birth. Yv 7 hether we are right or wrong, Jerome himself goes right on from this story to the following words, — " For what func- tion belongs to a bishop that does not also belong to New Forms of Non- Episcopalian View. 73 a presbyter, excepting ordination ? " (Jerome, Let- ter cxlvi., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vi. 289.) "Excepting ordination" The story presents a real difficulty, but it is hardly to be taken as show- ing that the writer thought that presbyters could ordain. Nay, in this very letter he finds it conven- ient to claim in one place that all bishops are " suc- cessors of the apostles." Twenty years ago, the writer would have ended this chapter here and proceeded at once to call in the early witnesses. To-day there is more to be said about rival theories first. Deepening study has driven back the battle-line of controversy. A new scholar- ship has sprung up on the non-Episcopalian side, which is frankly dissatisfied with statements even so late as Doctor Schaffs. It recognizes in the letters of Ignatius a prevailing episcopacy in Asia Minor in the earl}^ years of the second century. It sees that the explanation of such an appearance must be looked for in the conditions of the first century. It has subjected those conditions to a new and search- ing examination of microscopic fineness. The fun- damental question between the two theories, to state it once more, is this : Are second century bishops apostles under a new name ? or are they some other order of ministers promoted to a new office? Many eminent Episcopalian scholars have taken the latter, here called for convenience the "non-Episcopalian," view, and one of the most distinguished of them all, the late Bishop Lightfoot, held it in this form, — the episcopate a development out of the presbyterate, with reservation of the title " bishop," or " over- 74 The Post- Apostolic Age, seer," to those presbyters who came to be permanent presiding officers, with greatly enlarged powers, and all this an evolution, rather than a revolution, under the eye and guiding hand of St. John, the last sur- vivor of the Twelve. It was the teaching of Bishop Lightfoot that just because the institution of episco- pal government of the Church was thus a natural, providential growth, to which the Church's mind was led by the guiding of the Spirit, therefore it was in a particularly high sense of divine origin, not in- herently necessary to the Church's being, or well- being, but also not to be given up or set aside with- out very plain providential intimations that its use- fulness had passed away." He was also so far from seeing any such intimations, that in the last years of his life he spoke of " the form of Church government inherited from apostolic times " as one of the " essen- tials which could under no circumstances be aban- doned " by the Church of England in efforts for Home Reunion {Commentary on Philippians y Preface xiv.). Another line taken by an Episcopalian scholar de- serves notice on the " non-Episcopalian " side, — that of the late Doctor Edwin Hatch in the Bampto.n Lectures of 1880, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches. This volume has the high dis- tinction of having been introduced to German read- ers with warm commendation by Professor Harnack, perhaps the most widely learned scholar now living in the department of early Church history. A very great scholar, it may be said, is not always even a Theory of Dr. Hatch. 75 moderately good reasoner. Some readers of Doctor Hatch's book will admire ungrudgingly his labo- rious learning, and close the volume with a sigh over his defective sense of what constitutes proof. But whether his proofs are held to stand good, or no, some points which he makes should be familiar to a student of to-day. (1) He still holds the old view of the identity of " presbyters " and " bishops " in the first century, but he explains that they got the name of "presby- ters " (" elders ") because they were really a council of the elder men in each Christian community. One gathers that he would hold that a young man like Timothy (1 Tim. iv. 12) could not have been a mem- ber of such a council in early days. There must have been natural leadership in other ways, but age was one essential condition. This council of older men was something that existed already in all Jewish communities under the same name. What more nat- ural than for Jewish Christians to borrow it without change? The title " bishop," on the other hand, comes from Greek sources. Greek clubs and so- cieties were apt to have an episcopos — so we may rep- resent in English characters the word which we have adopted into English speech as "bishop," and which means " overseer," — and in such organiza- tions the matters looked after by the episcopos were money matters. Obviously, argues Dr. Hatch, the Christian Churches called their " elders " " over- seers " from the same kind of oversight, because they received the alms of the Christian community, 76 The Post- Apostolic Age. and decided how they should be used. 1 Later, he would suggest, one " elder " came to have all this "overseeing" left in his hands. Then he soon came to have an exclusive hold on the title which belonged to that work. This theory provides a perfectly pos- sible and simple explanation for the transference of the title " bishop " from many to one. No early writer says that things did happen in this way. Indeed, they tell us that things happened in another way. Dr. Hatch claims that their statements are not to be believed, that their explanation is obviously artificial, invented to cover a departure from the earlier ways, and that his explanation makes all the known facts fall easily into place. (2) It is a very important part of Dr. Hatch's theory that these Christian ministries of presbyters, or bishops, and deacons, were at first purely a busi- ness matter. Elders or bishops did not necessarily teach or preach, baptize, celebrate the Eucharist, or do any spiritual duties whatever. Those things were for " prophets " and " teachers " to attend to. These 'This is quite possible, hut all arguments as to what people ought to have raeaut in adopting words to express new ideas are highly precarious. Thus if some Chinese student of forgotten English, centuries hence, shall argue that because "steamboat" meant "boat urged forward by steam," therefore we must have meant by "sawhorse" "horse urged forward by a saw," he will be doing no worse than philological scholars have been known to do before, but he will be profoundly mistaken. Men have a meaning. They look about for a word to express it. If they find one that suits them, they seize upon it. The}' do not stop to think whether that word might more logically have been used for something else which they did not happen to want to say. Dr. Hatch assumes constantly that Christians really had nothing to say about their ordained ministry which a Jew might not have said of his village-elders, or a Greek of the steward of his club. Theory of M. Reville. 77 presbyter-bishops were simply keepers of accounts, managers of business matters, such as the distribu- tion of poor-relief, and then because this last duty included a responsibility for deciding who were worthy applicants, judges in all cases of Church discipline. They were rulers, not pastors. Any gifted Christian might be a prophet, a teacher, a leader in spiritual things, without any ordination at all. Ordination set a man apart for serving tables and ruling and for nothing else. This view is sup- ported by Dr. Hatch, (p. 78), by a reference to 1 Tim. v. 17, "Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially they who labor in the w r ord and doctrine." "It is a clear in- ference," he says, that "if they taught as well as ruled, they combined two offices." Perhaps one should observe, however, that it is ruling, and doing it well, that brings double honor, not ruling and do- ing something else, and again, that ruling well seems to be defined as especially good, if it includes teach- ing, as if the writer conceived teaching as part of the ruling. And that is just what this writer did hold. He says (1 Tim. iii. 2), "a bishop must be . . . apt to teach," a man of the teacher's gift and habit. Why should an episcopos such as Dr. Hatch supposes be required to possess an en- dowment of this kind ? Did a Greek social club require anything of the sort of its episcopos f As an example of Continental thought about the Christian beginnings, we may refer to a work of M. Re*ville, a professor in the Sorbonne, Les Origines de V Ejnscopat. It represents the latest word of French 78 The Post- Apostolic Age. Protestantism. No scholar, says M. Reville, pays any attention now to alleged utterances of Jesus Christ after His resurrection. To attach any belief to such passages as St. Matt, xxviii. 18-20, or St. John xx. 20-23, would be totally unhistorical. He holds with Dr. Hatcli that all ordained ministers in the early Church had a purely secular ministry, and that all really spiritual ministries were performed by volunteers who felt moved thereto, — of course, pres- byters and such like might have such movings as well as others, — but that gradually the non-spiritual ministry of table-serving and financiering assumed to itself all spiritual functions, as spiritual power de- clined. The very first Christian Churches, he tells us, were thoroughgoing democracies. At Corinth, for example, St. Paul had, and claimed, no authority whatever. He had no power to carry out any policy there except as he might be able by persuasive argu- ment to induce a majority in the Church to adopt his views. " Inspiration " and " prophecy " were the great forces of those early days, and prevailed mightily over such considerations as "tradition" and "custom " and "ecclesiastical law." This does not seem just like St. Paul's idea, who wrote, " I will know, not the speech of them which are puffed up, but the power. . . . Shall I come to you with a. rod ? " Or again, " The rest will I set in order, when I come " ; " We have no such custom, neither the Churches of God " ; " If I come again, I will not spare " ; "I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness." Doubt- less there was a highly democratic party in Corinth, Presbyters not Bishojis at all. 79 but it would seem as if St. Paul insisted that he had just that authority which they denied. l But the most notable points in M. ReVille's view are two. (1) He finds a difference between the presbyter and the bishop. The Churches of Palestine organized in true Jewish fashion with a council of elders, he thinks. Churches mostly of Gentile origin organized in another way. Both kinds of Church had subordinate officers and called them by the same name, " deacons." But bishops and pres- byters were somewhat different officers of different groups of Churches. The fact that St. Paul wrote to the Church of Philippi as under the care of " bishops and deacons," and that St. Polycarp writ- ing to the same Church fifty or sixty years later, mentions only " presbyters and deacons," gives him no difficulty. He supposes a serious change in Church government to have taken place at Philippi in the interval, — a change too from a Gentile to a Jewish predominance! (2) Having to deal with the speech of St. Paul to the Ephesian presbyters 1 As a further illustration of the difference between great learn- ing and a keen sense of what constitutes proof, one may take this precious piece of argument, — " Neither at Tyre, nor at Ptolemais, is there the least trace of any ecclesiastical organization what- ever." Precisely so. All that we hear of Tyre as a Christian centre is contained in three verses (4-6) of Acts xxi., and all that we learn of Ptolemais in that character is contained in one verse more (7) of that same chapter. There is equally no trace that the disciples in those places ever had anything to eat. There is also no trace that they wore clothing when they went abroad. Indeed, the fact that they found no difficulty in all kneeling down on the shore, when they prayed, might be taken to suggest that they did not wear clothes. Surely the argument of this eminent scholar can only be described in his own beautiful and expressive tongue. C'est ires naif! 80 The Post-Apostolic Age. (Acts xx. 17, 28), where he speaks of "the flock over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you over- seers" in Greek, " bishops," he sets it down as a late forgery contrived on purpose to give an appearance of high sanction to what was really an innovation on the ecclesiastical order, when " bishops " and presbyters had come to be identified in the popular mind (and had not yet been pulled apart again by the setting up of a diocesan bishop), and were sup- posed really to have been endued with mysterious powers by the Holy Ghost at their ordination. Correspondingly, the Epistles to Timothy and Titus are set down as forgeries of the same period and purpose. This tendency to set aside portions of the New Testament volume as unauthoritative is a very distinguishing sign of the times. Of course, it has been done by many critics for many generations. It was done by heretics in the second century. But it is now the easy resort of Christian scholars who consider themselves very orthodox. Meanwhile those of us who hold the old-fashioned view of the origins of the ministry feel justified in asking the attention of our brethren on the other side to this fact, — " Your best modern scholars are insisting that St. Paul cannot have written the letters to Timothy and Titus which the Church accepted as Sacred Scriptures, because they find them to mean what we have always said that they meant." We cannot here go into the question whether a forger did impose, or whether a forger could have imposed, upon the Church about A. D. 90-100 letters purporting to be of St. Paul, but gravely misrepresenting him, and in- Dr. McGifferfs View. 81 tended to bolster up a s) r stem which had all grown up in the years, not more than thirty -seven at the outside, since St. Paul suffered martyrdom. A notable presentation of the non-Episcopalian theory in its later manner is that of Dr. A. C. Mc- Giffert, a Presbyterian scholar of distinction, Pro- fessor of Church History in the Union Theological Seminary, New York, a pupil of Harnack, but a thor- oughly independent enquirer, in his book, The Apos- tolic Age, published in 1897. Like most of the later writers on his side of the question he dwells much on the importance of the "prophets," with their special gifts, in the early years of the Church, and he regards "bishop " as the title of an office of financial rather than spiritual interest. But he gives his view much greater historical probability by suggest- ing that it was just exactly the men of most marked spiritual endowments, "apostles," "prophets," " teachers," to whom the office of distributing the Church funds and the consequent administration of the Church's discipline were ordinarily committed. That helps to account, as other forms of this theory had failed to account, for the obvious fact that our earliest Christian writings treated these officers as if they ivere especially concerned with spiritual things. The episcopoi were men who had spiritual oversight, Dr. McGiffert would say, but they had not these spiritual cares because they were Church officers under this title. They were put in trust with this semi-secular office because they had already risen to leadership in more purely spiritual things. What happened, he goes on to enquire, when the supply F 82 The Post- Apostolic Age. of supernaturally gifted " prophets " and " teachers " began to fail ? and his answer is, The Church looked around for suitable men to be episcopoi and found them among her elder membership rather than in the younger set. We all agree that " elders " and " younger men " are sometimes used both in the New Testament and in other early Christian writings in an entirely untechnical way. " Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder " (1 Peter v. 5), certainly does not mean, "Ye deacons be sub- ject to the presbyters." So, Dr. McGiffert would say, " elders " continued for long to be no technical term at all, but simply meant the mature, experi- enced men, the natural leaders of the Christian com- munity. From among such alone would " bishops " be chosen as soon as extraordinary spiritual gifts began to fail. Thus neither those who identify " bishops " and " presbyters," nor those who think that the two are distinct groups of officers, are right. Rather, there is no office of presbyters at all, but some presbyters, that is " elder Christians," were put into a special office as " bishops," and others were not. Acts xiv. 23 and Titus i. 5 are not to be under- stood of ordaining men to be elders, but of appoint- ing certain elder men to an office not named, in fact the office of an episcopos. To the present writer this seems the most defensible form of the non-Episco- palian view that he has ever seen presented. It does not, however, seem to account fully satisfactorily for the emergence of a clerical order of presbyters, who may be young men, appearing in a graduated hier- archy, between a highly authoritative bishop and his Acts and Pastoral Epistles Forgeries. 83 deacons, in the first years of the second century. It may be noted that Dr. McGiffert is one of those scholars who reconstruct the New Testament with a strong hand, when it does not suit them. The Book of the Acts is here set down as a composition of one who had never known St. Paul, and had in some points totally misunderstood him, in the last years of the first century. " The ascription to him [St. Paul] and to other apostles of the power to impart the Spirit by the laying on of hands, which we find in the Book of Acts, is certainly not in accord with his conception " (p. 542). " We should hardly ex- pect one to be so unfamiliar with his [St. Paul's] Gospel, as the author of the Acts seems to have been " (p. 238 n.). In like manner the Epistles to Timothy and Titus are set down as not only not St. Paul's, but very poor compositions indeed. "It is not simply the absence of the great fundamental conceptions of the Pauline Gospel, it is the presence of another Gospel of a different aspect, that is most significant M (p. 403). They were a deliberate forgery founded on letters actually written by the Apostle. " Paul's brief letters to Timothy and Titus coming into his hands, he added to them in good faith what he believed Paul himself would say in the light of the peculiar needs of the day " (p. 412). What was that day, according to these lights? "The emphasis upon heresy in all three epistles, the lack of the primitive idea of the endowment of all believ- ers with spiritual gifts, fitting them for special forms of service, and the substitution for such inspired be- lievers of appointed officers, charged with the per- 84 The Post- Apostolic Age. formance of teaching as well as of financial and dis- ciplinary functions, points to a time as late as the close of the first century or the early years of the second " (pp. 413-414). This, then, is the latest hinge of the controversy, the question whether certain books received for ages as Holy Scripture, are truly unworthy of the name. It is a question for scholars. It will be discussed for a generation or two, probably, before they will agree. It cannot be discussed here. Only it does seem fair to say that one of the grounds which this newest scholarship is alleging for casting certain books out of the New Testament Canon, is that they do not speak as it would judge that they ought to speak, on the subject of the origins of the Christian ministry. CHAPTER IV. THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE: THE WITNESSES CALLED. E have seen that there is much in which scholars cannot yet agree. What, for in- stance, was the form of government of the Church of Corinth in St. Paul's day ? Was it a pure democracy, wherein the members of the Church managed their own affairs, deciding all questions by a majority vote? Or was it a sort of constitutional monarchy, limited partly by some well-recognized rights of Christians generally, under the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and partly by the consideration and largeness and common sense of St. Paul, the governing apostle? Different men read the New Testament indications and come to the most opposite results. It is agreed, however, on all sides, that in the end of the first century and the beginning of the second a government by one official head called a bishop was appearing in the Churches, that there was something new about it, and that by the middle of the second century the new use was pretty general. We are now to call in some early witnesses and see if they can answer certain questions for us. We want to know whether government by single officers (under whatever name) was established by apostles in any of the great Church centres, whether 85 86 The Post- Apostolic Age. the apostles' office was understood to have con- tinued beyond the Twelve and St. Paul, and whether government by chief officers such as we now call " bishops " was regarded by men who were in the midst of the change of methods (whatever that change may have been) as part of a divine plan. 1. First we will call Eusebius, the historian. He lived two centuries after the time about which we are enquiring but then he had access to many valua- ble records now lost, and among them to the Church History of Hegesippus, written as early as A. D. 165. According to Eusebius, then, the Church of Jeru- salem had James the Lord's brother, called in Holy Scripture an apostle, for its first bishop. He quotes Hegesippus as sa}dng that " James, the brother of the Lord, succeeded to the government of the Church in conjunction with the Apostles," and Clement of Alexandria as sajdng that " Peter and James and John . . . strove not after honor, but chose James the first bishop of Jerusalem." After James are named fourteen other bishops of Jerusalem be- fore the destruction under Hadrian, A. D. 132, the list beginning with Symeon, son of Clopas, which Clopas was, according to Hegesippus, a brother of St. Joseph, making Symeon a (legal) cousin of our Lord. Eusebius illustrates his own careful accuracy by telling us that he could find no table of these first bishops of Jerusalem with their dates, but that it was understood that they were all short-lived. For the Church of Alexandria he gives a list of bishops with definite dates, St. Mark the Evange- list coming first, Annianus following him A. D. 62, Eusehian Lists of Early Bishops. 87 and governing the Church for twenty-two years, Abilius succeeding A. D. 84, Cerdon A. D. 97, and so on. l For the Church of Antioch Eusebius does not profess to know the dates of things for the first be- ginnings, but he is clear that Ignatius was the second bishop, Evodius having preceded him. Even severe critics acknowledge that this must be a historical statement. A mere legend would have connected so interesting a person as Ignatius straight back to St. John or St. Peter or St. Paul. Coming now to the Church of the imperial city, Rome, Eusebius had a list of the early bishops, made by Irenseus, bishop of Lyons, who visited Rome in the year 177, and who gives this testimony : " The blessed Apostles, having founded and established the Church, entrusted the office of the episcopate to Linus." Then come Anencletus, Clement, the writer of the letter to the Church of Corinth, Evarestus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius, 1 Some scholars pour contempt ou these dates, and so on the whole list. As an example of their reasoning take this. If St. Mark's successor was made bishop in the year 62, St. Mark must have died in that year or earlier, but according to the best traditions St. Mark wrote his Gospel after St. Peter's death, and so as late as A. D. 65 at least. But to suppose that St. Mark must have died before he could have had a successor as apostle or bishop in charge of the Alexandrian Church, and that he could by no possibility have left a substitute at Alexandria, as St. Paul once left St. Timothy at Ephesus, and go somewhere else to do a special work which especially called him, is a very uncareful assumption. It is not scholarly to throw Eusebius overboard whenever one does not like his statements, and one may predict that after Lightfoot's examination of the Eusebian chronology of bishops of Rome and bishops of Antioch has had time to be digested by scholars generally, the old-time historian will be treated with more respect. 88 The Post- Apostolic Age. Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherus. Nothing could be clearer or more positive. On the other hand, some really eminent modern scholars set this testimony all aside. They do not question that Irenseus found such a list of bishops at Rome ; but they argue (rather uncertainly) from certain passages of the Shepherd of Hernias, that there was no one " elder " who had an acknowledged claim to preside over the Church, but that it was still under the care of a council of presbyters, and that Hermas's brother Pius must have been the very first " elder " who succeeded in making himself a single governor of the Church of the Romans. Within forty years after- ward, according to this view, everybody at Rome had forgotten the circumstances, and it was generally understood that they had had diocesan bishops for a century ! Nor does Eusebius leave us to depend on Irenaeus alone as his authority. He quotes Hegesip- pus as saying that he made a list of the Roman bishops down to Anicetus, not less than ten years before the visit of Irenseus. It is true that some learned men think that the Greek of Eusebius has been miscopied, and that where we now read " I made a succession down to Anicetus," we ought rather to read as the statement of Hegesippus, " I made a visit till the time of Anicetus." If they are right, so much the better. Hegesippus, eagerly collecting materials for a Church history, either made a list of Roman bishops within twenty-five years after the time when Pius is supposed to have made himself the first one, or else made a visit in Rome in the very days of Pius himself, and made no record of Apostles in the Didache. 89 any such interesting overturn. All the authorities consulted by Eusebius seem to have given him the same impression, that the transition from apostles to diocesan bishops was immediate. 2. The second witness shall be the unknown author of The Teaching of the Tivelve Apostles. We want him simply for one point, to tell us whether the office of apostles was continued and extended beyond those named in the New Testament. This is what he says (Chapter XI.) : " Now with regard to the apostles and prophets according to the decree of the Gospel, so do ye. Let every apostle that cometh to you be received as the Lord. But he shall not stay more than one day, and if need be, another also : and if he stay three days, he is a false prophet. And when the apostle deparceth, let him take nothing except bread enough till he reach his next lodging. And if he ask for money, he is a false prophet." We seem to have here a picture of a church officer visiting a series of rural communities who do not know his face, and who do know that false apostles sometimes impose themselves upon the Churches. " If he ask for money, he is a false prophet," is superficially very different from " The bishop will expect an offering, at every visitation, for diocesan missions." Yet there is no difference in principle. A true apostle will be in haste to get on from one work to another, and will ask nothing for himself. All that is true of the modern episcopal visitation. It is to be noted further that these Churches oc- casionally visited by itinerant " apostles " are bidden 90 The Post- Apostolic Age. (Chapter XV.), " Elect for yourselves bishops and deacons," as a local ministry. Apostles, bishops, deacons, — these are the three orders of the ministry, as in the New Testament. Some of these have supernatural gifts of utterance in God's Name and are known as " prophets," but there is no hint that the prophets are an order of the ministry. A lay- man may be a prophet. A man in any of the three orders may be a prophet. The sham apostle is declared to be " a false prophet." The inference is that a genuine apostle would be expected to be a man having something of the prophetic gift. We can see also how the gradual withdrawal of super- natural gifts of a prophetic kind and the fear of false apostles would make a government by itinerant apostles, unknown by face to the Churches which they visited, more and more undesirable. A local- ized, steady oversight would be demanded in the natural order of things. Some admirable scholars take another view of these " apostles." They are mere travelling preach- ers, we are told, to whom the Church gave the same title as to the original Twelve, but in an entirely different meaning. The Jews, it is argued, used the word " apostle " for a kind of Church messenger in their arrangements after the destruction of Jerusa- lem ; but it should be added that in their use the title was given to a very eminent and responsible officer, and in any case there seems to be no possibil- ity that these "apostles " of the Teaching were mes- sengers from one Church to another. No such thing is hinted at. The question might naturally be asked, Prophets Galled Chief Priests. 91 too, what these " travelling preachers " were good for, that they should be received " as the Lord " — a most significant reference to our Lord's word to the Twelve (St. Matt. x. 40), " He that receiveth you, receiveth Me," — in communities having already a supply of bishops and deacons, some of them en- dowed with the prophet's gift beside. On the whole, the Teaching seems to favor the theory that the Church had "apostles" as chief ministers, and plenty of them, till it chose to give them another name. In Chapter XIII., occurs a passage about paying tithes to the prophets, "for they are your chief priests." It has been urged that this is a clear testi- mony to the writer's feeling that " inspiration " was immensely superior to " order." A mere layman, it is said, could, if a prophet, perform any ministry in the Church, for instance, celebrate the Eucharist. The most stiffly ecclesiastical thinker will always readily admit that Almighty God could at any time and in any place call a man to any work of special ministry (as certainly St. Paul was called, " not of men" by any human selection, "nor by man" through any human agency, as of ordination) with- out connecting that man back to any successional ministry beginning from our Lord through His early apostles. But some of us are loath to think of God as using the method of " special creation " for the Church's ministry, any more than for filling the world with the forms of animal and vegetable life. Prophets were a splendid gift to the Church and well deserved to be supported by the Church, that they might be free for teaching functions. They deserved 92 The Post- Apostolic Age. to be supported by tithes as well as ever the Jewish chief priests did. We do not see that the Teaching means more than that. If, however, it is to be taken as meaning more, it must mean a great deal more, even that the ministry of the Christian Church was already clearly recognized as including a sacrificing priesthood, such as the ministry of the elder Church, and that is a conclusion which most Protestant scholars are quite unready to accept. 3. Clement of Rome has been often quoted by writers on what may be called the Episcopalian side for something which they can never prove by him. They represent him as saying that the Apostles ex- pressly provided that other men should succeed to their office. He may have meant to say that. More probably he did not. But he did contrive a sentence that is wonderfully ambiguous. These are his words as given in Lightfoot's translation of Chapter XLIV. " And our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife over the name of the bishop's office. For this cause, therefore, having received complete foreknowledge, they appointed the aforesaid persons, and afterward they provided a [continuance], that if [these] should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed to their minis- tration. Those, therefore, who were appointed by them, or afterward by other men of repute with the consent of the whole Church, and have minis- tered unblamabty to the flock of Christ in lowliness of mind, peacefully and with all modesty, and for long time have borne a good report with all, — these men we consider to be unjustly thrust out from their St. Clement's Ambiguity. 93 administration. For it will be no light sin for us, if we thrust out those who have offered the gifts of the bishop's office unblamably and holily." We bracket two words in Bishop Lightfoot's trans- lation, because there is great doubt about- them. Clement did not say "if these should fall asleep," but "if they should fall asleep." Bishop Lightfoot is sure that he meant " if these," i. e., " the aforesaid persons" of the next preceding clause, and the writer of these lines inclines to follow this sugges- tion, but oh! how easy it would have been for St. Clement to have said " these," if that really was his meaning. As it is, we cannot tell from the language used which of two things he intended to convey, whether that the Apostles provided that when they (the Apostles) fell asleep, other men should succeed to the apostolic office, or that the provision was that when they (the bishops and deacons formerly men- tioned) fell asleep, other men should be bishops and deacons in turn. It seems just possible that the good man was ambiguous on purpose, distinctly in- tending that both statements should be covered (and intimated) by his phrase. But at any rate the am- biguity is there. No one can expect to prove from Clement that the Apostles provided that they them- selves should have successors. Nevertheless there are five little points in this brief passage which are important as throwing light on Clement's mind, and which are not ambiguous at all. (1) Our Apostles kneiv through our Lord Jesus Christ. Clement believed, rightly or wrongly, that our Lord had personally interested Himself, and had 94 The Post- Apostolic Aye. given some direction to His Apostles, about the fu- ture organization of the ministry of His Church. (2) Having received complete foreknowledge. The word for " complete " is that commonly rendered " perfect." Surely Clement had seen nothing, had heard of nothing, in the way of development of the offices of the ministry thus far, which did not appear to him as having been foreseen by apostolic wisdom. (3) They provided a continuance. Here there is much difference of opinion as to what word Clement really wrote. A recent discovery of an old Latin version of this letter makes it nearly certain that for " con- tinuance " we should read "additional direction." But whether it was a " continuance " or a " direc- tion," it remains that Clement regarded the apostles not only as having foreseen everything that would make contention about the ministry, but as having made due provision how the difficulty should be met. (4) The strife that was understood to have been thus foreseen and provided for was to be over the name of the bishop's office. At this very time the name of " bishop " must already have begun to be used in a new way in the regions of Asia Minor and Syria, and Clement must have heard of it. The Ignatian letters will hardly allow us to suppose that when the second bishop of Antioch wrote them, diocesan epis- copacy had been known less than twenty years. In that case Clement implies (whatever the nature of the change may be understood to be, and whether we understand him to have approved or disapproved) that the Apostles had left distinct directions covering this point one way or the other. (5) Clement de- A Bishop Offers Sacrifice, 95 scribes presbyters as those who have offered the gifts of the bishop's office. As against the theory of the learned Dr. Hatch, that the duties of the ordained ministry were mainly secular at first, and that all particularly spiritual offices might be rendered by very spiritual laymen just as well, Clement chooses as the very chief idea of the office of a presbyter the thought that he is a man who offers the gifts, — offers at the Altar the great Christian Sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist. The gifts of the bishop s office. The Holy Gifts belong to that office. The Holy Gifts give the best definition of that office. According to the view of the primitive ministry advanced by Hatch and Harnack, we ought certainly to have here, " those who have faithfully administered the Church's poor relief, and upheld firmly the Church's disci- pline." 1 But that was not Clement's ruling idea of what a presbyter was for. He is not chiefly preacher, or pastor, or teacher, but one who offers an offer- ing. A few words more must be quoted from St. Clem- ent. He tells us in Chapter XL., that "We ought to do all things in order, as many as 1 Since these words were written Dr. McGiffert's Apostolic Age has appeared. On p. 660 he implies that he holds the "offering of the gifts " here referred to to be precisely the administration of poor relief. But even if it be granted that " offering the gifts," as equivalent to "celebrating the Eucharist," is technical lan- guage of a later day, it seems hard to understand how any one can take this " offering " as anything else than an offering to God. And coming before God with an offering, even of Christian men's alms, is a very different thing to take as the characteristic of a man's work in life, from an office of distribution of charities among the needy. The Clementiue idea of the ministry is that it offers something — we need not now decide what — to God. 96 The Post- Apostolic Age. the Master hath commanded us to perform at their appointed seasons. Now the offerings and ministra- tions He commanded to be performed with care, and not to be done rashly and in disorder, but at fixed times and seasons. And where and by whom He would have them performed, He Himself fixed by His own supreme will, that all things being done with piety according to His good pleasure, might be acceptable to His will. They, therefore, that make their offerings at the appointed seasons are acceptable and blessed ; for while they follow the institutions of the Master, they cannot go wrong. For unto the high priest his proper services have been assigned, and to the priests their proper office is appointed, and upon the Levites their proper ministrations are laid. The layman is bound by the layman's ordi- nances." The object of quoting this passage is to show that Clement was in the habit of regarding a good deal of the Church order of his day as a matter of divine law rather than of human expediency. Particular attention may be invited to two points. The first is that he believed the Church to be under a divine command to make certain offerings at particular times. What offerings? At what times? The only thing to which the Church's practice points us clearly is the celebration of the Eucharist on every Lord's Day. We may be pretty sure that, whether rightly or wrongly, Clement, the hearer of St. Paul and St. Peter, believed the Church's practice in that particular to rest upon a distinct " Thus saith the Lord." The second point is that Clement found in Hiyli-priests, Priests, and Levites Now. 97 the Church's system a high priest, priests, and Le- vites, or something that could be called by those names, as a matter of divine appointment. This is stoutly denied by many scholars. Bishop Lightfoot, for instance, thinks it unfair to press the analogy of three orders. All that Clement means, he thinks, is to say, " The Jewish Church had a fixed order from God. We might naturally expect that He would wish the Christian Church to have a fixed order, too." But the present writer has seen no discussion of this important point, — St. Clement does not say- that these things used to be, as in some former divine order, but that they are. It was once argued gravely that this letter must have been written before the destruction of Jerusalem, because all these allusions are in present tenses. It has been proved abundantly, and all scholars agree, that the letter is fully twenty- five years later than that destruction, and the conse- quent overthrow of the old order. Then further, it has been pointed out that Josephus speaks of such things in the present in the same way, writing long after they had ceased to be. There scholarship would seem to have stopped, but surely it ought to take one step more, and answer the question how these men came to use such language, speaking of things as still present which belonged really to a vanished past. The two cases seem to need different explanations. In that of Josephus, it may be submitted, Ave have the language of a Jew who believes sincerely that it is God's will that the Temple system go on till the world's end. He regards the present interruption as G 98 The Post- Apostolic Age. a temporary trial of faith, and he ignores the inter- ruption. " The sacrifices are offered thus and so," he says, because that is the everlasting law of them in his belief, and he will take no notice of the fact that they are suspended for a while. In Clement's case there can be no such reason as that. We must accept him as holding the order of the Jewish Church to have decayed and waxed old and to be now gone forever. If he uses the phrases of the old order to describe any things as existing realities, it must be because he regards the things of which he so speaks as being realities still, verily reproduced in the life of the Christian Church. If we are not to take him so, we must make him out to use human language in some non-human fashion. Lightfoot objects to such a view that it would be considered "mere ingenious tri- fling " to hunt out Christian analogies for Clement's reference to different forms of Old Testament sacri- fice in the succeeding chapter, but he overlooks the fact, which really ought to be made known to good people of to-day, that most Christians of that time would not have thought it trifling at all. Every form of Jewish sacrifice was believed to be a "type," filled with Christian meaning, and to have analogies in the Christian Eucharist. Almost, if not quite, every sort of Christian mind believed in what is called "mystical interpretation." Even against so great a scholar, and interpreter, also, as Bishop Lightfoot, it may be maintained that Clement does assert the presence of a high priest, priests, and Le- vites, all three, in the order of the Christian minis- try. They would be, of course, the apostle, bishops, In the Mind of Jesus Christ. and deacons, of the Teaching, the bishop, presbyters, and deacons of the Ignatian phraseology. 4. St. Ignatius of Antioch has already assured us of the presence of bishops (in the sense of single governors of Churches) in Syria and Asia Minor about the time of the death of the Apostle St. John. It remains still to ask whether he regarded the bishop's office as a matter of good, wise human judg- ment, or as of divine ordering. Three passages, from as many different letters, will tell us as much as we can learn of his view. (a) In Ephesians III. he says, " Jesus Christ also, our inseparable Life, is the mind of the Father, even as the bishops that are settled in the farthest parts of the earth are in the mind of Jesus Christ." Now Ignatius may have been right or wrong about his facts. We are at liberty to suspect that he exaggerated his expression somewhat beyond his real opinion. But after all allowances, this is testi- mony too strong to be set aside that the diocesan bishop was by this time established in a considerable portion of the Church. " Farthest parts of the earth " may be a very great exaggeration, but it simply could not be said by a man who knew all the time that the thing was not true of great, conspicuous Church centres such as Rome, Alexandria, Corinth, Jeru- salem, Csesarea, to name none about which he can fairly be supposed to have been mistaken. But what (for this is still more important) does Ignatius mean by "in the mind of Christ"? Bishop Light- foot rejects the interpretation " by the will of Christ," which certainly would not be a fair transla- 100 The Post- Apostolic Age. tion of the Greek phrase, and says that the bishops are represented as "sharing the mind of Christ." Would not the natural way to say that be, that "the mind of Christ was in them " ? Let us look closely at both sides of what we must carefully observe to be a comparison. Here is a parallel between two facts, and the heavenly is " even as " the earthly. The higher, heavenly fact is that our Lord is the mind of the Father, not, of course, the instrument by which the Father thinks, but the expressed judg- ment of the Father, the uttered purpose of the Father, the mind made known. This relation of the Son as the expression of the Father's mind is a close parallel to a well-known earthly fact, that these fast multiplying bishops, spreading out into the remote places of the earth, " are in," form a part of, " the ex- pressed judgment," " the uttered purpose," " t>he mind made known," of the Divine Son Himself. With all the parallelism, too, there is a significant difference. Oar Lord is the mind of the Father. The bishops are in the mind of the Son. They are but a part of what he has to say. Yet also, a part of what he has to say, they really are. (b) In Magnesians VI. we have a famous pas- sage : "Be ye zealous to do all things in godly concord, the bishop presiding after the likeness of God, and the presbyters after the likeness of the council of the Apostles, with the deacons also, who are most dear to me, having been entrusted with the diaconate of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before the worlds and appeared at the end of time." Presbyters Called Successors of Ajwstles. 101 Certain scholars have insisted eagerly that Igna- tius here recognizes an older idea, that the presby- ters were the true successors of the Apostles, the bishop being an ecclesiastical afterthought for whom something had to be provided, so this bishop of more than vaulting ambition compares his office to that of God Himself! It must be acknowledged that the martyr sometimes indulged in a sprawling luxuriance of comparison. Here and in another passage soon to be quoted, he parallels the deacons of each Church to our Lord Jesus Christ himself. But there is always an underlying thought. Whence then comes this idea of comparing the presbyters to " the coun- cil of the Apostles " ? In a Church service of some- what later times we know that the bishop sat behind the altar at the upper end of the place of meeting, with his presbyters arranged on either side of him in a semicircle. Ignatius, who compares the presby- ters to a crown, had probably seen the same arrange- ment, and it suggested to his quick fancy the idea of our Lord, " God manifest in the flesh," with His Apostles gathered about Him. Again, it may have suggested, if Ignatius knew the Revelation of St. John, that vision in the fourth chapter where the throne of God was seen, and around it four and twenty elders, representing, apparently, by a combi- nation of the number of the twelve patriarchs and that of the Twelve Apostles the worship of both the elder and the later Church. Either way, or both ways, Ignatius would be brought to think of the bishop as presiding " after the likeness," or as some read it, " in the place " of God, while the presbyters are 102 The Post- Apostolic Age. gathered about him, as the Apostles were once gathered around the Divine Man, the Representative of the Father here on earth. But suppose that Igna- tius had been asked to make the same picture illus- trate the life of the Church in the days of St. Paul. Can any one doubt that then he would have de- scribed each apostle of the Church, wherever he might come, as presiding in the place, or likeness, of God, while the presbyters were gathered around that apostle in the likeness of the council gathered about the Lord, which had itself consisted of apostles, so few years before ? To Ignatius's thought, undoubt- edly, the Apostles had had two very different posi- tions at different periods in their experience. In our Lord's earthly ministry they had been helpers to the Church's chief minister. After our Lord's earthly ministry was over, they were made to be in a sense chief ministers themselves. The Church's presbyters succeeded in due time to the former function of the Apostles as helpers of the chief minister. At a later day officers under the name of bishops were found succeeding to that other function of the apostles as chief ministers in the likeness of the invisible Divine Head. Ignatius certainly did not mean to exalt the bishop of his day above the original Apostles, but when he presents the bishop as " presiding after the likeness of God," he certainly claims for him that he holds in turn the fulness of the original Apostles' authority. One more quotation, and we have done with this long study of controversy. In the letter to the Church of Tr alien (Chapter III.), we find this : Apart from These, No Church. 103 " In like manner let all men respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as they should respect the bishop as being a type of the Father, and the presby- ters as the council of God and as the council of Apostles. Apart from these there is not even the name of a Church." "Apart from these no Church is called [so]," is the more literal rendering of the last phrase, but Bishop Lightfoot's version seems to give the only possible meaning. One may guess that if Ignatius could have foreseen how the history of the Church would unfold itself in these later days, he would not have spoken quite so strongly. Certainly the "man composed unto union " would have wept with passionate grief over the vision of a Church divided into denominations owning no common discipline and keeping no single standard of the faith. On the other hand, he who wrote the phrase " where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church," would have felt obliged, we may think, to acknowledge that a con- gregation of very members of Christ, meeting con- stantly together for praise and prayer, and maintain- ing a high standard of righteous living and loving self-devotion, under the guiding ministry of a "prophet" only, apart from any offices of bishop or presbyter or deacon in the Ignatian meaning of those words, was still a great spiritual fact, which must be called a Church of Christ. But having thus essayed to tell what would have been the utterance of Ignatius in the nineteenth or twentieth century, we must in justice return to what he did say in the be- ginning of the second, " Apart from these," — the 104 The Post -Apostolic Age. three orders of bishop, presbyters, and deacons, — " there is not even the name of a church." That sentence shows two things concerning the mind of Ignatius: first, that he thought this ministry, while in some ways a new order of things, was substan- tially the same as that under which Churches had been living for two or three generations before ; and secondly, that this ministry of three orders, under either kind of head, the itinerant apostle, or the diocesan bishop, was something far above the level of any clever device of human policy. CHAPTER V. THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE: I. PERSECUTIONS AND APOLOGISTS, TO THE DEATH OF ST. POLY- CARP. E have seen the Church perfecting its or- ganization within, to adapt it to the work that lay before it. We must now turn our attention to the Church's relation to the powers that were without. The relation of the Church to the Roman Empire has lately been made the subject of interesting studies by two English writers, Professor W. M. Ramsay, of the University of Aberdeen, The Church in the Roman Empire before A. D. 170, and an Oxford scholar, E. G. Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government. Both agree that by the time of Domit- ian (A. D. 81-96) it was a settled polic} r of the Roman Emperors to treat Christianity as a crime. As to the time when this condition began to be, it seems best to follow Mr. Hardy's view, supported as it is by the great German scholar, Mommsen. This traces the establishment of such a policy to Nero. After the great fire of Rome, as we learn from the historian Tacitus, Nero, suspected of causing that awful disaster himself, tried to torn the current of popular feeling by charging the crime upon the Christian community. It would seem that 105 106 The Post- Apostolic Age. even in the eyes of. the Roman judge the charge of incendiarism broke down utterly. But the testi- mony taken was made the foundation of a charge more dangerous by far, — hostility to mankind in general, in technical Latin, odium generis humani. It has often been enquired under what law of the Roman Empire Christians could have been brought before the courts, and the imperial jealousy against secret societies and even against clubs and societies not understood to have any secret character, is much referred to. There was such a jealousy. We even find an emperor directing one of his provincial governors to refuse permission for the organizing of a fire-company in a large town. Men were not to be allowed to organize at all. Then there would be no seditious organizations. Yet organizations were very numerous in the Empire. There was some such craze for them as we see to-day. The imperial law made exceptions in favor of mutual benefit clubs, and rather especially in favor of burial clubs, and probably any Christian congregation could have made itself into such a society as Roman law would commonly license. Only the jealous law was so strict that when any society was suspected of having a treasonable character, it was easy to find an ex- cuse for suppressing it. According to Hardy and Mommsen, however, Christians were not generally proceeded against under any law at all. Under the highly practical Roman system, whatever was held to be " dangerous to the State " came under what we may call the police jurisdiction of the magistrates, a jurisdiction reaching even to sentences of torture Causes of Dislike for Christians. 107 and death, without the necessity of quoting any law at all. "Hostility to mankind " was obviously a danger to the state. How could such a charge be plausibly maintained? Hardy gives five causes of popular or governmental dislike for Christians, any of which might help to give such an impression of the Chris- tian character. 1. Disinclination to marriage. It is easy to exag- gerate this. We must remember that St. Paul had condemned " forbidding to marry " as one of the false teachings that should trouble the Church in evil days. Yet the same St. Paul advised the Co- rinthians that in times of persecution and difficulty the unmarried were going to be far better off than those who had encumbered themselves with family cares, and certainly there must have been repeated refusals to make otherwise advantageous marriages into heathen families. One can see how the heathen families would feel. " Common humanity is not good enough for these people to intermarry with," they would say. " They despise and hate the world in which they dwell." 2. Interference with family property. Hardy seems to write as if community of goods like that of the Jerusalem Christians at the beginning (Acts iv. and v.) prevailed among Christians (1) generally and (2) for generations, both being suppositions con- trary to fact. Even at Jerusalem it was not a law. What every man had was his own. Only it became a pretty general practice for men to give all that they had for the common need in a certain extraor- 108 The Post- Apostolic Age. dinary emergency. Still emergencies of special need came often. A rich man becoming the slave of Jesus Christ would feel that the Christian king- dom had immense claims on his property. Doubt- less cases came up in which heathen relatives found the ties of blood disregarded, and great family prop- erties wasted, as they would hold, in favor of a swarm of foreign parasites. Here again would come a cry, " These Christians learn to hate their own flesh and blood." Our Lord Himself said, " If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (St. Luke xiv. 26). It may well be imagined how an incautious quotation of such a saying before heathen hearers might give rise first to misunder- standing of the meaning, then to distortion of the words, and so to a telling piece of evidence as to the dark misanthropy of the new sect. 3. Conscientious refused to live like other people. Christians could not illuminate their houses and put wreaths of flowers and green on their gates for a heathen festival. They could not accept offices under the government which included the perform- ance of heathen religious rites. As to social life consciences differed. Some Christians felt that they could not go to weddings, to funerals, to ceremonies at a coming of age, in the houses of heathen friends. Others followed a rule to which even the severe Tertullian gave his sanction at the beginning of the third century. They could not go anywhere "to assist at a sacrifice," but they might go "to serve a Witchcraft and Immorality Charged. 109 friend," even to a place where they knew that heathen rites would be. The Letter to Diognetus, an apologetic writing of the middle of the second cen- tury, claims that the Christians " are marked by no peculiar usages," but most heathen observers would have thought differently. Perhaps it should be mentioned here that the Christians did take a very severe view of the heathen world and its probable fate. "Probable," indeed, was no word of theirs. Whosoever was not a Chris- tian was certainly on the road to an everlasting hell. That was the idea of most Christians, and they took delight in the prospect. Zeal for souls as possible objects of salvation was common. Love of souls that seemed to be obstinately refusing salvation was rare. Many a Christian gave his heathen neighbors some justification for thinking him sour and hateful toward all that did not agree with him. 4. Charges of witchcraft and abominable immo- rality. Strange as it may seem to us, these were really widely believed. The secrecy of Christian rites gave much reason for the suspicion. In those horribly evil days what was secret generally ivas abominable. Then a few words caught up by lis- tening slaves and other spies, about a certain mys- terious eating of " flesh " and " blood," and probably the carrying of occasional infants to the places of Christian assembly, really for the innocent purpose of securing their Baptism, would be enough to con- dense the mist of suspicion into a bloody rain of ac- cusations of cannibal feasts. Furthermore, the cast- ing out of evil spirits, which had certainly been 110 The Post- Apostolic Age. known in the Apostolic Age, and was confidently claimed to be one of the Church's gifts in the next two centuries, would only confirm in a certain class of unbelievers the suspicion that the Christians were in league with powers of darkness. Once start in a heathen population the notion that Christians practised magic arts, and then so simple a matter as the Christians' habit of signing themselves with the sign of the cross on all manner of occasions would do much to feed the fear. It is noteworthy that the horrible punishments devised for Christians in Nero's persecution were exaggerations of those prescribed in Roman law for magicians. Accomplices in magical practices were to be thrown to wild beasts, or cruci- fied, and magicians themselves were to be burned alive. Nero's martyrs were wrapped in skins of wild beasts and exposed to savage dogs, or smeared with pitch, and then fastened to crosses and set on fire. 5. Supreme loyalty to a law outside the Roman law. The Roman authorities cared more for this point than for all other allegations against Chris- tianity together. Here was a body of people who openly professed that they served a God whose will was their supreme authority, and that if at any point the law of the Empire came into conflict with the law of their God, they should certainly obey their God and defy the Empire. Also they were zealous proselytizers, adding to their number daily, and rap- idly enlarging this constant menace of treasonable example. Perhaps it is hard to realize the intensity of bitterness which this discovery created. It ought The State Jealous of a Higher Law. Ill to be very easy. Now and then in our own day con- troversialists grow excited, clever politicians work themselves into a frenzy, even powerful governments take alarm, lest the power of Roman Catholic princi- ples over Roman Catholic consciences should prove dangerous to the State. It is felt that any govern- ment containing a large mass of citizens pledged be- forehand to refuse obedience to laws which the gov- ernment might conceivably find it desirable to enact, is a government in a condition of unstable equilib- rium. That is true in theory, at least. Practically, the Roman government could have made the Church of Christ one of the strongest defenses of the Em- pire. Constantine, as first Christian Emperor, did so. But the suggestion that a certain group of people will in any circumstances set up a supposed higher law as a reason for refusing obedience to the law of the Civil State, is always irritating and too often maddening to rulers who have no conscience for anything higher than human law. 1 From all these causes together Christianity was 1 In 1888 the Legislature of the State of Kansas passed a form of "Prohibitory Law," omittiDg the usual exception allowing the use of wine for sacramental purposes. This was a direct attack on the conscience of all Christian persons who had not embraced the (so-called) Two "Wine Theory, and more especially upon the Episcopalian and Reman Churches, which officially hold that "wine" means wine. If the politicians had not given way, there must have been a wide-spread persecution. Here is a clear case of a government impeded in legislation by obstructive con- sciences, but jjrobably no one will maintain that the welfare of Kansas was seriously endangered by the presence of the con- sciences in question. Yet it is very common even to-day for men to maintain that no man can be a perfectly loyal citizen who ac- knowledges that if a law interfered with his conscience he would not obey that law. 112 The Post-Apostolic Age, unpopular in general society and regarded as a dan- gerous force by the authorities. Imperial policy, having come to hold the "hostility to mankind" theory at the beginning of our period, maintained it without official change to the end. Yet it should be noted that the conditions of the Church as a perse- cuted body varied from emperor to emperor, and even from season to season. The Roman government was immensely practical. In theory, Christianity was a thing to be crushed out. In practice, that would be hard to do, and it seemed quite enough to watch the course of things, and simply do something about the matter when there seemed to be par- ticular indications that something needed to be done. To be a Christian was to be an outlaw. A Christian might be proceeded against any day. For that very reason it was not necessary to be doing it every day. In fact, the position of a Christian in the Roman Empire in the second or third century was curiously like that of a liquor-dealer in an American State which has a general Prohibitory Law, to-day. There is a powerful human instinct working against the law every moment. The officers of the law do not feel convinced that absolute enforcement of this regu- lation is either necessary or possible. They aim at keeping the thing within what seem to them as prac- tical men " reasonable bounds." They have spasms of enforcement. They fall into long, neglectful tor- pors of non-enforcement. They do not theorize. They have no stern convictions. They despise the business and those who follow it, but their handling of it is dictated by policy at every turn. Just so Causes of Danger to Christians. 113 was Christianity regarded by the administrators of Roman law. Of course, then, popular feeling had a great deal to do with the matter. Indeed, to a Roman magis- trate there could hardly be a greater reason for pro- ceeding against a suspected society than that it tended to stir the general population to acts of vio- lence, or that there was found to be a general feel- ing that the government was dealing weakly with an acknowledged cause of offense. No matter whether the victims of mob violence deserved ill of their neighbors or not, mob violence was not a good thing to have in the community, and the hard-headed Roman policy did not care much for abstract justice. It was not going to give any license to conditions, even though innocent in themselves, which would probably lead to popular uprisings. And we may remind ourselves that the Roman magistracy did not believe that Christianity was a force innocent in it- self. As to the amount of danger from popular move- ments, in which Christians had to live, we may note two forces that specially worked against them, one pretty constant, the other highly variable. The con- stant cause was the hatred of the Jews. It varied little in its bitter watchfulness to do harm. The destruction of Jerusalem under Titus (A. D. 70) gave a great impulse to that extremity of ill-will, no doubt, and the flame may have been fanned higher by the second destruction, after the revolt of Bar Cochba (A. D. 132-5), when the Emperor Hadrian caused a new city named Aelia Capitolina, from his H 114 The Post- Apostolic Age. own name, Aelius^ to be built upon the sacred site, and enacted that no Jew should come within its gates. The more variable cause of popular out- breaks lay in the superstitions of heathendom. Floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, pestilences, crop-failures, hard times, all these were traceable to offended gods, and who so offensive to the gods as these Christians, who certainly worshipped none of the objects of their neighbors' fear, and were popu- larly understood to worship no god at all ? II. From the general survey of the relations be- tween the Christian Kingdom and the great Empire of Rome, we turn to consider a little more in detail the actual working of the policy of persecution and the Church's endeavors in its own defense. Domit- ian (A. D. 81-96) seems to have been a persecuting emperor somewhat particularly. It was in this reign, according to Irenseus, Bishop of Lyons, who would get his information from Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, who had known St. John personally, that the beloved disciple was an exile in the island of Patmos and saw the Revelation which taught the true meaning of this world's tragical history. The short reign of Nerva (A. D. 96-98) leaves no trace in our story. Out of the period of Trajan (A. D. 98-117), there emerges an interesting piece of his- tory. Pliny the Younger, a cultivated Roman law- yer, is sent out to govern for the two years 111-113 the province of Bithynia-Pontus. In that prov- ince, where sixty years before St. Paul had been prevented from preaching the Gospel because he was more needed elsewhere (Acts xvi. 7), some lesser First Account of Christian Worship. 115 founders had done a great work. The new gover- nor had an anonymous paper presented to him, charging many persons with being Christians. Some denied it, and these supported their denial by wor- shipping images of heathen gods and a representa- tion of the emperor, 1 and repeating heathen formulas at the governor's dictation. Others acknowledged themselves Christians, and showed such obstinacy of disrespect for the official view of their behavior as a crime, that Pliny ordered them off to execution, de- claring that that alone was sufficient cause." Others still declared that they had been Christians once, but had long ceased to be, some even as much as twenty years before. Even these maintained that the worst that they had ever done was to meet before daylight on a fixed day, and sing antiphonally a hymn to Christ as God, binding themselves by an oath (sacra?nento) not to the commission of any crime, but simply not to be guilty of theft, robbery, or adulteiy, not to break a promise, nor keep back a pledge. Then they used to separate, and assemble again later for a common meal, in which, however, there was nothing out of the way. This last, they said, had been given up in consequence of an im- perial edict about social clubs, an edict which Pliny himself had published not long before. 1 As early as the reign of Dornitian the Roman Emperor had allowed himself to he called divine, and to he made an object of worship as representing the Genius (the Guardian Spirit) of the empire. It come to he one of the most, common tests of Chris- tians to ask them to worship the image of the Emperor and to swear by the Genius of the Emperor. u Per sahitem Imperatoris" "by the health and safely of the Emperor " they were willing to swear; by his Genius, they would not. 116 The Post-Apostolic Aye. This is our first glimpse of Christian worship in the Post- Apostolic Age, a subject which must have a chapter to itself. What is to be noted now is that this new religion was found to have taken hold of all the cities of the district, and to have spread into the villages and even into the open country. The heathen temples had been left solitary, this Roman governor tells us, and their ceremonies had fallen into disuse. It was a very rare thing to find any- body buying animals for heathen sacrifices, so that the trade in that line was seriously impaired. No doubt, part of this evidence of changed conditions of belief was negative. Not all the people who had given up the heathen religions had taken up another religion instead, and so when Pliny tells us that now the temples were frequented again, and the trade in the materials of heathen worship reviving, we are not to suppose that all these newly interested per- sons were apostate Christians. But certain it is that of Christians there was a great company, and that Christianity had become so far a popular re- ligion as to have its " mixed multitude " of follow- ers, some of whom would in time of persecution fall away. In such conditions Pliny takes advice. He lias examined by torture two slave women such as the Christians call ministrce, — this must be Pliny's Latin for " deaconesses," though the Latin-speaking Church made for them later a title adapted from the Greek, diacoiiissce, — and all he has found is " an offensive and irrational superstition." It seems plain that this Roman judge was inwardly convinced that the vul- The Dechion of Trajan. 117 gar charges about Christian crimes were unfounded. Now he writes for instruction. Is he to make a dif- ference between young and old, strong and weak ? Is he to accept renunciation of Christianity without punishment for the past ? Is he to punish Christians simply for being Christians, " for the name," on the ground that Christians are recognized evil deers, or only for particular misdeeds which they can be shown to have done ? The Emperor answers that no hard and fast rule can be made which will cover every case, but Pliny has done entirely right. Christians are not to be hunted up. An accused person who will purge him- self by acts of heathen worship is to be pardoned, as on repentance, even though the judge may be con- vinced that he was a Christian formerly. Christians who are openly accused and convicted must be pun- ished. That is, Christianity, though not an offense against any particular law, is still to be treated as a danger to Roman policy. But it need not be de- stroyed. To keep it down is enough. For the letter goes on to say that anonymous accusations are not to be attended to at all. " That is a very bad prece- dent, and contrary to the spirit of our age." " This Edict," says the German writer, Uhlhorn, " has been regarded by some as a sword, and by others as a shield. Really, it was both." It is a for- cible comment on the hard case of the Christians of the second century, that they seem to have regarded Trajan, who thus approved their slaughter, as a benevolent protector. Practically, to these unfortu- nate victims already classed as outlaws, this order 118 The Post- Apostolic Age. that nothing should be done to their hurt without a prosecutor ready to take the responsibility of appear- ing openly against them, was of inestimable value. Under this reign hundreds must have perished, it would seem, in Bithynia-Pontus, and holy Ignatius was thrown to the beasts at Rome, yet later in the century men looked back to it as to a time of im- perial favor. It is not to be set down as a mere blunder of theirs. It was but the exaggeration of a fact. Trajan held the common view of Christians, but considering what that view was, he held it mer- cifully. In the next reign, that of Hadrian, Christianity made a clear step forward. It began to speak for itself. The date of this new beginning is not with- out significance. It was just after getting its minis- try settled in the form which it was to hold without any substantial change for ages, — the development of the Mediaeval Papacy ivas a substantial change, but that cannot fairly be dated earlier than the time of the " Forged Decretals," the middle of the ninth century, — that the Church first set itself to the great work of explaining and defending itself to the sur- rounding world. Not that the Church was just now waking up to the idea of its duty to convert the world. Far from it. Not only the spirit of salva- tion and self-sacrifice, which is the spirit of every deeply converted soul, but the very spirit of selfish- ness and self-preservation, would dictate to every man who gave himself to the Christian Kingdom a sense of the necessity of laboring for the Kingdom's growth. They that had embraced the hope of the An Aye of Apologists. 119 Gospel were but a little handful everywhere, mis- conceived, disliked, suspected, threatened, perse- cuted. They must convert their swarming foes into friends and fellow laborers, or to all human foresight they must perish. That had been felt, no doubt, from the very first. Whether in self-sacrifice, or in self-interest, Christians had been scattering good seed as well as they knew how. But certainly with the completion of its organization, the Church began to present its cause before the world in a new way. It began to write books. It began to explain and argue its case in a literary form. Hitherto the mis- sionary work of the Church had been a work of in- dividuals upon individuals. Now it began to be the appeal of an organization to a community. It may be supposed that the newly established Diocesan Episcopacy gave the Church a deeper sense of its own strength. A strong organization does produce such an effect. At the same time the rising strength of this strange sect called " Christians " had certainly begun to make a serious impression upon the heathen world. Christianity was just grown to the point of putting forward representatives and champions. Heathenism was just beginning to be ready to listen, not with any intellectual respect at first, but with the attention due to a movement large enough to be a danger. Hence the second century came to be preeminently an Age of Apologists, as the technical phrase is, of writers maintaining the Christian Reve- lation and the Christian Kingdom against the oppo- sition of heathen and Jew. We have reckoned the transition from the Apos- 120 The Post- Apostolic Age. tolic to the Post-Apostolic Age as covering roundly the years 75-125. In that last year precisely, it would seem, a political event, a visit of the Emperor Hadrian to Athens, called out the first two writings of this class, the Apologies of Quadratics and Aristides, Of Quadratus almost nothing is known. There was a bishop of Athens of that name at a later time, but it could not have been this one. Oh the other hand, Eusebius, who seems to have regarded the writing of this book as an important turning-point in the Church's history, for he finds room for it in his very meagre Chronicle, besides giving it the first among events of the reign of Hadrian in his History, men- tions Quadratus without any descriptive addition, as if he were either a man already introduced, or one of whom he could find nothing more to tell. If this ts the same Quadratus whom Eusebius has named be- fore, he is a man who in the days of Ignatius of Antioch was reckoned among the glories of the Church in Asia Minor, being " renowned along with the daughters of Philip 1 for prophetical gifts." He is mentioned in one place in Eusebius in connection with a prophetess, Ammia, who lived in Philadel- phia, but we have no clear indication of his own place of residence. It would be pleasant to think that just when the prophetical gift was beginning to be withdrawn from the Church, and was already rare, it was used in one of its last outpourings to lead the way into a new line of Christian activity, 1 Eusebius has Philip the Evaugelist in his mind, and the pas- sage Acts xxi. 8. He seems to have confounded this Philip, the deacon, with Philip the Apostle. The Philip here named ended his days in Hierapolis. Quadratus Historical, not Metaphysical. 121 and give the first example which the Christian evi- dence-writers of all the ages should follow. Cer- tainly, if our Quadratus was a man that lived some- where in the neighborhood of Ephesus, he could easily have crossed the ^Egean sea to Athens, to meet the great Emperor and present his appeal to him. This is only a guess, it may be said, but it is a highly probable guess, and rather illuminatiug. Two things Eusebius tells us distinctly, that Quadratus wrote this appeal because evil men were trying to raise persecution against the Christians, — it was, apparently, a popular, rather than an official movement, — and that he had been a hearer of the Apostles. The only passage of his Apology now known is one which Eusebius quotes as showing how early in Christian history the writer must have lived. " But the works of our Saviour were always pres- ent, 1 for they were genuine, — the people healed, and the people raised from the dead, who were seen not only when they were healed, and when they were raised, but were also always in evidence. And not merely while the Saviour was on earth, but also after His death, they were alive for a considerable time, so that some of them lived even to our day." Quadratus, then, is the father of the historical method in Christian Evidences. He appeals to facts as witnesses to the presence of a power sufficient to cause them, and very probably it was the appeal of the man of simple common sense. Aristides, on the other hand, was an Athenian philosopher, a man of 1 He seems to meau that they lasted, unlike the tricks of ma- gicians, and could be examined long after. 122 The Post- Apostolic Age. trained mind, accustomed to metaphysical subtleties. His defense of Christianity was likely to take an- other tarn, commending it as the first successful answer to the soul's questions about life. It is note- worthy that Eusebius, working with the historian's instinct uppermost, quotes nothing whatever from this, the second of the Christian Apologists, and for centuries it was supposed that his book was utterly lost. It has lately been very fully restored, and the story of its recovery is one of the romances of Chris- tian literature. A few years since a fragment of an Armenian version was found in a Venetian mon- astery of studious Armenian monks, who published a Latin translation of their treasure in 1878. Eleven years later Professor J. Rendel Harris had the satis- faction of finding a Syriac version of the whole Apology in that famous Convent of St. Catharine, on Mount Sinai, where the Sinaitic Codex of the New Testament and other important manuscripts have been brought to light. Then came the ro- mantic surprise. It had long been known that in the eighth century a Christian writer had produced an extraordinary fiction, " The Story of Barlaam and Josaphat," founded on the traditions that circulated in India concerning the wonderful life of Gautama Buddha. In the Christian, as in the Hindu, story we have a king's son brought up in great seclusion and in great luxury, yet longing to know the world in which he lives, and presently discovering its cruel misery. In each story the young prince gives up luxury and splendor and retires into a monastic solitude to practise ascetic rigors. But with a holy Story of Barlaam and Josaphat. 123 boldness the Christian story turns the founder of Buddhism into a Christian convert and devotee, humbly learning lessons of true religion from a Christian monk, Barlaam, who encounters him in the wilderness of his self-banishment. The king hears of his son's conversion, recalls him to the court, and orders a public disputation to be held, to restore the wanderer to a better mind. Barlaam is to be repre- sented by a non-Christian substitute, who has orders to be sure to make a weak defense. The day ar- rives, and the false monk, Nachor, presents an argu- ment so noble that king and court and people, and the unwilling orator himself, are converted by it to the Christian religion. The rest of the story may be passed over. Its in- terest for us lies in the fact that in this story of Barlaam and Josaphat y translated into ^Ethiopic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian in the East, and into nearly every language of the West, and made even into a mediaeval English poem, has been preserved through the centuries, though for centuries no man suspected it, the lost Apology of Aristides of Athens, put into the mouth of a Hindu sage. The eighth century novelist could find no written argument for Christianity which seemed to him more worthy to be represented as an utterance dictated by supernat- ural power. " I, O King," says the philosopher, " by the grace of God came into this world, and when I had considered the heaven and the earth and the seas, and had sur- veyed the sun and the rest of the creation, I marvelled at the beauty of the world. And I perceived that the 124 The Post- Apostolic Age. world and all that is therein are moved by the power of another, and I understood that he who moves them is God, who is hidden in them and veiled by them. And it is manifest that that which causes motion is more powerful than that which is moved. But that I should make search concerning this same Mover of all, as to what is His nature, for it seems to me, He is indeed unsearchable in His nature, and that I should argue as to the constancy of His gov- ernment, so as to grasp it fully, — this is a vain effort for me ; for it is not possible that a man should fully comprehend it. I say, however, concerning this Mover of the world, that He is God of all, who made all things for the sake of mankind. And it seems to me that this is reasonable, that one should fear God, and should not oppress man. " I sky, then, that God is not born, not made, an ever-abiding Nature, without beginning and without end, immortal, perfect, and incomprehensible. Now when I say that He is perfect, this means that there is not in Him any defect, and that He is not in need of anything, but all things are in need of Him. And when I say that He is without beginning, this means that everything which has beginning has also an end, and that which has an end may be brought to an end. He has no name, for everything which has a name is kindred to things created. Form He has none, nor yet any union of members, for whatso- ever possesses these is kindred to things fashioned. He is neither male nor female. The heavens do not limit Him, but the heavens and all things, visible and invisible, receive their bounds from Him. Ad- Aristides not in Bondage to the Letter. 125 versaiy He lias none, for there exists notary stronger than He. Wrath and indignation He possesses not, fur there is nothing which is able to stand against Him. Ignorance and forgetfulness are not in His nature, for He is altogether wisdom and understand- ing, and in Him stands fast all that exists. He re- quires not sacrifice and libation, nor any single thing that is seen. He requires not aught from any, but all living creatures stand in need of Him." This is a fine beginning, notably fine in its freedom from the bondage of the letter of the religion which it defends. It says that God has no name, though He has condescended to name Himself as Jehovah, and even to wear the lowlier name of Jesus. It says that God has no indignation, no wrath, when God's own Word many times ascribesjooth to Him. It says that God requires no sacrifice, nor any visible tiling, when eveiy Christian held himself under a strict law to pay to God a visible worship, and in particular to offer to Him something which every Christian called a " sacrifice " on the first day of every recurring week. Yet in every case what Aristides meant was true, and his manly recognition that human words must be used with a breadth that will look like inconsistency, in order to cover the truth of a great universe and an infinite God, is really splendid. Only such broad denials must be read with care, so that we shall not bring Aristides as a witness to prove that some Christians did not believe this or that, which no Christian of those days ever thought of denying. The Apology goes on to divide the world's popula- 126 . The Post- Apostolic Age. tion into four groups, — Barbarians, Greeks, Jews, and Christians, "Barbarians'' and "Greeks " being evi- dently a Greek writer's technical terms for people out- side of the Roman Empire, and people inside of that great organism, respectively. The religious ideas of each of these four classes are examined. The bar- barian notions of gods many and lords many are shown to be shamefully foolish, and the Greek no- tions shamefully immoral. The gods and goddesses of the Greek and Roman mythology had every kind of vice and crime ascribed to them, and Aristides breaks out in a fine piece of declamation, — " For be- hold ! when the Greeks made laws, they did not per- ceive that by their laws they condemn their gods. For if their laws are righteous, their gods are un- righteous." The Jews are taken up in turn, and a little unfairly dealt with. Evidently the bitterness toward them as dangerous stirrers up of persecution had made it impossible for the philosopher to be perfectly philosophical. Then comes the positive statement of what Christians are like. There is but little about their doctrine. That was a pearl not to be cast before a heathen hearer, who might be swinish in his treatment of it. But from the glowing ac- count of what Christians were in life, it is worth while to read this extract: " They know and trust in God, the Creator of heaven and earth, in whom and from whom are all things, to whom there is no other god as companion, from whom they received commandments which they engraved upon their minds, and observe in hope and expectation of the world which is to come. Where- The Character of Christians. 127 fore they do not commit adultery, nor fornication, nor bear false witness, nor embezzle what is held in pledge, nor covet what is not theirs. They honor father and mother, and show kindness to those near to them, and whenever they are judges, they judge uprightly. They do not worship idols made in the image of man, and whatsoever they would not that others should do unto them, they do not to others, and of the food which is consecrated to idols they do not eat, for they are pure. And their oppressors they treat with kindness, and make them their friends ; they do good to their enemies. And their women, O King, are pure as virgins, and their daughters are modest. And their men keep them- selves from every unlawful union and from all un- cleanness, in the hope of a recompense toxome in the other world. Further, if one or other of them have bondmen and bondwomen or children, through love toward them they persuade them to become Christians, and when they have^ done so, they call them brethren without distinction. They do not worship strange gods, and they go their way in all modesty and cheerfulness. Falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another, and from widows they do not turn away their esteem, and they deliver the orphan from him who treats him harshly. And he who has gives to him who has not without boasting. l And when they see a stranger, the}*- take 1 Compare the following from the next chapter of the Apology : "And they do not proclaim in the ears of the multitude the kind deeds they do, but are careful that no one should notice them ; and they conceal their giving just like one who finds a treasure and conceals it." Church fairs were not then invented ! 128 The Post- Apostolic Aye. him into their homes, and rejoice over him as a very brother; for they do not call them brethren after the flesh, but brethren after the spirit and in God. And whenever one of their poor passes from the world, each one of them, according to his ability, gives heed to him, and carefully sees to his burial. And if they hear that one of their number is imprisoned, or af- flicted, on account of the name of their Messiah, all of them anxiously minister to his necessity, and if it is possible to redeem him, they set him free. And if there is among them any that is poor and needy, and they have no spare food, they fast two or three days, in order to supply to the needy their lack of food. They observe the precepts of their Messiah with much care, living justly and soberly, as the Lord their God commanded them. Every morning and every hour, they give thanks and praise to God for His loving kindnesses toward them, and for their food and for their drink they offer thanksgiving to Him. And if any righteous man among them passes from the world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God, and they escort his body as if he were setting out from one place to another near. And when a child has been born to one of them, they give thanks to God, and if, furthermore, it happen to die in childhood, they give thanks to God the more, as for one who has passed through the world without sins. And further, if they see that any one of them dies in his ungodliness, or in his sins, for him they grieve bit- terly, and sorrow as for one who goes to meet his doom." Excellently said, and the facts were better than The Rescript of Hadrian. 129 the* words. Bat neither the appeal of plain common sense to the testimony of the people that had had^ personal experience of the miracles of Jesus Christ, nor yet the appeal of the philosopher to the better instincts of humanity, accomplished any considerable result. In matters touching religion, even more than' in others, reason contending with prejudice always loses the first battle, and the second, and the third. It must go to Valley Forge before it can open the road to Yorktown. A rescript sent by Hadrian to the Proconsul Minucius Fundanus, governor of the Roman province of Asia (the western strip, it may be remembered, of what we call Asia Minor), seems to be the measure of the effect produced on the Em- peror's mind by appeals in behalf of his Christian subjects. The genuineness of this rescript has been much questioned, but it is defended most confidently by such scholars as Lightfoot and Mommsen, and they seem to have proved their case. The imperial letter runs thus : " I have received the letter sent me by your dis- tinguished predecessor, Serenus ] Granianus, and I am unwilling to pass over his report without reply, for fear that innocent persons may be subjected to attack, and opportunity given to false accusers to despoil them. If therefore, the people of your prov- ince are plainly anxious to support these complaints of theirs against the Christians by presenting formal charges against them on any point before your judg- ment seat, do not forbid them to pursue this course. But I will not allow them in this matter to resort to 1 The name is so given iu our copies. It should he Silvanus, I 130 The Post- Apostolic Age. mere passionate appeals and outcries. For it is far more just, that if any person is ready to file an in- dictment, you give a formal hearing. " Accordingly, if any person files an indictment, and proves that the people above-mentioned are commit ting any violation of law, you are to decree penalties in proportion to the deserts of the offenders. But the point you are to give most especial heed to is, if any person wittingly prefers false charges against any one of these people, to punish the accuser more severely in consideration of his flagrant wickedness." Plainly there had been a popular movement against Christians in the province of Asia, and an attempt to make Trajan's rule of procedure mean that any person, or a promiscuous crowd, might charge a man with being a Christian, and leave it to the court to apply tests and find out whether it was true. Hadrian seems to have made one advance upon Trajan's policy. The court is not called upon to make a Christian testify against himself. There must be an accuser armed with proofs of some offense against the law, and if he fails in his at- tempted proof, he is liable to severe punishment for attempted defamation of character. But does Ha- drian mean to affirm, or to reverse, his predecessor's distinct affirmation that a man must be punished as an evil doer, if proved to be a Christian? That we cannot tell. Apparently, he was intentionally am- biguous. He said that an offense against the law must be proved. There was technically no law against a man's being a Christian. Yet to refuse to worship the Emperor's image was constructive trea- Severity of the Antonines. 131 son, and a Christian would refuse to pay such wor- ship, if tried. It seems as if Hadrian, somewhat more even than Trajan, discouraged habitual perse- cution, and yet no Christian's life was safe before a judge with a personal leaning to severity. However much certain later traditions which ascribe many martyrdoms to this reign may be discounted, it is certain that just in its last years, at Rome itself, the imperial city, the bishop of that Church, Teles- phorus, suffered for Christ's sake, and sealed the glorious promise of his name. ! The reigns of. Antoninus Pius (138-161) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180) seem to have been marked by a deepening severity against the Chris- tian name. Both were exceptionally worthy men, Marcus especially being one of the noblest Romans in the whole history of the decaying empire ; but just because they took life with a conscientious seriousness, they were less tolerant than a man of " practical politics," like Trajan, or a frivolous scep- tic, like Hadrian. It is true that Antoninus wrote letters to certain " Greek cities,"— the expression is probably to be taken as including Smyrna and other leading cities of Asia Minor, which prided them- selves on their Greek origin, — to prohibit sharply any " revolutionary proceedings " against the Chris- tians, that is, popular uprisings not following the es- tablished forms of law ; but it is abundantly clear that in his time the mere fact of being shown to be a Christian was quite enough to condemn a man to 1 Teksphorus means in Greek "one that brings his work to a full end," "one that brings fruit to perfection." 132 The Post- Apostolic Age. death, and in the days of the high-minded philoso- pher, Marcus, every feature of protection was taken away, Christians were carefully sought out for pun- ishment, rewards were given to informers against them, and the only restraint upon persecution was that it must be a matter of legal procedure, and not of mob rule. The martyrdom of Publius, a bishop of Athens, belongs probably to the reign of Antoninus, and is likely to have been the outcome of one of those very commotions which drew out his rescript addressed to the Greek cities. A more conspicuous example of this government by popular clamor is found in the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. We have seen this bishop before, entertaining the prisoner, Ignatius, on his road to martyrdom, receiv- ing later a letter from him, and writing himself to the Church at Philippi. The friend of Ignatius, the pupil of St. John, the teacher in turn of the great teacher, Irenseus, who a generation later was a chief defender of the Church's faith as a secure tradition from Jesus Christ the Son of God, Polycarp is the most important figure in Christian history in this middle portion of the second century, and one of the most important in Christian history generally. It is not departing far from the subject of the Church's persecutions and the Church's self-defense, to point out how this heroic figure stands for the security of our faith in that Christian faith for which he died. His pupil, Irenseus, records that he was made Bishop of Smyrna "by the Apostles." The plural number is hardly to be pressed, but the The Faith not Changed in Transmission. 133 meaning certainly includes St. John, whose pupil Polycarp is expressly declared to have been. 1 Poly- carp, then, not only received from St. John, the Apostle, the Gospel as St. John received and under- stood and preached it, but was himself a specially trusted representative of St. John in the carrying on of that Gospel into the second century. Of Poly- carp, in turn, we have in Irenaeus not only a pupil, but a devoted friend and follower, and it is Irenaeus who more than any other man stands forward as the spokesman of the Church against the forces of heresy and division in the closing years of that same second century, one hundred and fifty years after the Sav- iour's death and the consequent birth of the Chris- tian Kingdom. It is claimed sometimes, by people not very familiar with the facts, that in some obscure passageway in the course of time the pure Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth was corrupted into a sacramental, sacerdotal ecclesiasticism, of the earth, earthy. The only possible place to which such a revolution may be assigned is covered by the testimony of Polycarp, and of Polycarp's greatest pupil, that their Gospel 1 There is not a little reason for thinking that Polycarp was the "angel of the Church of Smyrna," to whom that great message was sent, "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life " (Rev. ii. 10). If that message, curiously inappro- priate, by the way, for an angel of the heavenly and deathless order, — was really sent, as Irenaeus expressly says that it was, " in the time of Domitian," — and how could Irenaeus have failed to get information on such a point from Polycarp and get it right? — then it is possible, indeed, that the chief leader of the Church of Smyrna suffered in that very " tribulation " which was then impendiug, and that Polycarp succeeded him. But " faithful unto death " gathers force wonderfully if regarded as a prophetic message to one who was to be exposed to danger and difficulty for nearly sixty years more. 134 The Post- Apostolic Age. was the Gospel of the first Apostles, and that was the one reason why they could feel sure that it was sure. For us the importance of Polycarp in history is that he is our chief, conspicuous witness at the most criti- cal juncture, that the Gospel of the Catholic Church is the Gospel of her Lord and Saviour. But we must return to the martyrdom. The " General Assembly of Asia " (in Latin, Com- mune Asice) was a body of representatives of the principal cities of that province, which met once a year from city to city to attend to certain responsi- bilities of local self-government, and held once in four years solemn religious exercises in futherance of the new cultus, in which Asia Minor seems to have been in every way first, the worship of the Emperor. The chief priest of these rites was called the Asiarch, and as we know that in February, A. D. 155, the Asiarch of that time, Philip of Tralles, was giving a public exhibition of games and wild beast shows at Smyrna, it seems likely that this assembly was then in a quadriennial session. We can imagine that the spirit of loyalty to Roman in- stitutions and of hatred to the Christians as supposed to be disloyal, was at fever heat. The Proconsul, Statius Quadratus, the Roman governor of the prov- ince, was present, but apparent^ as a guest onl} r , and not to hold court in any regular fashion. Eleven Christians already condemned to death from the neighboring city of Philadelphia suffered by torture and by exposure to wild beasts. " When they were so torn by lashes that the mechanism of their flesh was revealed, even as far as the veins and arteries," Let Search be Made for Poly carp ! 135 — so says the letter of the Church of Smyrna to the Church of Philomelium, to which we owe this story of Polycarp's good end, — " they endured patiently, so that the very bystanders had pity and wept ; while they themselves reached such a pitch of bravery that none of them uttered a cry or a groan, thus showing to us all that at that hour the martyrs of Christ, being tortured, were absent from the flesh, or rather that the Lord was standing by and conversing with them. And giving heed unto the grace of Christ, they despised the tortures of this world, purchasing at the cost of one hour a release from eternal punishment." On the other hand, a self- confident soul who had persuaded himself and some others to seek death by self-denunciation, was so terrified at the sight of the wild beasts that he was persuaded to swear the heathen oath and offer the heathen sacrifice demanded of him. " For this cause, therefore, brethren," says the letter, with a noble self-restraint, "we praise not those who deliver themselves up, for the Gospel doth not so teach us." From the throng that filled the amphitheatre, whether maddened by the constancy of some, or made hopeful by the weakness of others, we cannot say, there arose a great outcry, — " Away with the atheists ! Let search be made for Polycarp ! " " The marvellous Polycarp," as the letter calls him, had had warning that his life was threatened, and he had wished to face the danger, but his friends had begged him to leave the city. He withdrew to a neighboring farm with a few companions and spent all his time in prayer, "praying for all men and for 136 The Post-Apostolic Age. all the Churches throughout the world ; for this was his constant habit." Three days before his arrest, he fell into a trance and saw his pillow burning. From that time he was sure that he was to be burned alive. A force of police and soldiers was sent after him. He had escaped to another farm, but two of his slaves were arrested and put to torture, — slavery was not going to be felt by any Christians to be unchris- tian for some centuries yet, — and one betrayed his master. The letter begins to dwell on points of likeness to another death. " It was impossible that he should be hid," it says, "when they that betrayed him were of his oion household" — a reminiscence of St. Matt. x. 36. He could have escaped once more, but he would not. He was sure that the final end must be. " Let the will of God be done," he said. When he heard that his pursuers were come, he came down from his room and talked with them, and men wondered at his age and his firmness. The old man ordered a table to be spread for his captors, — probably they had had a long night ride, and were tired and hungry, — and asked one favor on their part, an hour in which to pray. " On their consent- ing, he stood up and prayed, being so full of the grace of God that for two hours he could not hold his peace, and those that heard were amazed, and many repented that they had come against such a venerable old man." It is noted that his prayer was not all for himself. All that we are told of it, in- deed, is that he remembered " all who at any time had come in his way, small and great, high and low, and the whole Catholic Church throughout the Points of Likeness to the Lord's Death. 187 world. Then he was ready to depart. They had come out against him as against a robber, it is noted, and now they set him on an ass to go to his triumph. It was noted further, with a grim satisfaction, that the high sheriff was Herod, and Christians said one to another that the betrayer would suffer the punish- ment of Judas. As the little procession was going toward the city, the Irenarch, Herod, whose title Lightfoot tries to render by the two suggestions of " Chief of Police " and " High Sheriff," came out to meet them, with his father, Nicetes, riding in a stately carriage. Nicetes and Herod are described as *' father and brother of Alee," evidently a woman well known in Christian circles. Is she the same Alee to whom Ignatius had sent a special greeting some forty years before ? Certainly the father of a woman who had had such prominence so long before, must have been a very aged man, one of the very few who could appeal to Polycarp by that power of a common memory of early days which is so great a power with the very old. Well, they took the old bishop into their chariot and were kind to him, and begged him to be reasonable, and say that " Caesar is Lord," and some other little innocent concessions. At first he would not answer. Then he said, " I will not do what you advise me," and they were so angry that they turned him out of their coach in rude haste, and made him bruise his shin in getting down. So he went on to the stadium. When he entered there, the noise was so great that it was hard to distinguish anything, but many 138 The Post- Apostolic Age. Christians heard a great voice saying, " Be strong, Poly carp, and play the man." It was set down as a voice from heaven. More probably it was the utterance of some zealous Christian in the upper seats among the poor, where the disposition to help the police is not apt to be the greatest. It may be said without irreverence that Polycarp needed no heavenly voice to raise his courage, that he had not heard already long before. The Proconsul tried to get him to save himself. " Swear by the Genius of Caesar," he said ; " Repent, and say, 4 Away with the atheists ! ' " But Polycarp would make no more an- swer than to wave his hand toward the throng of lawless heathen in the stadium, and say solemnly, " Away with the atheists." " Swear the oath, and I will release thee ; revile the Christ," urged the magistrate. " Eighty and six years have I been His servant," was the answer, " and He hath done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me ? " l This course of fruitless persuasion and firm refusal seems to have gone on some time before the Proconsul would acknowledge himself beaten by his prisoner's obstinacy. Then a herald made pro- 1 How old was Polycarp? His "eighty and six years " must be reckoned from his conscious acceptance of the yoke of Christ's service, or (possibly) from his baptism in infant years. No Christian of the second century would have thought of reckoning his service of Christ from his natural birth. His age, then, may have been a little over eighty-six, or about a hundred. In favor of the lesser age, Lightfoot argues that Polycarp was not too old to make a journey to Rome the year before. In favor of the other view is the fact that his age is referred to as something amazing, and perhaps a greater naturalness in the use of words. "I have served" seems more likely to mean "I have consciously given myself to serving." In that case Polycarp's birth must be dated about A. D. 55, or not later than 60. The Death of St. Polycarp. 130 clamation through the stadium thrice, — " Polycarp hath confessed himself to be a Christian ! " At this the multitude raised a great cry, " This is the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, the puller down of our gods, who teacheth numbers not to sacrifice nor worship," and "with ungovern- able anger " they demanded that he be thrown to the lions. The Asiarch protested that he could not give the order : the games were officially closed. Forthwith the multitude demanded that the martyr be burned alive. Jews, the most bitter of all Chris- tian-haters, abounded in Smyrna. Under their leadership crowds of people from the audience rushed out to gather from baths and workshops stores of wood to make the funeral pile. The aged bishop removed his outer garments and stooped to take off his shoes, but it was hard work. He had not had to do such a thing for years, so tenderly had he been cared for. Even before he was old, the faithful had vied with one another, who should be first to touch him, so great had been his reputation for holiness. Men came to nail him to the stake, but he begged them not. The Lord would give him power to stand firm without such mean security. They tied him, there- fore, and then, when he had prayed and given thanks for the privilege of martyrdom, they set the fire. It was not God's will that this should be the manner of his dying. A breeze drove the flames from him, causing them to eddy round him like a bellying sail. The spectacle proved disappointing, and the execu- tioner was ordered to go up and stab the saint with a dagger. It was done, and the Christians noted 140 The Post- Apostolic Aye. with triumph that the pouring stream of the martyr's blood extinguished the flame that had been kindled for him. There remained one more trial of Christian feeling. The same Nicetes whom we have seen endeavoring to persuade Polycarp to apostatize, was now put for- ward by the Jews to beg that the body might not be given to Christian keeping, " lest they should aban- don the Crucified One, and begin to worship this man." " Not knowing," says the letter of the Church of Smyrna, " Not knowing that it will be impossible for us either to forsake at any time the Christ who suffered for the salvation of the whole world of those that are saved, — suffered, though faultless, for sin- ners, — nor to worship any other. For Him, being the Son of God, we adore, but the martyrs, as disci- ples and imitators of the Lord, we cherish (as they deserve) for their matchless affection toward their own King and Teacher. May it be our lot also to be found partakers and fellow disciples with them ! " So the body was burned, and only after that were the Christians permitted to gather up the bones " more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold," and lay them in a suitable place, where they promised themselves that they would come together once a year, "in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birthday " — so they called it — " of his martyr- dom." CHAPTER VI. THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE : II. PERSECUTIONS AND APOLOGISTS, FROM THE DEATH OF ST. POLY- CARP TO THE ACCESSION OF COMMODUS. UCH a death asPolycarp's, and the deaths of those eleven sufferers who had just preceded him in the same arena, consti- tuted a powerful Apologia for the Chris- tian cause. "I myself, too," said the greatest Christian thinker of those days, describing the period before his conversion, — " I myself, too, when I was delighting in the doctrines of Plato, and heard the Christians slandered, and saw them fear- less of death, and of all other things which are counted fearful, perceived that it was impossible that they could be living in wicked self-indulgence " (Justin Martyr Second Apology xii.). Thus the martyrs raised up apologists in turn, and these with pen more mighty than the persecutor's sword urged on the work of conviction of the truth. The chief representative of the apologist by argument is the writer whom we have just quoted, Justin, the philos- opher, who also sealed his testimony with his blood, and has been known in all ages since as Justin Martyr. He is thus the only one of all the old-time sufferers who never appears without his crown. The honor is well deserved. It is an interesting fact about this eminent de- 142 The Post- Apostolic Age. fender of the faith that he was " a good Samaritan." Born at Flavia Neapolis, a new town built up near the ruins of the ancient Shechem and named for the Emperor Vespasian {Flavins Vespasianus), who set- tled a colony of his old soldiers there after the Jew- ish war, Justin speaks of " my race, the Samari- tans," in a way that certainly seems to identify him with that strange race as one of their blood. Yet his grandfather's name, Bacchius, is Greek, his fath- er's, Priscus, is Latin, as is his own, and his education would seem to have been wholly Grecian and un- mixedly heathen as well. We may guess that the grandfather was a soldier of Vespasian, that he married a woman of Samaritan family, and that he named his son for some Roman officer under whom he had served, and brought him up to be as much like a Roman as he could. Then if this son married a wife who represented Greek or Roman traditions, the young Justin would receive no edu- cational influences from his Samaritan ancestry, and would never feel interested in it till he had become a convert to Christianity and a student of the Old Testament. Intellectually ambitious, and, it would seem, sufficiently well off to give all his time to travel and study, the young man devoted himself to the learning of his day, which consisted largely in so-called philosophic speculations with almost no foundation. Every school made its own guesses as to the origin of the universe, the destiny of man, the true wisdom in the conduct of life. When Justin represents himself as having gone to four teachers in succession, a Stoic, who could tell him nothing about Justin Finds a Better Philosophy. 143 God, and thought that there • was nothing worth knowing in that direction, a Peripatetic, who wanted regular pay for his teaching, so that it might be profitable to both teacher and taught, — Justin was much disgusted with him, — a Pythagorean, who could not undertake to teach him anything, until he should first have become proficient in music and geometry and astronomy, and finally a Platonist, who for a while really satisfied his craving for noble thoughts, he may, of course, be giving us an imag- inary history, intended to suggest how unsatisfactory all other teachings would be found to be in compari- son with Christianity, but more probably it is the simple truth. Many such a man must probably have gone the round of the heathen philosophers, not find- ing the best till the last, and then had Justin's ex- perience of finding something better still. This Samaritan who had never heard of Moses, and knew nothing of his people's traditions, ascribes his conversion to a providential meeting with an old man who found him walking near the sea — this could not have been at Flavia Neapolis. Perhaps it may have been at Ephesus, where Eusebius tells us that Justin was once resident, — and drew him into talk in which the stranger showed Justin that Platonism was not as full an answer to the soul's questions as he had thought, and introduced him to the study of the Old Testament prophets as witnesses to the re- ligion of Jesus Christ. Already, as we have seen, Justin had come to feel that Christians must be men who took life seriously. These could not be men given up to vicious self-indulgence, who would en- 144 The Post- Apostolic Age. dure tortures and death rather than go through a mere verbal form of denying their Christ and prom- ising to forsake their religion. A set of cannibals and debauchees, such as Christians were very com- monly believed to be, would, of course, take any number of oaths to save their lives, and go home and break them with equal facility. So much Justin had felt already. Now he found, to his own amazement, that this despised Christianity was the one great sat- isfying philosophy of the world and life. As such he embraced it, as such he began diligently to teach it. He seems to have done so for a term of years at Ephesus. Then he came, wearing still the philoso- pher's cloak, the badge of a professional teacher of the higher subjects, — the forerunner, if it be not indeed the first form, of the academic gown of mediaeval universities and of some modern pulpits, — and opened a school at Rome. A " good Samaritan " our philosopher proved him- self to be, in that when his brethren were in distress, he would not withhold himself from going to their help. The deepening danger of Christians under Antoninus was to him only a 'more pressing reason for coming forward openly in their defense. To Antoninus Pius, therefore, and to the future Em- peror, Marcus Aurelius, already associated in the government of the empire, Justin presented two Apologies, the second, however, being only a sort of postscript to the first. There is a splendid boldness in them which leaves one wondering whether the writer went into hiding, like Jeremiah of old, while another person put his book into the ruler's hand. Christians not to be Condemned for a Name. 145 In form his address is a petition in his own name to the Emperor, to his associate Caesars, and to the Senate and People of Rome, — the argument was probably aimed to win converts from the people even more than to secure justice from the ruler, — u in behalf of those of all nations who are unjustly hated and wantonly abused, myself being one of them." The Emperor is reminded of his title of Pius. " Do ye who are called pious and philoso- phers, guardians of justice and lovers of learning, give good heed and hearken to my address ; and if ye are indeed such, ye will show it." " We reckon that no evil can be done us, unless we be convicted as evil doers." " You can kill, but you cannot hurt us." " Rulers who prefer prejudice to truth have only the power of robbers in a desert." Such is Justin's defiant answer to the imperial ruling that simply to be a Christian is enough to constitute a capital offense. That the name should be a con- demnation in itself, pleads Justin, (Apol. iii.), is manifestly unfair. Indeed, the name ought to sug- gest that these are a most excellent people. He re- fers to a confusion that the heathen were always making between Christus and chrestus, the latter be- ing the Greek word for a kindly, pleasant-tempered soul, with a touch of contempt in it, however, as in our use of the word " easy-going," from which the New Testament use was just beginning to raise it. It is doubtful how far it was a wise argument for Justin to use. Certainly man}- of his heathen neigh- bors were unready as yet to admire a man for being J 146 The Post-Apostolic Age. chrestus. It is Christ who has taught men that a kind heart is an ornament of a great soul. Secondly, Justin disposes (Apol. vi.) of the charge of atheism. The early Christians were divided in opinion about the heathen gods, whether they were evil spirits, or dead men about whose memory lying legends had grown up, or finally, mere names with no real existence whatever back of them. Justin adopts the first view warmly. " All the gods of the heathen are demons," he read in his Greek version of Ps. xcvi. 5, where we have more correctly, " are but idols." " We confess," he says, " that we are atheists as far as gods of this kind are concerned, but not with respect to the most true God, the Father of righteousness and temperance and the other virtues, who is free from all impurity. 1 But both Him and the Son who came forth from Him and taught us these things, and the host of the other good angels, who follow and are made like to Him, and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore, knowing them in reason and truth, and declaring without grudging to every one who wishes to learn, as we have been taught." 2 1 We must remember that almost every heathen god had his legends of such moral vileness as could be not be told in these pages. Men like Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius had a vague idea of a passionless Supreme Being somewhere back of all the powers of the universe, but that unknown force received no worship and was not regarded as having any feeling about the world or men. a That Justin should speak here of Christians as worshipping and adoring angels, has greatly scandalized many good people. Fearful and wonderful are the attempts of critics to translate his sentence into some other meaning. It ought to be taken calmly just as it stands. Christianity raised enormously, but of course ' Justin's Argument Continued. 147 But thirdly, some Christians have been found guilty of heinous crimes. Be it so, says Justin. All we ask is a fair trial. Again, Christians do not use idolatrous methods of worship. But then such methods are absurd and unphilosophical. Christians are charged with aiming to set up a kingdom of their own, apart from the government of the Emperor. True, but it is not an earthly kingdom, as is shown by the fact that they welcome death as a means of entering into it. The virtues of Christians are set forth, and it is boldly claimed that they are of great value to the empire because of their loyalty and their good behavior. The foolishness and immorality of the heathen religious teachings is insisted on, and there is a little digression on the resurrection of the only gradually, the common idea of what is meant by "worship " and of what is meant by "god." We to-day represent our new idea of what "god " can mean by spelling it with a capital letter, "God." We represent our new idea of what "worship" can mean by refusing to use the word for anything lower than that high gift which we reserve for God alone. Yet even to this day, and after all our controversies about the proper limitations of " worship," the Church of England Prayer Book still retains in the office of Holy Matrimony the phrase, "With my body I thee worship," and both in England and in America men in certain honorable stations are spoken of, and spoken to, as " woishipfui." All this goes back to a time when that English word "worship " did not necessarily mean more than "treat with distinguished honor." Justin had several grades of meaning in his mind for such words as "worship" and "adore." When he was dealing with a heathen charge that Christianity swept the invisible world clear of objects of worship and left it a lonely waste, nothing was more natural for him than to take the words on their heathen level when telling the heathen man that the universe was as full of friends to the Christian as it could seem to him, only the friends were vastly better friends to have. When writing elsewhere of Christian worship from a Christian standpoint, our philosopher is perfectly evangelical, never hinting at any worship (in our sense of the word) of any other powers than the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. 148 The Post- Apostolic Age. bocty as no more incredible than that human bodies should originate as every one knows that they do. The bulk of the book (xxx.-lx.) is then given to showing how the leading facts of the Christian be- lief were foretold by Christian prophets ages before they came to pass, a few of these chapters being oc- cupied with an exposition of Justin's idea that evil spirits had got hold of some of these prophecies and twisted them into parodies as part of the heathen mythology. Hence, Justin would say, come all the stories of wonder-working sons of God, of virgin births, and of resurrections from death. And here it may be noted that this Christian philosopher of the middle of the second century makes copious use of the argument from prophecy, and none at ail of the argument from miracle. He believes in miracles profoundly. But he does not use them to base an argument on. It is sometimes said, especially by people who do not know much about it, that the Christians of the early daj^s were a superstitious lot of people, ready to believe anything that was pleas- antly marvellous. As a matter of fact, a superstitious age is apt to be incredulous also. When people are hearing of marvels constantly, a few more or less make very little difference. When miracles are al- leged to prove half a dozen opposing religions, how much do any of them prove? The resurrection of our Lord was a different sort of marvel from the common ones, and it rested on different, and over- whelmingly strong, evidence. Christians did appeal to it as to a thing certain. But as to our Lord's mir- acles generally, Christians of Justin's type believed How Christians Were Regenerated. 149 in the miracles because first they had been led to be- lieve in the Christ. They did not believe in the Christ because of the miracles. The only marvels that Justin appeals to in order to persuade a heathen, are the marvel of prophecy and the marvel of a life changed for the better. The last eight chapters of the Apology are of im- mense value to us, because they contain our first ac- count of Christian worship and Christian ceremo- nies from a Christian source. In lxi. the writer describes a Christian Baptism : " I will also relate the manner in which we dedi- cated ourselves to God, when Ave had been made new through Christ, lest if we omit this we seem to be unfair in the explanation we are making. As many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, are instructed to pray and to en- treat God with fasting for the remission of their sins that are past, we praying and fasting with them. Then they are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. For in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost, they then receive the washing with water. For Christ also said : Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven" He points to the impossibility of being born again in a physical sense, quotes Isa. i. 16-20, as a prophecy that repentant sinners were to escape from their sins by a washing, and goes on thus : 150 The Post- Apostolic Age. " And for this we have learned from the Apostles this reason. Since at our birth we are born without our own knowledge or choice by our parents' coming together, and were brought up in bad habits and wicked training, in order that we may not remain the children of necessity and of ignorance, but may become the children of choice and knowledge, and may obtain in the water the remission of sins for- merly committed, there is pronounced over him who chooses to be born again, and has repented of his sins, the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, he who leads to the laver the person that is to be washed, calling Him by this name [i. e. ' God ' and the ' Father '] alone. For no one can utter the name of the ineffable God, and if any one dares to say that there is a name, he raves with a hopeless madness. And this washing is called illumination, because they who learn these things are illuminated in their understandings. And in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in the name of the Holy Ghost, who through the prophets foretold all things about Jesus, is the per- son washed." There follow three chapters of digression, begin- ning with deriving all heathen ceremonies of purifi- cation from Isaiah's " Wash you, make you clean," by the agency of evil spirits, then turning off to say that heathen priests got their custom of going bare- foot into the shrines of their idolatry from the word spoken to Moses, " Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." In Chapter lxi. he resumes his account: The Food Called a Eucharist. 151 "But we, after we have thus washed him who has been convinced and has assented to our teach- ing, bring him to the place where those who are called brethren are assembled, in order that we may offer hearty prayers in common, for ourselves and for the illuminated person, and for all others in every place, that we may be counted worthy, now that we have learned the truth, by our works also to be found good citizens and keepers of the command- ments, so that we may be saved with an everlasting salvation. Having ended the prayers, we salute one another with a kiss. There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water, and he taking them gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe through the name of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and offers thanks at considerable length for our being counted worthy to obtain these thing at his hands. And when he has concluded the prayers and thanksgiv- ings, all the people present express their assent by saying Amen. This word Amen answers in the Hebrew language to our ' so be it/ And when the president has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their assent, those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water, over which the thanksgiving was pronounced, and to those who are absent they carry away a portion. And this food is called among us a Eucharist : , of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true, and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remis- 152 The Post-Apostolic Age. bio 11 of sins unci unto regeneration, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these, but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, 1 had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the pra} r er of His Word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. For the Apostles, in the memoirs composed b} r them, which are called Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them, — that Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said : Do this in remembrance of Me : this is My Body ; and that after the same manner, having taken the cup, and given thanks, He said, This is My Blood, and gave it to them alone." In the next chapter, lxvii., Justin goes on to an account of the ordinary Sunday morning service : 44 And on the day called Sunday all, whether living in town or country, gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the Apostles or the writ- ings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. Then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and 1 Note that in Justin's mind the Holy Ghost has the title of the Word of God, as being the expression of the Father's mind, as well as the Son. It is thought by some, with much reason, that the phrase, "prayer of His Word," a few lines farther on, refers to a prayer of Invocation of the Holy Ghost, which is always found in Oriental Liturgies, and leaves traces in the Liturgies of the West. The Regular Sunday Morning Sere ice. 153 pray, and as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings according to his ability, and the peo- ple assent, saying, Amen, and there is a distribution to each and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a por- tion is sent by the deacons. And they also who are well to do and willing give what each thinks fit, and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succors the orphans and widows, and those who are in bonds, and the strangers sojourning among us, and, in a word, takes care of all who are in need. And Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it was on the first day that God. having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world, and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. So He was crucified on the next day before that of Saturn, 1 and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, He appeared to His apostles and disciples, and taught them these things which we have submitted to you also for } r our consider- ation." All comment on these interesting disclosures must be reserved for later chapters. We are concerned here with showing simply what Justin had to offer in behalf of the Church. We may do well to re- member in the meantime that his object was only to J Justia uses this quaint circumlocution, " the day before Sat- urday," because he is unwilling to call the day of our Lord's death by its Roman name, "the day of Venus," which is the same as to say, " the day of lust." 154 The Post- Apostolic Age. tell the unbeliever enough to show that Christian procedures were blameless. Probably his brief ex- position of the doctrine of the Eucharist was meant simply to suggest how innocent a foundation under- lay the shocking charges of eating human flesh and drinking blood which were brought against the Christians on every side. The statement was wrung from him because it had got out that Christians used language of a suspicious sound, and to tell exactly how they used it was the only possible defense against the most cruel misunderstanding. Having thus made his defense Justin closes with renewing briefly, and with simple dignity, his plea that men should not be tortured and put to death without some proof of some definite wrongdoing, appealing also to the policy of Hadrian, the preceding em- peror, and to the rescript addressed by him to Minucius Fundanus. Justin gives that rescript as an appendix to his work. That this First Apology accomplished nothing with the rulers of Rome is evident from the Second Apology, which seems to have followed shortly after. It was drawn out by a characteristic example of the harsher policy of the Antonines. A woman of evil life had been converted to Christianity. Her vicious husband tried to drag her back to such evil courses as he still delighted in, and she refused. Finally she sent him a writing of divorce, as her only safety, and he, enraged, denounced her as a Christian. While she was awaiting trial, he succeeded in getting a certain Ptolemreus, who had been his wife's in- structor, accused too. Ptolemseus is brought before An Example of Roman Justice. 155 the City Prefect, Urbicus, and asked the one ques- tion, " Are you a Christian ? " On his answering that he is, he is ordered to immediate execution. A certain Lucius, standing by, cries out in protest against such a sentence. " Why have you punished this man, not as an adulterer, nor fornicator, nor murderer, nor thief, nor robber, nor convicted of any crime at all, but who has only confessed that he is called by the name of Christian ? " " You also seem to be such a one," was the judge's reply, and when Lucius acknowledged it, he too was ordered to ex- ecution, giving thanks for such a death, and straight- way after another followed in the same course. Justin declares that he expects to suffer in like manner. More especially, there is a philosopher of the Cynic School, Crescens by name, who writes against Christianity, and is bitter against Justin for refuting him. He will probably bring his Christian adversary before the judge. But oh ! if the Em- peror would order a public disputation between the Cynic and the Christian teacher, and himself attend it, that would be a worthy deed ! How Justin escaped the natural consequences of this boldness, we cannot tell. He lived to write several other books, of which but one remains to us, his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, a work longer than the two Apologies put together, presenting the Church's answer to the Jewish objection. It is not worth while to try to analyze it here, but it may be said that it is of high value as showing what was the Christian view of some great matters in Justin's time, and that it is a storehouse of illustrations of 156 The Post- Apostolic Age. that allegorizing method of interpreting the Old Tes- tament Scripture which we have noted in the Epistle of Barnabas, and which seems to have prevailed uni- versally in those early days. After a few more years of great usefulness the natural end did come at last. Before a magistrate named Rusticus, — we know not in what year precisely, but Rusticus be- came Prefect of the City A. D. 163, — Justin was brought, with six companions, one a woman, to answer to this same sole charge of Christianity. All were steadfast, and all were sentenced to suffer the hor- rors of a Roman scourging, and then to be beheaded. So they glorified God. The death of Justin brings us within the reign of Marcus Aurelius, A. D. 161-180. Under that great emperor and noble man the imperial policy toward Christians was technically the same that it had been for a hundred years, but practically, harder than ever before. Marcus seems to have believed pro- foundly every vilest charge against Christian belief and life, and being himself high minded and con- scientious, he not only despised such a people, he raged against them. His feeling in the matter seems to have been due particularly to the influence of an old teacher of his, the philosopher Fronto, to whom he was ardently attached. Fronto's attack did the Church a service in that it brought out an- other notable apology, the Octavius of Marcus Minu- cius Felix, written probably in the last year or two of the life of Antoninus Pius. 1 The writer was a 1 Is Minucius Felix to be dated about A. D. 160? or about A. D. 230-235? He seems certainly to have borrowed from. Tertul- The First Christian Booh in the Latin Tongue. 157 Roman lawyer, "of no mean ability/' as we are told by one of the latest writers of our period, Lactan- tius, but his birthplace seems to have been the same town, of Cirta in North Africa, from which Fronto himself had come forth to win fame and fortune. The Octavius is an account of a discussion between two friends of the writer, Octavius, a Christian, and Caecilius, a heathen, who had gone with him to Ostia for a seaside holiday. It contains almost nothing of Christian doctrine or Christian practice. Its argu- ment is for the unity of God and for the resurrec- tion of the body, and to defend the Christians from the charge of unspeakable immoralities. Beautiful as its style is, — and so competent a critic as Dean Milman said of it, that it recalled the golden days of Latin prose composition,— it would be of smallest interest to the historical student but for this one consideration : if we are right in dating it in the last year of Antoninus, this is the first Christian book in the Latin tongue, the first abiding utterance of lian's Apologeticus, or Tertullian from him. Salmon (Dictionary of Christian Biography, Minucius) adopts the later date, Lightfoot (Ignatius andPolycarp, I. 534.) the earlier. Two points favor placing him here. (1) He makes Fro u to his representative of the attacks on Christians, which he would not have done 60 or 70 years after Fronto's death. (2) In arguing the unity of God, he urges the absurdity of trying to rule any great empire with a divided au- thority. "Who ever heard," he says, "of a partnership in su- preme power (societatem regni) that either began with honesty, or came to an end without blood?" The rule of Marcus Aure- lius saw two such partnerships, of Aurelius and Yerus (161-169), and of Aurelius and his son Coin mod us (177-180). It would seem as if Minucius must have written before these examples had come to light. Of course, he may have written fifty years after the death of Aurelius, and written so carelessly as to use an argument that any one with a decent knowledge of history, or any old man with a good memory for politics, could instantly demolish. But that is hardly likely. 158 The Post- Apostolic Age. Latin Christianity. The family name Minucius would seem to imply a man of good blood, of the same large family connection with that Minucius Fundanus to whom Hadrian sent the rescript. It is a step gained when the Christian cause has for a de- fender a gentleman of social standing and a member of the Roman bar. It is another step, when the Christian answer begins to be heard in the Roman speech, because certainly Latin could gain a hear- ing in some quarters where Greek would not find entrance. It will be nearly thirty years yet before we come to a Roman bishop, Victor, with a Latin rather than a Greek name. Here for the first time we find Christianity so well assimilated at Rome as that a Roman speaks for Christ in the Roman speech. It is noteworthy that this very case is that of a Roman born in North Africa. That province was the nurse, if not the mother, of Latin Christi- anity. Rome was so much dominated at this period by foreign fashions, and particularly by Greek taste, Greek feeling, Greek thought, Greek literature, that the Roman character did not for long get a chance to show what it would make of Christ's religion, which every nation colors with its own individuality, nor what Christ's religion would make that strong character to be. Over Carthage, Rome's ancient rival, and over the province that had Carthage for its metropolis, the Latin tongue and the Latin tem- per had a sway that they had not in their proper home. It was in the province of Africa that the Bible was first translated into Latin, a version some- what rude and provincial, to be sure, and not always A Boman's View of Martyrdom. 159 accurate, but a forming force among readers who knew no Greek, while as yet all Italy was without such a treasure. Latin Christianity had its cradle in North Africa, and whether it was the Roman lawyer, Minucius, or the Carthaginian lawyer, Ter- tullian, that first gave it voice in argument, it was in any case an African, rather than a Roman im- pulse to which the first Latin argument is due. Yet after all, though it is the African education that makes the Roman lawyer plead for Christianity in Latin rather than in Greek, it is the old Roman tem- per that speaks out in the extract (Octavius, xxxvii.) which shall represent Minucius to us, and at the same time illustrate the history in which he had been called to bear a part : " How beautiful is the spectacle to God, when a Christian does battle with pain ! When he is drawn ip against threats and punishments and tortures, when mocking the noise of death he treads under foot the torture of the executioner, when he raises up his liberty against kings and princes and yields to God alone, to whom he belongs, when, triumphant and victorious, he tramples upon the very man who has pronounced sentence against him ! For he has conquered who obtains that for which he contends. What soldier would not provoke peril with greater boldness under the eye of his general? For no one receives a reward before his trial, and yet the gen- eral does not give what he has not : he cannot pre- serve life, but he can make the warfare glorious. But God's soldier is neither forsaken in suffering, nor brought to an end by death. Thus the Chris- 160 The Post- Apostolic A