allowed by the Roman laws, and were guilty therein of a capital crime.
This crime, if technically expressed, would amount to sacrilege and
treason;(143) for they could not acknowledge the Roman gods as gods, nor
the emperor as Pontifex Maximus; nor could they swear by his genius, which
was the oath expressing fidelity to the Roman constitution in its civil
and religious aspect. This was that “hatred of the human race,” that is,
in other words, of the Roman empire, of which in the eyes of Tacitus and
Pliny, of Nero now and of Trajan afterwards, they were guilty as
Christians. But the singular thing is this, that the Jew, who was the
first to drag them before the Roman tribunal, who was their omnipresent,
ever-ready antagonist and traducer, though he worshipped one only God,
though he abhorred the whole Roman polytheism, though he swore not by the
genius of the emperor, was exempt from punishment: his religion was
recognised by Roman law and the senate its interpreter, because it was the
national and time-honoured religion of a constituent part of the empire.
On the same ground the vilest Egyptian, Asiatic, African idol was allowed
the worship of those who claimed it as their ancestral god. The Christian
Faith was the sole exception to this universal tolerance, because it was
not the religion of a subject nation, because it was new, because, in
fine, it rested on principles which, if carried out, would sweep away the
whole fabric of polytheism on which the Roman State rested. And the act of
Nero had its great importance in that it formally distinguished the
Christian from the Jewish religion, and took away from it by a legal
decision of the State’s highest authority the claim to be considered
“licit.”

Nero then bestows the crown of martyrdom on S. Peter and S. Paul, and on
what Tacitus calls, even within Rome alone, a vast multitude. But he does
more than this. On the first appearance of Christians before the supreme
authority he so applies an existing law to their case as to establish
their liability under it to capital punishment, and this liability rests
upon them henceforth down to the time of Constantine. It is by no means
always carried out; it is often suspended, sometimes for many years
together, according to the character of the ruling prince, or the maxims
of his government, or the state itself of the empire. But it is henceforth
the legal position of Christians. It is a danger which besets their
condition, and may be called into action at any moment, in any city of the
empire, from any motive of private enmity, cupidity, or passion. It is the
legal Roman equivalent and interpretation of their Master’s words, “You
shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake.”(144)

How often, and in how many instances, it was carried out in this period of
seventy years we have no means of telling; but another emperor is named as
a persecutor. Domitian not only put to death as Christian his cousin, the
Consul Flavius Clemens, but, as it would seem, a great many others at
Rome, in the latter years of his principate.(145) Domitian and Nero are
mentioned as persecutors by Melito when addressing Marcus Aurelius, and by
Tertullian,(146) in the time of Severus, though it was the object of both
to make the emperors appear to have been not unfavourable to Christians.
But, independent of any general act which would constitute an emperor a
persecutor,(147) this liability to punishment,(148) in virtue of which the
confessor or martyr was brought before the local magistrates, was that
under which individual Christians, in most peaceful times, and in the
reign of emperors generally just and moderate, endured their sufferings.
The Emperor Tiberius is said by Tertullian to have brought before the
senate a proposition to allow the Christian Faith as a lawful religion.
Had this been done, the whole course of Christian history in these three
centuries would have been changed. As it was, every one, in becoming a
Christian, accepted the chance that he might thereby be called upon to
forfeit the possession of wife, children, goods, every civil right, and
life itself.

The end of the reign of the first Antonine, in the year 161, furnishes us
with a second fitting epoch at which we may estimate the growth and
position in the empire of the Christian Faith.

During the sixty years which elapse from the death of S. John to the
accession of Marcus, the Roman empire is ruled by three sovereigns, who
have each left a fair name and a considerable renown behind them, and who,
compared with most of those who preceded or who followed them, may almost
be termed great. Trajan by his military successes raised to the highest
point the credit of the Roman arms, by his moderation in civil government
effaced the remembrance of Domitian’s cruelties, and gave the Romans
perhaps as much liberty as they could bear. His successor Hadrian, joining
great energy, administrative ability, and moderation of his own to the
fear and respect for the Roman name, which the powerful arm of Trajan had
spread around, was able at once to exercise his army with unwearied
discipline, and to maintain the empire at its full tide of power in
honourable peace, while Antoninus crowned the forty years of equable and
generally just government—bestowed on the Roman world by Trajan and
Hadrian—with a further happy period of more than half that length, wherein
the glory of the empire may be said to have culminated. Imperial Rome
never saw again such a day of power, or such a prospect of security, as
when Antoninus celebrated the secular games at the completion of nine
hundred years; and for ages afterwards his name carried respect, and men
looked back on his reign as on an ideal period of happiness for those whom
he ruled.

One of the most competent observers of our time has marked the last ten
years of the reign of Pius as the period at which the independent
development of Græco-Roman heathenism terminated, when it had exhausted
all the forms of its own inward life, since the Neoplatonic philosophy
which is the only striking product of intelligence that arises afterwards,
is manifestly due to the antagonism with Christianity, and is no pure
offspring of the heathen spirit.(149) From this time forth Christian
influences become unmistakable in their action upon heathen thought and
society. This, then, affords another reason why we should endeavour to
trace the progress and extension which the Church had reached at this
point.

Now a contemporary of Antoninus declares that in his time, that is, about
the year 150, there was no race of men, either barbarians or Greeks, none
even of Scythian nomads roaming in waggons, or of pastoral tribes dwelling
in tents, among whom prayers and thanksgivings were not offered to the
Father and Creator of the universe in the name of the crucified
Jesus.(150) Thus, in a hundred and twenty years the Church had outstripped
the limits of the empire. The germ which in the time of S. John was rooted
in the chief cities, had spread out thence and increased, taking more and
more possession of the soil in all directions. Still we must consider the
Christian Church in each place of its occupation as a small minority of
the people: nor is there any reason to doubt the statement made by Celsus,
that at the period when he wrote, the middle of the second century, the
Christian Faith counted few of the educated, distinguished, and rich among
its adherents;(151) for Origen, in replying to him, alleges no specific
example to the contrary. Yet, here too we must consider the justice of
Origen’s remark,(152) that these classes are everywhere few in proportion
to the poor and ignorant, and that Christianity being the day-star arising
on every soul took of all classes alike. So much, then, as to the Church’s
material extension: now as to its internal growth.

As this period opens, comrades of the Apostles still abound in the
churches. We know of several instances wherein such persons hold eminent
rank. At Rome, S. Clement is the third successor of S. Peter; and S.
Irenæus,(153) recording him as such eighty years afterwards, specially
notes that he had seen and lived with Apostles, and had their preaching
still sounding in his ears, and their tradition before his eyes; at
Antioch, S. Ignatius, second after the same S. Peter; in the See of
Jerusalem, S. Simeon, the brother of James, still survives; at Smyrna, S.
John’s disciple Polykarp is bishop. Many more such S. Irenæus declares
that there were. This would prepare us for the strength with which the
principle of authority and tradition was held, and show how completely the
sense of a spiritual government, of cohesion, and continuity of moral
life, and of a common doctrine and teaching, the foundation of these,
prevailed. But we are not left to inferences, we have the clearest
statements on this point about fifteen years after S. John’s death. It has
been remarked above how in the Apocalypse our Lord himself, addressing the
seven churches, gathers them up in their bishops, and speaks of them each
collectively as of one person. In the year 116, as is supposed, Ignatius
still after forty-eight years bishop of one of the three great mother
churches, all of them Sees of Peter, and types and models of church
government, whence missions went forth, and the layers of apostolic
teaching were propagated, in his seven extant epistles conveys the same
idea as that presented by those divine words which S. John had heard in
vision, and was commanded to record, but with much greater detail. As he
is being led to martyrdom, in the long transit between Antioch and Rome,
he pours forth the earnestness of one under sentence of death, glowing at
the prospect of shedding his blood for Christ, and being for ever united
with Him. These letters remain as a sample of numberless conversations
held with the deputations which came to meet him on his way, mingling
their tears at his approaching passion with their exultation in his
triumph. They are of one tissue throughout. Ignatius dwells with incessant
repetition upon union with God and with Christ through obedience to the
hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, by maintenance of one faith,
in one body of the Church, which is wherever Christ is.(154) Let us take
one instance from his letter to the Ephesians. After saying that he had
“received their whole multitude in the person of Onesimus, their bishop,”
he continues: “It is, then, fitting that you should by all means glorify
Jesus Christ who has glorified you; that by a uniform obedience you may be
perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment, and
may all speak alike concerning everything, and that being subject to the
bishop and the presbytery, you may be altogether sanctified. I am not
giving you commands, as if I were any one; for, though I am in bonds for
His name, I am not yet perfected in Jesus Christ. For now I begin to
learn, and I speak to you as my fellow-disciples, for I had need to be
encouraged by you in faith, exhortation, endurance, long-suffering. But
since charity suffers me not to be silent to you, I have taken on me to
exhort you to run together all with the mind of God. For Jesus Christ,
your inseparable life, is the mind of the Father, as also the bishops,
placed in their several limits, are the mind of Jesus Christ. Therefore
you should run together with the bishop’s mind, as indeed you do. So then
in your concord and harmonious charity Jesus Christ is sung. And each
several one of you makes up the chorus; so that all being harmonious in
concord, you take up the melody in unity, and sing with one voice through
Jesus Christ to the Father, that He may hear you, and perceive by your
good works that you are members of His Son. It is good for you then to be
in blameless unity, that you may always have fellowship with God.” And
then he adds: “For if I in a short time have had such familiarity with
your bishop, and that not human, but spiritual, how much more should I
think you happy, who are so fused with him as the Church with Jesus
Christ, and as Jesus Christ with the Father, that all things may be
accordant in unity.”(155)

This is an incidental passage out of a very short letter, in which the
speaker is addressing practical exhortations to the people of a great
church, founded by S. Paul about sixty years before, dwelt in by S. John
up to about fifteen years of the time at which he was speaking. We should
not in such a writing expect S. Ignatius to speak with the scientific
correctness of a theologian, nor is he completely exhibiting his subject
in a treatise; yet here, as it were at the first moment after the Apostles
have left the earth, we have a picture of the Church as a world-wide
institution, held together by a divine unity, which has its seat in the
Person of Christ as the mind of the Father. It is a composite unity which
is contemplated in the image of a harp with its strings pouring forth one
song—the song of Christ—to the Father. It is a unity wide as the earth;
for the bishops, placed in their several limits, constitute the mind of
Christ, who is Himself the Father’s mind. It is the unity of the diocese,
for it is summed up in the bishop: but it is the unity likewise of the
whole Church, for the bishops are linked together in One whose mind they
collectively represent, and that One is He from whose Person their
authority radiates; in whom, as he says in this same letter, “the old
kingdom was being destroyed, God appearing in the form of a man, unto the
newness of eternal life.”(156) Again, it is not merely an outward unity of
government, but an inward unity of the truth held in common, and also held
as given by authority: not truth, as a result of the curiosity of the
human intellect, rather truth, as a participation in the mind of Christ.
Thus the Catholic unity of government is at the same time a unity of
belief, which two unities are not, in fact, separable, for their principle
is one in the Person of Christ, in respect of whom submission to the Ruler
is one and the same thing with belief in the truth revealed by Him, who is
King no less than Word, Word no less than King.

We have, then, here the principle of authority and tradition as seated in
the hierarchy, and at the same time the whole order and unity of the
Church as girdling the world by its chain of the Episcopate, and as
possessing the truth and exhibiting it in its quality of an institution.
It is before us and at work in its succession of men, in its sacraments
which they administer,(157) in its truth which is imparted by the one and
delivered by the other. It is no vague congeries of opinions held by
individuals with the diversity of individuals, but a body strongly
organised, and possessing an imperishable life, the life of its Author.
And we have all this mentioned as fulfilled at the distance of one life
from our Lord’s ascension, while indeed his kinsman and elder in age, S.
Simeon, is still bishop of Jerusalem, and mentioned by one of whom a
beautiful though insufficiently grounded legend says that he was that
child whom our Lord had called and placed before His disciples as the
model of those who should enter into His kingdom. He was at least so near
in time to Christ that this could be said of him. He is the bishop of
Antioch; he is on his way to be thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum at
Rome;(158) he is welcomed on his way by church after church, and he sees
and describes the bishops, in their several boundaries through the earth,
as each maintaining the mind of Christ in the unity of his Body.

Such is the Church merely stated as a fact towards the beginning of the
second century.

And the trial which in these sixty years the Church was going through was
well calculated to test her constitution. It is against the spread of
false doctrine that S. Ignatius in these epistles so constantly appeals,
to the unity of the faithful among each other.(159) He warns them to use
only Christian nourishment, and to abstain from strange food, which is
heresy.(160) The Church was then continually receiving into her bosom
converts at all ages of life, some from the Jews, many more from the
Gentiles; among these, therefore, minds brought up in Jewish prejudices,
and others which had run havoc in eastern superstitions and systems of
philosophy. In the course of these sixty years she probably multiplied
many times over in number; and the multiplication was rather by the
accession of adults than by the education of children born of Christian
parents. The Church was composed of a small minority of the general
population scattered at wide intervals over an immense empire; and, so far
from being assisted by the civil power, was under constant persecution
from it. Whatever force her spiritual government possessed could be
exercised only by the voluntary submission of her members. Let us weigh
the fact that, under these circumstances, a number of heresies arose. Some
were of Jewish, some of Gentile parentage. But we are not here concerned
either with their cause or with their matter: we dwell at present only on
the fact of their existence. In number they were many; in character most
diverse; they arose and flourished in different places. Hardly anywhere
was the Church free from them. Let us ask only one question here: by what
power were they resisted? The human mind had then the fullest liberty of
action in Christians. It was by a free choice—a choice accompanied with
danger, and persisted in through suffering—that men became Christians. The
liberty which men exercised in becoming Christians they could use further
against Christian doctrine, by innovating; by mixing it up with other
doctrines, with which, perhaps, their minds had been familiar before their
conversion; by developing it after their own fashion. The desire of fame,
the self-will of genius, the mere luxury of thought, would offer a
continual temptation to such a course. Many, from one motive or another,
fell into it. The question which we repeat is, what power prevented the
one Church from breaking up under this process of free thought into
fragments? These heresies began even while the Apostles were teaching. S.
Peter, S. Paul, and S. John speak strongly against them. They swarm in the
two generations succeeding the death of S. John. How is it that, at the
accession of Marcus Aurelius, Christians having passed the limits of the
empire, and being found so far as the wandering tribes of the north, there
is still one Church, surrounded, indeed, by a multitude of sects,
differing from her and from each other, but herself distinguished and
unmistakable among them all? We think the epistles of S. Ignatius furnish
us with a reply to this question. As we have seen above, he views the
Church in each place as a community closely bound together under a
spiritual government which is summed up in the bishop, while the bishops
in their several dioceses are as closely linked to each other, and all
form one society, wherein is Jesus Christ. And these two truths are not
separated from each other, but the unity of the part is deduced from the
unity of the whole, and is subordinate to it. See, first, with what force
he states the unity of the diocese.(161) “Avoid divisions, as the
beginning of evils. Follow all of you the bishop as Jesus Christ the
Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles, and reverence the deacons as
God’s command. Let no one without the bishop do aught of what appertains
to the Church. Let that be deemed a sure Eucharist which is under the
bishop, or under him who has the bishop’s authority for it. Wherever the
bishop appears, there let the multitude (of the faithful) be.” But this
strict unity of the diocese is derived from that of the whole Church; for
he adds as the reason of the foregoing, “just as wherever Jesus Christ is,
there is the Catholic Church.”(162) This is the first time when the word
“catholic” is known to be used, and it is applied to the Church as its
distinctive character, to convey the two attributes of unity and
universality, in connection with the Person of Christ, exactly as it has
been used, an unique term for an unique object, from that day to this. S.
Ignatius further views the Church in each place as having one faith; and
not only so, but the same faith in every place; one faith at Antioch, one
at Rome, one at every city between them, beyond them, around them. Here,
then, is a double unity, inward and outward. As the double unity of body
and spirit makes the man, so the double unity of government and of faith
makes the Church. As neither mind nor body alone make the man, so neither
faith nor government alone make the Church, but the coherence of both. The
Incarnation is the joining a human soul and body with the Person of the
Divine Word; after which pattern the Church, which is His special
creation, is the joining of one faith and one government in a moral unity.
It is by this force, by the same hierarchy everywhere guarding the same
faith, by the principle of authority and tradition planted in this one
living organisation throughout the earth, that the attacks of heresy are
everywhere resisted. What S. Paul(163) lays down in dogma, history
exhibits in fact. A hundred years after his words are written, the Church
has stretched her limits beyond the empire, has multiplied incessantly,
has been attacked by a crowd of heresies striving to adulterate her
doctrine, and has cast them out of her by this double unity of her faith
and her government, and so is one Body and one Spirit. Her victory lies
not in being without heresies, but in standing among them as a contrast
and a condemnation.

The solidity of internal organisation, and the definiteness of the One
Faith which animated it, kept pace with the material increase of numbers.
At the expiration of this period it is probable that among all the
contemporaries and immediate disciples of the Apostles one only of high
rank remained, that Polykarp, joint-hearer with Ignatius of S. John, and
to whom in his passage the martyr addressed a letter as well as to his
Church; whose own letter written at the time of the martyr’s combat, and
commemorating the wonderful patience therein shown forth, is yet extant.
But in the mean time in every Church the transmission of authoritative
teaching passed to those who had grown up themselves in the bishop’s
council—his presbytery, which Ignatius loved to represent as being to each
bishop what the Council of Apostles was to their Lord. And as the death of
Apostles themselves had caused no break in this living chain, so the
gradual departure of their immediate disciples was made up by the careful
handing-on of the same deposit, lodged securely in its receptacle, the
succession of men, which carried on the teaching office of the
Church.(164)

In the mean time, what was the attitude of the empire to the Christian
Faith under Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius? Domitian’s reign had
ended in active persecution, to which Nerva had put a stop on his
accession.(165) But though Domitian’s edicts had been reversed, like those
of Nero, one of the most ancient laws of the Roman empire forbad the
worship of any god not approved by the Senate.(166) This, as we have said
above, was the sword perpetually suspended over the heads of Christians,
without any fresh action on the part of the emperors. By virtue of this,
even when it was forbidden to accuse them, yet if they were brought before
justice it was forbidden to absolve them.(167) And even senators,(168) if
accused, were not exempt from this severity. We find Trajan acting upon
this law in the year 111, when Pliny, being governor of Bithynia, brings
expressly the case of the Christians before him. And the terms in which he
does this show at once the temper of the Roman magistrate in such cases
and the state of the law.

“I have never been present,” he says, “at the trials of Christians, and
therefore do not know either the nature of their crime, or the degree of
the punishment, or how far examination should go. And I have been in great
hesitation whether age made any difference, or the tender should not be
distinguished from the strong; whether they should be pardoned upon
repentance, or, when once a man had been a Christian, ceasing to be so
should not profit him; or whether the mere profession without any crime,
or whether the crimes involved in the profession should be punished. In
the mean time, with regard to those brought before me as Christians, my
practice has been this: I asked them if they were Christians. If they
admitted it, I put the question a second and a third time, threatening
them with death. If they persevered, I ordered them to be led away to
execution.(169) For whatever it was which they were confessing, I had no
doubt that stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment.
There were others of a like infatuation, but as being Roman citizens I
directed them to be sent to the city. Presently the crime spreading, from
being under prosecution, as is usual, several incidents happened. An
anonymous delation was sent in to me, containing the names of many who say
that they are not Christians, nor ever were. As at my instance they
invoked the gods, and made supplication with frankincense and wine to your
image, which I had ordered for that purpose to be brought, together with
the statues of the gods, and as moreover they reviled Christ, none of
which things, it is said, real Christians can be induced to do, I thought
they might be let go. Others, being accused by a witness, admitted that
they were Christians, and presently said that they had been, some three
years before, some many years, and some even twenty, but were no longer.
All venerated your image and the statues of the gods, and reviled Christ.
But they alleged that the utmost of their fault or error was this: They
were accustomed to meet before dawn on a stated day, and addressed
themselves in a certain form to Christ as to a god, binding themselves by
oath not to any crime, but not to commit theft, robbery, adultery, the
breaking of their word, or the refusal to restore a deposit. After this
they were wont to separate, and then reassemble to take a common and
harmless meal. This, however, they had ceased to do from the publication
of my edict forbidding, according to your command, private assemblies. I
therefore thought it the more necessary to examine into the truth by
putting to the torture two female slaves, who were said to be deaconesses
among them. I found, however, nothing but a perverse and immoderate
superstition, and so, adjourning the inquiry, I took refuge in consulting
you. For the matter seemed to me worthy of consultation, specially on
account of the number of those involved in danger. For many of every age,
every rank, both sexes, have been already, and will be endangered, since
the contagion of this superstition has spread not only through cities but
through villages and country. And it seems capable of being arrested and
corrected. At all events there is proof that the almost deserted temples
have begun to be frequented, and the long intermitted rites renewed, and
victims for sacrifice are found ready, whereof hitherto there were very
few purchasers. Hence it is easy to form an opinion what a number of
persons may be reclaimed if pardon be allowed.”(170)

To which the emperor replies: “You have pursued the right course, my dear
Secundus, in examining the causes of those delated to you as Christians.
For no universal rule can be laid down in a certain formula. They are not
to be searched after; but if brought before you and convicted, they must
be punished. Yet with this condition, that whoever denies himself to be a
Christian, and makes it plain in fact, that is, by supplicating our gods,
though he has been in past time suspected, shall obtain pardon for his
repentance. But anonymous delations must not be admitted for any
accusation. This is at once the very worst precedent, and unworthy of our
time.”

A great difficulty in tracing the progress of the Christian Faith in these
three centuries is that we possess nothing like a consecutive secular or
religious history of them. We only catch glimpses of what passes at
intervals. Incidents are recorded which, like a flash of lightning,
suddenly reveal the landscape and the actors. Such an incident is this
letter of Pliny to Trajan, and his reply. We have here the governor of a
province before whom Christians are brought as criminals. We find that if
they acknowledge their faith and persist in professing it, he sentences
them to death. But embarrassed by their numbers, and perplexed also by the
fact, that, save the profession of their faith, there appeared nothing
criminal in their conduct, he refers the matter to the emperor. The
emperor, no Nero or Domitian, but one renowned for his justice and
moderation, praises what the governor has done; pronounces that Christians
as such are guilty of a capital crime, and that Pliny was right in so
interpreting the existing law; that, however, it is not desirable to seek
them out; that even when brought before justice they are to be released if
they deny their faith, but that if they persist in it, they are to be
punished with death.

Here, then, is the law—an original law of Rome before the Christian Faith
began—under which the martyrs suffered at different times, throughout
every province and city, without anything which could be called a general
persecution on the part of the emperor directed to the destruction of the
whole religion. This perpetual liability to punishment might be called
into action anywhere in the empire for various causes. The first in time,
and one of the most constant, was the enmity of the Jews; then the dislike
of the heathens to Christians and their ways, which was further sharpened
by local calamities or distress irritating the mind of the population, or
by the jealousy of the heathen priests and worshippers at the desertion of
their temples. Then, again, there was the ascription to Christian
godlessness, as it was called, that is their refusal to acknowledge the
Roman gods, of famines, pestilences, and whatever troubled the popular
mind. To these we must add a copious harvest of private grudges, and a
host of calumnies, which seem now almost grotesque, but then found wide
belief. But it was the existence of such a law as this, acted on by Pliny
before he referred to the emperor, and confirmed by Trajan, that gave
force and effect to all these causes of persecution. And it would appear
that when Christians were brought before the magistrates, as guilty of the
Christian Faith, it was not in the magistrates’ power to decline hearing
the case, any more than any other accusation of sacrilege or treason, for
it had been determined that Christians were not a mere Jewish sect, and
therefore could not in security worship one God, as the Jews did. It was a
ruled point that their worship was unauthorised.

The practice of Trajan himself was in accordance with his answer to Pliny.

The very ancient and genuine acts of the martyrdom of S. Ignatius state
that having struggled with difficulty through the persecution of Domitian,
he had carefully governed his church of Antioch, grieving only that he had
not yet reached the rank of a perfect disciple by the sacrifice of his
life, for he considered that the confession which is made by martyrdom
brings into closer union with the Lord. Trajan then having come to the
East, full of exultation at the victories which he had gained, and
considering that the subjugation of the Christians was all that was
wanting to the perfect obedience of his empire, began to threaten them
with the alternative of sacrifice or death. Then Ignatius fearing for his
church caused himself to be brought before the emperor, and being in the
presence was thus addressed by him. “Who are you, evil spirit, who are
zealous to transgress our commands, besides persuading others to come to
an evil end?” Ignatius replied, “No one calls the bearer of God an evil
spirit, for the demons fly away from the servants of God. But if you mean
that I am a trouble to these, and so call me evil to them, I admit it, for
having Christ my Heavenly King, I continually dissolve their plots.”
Trajan said, “Who is a bearer of God?” Ignatius replied, “He who has
Christ in his breast.” Trajan said, “We then appear to you not to have
gods in our minds, whom we use to help us against our enemies.” Ignatius
answered, “You in your error call gods the demons of the nations, for
there is one God who made the heaven, the earth, and the sea, and all that
is in them; and one Christ Jesus, the only-begotten Son of God, of whose
friendship may I partake.” Trajan said, “You mean him who was crucified
under Pontius Pilate?” Ignatius answered, “Him who crucifies my sin, with
its inventor, and condemns all the error and the malice of the demons
under the feet of those who carry him in their heart.” Trajan said, “You
then carry the Crucified in your heart?” Ignatius replied, “Yes; for it is
written, I will dwell in them, and walk in them.” Trajan gave sentence:
“It is our command that Ignatius, who says that he carries the crucified
one about in him, be taken in chains by soldiers to the great Rome to
become the food of wild beasts, for the pleasure of the people.” The holy
martyr, when he heard this sentence, cried out with joy, “I thank Thee, O
Lord, who hast thought me worthy to be honoured with perfect charity
towards Thee, and to be bound in iron chains together with Thy Apostle
Paul.”(171)

So, with great eagerness and joy, through desire of his passion, having
commended his church to God, he set out on that long journey, “fighting,
as he says, with wild beasts all the way from Syria to Rome, over land and
sea, by day and by night,” a captive under sentence of death, in the hands
of soldiers, but receiving at each city a deputation from the bishop and
people, who came forth to honour him as their champion. And he has but one
anxiety, expressed again and again in that fervent letter to the Roman
Christians, that they should not by their prayers intercept his martyrdom.
“I entreat you not to be untimely kind to me. Suffer me to be the food of
the beasts, since by them I may enjoy God. I am God’s grain: let me be
ground by their teeth, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ:”(172)
and then, presently, “I do not command you, as Peter and Paul;” thus
giving an incidental but most powerful witness of the special relation
which those Apostles bore to the Roman Church.

And it may be remarked that while he has words of honour, praise, and
affection for the other five churches which he addresses, yet in speaking
of Rome his heart overflows with emotion. Upon this church he pours out
epithet upon epithet, as “the beloved and enlightened in the will of Him
who has willed all things which are according to the charity of Jesus
Christ our God,” whose people are “united to every command of His in flesh
and spirit, filled undividedly with the grace of God, and thoroughly
cleansed from every spot of foreign doctrine.” She is not only the Church
“which presides in the fortress of Roman power,” but likewise, “worthy of
God, and of all honour and blessing and praise, worthy to receive that
which she wishes, chaste, bearing the name of Christ and the name of the
Father, and presiding over charity.” What is the meaning of this last
phrase? As she presides in the fortress of Roman power, so she presides
over charity. May we thus interpret the mind of the martyr? God in His
Triune Being is Charity; the Holy Spirit, the ineffable embrace of the
Father and His Image, their Love, or Delight, or Joy, or Blessedness, or
whatever human name we may dare to give to what is most divine, is
charity: by charity God became man; charity is the individual Christian’s
state; charity makes men one in the Body of the God-man; charity is the
condition of angels and men in the great kingdom to come, the God-formed
kingdom. Thus charity is the distinctive mark of the Christian religion,
that from which it springs, that which it is, that which it points to, and
in which it will be consummated. When, then, S. Ignatius said of the Roman
Church, using the same word in one sentence,(173) that as she presided
over the country of the Romans, so she presided over charity, does he not
with equal delicacy and emphasis indicate her primacy? she presides over
that in which the Unity of the Church consists, in which its truth, its
grace, and its holiness coinhere.

The desire of the martyr was accomplished: he reached Rome on the last day
of the great games, and was thrown in the Colosseum before the beasts,
which, according to his repeated prayers, so entirely devoured him that
only the greater bones remained. These, says the contemporary account, “a
priceless treasure,” were carried back to Antioch. Somewhat less than
three hundred years afterwards S. Chrysostom, preaching on his day in his
city, thus speaks of him: “It was a divine benefaction to bring him back
again to us, and to distribute the martyr to the cities:—Rome received his
dripping blood, but you are honoured with his relics.—From that time he
enriches your city, and like a perpetual treasure, drawn upon every day
and never failing, gives his bounty to all. So this happy Ignatius,
blessing all that come to him, sends them home full of confidence, bold
resolution, and fortitude. Not, then, to-day only but every day go to him,
reaping spiritual fruits from him. For, indeed, he who comes hither with
faith may reap great goods. Not the bodies only, but the very coffins of
the saints are full of spiritual grace. For if in the case of Eliseus this
happened, and the dead man who touched his bier broke through the bonds of
death, how much more now, when grace is more abundant, and the energy of
the Spirit fuller?—So, I beseech you, if any one be in despondency, in
sickness, in the depth of sin, in any circumstance of life, to come here
with faith, and he will put off all these.”(174)

Before S. Ignatius reached that completion of his faith to which he
aspired, he was cheered with the account that his sacrifice had produced
its effect, and peace had been restored to his church, with the
completeness of its body.(175)

Now in all this—in Pliny’s conduct as governor, in his reference to
Trajan, in the emperor’s reply, in his treatment of S. Ignatius, and in
the restoration of peace afterwards—there is, we conceive, a very exact
sample of what the position of Christians was in Trajan’s time. His answer
ruled the question of Roman law for the following two hundred years. It
declared the profession of Christianity to be illicit and a capital
offence; but to call this law into action, or to leave it suspended as a
threat over the heads of Christians, was a matter of expedience. When the
latter took place, the churches were said to be at peace; when the former,
a persecution was said to rage; but at any time and place an individual
might suffer; while on the other hand a persecution directed to root out
the whole Christian name was not yet thought of.

And this state of things seems to continue through Hadrian’s principate.
In his first year, Alexander, fifth successor of S. Peter at Rome, having
been imprisoned under Trajan, suffers martyrdom; It would seem as if the
same hand had struck down about the same time the heads of the two great
churches of Rome and Antioch, the first and the third in rank, and perhaps
ordered the execution of the bishop of Antioch at Rome, with that of the
Roman bishop, in order to give greater force to the example.(176) Many
other martyrs at Rome and in the north of Italy are found at this time. It
is not at all necessary to suppose the personal action of Hadrian in
these.

After this he was engaged during fifteen years in those splendid
progresses, in which he examined personally every part of his vast empire,
from its northern frontier between Carlisle and Newcastle to the
Euphrates. While he was so engaged, the governors of the various provinces
would apply the existing law in the cases brought before them. He would
have had to interfere, and that with the whole weight of the imperial arm,
if he wished to check the course of the law. We have, however, recorded
the most interesting fact that when he was at Athens in the year 126,
Christians for the first time approached a Roman emperor with a public
defence of their doctrines, and a persecution is said to have been stopped
by the apologies which Quadratus and Aristides presented to him. Perhaps
the rescript to Minucius Fundanus, proconsul of the province of Asia,
which Justin has preserved, was a result of this. It runs thus: “I have
received the letter written to me by your predecessor, the noble Serenius
Granianus. And indeed it seems to me that that affair should not be passed
by without a diligent examination, in order that Christians may not be
disturbed, nor an occasion of false accusation be opened to informers. If,
then, the provincials can present themselves openly with their petitions
against Christians, so as to answer before the tribunal, let them do that,
and not betake themselves to mere requests and outcries. It would be much
more just that you should take cognisance of the matter, if any one be
willing to accuse. If, then, any one denounce them, and prove that they
are doing anything illegal, sentence them according to the gravity of the
crime. But, by Hercules, if it be a mere false accusation, punish the
informer according to its importance.”

Here would seem to be a considerable modification of Trajan’s rescript.
The profession of Christianity is not taken by itself as a capital
offence. Proof must be given that something illegal has been committed. So
far it approaches to an act of toleration. It plainly discourages
anonymous and malicious attacks. But on the other hand it was not
difficult to show that Christians did commit something illegal. Any real
accuser bringing them before the tribunal could prove by their own
testimony that they declared the gods worshipped by the Romans to be
demons, while they refused to swear by the emperor’s genius. Thus,
favourable as this decree was to them, it fell far short of declaring
their religion to be allowable.

And the same emperor who could thus write, whose curiosity made him
acquainted with all the religious sects of his empire, whose temper, as an
exceedingly accomplished man, having the widest experience of men and
things, and ruling an empire of the most diverse races with the most
various religions, led him to an eclectic indifference, and so far
toleration of all, yet showed by his personal conduct at a later period of
his life how he would treat the profession of the Christian Faith if it
thwarted a ruling desire. When, after fifteen years of incessant travel,
study, and observation, he returned to Rome, and had enclosed at Tivoli a
space of eight miles in circumference, adorned with copies of the most
beautiful temples in his wide dominion, he offered sacrifices and
consulted the gods as to the duration of his work; but he received for
answer that the gods who inhabited their images were tormented by the
prayers which the widow Symphorosa and her seven sons offered daily to
their God.(177) If she and her children would sacrifice, they promised to
grant all his demands. Upon this Hadrian ordered Symphorosa and her seven
sons to be brought before him, and endeavoured by kind words to bring them
to sacrifice. She replied, “It was for not consenting to what you ask that
my husband Gætulius and his brother Amantius, both tribunes in your army,
suffered various tortures, and, like generous champions, overcame your
demons by a glorious death. If their death was shameful before men, it was
honourable in the sight of the angels, and now they are crowned with
immortal light. They live in heaven, and follow everywhere the King who
reigns there, covered with glory by the trophies they have gained in dying
for Him.” Hadrian, stung by this reply, could not contain himself, but
said: “Either sacrifice this instant to the immortal gods, or I will
myself sacrifice you with your children to these gods whom you despise.”
“And how should I be so happy,” said Symphorosa, “as to be worthy with my
children to be sacrificed to my God?” “I tell you,” said Hadrian, “I will
have you sacrificed to my gods.” “Your gods,” replied she, “cannot receive
me in sacrifice. I am not a victim for them; but if you order me to be
burnt for the name of Christ my God, know that the fire which consumes me
will only increase their punishment.” “Choose, I tell you,” said the
emperor; “sacrifice or die.” “You think, doubtless, to frighten me,”
rejoined Symphorosa; “but I desire to be at rest with my husband, whom you
put to death for the name of Christ.” Then the emperor ordered her to be
taken before the temple of Hercules, to be struck in the face, and hung up
by her hair. But finding that these torments only served to strengthen her
in the faith, he had her thrown into the Anio. Her brother Eugenius, being
one of the chief men at Tibur, drew her body from the water, and buried
her in the suburbs of the town.

The next day Hadrian ordered the seven sons of Symphorosa to be brought
before him. And, seeing that neither his threats nor his promises, nor the
exhibition of the most fearful punishments, could shake their constancy,
nor induce them to sacrifice to idols, he caused seven poles to be planted
round the temple of Hercules, on which they were raised by pulleys. Then
Crescentius, the eldest, had his throat cut; Julian, the second, was run
through the breast; Nemesius was struck in the heart; Primitivus in the
stomach; Justin in the back; Stactæus in the side; while the youngest,
Eugenius, was cleft to the middle.

The day following the death of these brethren Hadrian came to the temple
and ordered their bodies to be removed, and to be cast into a deep hole.
The priests and sacrificers of the temple called this spot the place of
the Seven Executed. Their blood stopped the persecution, which was only
rekindled eighteen months afterwards.(178)

As the rescript to Minucius Fundanus did not prevent the emperor from thus
acting, neither was it an obstacle to such an incident as this occurring
in any part of the empire.

That it was so likewise in the principate of his successor, of all down to
this period the most tranquil and the least persecuting, we have strong
and clear evidence in the earliest of the extant apologies, that of Justin
Martyr, presented to the emperor Antoninus Pius about the year 150. He who
would breathe the atmosphere in which the early Christians lived will find
it in this work of a distinguished convert from heathen philosophy, which
is the more interesting as being composed at a moment when the empire
seems to have reached its highest point, and the ruler of it was its most
moderate spirit. We may cite a few passages bearing on the condition of
Christians.

“To the Emperor Titus Ælius Adrianus Antoninus Pius Augustus Cæsar, and to
his son Verissimus the Philosopher, and to Lucius the Philosopher, son of
Cæsar by birth, and of Pius by adoption, the lover of learning, and to the
sacred Senate, and to all the Roman people, in behalf of those out of
every race of men who are unjustly hated and persecuted, I, that am one of
such myself, Justin, son of Priscus, and grandson of Baccheius, natives of
Flavia Neapolis, of Palestine, in Syria, offer this address and
supplication.

“Reason dictates that those who are really pious and philosophers should
love and honour truth alone, declining to follow the opinions of the
ancients if they be corrupt. For right reason not only forbids us to
assent to those who are unjust either in practice or in principle, but
commands the lover of truth to choose that which is just in word and deed
in every way, even before his own life, and with death threatening him.
Now you hear yourselves called on all sides Pious, Philosophers, Guardians
of Justice, and Lovers of Learning; but, whether you be such in truth, the
event will show. For we have come before you, not to flatter you in this
address, nor to gain your favour, but to demand of you to pass judgment
according to strict and well-weighed reason, not influenced by prejudice,
nor by the desire of pleasing superstitious men, nor by inconsiderate
passion, nor by the long prevalence of an evil report, in giving a
sentence which would turn against yourselves. For, as to us, we are fully
persuaded that we can suffer no injury from anyone, unless we be found
guilty of some wickedness, or proved to be bad men; and, as to you, kill
us you may, but hurt us you cannot.(179)

“We ask, then, that the actions of those who are accused before you may be
examined, that he who is convicted may be punished as an evildoer, but not
as a Christian. And, if anyone appears to be innocent, that he may be
dismissed as a Christian who has done no evil. For we do not require you
to punish our accusers: they are sufficiently recompensed by their own
malice, and their ignorance of what is good. Moreover, bear in mind that
it is for your sakes that we thus speak, since it is in our power to deny
when we are questioned. But we choose not to live by falsehood.(180)

“And you, when you hear that we are expecting a kingdom, rashly conceive
that we mean a human one, whereas we speak of that with God, as is evident
even from those who are under examination by you confessing that they are
Christians, whilst they know that death is the penalty of the confession.
For if we expected a human kingdom, we should deny in order to obtain our
expectations; but, since our hopes are not of the present, we do not
regard those who kill us, knowing that death is an inevitable debt to
all.(181)

“We adore God only, but in all other matters joyfully serve you,
confessing that you are kings and rulers, and praying that you may be
found to possess, together with your royal power, a sound and discerning
mind. If, however, notwithstanding that we thus pray and openly lay
everything before you, you treat us with contempt, we shall receive no
injury; believing, or rather, being convinced, that every one, if his
deeds shall so deserve, shall receive the punishment of eternal fire, and
that an account will be required of him in proportion to the powers which
he has received from God, as Christ has declared in those words, ‘To
whomsoever God has given much, of him shall be much required.’(182)

“Though death be the penalty to those who teach or even who confess the
name of Christ, we everywhere accept it, and teach it. And if you as
enemies meet these words, you can do no more, as we have already said,
than kill us, which brings no hurt to us, but to you, and to all who hate
unjustly, and do not repent, the chastisement of eternal fire.”(183)

And his concluding words are: “If now what we have said appears to be
reasonable and true, honour it accordingly; but if folly, despise it as
foolish; yet pass not sentence of death against those as enemies, who have
done no evil. For we tell you beforehand that you will not escape the
future judgment of God, if you continue in injustice, and we shall cry,
Let the will of God be done.”(184)

Such then is the testimony of a Christian as to the way in which the
confessors of his religion were treated; and it is corroborated by that of
the heathen philosopher Celsus, who writes his books against Christianity
about this time, and imputes the secrecy practised by Christians in their
teaching and their actions to their attempts to escape the punishment of
death hanging over their heads.(185) And again having put into the mouth
of Christians the remark, that if they blaspheme or strike a statue of
Jupiter or Apollo, these gods cannot defend themselves, he subjoins: “Do
you not, then, see that your own demon is not merely blasphemed but
expelled from every land and sea, while you, his consecrated image,(186)
are chained, and led away to prison, and crucified; and the demon, or as
you call him, the Son of God, gives you no protection.” And in another
place, comparing Christians with Jews, to whom God had made so many
promises: “See,” he says, “what good has He done to them and to you? To
them, instead of being lords of all the earth, not a clod of soil or a
hearth remains;(187) while of you, if any one still wanders about in
hiding, yet justice pursues him with the doom of death.”

However, we know that at this time at least the bold words of Justin drew
down no punishment from Antoninus, and a rescript of this emperor, dated
about two years after the presentation of this first apology, has been
preserved, which is more favourable to Christians than that of Hadrian. It
is addressed to that province of Asia which contained so many flourishing
Christian churches, and which accordingly was so bitter against them. They
had written to complain of the Christians, and to accuse them as the cause
of the earthquakes which had happened. The emperor replies: “It was my
belief that the gods would take care that such men as you describe should
not escape. For much rather would they, if they could, punish such as will
not worship them. Now these men you are annoying, and accusing their
opinion as atheistical, and charging them with sundry other things which
we cannot prove. Yet it would be serviceable to them to seem to meet their
death for such an accusation; and they surpass you in giving up their
lives rather than comply with what you call upon them to do. But as to the
earthquakes which have happened or are happening now, it is not reasonable
that you should mention them, you who lose heart when they take place,
comparing your conduct with theirs, who have more confidence than you
towards God. And you indeed in such a time seem to have no knowledge of
the gods, and neglect the temples, and know nothing of worshipping God;
whence it is that you are jealous of those who do worship him, and that
you persecute them to death. Respecting such men various other rulers of
provinces wrote to my divine father, and his reply was, not to trouble
such men, except they appear to be contriving something against the Roman
empire. Many too have referred to me about such, and my reply was in
agreement to my father’s decision. Now if anyone has an accusation to
bring against such a one as such, let the accused be released from the
charge, even though he appear to be such, and let the accuser be
punished.”(188)

Here we reach the highest point of toleration which Christians received in
the first 130 years. Instead of Trajan’s somewhat reluctant order to
punish Christians as Christians, when once convicted, instead of Hadrian’s
decision that something contrary to Roman law must be proved against them,
Antoninus, while quoting the latter, goes far beyond it, and lays down
that as Christians they were blameless, and were only to be punished in
case some hostility to the Roman empire could be proved in their conduct.
Moreover, their accuser was to be punished. And this rescript being
repeated to several places, amounted to an assurance that Christians
should be left in tranquillity during the principate of Pius.

Putting ourselves into the position of a Roman emperor at this middle of
the second century, let us endeavour to form a notion of what Christianity
would appear to him. In the first place, he who had all the threads of
Roman organisation gathered in his hand, would certainly recognise it as a
sect spread throughout the empire, the Jewish origin of which was known to
him, and the author as one crucified by order of a Roman governor under
Tiberius.(189) Yet he would hardly distinguish accurately the Church from
the different heresies which everywhere sprang up around it, holding more
or less of its doctrines and mixing them up with corruptions and
abuses.(190) And it would scarcely appear to him as a power in the State,
either from its numbers or the influence of the people belonging to it;
yet on the other hand it would appear as something not inconsiderable in
either of these respects. Moreover, we may suppose it would come before
him as a _belief_, and not as an _institution_. It had as yet no public
churches.(191) A heathen would say of Christians at this time that they
had no temples, altars, or statues;(192) no ceremonial worship, for he
could not, as a heathen, get admittance to Christian rites, which moreover
were carried on in private houses, and carefully concealed. The emperor
would be well aware that Christians had rulers of their own;(193) it was
as such that Trajan had fixed upon the bishop third in rank among
Christian communities for punishment the most severe and degrading, to be
thrown as food for wild beasts, for the pleasure of the people. But
nevertheless, the internal constitution of the Church would lie hidden
from him: the link which bound together the bishops of the various local
communities, and so formed the Catholicism of the Church, would be quite
invisible to all outside. Jealous as Trajan was of secret societies, so
that he could hardly tolerate a guild of firemen in a provincial town, he
had no suspicion of a society which had become even in his time
conterminous with his empire, and was bound together not only by the
profession of one faith, but by the living links of one government. Nor,
fifty years later, could Antoninus have had any such knowledge. The
persecution which we have seen arose from simpler causes; the faith of
Christians in one God who had made heaven and earth, and in one Son of God
who had become Man and redeemed them, and with this, and indeed as part of
this, their summary rejection, their utter intolerance of all the heathen
gods; this it was that had drawn down the Roman sword upon them in answer
to the popular cry,(194) Away with the godless! And again, their standing
aloof from heathen life, their refusal to take part in heathen festivals,
their withdrawal as far as possible from all public concerns: this was
part of the hatred of the human race imputed to them, which made them
objects of suspicion first, and then, when any special excitement arose,
of persecution. These peculiarities also, and the secrecy with which their
worship was necessarily conducted because it was not allowed, had led to
calumnies concerning them, imputing the grossest immorality as well as
cruelty.

The apologies of Quadratus, Aristides, and Justin, were probably the first
connected revelation of the Christian doctrines which the emperor could
have; but these would be very far from conveying to him the character of
the Church as an institution. They were intended to obviate the
persecutions arising from the causes above described, to show the purity
of Christian morality, the reasonableness of Christian belief, the
fidelity of Christian sentiment to the imperial rule as established by a
divine providence. They were not in the least intended to lay before him
the Christian Church as a whole. Thus Justin, replying to the accusation
that they were expecting a kingdom, says, “You rashly conceive that we
mean a human one, whereas we speak of that with God.” We may then, it
seems, conclude with certainty that Antoninus was only partially aware of
what Christianity was. That discipline of the secret, which was itself the
result of persecution—of the Christian Faith having to make itself a place
in a world utterly opposed to it,—became at once its protection, and the
cause of further persecution; of persecution, in so far as it put
Christians under general suspicion, but of protection, inasmuch as it
covered with a veil that complete moral revolution to which the Christian
Faith was tending from the first, and towards which it was continually
advancing. Could Trajan have foreseen what was apparent under Constantine,
his treatment of Christians would have had no forbearance or hesitation in
it, his blows no intermission or doubtfulness. As it is, up to the time we
are now considering, there are no traces of a general persecution against
the Christian name organised by the emperor as head of the State. There
are numberless local and individual persecutions starting up in this city
and in that, and arising from the fundamental contrariety of Christian
belief to the existing heathen worship and the ordinary heathen life. Such
we have and no more. And so a great host of martyrs in single combat won
their crown. But the emperor did not set himself to destroy a unity which
he did not see.

Now as to the character in Christians which their condition in these
hundred and thirty years tended to produce, we can form a clear
conclusion. Of the relative proportion of actual martyrs to the whole mass
of believers, we can indeed have no accurate notion; but it is plain that
all were liable to suffering as Christians in every various degree up to
that ultimate point of witnessing by death. Thus the acceptance of the
Christian Faith itself involved at least the spirit of confession, if not
that of martyrdom. A man lived for years, perhaps a whole generation, with
the prospect of suffering, which it may be never came, or came as the
crown of a long period in which heroic virtues had been called forth. Thus
S. Ignatius had been more than forty years bishop of Antioch, and had
carried his church hardly through the bad times of Domitian, when he
gained at last what he deemed perfect union with his Lord, by being ground
under the teeth of lions, as “the pure bread of God.” What is here
expressed with so sublime a confidence by one actual martyr, must have
made the tissue of Christian life in general. Those early disciples of the
cross put in the cross their victory. The habitual danger which hung about
their life must have scared away the timid, the insincere, the
half-hearted. Yet alternations of peace rapidly succeeded times of
suffering. Throughout these hundred and thirty years there is no
long-continued even local persecution. Breathing-times of comparative
tranquillity come, wherein Christians can grow, propagate, and mature for
the conflict which may at any time arise. Thus while the opposition made
to the infant faith is quite sufficient to have destroyed an untrue
religion, born of earth or human device, to have scattered and eradicated
its professors, it was precisely what would favour the real advance of a
faith rooted upon a suffering God, and in which suffering with Him was
made the means of union with Him.

And here we halt at the accession of Marcus Aurelius, as a middle point
between the day of Pentecost and the time of Constantine.

CHAPTER XI. THE SECOND AGE OF THE MARTYR CHURCH.

    “Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.
    Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.
    Ingredere, O magnos, aderit jam tempus, honores,
    Cara Dei soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum.”

There is a moment in the history of the Roman empire when it comes before
us with the most imposing grandeur. The imperial rule has been
definitively accepted by that proud old aristocracy under which the city
of the seven hills was built up from a robber fortress to be the centre of
a world-wide confederation; while on their side the nations all round the
Mediterranean bow with an almost voluntary homage before the sceptre of
their queen. If the north be still untameable, it has learnt to dread the
talons of the Roman eagle, and cowers murmuring in its forests and
morasses; if the Parthian still shoot as he flies from the western Cæsar’s
hosts, he has at least expiated in the ruin of Ctesiphon the capture of
Crassus and the dishonour of Mark Antony. But far more than this. On the
Cæsar in his undisputed greatness has dawned the real sublimity of the
task which Providence had assigned to him; to mould, that is, under one
rule of equal beneficence the many tongues and many nations which a course
of conquest often the most unjust had brought to own his sway. And this
point of time is when after the great warrior Trajan comes Hadrian the man
of culture; in whom seems implanted the most restless curiosity, carrying
him with the speed of a soldier and the power of a prince over every
climate from Carlisle to Alexandria, from Morocco to Armenia, in order
that he may see in each the good of which so many varying races of men are
capable, and use them all for his grand design. To him Rome is still the
head; but he has learnt to esteem at their due value the members of her
great body. The first fifteen years of his reign are almost entirely spent
away from Rome, in those truly imperial progresses wherein the master of
this mighty realm, when he would relieve himself of his helmet, walks like
the simple legionary,(195) bareheaded in front of his soldiers, under the
suns of the south, examining, wherever he comes, the whole civil and
military organisation, promoting the capable and censuring the unworthy,
scattering benefits with unsparing hand. York has known him as a
protecting genius; Athens blends his name with that of her own Theseus as
a second founder; wayward Alexandria exalts him, at least for the time, as
a granter of privileges; the extreme north and utmost south acknowledge
alike the unsparing zeal and majestic presence of their ruler. At that
moment Rome is still Roman. While the Augustan discipline still animates
her legions, the sense of the subordination of the military power to the
civil spirit of a free state is not wholly lost; her proconsuls and
præfects have passed out of those plundering magnates, who replenished in
the tyranny of a year or two from a drained province the treasures they
had squandered in a life of corruption at Rome, into the orderly and yet
dignified magistrates accountable to the Republic’s life-president(196)
for their high delegated power. Perhaps the world had never yet seen
anything at once so great and so beneficent as the government of Hadrian.
But one thing was wanting to the many-tongued and many-tempered peoples
ruled by him, that they should of their own will accept the worship of one
God, and so the matchless empire receive the only true principle of
coherence and permanence in the common possession of one religion. And the
thoughtful student of history can hardly restrain himself from indulging
his fancy as to what might then have been the result, and into how great a
structure provinces worthy of being kingdoms might then have grown by the
process of an unbroken civilisation instinct with the principles of the
pure Christian Faith. Then the northern flood of barbarism and the eastern
tempest of a false religion, which together were to break up the fabric of
a thousand years, might have been beaten back from its boundaries, and
from them the messengers of light have so penetrated the world in all
directions that the advance of the truth should not have been impeded by
any great civil destruction, but the nations of Europe have developed
themselves from their Roman cradle by a continuous growth, in which there
had been no ages of conquest, violence, and confusion, no relapse into
chaos, no struggle back into an intricate and yet imperfect order, but the
serene advance from dawn to day.

So, however, it was not to be. The time of probation in the reigns of
Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, wherein a sort of toleration had seemed to be
allowed to Christians, passed away, and the beginning of a far different
destiny broke upon the empire. With the accession of Marcus Aurelius the
great old enemies, the North and the East, awoke from their trance in
fresh vigour. A Parthian war of four years, a German war of twelve, with
pestilence, earthquakes, and famines through a large part of the empire,
try to the utmost the vigour and temper of one of the most upright
sovereigns known to heathenism. Marcus Aurelius meets both enemies with
equal courage and ability, but he dies prematurely, and leaves the rule
carried so temperately by four great sovereigns successively adopted to
empire at mature age, in the untried hands of the heir of his blood, a
youth of nineteen, born in the purple. In this at least the great Roman
was wanting both to Stoic greatness and to Roman duty. And it was a fatal
error. During thirteen years this son of the most virtuous heathen shows
himself the most vicious of tyrants. At a single bound Rome passes from a
ruler more just than Trajan to a ruler more abandoned than Nero; and in
the palace of Marcus Aurelius endures an emperor who has a double harem of
three hundred victims;(197) who spares the blood of no senator, and
respects the worth of no officer.

When a revolution, similar to that which swept away Domitian, has removed
Commodus, the Roman world is not so fortunate as to find a second Trajan
to take his place. Three great officers who command in Syria, Illyricum,
and Britain, contend for the prize, and when victory has determined in
favour of Septimius Severus, he rules for eighteen years with a force and
capacity which may indeed be compared with Trajan’s, but with a deceit and
remorseless severity all his own. At one time forty senators are
slaughtered for the crime of having looked with favour upon that pretender
to the empire who did not succeed. Nor is this a passing cruelty, but the
fixed spirit of his reign. The sway of the sword is openly proclaimed.
That the army is everything is not only acted on, but laid down as a
guiding principle of state to his children. The unbroken discipline of her
legionaries had hitherto indeed proved the salvation of the state; but
this Septimius fatally tampers with, and in so doing sows the seeds of
future anarchy and dissolution.

His death in 211 places the empire in the hands of a youth of
twenty-three, all but born in the purple, like Commodus, and his rival in
tyranny and dissoluteness of every kind. Caracalla is endured for six
years, and being killed by a plot in the camp, is succeeded by his
murderer Macrinus. He again, after a year, gives place to a Syrian boy of
fourteen, who took at his accession the honoured name of Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus, but is known to posterity as Heliogabalus. Once more during a
space of four years the crimes of Commodus and Caracalla are repeated, or
even exceeded. Indeed in these years from 218 to 222 the story of shame
and degradation reaches its lowest point. But the soldiers of the
prætorian camp themselves rise against Heliogabalus, massacre him with his
mother, and place on the throne his cousin Alexander Severus, at the age
of fourteen. Now Alexander has for his mother Mammæa, if not a Christian,
at least a hearer of Origen, who gives her son from his earliest youth a
virtuous education, who surrounds him on the perilous height of the Roman
throne with the arms of her affection and her practical wisdom. Alexander
rules for thirteen years, a period equal to that of Commodus, and little
less than that of Nero. Younger than both at his accession and his death,
his reign offers the most striking contrast to theirs. Of all heathen
rulers he stands forth as the most blameless. It is a reign which, after
the obscene domination of Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, with the
savagery between them of Septimius Severus immediately preceding it, seems
like a romance of goodness. Simple and admirable in his private life, he
rivals Marcus Aurelius in his zeal for the administration of justice, for
the choice of good governors, for devotion to the public service; and,
happier than Marcus Aurelius, on his name rests no stain of persecution.
“He suffered the Christians to be,”(198) are the emphatic words of his
biographer; concerning which it has been well remarked that little as this
seems to say, it had been said of no one of his predecessors, though
several had not persecuted the Church.(199) And therefore this expression
must mean that he left them in an entire liberty as to religion. It is
indeed the exact contradiction of what, thirty years before, Tertullian
had stated respecting the law in the time of Septimius Severus; for one of
his complaints in pleading for Christians was, “your harsh sentence ‘that
we are not allowed to exist,’ is an open appeal to brute force.”(200)

Alexander Severus, the darling of his people, perished by the hands of
some treacherous soldiers suborned by his successor Maximin; and with him
ends this period of seventy-four years, which we will consider together,
in order to estimate the progress of the Christian Faith. A time of more
remarkable contrasts in rulers cannot be found. It begins with Marcus
Aurelius, and it ends with Alexander Severus, the two most virtuous of
heathen princes; between them it contains Commodus, Caracalla, and
Heliogabalus, the three generally reputed the most vicious; while the
definitive course which the history of the empire took is given to it by
another, Septimius Severus, of great abilities and mixed character, who
gained the empire as a successful soldier, and was true to his origin in
that he established the ultimate victory of pure force over every
restriction of a civil constitution: an African unsparing of blood, who
sat on the throne of Augustus, and worked out the problem of government
which the founder of the empire had started by preparing the result of
Diocletian.

The rule of Commodus and his successors fully revealed the fatal truth,
that the five princes who from the accession of Nerva had governed as if
they were really responsible to the senate, had only been a fortunate
chance; that this time of prosperity rested upon no legal limitation of
rights between those things wont to exist only in severance,(201) the
sovereign’s power and the subject’s freedom; that it was no result of a
constitution which had grown up under a mutual sense of benefit arising
from authority exercised conscientiously, and obedience cordially
rendered. The age which Tacitus(202) at its commencement had called “most
blessed” was indeed over, and as soon as the second Antonine left the
scene, a state of things ensued in which tyranny and cruelty were as
unchecked as under Nero or Domitian at their worst. It became evident that
all had depended on the sovereign’s personal character. From Marcus to
Commodus the leap was instantaneous; and so, again, afterwards the
short-lived serenity and order of Alexander’s rule passed at his death
into a confusion lasting for more than forty years, which threatened to
break up the very existence of the empire.

But in Rome from the accession of Commodus in 180 to the death of
Heliogabalus in 222 we find a profound corruption of morals, an excess of
cruelty, and a disregard of civil rights, which could scarcely be
exceeded. Tacitus, at the beginning of Trajan’s reign, burst forth into
indignation at the thought that it had cost Rusticus and Senecio their
lives, in Domitian’s time, to have praised Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus,
and that their very writings had been publicly burned, as if that fire
could extinguish the voice of the Roman people, the liberty of the senate,
and the conscience of mankind. “Truly great,” he cried, “was the specimen
of patient endurance which we exhibited.”(203) What words, then, would he
have found to express the degradation of servile spirit in that selfsame
city a hundred years later, when Plautianus, the favourite minister of
Septimius Severus, at the marriage of his daughter with Caracalla, caused
a hundred persons of good family, some of them already fathers, secretly
to be made eunuchs, in order that they might serve as chamberlains to the
imperial bride.(204) Or to take another example; as Quintillus, one of the
chiefs of the senate, both by birth and by the employments which he had
held, a man of advanced years and living retired in the country, was
seized in order to be put to death, he declared that his only surprise was
that he had been suffered to live so long, and that he had made every
preparation for his burial. A third incident will show both the sort of
crimes for which men were punished, the protection given by the law to the
individual, and the spirit and temper of the senate. It had condemned
Apronianus, proconsul of Asia, without giving him a hearing, because his
nurse had dreamt that he was one day to reign, concerning which he was
reported to have consulted a magician. Now, in reading the informations
laid against him, it was found that a witness deposed that during the
consultation some senator who was bald had stretched out his head to
listen. Upon this all the bald senators, even those who had never gone to
the house of Apronianus, began to tremble, while the rest put their hands
to their heads to make sure that they had still their hair. However, a
certain Marcellinus fell under special suspicion, whereupon he demanded
that the witness should be brought in, who could not fail to recognise him
if guilty. The witness looked round upon them all for a long time without
saying a word, until upon a sign that a certain senator made him, he
declared it was Marcellinus, who forthwith was hurried out of the senate
to be beheaded, before Severus was even informed of it. As he went to
execution he met four of his children, to whom he said that his greatest
grief was to leave them living after him in so miserable a time.(205) It
was not without reason that Tertullian at this very moment encouraged the
martyrs to be constant, with the reflection that there was no one who
might not, for the cause of man, be made to suffer whatever nature would
most shrink from suffering in the cause of God. “The times we live in are
proofs,” he cried, “of this. How many and how great are the instances we
have seen, in which no height of birth, no degree of rank, no personal
dignity, no time of life, have saved men from coming to the most
unexpected end, for some man’s cause, either at his own hands, if they
stood against him, or if for him, by the hands of his adversaries.”(206)

It was a time at which the extremes of reckless cruelty, of profuse
luxury, of shameless dissoluteness, met together; in which women were
forbidden by an express law to expose themselves on the arena as
gladiators; in which, when the emperor Severus would legislate against
adultery, a memorial was handed to him with the names of three thousand
persons whom his law would touch.(207) Such was the character of the time
which followed at once on the empire’s golden age; the time in which the
Church of God was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes, and
building up her divine polity amid the worthlessness of the world’s
greatest empire, and the instability of all earthly things.

II. In the last review which we took of her material progress we said that
to the eye of Pius Antoninus she would not yet appear from her multitude
as a power in the state. But before the end of the seventy-four years
which we are here considering as one period, it was otherwise. Already in
the reign of Commodus, Eusebius states that the word of salvation was
bringing to the worship of the one God men out of every race, so that in
Rome itself many distinguished for wealth and rank embraced it with their
whole families.(208) A few years later, when Tertullian writes his
apology, he makes the heathen complain “that the state is overrun with us,
that Christians are found in the country, in forts, in islands; that every
sex and age and condition and rank come over to them.”(209) And again; “we
are of yesterday, and have already filled every place you have, your
cities, islands, forts, boroughs, councils, your very camps, tribes,
corporations, the palace, senate, and forum. Your temples only we leave
you. For what war should we not be equal, we who are so ready to be
slaughtered, if our religion did not command us rather to suffer death
than to inflict it.” Elsewhere he speaks of Christians as “so great a
multitude of men as to be almost the majority in every city.” Now make
whatsoever allowance we will for Tertullian’s vehemence, such statements,
laid before adversaries, if they had not a great amount of truth in them,
would bring ridicule on his cause rather than strengthen it. Tertullian
besides wrote at the time of the general persecution set on foot by
Septimius Severus against the Christian Faith, which itself was a proof of
what importance it had assumed. We may perhaps put the first twenty years
of the third century as the point at which, having passed through the
period when it was embraced by individuals with a several choice, it was
become the faith of families, and one step only remained, that it should
become the faith of nations.(210)

Let us consider a moment the mode of its increase. It was twofold. The
plant of which a root was fixed by the Apostles and their successors in
each of the cities of the empire grew, gathering to itself in every place
the better minds of heathenism, and exercising from the beginning a marked
attraction upon the more religious sex and upon the most down-trodden
portion of society; women were ever won to it by the purity which its
doctrines inculcated, slaves by its tender charity: it gave a moral
emancipation to both. If we possessed a continuous and detailed history of
the Christian Faith in any one city, say Rome, or Alexandria, or Antioch,
or Ephesus, or Carthage, or Corinth, for the first three centuries, what a
wonderful exhibition of spiritual power and material weakness it would
offer. By fixing the mind on Christianity as merely one object, as an
abstraction, we lose in large part the sense of the moral force to which
its propagation bears witness. It was in each city a community,(211) which
had its centre and representative in its Bishop, which had its worship,
discipline, and rule of life presided over by him; its presbytery,
diaconate, and deaconesses; its sisterhoods and works of charity,
spiritual and temporal: a complete government and a complete society held
together by purely spiritual bonds, which the state sometimes ignored, not
unfrequently persecuted, but never favoured. Such was the grain of
mustard-seed, from north to south, from east to west, in presence of the
political Roman, the sensitive and lettered Greek, the sensuous African,
the volatile and disputatious Alexandrian, the corrupt Antiochene. It had
one sort of population to deal with at Rome, quite another in the capital
of Egypt, a third at Ephesus, which belonged to the great goddess Diana,
and the statue which had fallen down from heaven, a fourth at Carthage,
where the hot Numidian blood came in contact with the civilisation of
Rome, a fifth at Corinth, the mistress of all art and luxury. And so on.
Now in each and all of these cities and a hundred others the divine plant
met with various soils and temperatures; but in them all it grew. It had
its distinct experiences, encountering many a withering heat and many a
stormy blast, and watered full oft with blood, but in them all the seed,
dropped so imperceptibly that the mightiest and most jealous of empires
was unconscious of what was cast into its bosom, became a tree. It was an
organic growth of vital power. Christianity, during the ten ages of
persecution, is the upspringing of several hundred such communities,
distinct as we see here, and as described above by S. Ignatius, but at the
same time coinherent, as we saw in the beginning, and as we shall find
presently. As, then, all the cities of the Roman empire had a secular
political and social life, and a municipal government of their own, so had
the Christian Faith in each of them a corresponding life of spiritual
government and inward thought; and if we had the materials to construct
the history of this Faith in any one, it would give us a wonderful insight
into the course of that prodigious victory over the world which the whole
result presents. We cannot do so. The data for it do not exist, and
because they do not, we allude here to this first mode of growth made by
the Christian Faith.

Its second mode was thus. The Apostolical Churches, as they severally
grew, scattered from their bosoms a seed as prolific as their own. They
sent out those who founded communities such as their own. Thus the
Christian plant was communicated from Rome to all the west. With every
decade of years it crept silently over the vast regions of Gaul and Spain,
advancing further west and north. This extension was not a chance
springing up of Christians in different localities. It always took place
by the founding(212) of sees, with the apostolic authority, after the
apostolic model. If the Roman colonia had its rites of inauguration, and
was a transcript of the great city, its senate and its forum, so much more
the Christian city had its prototype and derived its authority from the
great citadel of the Faith, wherein Peter’s prerogative was stored
up,(213) and whence it had a derivation wider in extent and more ample in
character than that of Rome the natural city. But we will take from
another quarter what is as perfect a specimen of this extension as any
that can be found. In the great city of Alexandria, the centre of
intellectual and commercial life to all the East and the whole Greek name,
S. Peter set up the chair of his disciple Mark. There the evangelist
taught and there in due time suffered. Dragged by an infuriated populace
through the streets he thus gave up his soul. But the plant which he so
watered with his blood was of extraordinary vigour. It not only grew amid
the intensest intellectual rivalry of Greek and Jew in the capital, but
likewise in course of time occupied the whole civil government which
obeyed the præfect of Egypt. From Alexandria, Egypt and the Pentapolis of
Cyrene derived their Christian faith and government; and so powerful was
this bond that the bishop of the capital exercised control over all the
bishops of the civil diocese, as it was then termed. He was in power a
patriarch long before he had that name, or even the name of archbishop.
How great and strict this rule was we may judge from an incident preserved
by Photius,(214) which occurred in the very last year of the period we are
considering, in 235. Heraclas, bishop of Alexandria, a former pupil of
Origen, had inflicted upon that great writer a second expulsion from the
Church for his erroneous teaching. Origen on his way to Syria came to the
city of Thmuis, where bishop Ammonius allowed him, in spite of the
above-mentioned censure of Heraclas, to preach. When Heraclas heard this,
he came to Thmuis and deposed Ammonius, and appointed in his stead
Philippus as bishop. Afterwards, on the earnest request of the people of
the city, he restored Ammonius to the office of bishop, and ordained that
he and Philippus should be bishops together. The latter, however,
voluntarily gave way to Ammonius, and succeeded him at his death. Such,
ninety years before the Nicene Council, which recognised and approved
these powers of the bishop of Alexandria, as being after the model of
those exercised by the bishop of Rome,(215) was his authority by the
natural force of the hierarchic principle which built up the Church. And
so little were these Christian communities, which we have seen so complete
in their own organic growth, independent of the bond which held the whole
Church together, and of which the authority of the Egyptian primate was
itself a derivation.

These, then, were the two modes in which the Christian Faith pursued and
attained its orderly increase; as a seed it grew to a plant in each city,
and as a plant it ramified, or as Tertullian says, carried “the vine-layer
of the faith”(216) from city to city, from province to province. In the
meantime the last disciples of the Apostles, those who from the especial
veneration with which they were regarded as teachers of the Faith and
“second links in the chain of tradition,” were termed Presbyters,(217) had
died out. S. Polycarp, at the time of his martyrdom in 167, was probably
the sole remaining one, though his pupil S. Irenæus had known others. When
the latter, upon the martyrdom of S. Pothinus in 177, is raised to the
government of the See of Lyons, we may consider that no one survived in
possession of that great personal authority which belonged to those who
had themselves been taught by Apostles; and so at the third generation
from the last of these the Church throughout the world stood without any
such support, simply upon that basis of the tradition and teaching of the
truth, and of the succession of rulers, on which the Apostles had placed
it, to last for ever. Now in this position it had already, throughout the
whole course of the second century, been violently assaulted by a family
of heresies, which growing upon one root—a natural philosophy confusing
the being of God with the world—burst forth into an astonishing variety of
outward forms. Gnosticism completely altered and defaced Christian
doctrine under each of the four great heads, the Being of God, the Person
of Christ, the nature of man, the office and function of the Church. Into
the Godhead it introduced a dualism, recognising with the absolute good an
absolute evil represented by matter: it denied the reality of the
Incarnation; it made the body a principle of evil in man’s nature: but we
will here limit ourselves to the characteristic and formal principle of
the system from which it derived its name, to Gnosis as the means of
acquiring divine truth. Now the Christian religion taught that revealed
truth was to be attained by the individual through receiving, upon the
ground of the divine veracity, those mysterious doctrines superior but not
contrary to reason which it unfolded; and that the communication of such
doctrines might continue unimpaired and unchanging, it taught that our
Lord had established a never-failing authority charged with the execution
of this office, and assisted by the perpetual presence of His Spirit with
it to the end. But the Gnostics admitted only in the case of the imperfect
or natural man that faith was the means for acquiring religious truth; to
the spiritual, the proper gnostic, gnosis should take the place of faith:
for to many a heathen, accustomed to unlimited philosophical speculation,
the absolute subjection of the intellect to divine authority, required by
the principle of faith, was repugnant. Now this Gnosis was in their mind
not knowledge grounded upon faith, but either philosophic science, or a
supposed intuition of truth, which was not only to replace faith, but the
whole moral life, inasmuch as the completion and sanctification of man
were to be wrought by it. And thus instead of an external authority the
individual reason was set up as the highest standard of religious truth,
the issue of which could only be rationalism in belief and sectarianism in
practice.

This formal principle of Gnosticism when duly carried out would deny the
idea of the Church, its divine institution, its properties and
prerogatives. For the gnostic mode of attaining divine truth, as above
stated, contains in it such a denial. Besides this, the gnostic doctrine
that matter was the seat of evil, destroyed the belief that Christ had
assumed a body: the gnostic doctrine that the supreme God could enter into
no communion with man made their Æon Christ no member of human society,
but a phantom which had enlightened the man Jesus, and then returned back
to the “Light-realm.” Not being really the Son of God, he could have no
Church which was his body: not really redeeming, for sin to the gnostic
had only a physical, not a moral cause, he was but a teacher, and
therefore had created no institution to convey grace; which, moreover, was
superfluous, for whatever elements of good human nature had were derived
from creation and not from redemption. Nor was such an universal
institution wanted, since not all men but only the spiritual were capable
of being drawn up to the Light-realm. The Gnostic therefore required
neither hierarchy nor priesthood, since the soul of this system was the
gnosis of the individual. For this a body enjoying infallibility through
the assistance of the Holy Ghost was not needed. It was enough for
enthusiasts and dreamers to pursue their speculations without any limit to
free inquiry, save what themselves chose to impose as the interpretation
of such scriptures as they acknowledged, or as the exhibition of a private
tradition with which they held themselves to be favoured.

Lastly, the idea of Sacraments, as conveying grace under a covering of
sense, would be superfluous to the gnostic, inasmuch as the spiritual
elements in man belong to him by nature, and are not communicated by a
Redeemer, and would be repulsive to him because matter is a product of the
evil principle, and cannot be the channel of grace from out the
Light-realm.(218)

My purpose here has only been to say just so much of Gnosticism as may
show how the whole Christian truth was attacked by it, and especially the
existence and functions of the Church.

And this may indeed be termed the first heresy in that it struck its roots
right up into Apostolic times. Irenæus, Eusebius, and Epiphanius account
Simon Magus to be its father, and the father of all heresy. As such it is
not without significance that he encountered the first of the Apostles in
Samaria, endeavouring to purchase from him the gifts of grace and
miraculous power, and that he likewise afterwards encountered him at Rome.
To this the first manifestation of Gnosticism succeed heretical doctrines
concerning the Person of our Lord, which sprung out of Judaism; but no
sooner are these overcome than Gnosticism in its later forms spreads from
Syria and Alexandria over the whole empire, everywhere confronting the
Church, seducing her members, and tempting especially speculative minds
within her. A mixture itself of Platonic, Philonic, Pythagorean, and
Parsic philosophy, affecting to gather the best out of all philosophies
and religions, in which it exactly represented the eclectic spirit of its
age, arraying itself in the most fantastic garb of imagination, but at the
bottom no dubious product of the old heathen pantheism, it set itself to
the work, while it assumed Christian names, of confusing and distracting
Christian truth. From the beginning of the second century it was the great
enemy which beset the Church. It may, then, well represent to us the
principle of heresy itself, and as such let us consider on what principles
it was met by the Church’s teachers.

Now to form a correct notion of the danger to which the Christian people
at this time was exposed, we must have before us that it was contained in
several hundred communities, each of them forming a complete spiritual
society and government. These had arisen under the pressure of such
hostility on the part of the empire that it is only in the time of the
last emperor during this period, Alexander Severus, that churches are
known to have publicly existed at Rome.(219) For a very long time all
meetings of Christians and all celebration of their worship was secret. It
is obvious what an absolute freedom of choice on the part of all those who
became Christians this fact involved. Nor did that freedom cease when they
had been initiated into the new religion. Their fidelity to the Christian
faith was all through their subsequent life solicited by the danger in
which as Christians they stood. Only a continuous freedom of choice on
their part could maintain it. And not only did every temporal interest
turn against it, but in the case at least of the more intellectual
converts the activity of thought implied in their voluntary acceptance of
a new belief served as a material on which the seductions of false
teachers might afterwards act, unless it was controlled by an everliving
faith, and penetrated by an active charity. The more these Christian
communities multiplied, the more it was to be expected that some of them
would yield to the assaults of false teachers. It is in just such a state
of things that a great dogmatic treatise was written against Gnosticism by
one who stood at only a single remove from the Apostle John, being the
disciple of his disciple Polycarp. Irenæus, by birth a native of lesser
Asia, enjoyed when young the instructions and intimate friendship of the
bishop of Smyrna. In his old age he delighted to remember how Polycarp had
described his intercourse with John, and with those who had seen the Lord:
how he repeated their discourse, and what he had heard from them
respecting the teaching and the miracles of that Word of life whom they
had seen with their own eyes. “These things,” says Irenæus, “through the
mercy of God I then diligently listened to, writing them down not on
paper, but on my heart, and by His grace I ruminate upon them
perpetually.”(220) Later in life he left Smyrna, and settled in Lyons, of
which Church he was a presbyter when the terrible persecution of 177 broke
out there. Elected thereupon to succeed a martyr as bishop, he crowned an
episcopate of twenty-five years with a similar martyrdom. He wrote, as he
says, during the episcopate of Eleutherius, who was the twelfth bishop of
Rome from Peter, and sat from 177 to 192. After describing at length the
Gnostic errors concerning the divine nature, he sets forth in contrast the
unity of the truth as declared by the Church in the following words:

“The Church, though she be spread abroad through the whole world unto the
ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and their disciples
faith in one God;” and he proceeds to recite her creed, in substance the
same as that now held: then he adds, dwelling with emphasis on the very
point which I have been noting, the sprinkling about, that is, of distinct
communities so widely dispersed, which yet are one in their belief.

“This proclamation and this faith the Church having received, though she
be disseminated through the whole world, carefully guards, as the
inhabitant of one house, and equally believes these things as having one
soul and the same heart, and in exact agreement these things she proclaims
and teaches and hands down, as having one mouth. For, though the languages
through the world be dissimilar, the power of the tradition is one and the
same. Nor have the churches founded in Germany otherwise believed or
otherwise handed down, nor those in Spain, nor in Gaul, nor in the East,
nor in Egypt, nor those in the middle of the world. But as the sun, God’s
creature, in all the world is one and the same, so too the proclamation of
the truth shines everywhere, and lights all men that are willing to come
to the knowledge of the truth. Nor will he among the Church’s rulers who
is most powerful in word say other than this, for no one is above his
teacher;(221) nor will he that is weak in word diminish the tradition, for
the Faith being one and the same, neither he that can say much on it has
gathered too much, nor he that can say little is deficient.”

Against the gnostic claim to possess a private tradition, in virtue of
which each of them “depraving the rule of the truth was not ashamed to
preach himself,” he sets forth the one original tradition which the
Apostles,(222) only “when they had first been invested with the power of
the Holy Ghost coming down on them, and endued with perfect knowledge,”
delivered to the churches founded by them. “And this tradition of the
Apostles, manifested in the whole world, may be seen in every church by
all who have the will to see what is true, and we can give the chain of
those who by the Apostles were appointed bishops in the churches, and
their successors down to our time, who have neither taught nor known any
such delirious dream as these imagine. For, had the Apostles known any
reserved mysteries, which they taught to the perfect separately and
secretly from the rest, assuredly they would have delivered them to those
especially to whom they intrusted the churches themselves. For very
perfect and irreprehensible in all respects did they wish those to be whom
they left for their own successors,(223) delivering over to them their own
office of teaching, by correct conduct on whose part great advantage would
accrue, as from their fall the utmost calamity. But since it were very
long, in a volume like this, to enumerate the succession of all the
churches, we take the church the greatest, the most ancient, and known to
all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles
Peter and Paul, and pointing out the tradition which it has received from
the Apostles, and the faith which it has announced to men, reaching down
to us by the succession of its bishops, we confound all those who form
societies other than they ought, in any way, whether for the sake of
self-fancied doctrines, or through blindness and an evil mind. For, with
this church, on account of its superior principate, it is necessary that
every church agree, that is, the faithful everywhere (every church) in
which by the (faithful) everywhere, the apostolic tradition is preserved.

“The blessed Apostles, then, having founded and built up the church,
committed to Linus the administration of its episcopate.... Anencletus
succeeds him, from whom in the third place from the Apostles Clemens
inherits the episcopate.... He is succeeded by Evaristus; Evaristus by
Alexander, who is followed by Xystus sixth from the Apostles. Then
Telesphorus, who was gloriously martyred; next Hyginus; then Pius; after
whom Anicetus. Soter followed Anicetus; and now in the twelfth degree from
the Apostles Eleutherius holds the place of bishop. By this order and
succession the tradition from the Apostles in the Church and the teaching
of the truth have come down to us. And this proof is most complete that it
is one and the same life-giving Faith which has been preserved in the
Church from the Apostles up to this time, and handed down in truth....
With such proofs, then, before us, we ought not still to search among
others for the truth, which it is easy to take from the Church, since the
Apostles most fully committed unto this, as unto a rich storehouse, all
which is of the truth, so that everyone, whoever will, may draw from it
the draught of life. For this is the gate of life: all the rest are
thieves and robbers. They must therefore be avoided; but whatever is of
the Church we must love with the utmost diligence, and lay hold of the
tradition of the truth. For how? if on any small matter question arose,
ought we not to recur to the most ancient churches in which the Apostles
lived, and take from them on the matter in hand what is certain and plain.
And suppose the Apostles had not even left us writings, ought we not to
follow that order of tradition which they delivered to those to whom they
intrusted the churches? To this order many barbarous nations of believers
in Christ assent, having salvation written upon their hearts by the Holy
Spirit without paper and ink, and diligently guarding the old
tradition.”(224)

This capital point of the ever-living teaching office he further dwells
on:

“The Faith received in the Church we guard in it, which being always from
the Spirit of God, like an admirable deposit in a good vessel, is young
itself, and makes young the vessel in which it is. For this office on the
part of God(225) is intrusted to the Church, as the breath of life was
given to the body, in order that all the members receiving may be
quickened, and in this is placed the communication of Christ, that is, the
Holy Spirit, the earnest of incorruption, the confirmation of our faith,
and the ladder by which we ascend to God. For, says he, in the Church God
has placed Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, and all the remaining operation
of the Spirit; of whom all those are not partakers who do not run to the
Church, but deprive themselves of life by an evil opinion and a still
worse conduct. For where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God:
and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the
Spirit is Truth. Wherefore they who are not partakers of Him are neither
nourished unto life from the breasts of the mother, nor receive that most
pure fountain which proceeds from the Body of Christ, but dig out for
themselves broken cisterns from earthly ditches, and from the filth drink
foul water, avoiding the Faith of the Church lest they be brought back,
and rejecting the Spirit that they may not be taught. So estranged from
the truth they deservedly wallow in every error, tossed about by it,
having different opinions on the same subjects at different times, and
never holding one firm mind, choosing rather to be sophists of words than
disciples of the truth; for they are not founded upon the one rock, but on
the sand, which has in it a multitude of pebbles.”(226)

And he elsewhere contrasts the certainty within, and the uncertainty
without, this teaching power:

“The said heretics, then, being blind to the truth, cannot help walking
out of the track into one path after another, and hence it is that the
vestiges of their doctrine are scattered about without any rule or
sequence. Whereas the road of those who are of the Church goes round the
whole world, because it possesses a firm tradition from the Apostles, and
gives us to see that all have one and the same faith, where all enjoin one
and the same God the Father, believe one disposition of the Son of God’s
incarnation, know the same gift of the Spirit, meditate on the same
precepts, guard the same regimen of ecclesiastical rule, await the same
advent of the Lord, and support the same salvation of the whole man, body
and soul alike. Now the Church’s preaching is true and firm, in whom one
and the same way of salvation is shown through the whole world. For to her
is intrusted the light of God; and hence the wisdom of God, by which He
saves all men, ‘is sung at her entrance, acts with confidence in her
streets, is proclaimed on her walls, and speaks ever in the gates of the
city.’ For everywhere the Church proclaims the truth: she is the
seven-branched candlestick bearing Christ’s light.”(227)

It has been necessary to give at considerable length the very words of S.
Irenæus, because they are stronger and more perspicuous than any summary
of them can be, and because they exhibit a complete answer not to this
particular heresy only, but to all heresy for ever. Such an answer, coming
from one who stood at the second generation from S. John, is of the
highest value. Thus he meets the gnostic principle that divine truth is
acquired by the individual through some process of his own mind, which in
this particular case is termed gnosis, but which may bear many other
names, by appealing to an external standard, the Rule of Faith in the
Church from the beginning, which by its unity points to its origin and
lineage from the apostles and Christ. And this serves to bring out the
central idea which rules his whole mind, that “where the Church is, there
also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the
Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth.” The deposit of which he
spoke is not a dead mass, or lump of ore, requiring only safe custody, but
a living Spirit dwelling in the Church, the source within her of unity,
truth, and grace, using her teaching office, which is set up in her
episcopate, for the drawing out and propagation of the deposit from the
double fountain of Tradition and Scripture, for these her teachers as such
have a divine gift of truth.(228) It is thus that he expands without
altering the doctrine of his teacher Polycarp’s fellow-disciple, “Where
Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”(229) And from it he
proceeds to what follows necessarily on such a conception, that this
Church must have a visible point of unity. As then he appeals to the
churches founded by Apostles as the principal centres of living tradition,
so before yet one of these churches had fallen into possession of
heretics,(230) before yet there was any disagreement between them, he
singles out one for its superior principate, on account of which it was
necessary for every church to agree with it, which he grounds on its
descent from S. Peter and S. Paul, giving every link in the chain of
succession during the hundred and ten years which had elapsed between
their martyrdom and his own episcopate. He sees an especial prerogative
lodged in that church as the means of securing the whole Church’s organic
unity; and this prerogative is, that it is among churches what S. Peter
and S. Paul were among Apostles;(231) as the first general western council
expressed it, “in it the Apostles sit daily, and their blood without
intermission bears witness to the glory of God.”(232)

Thus the conception expressed by Irenæus, with the greatest emphasis and
continual repetition, in order to refute heresy, is that all truth and
grace are stored up in the one body of the Church; to which his doctrine
of the Roman Primacy is as the keystone to the arch. For everything in his
view depends on the unity, the intrinsic harmony, of the truth which he is
describing as lodged in the episcopate: the means therefore of securing
that unity are part of its conception. Accordingly, to see in its due
force his statement that every church must agree with the Roman Church, it
must not be severed from the context and taken by itself, but viewed in
connexion with the argument as part of which it stands. If the Church is
to speak one truth with one mouth, which is his main idea, she must have
an organic provision for such a result, which he places in the necessary
agreement of all churches with one: and this is his second idea,
subsidiary to the first, and completing it.

Irenæus by birth and education represents in all this the witness of the
Asiatic churches; as bishop of Lyons, the churches of Gaul.

A few years after Irenæus, Tertullian in a professed treatise against
heresy lays down exactly the same principles. With him, too, the main idea
is the possession of all truth and grace by the one Body which Christ
formed and the Apostles established. This he thus exhibits:

“We must not appeal to the Scriptures, nor try the issue on points on
which the victory is either none, or doubtful, or too little doubtful. For
though the debate on the Scriptures should not so turn out as to place
each party on an equal footing, the order of things requires that that
question should be first proposed which is the only one now to be
discussed, To whom does the Faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures?
From whom and through whom, when and to whom, was that discipline by which
men become Christians delivered? For wherever the truth of that which is
the Christian discipline at once and faith be shown to be, there will be
the truth of the Scriptures, of their exposition, and of all Christian
traditions. Our Lord Jesus Christ (may He suffer me so to speak for the
present), whoever He is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance
God and Man, of whatever reward the promiser, Himself declared so long as
He was on earth, whether to the people openly, or to the disciples apart,
what He was, what He had been, what will of the Father He administered,
what duty of man He laid down. Of whom He had attached to his own side
twelve in chief, the destined teachers of the nations. One of these having
fallen off from Him, He bade the other eleven, on his departure to the
Father after the resurrection, go and teach the nations, who were to be
baptised into the Father, into the Son, and into the Holy Ghost. The
Apostles then forthwith, the meaning of their title being the Sent,
assuming by lot Matthias as a twelfth into the place of Judas, by the
authority of the prophecy in the psalm of David, when they had obtained
the promised power of the Holy Ghost for miracles and utterance, first
through Judea bore witness to the Faith in Christ Jesus, and established
churches, thence proceeding into the world promulgated the same doctrine
of the same Faith to the nations, and thereupon founded churches in every
city, from which the other churches thenceforth borrowed the vine-layer of
the Faith and the seeds of the doctrine, and are daily borrowing them that
they may become churches. And for this cause they are themselves also
counted apostolical, as being the offspring of apostolical churches. The
whole kind must be classed under its original. And thus these churches so
many and so great are that one first from the Apostles, whence they all
spring. Thus all are the first, and all apostolical, while all being the
one prove unity: whilst there is between them communication of peace, and
the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality.(233) And no other
principle rules these rights than the one tradition of the same
sacrament.”(234)

Here is the summing up of what Irenæus had said with the force, brevity,
and incisiveness which characterise Tertullian. Further on he rejects any
appeal on the part of heretics to scripture:

“If the truth be in our possession, as many as walk by the rule which the
Church has handed down from the Apostles, the Apostles from Christ, and
Christ from God, the reasonableness of our proposition is manifest, which
lays down that heretics are not to be allowed to enter an appeal to
scriptures, since without scriptures we prove them to have no concern with
scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, inasmuch
as they do not hold from Christ what they follow by their own choice, and
in consequence admit the name of heretics.(235) Therefore not being
Christians, they have no right to Christian writings. To whom we may well
say, Who are you? when did you come? and whence? What are you, who are not
mine, doing in my property? By what right dost thou, Marcion, cut down my
wood? By what license dost thou, Valentinus, turn the course of my waters?
By what power remove my landmarks? This is my possession: how are you
sowing it and feeding on it at your pleasure? It is mine, I repeat: I had
it of old; I had it first: I have the unquestioned title-deeds from the
first proprietors. I am the heir of the Apostles. According to their will,
according to their trust, according to the oath I took from them, I hold
it. You, assuredly, they have ever disinherited and renounced, as aliens,
as enemies. But why are heretics aliens and enemies to Apostles, save from
difference of doctrine, which each at his own pleasure has either brought
forward or received against Apostles?”(236)

Thus Tertullian adds the witness of the African church to that of the
Asiatic and Gallic churches in Irenæus.

We have noted the great church of Alexandria as a most complete instance
of the growth whereby from the mother see the hierarchy took possession of
a land. But the principle of such growth was the ecclesiastical rule, and
its strength the energy with which that rule was preserved. This rule was
twofold: the rule of discipline, or outward regimen, what we now call a
constitution; and the rule of Faith. What the church of Alexandria was in
discipline has been seen above: and now just at this time we have in the
first great teacher of this church, who has come down to us, the most
decisive exhibition of this rule as a defence against this same gnostic
heresy. “As,” says Clement, “a man like those under the enchantment of
Circe should become a beast, so whoever has kicked against the tradition
of the Church, and started aside into the opinions of human heresies, has
ceased to be a man of God, and faithful to the Lord.” ... “There are three
states of the soul, ignorance, opinion, knowledge. Those who are in
ignorance, are the Gentiles; those in knowledge, the true Church; those in
opinion, the adherents of heresies.” ... “We have learnt that bodily
pleasure is one thing, which we give to the Gentiles; strife a second,
which we adjudge to heresies; joy a third, which is the property of the
Church.” Again, he speaks of those who “not using the divine words well,
but perversely, neither enter themselves into the kingdom of heaven, nor
suffer those whom they have deceived to attain the truth. They have not
indeed the key to the entrance, but rather a false key, whereby they do
not enter as we do through the Lord’s tradition, drawing back the veil,
but cutting out a side way, and secretly digging through the Church’s
wall, they transgress the truth, and initiate into rites of error the soul
of the irreligious. For that they have made their human associations later
than the Catholic Church, it needs not many words to show.” Then, after
referring to the origin and propagation “of the Lord’s teaching,”(237)
exactly after the mode of Irenæus and Tertullian, he concludes, “So it is
clear from the most ancient and true Church, that these heresies coming in
subsequently to it, and others still later, are innovations from it, as
coins of adulterate stamp. From what has been said, then, I consider it
manifest that the true Church, the really ancient Church, is one, in which
are enrolled all who are just according to (God’s) purpose. For inasmuch
as there is one God and one Lord, therefore that which is most highly
precious is praised for being alone, since it is an imitation of the one
Principle. The one Church, then, which they try by force to cut up into
many heresies, falls under the same category as the nature of the One. So
then we assert that the ancient and Catholic Church is one alone in its
foundation, in its idea, in its origin, and in its excellence, collecting
by the will of the one God, through the one Lord, into the unity of one
Faith, according to the peculiar covenants, or rather to the one covenant
at different times, the preordained whom God predestined, having known
before the foundation of the world that they would be just. But the
excellence of the Church, as the principle of the whole construction, is
in unity, surpassing all other things, and having nothing similar or equal
to itself.”(238)

One other writer remains, the larger part of whose life falls within this
period, greater in renown than either of the foregoing; and into whatever
particular errors Origen may have fallen, he did not swerve from their
doctrine as to the mode of meeting error itself. “Since,” says he, “there
are many who think that they hold the tenets of Christ, while some of them
hold different tenets from those who went before them, let the
ecclesiastical preaching as handed down by the order of succession from
the Apostles, and maintained even to the present time in the churches, be
preserved: that alone is to be believed as truth which in nothing is
discordant from the ecclesiastical and apostolical tradition.”(239) And
the ground for such a principle he has given elsewhere:

“The divine words assert that the whole Church of God is the Body of
Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body as a
whole are particular believers: since as the soul quickens and moves the
body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so
the Word moving to what is fitting, and working in, the whole body, the
Church, moves likewise each member of the Church, who does nothing without
the Word.”(240)

The four great writers, then, of this period, Irenæus, Tertullian,
Clement, and Origen, none of them indeed from Rome, but representing the
churches of Asia, Gaul, Africa, and Egypt, exactly concur in the principle
by which they refuted heresy, the propagation, that is, of the rule of
Faith in its purity and integrity, by those who possessed the succession
of the Apostles and their office of teaching, in which lay a divine gift
of the truth.

But to those who proceeded from this basis it was a further labour to set
forth the true knowledge against the false. And we may trace the following
results of heresy, quite unintended by itself, in its operation on the
Church.

1. In the first place, S. Augustine continually remarks that the more
accurate enucleation of true doctrine usually proceeded from the attacks
of heresy; and this happened so continually that it seems to him a special
instance of that law of divine Providence which educes good from evil. “If
the truth,” says he, “had not lying adversaries, it would be examined with
less carefulness,” and so “a question started by an opponent becomes to
the disciple an occasion of learning.”(241) And he observes that “we have
found by experience that every heresy has brought into the Church its own
questions, against which the divine Scripture was defended with greater
care than if no such necessity had existed.”(242) Thus the doctrine of the
Trinity owed its perfect treatment to the Arian assault on it; the
doctrine of penance to that of Novatian; the doctrine of baptism to those
who wished to introduce the practice of rebaptising; even the unity of
Christ was brought out with greater clearness by the attempt to rend it,
and the doctrine of one Catholic Church diffused through the whole world
cleared from its objectors by showing that the mixture of evil men in it
does not prejudice the good.(243) And he illustrates his meaning by a very
picturesque image: “When heretics calumniate, the young of the flock are
disturbed; in their disturbance they inquire; so the young lamb butts its
mother’s udder till it gets sufficient nutriment for its thirst.”(244) For
the doctors of the Church being called upon for an answer supply the truth
which before was latent. And there is no more signal instance of the great
writer’s remark than himself; for the attacks of the most various heresies
led him during forty years of unwearied mental activity into almost every
question of theology.

The gnostic heresy, then, presents us with the first instance of a law
which will run all through the Church’s history. Peter, the first Apostle,
meets and refutes Simon Magus, the first propagator of falsehood, who
receives divine sacraments and then claims against the giver to be “the
great power of God.” This fact is likewise the symbol of a long line of
action, wherein it is part of the divine plan to make the perpetual
restlessness of error subserve the complete exhibition of truth. The
Gnostics denied the divine monarchy; at once mutilated and misinterpreted
Scripture; claimed to themselves a secret tradition of truth. We owe to
them in consequence the treatises of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement, and
a written exhibition of the Church’s divine order, succession, and unity,
as well as a specific mention of the tie which held that unity together;
and the mention of this tie at so early a period might otherwise have been
wanting to us. But these three writers do but represent to us partially an
universal result. The danger which from gnostic influence beset all the
chief centres of ecclesiastical teaching marks the transition from the
first state of simple faith to that of human learning, inquiry, and
thought, turned upon the objects of Christian belief. The Gnostics had a
merit which they little imagined for themselves. They formed the first
doctors of post-apostolic times. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement are a
great advance upon the more simple and external exhibition of Christianity
which we find in the apologists. In them the Church is preparing to
encounter the deepest questions moved against her by Greek philosophy.
They are her first champions in that contest with Hellenic culture which
was a real combat of mind, not a mere massacre of unresisting victims, and
which lasted for five hundred years.

2. Secondly, when the gnostic attack began, the canon of the New Testament
was still unfixed. Nothing can be more certain than that the Apostles did
not set forth any official collection of their writings, and that no such
collection existed shortly after their death. This fact most plainly shows
that the Christian religion at their departure did not rest for its
maintenance upon writings. Not only had our Lord written no word Himself,
but He left no command to His Apostles to write. His command was to
propagate His Gospel and to found His kingdom by oral teaching; and His
promise was that the Holy Ghost should accompany, follow upon, and
continue with, this their action. What we find is, that they did this, and
that the writings which besides they left, being from the first kept and
venerated by the several churches to which they were addressed, gradually
became known through the whole body of the Church. With the lapse of time
they would become more and more valuable. Moreover, when the Gnostics set
themselves to interpolate and corrupt them, and to fabricate false
writings, the need of a genuine collection became more and more urgent. It
is from the three writers above mentioned, towards the end of the second
century, that we learn that such a collection existed, in forming which
these principles were followed: only to admit writings which tradition
attested to spring from an Apostle or a witness of our Lord’s life,(245)
among whom Paul was specially counted: secondly, only such writings as
were attested by some church of apostolical foundation: and thirdly, only
such writings the doctrine contained in which did not differ from the rule
of faith orally handed down in the churches of apostolic origin, or in the
one Catholic Church, excluding all such as were at variance with the
doctrine hitherto received. Thus in the settlement of the Canon authority
as well as tradition intervened; an authority which felt itself in secure
possession of the same Holy Spirit who had inspired the Apostles, and of
the same doctrine which they had taught.(246)

With the reception of a book into the Canon of Scripture was joined a
belief in its inspiration, which rested on what was a part of oral
tradition, that is, that the Apostles as well in their oral as in their
written teaching had enjoyed the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It is evident that such a tradition reposes, in the last instance, upon
the authority of the Church.(247)

If by means of the gnostic attacks the Canon of the New Testament, as we
now possess it, was not absolutely completed, it had at least advanced a
very great way towards that completion, which we have finally attested as
of long standing in a Council held at Carthage in 397.(248)

3. Another result of the gnostic attack was the setting forth the
tradition of the Faith, seated and maintained in the apostolic churches,
as the rule for interpreting Scripture. The Gnostics in two ways impeached
this rule, by claiming a private tradition of their own, and by
interpreting such scripture as they chose to acknowledge after their own
pleasure. Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement found an adequate answer to
both errors by showing that the Faith which the Apostles had set forth in
their writings could not contradict the Faith which they had established
in the Church. These were two sources of the same doctrine; but it is by
the permanent connection and interpenetration of the two that the truth is
maintained; and that which holds both together, that which utters and
propagates the truth which they jointly contain, is the Teaching office,
the mouth of the Church. Hence the force of the appeal in Irenæus to the
succession of the episcopate, and to the divine gift of truth which the
Apostles had handed down therein with their teaching office. Hence
Tertullian’s exclusion of heretics from the right to possess scriptures
which belong only to the Church. Hence Clement’s description of the only
true Gnostic, as “one who has grown old in the study of the Scriptures,
while he preserves the apostolic and ecclesiastical standard of
doctrine.”(249) For neither in founding churches, nor in teaching orally,
nor in writing, did the Apostles exhaust or resign the authority committed
to them.(250) The authority itself, which was the source of all this their
action, after all that they had founded, taught, or written, continued
complete and entire in them, and was transmitted on to their successors,
for the maintenance of the work assigned to it. It is this perpetual