Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/708

Rh ($94 CHRISTIANITY power and permanence. And it was a real feeling of wor ship that raised in every house the altar to the divus imperator, and spread over the whole of the Roman empire, jostling aside its myriad creeds, the one faith in Rome, in its power, its eternity, and its mysterious strength. It was in this way that paganism and Rome became almost synonymous, and that Christianity and Rome were foes from the first. Rome never treated Christianity as other religions were treated. Gibbon tells us that the Romans were already somewhat intolerant of Judaism and extended their intol erance to the new Jewish sect, somewhat more intractable than their neighbours, which Christians were supposed to be. He also shows that Christians who had neither temples nor synagogues were supposed to be atheists, and so beyond the pale of toleration, and that the secret assemblies of Christians were supposed to have a hostile political meaning. But something more is required to explain the uncompromising hostility of Rome, especially when we find that latterly that hostility was strongest under the greatest and noblest emperors. Since Roman toleration was founded on public policy, there was an end of it with regard to a religion which was of no use in curbing a conquered people. The Christian religion was nova and illicita ; it was not a national religion nor a recognized faith, and was a new and unaccountable pheno menon which might be, and most probably was, fraught with danger to the sacred state. We find, too, in many of Rome s ablest statesmen a strange instinctive dread of Christianity. They made inquiries about it and were watchful of it, and yet could get no real insight into it. They could not help noticing how in spite of edicts and persecutions Christianity was rapidly increasing ; they saw how, with a daring which to them was simply inexplicable, it was nothing loath to match itself against the power of Rome. To the ears of these dark and jealous emperors came tidings of Christianity copying the jurisdic tion of Rome in its ecclesiastical divisions of the land, of its success in the large towns in the empire, of its entrance into the army. They saw, too, what Constantino was the first to make use of, that Christianity acted in such a way upon the physical frame that Christian soldiers were stronger ami braver than their fellowS, and man for man and battalion for battalion were more than a match for the pagans, Above all, they heard rumours of a new kingdom which the Christians were to establish, of con fidently expressed hopes that the kingdom would soon come, and of openly asserted resolutions and prophecies that it would be established on the ruins of Rome itself. And, on the side of the Christians, Tertullian was ready to boast that in a few years the Christian empire had more extensive boundaries than the Roman, and that Christian soldiers had penetrated and triumphed in regions where the Roman arms were unknown or defied. Christian martyrs marching to the arena confidently predicted the speedy overthrow of the cruel paganism which sent them there. As the struggle deepened, too, thera entered a distinctly new element on the Christian side, and the contest became not merely one of the true religion against a false paganism and a pagan and persecuting state ; it became a battle between two kingdoms. The Christian bishop and the Roman governor were two rival authorities, viceroys in two warring empires ; and the saints would inherit the earth, when the church ruled instead of Rome as the mistress of the world. During the long struggle between Rome and Christianity we see this subtle influence entering into arid withering the true spiritual conception of the kingdom of God, until at last it is almost transformed into an earthly empire. St Augustine has seized on and represented this idea with sublime dramatic power in his Civitas Dei in peregrinatione per terras, where the Civitas Dei, or the church, is set over against the Civitas Terrena, or state ; and where the kingdom of God, howev r er grandly pictured, is almost as material, earthly, and sensible as the empire of pagan Rome. From this fatal influence have come all the attempts to realize the universality and catholicity of the church in a purely external or visible way, and the failure to understand how Christianity may be all-embracing without visibly covering and controlling the earth. In her contest with Rome Christianity succeeded in realizing and giving expression to her claim to universal dominion, but in Rome s overthrow she inflicted an almost fatal wound on herself when she was unconsciously induced to take the government of a pagan empire as her model for the organization of a spiritual kingdom. In the contest which Christianity had to maintain with pagan philosophy the early Christians were compelled to work out another side of the great problem which con- fronted the early church the relation of the Old Testament to the New Testament kingdom of God. Philosophy when engaged upon topics which belong to Christianity is always easily distinguished by the way in which it puts its questions. The question with philosophy, for example, is, What is Sin ? How can its existence be explained ? But the Christian question is : How can I get rid of sin 1 To the philosopher sin is food for meditation, but to the Christian it is something to be escaped from. Outside Christianity there were many schools of thinkers who busied themselves with speculations about the origin and nature of sin, death, God, judgment, holiness, and so on, and there were many philosophers who were quite willing to take help from the Hebrew Scriptures in their difficulties. It was always a matter of earnest endeavour on the part of Christian theologians to make it clear that Christianity was not a philosophy to be discussed but a life to be lived ; but when they were called, by the views of some of the Gnostics, to explain their relation to the Old Testament Scriptures and to the New Testament canon, we find them unable to realize the full significance of the problem. To the early Christians the Old Testament -svas pre-eminently the scripture, it was in their possession before the New Testament, and the New Testament canon wa.s gradually formed as one after another of the writings which compose it were found worthy of a place beside the Old Testament Scriptures. Certain of the Gnostic sects mado use of the facts, statements, and truths contained in the Scriptures in their theories of creation and redemption, of man, sin, and salvation ; and Christian theologians wero compelled to refute the Gnostics by setting forth over against the false doctrines what they held to be the truths concerning the matters taught. In this way and gradually there grew up an intellectual system of Christian truth, embodied in the creeds of the church and in the writings of her theologians. The necessity was laid upon Christian theologians to present Christianity intellectually in this way, and oppose a true to the false yvaxm ; but just as in her contest with Judaism and Rome Christianity insensibly adopted part of the error contended against, so here the struggle against intellectual evil had the result of tending to dissociate Christian life from the Holy Scriptures, and of creating two kingdoms of God one of life which was to be lived on the lines of the old Roman empire, and one of doctrine which was to be based on the foundations of Greek philosophy. This latter tendency did not appear in the church until the early Jewish element had almost died out. To the Jew Judaism was an historical past which it was not to the Gentile, who cculd with difficulty think of the church of the Old Testament as a spiritual organization into which he was actually brought by regeneration. To TllG illfll