Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/55

 41

judgment that is to follow at the world's end. He summoned the divine pneuma upon a nature unredeemed. The storm from on high shall, he vowed, tear the Christian loose from his slothful self. Revela- tion has not ceased, it never will cease to be given as an exciting dis- covery to him who has renounced living in the world. Away, there- fore, with science, with art, with games, and with gymnastics. He frowned likewise on military service, flight from persecution, and re- marriage after the spouse's death. Tertullian, the enthusiast, would preach a Church of the spirit against the Church of bishops and priests. He severed himself from the Catholic community and joined the party of the Rigorists who owe their name and ideal to the sombre Phrygian Montanus. Tertullian, prophet of an anarchical Christianity seeking direct individual communion with God, hated the hierarchical Church to the end. Contesting its power to bind and to loose, he hurled one of the last of his frigidly sarcastic declarations at the Roman Ponti- fex Maximus Calixtus, Bishop of all Bishops, accusing him of for- giving unforgivable sins, such as adultery and fornication. The Church is indebted forever to her greatest Apologist before Augustine's time, but he was also the greatest of apostates prior to Luther. Ter- tullian was the creator of her style. But the danger which he personi- fied, the danger of destruction in the name of God, was also rightly discerned by the Papacy, as time has shown.

Cyprian was a man of the world and remained one after he had become a man of the Church, He was solid, pious, cultivated the virtus Romana in Christian form. As a teacher and shepherd he gave his time the perfect definition of Catholicism. Latin genius gave her the basic text of a political order which the Greek East could not have provided. A decade of catastrophes proved Cyprian's mettle as a born leader in public life. During the persecution of Deems, com- pared with which all those which had preceded were mere pogroms, the new bishop fled from Carthage in 249. His reason for doing so was to keep his flocks from being without a shepherd. Many now doubted his courage, but he soon found opportunity to demonstrate that. He ruled his diocese from his hiding place and saved whatever could be saved. During the peaceful reigns of the Syrian emperors, many had flocked into the Church; and now, under the blows of the

42