THE METHODS OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN DEALING WITH HEATHENISM
The coincidences of our present conquest
of the non-Christian races with that to which the
Apostolic Church was called are numerous and striking.
Not even one hundred years ago was the struggle with
heathen error so similar to that of the early Church.
To a great extent the missionary efforts
of the mediaeval centuries encountered only crude
systems, which it was comparatively easy to overcome.
The rude tribes of Northern Europe were converted by
the Christianity of the later Roman Empire, even though
they were conquerors. Their gods of war and brute
force did not meet all the demands of life. As
a source of hope and comfort, their religion had little
to be compared with the Christian faith, and as to
philosophy they had none. They had inherited
the simple nature worship which was common to all
branches of the Aryan race, and they had expanded it
into various ramifications of polytheism; but they
had not fortified it with subtle speculations like
those of the Indo-Aryans, nor had their mythologies
become intrenched in inveterate custom, and the national
pride which attends an advanced civilization.
At a later day Christian missionaries
in Britain found the Norse religion of the Saxons,
Jutes, and Angles, scarcely holding the confidence
of either rulers or subjects. They had valued
their gods chiefly for the purposes of war, and they
had not always proved reliable. The king of Northumbria,
like Clovis of France, had vowed to exchange his deities
for the God of the Christians if victory should be
given him on a certain battle-field; and when he had
assembled his thanes to listen to a discussion between
the missionary Paulinus and the priests of Woden on
the comparative merits of their respective faiths,
the high priest frankly admitted his dissatisfaction
with a religion which he had found utterly disappointing
and useless; and when other chief counsellors had
given the same testimony, and a unanimous vote had
been taken to adopt the Christian faith, he was the
first to commence the destruction of the idols.
The still earlier missionaries among
the Druid Celts of Britain and France, though they
found in Druidism a more elaborate faith than that
of the Norsemen, encountered no such resistance as
we find in the great religious systems of our day.
Where can we point to so easy a conquest as that of
Patrick in Ireland, or that of the Monks of Iona among
the Picts and Scots?
The Druids claimed that they already
had many things in common with the Christian doctrines,
and what was a still stronger element in the case,
they made common cause with the Christians against
the wrongs inflicted on both by pagan Rome. The
Roman emperors were not more determined to extirpate
the hated and, as they thought, dangerous influences
of Christianity, than they were to destroy every vestige
of Druidism as their only hope of conquering the invincible
armies of Boadicea. And thus the mutual experience
of common sufferings opened a wide door for the advancement
of Christian truth.
The conquests of Welsh and Irish missionaries
in Burgundy, Switzerland, and Germany, encountered
no elaborate book religions, and no profound philosophies.
They had to deal with races of men who were formidable
only with weapons of warfare, and who, intent chiefly
on conquest and migration, had few institutions and
no written historic records. The peaceful sceptre
of the truth was a new force in their experience, and
the sympathetic and self-denying labors of a few missionaries
tamed the fierce Vikings to whom Britain had become
a prey, and whose incursions even the armies of Charlemagne
could not resist.
How different is our struggle with
the races now under the sceptre of Islam, for example inflated
as they are with the pride of wide conquest, and looking
contemptuously upon that Christian faith which it
was their early mission to sweep away as a form of
idolatry! How different is our task in India,
which boasts the antiquity of the noble Sanskrit and
its sacred literature, and claims, as the true representative
of the Aryan race, to have given to western nations
their philosophy, their religion, and their civilization!
How much more difficult is our encounter with Confucianism,
which claims to have laid the foundations of the most
stable structure of social and political institutions
that the world has ever known, and which to-day, after
twenty-five centuries of trial, appeals to the intellectual
pride of all intelligent classes in a great empire
of four hundred millions! And finally, how different
is our task with Buddhism, so mystical and abstruse,
so lofty in many of its precepts, and yet so cold and
thin, so flexible and easily adapted, and therefore
so varied and many sided! The religious systems
with which we are now confronted find their counterparts
only in the heathenism with which the early Church
had to deal many centuries ago; and for this reason
the history of those early struggles is full of practical
instruction for us now. How did the early Church
succeed in its great conquest? What methods were
adopted, and with what measures of success?
In one respect there is a wide difference
in the two cases. The Apostles were attempting
to convert their conquerors. They belonged to
the vanquished race; they were of a despised nationality.
The early fathers also were subjects of Pagan powers.
Insomuch as the Roman emperors claimed divine honors,
there was an element of treason in their propagandism.
The terrible persécutions which so long devastated
the early Church found their supposed justification
in the plea of self-defence against a system which
threatened to subvert cherished and time-honored institutions.
Candid writers, like Archdeacon Farrar, admit that
Christianity did hasten the overthrow of the Roman
Empire.
But we find no conquering powers in
our pathway. Christianity and Christian civilization
have become dominant in the earth. The weakness
of the Christian Church in its conquests now is not
in being baffled and crippled by tyranny and persecution,
but rather in the temptation to arrogance and the
abuse of superior power, in the overbearing spirit
shown in the diplomacy of Christian nations and the
unscrupulous aggressions of their commerce. There
is also a further contrast in the fact that in the
early days the advantages of frugality and simple
habits of life were on the side of the missionaries.
Roman society especially was beginning to suffer that
decay which is the inevitable consequence of long-continued
luxury, while the Church observed temperance in all
things and excelled in the virtues which always tend
to moral and social victory.
On the other hand, we who are the
ambassadors to the heathen of to-day, are ourselves
exposed to the dangers which result from wealth and
excessive luxury. Our grade of life, our scale
of expenditure, even the style in which our missionaries
live, excites the amazement of the frugal heathen
to whom they preach. And as for the Church at
home, it is hardly safe for a Persian or a Chinaman
to see it. Everyone who visits this wonderful
eldorado carries back such romantic
impressions as excite in others, not so much the love
of the Gospel as the love of mammon. When the
Church went forth in comparative poverty, and with
an intense moral earnestness, to preach righteousness,
temperance, and the judgment to come; when those who
were wealthy gave all to the poor like Anthony
of Egypt, Jerome, Ambrose, and Francis of Assisi and
in simple garments bore the Gospel to those who were
surfeited with luxuries and pleasures, and were sick
of a life of mere indulgence, then the truth of the
Gospel conquered heathenism with all that the world
could give. But whether a Church in the advanced
civilization of our land and time, possessed of enormous
wealth, enjoying every luxury, and ever anxious to
gain more and more of this present world, can convert
heathen races who deem themselves more frugal, more
temperate, and less worldly than we, is a problem
which remains to be solved. We have rare facilities,
but we have great drawbacks. God’s grace
can overcome even our defects, and He has promised
success.
But in the proud intellectual character
of the systems encountered respectively by the ancient
and by the modern Church, there are remarkable parallels.
The supercilious pride of Brahminism, or the lofty
scorn of Mohammedanism, is quite equal to that self-sufficient
Greek philosophy in whose eyes the Gospel was the
merest foolishness. And the immovable self-righteousness
of the Stoics has its counterpart in the Confucianism
of the Chinese literati. A careful comparison
of the six schools of Hindu philosophy with the various
systems of Greece and Rome, will fill the mind with
surprise at the numerous correspondences one
might almost say identities. And that surprise
is the greater from the fact that no proof exists
that either has been borrowed from the other.
The atomic theory of creation advanced
by Lucretius is found also in the Nyaya philosophy
of the Hindus. The pessimism of Pliny and Marcus
Aurelius was much more elaborately worked out by Gautama.
The Hindus had their categories and their syllogisms
as well as Aristotle. The conception of a dual
principle in deity which the early Church traced in
all the religious systems of Egypt, Phoenicia, and
Assyria, and whose influence poisoned the life of
the Phoenician colonies, and was so corrupting to
the morals of Greece and Rome, was also elaborated
by the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and it has plunged
Hindu society into as deep a degradation as could
be found in Pompeii or Herculaneum. The Indian
philosophy partook far more of the pantheistic element
than that of Greece. Plato and Aristotle had
clearer conceptions of the personality of the deity
and of the distinct and responsible character of the
human soul than any school of Hindu philosophers certainly
clearer than the Vedantists, and their ethics involved
a stronger sense of sin.
German philosophy has borrowed its
pantheism from India rather than from Greece, and
in its most shadowy developments it has never transcended
the ancient Vedantism of Vyasa.
As in the early centuries, so in our
time, different systems of religion have been commingled
and interwoven into protean forms of error more difficult
to understand and dislodge than any one of the faiths
and philosophies of which they were combined.
As the Alexandrian Jews intertwined the teachings
of Judaism and Platonism; as Manichaeans and Gnostics
corrupted the truths of the Old and New Testaments
with ideas borrowed from Persian mysticism; as various
eclectic systems gathered up all types of thought
which the wide conquests of the Roman Empire brought
together, and mingled them with Christian teachings;
so now the increased intercommunication, and the quickened
intellectual activity of our age have led to the fusion
of different systems, ancient and modern, in a negative
and nerveless religion of humanity. We now have
in the East not only Indian, but Anglo-Indian, speculations.
The unbelieving Calcutta graduate has Hegel and Spinoza
interwoven with his Vedantism, and the eclectic leader
of the Brahmo Somaj, while placing Christ at the head
of the prophets and recognizing the authority of all
sacred bibles of the races, called on Christians, Hindus,
Buddhists and Mohammedans to unite in one theistic
church of the New Dispensation in India. Not
even the old Gnostics could present so striking an
admixture as that of the Arya Somaj. It has appropriated
many of those Christian ethics which have been learned
from a century of contact with missionaries and other
Christian residents. It has approved the more
humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing
caste, and the degradation of woman. It has repudiated
the corrupt rites and the degrading superstitions
of Hinduism. At the same time its hatred of the
Christian faith is most bitter and intense.
And there are other alliances, not
a few, between the East and the West. In India
and Japan the old Buddhism is compounded with American
Spiritualism and with modern Evolution, under a new
application of the ancient name of Theosophy.
In Japan representatives of advanced Unitarianism
are exhorting the Japanese Buddhists to build the religion
of the future on their old foundations, and to avoid
the propagandists of western Christianity.
The bland and easy-going catholicity
which professes so much in our day, which embraces
all faiths and unfaiths in one sweet emulsion of meaningless
negations, which patronizes the Christ and His doctrines,
and applies the nomenclature of Christianity to doctrines
the very opposite of its teachings, finds a counterpart
in the smooth and vapid compromises of the old Gnostics.
“Gnosticism,” says Uhlhorn, “combined
Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental
theosophy, thus forming great systems of speculative
thought, all with the object of displaying the world’s
development. From a pantheistic First Cause,
Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of aeons beings
of Light. The source of evil was supposed to
be matter, which in this material world holds light
in captivity. To liberate the light and thus redeem
the world, Christ came, and thus Christianity was added
as the crowning and victorious element in this many-sided
system of speculation. But Christ was regarded
not so much as a Saviour of individual souls as an
emancipator of a disordered kosmos, and the system
which seemed to accord great honor to Christianity
threatened to destroy its life and power.”
So, according to some of our Modern Systems, men are
to find their future salvation in the grander future
of the race.
Not only do we encounter mixtures
of truth and error, but we witness similar attempts
to prove that whatever is best in Christianity was
borrowed from heathenism. Porphyry and others
maintained that Pythagoras and Theosebius had anticipated
many of the attributes and deeds of Christ, and Philostratus
was prompted by the wife of Severus to write a history
of Appolonius of Tyana which should match the life
of Christ. And in precisely the same way it has
been variously claimed in our time that the story
of Christ’s birth, childhood, and ministry were
borrowed from Buddha and from Krishna, and that the
whole conception of his vicarious suffering for the
good of men is a clever imitation of Prometheus Bound.
Now, in the earlier conflict it was important to know
the facts on both sides in order to meet these allegations
of Porphyry, Marinus, and others, and it is equally
important to understand the precise ground on which
similar charges are made with equal assurance now.
The very same old battles are to be fought over again,
both with philosophy and with legend.
And it is very evident that, with
so many points of similarity between the early struggle
of Christianity with heathenism and that of our own
time, it is quite worth our labor to inquire what were
the general methods then pursued. Then victory
crowned the efforts of the Church. That which
humanly speaking seemed impossible, was actually accomplished.
From our finite standpoint, no more preposterous command
was ever given than that which Christ gave to his little
company of disciples gathered in the mountains of
Galilee, or that last word before his ascension on
Mt. Olivet, in which He placed under their responsible
stewardship, not only Jerusalem, but all Judea and
Samaria, and the “uttermost parts of the earth.”
The disciples were without learning or social influence,
or political power. They had no wealth and few
facilities, and so far as they knew there were no open
doors. They were hated by their Jewish countrymen,
ridiculed by the ubiquitous and cultured Greeks, and
frowned upon by the conquering powers of Rome.
How then did they succeed? How was it that in
three or four centuries they had virtually emptied
the Roman Pantheon of its heathen deities, and had
gained the sceptre of the empire and the world?
It is easy to misapprehend the forces
which won the victory. The disciples first chosen
to found the Church were fishermen, but that affords
no warrant for the belief that only untutored men were
employed in the early Church, or for the inference
that the Salvation Army are to gain the conquest now.
They were inspired; these are not; and a few only
were chosen, with the very aim of setting at naught
the intolerant wisdom of the Pharisees. But when
the Gospel was to be borne to heathen races, to the
great nations whose arrogance was proportionate to
their learning and their power, a very different man
was selected. Saul of Tarsus had almost every
needed qualification seen from a human point of view.
Standing, as he must, between the stiff bigotry of
Judaism and the subtleties of Greek philosophy, he
was fortunately familiar with both. He was a
man of rare courtesy, and yet of matchless courage.
Whether addressing a Jewish governor or the assembled
philosophers and counsellors of Athens, he evinced
an unfailing tact. He knew how to conciliate
even a common mob of heathen idolators and when to
defy a high priest, or plead the immunities of his
Roman citizenship before a Roman proconsul.
In tracing the methods of the early
Church in dealing with heathenism, we begin, therefore,
with Paul; for although he was differentiated from
all modern parallels by the fact that he was inspired
and endowed with miraculous power, yet that does not
invalidate the force of those general principles of
action which he illustrated. He was the first
and greatest of all missionaries, and through all
time it will be safe and profitable to study his characteristics
and his methods. He showed the value of thorough
training in his own faith, and of a full understanding
of all the errors he was to contend with. He could
reason with Jews out of their own Scriptures, or substantiate
his position with Greeks by citing their own poets.
He was certainly uncompromising in maintaining the
sovereignty of the one God, Jéhovah, but he was not
afraid to admit that in their blind way the heathen
were also groping after the same supreme Father of
all. The unknown God at Athens he accepted as
an adumbration of Him whom he proclaimed, and every
candid reader must admit that in quoting the words
of Aratus, which represent Zeus as the supreme
creator whose offspring we are, he conveys the impression
of a real resemblance, if not a partial and obscured
identity.
The essential principle here is that
Paul frankly acknowledged whatever glimpses of truth
he found in heathen systems, and made free use of them
in presenting the fuller and clearer knowledge revealed
in the Gospel. No man ever presented a more terrible
arraignment of heathenism than that which he makes
in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans,
and yet, with marvellous discrimination he proceeds,
in the second chapter, to show how much of truth God
has imparted to the understandings and the consciences
of all men. And he seems to imply the Holy Spirit’s
regenerative work through Christ’s atonement,
when he maintains that whoever shall, “by patient
continuance in well doing, seek glory and immortality,”
to him shall “eternal life” be given; but
“tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man
that doeth evil, to the Jew first, and also to the
Gentile.” Peter was not prepared to be a
missionary till he had been divested of his Jewish
narrowness by witnessing the power of grace in the
Roman centurion at Cesarea. That widened out
his horizon immensely. He saw that God in his
ultimate plan was no respecter of persons or of races.
There has been great difference of
opinion as to whether the annual worship of the supreme
God of Heaven in the great imperial temple at Peking
is in any degree a relic of the worship of the true
God once revealed to mankind. Such Chinese scholars
as Martin and Legge and Douglass think that it is;
others deny it. Some men raise a question whether
the Allah of the Mohammedan faith is identical with
the Jéhovah of the Old Testament. Sales, the
profoundest expositor of Islam, considers him the
same. Moslems themselves have no doubt of it:
the intent of the Koran is that and nothing else;
Old Testament teachings are interwoven with almost
every sura of its pages. I think that Paul would
have conceded this point at once, and would the more
successfully have urged the claims of Jesus, whom
the Koran presents as the only sinless prophet.
Of course Mohammedans do not recognize the Triune God
as we now apprehend Him, from the New Testament standpoint;
neither did ancient believers of Israel fully conceive
of God as He has since been more fully revealed in
the person and the sacrifice of his Son Jesus
Christ.
Both the teachings and the example
of Paul seem to recognize the fact that conceptions
of God, sometimes clear and sometimes dim, may exist
among heathen nations; and many of the great Christian
fathers evidently took the same view. They admitted
that Plato’s noble teachings were calculated
to draw the soul toward God, though they revealed no
real access to Him such as is found in Christ.
Archbishop Trench, in his Hulsean lectures on “Christ
the Desire of the Nations,” dwells approvingly
upon Augustine’s well-known statement, that he
had been turned from vice to an inspiring conception
of God by reading the “Hortensius”
of Cicero. Augustine’s own reference to
the fact is found in the fourth book of his “Confessions,”
where he says: “In the ordinary course
of study I fell upon a certain book of Cicero whose
speech almost all admire not so his heart.
This book contains an exhortation to philosophy, and
is called ‘Hortensius.’ But this
book altered my affections and turned my prayers to
Thyself, O Lord, and made me have other purposes and
desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless
to me, and I longed with an incredible burning desire
for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise
that I might return to Thee. For not to sharpen
my tongue did I employ that book: nor did it infuse
into me its style, but its matter.”
The “Hortensius”
of Cicero has not survived till our time, and we know
not what it contained; but we cannot fail to notice
this testimony of a mature and eminent saint to the
spiritual benefit which he had received at the age
of thirty-one, from reading the works of a heathen
philosopher. And a most interesting proof is here
furnished for the freedom with which the Spirit of
God works upon the hearts of men, and the great variety
of means and agencies which He employs, and
that beyond the pale of the Christian Church, and
even beyond the actual knowledge of the historic Christ.
It would be interesting to know whether the regeneration
of Augustine occurred just then, when he says in such
strong language, that this book altered his affections
and turned his prayers unto God, and made him “long
with an indescribable burning desire for an immortality
of wisdom.” All men are saved, if at all,
by the blood of Christ through the renewing of the
Holy Ghost; but what was the position of such men
as Augustine and Cornelius of Cesarea before they
fully and clearly saw Jesus as the actual Messiah,
and as the personal representative of that Grace of
God in which they had already reposed a general faith,
is at least an interesting question.
Not less positive is the acknowledgment
which Augustine makes of the benefits which he had
received from Plato. And he mentions many others,
as Virgininus, Lactantius, Hilary, and Cyprian,
who, like himself, having once been heathen and students
of heathen philosophy, had, as he expresses it, “spoiled
the Egyptians, bringing away with them rich treasures
from the land of bondage, that they might adorn therewith
the true tabernacle of the Christian faith.”
Augustine seems to have been fond of repeating both
this argument and this his favorite illustration.
In his “Doctrine of Christ” he expands
it more fully than in his “Confessions.”
He says: “Whatever those called philosophers,
and especially the Platonists, may have said conformable
to our faith, is not only not to be dreaded, but is
to be claimed from them as unlawful possessors, to
our use. For, as the Egyptians not only had idols
and heavy burdens which the people of Israel were
to abhor and avoid, but also vessels and ornaments
of gold and silver and apparel which that people at
its departure from Egypt privily assumed for a better
use, not on its own authority but at the command of
God, the very Egyptians unwittingly furnishing the
things which themselves used not well; so all the
teaching of the Gentiles not only hath feigned and
superstitious devices, and heavy burdens of a useless
toil, which we severally, as under the leading of
Christ we go forth out of the fellowship of the Gentiles,
ought to abhor and avoid, but it also containeth liberal
arts, fitter for the service of truth, and some most
useful moral precepts; as also there are found among
them some truths concerning the worship of the One
God Himself, as it were their gold and silver which
they did not themselves form, but drew from certain
veins of Divine Providence running throughout, and
which they perversely and wrongfully abuse to the
service of demons. These, the Christian, when
he severs himself from their wretched fellowship,
ought to take from them for the right use of preaching
of the Gospel. For what else have many excellent
members of our faith done? See we not how richly
laden with gold and silver and apparel that most persuasive
teacher and most blessed martyr, Cyprian, departed
out of Egypt? Or Lactantius, or Victorinus,
Optatus, Hilary, not to speak of the living,
and Greeks innumerable? And this, Moses himself,
that most faithful servant of God, first did, of whom
it is written, that ‘he was learned in all the
wisdom of the Egyptians.’”
Let us for a moment pause and see
of what these treasures of Egypt consisted, and especially
what Plato taught concerning God. Like Socrates,
he ridiculed the absurd but popular notion that the
gods could be full of human imperfections, could make
war upon each other, could engage in intrigues, and
be guilty of base passions. And he earnestly
maintained that it was demoralizing to children and
youth to hold up such beings as objects of worship.
Such was his condemnation of what he considered false
gods. He was equally opposed to the idea that
there is no God. “All things,” he
says, “are from God, and not from some spontaneous
and unintelligent cause.” “Now, that
which is created,” he adds, “must of necessity
be created by some cause but how can we
find out the Father and maker of all this universe?
If the world indeed be fair, and the artificer good,
then He must have looked to that which is external for
the world is the fairest of creatures, as He is the
best of causes.”
Plato’s representation of the
mercy of God, of his providential care, of his unmixed
goodness, of his eternal beauty and holiness are
well-nigh up to the New Testament standard. So
is also his doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
The fatal deficiency is that he does not know.
He has received no divine revelation. “We
will wait,” he said in another passage, “for
one, be it a god or a god-inspired man, to teach us
our religious duties, and as Athene in Homer says
to Diomede, to take away the darkness from our eyes.”
And in still another place he adds: “We
must lay hold of the best human opinion in order that,
borne by it as on a raft, we may sail over the dangerous
sea of life, unless we can find a stronger boat, or
some word of God which will more surely and safely
carry us."
There is a deep pathos in the question
which I have just quoted, “How can we find out
the Father and maker of all this universe?” And
in the last sentence quoted, Plato seems to have felt
his way to the very threshold of the revelation of
Christ.
Augustine shows a discrimination on
this subject too important to be overlooked, when
he declares that while the noble philosophy of the
Platonists turned his thoughts away from his low gratifications
to the contemplation of an infinite God, it left him
helpless. He was profited both by what philosophy
taught him and by what it could not teach: it
created wants which it could not satisfy. In short,
he was prepared by its very deficiencies to see in
stronger contrast the all-satisfying fulness of the
Gospel of Eternal Life. Plato could tell him nothing
of any real plan of redemption, and he confesses with
tender pathos that he found no Revealer, no divine
sacrifice for sin, no uplifted Cross, no gift of the
transforming Spirit, no invitation to the weary, no
light of the Resurrection. Now, just here is the
exact truth; and Augustine has conferred a lasting
benefit upon the Christian Church by this grand lesson
of just discrimination. He and other Christian
fathers knew where to draw the lines carefully and
wisely with respect to heathen errors.
We often have occasion to complain
of the sharpness of the controversies of the early
Church, but it could scarcely be otherwise in an age
like that. It was a period of transitions and
of rude convulsions. The foundations of the great
deep of human error were being broken up. It
was no time for flabby, jelly-fish convictions.
The training which the great leaders had received
in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen dialectics.
They had something of Paul’s abhorrence of heathen
abominations, for they saw them on every hand.
They saw also the specious admixtures of Gnosticism,
and they met them squarely. Tertullian’s
controversy with Marcion, Augustine’s sharp issue
with Pelasgius, Ambrose’s bold and uncompromising
resistance to Arianism, Origen’s able reply
to Celsus, all show that the great leaders of
the Church were not men of weak opinions. The
discriminating concessions which they made, therefore,
were not born of an easy-going indifferentism and
the soft and nerveless charity that regards all religions
alike. They found a medium between this pretentious
extreme and the opposite evil of ignorant and narrow
prejudgment; and nothing is more needed in the missionary
work of our day than that intelligent and well-poised
wisdom which considers all the facts and then draws
just distinctions; which will not compensate for conscious
ignorance with cheap misrepresentation or wholesale
denunciation.
1. Now, first of all, in considering
the methods of the early Church and its secret of
power in overcoming the errors of heathenism, it must
be borne in mind that the victory was mainly due to
the moral earnestness which characterized that
period. In this category we must place the influence
which sprang from the martyrdom of thousands who surrendered
life rather than relinquish their faith. That
this martyr spirit did not always produce a true symmetry
of Christian character cannot be denied. The
tide of fanaticism swept in, sometimes, with the current
of true religious zeal, and inconsistencies and blemishes
marred even the saintliest self-sacrifice; but there
was no resisting the mighty logic of the spirit of
martyrdom as a whole. The high and the low, the
wise and the unlettered, the rich and the poor, the
old and the young, strong men and delicate women,
surrendered themselves to the most cruel tortures
for the love of Christ. This spectacle, while
it may have served only to enrage a Nero and urge
him on to even more Satanic cruelty, could not be
wholly lost upon the more thoughtful Marcus Aurelius
and others like him. It was impossible to resist
the moral force of so calm and resolute a surrender
unto torture and death. Moreover, an age which
produced such relinquishment of earthly possessions
as was shown by men like Anthony and Ambrose, who were
ready to lay down the emoluments of high political
position and distribute their large fortunes for the
relief of the poor; and such women as Paula and others
of high position, who were ready to sacrifice all for
Christ and retire into seclusion and voluntary poverty an
age which could produce such characters and could
show their steady perseverance unto the end, could
not fail to be an age of resistless moral power; and
it would be safe to say that no heathen system could
long stand against the sustained and persistent force
of such influences. Were the Christian Church
of to-day moved by even a tithe of that high self-renunciation,
to say nothing of braving the fires of martyrdom, if
it possessed in even partial degree the same sacrifice
of luxury and ease, and the same consecration of effort
and of influence, the conquest of benighted nations
would be easy and rapid.
The frugality of the early Christians,
the simplicity of life which the great body of the
Church observed, and to which even wealthy converts
more or less conformed, was also, doubtless, a strong
factor in the great problem of winning the heathen
to Christ. Probably in no age could Christian
simplicity find stronger contrasts than were presented
by the luxury and extravagance, the unbridled indulgence
and profligacy, which characterized the later periods
of the Roman Empire. Universal conquest of surrounding
nations had brought untold wealth. The Government
had hastened the process of decay by lavish distribution
to the people of those resources which obviated the
necessity of unremitting toil. It had devoted
large expenditures to popular amusements, and demagogues
had squandered the public funds for the purpose of
securing their own preferment. Over against the
moral earnestness of the persecuted Christian Church,
there was in the nation itself and the heathenism
which belonged to it, an utter want of character or
conviction. These conditions of the conquest,
as I have already indicated, do not find an exact
counterpart with us now. There is more of refined
Christian culture than existed in the early Church;
probably there is also more of organized Christian
effort. In many points the comparison is in our
favor, but earnestness, and the spiritual power which
attends it, are on a lower grade. There is no
escape from the conviction that just here lies the
reason why the Christian Church, with all her numbers,
her vast material resources, and her unlimited opportunities,
cannot achieve a greater success.
2. But, on the intellectual side,
and as relating to the methods of direct effort, there
are many points in which imitation of the early example
is entirely practicable. And first, the wise discrimination
which was exercised by Augustine and other Christian
leaders is entirely practicable now. There has
prevailed in our time an indiscriminate carelessness
in the use of terms in dealing with this subject.
The strong language which the Old Testament employed
against the abominations of Baalism, we have seemed
to regard as having equal force against the ethics
of Confucius or Gautama. “Heathenism”
is the one brand which we have put upon all the non-Christian
religions. I wish it were possible to exchange
the term for a better. Baalism was undoubtedly
the most besotted, cruel, and diabolical religion that
has ever existed on the earth. When we carefully
study it we are not surprised at the strong language
of denunciation which the Old Testament employs.
But as I have already shown, we find in the New Testament
a different spirit exercised toward the types of error
which our Saviour and his disciples were called to
meet. There is only gentleness in our Lord’s
dealings with those who were without the Jewish Church.
His strongest denunciations were reserved for hypocrites
who knew the truth and obeyed it not. He declared
that the men of Nineveh would rise up in judgment
against those who rejected the clear message of God’s
own Son. The man who goes forth to the great
mission fields with the feeling that it is his province
to assail as strongly as possible the deeply-rooted
convictions of men, instead of winning them to a more
excellent way, is worse than one who beats the air;
he is doing positive harm; he is trifling with precious
souls. He does not illustrate the spirit of Christ.
The wisest of the early Fathers sometimes
differed widely from each other in their methods;
some were denunciatory, others were even too ready
to excuse. The great African controversialist,
Tertullian, was unsparing in his anathemas, not only
against heathen customs, which were vile indeed, but
against the teachings of the noblest philosophy.
He had witnessed the former; he had not candidly studied
the latter. With a blind zeal, which has too
often been witnessed in the history of good causes,
he denounced Plato, Aristotle, and even Socrates with
a violence which marred the character of so great
a man. On the other hand, Justin Martyr and Clement
of Alexandria were perhaps excessively broad.
Of two noted Alexandrines, Archdeacon Farrar says:
“They were philosophers in spirit; they could
enforce respect by their learning and their large,
rounded sympathy, where rhetorical denunciation and
ecclesiastical anathemas would only have been listened
to with a frown of anger, or a look of disdain.
Pagan youths would have listened to Clement when he
spoke of Plato as ‘the truly noble and half-inspired,’
while they would have looked on Tertullian as an ignorant
railer, who could say nothing better of Socrates than
to call him the ‘Attic buffoon,’ and of
Aristotle than to characterize him as the ‘miserable
Aristotle.’”
Tatian and Hermes also looked upon
Greek philosophy as an invention of the devil.
Irenaeus was more discriminating. He opposed the
broad and lax charity of the Alexandrines, but he
read the Greek philosophy, and when called to the
bishopric of Lyons, he set himself to the study of
the Gallic Druidism, believing that a special adaptation
would be called for in that remote mission field.
Basil was an earnest advocate of the Greek philosophy
as giving a broader character to Christian education.
There were among the Fathers many
different types of men, some philosophically inclined,
others better able to use practical arguments.
Some were more successful in appealing to the signs
of the times, the clear evidences of that corruption
and decay to which heathenism had led. They pointed
to the degradation of women, the prevalence of vice,
the inordinate indulgence in pleasures, the love of
excitement, the cruel frenzy of the gladiatorial shows,
the unrest and pessimism and despair of all society.
One of the most remarkable appeals of this kind is
found in a letter of Cyprian to his friend Donatus.
“He bids him seat himself in fancy on some mountain
top and gaze down upon what he has abandoned (for
he is a Christian), on the roads blocked by brigands,
the sea beset by pirates, the camps desolated by the
horrors of many wars, on the world reeking with bloodshed,
and the guilt which, in proportion to its magnitude,
was extolled as a glory. Then, if he would turn
his gaze to the cities, he would behold a sight more
gloomy than all solitudes. In the gladiatorial
games men were fattened for mutual slaughter, and
publicly murdered to delight the mob. Even innocent
men were urged to fight in public with wild beasts,
while their mothers and sisters paid large sums to
witness the spectacle. In the theatres parricide
and infanticide were dealt with before mixed audiences,
and all pollution and crimes were made to claim reverence
because presented under the guise of religious mythology.
In the homes was equal corruption; in the forum bribery
and intrigue ran rife; justice was subverted, and
innocence was condemned to prison, torture, and death.
Luxury destroyed character, and wealth became an idol
and a curse." Arguments of this kind were ready
enough to hand whenever Christian teachers were disposed
to use them, and their descriptions found a real corroboration
in society as it actually appeared on every hand.
None could question the counts in the indictment.
3. While the Christian Fathers
and the missionaries differed in their estimates of
heathenism, and in their methods of dealing with it,
one thing was recognized by all whom we designate
as the great leaders, namely, the imperative necessity
of a thorough knowledge of it. They understood
both the low superstition of the masses and the loftier
teaching of the philosophers. On the other hand,
they had the same estimate of the incomparable Gospel
of Christ that we have; they realized that it was
the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation
as clearly as the best of us, but they did not claim
that it was to be preached blindly and without adaptation.
The verities of the New Testament teachings, the transforming
power of the Holy Ghost, the necessity for a new birth
and for the preternatural influence of grace, both
in regeneration and in sanctification, were as strongly
maintained as they have ever been in any age of the
Church; but the Fathers were careful to know whether
they were casting the good seed upon stony places,
or into good ground where it would spring up and bear
fruit. The liberal education of that day was,
in fact, an education along the old lines of heathen
philosophy, poetry, history, and rhetoric; and a broad
training was valued as highly as it has been in any
subsequent period. It was thoroughly understood
that disciplined intellect, other things being equal,
may expect a degree of influence which can never fall
to the lot of ignorance, however sanctified its spirit.
There has never been a stronger type of men than the
Christian Fathers. They were learned men, for
the age in which they lived, and their learning had
special adaptations to the work assigned them.
Many of them, like Cyprian, Clement, Hilary, Martin
of Tours, had been born and educated in heathenism;
while others, like Basil, Gregory, Origen, Athanasius,
Jerome, and Augustine, though born under Gospel influences,
studied heathen philosophy and poetry at the instance
of their Christian parents.
4. Some of the leaders familiarized
themselves with the speculations of the day, not merely
for the sake of a wider range of knowledge, but that
they might the more successfully refute the assailants
of the faith, many of whom were men of great power.
They were fully aware that it behooved them to know
their ground, for their opponents studied the points
of comparison carefully. The infidel Celsus
studied Christianity and its relation to the Old Testament
histories and prophecies, and he armed himself with
equal assiduity with all the choicest weapons drawn
from Greek philosophy. How was such a man to be
met? His able attack on Christianity remained
fifty years unanswered. To reply adequately was
not an easy task. Doubtless there were many, then
as now, who thought that the most comfortable way
of dealing with such things was to let them alone.
But a wiser policy prevailed. Origen was requested
to prepare an answer, and, although such work was
not congenial to him, he did so because he felt that
the cause of the truth demanded it. His reply
outlived the attack which it was designed to meet,
and in all subsequent ages it has been a bulwark of
defence.
Origen was not of a pugnacious spirit it
was well that he was not but with wide
and thorough preparation he summoned all his energies
to meet the foe. Archdeacon Farrar says of him,
that he had been trained in the whole circle of science.
He could argue with the pupils of Plato, or those
of Zeno, on equal terms, and he deems it fortunate
that one who was called, as he was, to be a teacher
at Alexandria, where men of all nations and all creeds
met, had a cosmopolitan training and a cosmopolitan
spirit.
No less resolute was the effort of
Ambrose in resisting the errors of Arianism, and he
also adapted himself to the work in hand. He had
not been afraid of Platonism. On the other hand,
we are told that Plato, next to his Bible, constituted
a part of his daily reading, and that, too, in the
period of his ripest Christian experience, and when
he carried his studies and his prayers far into the
hours of the night. But in dealing with Arianism
he needed a special understanding of all its intricacies,
and when among its advocates and supporters he encountered
a powerful empress as well as her ablest advocates,
he had need of all the powers within him that
power of moral earnestness which had led him to give
all his property to the poor that power
of strong faith, which prepared him, if need be, to
lay down his life the power of a disciplined
intellect, and a thorough knowledge of the whole issue.
5. The early Fathers not only
studied the heathen philosophies of Plato and Aristotle,
but they learned to employ them, and their successors
continued to employ them, even to the Middle Ages,
and the period of the Reformation. As an intellectual
framework, under which truth should be presented in
logical order, it became a strong resource of the early
Christian teachers. Let me refer you on this point
to the clear statements of Professor Shedd. He
has well said that “when Christianity was revealed
in its last and beautiful form by the incarnation
of the Eternal World, it found the human mind already
occupied by human philosophy. Educated men were
Platonists, or Stoics, or Epicureans. During
the age of Apologetics, which extended from the end
of the apostolic age to the death of Origen, the Church
was called to grapple with these systems, to know
as far as possible what they contained, and to discriminately
treat their contents, rejecting some things, utilizing
others.” “We shall see,” he
continues, “that Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero
exerted more influence than all other philosophic
minds united upon the greatest of Christian Fathers,
upon the greatest of the School men, and upon the
greatest of the theologians of the Reformation, Calvin
and Melancthon; and if we look at European philosophy,
as it has been unfolded in England, Germany, and France,
we can perceive that all the modern philosophic schools
have discussed the principles of human reason in very
much the same manner in which Plato and Aristotle
discussed them twenty-two centuries ago.”
I need hardly say, in closing, that
it is not necessary to borrow from the heathen systems
of to-day as extensively as the Fathers did from the
systems of Greece and Rome, and it would be discordant
with good taste to illustrate our sermons with quotations
from the Hindu poets as lavishly as good Jeremy Taylor
graced his discourses with gems from the poets of
Greece. But I think that we may so far heed the
wise examples furnished by Church history as to face
the false systems of our time with a candid and discriminating
spirit, and by a more adequate knowledge to disenchant
the bugbears with which their apologists would alarm
the Church.
We are entering upon the broadest
and most momentous struggle with heathen error that
the world has ever witnessed. Again, in this later
age, philosophy and multiform speculation are becoming
the handmaids of Hindu pantheism and Buddhist occultism,
as well as of Christian truth. The resources
of the East and the West are combined and subsidized
by the enemy as well as by the Church. As in
old Rome and Alexandria, so now in London and Calcutta
all currents of human thought flow together, and truth
is in full grapple with error. It is no time to
be idle or to take refuge in pious ignorance, much
less to fear heathen systems as so many haunted houses
which superstitious people dare not enter as
if the Gospel were not as potent a talisman now as
it was ages ago. Let us fearlessly enter these
abodes of darkness, throw open the shutters, and let
in the light of day, and the hobgoblins will flee.
Let us explore every dark recess, winnow out the miasma
and the mildew with the pure air of heaven, and the
Sun of Righteousness shall fill the world.