The Historians' History of the World 08

The dimness and obscurity which veiled the growing church, no doubt threw its modest concealment over the person of the bishop. He was but one man, with no recognised function, in the vast and tumultuous population. He had his unmarked dwelling, perhaps in the distant Transteverine region, or in the then lowly and unfrequented Vatican. By the vulgar, he was beheld as a Jew, or as belonging to one of those countless eastern religions, which, from the commencement of the empire, had been flowing, each with its strange rites and mysteries, into Rome. The emperor, the imperial family, the court favourites, the military commanders, the consulars, the senators, the patricians by birth, wealth, or favour, the pontiffs, the great lawyers, even those who ministered to the public pleasures, the distinguished mimes or gladiators, when they appeared in the streets, commanded more public attention than the Christian bishop, except when sought out for persecution by some politic or fanatic emperor. Slowly, and at long intervals, did the bishop of Rome emerge to dangerous eminence.

Christianity itself might seem, even from the first, to have disdained obscurity—to have sprung up or to have been forced into terrible notoriety in the Neronian persecution and the subsequent martyrdom of one at least, according to the vulgar tradition, of its two great apostles. What caprice of cruelty directed the attention of Nero to the Christians, and made him suppose them victims important enough to glut the popular indignation at the burning of Rome, it is impossible to determine. The cause and extent of the Domitian persecution is equally obscure. The son of Vespasian was not likely to be merciful to any connected with the fanatic Jews. Its known victims were of the imperial family, against whom some crime was necessary, and an accusation of Christianity served the end.

At the commencement of the second century, under Trajan, persecution against the Christians is raging in the East. That, however, was a local or rather Asiatic persecution, arising out of the vigilant and not groundless apprehension of the sullen and brooding preparation for insurrection among the whole Jewish race (with whom Roman terror and hatred still confounded the Christians), which broke out in the bloody massacres of Cyrene and Cyprus, and in the final rebellion during the reign of Hadrian, under Barchochebas (Bar Koziba). But while Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, is carried to Rome to suffer martyrdom, the Roman community is in peace, and not without influence. Ignatius entreats his Roman brethren not to interfere with injurious kindness between himself and his glorious death.

The wealth of the Roman community, and their lavish Christian use of their wealth, by contributing to the wants of foreign churches, at all periods, especially in times of danger and disaster (an ancient usage which lasted till the time of Eusebius), testifies at once to their flourishing condition, to their constant communication with more distant parts of the empire, and thus incidentally, perhaps, to the class, the middle or mercantile class, which formed the greater part of the believers.

But the history of Latin Christianity has not begun. For some considerable (it cannot but be an undefinable) part of the first three centuries, the church of Rome, and most, if not all the churches of the West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their language was Greek, their organisation Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures Greek; and many vestiges and traditions show that their ritual, their liturgy, was Greek. Through Greek the communication of the churches of Rome and of the West was constantly kept up with the East; and through Greek every heresiarch, or his disciples, having found his way to Rome, propagated with more or less success his peculiar doctrines. Pope Leo I (440-461) was the first celebrated Latin preacher, and his brief and emphatic sermons read like the first essays of a rude and untried eloquence, rather than the finished compositions which would imply a long study and cultivation of pulpit oratory. Compare them with Chrysostom.

[42-312 A.D.]

Africa, not Rome, gave birth to Latin Christianity. Tertullian was the first Latin writer, at least the first who commanded the public ear; and there is strong ground for supposing that, since Tertullian quotes the sacred writings perpetually and copiously, the earliest of those many Latin versions, noticed by Augustine, and on which Jerome grounded his Vulgate, were African. Cyprian kept up the tradition of ecclesiastical Latin. Arnobius, too, was an African.