INTRODUCTION.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CONDITION OF CHRISTENDOM.

Ar Rome, eighteen centuries ago this very year, Nero was married to a maiden called Octavia. He was the son of Ahenobarbus and Agrippina; the son of a father so abandoned and a mother so profligate that when congratulated by his friends on the birth of his first child, and that child a son, the father said, what is born of such a father as I, and such a mother as my wife, can only be for the ruin of the State. Octavia was yet worse born. She was the daughter of Claudius and Messalina. Claudius was the Emperor of Rome, stupid by nature, licentious and drunken by long habit, and infamous for cruelty in that age never surpassed for its oppressiveness, before or since. Messalina, his third wife, was a monster of wickedness, who had every vice that can disgrace the human kind, except avarice and hypocrisy her boundless prodigality saved her from avarice, and her matchless impudence kept her clean from hypocrisy. Too incontinent even of money to hoard it, she was so careless of the opinions of others that she made no secret of any vice. Her name is still the catchword for the most loathsome acts that can be conceived of. She was put to death for attempting to destroy her husband's life; he was drunk when he signed the warrant, and when he heard that his wife had been assassinated at his command he went to drinking again.

Agrippina, the mother of Nero, and the bitterest enemy of Messalina, took her place in a short time, and became the fourth wife of her uncle Claudius, who succeeded to the last and deceased husband of Agrippina only as he succeeded to the first Roman king-a whole commonwealth of predecessors intervening. Octavia, aged eleven, was already espoused to another, who took his life when his bride's father married the

mother of Nero, well knowing the fate that else awaited him. Claudius, repudiating his own son, adopted Nero as his child and imperial heir. In less than two years Agrippina poisoned her husband, and by a coup d'état put Nero on the throne, who, ere long, procured the murder of his own mother, Seneca the philosopher helping him in the plot, but also in due time to fall by the hand of the tyrant.

Eighteen centuries ago this very year, Nero, expecting to be emperor, married Octavia,―he sixteen years old, yet debauched already by premature licentiousness, she but eleven, espoused to another who had already fallen by his own hand, bringing calculated odium on the imperial family; a yet sadder fate awaited the miserable maid thus bartered away in infancy.

This marriage of the Emperor's adopted son with his only daughter was doubtless thought a great event. Everybody knew of it: among the millions that swarmed in Rome, probably there was not a female slave but knew the deed. Historians in their gravity paused to record it; poets, doubtless, with the customary flattery of that inconstant tribe, wrote odes on the occasion of this shameless marriage of a dissolute boy and an unfortunate girl.

as it

seems,

The same year, fifty-three after the birth of Christ, according to the most ancient chronological canon which has come down to us, there came to Rome an obscure man, Saul by name, which he had altered to Paul; a sail-maker, from the little city of Tarsus in Cilicia. Nobody took much notice of it. Nay, the time of his coming is quite uncertain and hard to ascertain; and it appears that the writer of this most ancient chronicle, though he lived sixteen or seventeen hundred years nearer the fact than we do, was mistaken, and that in the year fifty-three Paul went to Corinth for the first time and dwelt there; and eight years after, in the spring of the year, was brought a prisoner to Rome. These curiosities of chronology show how unimportant Paul's coming was thought at that time. The marriage of a dissolute boy, with an unfortunate girl, was set down as a great thing, while the coming of Paul was too slight a circumstance to deserve notice.

He came from a hated nation,-the Jews were thought the enemies of mankind,—he was a poor plebeian, a mechanic, and lived in an age when military power and riches had such

an influence as never before, or since. He was apparently an unlettered man, or had only the rough, narrow culture which a Hebrew scholar got at Tarsus and Jerusalem. He had little eloquence; "his bodily presence was weak, and his speech contemptible." He came to the most populous city in the world, the richest and the wickedest. Nero and Agrippina were types of wealthy and patrician Rome; for that reason it is that I began by telling their story, and, though aware of the true chronology, have connected this atrocious wedlock with the coming of the apostle.

Of

The city was full of soldiers; men from Parthia and Britain, who had fought terrible battles, bared their scars in the Forum and the Palace of the Cæsars. Learned men were there. Political Greece had died; but Grecian genius long outlived the shock which overturned the state. science Greece was full, and her learned men and men wellborn with genius fled to Rome. The noble minds from that classic land went there, full of thought, full of eloquence and song, running over with beauty. Rough, mountainous. streams of young talent from Spain and Africa flowed thither, finding their home in that great oceanic city. The Syrian Orontes had emptied itself into the Tiber. There were tem. ples of wondrous splendour and richness, priests celebrated for their culture and famed for their long descent. All these were hostile to the new form of religion taught by Paul.

But the popular theology was only mythology. It was separate from science, alienated from the life of the people. The temple did not represent philosophy, nor morality, nor piety. The priests of the popular religion had no belief in the truth of its doctrines, no faith in the efficacy of its forms. Religion was tradition with the priest; it was police with the magistrate. The Roman augurs did not dare look each other in the face on solemn days, lest they should laugh outright and betray to the people what was the open secret of the priest.

Everywhere, as a man turned his eye in Rome, there was riches, everywhere power, everywhere vice. Did I say everywhere? No; the shadow of riches is poverty, and there was such poverty as only St Giles's Parish in London can now equal. The shadow of power is slavery; and there was such slavery in Rome as American New Orleans and Charleston cannot boast. Did I say there was vice everywhere?

No: in the shadow of vice there always burns the still, calm flame of piety, justice, philanthropy; that is the light which goeth not out by day, which is never wholly quenched. But slavery and poverty and sin were at home in that city,-such slavery, such poverty, and such sin as savage lands know nothing of. If we put together the crime, the gluttony, the licentiousness of New Orleans, New York, Paris, London, Vienna, and add the military power of St Petersburg, we may have an approximate idea of the condition of ancient Rome in the year fifty-three after Christ. Let none deny the manly virtue, the womanly nobleness, which also found a home therein; still it was a city going to destruction, and the causes of its ruin were swiftly at work.

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Christianity came to Rome with Paul of Tarsus. The tidings thereof went before him. Nobody knows who brought them first. It was a new superstition," not much known as yet. It was the religion of a "blasphemer" who had got crucified between "two others, malefactors." Christianity was then "the latest form of infidelity." Paul himself came there a prisoner, but so obscure that nobody knows what year he came, how long he remained, or what his fate was. "He lived two years in his own hired house," that is the last historic word which comes down to us of the great apostle. Catholic traditions tell us of missions to various places, and then round it off with martyrdom. The martyrdom only is probable, the missions obviously fictitious. Probably he was in jail to the end of his days, when the headsmen ferried that great soul into heaven;-and very seldom was it, so it seems, that he took over so weighty a freight as Paul made for that bark.

The sail-maker brought the new religion. It was an idea, and action also; belief in men and life out of them. It had nothing to recommend it, only itself and himself. Paul offered no worldly riches, no honour, no respectability. A man who "joined the church" then, did not have his name trumpeted in the newspapers; did not get introduced to reputable society; did not find his honour and respectability everywhere enhanced by that fact.

Christianity had these things to offer, scorn, loathing, contempt, hatred from father and mother, from the husband of the wife's bosom,-for probably it was the wife who went first, it is commonly so,-and at last it offered a cruel death.

But it told of a to-morrow after to-day; of a law higher than the statutes of Nero; of one God, the Father of all men ; of a kingdom of Heaven, where all is sunlight and peace and beauty and triumph. Paul himself had got turned out of the whole Eastern world, and the founder of this scheme of religion had just been hanged as a blasphemer. Christianity was treason to the Hebrew State; to the Roman Church the latest form of infidelity.

Doubtless there were great errors connected with the Christian doctrine. One need only read the epistles of Paul to know that. But there were great truths. The oneness of God, the brotherhood of men, the soul's immortality, the need of a virtuous, blameless, brave life on earth,-these were the great truths of Christianity; and they were set off by a life as great as the truths, a life of brave work and manly selfdenial and self-sacrifice.

The early, nay, the earliest Christians had many an error. How does wheat grow? With manifold straw; and there are whole cart-loads of straw for a single sack of wheat corn. The straw is needful; not a grain of corn could grow without it; by and by, it litters the horses, and presently rots and fertilizes the ground whence it came. But the grain lives on; and is seed-corn for future generations, or bread-corn to feed the living.

Christianity as an idea was far in advance of Judaism and Hebraism. As a life it transcended everything which the highest man had dreamed of in days before. Men tried to put it down, crucified Jesus, stoned his disciples, put them in jail, scourged them, slew them with all manner of torture. But the more they blew the fire, the more swiftly it burned. Water the ground with valiant blood, the young blade of heroism springs up and blossoms red: the maiden blooms white out of the martyr blood which her mother had shed on the ground; and there is a great crop of hairy men full of valour. Christians smiled when they looked the rack in the face; laughed at martyrdom, and said to the tormentors, "Do you want necks for your block? Here are ours. Betwixt us and Heaven there is only a red sea, and any axe makes a bridge wide enough for a soul to go over. Exodus out of Egypt is entrance to the promised land. Fire is a good chariot for a Christian Elias."

In a few hundred years that sail-maker had swept Rome of VOL. XI.-Theism, &c.

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