T. W. Allies
The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

Preface

In the six chapters forming the first volume of this work I was engaged in describing the operation of Christianity, as it took the individual human soul for its unit, purified it, and wrought in it a supernatural life. I began with the consummation of the old world in its state of the highest civilisation united with the utmost moral degeneracy; I proceeded thence to the new creation of individual man; compared heathen with Christian man in the persons of Cicero and St. Augustine; drew out certain effects upon the world around of Christian life, as seen in those professing it, and viewed Christian marriage as restoring the primary relation between man and woman, and thus remaking the basis of human society, while the Virginal Life exhibited the crown and efflorescence of the most distinctive Christian grace in the soul.

I had thus, beginning with the stones of which the building is formed, reached the building itself; and the next thing was to consider the Christian Church in its historical development as the Kingdom of Truth and Grace: for while the soul of man is the unit with which it works, the word “Christendom” betokens a society founded in Christ, made by Christ, stamped with the image of Christ. It is the first great epoch of such a Kingdom of Truth and Grace, proceeding from the Person of its Founder, which I here attempt to delineate.

But not merely is the volume which I now publish a part only of a projected design; even as a part it is incomplete. It was my wish to finish this portion of my subject in one volume, which should reach to the great Nicene Council. But the treatment of the Greek Philosophy was too large for my limits, and so the last two chapters serve but as an introduction to the actual contact of that Philosophy with the Christian Church, which remains to be considered before I can complete my view of the Formation of Christendom in the ante-Nicene period.

Chapter VII. The Gods Of The Nations When Christ Appeared

“Emmanuel, Rex et Legifer noster, Expectatio gentium, et Salvator earum, veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster.”

Under the sceptre of the imperial unity were brought together a hundred different lands occupied by as many different races. That rule of Rome which had grown for many centuries with out, as it seemed, any presiding thought, by the casual accretions of conquest, may be said to assume under the hands of Augustus, about the year of Rome 750, certain definite and deliberately chosen limits, and to be governed by a fixed Idea, more and more developed in the imperial policy. The limits which the most fortunate of Roman emperors, nay the creator of the empire itself, put to it, were the Rhine and Danube, with the Euxine Sea, on the north; the deserts of Africa on the south; the Euphrates on the east; the ocean on the west. The Idea, which may indeed have been conceived by Julius, but was certainly first embodied by Augustus, was to change the constitution of a conquering city, ruled by an aristocratic senate, into a commonwealth governed by one man, the representative of the whole people; and the effect of this change, an effect no doubt unforeseen, at least in its extent, by its framer, was gradually to absorb the manifold races inhabiting these vast regions into the majesty of the Roman law, order, and citizenship. The three centuries which follow Augustus are occupied in working out the drama of this unity. During this time the provinces appear to come out more and more as parts of one whole. Some which at its commencement had only just entered the circle of Roman power and thought, as Gaul, become entirely interpenetrated with the law, language, customs, and civilisation of the sovereign city. Spain was nearly as much, and northern Africa perhaps even more Latinised: in all, local inequalities, and the dissimilarity arising from conflicting races, customs, and languages, are more and more softened down, though never entirely removed; and while throughout this period the great city continues the head, yet the body assumes an ever-increasing importance, until at length its members engage the equal solicitude of that central potentate to whom all equally belong. In the times of so-called Roman liberty, the plunder of lands which received pro-consuls for their annual rulers, served to replenish the fortunes of nobles exhausted by the corruption requisite to gain high office; but if the dominion of one at Rome seemed an evil exchange to a nobility which deemed itself born to enjoy a conquered world, at least it served as a protection to those many millions for whom the equality of law and order, the fair administration of justice, and the undisturbed possession of property, constituted the chief goods of life. Cicero and his peers might grieve over the extinction of what they termed liberty, but Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Asia exulted in deliverance from the oppression of a Verres, a Fonteius, a Gabinius, a Piso, or a Clodius, in the communication of citizenship, and in the peace of a common civilisation.

I. With a passing glance at the progress of this unity, which, great and magnificent as it is, is yet external, let us turn to an object filling the whole of this vast empire with its varied manifestations: for this object leads us to the consideration of another unity, wholly internal, without which that of government, law, and order must be apparent rather than real, or at best, however seemingly imposing, be deprived of the greater part of its efficacy.

1. It has been said that the empire contained in it many lands and many races, but these likewise worshipped their own distinct gods, which were acknowledged and sanctioned as national divinities for the several countries wherein they were locally established. Had Augustus ordered an enrolment not only of the numbers, the landed property, and the wealth of his subjects, but of their gods, his public register, or Breviarium, would have included at least ten distinct systems of idolatrous worship. First of all, there would be the proper gods of Rome, then those of the Hellenic race; and these, though the most similar to each other, yet refused a complete amalgamation. But besides these there were on the west the Etrurian, the Iberian, the Gallic, and the Germanic gods; on the east, the Carian and Phrygian, the Syrian, the Assyrian, the Arabian; on the south, the Phœnician, Libyan, and Egyptian. All these different races, inasmuch as they were subjects of the empire, enjoyed undisturbed the right of worshipping their ancestral gods,¹ who, so long as they did not overstep their local boundaries, were recognised; they possessed priests, rites, temples, estates, and self-government; they held the soil, and their worship was legal. It was a matter of Roman policy not to interfere with them. Nay, their several worshippers could carry their rites along with them in their various sojourns and settlements, and even in Rome build altars, and adore Egyptian, Asiatic, African, or Gallic gods. These various systems agreed all in one point, that they were systems of polytheistic idolatry: they all divided the attributes of the godhead, assigning them to more or fewer objects, and worshipping all these by visible symbols which the power worshipped was deemed to inhabit:² but they did not make the same division with a mere difference of name; on the contrary, they ran into and across each other with the most bewildering multiplicity, variation, and contradiction. Even in the same system, if we may give this name to any of the various mythologies, the several divinities were perpetually interfering with each other's province. When the Roman made vows for the removal of his ailments, in his uncertainty to which god the ailment belonged, or who was most proper to remove it, he addressed his vow to several together; or in public supplications, being often uncertain to whom exactly the prayer or offering should be made, he cautiously expressed himself, “whether it be a god or a goddess.” And the various Hellenic, Asiatic, or Egyptian cities often possessed local gods, whose worship was supreme there, while they exercised far less influence, or were even scarcely known elsewhere.³

Now merely as a specimen of what this worship was all over the Roman empire, let us take the brilliant Athens, Greece's eye, the world's university. First of all ruled in her the worship of Pallas-Athené: she was the lady of the land, who had won it for her own after a hard contest with Poseidon. Her chief sanctuaries were the temple of Athené, guardian of the city, with its old statue fallen down from heaven on the Acropolis. On the Acropolis likewise the Parthenon, built expressly for the gorgeous Panathenaic festival; and in the lower city the Palladium with the statue of the goddess supposed to have been brought from Troy. Yet the worship of the “high goddesses,” Demeter and Persephoné, was also richly endowed with shrines and festivals, and affected scarcely less the feelings of the Athenians. Then Jupiter, as “supreme,” was honoured with unbloody offering before the Erechtheium, dedicated to Athené: whilst as “Olympian” he had the colossal temple begun by Peisistratus and finished after many hundred years by Hadrian, and as “guardian of the city” distinct festivals. Yet more manifold was the invocation of Apollo, as the Pythian, the Delphic, the Lycian, as the ancestral god of the Ionians. The multiform Artemis had her temples and worshippers as the Tauric, by the name Brauronia; as the port-goddess, by the name Munychia; as the goddess of the hunt, by the name Agrotera, who had the credit of the victory won at Marathon; as presiding over birth, she was called Chitone, while Themistocles had built a temple to her as the Counsellor. Heré had only a doorless and roofless temple on the road to Phalerum; but the god of fire was worshipped in Athens abundantly. Hermes had his peculiar statues in every street, irreverence to which might be fatal even to an Alcibiades, the city's darling; while Aphrodité had a crowd of temples and shrines whose unchaste worship found but too many frequenters. Poseidon had to content himself with a single altar in his rival's city, and with games in its harbour; but Dionysos had three temples, with brilliant festivals; Mars was not without one; Hestia was throned in the Prytaneum; the Earth, Kronos, and Rhea had their temples and festivals, as also the Erinnyes, who were worshipped only in two other places in Greece. Here alone in Greece was a sanctuary and a rite to Prometheus; while the Asiatic mother of the gods had a splendid temple where the archives of the state were kept. Besides, there was the worship of the Hours and the Graces, of Eileithyia, goddess of victory and of birth, of Æsculapius and Themis, of the Kabirian Anakes, the Arcadian Pan, the Thracian Cotytto and Bendis, the Egyptian Serapis. Mercy and Shame, Fame and Endeavour had their altars; and the hero-worship numbered Theseus, Codrus, Academus, Solon, the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton; and Hercules, originally a hero, but here and elsewhere widely honoured as a god.⁴

Athens, if the most superstitious as well as the most intellectual of cities, may be taken as the type of a thousand others of Hellenic race scattered over the Roman empire from Marseilles to Antioch. Say that she had twice as many deities and festivals as her sister cities, enough will remain for them wherewith to occupy the soil with their temples and to fill the year's cycle with their rites.

The lively Grecian imagination impregnated not with stern notions of duty, nor with reverential devotion to those whom it worshipped, but regarding them as objects of æsthetical satisfaction,⁵ and yearning for a serene and confidential exchange of relations with them, had in process of time spun out a complete web of idolatrous worship which encompassed heaven and earth, the whole domain of nature, every state and act of human life. Rain and sunshine and the weather stood under the ordering of Zeus; the fruitfulness of the soil was Demeter's care; countless nymphs of field, of fountain, and of river, offered to men their gifts; the vine and its juice was under the protection of Dionysos, and Poseidon was lord of the sea. The flocks had their defenders in Hermes and Pan; the Fates ruled the lot of men. Kings and magistrates had in Zeus their prototype and guardian. Athené held her shield over cities; the hearth of each private home and the public hearth of the city were in Hestia's charge. Marriage was secure under Heré's care. Demeter was entrusted with legislation; the pains of childbirth were recommended to Eileithyia, or Artemis. Music, archery, divination, were Apollo's attributes; the art of healing claimed him and his son Æsculapius as patrons. Athené and Ares swayed the issue of war; the chase was the domain of Artemis; smiths and all workers in fire saw in Hephæstus their patron; whilst Athené the Worker protected the gentler trades, and Hecate watched over the roads.⁶

Yet Rome itself, whose own Capitoline Jupiter claimed a certain superiority over all these gods, would scarcely have yielded to any Grecian city, even were it Athens, in the number or variety of her deities, the frequency and solemnity of her festivals; while in the costliness of victims offered to her gods, and in the strictness of her ceremonies, she probably far surpassed that and all other cities. Her sterner worship of originally shapeless gods, presiding over the labours of a simple agricultural life, had long yielded to the seductions of her dangerous Grecian captive. The rude block Terminus, and Jupiter the Stone, ceased to satisfy those who had beheld the majesty of the father of gods and men embodied by the genius of a Phidias; and she had ended by going farther in breaking up the conception of one god, and in the personification of particular powers, operations, physical functions, and qualities, than any nation of antiquity.⁷ But though the beautiful forms of the Hellenic gods, as expressed by the skill of unrivalled sculptors, had carried her away, yet the nature of her worship was in strong contrast with that of Greece. Her religion had rested originally on two ideas, the might of the gods friendly to Rome, and the force of ceremonial over these gods;⁸ and still when she accepted the gods of conquered nations for her own, it was to secure the possession of their might, and to have them for friends instead of foes; while her own worship was a matter of routine and habit jealously guarded by unchanging ceremonies, and prosecuted not out of affection, but for the material security of daily life, which, according to the deeply-rooted feeling of the people, could not go on without it.

The individualised and humanised Latin and Hellenic gods, if they had much in common, still could not be thoroughly amalgamated; but Rome, as the mistress of Western Asia and Egypt, came upon Oriental religions of a very different stamp. Instead of this wide Pantheon of gods, each of whom had his occupation, these Asiatics generally regarded the deity in a sexual relationship, as one male and one female god, representing the active and passive forms of nature,⁹ and worshipped with a mixture of fear and voluptuousness. Such were Bel and Mylitta, Moloch and Astarte, and by whatever different names the same idea was presented. The worship of the great mother Cybele, so widely spread through Asia Minor, approached in many respects in character to that of this female goddess. But it is needless to go farther into the specific differences of these various idolatries; only bear in mind that they in their several countries occupied the domain of public and private life, as the worship of which I have given the details did at Athens. So it was before the influence of external conquerors reached them. After this a certain change ensues. The Roman empire was accomplishing in the west as well as in the east what the progress of Grecian rule and thought had commenced three hundred years before¹⁰ under Alexander and his successors, the bringing together and in some sort fusing the multiform and often contradictory worship of the nations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Not merely in Rome, but in all the chief cities of the Empire, the Asiatic, the Egyptian, the Libyan deities, and many others of subject nations under the Roman sway, were worshipped side by side. Accordingly, in the time of Augustus, and at the year of Rome 750, where we are taking our stand, there prevailed all over the hundred millions of men ruled by him a polytheistic idolatry bewildering by its multiplicity, internal contradictions, fluctuations, and mixtures, yet imposing by its universal extent and prevalence. The only exception seems to have been the Jewish worship of one God, whether in its chief seat, the small province of Judæa, or as it was seen in the lives of Jewish settlers scattered throughout the empire. It must be remarked that this Jewish worship of the true God was sanctioned as that of a national god belonging to the Jews, and sacrifice was perpetually offered for Augustus in the Temple at Jerusalem. But the Jews did not, as a rule, make efforts to convert the Gentiles to their religion, nor seek to exhibit it as antagonistic to the prevailing idolatry, and as claiming to subdue and cast it out. They were content to keep their own worship to themselves, and with the toleration which the Roman law thus allowed them. Yet even so in every place where they dwelt in any numbers some of the better heathens were found to be attracted to their worship by the intrinsic beauty of their belief in one God.

2. But such an exception as this hardly made a perceptible break in that continuous mass of evil and falsehood which then surrounded young and old, learned and ignorant, rich and poor, in its grasp. The sea stands in Holy Writ as the well-known image of the world's disobedience to the divine promptings, of its impetuosity and lawlessness. What image is there in nature so striking and awful as the long waves of the Atlantic bearing down in storm upon a helpless ship, and sweeping it upon an iron-bound coast! So broke that wild sea of human error over the individual mind of man. The observer looked round upon all the nations, and it was everywhere the same – a multiplicity of gods filling up the whole circle of human life, many-named, many-natured, but all without truth, purity, and justice; full of violent and sensual deeds, and still viler imaginations. What stay was there for the spirit of man against that universal flood? Its vastness was everywhere. Who was strong enough, who wise enough, to resist what all his fellows accepted? And the struggle of a single soul against it might seem like that of “some strong swimmer in his agony” alone at night amid the waste of waters.

3. For this polytheism was no dormant, otiose power withdrawn into the background and crouching apart from the actions and feelings of daily life. Its presence was indicated in every home by the little images of the Lares; homage was done to it at every table by libations; every house had its consecrated emblems; every street its statues of Hermes and serpents; in the forum there were feasts in honour of the gods; the shops, taverns, and manufactories had little altars on which wine and incense were offered to them; there were idolatrous emblems on the foreheads of the dead, on their funeral pyre, on their tombs. The places of amusement were specially dedicated to the gods; the theatres had representations in honour of them; the circus had their images, chairs, carriages, robes borne in procession; the amphitheatre was consecrated to them, and as being so Tertullian called it “the temple of all demons.” So much for private and social life. But not only so. All political acts were bound up with a crowd of religious formalities, and outward signs of divine concurrence; and were carried on with a ceremonial, every part of which was prescribed as having an exact inward meaning. Then there were continually recurring vows to the gods made for the great, made for private individuals, made for the emperor and his family. Three special ceremonies were used to obtain favours from them or to deprecate calamities, feasts, the solemnly bearing their images on cushions, processions with naked feet.¹¹ To this we must add the priestly colleges, pontifices, flamines, augurs, and magistrates, whether distinct or co-ordinated. Then, besides, consider the magical character of the prayers, and the strict use of formularies without mistake, omission, or addition, which were supposed to insure success apart from the intention of those offering them. Thus the whole life of the Romans was filled with invocations, propitiations, purifications, and even in any small matter a whole string of gods had prayer and service offered to them, and no one of their names might be omitted. Consider again the great frequency of the offerings, whether propitiative or consultatory; and, further, how particular beasts belonged to particular gods. The mere expense of victims was felt as a great burden. It was reckoned that on the accession of Caligula 160,000 animals, chiefly oxen and calves, were sacrificed in the Roman Empire in token of the general joy; and Augustus and Marcus Aurelius devoted such a multitude of beasts to their sacrifices that what had been said of the former was repeated as to the latter, how the white oxen had written to him, saying, “If you conquer, we are lost.” Indications of the will of the gods were to be taken on all occasions; nothing was to be done in public or private without consulting the auspices. Then there was the institution of the Haruspices, in its two branches of examining the entrails of the victims, and divining the meaning of all prodigies. One is still amazed at the ever-untiring solicitude which the senate showed to have all these things carefully watched – eclipses, rainbows of unusual colours, shooting stars, misbirths human or bestial; showers of earth, stones, chalk, or ashes; mice gnawing the golden vessels of a temple, bees swarming on a public place, but especially a shrine touched by lightning. Such things struck senate and people with consternation; special supplications were ordered to appease the causers of them.¹²

These are the external manifestations of polytheism which struck every eye, and affected the mind by their constant recurrence. But if we go beneath the surface and examine the root, we shall find an universal sense in the minds of all men in that day of unseen power over and above the material operations of nature. It was too strong as well as too general and invariable to be called an opinion, and it so acted on the nerves and feelings of men that I term it not so much a logical conviction as a sense of the close contact between man and nature, or rather an unseen power behind the veil of nature and working through it. Various as the forms of idolatry were – Egyptian, Asiatic, Libyan, Greek, or Roman; or, again, Iberian, Gallic, German, – all teemed with this sense. To the adherents of these religions, one and all, the world was very far from being a mere system of nature governed by general laws;¹³ it may rather be said that this was precisely what it was not. They looked upon nature in all its forms as an expression of the divine will, and therefore the unusual productions of nature became to them intimations respecting that will. And having lost the guidance of a fixed moral and religious teaching, they were ruled by an ever-watchful anxiety to gain acquaintance with that will. On this sense rested the universal belief that it was in man's power to hold intercourse by means of charms, spells, adjurations, with spirits of greater might and knowledge than his own – that is, magic or witchcraft. Hence the evocation of the spirits of the dead to reveal secrets of their prison-house, or necromancy. Hence the recurrence to oracles, running through all pagan history, of which there were many scattered through the Roman world, and which, after a temporary discredit, rose again into name in the time of Hadrian. Not less general was the belief that men and women might be possessed by spirits who ruled their words and actions according to an overmastering will. Then divination existed in endlessly various forms; and of its force we can gather a notion by Cicero's remark that it lay like an oppressive burden on the minds of men, so that even sleep, which should be the refuge from anxieties, became through the meaning attached to dreams the cause of a multitude of cares.¹⁴ To this must be added the use of sortileges, amulets, and talismans, in countless number and variety; and the belief that the actions and fortune of men were swayed by the course of the stars – that is, astrology. It was not the vulgar and ignorant merely whose minds were filled with these things. Scarcely a philosopher, scarcely a statesman, scarcely a ruler can be found whose mind, even if proof against a genuine devotion to a divine providence, was not open to one or more manifestations of the dark mysterious power pressing upon the confines of human life, and every now and then breaking through the veil of visible things with evidences of malignant might. A more determined and unscrupulous conqueror than Sylla, a more genuine philosopher than Marcus Aurelius, a more sagacious user of religion than Augustus, we shall not easily find; yet each of these, like their ordinary countrymen, had this sense of the supernatural and intangible above, beneath, and around them. Sylla, on the eve of any battle, would, in the sight of his soldiers, embrace a small statue of Apollo, which he had taken from Delphi, and entreat it to give an early fulfilment of its promises.¹⁵ Marcus Aurelius, in his war with the Marcomanni, collected priests from all quarters to Rome, and was so long occupied in offering rites to their various foreign gods that he kept his army waiting for him. And Augustus watched carefully the most trivial signs, and was distressed if in the morning his left shoe was given to him for his right. Even that Julius before whose genius all men quailed, and whose disbelief of a future state stands recorded at a notable point of Roman history, never mounted a chariot without uttering certain words for good luck and preservation against calamity.¹⁶ We shall therefore judge most inadequately of the force which the innumerable rites, temples, festivals, pomps, ceremonies, prayers, invocations, priesthoods, sodalities, initiations, and mysteries of polytheism exercised upon the minds of men, unless we take into full account that remarkable sense of contact and sympathy between the external world and man – of invisible power betraying itself through palpable agents, whether in reasoning or unreasoning productions, whether in the animal or vegetable world – which served as its basis. The line between religion and superstition in paganism no eye can trace; but at least the foundation of true worship plunged deep out of sight into the secret recesses of abject fear.

4. But what was the moral influence of this multiform, universal, all-embracing, and all-penetrating worship?

Varro, whom Cicero calls the most acute and learned of writers, and whose great work in forty-one books he praises as containing the names, classes, offices, and causes of all divine and human things, divided theology into the fabulous, the natural, and the civil. In the first, he said, are many fictions unworthy of the nature and dignity of immortal beings: such as that one god sprang from the head, another from the thigh, another from drops of blood; such, again, as that gods were thieves or adulterers, or became slaves to men. In fact, this fabulous theology attributed everything to them which might happen not merely to a man, but to the most contemptible of men.¹⁷ Let us leave what he calls natural theology, which is the discussion of philosophers concerning the physical nature of the gods, and proceed to the third, which he calls civil, and which is that which the citizens, and especially the priests of human communities, are bound to know and administer. This treats of what gods are to be worshipped, and with what rites and sacrifices. The first theology, he says, belongs to the theatre, the second to the universe, the third to the city. S. Augustine, commenting at length upon his division, proves that the first and the third, the fabulous and the civil, are, in fact, identical, since the universe is a divine work, but the theatre and the city works of men. The theatre is indeed made for the city, and the very same gods are ridiculed on the stage who are adored in the temple; the same have games exhibited in their honour and victims sacrificed to them. The images, features, ages, sexes, bearing of the gods in the one and in the other are the same. Thus this fabulous, theatrical, and scenic theology, full of everything vile and criminal, is actually a part of the civil, cohering with it as limb with limb in the same body.¹⁸

Conceive, then, every revolting detail of adultery, prostitution, incest, or of dishonesty, or of violence, which the perverted invention of modern writers has ever dressed up for the theatres of great cities in this and other countries. They will perhaps yield in turpitude to that which the theatres of the Roman empire exhibited. But what these theatres represented in mimic action was the exact image, as reflected in a mirror, of what was transacted at the solemn service of the gods in unnumbered temples.¹⁹ The exact image so far as it went, yet stopping short in some respects, for our eye-witness above cited declares that gratitude was due to the actors, inasmuch as they spared the eyes of men, and did not lay bare upon the theatre all that was hidden within the walls of temples. It was not enough, then, that all the many games and spectacles in which such things were represented were dedicated to the gods, acted under their especial sanction, even enjoined by them as means of gaining their favour or averting their wrath, which alone would have made them answerable for the immorality so portrayed; not enough, even, that actions of this quality were in the theatres ascribed to the gods who presided over them; but these acts of immorality were not the fictions of poets or the acting of players, but the very substance of the theology itself in which the worship of all these nations was embodied. Priapus appeared to make a laugh on the stage exactly in the costume in which he was worshipped in the temples, or in which he entered into the rites of marriage; a costume of indescribable turpitude, the shame of our human nature. The players on the stage and the statues in the temples equally exhibited Jove bearded and Mercury beardless, Saturn in decrepitude and Apollo in youthful beauty. In the rites of Juno, of Ceres, of Venus, of the mother of the gods, words were uttered and scenes acted such as no decent person would suffer to be spoken or acted before his own mother; or rather they contained, as a portion of themselves, the worst crimes which the theatres represented; nay, crimes which they stopped short of acting, and persons so infamous that they were not tolerated even on the stage, where yet to take part was a civil dishonour. What, then, was the nature of those rites wherein those were chosen to take part whom the utmost license of the stage banished from its boards?²⁰ Let us conceive – if such a conception can be adequately represented to the mind – that the vilest drama ever acted upon a modern theatre was being daily carried on in all the churches of Christendom by troops of priests and priestesses, with all the paraphernalia of costliest worship, with prayers, invocation, and sacrifices, as a service acceptable to the Ruler of man's lot, and as an account of what that ruler had Himself done, and of what He loved to be imitated by others. That would be a picture of heathen worship in the time of Augustus; that would be the moral food on which was nurtured that crowd of nations which acknowledged Cæsar's sway; that the conception of divine things wrought into the minds of the hundred millions of men who formed the Roman empire.

Was it surprising that all worshippers of the gods should look for their example rather in Jupiter's actions than in Plato's teaching or the moral judgments of Cato?²¹ A nature subject in itself to the sway of passion was stimulated by an authority supposed to be divine to the commission of every criminal excess; and herein lay a strong proof of the malignant and impure character of these gods.

On the other hand, the same eye-witness challenges the defenders of the pagan gods to produce a single instance wherein moral precepts of living were delivered to their worshippers upon divine authority. True, indeed, there were here and there whispers of secret rites in which a pure and chaste life was recommended, but where were the buildings dedicated to the public preaching of such truths? Places there were in abundance consecrated to the celebration of infamous games, rightly termed “Fugalia,” since they put modesty and decency to flight, but none where the people might listen to divine commands repressing avarice, ambition, or unchaste desire. Thus with the positive inculcation of all evil, under cover of their own example, was united the negative absence of all moral teaching.²²

For even the prayers which accompanied these sacrifices and this ceremonial, and this lavish exhibition of every human wickedness under divine names, were not addressed for moral goods, but for wealth, bodily strength, temporal prosperity. Horace but expresses the general mind when he says:

“Sed satis est orare Jovem quæ donat et anfert;

Det vitam, det opes, æquum mi animum ipse parabo.”

(Epist. i. 18, 111.)

They were moreover viewed as carrying with them a sort of physical force, not as prevailing through purity of intention in those who offered them. In fact, the gods to whom they were addressed were powers of nature, or malignant and impure powers, but in neither case beings who looked for a moral service from rational creatures.

One other turpitude the Asiatic idolatry added to the Greek and Roman forms. By consecrating the sexual relations themselves in one male and one female god, they effected this crowning connection of idolatry with immorality that unchaste acts became themselves acts of sacrifice, and so of worship.²³ This is the strange perversion borne witness to by Herodotus, and corroborated by the prophet Jeremiah. A great seat of this worship was the city of Hierapolis, in Syria, where was one of the most magnificent temples of the ancient world, dedicated to Derketo, and rich with the offerings of Arabians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Cilicians, Cappadocians, and all nations of the Semitic tongue. Nor was this worship confined to the East, for hence, as from a centre, the adherents of the Syrian goddess spread themselves in begging troops over the provinces of the empire. And the worship of Venus at Eryx, and other places in the West, with the thousands of female priestesses dedicated to it, reproduced the same abomination.

As the great result of all that we have said, we find the notion of sanctifying the human will absent from the religious rites of the polytheistic idolatry in all its forms. To this corresponded the absence of the notion of holiness in the gods. And this leads us finally to the remarkable character which defines it as a whole. This worship was throughout a corruption,²⁴ the spoiling, that is, of something good; a turning away from the better to the worse. The worship itself had been originally good. The corruption lay in the alteration of the quality and the object of the worship. Worship had been implanted in man, and prescribed to him. It was at once the need of his nature and the command of Him who gave that nature. It had for it, first, positive institution, and then tradition and custom, and throughout, the conscience, the reason, and the heart of man. The reason of man ever bore powerful witness to the unity of the Godhead; the breaking up of that unity, as exhibited by this idolatrous polytheism, in contradiction to the original prompting and continued witness of the reason, is a very strong proof of that moral corruption in the will which first generated it, which continued its existence, and which, while multiplying, degraded its forms from age to age. But man was free to decline from the good in which he had been placed. The corruption which was left in his power he exerted; he changed the quality of the service, and the person served. The productive cause of idolatry on the part of man was the soul of man turning away from the notion of a good and holy Creator, the contemplation of whom was its present support and future reward, to visible things. Of these things the chief were bodily pleasures. Thus this corruption of the soul, in process of time, and continually becoming worse, produced this whole pantheon of gods, originally the creation of its own lusts, and subsisting as a perpetual food and support of those lusts. For this cause it had broken up the one perfect idea of God the Creator and Ruler of all persons and things into a multitude of gods, whose functions became more and more divided, until the ether, the air, the earth, and the water swarmed with these supposed beings, which took possession even of wood and stone, dwelling in the statues erected to them; and every desire which the soul in its corruption could entertain had its corresponding patron, helper, and exemplar. In this descending course cause and effect were perpetually reacting on each other, and as the corruption of the human soul had generated these gods, so their multiplication and degradation intensified its corruption from age to age.²⁵

5. But this was not all. If corrupt affection in man himself, if the charm of representing the unseen objects of worship in visible characters of wood or stone, if, finally, the ignorance of the true God, together with the beauty of the creature substituted for Him,²⁶ were the disposing causes within man to idolatry, there was a cause outside of him which must not be forgotten. When we look upon this idolatry, occupying not one country or race, but all; not merely bewildering savage or uncivilised man, but throned in the chief seats of the world's choicest civilisation; when we look upon its endlessly divergent forms, its palpable contradictions, its cherished or commanded immoralities, its crowd of debasing, irrational, heterogeneous superstitions, its cruelty, sensuality, and fearfulness, all these being no less an insult to man's reason than a derogation from God's majesty, who is there that does not feel this to be the strangest and most astonishing sight which history presents to man? And yet there is a unity which runs through it all, and stamps it with a double mark. Not only is it a service due from man to God, which is paid by him to the creature rather than to the Creator,²⁷ but more especially it is that service paid by man to God's enemies, the fallen angels. These it is who have assumed the mask of dead men; these it is who within the sculptured forms of Jupiter, Juno, Mars, and Venus, of Baal and Derketo and Mylitta, of Anubis and Serapis, of Thor and Woden, and so many more, receive man's adoration, and rejoice above all things in possessing his heart. These it is who have seduced him by exhibitions of visible beauty, have lain in wait for him by fountain, forest, and field, and filled the groves and high places with the charms which best pleased him under the name of worship; or have promised to disclose future things to him; or, again, have harrowed his soul with phantasms and terrors of the unseen world. These incoherent systems; these deities, whose functions ran into and athwart each other; these investing of human passions, and even unnatural and monstrous vices, with immortality and terrible power; these rivals ever quarrelling with each other, and jealous for the possession of man's homage, all serve the purpose of those behind the scenes, are puppets under their command, and have a common end and result in the captivity of their victim. More even than this; while they seem disunited and contradictory, they are really one, marshalled by the power, directed by the mind, held in the hand of him who is called “the ruler of this world,” “the power of darkness,” “the might of the enemy,” who “holds the power of death,” “the ancient serpent, who leads into error the whole world,” “that malignant one in whom the whole world is lying,” “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the children of disobedience,” who musters “the principalities, the powers, the world-rulers of this life's darkness, the spirits of wickedness in ethereal places,” to serve him in his conflict with man's flesh and blood; in fine, for S. Paul's language goes one point even beyond that of his Master, and terms him not merely the ruler, but “the God of this world;”²⁸ that is to say, this manifold idolatry is the establishment of his kingdom, the enthronement of his godhead over men, the mark of their captivity and prostration before him.

The statements of our Lord and his apostles being so express and definite as to the existence of this diabolic kingdom, and as to the personal sway of a sovereign over it, let us look once more at this idolatry itself by the light thus shed upon it.

And first, whether we regard men as made to be members of a well-ordered society, enjoying temporal prosperity in this life, or as further intended for happiness in a future life, resulting from their present actions,²⁹ the condition in which the heathen nations are actually found at our Lord's coming is quite unintelligible unless we suppose the reality of a diabolic power exercised upon them. The polytheism which we have witnessed holding all human life in its grasp, while it did not teach and uphold the great laws of morality, did, on the other hand, actively inculcate the violation of those laws by continually representing to the minds and eyes of men such a violation in the acts of the deities worshipped. It was a perpetual incitement of men to crimes, as well against social order as against all the sanctities of private life; it fostered the savageness of slavery, and the utmost cruelty in carrying on war, because its deities, being diverse for every nation, and belonging exclusively to the nation, had obliterated the idea that all men were of one blood, and thus delivered over the captive and the slave to the pitiless hatred or equally pitiless luxury of their fellow-men. So much for its action on human society as terminating with this life, while for a life to come it had no doctrine and made no preparation, but had suffered the earlier teaching of a future retribution to be considered as a fable fit for children and old women. Looking at such a condition of human society from the moral point of view, we may conclude with certainty that man would never, if left to himself, have devised it.

Secondly, regarding this polytheism as an object presented to the human intellect, nothing more unreasonable and monstrous than this crowd of deities can even be conceived. The human reason demands imperatively the unity of the godhead, since infinite power at least enters into the conception of the godhead, and to divide or limit infinity is an unreason. All the great works and order of the world bore witness likewise to this unity of the godhead, and were sufficient to prove it;³⁰ and even in the worst times of paganism we find this proof exhibited with a force and lucidity to which even now little can be added. And in the worst times, again, we find the natural witness of the human soul breaking out in moments of sudden trial or great anguish, and calling upon the one God for help.³¹ Yet in spite of this we see whole nations renowned for their intellectual productions, and men among them in whom the force of reason has rarely or never been surpassed, bowing their necks to this yoke of polytheism, and accepting this tissue of monstrous error, paying homage to it in their life, and dying with it on their lips; as Socrates offering the cock to Æsculapius, and Seneca the libation to Jove the liberator. We know not how to account for this, were man's reason left alone. We can see an adequate ground for it only in “men having been made unreasonable, and in the demoniacal error overshadowing the earth, and concealing the knowledge of the true God.”³²

Let us take a third view of it, neither the moral nor the logical, but the view of it as an existing fact, as something which for many hundred years occupied the earth, ruled nations, moulded the institutions and characters of men. Here we do not speak merely of the multitude of temples, of priests or priestesses serving in them, of sacrifices offered by these, of prayers, vows, festivals in honour of the gods – because all these enter into the notion of a service rendered by man to the power superior to him, and in their utmost perversion there is nothing which may not be accounted for by a simply human corruption stealing into and spoiling an originally good institution; but all these in the actual condition of paganism were mixed up with and penetrated by other elements, and accompanied by effects not to be so accounted for. Let us take the universal persuasion that the statues of the gods were inhabited by the deities which they represented, as bodies by souls.³³ Here was the notion of a spiritual power taking possession of material forms. But how was this notion introduced, propagated, and maintained in men's minds? By certain visible and palpable effects,³⁴ of which those who were eye-witnesses give us many details. Take again the oracles which existed throughout the heathen world, and, as dealing with the same subject-matter, divination in all its forms. However much of deceit there might be here, was there not also, in many instances, an exhibition of power and knowledge beyond that of man, which no mere deceit could produce? Take again magic, the invocation, adjuration, and compacting with spirits, which ran through heathen society in numberless shapes; and take lastly the fact of spirits seizing upon and possessing the bodies of men, speaking by their voice, and controlling their minds. The four classes which we have just given comprehend in themselves an innumerable multitude of facts which are apparent in pagan history, in all which the corruption of the human soul is an agent or patient, but for which that corruption by itself supplies no adequate cause. A spiritual power is behind, laying hold of and acting upon this corruption, and by fault of the human will making an inroad into the visible world, and partially mastering it, bending it to an evil purpose, and making it serve as an agent to man's captivity. Let us briefly cite as to the reality of this spiritual power the witness of its victims and the witness of its opponents.

First, as to its victims. Scarcely a writer, whether poet, historian, philosopher, or biographer, can be found among the heathens of Greece and Rome who does not attest facts belonging to one or more of these four classes which surpass human power, and suggest an invisible spiritual agency. The poet who writes expressly to deny such an agency speaks of the whole world as bowed beneath the fear of it; another poet,³⁵ referring tacitly to this very passage, felicitates the man not who has a pure conscience, but who through knowledge of natural things has trampled these fears under his feet. Nor is such a belief confined to the vulgar; but scarcely a man of eminence, a soldier, or a statesman can be cited who does not in his life and actions acknowledge it, shrink from it, or cower beneath it. It is too powerful for Alexander or even Julius to escape; and the philosophers who affect to deny it in their systems exhibit it in their conduct. They have all the conviction of an evil power beyond and above nature, but taking hold of natural forms, and ever lying in wait to burst forth from them upon human life. The Greek name for superstition is fear of the demons; and what S. Paul said of the Athenians, that he found them in all things too fearful of the demons, might be applied to the whole circle of nations surrounding the midland sea.

Secondly, as to the opponents of this power. Now they offer a triple witness to its existence. The first of these is in the facts mentioned in the New Testament. The strongest, most terrible, and most inexplicable instance of this power lies in those diabolical possessions with which so many of our Lord's miracles are concerned. Again, as to the reality of divining powers arising from the presence of a demon in a human form, we have the evil spirit in the girl at Philippi acknowledging in S. Paul a servant of the most high God, and, when cast out by the Apostle in the name of Christ, leaving his victim destitute of those powers which had brought gain to her masters, who forthwith try to avenge themselves for their loss by exciting a persecution against the Apostle.³⁶

A second witness is found in the rites and offices of the very power set up to dethrone and abolish this other power. The Church called upon every one who was received into her bosom to begin by renouncing the usurpation of this great enemy, which was thus declared to be universal. She provided forms for exorcising him. One of her Apostles warned those to whom he wrote that men could not partake at once of the Christian sacrifice and the heathen; for as truly as one was the chalice of the Lord, the other was the chalice of devils; as one was the table of the Lord, the other was the table of devils.³⁷

A third witness is found in the unanimous testimony of all Christian writers as to the reality of the demoniacal powers with which they were waging war; as to their perpetual interference with human life; as to the open and palpable effects which they produced; as to their unwilling retirement in the face of that Stronger One who was come upon them. It was not merely the fervid Tertullian who offered to rest the truth of Christianity and the life of any ordinary Christian upon his power publicly to expel a demon. Athanasius, who weighs every word he utters, says also, “Let him who will, try the truth of what we have said, and in the very presence of the spectral illusion of the demons, of the deceit of oracles and the wonders of magic, let him use the sign of the cross derided by them, only naming the name of Christ, and he shall see how by him the demons fly, the oracles cease, and every sort of magic and witchcraft is annulled.” No less express is S. Augustine in acknowledging the reality of these dark powers, and the wonders worked by them.³⁸

Resuming then for a moment our view of heathenism as a whole, with regard to the exhibition of diabolic power in it, let us bear in mind, joined to the absence of moral teaching, its flagrantly immoral disposition; secondly, its illogical character, by which it is an insult to human reason while yet accepted by the human will; and thirdly, the superhuman effects noted in it and attached to its rites, ceremonies, and practices, attested by many generations alike of its victims as of its opponents. These proofs have each their own separate force, but they have likewise as to our conclusion a cumulative force; and its result is, that the existence of a diabolic kingdom and sovereign throned in heathenism, pervading its rites and directing its operations, which is so expressly declared in Holy Writ, is no less strongly proved by the facts of history.

6. Now, having sketched in four main points the substance of this polytheism, its multiplicity, its universality, its hold upon daily life, and its moral corruption, to all which a consummating force is added by the indwelling of diabolic power, it remains to give a glance at certain conditions and circumstances under which it was acting on the minds of men. We have here taken it and examined it by itself, abstracting it from those circumstances, but it never so appeared to those who lived under it. The wonderful error which so enfolded these widespread nations never exhibited itself to them bare and naked. On the contrary, it came to them interwoven with the dearest claims of the family, the city, the country, with the force of habit and tradition, with the dread of change, with the past history and future hopes of their fatherland, coloured moreover with the radiant dress of a rich and ever-advancing civilisation.

To judge of its power, vitality, and chance of permanence, we must look at it under these conditions. And if, when we regard this idolatrous polytheism in itself, one is lost in wonder at its ever having arisen, at its existence, at its continuance, so, when one regards it as throned in the customs, feelings, convictions, and interests of society, one wonders how any moral force could ever overthrow it. At the present time not only are there religions outside of Christianity, but there are also sects within it, so irrational, so devoid of the witness given by internal truth and harmony, so unable to render any account of themselves and their claims which will satisfy a mind looking for consistency, that, regarding them merely as facts, one cannot account for them, yet notwithstanding they may have existed for several hundred years, and had a large share in forming national habits of thought, or even national character; nay, perhaps their secret strength lies in some fold of this character itself. And because they are never seen by themselves, their intrinsic absurdity does not come before their adherents, and the last thing which these think of examining is the foundation of their sect, inasmuch as in fact it has never approached them otherwise than as a condition of their daily life. So we shall understand paganism better by considering it as interwoven with civilisation, polity, and national feelings. We will treat of it briefly under these three heads.

1. First, the whole eastern part of the Roman empire was made up of many various nations having a long and sometimes renowned history, kingdoms, and politics much anterior to Rome herself, of which the Romans had taken violent possession, but wherein remained still the fruits of a rich and undisturbed civilisation. And this word comprehends all the natural life of man, all the discoveries gained by his invention or experience, and accumulated by wealth descending from age to age, all the manifold ties of social intercourse, all the pleasures of the intellect, united, moreover, in their case with an art even now unrivalled in portraying the beauty of the human figure, and in the elegance with which it adapted material forms to the conveniences of life. So rich and varied an inheritance unfolded itself in a thousand Hellenic cities studding the shores of the Mediterranean. The culture itself since the time of Alexander might be termed Hellenic, but it embraced Egypt, and Syria, and all Western Asia. And so completely was idolatrous polytheism interwoven with culture, so inextricably was it blended with the bulk, so gradually had it grown with the growth, and wound its fibres about the tree and the branches, that the worship might be absolutely identified with the civilisation. The gods of Greece were the heads of the most illustrious Grecian families; their hero-worship consecrated every city, every grove, every field. The gods of Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. They had their mementos in every street of busy traffic; they watched over the Acropolis; not a fountain but laid claim to their patronage, nor a field which was fruitful but by their supposed influence. These countries had lost their political independence, but the material ease of life under the majesty of the Roman name they retained. There was a passionate love for this world's goods, comforts, and enjoyments in the Greek, Syrian, Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan races, all of them more or less worn, and effete, and deeply sensualised; but their glory was this great Hellenic civilisation, with which polytheism might be termed one and the same thing.

2. When we turn to the West, the seat of the sovereign city and of the empire itself, we find that from the very beginning and through many centuries the political constitution of the city had been indissolubly blended with the worship of the Roman gods. The religion of Rome was much more than national; her polity seemed only another name for her worship. Her temples were as much a part of her political life as her forum. So far at least she had embodied in her whole structure the legend of her Etruscan teacher, wherein the dwarf Tages sprung from the soil to communicate the worship claimed by the gods.³⁹ Her soil and her worship were indivisible. And even after seven centuries, when the city was embracing the world in its arms, this union practically existed. Rome indeed admitted, as we have said, the gods of the conquered nations into her pantheon, but it was on the same tenure as the nations themselves shared her civic rights. Jupiter Capitolinus was a sort of suzerain not only to the gods of the Grecian Olympus, but to the dark forms of the Nile deities, to the Syrian, the Libyan, the Gallic, the Germanic, the Sarmatian Valhalla. When the greatest of her poets would express unending duration, he joins together the race of Æneas enthroned on the Capitol with the god who dwelt there:

“Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo,
Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.”

The Roman father is the Capitoline Jupiter. I am not a king; the only king of the Romans is Jupiter, said the most royal of the race, and the founder of her empire, when, seeing all prostrate at his feet, he put away reluctantly the diadem offered by his creature. Thus even he who had seized the reality of power, who would have omens when he pleased, and whose will was his law, left the crown on the head of Jupiter. In Rome, all through her history “piety and patriotism were the same feeling.”⁴⁰ When her empire became world-wide, this sort of devotion did not cease. Rome had long been deified; and the double import of her name⁴¹ expressed strength against the foe without, and nourishment to the child within. She was at once a warrior-goddess clothed in mail to meet the enemy, and a mother offering her bosom to her citizens clustered around her. And so in her new constitution, adapted for the world, her emperor too was deified, as the first of her children, her living representative, the embodiment of her force and love, the visible wielder of her unseen power. All that is sacred in home and country to us the Roman signified when he swore by the genius of the emperor. Nothing could be more tolerant than this polytheism, if the innovation extended only to the borrowing or creating a new divinity, to reforming a rite or a ceremony,⁴² or to suchlike modifications of worship which admitted that on which it rested; but nothing more intolerant than the same polytheism when the worship itself was attacked. A movement against the Capitoline Jupiter would be not only sacrilege but high treason, and the refusal to call to witness the emperor's genius was in fact to deny his imperial authority. The worship of the gods was as much identified with the empire of Rome in the West as with the civilisation of Greece throughout the East.

3. But as if these two powers were not ties sufficiently strong to hold polytheism together, there was another feeling distinct from both, which formed its last bulwark. The iron hand which held in its grasp these vast countries, many of them so large that by themselves they might have been empires, was strong enough to prevent or crush insurrection, but provided only the majesty of the Roman peace was accepted, did not seek to disturb a large remnant of local feeling and interest still representing the former life and polity of the several provinces. Now whatever of national, tribe, or race feeling existed, was grouped everywhere about the worship of the native gods.⁴³ The Nile-land had ceased to be a royal seat, and was governed by a simple Roman knight as prefect of the emperor; but not for this had the Nile gods abdicated their dark sway over their votaries. In them the Egyptians still felt that they had something which was their own. Thus, whatever force of patriotism still lurked in the several parts of the empire was nurtured by its own form of polytheism, which it in turn invested with the memories dearest and most ineradicable in man, of past independence or renown. Not only the Egyptians, but the various Asiatic and Libyan races, the Gauls and Germans under Roman sway, were thus attached to their native gods with a feeling no doubt akin to that of the English towards “Old England,” or the Russians towards “Holy Russia.”

4. Two more conditions of society throughout the whole empire we have yet to consider in their bearing on the maintenance of polytheism: first, the concentration of the vast power of the state – in itself an acknowledged omnipotence, without the restriction or reservation of individual rights – in one hand, the hand of the emperor, the sole representative of the people. By this it would seem that all the upper classes of society, the classes at ease as to their maintenance, the classes who have leisure to think and will to act in political matters, were deprived of so much of their freedom, and such deprivation would tend to support an existing institution. Secondly, the despotism above was met by a corresponding despotism below. The rights of the slaveholder over the human labourer left as little margin of freedom to daily toil as the right of the imperial autocrat to the freedom of conscience in the rich. The servants throughout the world of Rome being slaves, were as much in the hand of their masters as those masters were in the hand of the prince.

We can now take a prospect of human society in reference to the polytheism of the empire from the standing-point of Augustus in the last twenty years of his reign. The worship of her gods was so intertwined with the political constitution of Rome from her birth through seven centuries and a half, that it might be said to be one thing with it. Almost as close was the identification of the several religious systems of the East with the enjoyments of civilised life which they prized so highly, and which the empire of Rome secured to them. Further in the background the national gods of the many races included in the empire were the last inheritance of their former independent life. Again, not only was the emperor as Pontifex Maximus the official head of this polytheism, but as representing the whole power of the state, he was its guardian, and whatever assailed it was an insult to the majesty which he embodied; while the slavery in which the masses were lying seemed to represent in human society the chances of war which had all ended in the dominion of Rome and the subjection of the whole pantheon of incongruous gods to the sovereignty of the Capitoline Jupiter. These were general conditions to that multifarious whole of nations and races. Then if Augustus sought to examine more narrowly the society of Roman citizens spread through his empire, he would find it divided very unequally as to numbers into two classes. The vast majority were those who take things as they find them, and who belonged with more or less fidelity and heartiness to the idolatrous polytheism. The worship which came to them as part and parcel of the empire, of civilised and of national life, they accepted without thought. To all these an indefinite number of immoral gods was throned in possession of Olympus; to all these the result of such worship was, as we have seen described by S. Augustine, the utter perversion of morality, the consecration of fables equalling in turpitude the utmost license of the theatres. But everywhere among the educated classes were to be found a small number of sceptical minds: philosophers they termed themselves: it was fashionable to follow some philosophic system or sect, and these fell mainly into two. Now the Epicureans and the Stoics, while they left the existing polytheism in practical possession, as a matter of custom and state religion, and so delivered themselves from any unpleasant consequences of denying the prevailing worship, concurred entirely in this, that the one by the way of atheism, the other by that of pantheism, destroyed all religion of the heart and inner conduct; because they equally removed the notion of a personal God, and its corresponding notion of a personal being in man outliving the body and the world of sense, and meeting with a personal retribution. Whether the power they acknowledge be nature, as in Lucretius, or a hidden physical force running through all nature, which might be called Jupiter, Juno, Hercules, or the name of any other god, as in Marcus Aurelius, the notion of a personal Creator, provident and rewarding, was equally destroyed. Nor before the preaching of the Gospel does there appear a single individual who drew out of the existing polytheism such a conclusion. On the contrary, in Augustus and his successors the imperial idea of unity in religion was to make out that all these systems of polytheism, running into and athwart each other, came practically to the same thing, differing in name only. Their obedience to Jupiter of the Capitol was the only bond of unity, and pledge of the empire's duration, conceived by the Roman rulers.

II. Thus in the time of Augustus no human eye, whether we look at the mass of mankind or the thinking few, could see any sign either that the dominant polytheism was about to fall, or that the lost doctrine of the divine Unity and Personality could be extricated from the bewildering mass of error and superstition which had grown over, disguised, and distorted it. Darker still, if possible, became the prospect under his successor, Tiberius, whose reign had reached the climax of moral debasement, when Sejanus was all-powerful at Rome. Hope for the human race there appeared none, when such an emperor devolved his omnipotence on such a prime minister. Then in the judgment-hall of a procurator in a small and distant eastern province, there passed the following dialogue between an accused criminal and his judge: – “Pilate went into the prætorium again, and called Jesus, and said to him, ‘Art thou the king of the Jews?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or have others told it thee of me?’ Pilate answered, ‘Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee up to me: what hast thou done?’ Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now my kingdom is not from hence.’ Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Art thou a king, then?’ Jesus answered, ‘Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.’ Pilate saith to him, ‘What is truth?’ ” He who thus declared himself to be a king, the cause of whose birth and advent into the world, the function of whose royalty, was to bear witness to the truth, received from the power which then ruled the world the punishment allotted to the slave who was worthy of death. For many ages a false worship had overshadowed the earth, hiding the true God from men, and setting up instead a multitude of demons for gods. And during this time the thinkers of Greek and Roman society had been asking, What is truth? And now the officer who asked that question of the Truth Himself, replied to it by crucifying Him. And when the body of that Crucified One was the same day taken down from the cross and laid in its sepulchre, the power which reigned in polytheism and spoke by the mouth of the judge, seemed to have given the final answer of triumphant force to its question, What is truth? and falsehood might be thought to reign supreme and victorious in the world.

It was with the resurrection of that Body, in which Truth was enshrined, that the resurrection of truth among men began. He had said to His disciples a few hours before, not “I show the truth,” but “I am the Truth.” His birth and His advent took place that His witness might be given to it, the witness to it being that very birth and advent, His appearance among men, and the reception He would meet with. The crucifixion itself – the reply of triumphant force to its own unanswered question – was the witness which, first in Him, and then in His followers, should make itself heard over the earth, now held in captivity by falsehood. And since Truth is His proper Name and His personal Being from eternity, and by being the Truth He who spoke is the second Person in the Godhead, the perfect Image of all Truth, let us consider the import of His Name as the summing-up of the great antagonism which He then planted on the earth.

For He named Himself the Truth because He is the Son and the Word of the Father. “Thus the Father, as it were uttering Himself, begot His Word, equal to Himself in all things. For He would not fully and perfectly have uttered Himself, if there were anything less or anything more in His Word than in Himself… And therefore this Word is truly the Truth; inasmuch as whatever is in that knowledge of which He is begotten, is also in Himself; and whatsoever is not in it, is not in Himself… The Father and the Son know each other, the one by generating, the other by being generated.”⁴⁴ Thus it is that He is the perfect Word, the absolute Image of God; and being the Image of God He created man in the beginning a copy of that Image, and according to its resemblance, in that He created him in the indivisible unity of a soul intelligent and willing – a created copy of the Trinity in Unity. But though by the original constitution of the soul this copy could not be destroyed, being the very essence of the soul, yet the resemblance might be marred, and the harmony which reigned in the original man between the soul, its intellect, and will, through the indwelling of God's Spirit, was broken by the act of sin; whereupon that Spirit withdrew from him, and left the copy of the divine Image defaced and disordered. All the heathenism we have been considering is the sequence of that disorder, part of which is the grievous obscuration of truth, that is, of the whole relation between God and man, of which idolatrous polytheism is the perversion. It was the exact representation of the soul's own disorder, being the distortion but not the extinction of worship; the fear of many demons, instead of the fear of one God; slavish instead of filial fear.

But as the Truth of the Father is beheld and expressed in generating His Son, His Word, His perfect Image, so truth to man is the resemblance of created things to the archetypal idea of them in God; the resemblance of the works of the divine art to the Artificer's intention. In this long act of heathenism we see the work of the divine Artificer marred and obscured, and the marring and obscuration seem to have gone as far as was possible without touching the essence of the soul. Who, then, should restore, but He who had first created? Who should give back to the copy the lost harmony, and reimprint the defaced resemblance, save the perfect Image of God? Thus, when the corruption had run its course, and the original disobedience had reproduced itself all over the earth in a harvest of evil and disorder, the time for the work of reparation was come, and the Divine Word, the Image of the Father, took flesh.

Magnificent as had been the dower of the First Man, and wonderful the grace which held his soul in harmony with itself, and his bodily affections in obedience to his soul, incomparably more magnificent was the dower of human nature in its reparation, inconceivably grander the grace which ruled the Soul and Body of the Restorer. For whereas the First Man's person had been simply human, the Person of the Second Man was the Divine Word Himself, the perfect Image of the Father; and whereas the grace of the First Man was such that he was able not to sin, the grace which had assumed the nature of the Second Man was a Person who could not sin, the fountain of grace itself, measureless, absolute, and personal. The Image of God Himself came to restore the copy of that Image in Man; his appearance as man among men was the reconveying of the Truth to them, because He was the Truth Himself. The Truth in all its extent; the Truth in the whole moral order and every relation which belongs to it; the Truth by which all the rational creation of God corresponds to the Idea of its Creator, was the gift which He brought to man in His Incarnation.

But this truth is not merely external to man. In order to be received and appropriated by him, he must become capable of it. The Restorer works his restoration by an inward act upon the soul, its intellect and will. The Image of God sets up His seat within His work, the copy. Man is sealed by the Holy Spirit with the likeness and resemblance of the Father's Face, the Son; and having the Son within him, and giving a home within the soul to the divine character, and making this his treasure, man is formed after God.⁴⁵ The supreme likeness, which is beyond all others, is impressed on human souls by the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As the defacing of the likeness, the result of the original fall, caused the obscuring of the Truth, so its restoration was itself the recovery of the Truth.

And this restoration is itself the witness to the Truth of which He spoke before Pilate as the object of His birth and advent. But to make the witness operative and fruitful, the greatest wonder in this list of wonders is required, the suffering of the Truth Himself. He said of the corn of wheat, which was to bear fruit in unnumbered hearts, that it would remain alone unless it fell into the ground and died. And so His crucifixion in the nature which He had assumed was the act from which the renewal of truth went forth; and not only in His Person, but likewise in His chosen witnesses this special mode of vivifying the truth, and making it fruitful, should be repeated. Not only must the absolute Truth of God appear in our nature itself in order to be accepted, but the nature in which it appeared should offer the sacrifice of itself; and this particular mode of propagating the truth should be observed in that chosen band whom He termed specially His witnesses. Their witness should be their suffering; in them too the Truth should be crucified, and so become fruitful.

And as man in his original creation had been a copy, however faint, of the eternal relations of the Godhead in itself, so his restoration springs from those same eternal relations. In it the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are seen working.⁴⁶ It springs from the Father, in that He is the Father of the only-begotten Son, the Original of the Image, and so the Father of all those who are the copies of that Image. It springs from the Son, in that He is the perfect Image of the Father, and by dwelling in a created nature has raised it to the dignity of His Person, from which the grace of Sonship comes. It springs from the Holy Spirit, whose work as the Spirit of the Father and the Son is to imprint the copy of the Son on man. He performs in every one of the redeemed by communicating to them a participation of the divine nature, by dwelling in them, by contact and coherence with them, a work infinitely less in degree, but yet of the same order with that work of His whereby all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt by personal unity in our Lord's Manhood.⁴⁷

But we left our Lord before Pilate, bearing witness to the truth. It remains to see how that truth became impressed on the world.

Chapter VIII. The First And The Second Man

“Totus Christus caput et corpus est. Caput unigenitus Dei Filius, et corpus ejus Ecclesia, Sponsus et Sponsa, duo in carne una.” S. Aug. de Unitate Ecc. tom. ix. 341.

“Totus Christus, id est, caput et membra.” S. Thomas, Prolog. ad 1 Sentent. art. 4.

Let us look back on the space which we have traversed, and gather up in a few words the sight which it presents to us. We have man before us as far as history will carry us back, as far as reasoning, planting itself on the scanty traces of history, will penetrate into the cloudland of prehistoric times: and the result stands before us exhibited in the manifold records still remaining of the most renowned ancient civilisation. Here, then, we see nations whose genius, whether in history, poetry, and literature, or in works of art, or in civil government, we still admire, comprising men in many of whom the powers of reason reached their utmost limit; nations inhabiting the most varied climates and countries, and amongst them the fairest in the world, nations formed under the most different circumstances and pursuing the most distinct employments, some agricultural, some commercial, some inland, some nautical, but alike in this, that they were enthralled by systems of a false worship, of which it is hard to say whether it was the more revolting to the reason by its absurdity, or to the conscience of man by its foulness. And this false worship does not lie distinct and apart from the concerns of daily civil and domestic life, but is intertwined with all the public and private actions of men, forming their habits and ruling their affections. Moreover, the polytheistic idolatry described above as existing at the time of Augustus in every province of his empire except one, in almost⁴⁸ every country which touched upon it, or was known to it, is the result, the summing-up, the embodiment of man's whole history up to that time, so far as we know it: it is that into which this history had run out, its palpable, it almost seemed its irresistible, form. And it amounts to a complete corruption, first of the relation between man and his Creator, secondly of the relation between man and his fellow, thirdly of the relations of man in civil government, that is, of states and political communities, to each other.

Now, looking at this polytheistic idolatry simply as a fact, without for the moment any attempt to give a solution of it from authority, looking at it just as modern science would regard the facts of geology or astronomy, there is one thing, we may suppose, which it proves with a superabundance of evidence not found to belong to any other fact of history; and that is, the intrinsic corruption of man as a moral being. That which in theological language is called the Fall of man is, apart from all revealed doctrine on the subject, brought in upon the mind with irresistible force by the mere enumeration of the gods which heathendom worshipped, and of the worship paid by it to them; a force which is indefinitely increased by every inquiry into the moral and religious state of man as he lived under this worship.

Now, then, let us consider what solution the Christian faith does give of this fact, which exists, be it remembered, independently of this solution, and would exist with all its force undiminished, if this were rejected.

I. The Christian faith, as a solution of this wonderful maze of polytheistic idolatry, with all its accompaniments and consequences, carries us back to the first father of the race, whose development we have been following in it. This, it says, is nothing else⁴⁹ but the body of Adam carried out through thousands of years, the body of Adam fallen under a terrible captivity. Not only does the Christian faith set before us man as one race descended from one, but because he is this one race, descended from one, it represents him as having come into such a state. To understand this we must contemplate the original creation, the fall of man, and its consequences, in their several bearings on each other, which will then lead us on to the nature and mode of the restoration.

In speaking of the creation of man we may first consider the union of the soul and body simply by themselves; that is, in order to obtain a clear view of our subject, we may form to ourselves a purely ideal state of simple nature. Such a state would include two things; one positive, the other negative.⁵⁰ Positively, human nature in this condition would have all natural faculties in their essential perfection, and the assistance and providence of God naturally due to it: negatively, it would have nothing superadded to nature, nothing not due to it, whether evil or good, that is, neither sin on the one hand, and what follows sin, the guilt which entails punishment, nor on the other hand any gifts of grace, or perfections not due to nature.

Human nature, if created in such a state, would have no supernatural end; its end would be to love God with a natural love, as the Author and Ruler of the world.

Of such a state it is requisite for our present purpose to say only two things further. The first, that it is not contrary to any attribute of God to have created human nature in such a state. The gift of eternal beatitude, arising from the vision of God, which such a creature would not have had for its end, is simply and absolutely a gratuitous gift of the divine bounty, which God is not bound to bestow on any creature as such. Secondly, God did not in fact so create man.

Going on from this state of simple nature, we may consider another state in man, in which, beyond all his natural faculties,⁵¹ he would have a certain special perfection, consisting in the absence of immoderate concupiscence, or in the perfect subjection of the sensitive to the rational appetite, so that the inferior appetite should not be allowed to set itself in motion against the superior, or to anticipate reason. For human nature, regarded in itself as the union of a spirit and a body, is as it were divided in its natural affections, which tend in diverse directions, and thus totters, so to say, in its gait; when, therefore, it receives an inward peace in its own proper faculties, it is said to be supplemented, or to receive its integrity.

Now it is much to be noted that this special gift of integrity would not be connatural to man, that is, not given to him by force of his nature itself. It is true indeed that as such a gift perfects nature in regard to all natural acts, and supplies a sort of natural deficiency arising out of the combination of a spiritual with a material substance, wherein a conflict is engendered, in such a sense it may be called natural: but strictly speaking it is a gift superadded to nature.

It must further be noted that this state of nature in its integrity, however high and beautiful, is not only entirely distinct from but of an inferior order to the state of human nature raised to the gift of Divine Sonship. Between human nature in this condition and human nature raised to the gift of sonship, there would be more than the difference⁵² that with us exists between the kindly-treated servant and the adopted son: for human nature in this integrity would still not by virtue of it possess sanctifying grace, or, in consequence, have God and His vision for its supernatural end.

But, thirdly, it was not merely in this state that God created man, but in a state which not only included this, but had grace for its basis,⁵³ that is to say, every perfection which it had sprang out of this, that it was united to God by grace. This is a state of far superior order, absolutely gratuitous, and beyond anything which is due to nature. The first man, Adam, then, was not only a union of soul and body, not only did he possess this nature in its integrity, but he was created in grace, so that there was a union of the Holy Spirit with him, whereby he was exalted to the condition of a supernatural end and adopted Sonship, and in this union was rooted the integrity of his nature, and the supernatural power of so ruling all the lower faculties of his soul that the higher could mount undisturbedly to God: and certain other gifts over and above, such as immunity from error or deception, so long as he did not sin, immunity from even venial fault, immunity from death, and from all pain or sorrow. Such was the original condition which grace bestowed on human nature, wherein man had not only a supernatural end, but the power to attain it easily.⁵⁴

Now it is evident that man, by being created in grace, was raised to an astonishing height of dignity, to which not only his nature, but any created nature whatsoever had no claim. All that the justice and goodness of God required him to do in creating such a being as man of two substances, soul and body, was to bestow on the compound being so united such perfections as made the several substances complete in their own order. Such would be the ideal state of simple nature as delineated above. It was a gift beyond nature, such as nature in its first beginning could not claim, to bestow on it the integrity which in the second place we considered. But how far beyond this, passing it by an unmeasured chasm, was that dower of sonship rooted in sanctifying grace which God actually bestowed on His favoured child? It is obvious at first sight that the divine gift here intended, being in Adam's actual creation the root of all which was over and above the natural faculties of body and soul in their union, was bestowed absolutely by the pure goodness of God, and therefore could be bestowed with such conditions attached to it as pleased the Giver. In all that is beyond the mere faculties and needs of nature – in forming which God's own being is a sort of rule to Him – He is absolutely free to give as pleases Himself, to what degree He pleases, on what terms He pleases. What, then, were the conditions on which He invested Adam with the gift of Sonship, and created Him in grace as its foundation? He created him, not only as the individual Adam, but as the Head of his race, so that his race was summed up in him, and a unity was founded in him attaching his whole race as members to his body, in such manner that the supernatural gift of sonship bestowed on him was to descend from him by virtue of natural propagation to every member of that body, which thus became a supernatural race from a supernatural father. So absolute was this unity that the order maintained in the case of every other creature put under the dominion of the man so formed was not followed in his case. For whereas they were created with the difference of sex, each a male and a female, he was created alone, as the Head, and then she, by whose coöperation the race was to be continued, was formed out of him. It was not a second man who was so formed from the first, but one made with reference to him, in dependence on him, to be a help meet for him, not for herself, with an independent being, but for him. This formation of Eve from Adam, which has a meaning of unfathomable depth in the development of the race, is an essential part of the original design. “Therefore,” says Adam, speaking in an ecstasy sent upon him by God, the words of God, “this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” First, the Eve so formed from him is one flesh with him; secondly, the race springing from both is one flesh likewise with him. The consequence intended by that one flesh was the transmission of that magnificent inheritance in which Adam was standing when he so spoke. In this he was Father and Head, for this created alone, then Eve built up from him, from whom afterwards was to issue their joint race. On the further condition of his personal obedience to God and fidelity to his grace, he held the whole supernatural gift of grace conferring sonship, both for himself and for his race: on these terms it was bestowed by the charter of God, the original Giver. Thus, the greatness of his Headship was visible in two things, the power of transmitting his quality of divine sonship to his race by propagation, and the dependence of that quality, in them as well as in himself, on his personal fidelity to God.

But the First Man, the Father and Head of the race, did not stand in his inheritance. He broke the divine command, and lost the gift of sonship, and with it all the prerogatives attendant on that gift, which were above nature and rooted in grace, and which the eminent goodness of God had bestowed upon him: and by the terms of the original charter lost the gift, not only for himself, but for his race. But he did not, therefore, destroy that relation between the Head and the Race, which was part of the original foundation of God. This continued; but whereas it had been intended to communicate the blessing of adoption, it now served to communicate the demerit of adoption lost, the guilt, and with it the punishment incurred by that loss. This is the original sin, the sin of the nature, not of the person, inherited by the members of Adam's body; and as there can be no sin without free-will, the sin of the whole nature included in Adam as its Root and Head, which sinned by Adam's abuse of his free-will.

Let us try to determine as accurately as we can the position into which Adam and his race fell.

Did, then, Adam simply lose with the forfeiture of sanctifying grace the gift of sonship, the supernatural inheritance, all which God had bestowed on him beyond that ideal state of pure nature which we described in the first instance? God, we said, might have created man originally in this condition, and man so created, that is, in virtue of this creation, would not have been under any sin, nor exposed to the anger of God. Did man, by Adam's sin, fall back into it? Not so. His state after his fall differed from such a state of pure nature in that he had upon him the guilt of lost adoption, of adoption lost by the first Adam's fault, and in proportion to the greatness of the loss, and the gratuitousness of the gift originally bestowed, was the anger with which, on the donor's part, the loss was regarded. How would a king, a man like ourselves, regard one whom he had raised out of the dust to be his adopted child, and who had been unfaithful to the parent who had so chosen him with more than natural affection? Such an anger we can indeed understand when felt against the person sinning; but we fail to enter into it as resting on the race, because the secret tie which binds the head and the race into one is not discerned by us; because too the greatness of the divine majesty, the awfulness of His sovereignty, and the wrath of that majesty slighted, are feebly appreciated by us. But this image may at least give us some notion of the nature of that divine anger which pressed upon Adam and his race after the fall. Not only, therefore, was the gift of sonship and the prerogatives attending it withdrawn, but this withdrawal was a punishment, which their absence in the presumed case of an original state of simple nature would not have been. Thus death was a punishment to Adam and his race; the body's weakness and disease, the soul's sorrows and pains, the disobedience of the inferior appetites to the reason, the resistance of the reason to the law of God, were all punishments, and a remarkable point of the punishment is to be seen in this. Adam, as the head of his race, was in virtue of natural propagation to have bestowed on the children of his flesh, the members of his body, his own supernatural inheritance. Thus a singular honour was conferred on the fathership of Adam. But now when, in virtue of this natural propagation, he, continuing to be the head of his race, transmitted to it the guilt of adoption lost instead of the blessing of adoption conferred, a peculiar shame was set by God upon this fathership of Adam, and upon all the circumstances attending it: so that henceforth in the disinherited race the bride veiled her head, and the act of being a father became an act of shame.

The condition, therefore, of Adam and his posterity after his fall differed from the condition which would have been that of simple nature by the whole extent of the guilt incurred by the nature in its fall from sonship.

And herein lies one peculiarity, and one strangely distressing condition of his state, in that while he lost by the fall the grace in which, as an indwelling gift, his whole supernatural state had been rooted, he yet did not lose that condition of being formed and intended for a supernatural end which grace alone could enable him to attain. For the supernatural vision and love of God he had been created, and in his fall he did not sink to be merely a natural man; but his original end was still held out before him as that which he might reach supported by that grace the aids of which were in a different measure promised to him in order to lead a life of penance, and as the earnest of a future restoration.

This, however, is far from being a complete statement of his case, and we must go back to the circumstances of his fall in order to add that further still more peculiar and remarkable condition which, added to the one just described, made up the whole of his fall.

Adam had not disobeyed the divine command, and so broken the covenant of his sonship, by the simple promptings of his own will. Another had intervened; had suggested to the woman doubts against her Maker and Father. She had yielded to these doubts, and disobeyed; and then Adam had suffered himself to be drawn with her in her disobedience. Who was this other? He was the prince and leader of spirits created good, but fallen into enmity with God. Thus, the favourite son of God had listened to the persuasion of God's chief enemy, and his fall from sonship had been, by the judgment of the offended Parent, not a simple fall from his supernatural estate, but a fall likewise into servitude to that enemy. This servitude also, with the guilt of the nature in which he had sinned, Adam transmitted to the members of his body in and by their nature. Adam with his race was the captive taken in war by the enemy of God, and the life which he was allowed to live had the condition of this servitude impressed on it, with this alleviation only, that the assistance of the divine grace offered to him by the mercy of God in his state of penance could protect those who accepted it from the effects of this servitude, and ultimately deliver them.

Here, then, is the condition of Adam's posterity in consequence of his fall; members of a Head who had broken his allegiance to his Creator and Father, and so inheriting with their nature the disinherited state into which he had cast himself; captives, moreover, of that powerful spirit, God's antagonist, who had tempted Adam, seduced him, and led him to his fall.

Now the heathenism which we have been contemplating is the carrying out in time and space of this body of Adam in those who, by their personal fault, fell away from the aids of grace which were accorded to man after his fall – aids given first to Adam for the whole race, and then renewed to Noah for the whole race; and the false worship, so blent and mingled with heathenism, which seemed as if it were the soul of its body, is the sign and stamp of that captivity to the evil spirit which the first man's sin inaugurated.

How powerful was the bond between Adam and his race, how great and influential the headship which the Divine choice had vested in him, we see in that mysterious transmission of guilt which passed from him to his children. And it must be expressly noted that it was not a transmission of punishment alone. Rather, the divine justice cannot punish where there is no guilt; and as in this case Adam's fall, and that of his posterity with him, was not merely a loss but a punishment, so it had the special nature of guilt, not only in him but in his posterity, and was a sin both of the person and of the nature in him, of the nature only in them. We see the force and range of the divine endowment of Adam here, though it be in the tenacity of the calamity which ensued to his race; but it must be remembered that such in this respect as the punishment was, the blessing would have been. Adam was created both an individual and a race. In him were two things – the single man and the head; but of these two things the headship was peculiar to himself, while such as the individual Adam was, his race was to be. He had it in his power to break the covenant of his sonship with God, but not the tie between himself and his race.

And this sheds a light upon the darkest part of that terrible picture which collected heathenism presents to us. Man, as a social animal, is incessant in his action on his fellow-man; the parent and the family form the child; the companion and the neighbourhood lead forth the child into manhood. This work is perpetually going on in all its parts, and society is the joint result. When, therefore, we see this society once fallen into the possession of a false worship, which perverts the very foundations of morality, and instils deadly error into the child with the mother's milk, no thoughtful mind can gaze without horror upon beings involved in such a maze,⁵⁵ yet intended for an eternal duration. Man's nature, as a race, seems turned against him; and in addition to the guilt under which each individual of the race is born, and the nature which each inherits, wherein the internal harmony of peace is broken, and neither the appetites obey the reason nor the reason is obedient to God, comes the force of habit, of education, of culture, of companionship, of man's business and leisure, his play and his earnest, the force of his language, the expression of his thoughts upon himself and others, the whole force, in fact, of man's social being when it is put under possession of an evil power, man's adversary. But this social nature was to have been to him the means of the greatest good. As by his natural descent from Adam unfallen would have come the grace of sonship, so the whole brotherhood of those who shared that gift would have helped and supported each in the maintenance of it. The human family would have had a beauty and a unity of its own as such; an order and a lustre would have rested on the whole body, confirming each member in the possession of his own particular gift. The concatenation of evil in the corrupt society is the most striking contrast to the fellowship of good in the upright; and while it is distinct from that guilt which descends to man as the sin of his nature, yet springs like it from the original constitution of that nature as a race. It is the invasion of evil upon good carried to its utmost point, wherein we discern most plainly “the prince of this world” wielding that “power of darkness” by which the Apostle described the whole state of the world, out of which these nations, which made the empire of Augustus, were a part.

We have thus contemplated four distinct pictures. The first of these was human nature bare and naked by itself, a merely ideal view of man, as a being compounded of soul and body, each possessing only the faculties which belong to them as spiritual and corporeal natures, the result of which is a substantial union, because the spiritual substance becomes the form of the corporeal, not by making the body, when already animated by another principle, to participate of spiritual life, but by becoming itself the principle first animating it. And we set forth this condition of human nature in order to throw light upon our second picture – the first man as he was actually created, possessing, as a gift superadded by the purest divine bounty to this his natural constitution, a divine sonship founded in grace; which transcendant union of the Holy Spirit with his soul kept the soul with all its faculties in a loving obedience to God, and the body in obedience to the soul; and added even to this state the further gratuitous prerogatives of immunity from error, fault, pain, distress, and death. Our third picture was man in this same state, but constituted besides by the divine will, whose good pleasure was the sole source of all this state of sonship, to be father of a race like to himself, receiving from him, with its natural generation, the transmitted gift of sonship; that is, from our view of him as an individual person we went on to consider him as the head of a body – the root of a tree. Fourthly, we have looked on the same man stripped by a fault, personal to himself but natural to his race, of this divine sonship – reduced to a state like that which the first would have been, but altered from it by two grave conditions, one of guilt lying on himself and his race on account of this gratuitous gift of sonship lost, another of captivity to that enemy of his Creator and Father who had seduced him to fall. And this picture included in it the double effect of guilt transmitted through a whole race from its head and father, and of the personal sins of each individual of the race: which, moreover, had a tendency to be perpetually heightened by the social nature of man – that part of his original condition which, as it would have supported his highest good in the state of innocence, so came to make his corruption intense and more complicated in the state of fall. It has not been our purpose in this sketch to dwell upon those who, like Adam himself after his fall, accepted the divine assistance offered to them, and the promise of a future Restorer, and who, living a life of penance, kept their faith in God. Such an assistance was offered not only to Adam but to his whole race, and such a line of men there always was; of whom Abel was the type in the world before the flood; Noah after the flood, as the second father of the whole race; Abraham, the friend of God and father of the faithful, in whose son Isaac a people was to be formed, which, as the nations in their apostasy fell more and more away from the faith and knowledge of the true God, should maintain still the seed of promise out of which the Restorer should spring. But before that Restorer came, the heathenism – of which we have been speaking in the former chapter, and of which we have been giving the solution above – was in possession of all but the whole earth, and the captivity of man to his spiritual foe, on account of which that foe is called “the Ruler” and “the God” “of this world,” which is said “to lie in the malignant one,”⁵⁶ was all but universal. This universality denoted that the fulness of the time⁵⁷ marked out in the providence of God was come.

For Adam, in his first creation, and in the splendour of that robe of sonship⁵⁸ in which he was invested, had been the figure of One to come: his figure as an individual person, his figure as father and head of a race; his figure likewise, when the race itself is viewed as summed up in one, as one body. Let us take each of these in their order.

What was the counterpart of Adam, as an individual person, in the new creation? It was the Eternal Son Himself assuming a human soul and body, and bearing our nature in His divine personality. Over against the creature invested with sonship stood the uncreated Son, invested with a created nature. For the grace of the Holy Spirit given by measure, and depending for its continuance on the obedience of the creature, was the Fountain of Grace Himself ruling the creature by a union indefeasible and eternal; for grace communicated grace immanent in its source. For the son gratuitously adopted was the Son by nature, making, by an inconceivable grace, the created nature assumed to be that not of the adopted but of the natural Son. In a word, the figure was man united to God; the counterpart, the God-man.

What, again, is Adam's counterpart as Father and Head of his race? It was human nature itself, which the Word of God espoused in the bridal chamber of the Virginal Womb, and so is become the Second Adam, the Father of a new race, the Head of a mystical Body, which corresponds to Adam's original Headship, but as far transcends it as the grace of the Incarnate Word transcends the grace bestowed on the first man. As Adam, had he stood in his original state of son, would have transmitted the gift of a like sonship to his whole race – as, falling, he did actually transmit to that race the guilt of adoption lost, so the Second Adam, out of His own uncreated Sonship, but through the nature which He had assumed, bestowed the dower of adopted sons and the gift of justice on his race. From the one there was punishment generating through the flesh;⁵⁹ from the other, grace regenerating through the Spirit. From the one, nature stripped and wounded, yet still bound to its head by an indissoluble tie; by the other, the Spirit of the Head, the Spirit of Truth, Charity, Unity, and Sanctity, ruling his Body and animating it, as the natural soul animates the natural body. Precisely where the mystery was darkest and the misery greatest, the divine grace is most conspicuous, and the divine power most triumphant. The very point which brings out Adam's connection with his race has an exact counterpart in Christ's Headship of His people, and an inscrutable judgment serves to illustrate an unspeakable gift. In exact accordance with the doctrine that the sin of Adam is man's sin, and the guilt of Adam man's guilt, is that boundless and unimaginable grace that the Incarnate Word did not merely assume an individual human nature, but espoused in that assumption the whole nature; that on the cross He paid the debt of the whole nature, whether for original or actual sin; that His resurrection is our collective justification; that the gift of sonship is bestowed on men not as individual persons, but as members of His Body, before they have personally merited anything, just as the guilt came on them, as members of Adam, before they demerited anything personally. Exactly where the obscurity of the fall was the deepest, the light of the restoration is brightest; and where the sentence was most severe, the grace most wonderful. But to deny the first Adam would entail the loss of the Second; and he who declines the inheritance of the father stripped and wounded cannot enter into the Body of the Word made flesh.

But thirdly, as in that terrible corruption of heathenism, wherein immorality was based on false worship, we saw the body of Adam run out through time and space into the most afflicting form which evil can assume in the individual and social life of man, so in that Body which is ruled by the Divine Headship we see the counterpart, the triumph of grace, individual man taken out of that state of fallen nature, and invested with a membership answering to the dignity of the Head. The one great Christian people, the Kingdom of Christ, stands over against that kingdom of violence, disorder, impurity, and false worship. As there is a unity of the fallen Adam, a force of evil which impact only gives, so much more is there a unity of the Second Adam, which is not a collection of individuals, but a Body with its Head. The first unity consists in the reasonable soul, informing the flesh which was moulded once for all from the clay and descended to the whole race; and the race so descending was polluted by a common guilt, on which, as an ever-fertile root, grew the whole trunk of man's personal sins, of falsehood, enmity, corruption of morals, division, having the common quality of egotism. The second unity consists in the Holy Spirit of the Head communicated to the soul and body of the faithful people, both being restored by that grace of which truth and charity, unity and sanctity, are the tokens, the full virtue being planted in the cross of the Head, and from the cross diffusing itself to His Body.

II. And so we are brought again to Him who stood before Pilate to make the good confession, and who declared that the cause of His coming into the world was to bear witness to the truth. In what form was that witness to be made, and how was it to be efficacious? This is that point which we have now to illustrate. Adam's disobedience was a single act, the power of which, springing out of his headship, extended through the whole line of his race; through the consequences of this act the truth was obscured to them, and human life involved in manifold error. What was that action on the part of Christ, the purpose, as He declares, of His Incarnation, which had an equally enduring effect? If the guilt communicated was not transitory, then should the corresponding grace be perpetual. And how was it so? The Son of God, as the Head of His race, does not stand at disadvantage with Adam, but rather, we are told His grace is superabundant in its results over the other's sin: and He Himself declared that He had completely finished the work given Him to do.⁶⁰ But here He describes this work to be the bearing witness to the truth. For, indeed, it was worthy of the eternal wisdom to clothe Himself in flesh⁶¹ in order that truth, the good of the intellect, and the end of the whole universe, might stand forth revealed to His rational creatures: and He who made all things in truth would Himself restore truth, when it had been obscured by the traducer.

1. Let us take the character which He acknowledged and claimed before Pilate: His character of King, and the kingdom in which it is exercised.

The Person of Christ, as that of the eternal Word, is the Truth itself. But He has assumed a body, and in that body He declares that He is a king, and that the exercise of His royalty is the bearing witness to the truth.⁶² His words therefore indicate no less than the creation of a kingdom to which the truth should be the principle of subsistence. But what in the material or temporal kingdom is that by force of which it subsists? Plainly power. A kingdom may be larger or smaller in population, wealth, extent, stronger or weaker in the quality of its people; but as long as it retains in itself that in which power culminates, sovereignty, it will be a kingdom. If this power departs from it, if it falls into subjection to a foreign authority, or if its own subjects successfully rebel against its power, it ceases to be. In the kingdom, therefore, of which Christ speaks, the maintenance of truth corresponds to what the maintenance of power is in a material kingdom.

But power in the material kingdom moves men to the natural end of society; it preserves order, administers justice, allows and assists all natural forces to develop themselves, and it must be in its supreme exercise one and indisputable: that is, it culminates in sovereignty. So in the spiritual kingdom truth, the corresponding power, moves men to the supernatural end, and truth culminates in infallibility. But where is this power seated, and how does the King wield it?

The same who here calls Himself King and declares it to be the function of His royalty to bear witness to the truth, in describing elsewhere the very creation of His kingdom says to His apostles, “You shall receive power by the Holy Ghost coming upon you,” bidding them also to remain in Jerusalem “until they were endued with power from on high.”⁶³ But a few hours before that scene in the hall of Pilate He had told them also that He would send them the Spirit of Truth, who should abide with them for ever, and should lead them into all truth. He creates therefore the kingdom of the truth by sending down the Spirit of the Truth to dwell for ever with those to whom He is sent; and this Spirit of the Truth is His own Spirit, whom He Himself will send as the token of His ascension and session; the Spirit who dwelt in the Body which He had assumed, and in which He spoke before Pilate, should be sent by Him when that Body had taken its place at the right hand of God, should invest with His own power those to whom He was sent, and should never cease to be with them in His character of the Spirit of Truth. Here, then, is that power in the kingdom of the Truth which enables it to bear a true and a perpetual witness. It is the power of the King, for it is His Spirit: it is the power of the kingdom, for it remains in it, is throned in it, and makes it to be what it is.

But to create a kingdom of the truth, and to bear perpetual witness in that kingdom to the truth, is not only to state what is true. These expressions mark out an organisation in and by means of which truth is perpetuated. And further, the spirit in man is both reason and will; and that man may act, the intellect which has truth for its object must work on the will which has good for its object. And so the witness which our Lord speaks of is that action of the truth upon the will which produces a life in accordance with it: it is truth not left to itself, but supported by grace. This power of the Spirit of Truth is therefore double, as intended to work on the two powers of the soul, the reason and the will: it is the double gift of Truth and Grace; as He is the Spirit of Grace no less than the Spirit of Truth, and all grace is His immediate gift.

Thus the Word made flesh being full of Truth and Grace from His own Person communicated that Truth and Grace as the power which should form His kingdom for ever, abide in it, and constitute its being a kingdom; the gift of truth and grace being the very presence of His own Spirit, who took possession of His kingdom on the day of Pentecost and holds it for ever.

This whole possession of Truth and Grace dwelling in a visible body is the work of the eternal Word, who assumed a body for that purpose. It is the counter-creation to the kingdom of falsehood which commenced with the sin of the first man believing a falsehood against his Maker, and which spread itself with his lineage into all lands.⁶⁴ And as in the natural creation He not only created but maintained – for He did not make His creatures and then depart from them, but from that time they exist in Him – so in the supernatural the act of maintaining is equivalent to the act of creating, it is a continued creation. As the guilt had a force which was fruitful, which continued and propagated itself, and produced a widespread reign of falsehood, how much more should that mighty and astonishing grace of a Divine Person assuming a created nature be fruitful, continue, and propagate itself in the maintenance of a visible kingdom, whose distinctive character and its very life should be the possession and communication of the truth. Should the Creator of man in His greatest work be less powerful than His seduced creature in his fall? and if the fall, pregnant with falsehood, bore fruit through ages in a whole race, should not the recovery likewise have its visible dominion, and stand over against the ruin as the kingdom of truth?

It is as King ruling in the kingdom of truth that the Divine Word incarnate redeems man from captivity, which began in a revolt from the truth, and in becoming subject to falsehood. All who are outside His kingdom lie in this captivity;⁶⁵ the life which He gave voluntarily is the price paid for their liberation; and as age after age, so long as the natural body of Adam lasts, the captivity endures, so age after age the liberation takes effect by entering into His kingdom. And this is the most general name, the name of predilection, which both in prophecy marked the time of Messiah the King, and was announced by His precursor, and taken by our Lord to indicate His having come. The eternal duration of this kingdom may be said to be the substance of all prophecy, and it was precisely in the interpretation of a vision describing under the image of a great statue the four world-kingdoms, that is, the whole structure, course, and issue of the heathenism which we have been contemplating, that Daniel contrasts these kingdoms with another. “In the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be delivered to another people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and shall stand itself for ever.” As King in this kingdom through all the generations of men from the moment that He stood in Pilate's hall until He comes to judge the world, our Lord bears witness to the truth, His witness and His royalty being contemporaneous and conterminous to each other.

2. This perpetual possession and announcement of the truth is indicated by another image which is of constant recurrence,⁶⁶ wherein Christ is the Inhabitant, His people the Inhabited, while both are the House or Temple, for that in which God dwells is at once His House and Temple. Thus Moses is said to have been “faithful in all his house as a servant, but Christ as a Son over His own house, whose house are we.” Here the King who bears witness to the truth is the God who sanctifies the faithful people by dwelling in them and building them in the truth. It is not merely the individual believer, but the whole mass of the faithful which grows up to be a holy temple; and the ever-abiding Spirit of truth, whose presence is the guarantee of truth, is the equally abiding Spirit of sanctity, whose presence imparts holiness. The Son dwells in His own house by His Spirit for ever: as He ceases not to be incarnate, He ceases not to dwell in His house, and could falsehood be worshipped in His temple, it would cease to be His. That was the work of heathenism, when a false spirit had caused error to be worshipped for truth; the specific victory of the Word incarnate was to set up a temple in which the truth should be worshipped for ever, “the inhabitation of God in the Spirit.” But living stones make up this temple, that is, individual spirits, endued with their own reason and will, yet no less fitted in and cemented together by His grace, and so forming a structure which has an organic unity of its own, being the House and Temple of One. It is in virtue of this inhabitation that the Church is termed the House of God, the pillar and ground of the truth, inasmuch as it contains, as between walls,⁶⁷ the faith and its announcement and proclamation, that is, the law of the King of Truth declared by His heralds. “We speculate,” says S. Augustine, “that we may attain to vision; yet even the most studious speculation would fall into error unless the Lord inhabited the Church herself that now is.”⁶⁸ And again: “In earthly possessions a benefit is given to the proprietor when he is given possession; not so is the possession which is the Church. The benefit here lies in being possessed by such a one.” – “Christ's Body is both Temple and House and City, and He who is Head of the Body is Inhabiter of the House, and Sanctifier of the Temple, and King of the City. – What can we say more acceptable to Him than this, Possess us?”⁶⁹

3. Again, to take another image, which is the greatest of realities. What a wonderful production of divine skill is the structure of the human body! Even its outward beauty is such as to sway our feelings with a force which reason has at times a hard combat to overcome, so keen is the delight which it conveys. But the inward distribution of its parts is so marvellous that those who have spent their lives in the study of its anatomy can find in a single member, for instance, in the hand, enough out of which to fill a volume with the wise adaptation of means to ends which it reveals. There are parts of it the structure of which is so minute and subtle that the most persevering science has not yet attained fully to unravel their use. In all this arrangement of nerves and muscles, machines of every sort, meeting all manner of difficulties, and supplying all kinds of uses, what an endless storehouse of wisdom and forethought! And all these are permeated by a common life, which binds every part, whatever its several importance, into one whole, and all these, in the state of health, work together with so perfect an ease that the living actor, the bearer of so marvellous a structure, is unconscious of an effort, and exults in the life so simple and yet so manifold poured out on such a multitude of members, a life so tender that the smallest prick is felt over the whole body, and yet so strong that a wound may transfix the whole structure leaving the life untouched. And, in addition to this physical marvel, the incorporeal mind, which has its seat in this material structure, and whose presence is itself its life, rules like an absolute monarch with undisputed sway over his whole dominion, so that the least movement of volition carries with it a willing obedience in the whole frame, and for it instantaneously the eye gazes, the ear listens, the tongue speaks, the feet walk, the hands work, and the brain feels with an incomparable unity. The marvel of the body is that things so many and various by the rule of the artificer impressed upon them are yet one, concur to one end, and produce one whole, from which no part can be taken, and to which none can be added without injury, the least and the greatest replete with one life, which so entirely belongs to the whole body that what is severed from the body at once dies. “Now as the body is one, and has many members, but all the members of this one body, being many, are one body, so also,” says S. Paul, “is Christ,” giving the name of the Head to the whole Body. What the human head is to its own body, that our Lord is to His Church. Perhaps no other image in the whole realm of nature would convey with such force the three relations⁷⁰ which constitute spiritual headship, an inseparable union, by which the head and the body form one whole, an unceasing government, including every sort of provision and care, and a perpetual influx of grace. This is on the part of the head, while as to the body perhaps no other image but this could equally convey the conjunction of many different members with various functions, whose union makes the structure, and whose unity is something entirely distinct from that which all the parts in their several state, or even in their collocation and arrangement, make up, for it is the life which makes them one. Thus it is an unfathomed depth of doctrine, which is conveyed in the words, “God gave Him to be Head over all things to the Church, who is His Body, the fulness of Him who fills all things in all.” For though no language could exhaust or duly exhibit the meaning of the kingdom or the temple in which the abiding work of our Lord is indicated, we have in this title yet more strikingly portrayed the intimate union and common life of His people with Christ, and His tender affection for them, since the King of Truth who redeems and the God of Truth who sanctifies is at the same time the Head who by His own Spirit of the truth rules and vivifies His own Body. If it be possible to dissociate the idea of the King from his kingdom, or that of God from the temple of living souls in whom He is worshipped, and whose worship of Him makes them one, yet in the human frame to dissever the head from the body is to destroy the propriety of both terms, and it is as a whole human body that the apostle represents Christ and His people to us.

4. Yet, as if this was not enough, S. Paul goes on to delineate Him as the Bridegroom, whose love after redeeming sanctifies one who shall be His bride for ever, one who obeys Him with the fidelity of conjugal love, one whose preservation of His faith unstained is not the dry fulfilment of a command, but the prompting of wedded affection. The image seems chosen to convey intensity of love, first on the part of the Bridegroom as originating it, and then on the part of the Bride as responding to it. But no less does the unity of person in the Bride, given by S. John as well as by S. Paul, indicate in the Church something quite distinct from the individuals who compose her. For she is the pattern of the faithful wife in that she is subject to Christ; and in these words a fact is stated,⁷¹ a fact without limit of place or time, which therefore marks that she who is so described can never at any time be separated from the fidelity and love due from her to her Head and Husband. And this is not true of the individual souls belonging to her, for they, having been once faithful members of the body, may fall away and be finally lost. The Bride alone is subject to Christ with a never-failing subjection. And He on His part loves her as His own flesh, a union of the two loves of the Head for the Body, and of the Bridegroom for the Bride, which is true with regard to Him of the Church alone, since individuals within her He may cast off, but her alone He cherishes and fosters for ever. It is indefectible union and unbroken charity with Him which her quality of Bride conveys.

5. And out of this wedded union by that great sacrament concerning Christ and the Church, of which in the same passage S. Paul speaks, that they two shall be one flesh, springs the whole race, in the generation of whom is most completely verified his title of the Second Adam. From the womb of the Church, become from a Bride the Mother of all living, the Father of the age to come bears that chosen race, and royal priesthood, and holy nation, and purchased people. And here we see expressed with great force the truth that all who belong to the Father's supernatural race must come by the Mother. Her office of parent is here set forth; as her fidelity and intense affection shine in the title of the Bride, as her union, submission, and unfailing reception of life in her title of Body, so in the title of Mother all the saved are borne to Christ by her, as S. Cyprian⁷² drew the conclusion, “he cannot have God for his father who has not the Church for his mother.”

In all this we see the five⁷³ great loves first shown by God to man, then returned by man to God; the love of the Saviour, redeeming captives, and out of these forming His kingdom; the love of the friend, who is God, sanctifying those whom He redeems into one temple; the love which He has implanted in man for self-preservation, since that which He so redeems and sanctifies He has made His own body; the love which He has given to the bridegroom for the bride, since it is the Bride of the Lamb who is so adorned; and the love of the Father for his race, since it is his wife who bears every child to him. Why is the whole force of human language exhausted, and the whole strength of the several human affections accumulated, in this manner? It is to express the super-eminent work of God made flesh, who, when He took a human body, created in correspondence to it that among men and out of men in which the virtue of His Incarnation is stored up, the mystical Kingdom, Temple, Body, Bride, and Mother. No one of these titles could convey the full riches of His work, or the variously wrought splendour of His wisdom, which the angels desire to look into; therefore He searched through human nature and society in all its depth and height for images whose union might express a work so unexampled and unique. Rather, it is truer to say that these natural affections themselves, the gift of that most bountiful giver, were created by Him originally to be types, foreshadowings, and partial copies of that more excellent supernatural love which He had decreed to show to man, since first of all things in the order of the divine design must the Incarnation have been. The whole structure of the family, and the affections which it contains, must spring out of this root, for nature was anticipated by grace in man's creation, and must ever have been subordinate to it. And now, when the full time of grace is come, these titles of things which by His mercy have lasted through the fall, serve to illustrate the greatness of the restoration. For this, which has many names, all precious and dear, is but one creation, having the manifold qualities of redemption and sanctification, of organic unity in one body, wherein many members conspire to a corporate life, which life itself is charity, and in which is the production of the holy race. As we gaze on the Kingdom, Temple, Body, Spouse, and Family, one seems to melt and change into the other. The Kingdom is deepened and enlarged by the thought that the King is the eternal Truth who is worshipped therein; and the worship passes on into the love of the Incarnate God for the members of His own Body, whom He first saves, then fosters and cherishes as His own flesh: and here again is blended that tenderest love of the Bridegroom for the bride, which further issues into the crowning love of the Father for His race. The mode of the salvation seems to spring from the nature of God Himself, since all paternity in heaven and earth springs from that whereby He is Father of the only-begotten Son, who, descending from heaven with the love of the Bridegroom for the bride, binds together in sonship derived from his own the members of His body, the bride of His heart, the subjects of His kingdom, who are built up as living stones into that unimaginable temple raised in the unity of worshipping hearts to the ever-blessed Trinity. To this grows out, as the fulness of Him who fills all in all, that body of the Second Adam, of which in the body of the first Adam He had Himself deposited the germ.

When the angel described to the Blessed Virgin herself that miracle of miracles which was to take place in her, the assumption of human flesh by the Son of God, he used these terms: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee.” When the Son of God, at the moment of His Ascension, declared to His Apostles the creation of His mystical body, by using similar words He referred them back to His own conception: “You shall receive power, the Holy Ghost coming upon you:” having already on the day of His Resurrection told them, “I send the promise of my Father upon you; but wait you in the city until you be indued with power from on high.”⁷⁴ Our Lord Himself thus suggests to us the remarkable parallel between the formation of His natural and His mystical body. He who framed the one and the other is the same, the Holy Ghost: the Head precedes, the Body follows; because of the first descent, that Holy Thing which was to be born should be called the Son of God; because of the second, “you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the farthest part of the earth;” and this is said in answer to their question whether He would then restore the kingdom to Israel: that is, the second descent of the Holy Ghost forms the kingdom whose witness to Christ is perpetual; forms the body with which and in which He will be for ever by this power of His Spirit dwelling in it to the end of the world. We have therefore here all the various functions and qualities which, under the five great titles of Kingdom, Temple, Body, Spouse, and Mother, delineate His Church, gathered up into that unity which comprehends them all, and from which, as a source, they all flow, “The Power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men.”⁷⁵ This creation is as absolutely His, and His alone, as the forming of our Lord's own Body in the Virginal Womb; it is the sequel of it; the fulfilment among men of those divine purposes for which God became Incarnate; in one word, the Body of the Head perpetually quickened by His Spirit. And here we may remark those striking resemblances between the natural and mystical Body which this “power of the Holy Ghost,” the former of them both, indicates. For in the first the manhood⁷⁶ cannot be severed from the Person of the Word, nor in the second can the body of the Church be severed from Christ the Head and His Spirit. Secondly, in the first the Person of the Word and His manhood make one Christ, and in the second Christ the Head and the Church the Body make one complete Body. Thirdly, in the first the manhood has its own will, but through union with the Godhead is impeccable and indefeasible; and in the second the Body of the Church, though possessing its own liberty, is so ruled by Christ and guided by His Spirit, that it cannot fail in truth or in charity. Fourthly, in the first there is an influx of celestial gifts from the Person of the Word into the manhood, and in the second there is a like influx from Christ the Head into His Body the Church, so that he who hears the Church hears Christ, and he who persecutes the Church, as Saul before the gate of Damascus, persecutes Christ. Fifthly, in the first the Head, through the manhood as His instrument, fulfilled all the economy of redemption, dwelt among men, taught them, redeemed them, bestowed on them the gifts of holiness and the friendship of God; and in the second, what He began in His manhood He continues through the Church as His own Body,⁷⁷ and bestows on men what He merited in His flesh, showing in and by the Church His presence among men, teaching them holiness, preserving them from error, and leading them to the eternal inheritance.

It is also by this one “power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men” that we learn how the Head and the Body make one Christ. As in the human frame the presence of the soul gives it life and unity, binding together every member by that secret indivisible force, from the least to the greatest, from the heart and brain to the minutest portion of the outward skin, so in this divine Body, which makes the whole Christ, it is the presence of the Holy Ghost, as of the soul, which gives it unity and life. The conclusion was drawn by a great Saint, and no less great a genius, fourteen hundred years ago, and I prefer S. Augustine's words to any which I can use myself: “Our spirit by which the whole race of man lives is called the soul; our spirit, too, by which each man in particular lives is called the soul; and you see what the soul does in the body. It quickens all the limbs: through the eyes it sees, through the ears it hears, through the nostrils smells, through the tongue speaks, through the hands works, through the feet walks; it is present at once in all the limbs that they may live; life it gives to all, their functions to each. The eye does not hear, nor the ear nor the tongue see, nor the ear nor the eye speak, but both live; the functions are diverse, the life common. So is the Church of God. In some saints it works miracles; in others gives voice to the truth; in others, again, maintains the virginal life; in others keeps conjugal fidelity; in these one thing, in those another; each have their proper work, but all alike live. Now, what the soul is to the human body, that is the Holy Spirit to the body of Christ, which is the Church: what the soul does in all the limbs of an individual body, that does the Holy Spirit in the whole Church. But see what you have to avoid, what to observe, and what to fear. It happens that, in the human body, or in any other body, some member may be cut off, hand, finger, or foot. Does the soul follow it when cut off? As long as it was in the body it lived: when cut off, it loses life. So too the Christian man is a Catholic while he lives in the body; when cut off, he becomes a heretic; the Spirit does not follow the amputated limb.”⁷⁸

But what is this “power of the Holy Ghost coming upon men”? It is the whole treasure of truth and grace, which dwelt first in the natural body of Christ, which He came to bestow on men, which He withdrew not when He ascended, but of which He promised the continuance in the Person of the Holy Ghost, and fulfils by that Person indwelling in the Church. It was the imparting the whole treasure of truth and grace by such an indwelling which made it expedient for Him to go, which made His bodily departure not a loss, but a gain, which was “the promise” of which He spoke on that last night, and which was expressly declared to be a perpetual presence, leading, as it were, by the hand⁷⁹ into all truth – an all-powerful, all-completing, all-compensating presence, such as that alone is or can be which maintains the intellect of man in truth, because it maintains his will in grace: and, instead of the two wild horses of which the great heathen⁸⁰ spoke, guides the soul in her course as borne aloft on those twin divine yoke-fellows,⁸¹ faith and charity.

Correlative, therefore, to the Person of Him who is at once King, and God, and Head, and Bridegroom, and Father, is that singular creation of His Spirit, by which, in the Kingdom, Temple, Body, Spouse, and Mother, He deposited the treasure of the truth and grace which He became man to communicate. It was not as individual men, living a life apart, but as common children of one race, joint members of one body, that the guilt of the first father fell upon them; it is only on them as children of a higher race and members of a far greater body, that the grace of the Deliverer is bestowed. The distinctions of race and the divisions of condition drop away as they are baptised into one body, and made to drink of one spirit. The new and supernatural life cannot be communicated save by this act of engrafting into a new body. As Eve from the side of Adam sleeping, so the Church from the side of Christ suffering; as Eve bears still to Adam the children of men, so the Church to Christ the children of Christ. These are not two mysteries, but one, unfathomable in both its parts, of justice and of mercy; but the whole history of the human race bears witness to the first, and the whole history of the Christian people to the second. It would be amply sufficient to prove what we have been saying, that the first communication of the supernatural life is conferred by being baptised into one body and made to drink into one spirit. But this is not all. There is a yet dearer and more precious gift, which maintains and increases the life so given. Our Lord stands in the midst of His Church visibly forming from day to day and from age to age that Body of His which reaches through the ages; He takes from Himself and gives to us. He incorporates Himself in His children. He grows up in us, and by visible streams from His heart maintains the life first given. Here, above all, is the one Christ, the Head and the Body. This is but an elemental truth of Christian faith, though it is the highest joy of the Christian heart. It was in an instruction to catechumens that S. Augustine said, “Would you understand the Body of Christ? Hear the Apostle saying to the faithful, ‘But you are the Body and the members of Christ.’ If, then, you are Christ's Body and His members, it is your own mystery which is placed on the Lord's table; it is your own mystery which you receive. It is to what you are that you reply amen, and by replying subscribe. For you are told, ‘the Body of Christ,’ and you reply, amen. Be a member of the Body of Christ, and let your amen be true. Why, then, in bread? Let us bring here nothing of our own, but listen to the Apostle himself again and again, for in speaking of that sacrament he says, ‘We that are many are one bread, one body.’ Understand and rejoice. Here is unity, verity, piety, charity. One bread. Who is that one bread? We being many are one bread. Remember that the bread is not made of one, but of many grains. When you were exorcised, it was as if you were ground; when baptised, as if you were kneaded together with water; when you received the fire of the Holy Ghost, it was your baking. Be what you see, and receive what you are. This the Apostle said of the bread. Of the chalice what we should understand is clear enough even unsaid. For as to make the visible species of bread many grains are kneaded with water into one, as if that were taking place which Holy Scripture records of the faithful, ‘they had one mind and one heart in God,’ so also in the case of the wine. Many grapes hang on the bunch, but their juice is poured together into one. So too Christ the Lord signified us; willed us to belong to Himself; consecrated on His own table the mystery of our peace and unity. He who receives the mystery of unity and holds not the bond of peace receives not a mystery for himself, but a witness against himself.”⁸²

Thus the coherence of the natural and mystical Body of Christ was at once exhibited and effected in the great central act of Christian worship, and the whole fruit of the Incarnation was seen springing from the Person of Christ, and bestowed on men as His members in the unity of one Body. Thus were they taken out of the isolation, distraction, and enmity – that state of mutual strife and disorder which heathendom expresses – and made into the one divine commonwealth; and thus the Body of Christ grows to its full stature and perfect form through all the ages of Christendom.

And if there be one conviction which, together with the belief in the Incarnation itself of the Word, is common to all the Fathers, Doctors, Saints, and Martyrs of the Church – which together with that belief and as part of it is the ground of their confidence in trouble, of their perseverance in enduring, of their undoubting faith in times of persecution, of their assurance of final victory, it is the sense which encompassed their whole life, that they were members of one Body, which, in virtue of an organic unity in itself and with its Head, was to last for ever. The notion that this Body, as such, could fail, that it could cease to be the treasure-house of the divine truth and grace, would have struck them with as much horror as the notion that Christ had not become incarnate, and was not their Redeemer. The Body which the Holy Ghost animated on the day of Pentecost never ceased to be conscious of its existence – conscious that the power of its Head, the Eternal Truth, was in it, and would be in it for ever. Confidence in himself as an individual member of the Body, the Christian had not, for he knew that through his personal sinfulness grace might be withdrawn from him, and that he might fall away; confidence he did not place either in his own learning, knowledge, and sanctity, or in these gifts as belonging to any individual Christian; his confidence lay in the King who reigned in an everlasting Kingdom, in the Head who animated an incorruptible Body. To sever these two would have been to decapitate Christ.⁸³ The thought that the Bride of Christ could herself become an adulteress, and teach her children the very falsehoods of that idol-worship which she was created to overthrow, would have appeared to him the denial of all Christian belief. And such a denial indeed it is to any mind which, receiving the Christian truth as a divine gift, looks for it also to have a logical cohesion with itself, to be consistent and complete, to be a body of truth, not a bundle of opinions. Let us take once more S. Augustine as expressing, not a private feeling, but the universal Christian sense, when he thus reprehended the Donatist pretension, that truth had deserted the Body of the Church to dwell in the province of Africa. “But, they say, that Church which was the Church of all nations exists no longer. She has perished. This they say who are not in her. O shameless word! The Church is not because thou art not in her. See, lest therefore thou be not, for though thou be not, she will be. This word, abominable, detestable, full of presumption and falsehood, supported by no truth, illuminated by no wisdom, seasoned with no sense, vain, rash, precipitate, and pernicious – this it was which the Spirit of God foresaw, and as against these very men, when He foretold unity in that saying, ‘To announce the name of the Lord in Zion, and his worship in Jerusalem, when the peoples and kingdoms join together in one that they may serve the Lord.’ ”⁸⁴

Now, to suppose that anything which is false has been, or is, or can be taught by the Church of God, is to overthrow the one idea which runs through the titles of the Kingdom, Temple, Body, and Spouse of Christ, it is to make the Mother of His children an adulteress, to deny that power of the Holy Ghost coming down on the day of Pentecost, and abiding for ever, with His special function of leading into all truth, that presence of the Comforter in virtue of which the Apostles said for themselves and for the Church through all time, “It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.” With all men who reason, such a supposition is equivalent to the statement that Christ has failed in what He came on earth to do, for “the Word was made flesh that He might become the Head of the Church.”⁸⁵ Next, therefore, in atrocity to that blasphemy which assaults the blessed Trinity in Unity upon His throne is the miserable and heartless blasphemy which, by imputing corruption of the truth to the very Kingdom and Temple, the very Body and Spouse of the Truth Himself, the Incarnate God, would declare the frustration of that purpose which He became man to execute, the falsifying of that witness of which He spoke in the hall of Pilate, and would so annihilate that glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good-will, which was the angelic song on the morning of His birth, and is daily⁸⁶ in the mouth of His Bride. The truth can as little cease out of the House and Temple of God as the Father and Son can cease sending the Spirit to dwell in it: the truth can as little cease to be proclaimed and taught in its own kingdom as the King can cease to reign in it. The conjugal faith of the Bride of Christ cannot fail, because He remains her Bridegroom. The power of the Head, the double power of truth and grace, cannot cease to rule and vivify His Body, because He is its Head for ever. The Mother cannot deceive her children, because she is of one flesh with the Son of Man, in the union of an unbroken wedlock.

It has been said above that the power of that bond which from the origin of man united the race to its head was shown not only in the guilt which the act of that head was able to inflict on the body, not only in the exact transmission of the same nature, thus stained, from age to age, but likewise in that social character of the race in virtue of which such a thing as a man entirely independent of his fellow men, neither acting upon them, nor acted upon by them, never has existed nor can exist. It was in that connected mass which this social nature creates, that corporate unity of human society, that heathenism appeared most terrible, because corruption seemed to propagate itself, and evil by this force of cohesion to become almost impregnable. But it was especially in creating a corporate unity which should show the force of our social nature for good, as the corruption had shown it for evil, that the power of the Restorer shines forth. The true Head of our race came to redeem and sanctify not so many individuals but His Body. Surely there is no distinction more important to bear in mind.⁸⁷ “No single member by itself can make a body; each of them fails in this; coöperation is required, for when many become one, there is one body. The being or not being a body depends on being united or not united into one.” And, again, beautiful as the individual member, the hand or the eye, may be in itself, far higher is the beauty which belongs to the body as the whole in which these members coalesce and are one. Each member too has a double energy, its own proper work, and that which it contributes to the body's unity, for this is a higher work which the coöperation of all produces; each a double beauty, its beauty as a part, and that which it adds to the whole: and these two, which seem to be separate, have the closest connection, for a maimed limb impairs the whole body's force, and as to its beauty, as it is incomparably finer than the beauty of any part, so is it marred by a slight defect in one part, as the fairest face would be spoilt by the absence of eyebrows, the fairest eyes lose their lustre, and the countenance its light, by the want of eyelashes. It is, then, in the beauty of the Body of Christ that the Christian mind would exult, not merely in the several graces of those who are its members, but in that corporate unity which they present. We see in the course of the world that great image of the prophet, lofty in stature and terrible to behold, whose head is of gold, whose breast and arms of silver, the thighs of brass, the legs of iron, the toes mixed of iron and clay. This is the form of the first Adam, seen in his race; and over against it likewise is the one man Christ, forming through the ages, gathering His members in a mightier unity. This is the Word made flesh, the Second Adam, “so that the whole human race is, as it were, two men, the First and the Second.”⁸⁸

So much, then, is the creation of the Church superior to the creation of a single Christian as the creation of a body is superior to that of a single bone or muscle. This superiority belongs to the nature of a body as such. It is another thought, which we only suggest here, whose body it is. And here it appears in two very different conditions, the one as it is seen by us now, the other as it will be seen hereafter. There is, I conceive, no subject in all human history comparable in interest to that which the divine commonwealth as such, when traced through the eighteen centuries which it has hitherto run, presents. What nation can be compared to this nation? what people to this people? what labours to its labours? what sufferings to its sufferings? what conflicts to those which it has endured? what triumphs to those which it has gained? what duration to that portion only of its years which is as yet run out? what promise to its future? what performance to its past? What is the courage and self-denial, what is the patience and generosity, what the genius, the learning, the sustained devotion to any work, shown by any human race, compared to those which are to be found in this race of the Divine Mother? How do those who are enamoured of nationalities fail to see the glories of this nation, before which all others pale their ineffectual fires? How do those with whom industry is a chief virtue, and stubborn perseverance the crowning praise, not acknowledge her whose work is undying and whose endurance never fails? These men admire greatness and worship success. Let them look back fourteen hundred years, when that great world-statue seemed to be breaking up into the iron and clay which ran through its feet. Then this kingdom was already great and glorious, and crowned with victory, and filled the earth. The toes of that statue have meanwhile run out into ten kingdoms, and the islands which were forest and swamp when this kingdom commenced have become the head of a dominion which can be mentioned beside that of old Rome; but still in undiminished grandeur the great divine republic stands over against all these kingdoms, penetrates through them, stretches beyond them, and while they grow, mature, and decay, and power passes from one to the other, her power ceases not, declines not, changes not, but shows the beauty of youth upon the brow of age, and amid the confusion of Babel her pentecostal unity. If success be worshipful, worship it here; if power be venerable, bow before its holiest shrine.

But if this be the Body of Christ here in its state of humiliation, during which it repeats the passion of its Head, if these be the grains of wheat now scattered among the chaff,⁸⁹ what is that one mass to be which these shall make when the threshing-floor is winnowed out? We see the Body in its preliminary state of suffering, where it has a grandeur, a duration, and a beauty like nothing else on earth. What it shall be in its future state S. John saw when he called it the great City invested with the glory of God, the Bride adorned for her husband; and S. Paul hints, when he speaks of the perfect man compacted and fitly framed together by what every joint supplies, and grown up to full stature in the Head. There is in the redeemed, not only the exceeding greatness of the quality of their salvation, that is, the gift of divine sonship; nor, again, that this gift is heightened by its being the purchase of the Son of God, so that He is not ashamed to call those brethren whom He has first washed in His own blood: but over and above all this, one thing more, that the whole mass of the redeemed and adopted are not so many souls, but the Body of Christ. Faint shadows, indeed, to our earthly senses are House and Temple, Kingdom and City paved with precious stones of that mighty unity of all rational natures, powers, and virtues, each with the perfection of his individual being, each with the superadded lustre of membership in a marvellous whole, under the Headship of Christ. The exceeding glory of this creation, which will be the wonder of all creation through eternity, is that God the Word made flesh, the Head and His Body, make one thing, not an inorganic, but an organised unity, the glorified Body of a glorified Head.

Once more let us note the consistency and unbroken evolution of the divine plan.

In the first creation of the human race the Body of Christ is not only foretold but prefigured, not only prefigured but expressed in the very words uttered by Adam in his ecstasy, the words of God delineating that act of God, the greatest of all His acts of power, wisdom, and goodness, whereby becoming man, and leaving His Father and His Mother,⁹⁰ He would cleave to the wife He so took, the human nature which in redeeming He espoused. This, and no other, was the reason why Eve was formed out of Adam. It is the beginning of the divine plan, which is coherent throughout, which was designed in the state of innocency, which remains intended through the state of guilt, which is unfolded in the state of grace, which is completed in the state of glory, when what that forming of Eve from the side of Adam, and of the Church from the side of her Lord, what that growth through thousands of years, through multitudinous conflicts, through unspeakable sorrows, through immeasurable triumphs, shall finally issue in, shall be seen by those whom the Second Adam has made worthy of that vision, and by whom it is seen enjoyed.

Chapter IX. The Second Man Verified In History

“Magnum principium, et regni ejus non erit finis. Deus fortis, dominator, princeps pacis.”

In order to complete the view taken in the preceding chapter of the work of Christ as the second Adam over against the work of the first Adam, it is necessary to dwell at greater length upon a point of which only cursory mention was made therein. It was our object there to bring out the relation of Christ to the Church, but this cannot be done without fully exhibiting the relation to the same Church of the Holy Spirit. To the Incarnation the Fathers in general give the title of the Dispensation of the Son, and as the equivalent, the result, the complement and crown of this Dispensation, they put the Giving of the Spirit.⁹¹ This Giving of the Spirit occupies the whole region of grace, and is coextensive with the whole action of the Incarnate God upon men whom He has taken to be His brethren. The Holy Spirit in this Giving is He who represents the Redeemer, and executes His will, not as an instrument, not as one subordinate, but as the very mind of Christ between whom and Christ there can far less enter any notion of division or separation than between a man and his own spirit. He is that other Paraclete, abiding for ever, who replaces to the disciples the visible absence of the first Paraclete, the Redeemer Himself: He is the Power constituting the Kingdom of Christ; the Godhead inhabiting His Temple; the Soul animating His mystical Body; the Charity, kindling into a living flame the heart of His Bride; the Creator and Father of His Race.

This connection between the Dispensation of the Son and the Giving of the Spirit was delineated by our Lord himself when He first appeared to His assembled disciples after His resurrection. As they were gazing in wonder and trembling joy on that Body which had undergone His awful passion, as He showed them the wounds in His hands and His feet, He told them how His sufferings were the fulfilment of all that in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms had been written concerning Him. And thereupon it is said, He opened their mind to the understanding of these Scriptures. It was thus that the Christ was to suffer, it was thus that He was to rise again on the third day. Hitherto He has dwelt upon His own dispensation, as the fulfilment of all prophecy, now He proceeds to its fruit: that in the name of this Christ repentance and remission of sins should be proclaimed to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you,” He says, “are the witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but stay you in the city of Jerusalem until you be endued with power from on high.” Again, at another occasion of equal solemnity, when He was with His assembled disciples in visible form for the last time, at the moment preceding His ascension, He uses the same emphatic words, charging them not to depart from the city, but to await there that promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Ghost, which they were to receive in common together, which was to be the power in virtue of which they should be His witnesses for all time unto the ends of the earth: the power which instead of restoring a local kingdom to Israel, as was in their thoughts when they questioned Him, was to create an universal kingdom to Him in the hearts of men. It is then as the result of His passion, and the token of His resurrection, that the Son sends down upon His disciples the promise of the Father, that is, the perpetual presence of the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit of Truth and Grace, that permanent and immanent power from on high, who, dwelling for ever in the disciples, makes the Church.

But these words, so singular and so forcible, which He uses on these two occasions, at His resurrection and His ascension, are themselves a reference to the long discourse which He had held with His apostles on the night of His passion. It is in this discourse, from the moment that Judas left them to the conclusion of the divine prayer – and if we can make any distinction in His words, surely these are the most solemn which were ever put together in human language, since they are the prayer not of a creature to the Creator, but the prayer of One divine Person to Another – it is in this discourse that He describes the power from on high with which, as the promise of the Father, He, the Son, would invest His disciples. It is here He says that He would ask the Father, who should give them another Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, to abide with them for ever: whom the world would not receive, nor see, nor know, but whom they should know, because He should abide with them and be in them. This other Paraclete, coequal therefore with Himself, whom the Father should send in His name, and whom He should send from the Father, the Spirit of holiness as well as the Spirit of truth, should teach them all things and remind them of all His teaching. And His coming, though invisible, should profit them more than His own visible presence. For while He declared Himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life,⁹² He revealed to them here that it was by that very way that the Spirit of truth should lead them by the hand into all truth. It was in this Truth, that is, in Himself, that they should be sanctified, and that they should be one, the glory of the Incarnation, which had been given to Him, passing on to them as the members of His Body, by the joint possession of the spirit of truth and holiness, whose presence was the gage that the Father loved them, as He loved Christ, the Body being identified with the Head. In all this He was describing to them the work of that other Paraclete, His own Spirit, “who was to sanctify what He had redeemed, and to guard and maintain possession of what He had acquired.”⁹³ This is but a small portion of that abundant revelation, which our Lord then communicated to His apostles, concerning the Power from on high with which they were to be invested.

The words of our Lord to His apostles at the three great points of His passion, His resurrection, and His ascension, stand out beyond the rest in their appeal to our affections. The last words of a friend are the dearest, and these are the last words of the Bridegroom, and they are concerning His Bride. When He was Himself quitting His disciples He dwells upon the Power which was to create and maintain His Church, upon the gift of His Spirit, His other self, in which gift lay the formation of His kingdom. It is thus He expresses to us the point with which we started, that the Giving of His Spirit is the fulfilment of all that Dispensation wherein the eternal Word took human flesh.

It is not only then the unanimous voice of the Fathers which sets the Giving of the Spirit over against the Incarnation of the Son. They are but carrying on that which our Lord so markedly taught; their tradition was but the echo of His voice, as their life was the fulfilment of it.

But it was a double malady in man which God the Word became man to cure. It was the whole nature which was affected with a taint, and the soul through the whole race touched in both its powers of the intellect⁹⁴ and the will. That false worship which we have seen spreading through the earth, and that deep corruption of manners which was interlaced with it, were the symptoms of this malady. The perversion of the truth concerning the being of God, and all the duties of man which grow out of this being, was inextricably blended with the disregard of these duties in the actual conduct of man. It was in vain to set the truth before man's intellect without a corresponding power to act upon his will. Therefore the apostle described the glory of the only-begotten Son, when He dwelt as man among us, by the double expression that He was “full of grace and truth.” Viewed as the Head of human nature, its Father and new beginning, He is the perpetual fountain to it of these two, which no law, not even one divinely given, could bestow. For the law could make nothing perfect, because it could not touch the will; and the law gave the shadow, but not the very truth of things. But when that unspeakable union of the divine nature with the human had taken effect in the unity of one Person, Truth and Grace had an everlasting human fountain in the created nature of the Incarnate Word. Now was the fountain to pour forth a perpetual stream upon the race assumed. And this it does by the descent of the Spirit. In this descent upon the assembled Church the Grace and Truth of the divine Head, with which His Flesh, carried by the Godhead, overstreams, find themselves a human dwelling in the race. Such an operation belongs only to the Divine Spirit, for God alone can so act upon the intellect and will of creatures as to penetrate them with His gifts of Truth and Grace, while He leaves them their free will, their full individuality, as creatures. This, then, was the range of that power with which our Lord foretold to His apostles that they should be invested, and for which He bade them wait. The whole field of truth as it respects the relation of God to His creatures as moral beings, and the whole extent of grace, as it touches the human will, for the performance of every act which a reasonable creature can execute, made up the extent of that divine indwelling in men which the Spirit of Christ assumed upon the day of Pentecost. This was the power of the Holy Ghost which then came down upon men. Through the whole divine discourse which preceded His passion, our Lord dwells upon this double power, referring to Himself as the Truth, to His Spirit as the Spirit of the Truth, to Himself as the Vine, and so that root of grace which should communicate its sap to the branches, and to His Spirit, who should take of His and give it to them; uniting both ideas of Truth and Grace in that one word, “Sanctify them in thy Truth,” that is by incorporation with me, who am the Truth, in my Spirit, who is the Truth. And so the eternal Word, having assumed a human Body, when He withdraws His corporal presence, proceeds to form that other human Body, the dwelling-place of His Spirit, in which His Truth and Grace are to become visible.

Thus the transfusion of Truth and Grace from the Incarnate Word to His mystical Body is the generic character of the Giving of the Spirit.

Two differential marks distinguish this giving from any which preceded the coming of our Lord.

First, the Spirit should come upon them, but should never depart from them. “He shall give you another Comforter, to abide with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth.” This giving was not an intermittent operation, whether extraordinary, such as had shown itself in Moses and the Prophets, for their inspiration in writing, or their guidance in particular trials, nor that ordinary one whereby from the beginning He had enabled all the good and just to lead a life acceptable to Him. It was a far higher gift,⁹⁵ wherein, as S. Augustine says, by the very presence of His majesty no longer the mere odour of the balsam, but the substance itself of the sacred unguent was poured into those vessels, making them His temple, and conveying that adoption in virtue of which they should not be left orphans, but have their Father invisibly with them for ever. No intermittent operation, and no presence less than that of His substance, would reach the force of the words used by our Lord, “I will ask the Father, and He shall send you another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, to abide with you for ever;” for that word “other” conveys a comparison with Himself, from whom they had never been separated since He had called them, in whose continuance with them alone was their strength, their unity, their joint existence and mission, without whom they could do nothing. All this to them that “other” Paraclete was to be, in order that the departure of the Former Paraclete should be expedient for them. For in this continuity of His presence was involved the further gift that the Paraclete was to come to them as a Body, and because of this manner of coming He replaced the Former. Had He come to them only as individuals, they would have suffered a grievous loss, the loss of the Head who made them one. But He came to them as the Body of Christ, and by coming made them that Body, being the Spirit of the Head. That rushing mighty wind filled the whole house in which they were sitting, and they all were filled together with the presence; and as a sign that the old confusion and separation of mankind were in them to be done away, speaking in one tongue the one truth which was evermore to dwell with them, they were heard in all the various languages of the nations present at the feast. “The society by which men are made the one Body of the only Son of God belongs to the Spirit,”⁹⁶ and He came upon all together in one House to indicate, as He made, that one Body. “The mode of giving,” says S. Augustine, “was such as never before appeared. Nowhere do we read before that men congregated together had by receiving the Holy Ghost spoken with the tongues of all nations.”⁹⁷ “Therefore He came upon Pentecost as upon His birthday.”⁹⁸

It is His presence alone which confers four gifts upon the body which He vivifies.

It was the will, says S. Augustine,⁹⁹ of the Father and the Son that we should have communion with each other and with Them by means of that which is common to Them, and by that gift to collect us into one, which, being one, They both have; that is to say, by the Holy Ghost, who is God, and the gift of God. For, says S. Thomas,¹⁰⁰ the unity of the Holy Spirit makes unity in the Church. It is not by similarity, or by juxtaposition, or by agreement, how much less by concessions and compromises, that unity exists in the body of Christ, but because the Spirit is one, because all gifts, however various, all functions, however distinct, are distributed by this One.

For the same reason truth dwells in this Body, because He is the Spirit of Truth. Our Lord Himself has defined His great function in this particular, to lead His disciples by the hand¹⁰¹ into all truth, to teach all things, and remind of all things which made up His own teaching. This function began on the day of Pentecost, and lasts to the day of judgment, and belongs to the Body of Christ, and to it alone, and belongs to it because it is animated by the Spirit of Truth. And this animation is like the Head, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is not of any past time more or less than of the present or the future. It is the illumination which belongs to that whole last day, through which the Body of Christ grows, teaches, labours, and suffers, until the mortal day break into the light of eternity.

His third gift to the Body is that of charity, and for the same reason, because He is this Himself. He who is not only the Unity of the Father and the Son, but their mutual Love, coming as the gift of that Divine love which redeemed the world by the sacrifice of its Maker, and as the Spirit of that Love, who invested Himself with human flesh, creates in this human dwelling-place that one charity which bears His name, and is of His nature, and which in that one body joins the wills of men together as His Truth joins their intellects. If the Body of Christ has one prevailing charity, which reaches to all its members, and encompasses the least as well as the greatest, it is because the heart is divine.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

1

Tertull. Apolog. xxiv, “Ideo et Ægyptiis permissa est tam vanæ superstitionis potestas, avibus et bestiis consecrandis, et capite damnandis qui aliquem hujusmodi Deum occiderint. Unicuique etiam provinciæ et civitati suus Deus est, ut Syriæ Astartes, ut Arabiæ Disares, ut Noricis Belenus, ut Africæ Cælestis, ut Mauritaniæ Reguli sui,” &c.; and Minucius Felix, Octavius vi., in like manner.

Back

2

See Aug. de Civ. Dei, l. viii. 24.

Back

3

Döllinger, Heidenthum und Judenthum, pp. 528, 529.

Back

4

From Heidenthum und Judenthum, pp. 101-2.

Back

5

Heidenthum und Judenthum, p. 480.

Back

6

Heidenthum und Judenthum, p. 107.

Back

7

Heidenthum und Judenthum, p. 469.

Back

8

Ibid. pp. 468, 480.

Back

9

Heidenthum und Judenthum, p. 344.

Back

10

Ibid. p. 312.

Back

11

“Epulæ, lectisternia, nudipedalia.”

Back

12

These incidents are taken from various places in Heidenthum und Judenthum, pp. 531, 549, 550, &c.

Back

13

Champagny, Les Antonins, liv. v. c. 3.

Back

14

De Divinat. ii. 72.

Back

15

Valerius Max. i. c. 2, 3.

Back

16

Merivale's History of the Romans, ii. 447.

Back

17

See Varro, quoted by S. Aug. De Civ. Dei, lib. vi. 5.

Back

18

De Civ. Dei, l. vi. 5, 6, 7.

Back

19

“Illam theatricam et fabulosam theologiam ab ista civili pendere noverunt, et ei de carminibus poetarum tanquam de speculo resultare: et ideo ista exposita, quam damnare non audent, illam ejus imaginem liberius arguunt.” De Civ. Dei, vi. 9; id. vi. 7.

Back

20

“Quæ sunt ergo illa sacra quibus agendis tales elegit sanctitas quales nec thymelica in se admittit obscœnitas.” De Civ. Dei, vi. 7.

Back

21

“Omnes cultores talium deorum – magis intuentur quid Jupiter fecerit, quam quid docuerit Plato vel censuerit Cato.” De Civ. Dei, ii. 7.

Back

22

De Civ. Dei, ii. 6. “Demonstrentur vel commemorentur loca – ubi populi audirent quid dii præciperent de cohibenda avaritia, ambitione frangenda, luxuria refrænanda.” See also sec. 28.

Back

23

See Heidenthum und Judenthum, p. 398. Herodotus, i. 199. Baruch, vi. 42-3.

Back

24

See S. Athan, con. Gentes, 5-9. In like manner S. Theophilus, lib. i. ad Autolyc. c. 2.

Back

25

In order to form a notion how far this division of gods could descend, and what an incredible depth of turpitude it reached, see De Civ. Dei, l. vi. c. 9, de officiis singulorum deorum. Its foulness prevents any adequate representation of it.

Back

26

See S. Thomas, Summa, 2, 2, q. 94, a. 4.

Back

27

Of this whole polytheism in the mass S. Paul pronounces the judgment: Οἵτινες μετήλλαξαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν τῷ ψεύδει, καὶ ἐσεβάσθησαν καὶ ἐλάτρευσαν τῇ κτίσει παρὰ τὸν κτίσαντα. Rom. i. 25. And the Psalmist adds: Ὅτι πάντες οἱ θεοὶ τῶν ἐθνῶν δαιμόνια; ὁ δὲ Κύριος τοὺς οὐρανοὺς ἐποίησεν. Sept. xcv. 5. See also Ps. cv. 37.

Back

28

See John xii. 31; xiv. 30; xvi. 11; Luke xxii. 53; x. 19; Apoc. xii. 9; Heb. ii. 14; 1 John v. 18; Ephes. vi. 12; ii. 2; 2 Cor. iv. 3.

Back

29

These two subjects occupy respectively the first five and the second five books of S. Augustine's City of God, where the argument is carried out in great detail.

Back

30

Rom. i. 20. See the Stoical argument for the unity of the deity in Cic. de Nat. Deor. 2.

Back

31

Tertullian de Testimonio Animæ, 2.

Back

32

Οὔτω τοίνυν ἀλογωθέντων τῶν ἀνθρώπων, καὶ οὕτω τῆς δαιμονικῆς πλάνης ἐπισκιαζούσης τὰ πανταχοῦ, καὶ κρυπτούσης τὴν περὶ τοῦ ἀληθινοῦ Θεοῦ γνῶσιν. S. Athan. de Incar. 13.

Back

33

See S. August. de Civ. Dei, viii. 24. “Immundi spiritus, eisdem simulacris arte illa nefaria colligati, cultorum suorum animas in suam societatem redigendo miserabiliter captivaverant.”

Back

34

Called by S. Athan. ἡ τῶν δαιμόνων ἀπάτη – μανία – φαντασίαι. Thus De Inc. 47. πάλαι μὲν δαίμονες ἐφαντασιασκόπουν τοὺς ἀνθρώπους. προκαταλαμβάνοντες πηγὰς ἢ ποταμοὺς, ἢ ξύλα, ἢ λίθους, καὶ οὕτω ταῖς μαγγανείαις ἐξέπληττον τοὺς ἄφρονας. Νῦν δὲ τῆς θείας ἐπιφανείας τοῦ Λόγου γεγενημένης. πέπαυται τούτων ἡ φαντασία.

Back

35

“Humana ante oculos fœde quam vita jaceretIn terris, oppressa gravi sub religione,” &c. Lucret. i. 63.

“Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.”

Virg. Geo. ii. 491.

Back

36

Acts xvi. 16.

Back

37

1 Cor. x. 21.

Back

38

Tertullian, Apologeticus, 23; S. Athanas. de Inc. 48; S. Aug. de Civ. Dei, xxi. 6, who says, “Ut autem demones illiciantur ab hominibus, prius eos ipsi astutissima calliditate seducunt, vel inspirando eorum cordibus virus occultum, vel étiam fallacibus amicitiis apparendo, eorumque paucos discipulos suos faciunt, plurimorumque doctores. Neque enim potuit, nisi primum ipsis docentibus, disci quid quisque illorum appetat, quid exhorreat, quo invitetur nomine, quo cogatur, unde magicæ artes carumque artifices exstiterunt.”

Back

39

Merivale, iii. 496.

Back

40

Beugnot, Destruction du Paganisme, i. 8.

Back

41

ῥώμη, strength; ruma, a mother's breast.

Back

42

Beugnot, i. 17.

Back

43

Οἱ ἐγχώριοι θεοί.

Back

44

S. Aug. de Trin. l. xv. c. 14, tom. viii. 984.

Back

45

S. Cyril. Alex. tom. v. 1, pp. 544, 557 a.

Back

46

S. Cyril. Alex. in Joh. x. p. 858 b.

Back

47

Petav. de Trin. lib. viii. c. 7.

Back

48

An exception must be made in favour of Persia, where the original monotheism was preserved with more or less corruption.

Back

49

“Das Heidenthum ist nichts anderes als der gefallene und nicht wiedergeborne Mensch im Grossen.” Möhler, Kirchengeschichte, i. 169.

Back

50

Suarez, de Gratia, Proleg. 4, cap. i. sec. 3.

Back

51

Suarez, de Gratia, Proleg. cap. ii. sec. 3.

Back

52

Kleutgen, die Theologie der Vorzeit, ii. p. 559.

Back

53

Suarez, de Grat. Proleg. 4, cap. v. sec. 3.

Back

54

Kleutgen, die Theologie der Vorzeit, vol. ii. 650.

Back

55

This is called by S. Peter 1. i. 18 ἡ ματαία ἀναστροφὴ πατροπαράδοτος.

Back

56

The apostle speaks here not of “wickedness,” but of a personal agent, “the wicked or malignant one;” as the context shows. “He who is born of God keeps himself, and the malignant one touches him not. We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the malignant one.” 1 John v. 18, 19.

Back

57

Gal. iv. 4. τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου.

Back

58

τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος. Rom. v. 14. “Forma futuri e contrario Christus ostenditur.” S. Aug. tom. x. 1335.

Back

59

“Adam unus est, in quo omnes peccaverunt, quia non solum ejus imitatio peccatores facit, sed per carnem generans pœna: Christus unus est, in quo omnes justificentur, quia non solum ejus imitatio justos facit, sed per spiritum regenerans gratia.” S. Aug. tom. x. p. 12 c.

Back

60

John xvii. 4.

Back

61

S. Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles, l. i. c. 1.

Back

62

John xviii. 37. “Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, to bear witness unto the truth.”

Back

63

Acts i. 8; Luke xxiv. 49.

Back

64

See S. Aug. tom. iv. 1039 e. “Ipse ergo Adam,” &c.

Back

65

Οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐσμὲν, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ κεῖται; οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἥκει, καὶ δέδωκεν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν ἵνα γινώσκωμεν τὸν ἀληθινόν; καὶ ἐσμὲν ἐν τῷ ἀληθινῷ, ἐν τῷ υἱῷ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. 1 Joh. v. 19. Two persons are here opposed to each other, ὁ πονηρός and ὁ ἀληθινός. Compare the Lord's Prayer, ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ. Matt. vi. 13 and Joh. xvii. 14, 15. ἐγὼ δέδωκα αὐτοῖς τὸν λόγον σου, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ἐμίσησεν αὐτοὺς, ὅτι οὐκ εἰσὶν ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, καθὼς ἐγὼ οὐκ εἰμὶ ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου. οὐκ ἐρωτῶ ἵνα ἀρῇς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου, ἀλλ᾽ ἵνα τηρησῇς αὐτοὺς ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ.

Back

66

Heb. iii. 1-6; Ephes. ii. 19-22; 1 Cor. iii. 9, 10-15; 2 Cor. vi. 16; 1 Peter ii. 4, 5.

Back

67

Τοῦτο γὰρ ἐστὶ τὸ συνέχον τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὸ κήρυγμα. S. Chrys. in loc. Compare S. Irenæus, lib. i. c. 10. Τοῦτο τὸ κήρυγμα παρειληφυῖα, καὶ ταύτην τὴν πίστιν, ὡς προέφαμεν, ἡ Ἐκκλησία, καίπερ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ κόσμῳ διεσπαρμένη, ἐπιμελῶς φυλάσσει, ὡς ἕνα οἶκον οἰκοῦσα.

Back

68

S. Aug. in Ps. ix. tom. iv. 51.

Back

69

Ibid. in Ps. cxxxi. tom. iv. 1473.

Back

70

Petavius on the Headship of Christ.

Back

71

Passaglia de Ecclesia.

Back

72

S. Cyprian de Unitate, 5.

Back

73

All these five relations between Christ and the Church are mentioned in one passage of S. Paul, Ephes. v. 22-33.

Back

74

Luke i. 35. Πνεῦμα ἅγιον ἐπελεύσεται ἐπί σε, καὶ δύναμις ὑψίστου ἐπισκιάσει σοι. Acts i. 8. λήψεσθε δύναμιν, ἐπελθόντος τοῦ ἁγίου Πνεύματος ἐφ᾽ ὑμᾶς. Luke xxiv. 49. ἕως οὗ ἐνδύσησθε δύναμιν ἐξ ὕψους.

Back

75

The Church is so called by S. Augustine.

Back

76

These five are taken from Passaglia de Ecclesia, lib. i. cap. 3, p. 34, 5.

Back

77

Compare S. Athanasius cont. Arian. de Incarn. p. 877 c. – καὶ ὅταν λέγῃ ὁ Πέτρος, ἀσφαλῶς οὖν γινωσκέτω πᾶς οἶκος Ἰσραὴλ ὅτι καὶ Κύριον καὶ Χριστὸν αὐτον ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τοῦτον τὸν Ἰησοῦν ὂν ὑμεῖς ἐσταυρώσατε, οὐ περὶ τῆς Θεότητος αὐτοῦ λέγει, ὅτι καὶ Κύριον αὐτὸν καὶ Χριστὸν ἐποίησεν, ἀλλὰ περὶ τῆς ἀνθρωπότητος αὐτοῦ, ἥτις ἐστι πᾶσα ἡ ἐκκλησία, ἡ ἐν αὐτῷ κυριεύουσα καὶ βασιλεύουσα, μετὰ τὸ αὐτὸν σταυρωθῆναι; καὶ χριομένη εἰς βασίλειαν οὐρανῶν, ἵνα συμβασιλεύσῃ αὐτῷ, τῷ δι᾽ αὐτὴν ἑαυτὸν κενώσαντι, καὶ ἀναλαβόντι αὐτὴν διὰ τῆς δουλικῆς μορφῆς.

Back

78

S. Aug. serm. 267, tom. v. p. 1090 e.

Back

79

Luke xxiv. 49 and John xvi. 13. ἐκεῖνος, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ὁδηγήσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν; and 14, 15. ἐγὼ ἐρωτήσω τὸν Πατέρα, καὶ ἄλλον παράκλητον δώσει ὑμῖν, ἵνα μένῃ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, τὸ πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας.

Back

80

Plato.

Back

81

πανταχοῦ συνάπτει καὶ συγκολλᾷ τὴν πίστιν καὶ τὴν ἀγάπην, θαυμαστήν τινα ξυνωρίδα. S. Chrys. 3d Hom. on Ephes. tom. xi. p. 16.

Back

82

S. Aug. serm. 272, tom. v. p. 1104 c.

Back

83

“Quid tibi fecit Ecclesia, ut eam velis quodammodo decollare? Tollere vis Ecclesiæ caput et capiti credere, corpus relinquere, quasi exanime corpus. Sine caussa capiti quasi famulus devotus blandiris. Qui decollare vult, et caput et corpus conatur occidere.” S. Aug. tom. v. p. 636.

Back

84

S. Aug. in Ps. ci. tom. iv. p. 1105 d.

Back

85

S. Augustine, tom. iv. p. 1677. “Elegit hic sibi thalamum castum, ubi conjungeretur Sponsus Sponsæ. Verbum caro factum est, ut fieret caput Ecclesiæ.”

Back

86

By the “Gloria in excelsis,” &c. in the Mass.

Back

87

Οὐδὲν γὰρ αὐτῶν καθ᾽ ἑαυτὸ σῶμα δύναται ποιεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ ὁμοίως ἕκαστον λείπεται εἰς τὸ ποιεῖν σῶμα, καὶ δεῖ τῆς συνόδου; ὅταν γὰρ τὰ πολλὰ ἓν γίνηται, τότε ἐστὶν ἓν σῶμα… τὸ γὰρ εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι σῶμα ἐκ τοῦ ἡνῶσθαι ἢ μὴ ἡνῶσθαι γίνεται… τῶν γὰρ μελῶν ἡμῶν ἕκαστον καὶ ἴδιαν ἐνέργειαν ἔχει καὶ κοινήν; καὶ κάλλος ὁμοίως καὶ ἴδιον καὶ κοινόν ἐστιν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ δοκεῖ μὲν διηρῆσθαι ταῦτα, συμπέπλεκται δὲ ἀκιβῶς, καὶ θατέρου διαφθαρέντος καὶ τὸ ἕτερον συναπόλλυται. S. Chrys. on 1 Cor. xii. tom. x. pp. 269, 271, 273.

Back

88

S. Aug. Op. imp. contr. Julian. lib. ii. tom. x. p. 1018 d.

Back

89

“Grana illa quæ modo gemunt inter paleas, quæ massam unam factura sunt, quando area in fine fuerit ventilata.” S. Aug. in Ps. cxxvi. tom. iv. p. 1429.

Back

90

See Origen on Matt. xiv. 17. καὶ ὁ κτίσας γε ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς τὸν κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ὃς ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπάρχων ἄῤῥεν αὐτὸν ἐποίησε, καὶ θῆλυ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, ἓν τὸ κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ἀμφοτέροις χαρισάμενος; καὶ καταλέλοιπέ γε διὰ τὴν ἐκκλήσιαν κύριος ὁ ἀνὴρ πατέρα ὃν ἑώρα, ὅτε ἐν μορφῇ Θεοῦ ὑπῆρχε, καταλέλοιπε δὲ καὶ τὴν μητέρα καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς ὢν τῆς ἂνω Ἱερουσαλὴμ, καὶ ἐκολλήθη τῇ ἐνταῦθα καταπεσούσῃ γυναικὶ αὐτοῦ, καὶ γεγόνασιν ἐνθάδε οἱ δύο εἰς σάρκα μίαν. διὰ γὰρ αὐτὴν γέγονε καὶ αὐτὸς σὰρξ, ὅτε ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ οὐκέτι γέ εἰσι δύο, ἀλλὰ νῦν μία γέ ἐστι σὰρξ, ἔπει τῇ γυναικὶ λέγεται τὸ, ὑμεῖς δέ ἐστε σῶμα Χριστοῦ καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους, οὐ γάρ ἐστί τι ἰδιᾳ Χριστοῦ σῶμα ἕτερον παρὰ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν οὖσαν σῶμα αὐτοῦ, καὶ μέλη ἐκ μέρους. καὶ ὁ Θεός γε τούτους τοὺς μη δύο ἀλλὰ γεγομένους σάρκα μίαν συνέζευζεν, ἐντελλόμενος ἵνα ἄνθρωπος μὴ χωρίζη τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἀπὸ τοῦ κυρίου.

Back

91

As S. Irenæus, v. 20. “Omnibus unum et eundem Deum Patrem præcipientibus, et eamdem dispositionem incarnationis Filii Dei credentibus, et eamdem donationem Spiritus scientibus;” and S. Aug. tom. v. app. p. 307 f. “Ecce iterum humanis divina miscentur, id est, Vicarius Redemtoris: ut beneficia quæ Salvator Dominus inchoavit peculiari Spiritus Sancti virtute consummet, et quod ille redemit, iste sanctificet, quod ille acquisivit, iste custodiat.” This striking sermon is quoted by Petavius as genuine, but placed by the Benedictines in the appendix.

Back

92

There is in the original words here something which is lost both in the Vulgate and in the English translation. First, c. xiv. 6. ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια, καὶ ἡ ζωή; then c. xvi. 13. ὅταν δὲ ἔλθη ἐκεῖνος τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ὁδηγίσει ὑμᾶς εἰς πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν. As Christ is the ὁδὸς, so His Spirit is the ὁδηγῶν. “Ego sum via et veritas; ille vos docebit omnem veritatem,” does not render this: and as little, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; He shall lead you into all truth.”

Back

93

S. Aug., quoted above in note.

Back

94

This word is used as the equivalent of λόγος, ratio, Vernunft, in man.

Back

95

See Petavius de Trin. vii. 7, where he states it to be the general belief of the ancient writers that a new and substantial presence of the Holy Ghost began at the day of Pentecost.

Back

96

S. Aug. tom. v. 398 g.

Back

97

S. Aug. tom. iii. pp. 2, 527.

Back

98

Ib. tom. v. 47.

Back

99

Ib. tom. v. 392 e.

Back

100

S. Thomas in Joh. i. lec. 10: “Nam unitas Spiritus Sancti facit in Ecclesia unitatem.”

Back

101

ὁδηγεῖν.

Back