PAGANISM & CHRISTIANITY 
 
PAGANISM 
 
 AND 
 
 CHRISTIANITY 
 
 BY 
 
 J. A. FAKKER 
 I 
 
 " Res ipsa, quae nimc religio Christiana nuncupatur, erat apud 
 itiquos nee defuit ab initio generis humani." ST. AUGUSTINE. 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH 
 ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 
 
 1891 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IF any great classical writers of the ancient world, 
 like Seneca or Cicero, could come to life again, 
 nothing surely would astonish them more than the 
 descriptions they might read in our books of the 
 state of the world when they left it, of its moral 
 depravity, and the absence of all religious ideas. 
 One would gladly hear what they would say to it 
 all ; but, failing that, it only remains to enter as 
 much as possible into their tone of thought, and to 
 present the case between Christianity and Paganism 
 as they might do if they could now speak for them- 
 selves, and had at their command eighteen centuries 
 of Church history and all the writings of the Fathers 
 and theologians. 
 
 In assuming on their behalf and in their stead 
 this advocacy of a literature and philosophy, repre- 
 senting a civilisation to which we still owe the 
 main and better elements of our own, I have 
 simply endeavoured to put the case of pre-Christian 
 Paganism in its best and truest light, and to meet 
 and controvert a legion of writers from the time of 
 
 897016 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 Eusebius to our own, who, in the zeal of their piety, 
 have been wont to misrepresent the state of the older 
 world, by the simple process of adding black to its 
 places of darkest shadow, and of noticing in historical 
 Christianity none but the regions of its higher lights. 
 The task of correcting this view involves no reference 
 whatever to Christianity as a religion ; its sole con- 
 cern is with such aspects of the history and teaching 
 of the Church as touched, and therefore can be com- 
 pared with, earlier systems of theology and ethics. 
 For the claims of truth and justice must be paramount 
 even here, though the matter only regards a long 
 extinct philosophy and a system of belief or fancy 
 whose sole remaining friends are among the poets. 
 It must no longer suffice to conduct to a triumphant 
 issue the comparison between Paganism and Chris- 
 tianity to contrast the worst practices or supersti- 
 tions of the lower Pagans, not with the practices or 
 superstitions of the Christians at all, but with the 
 highest and unapproached ideals of the foremost 
 Christian teachers ; to be fair we must compare ideals 
 with ideals, the best teaching of the one with the best 
 teaching of the other, the Philosophers with the Fathers, 
 in order to arrive at results which may correspond 
 with real truth, not merely with foregone conclusions. 
 The fashion alluded to, of conveying a false im- 
 pression of classical literature, coincides with that 
 other modern fashion of depreciating its utility, 
 
INTRODUCTION Vll 
 
 and both are phases of that ever-encroaching sacer- 
 dotalism of our time which is hostile to free inquiry 
 into Church history or to a free use of the human 
 reason in matters of doctrine. But a Protestant 
 Christian who holds aloof from that vortex, and 
 looks, with the complacency of a landsman on the 
 toilers of the sea, upon the frivolities of theological 
 controversy and upon the anathemas of the sects, may 
 still assert the same freedom to form his opinion about 
 the Fathers as about the Popes, and to scrutinise 
 the primitive as closely as the mediaeval Church. 
 And from that standpoint it is necessary to refer 
 briefly to the general history of the Catholic Church, 
 in order to justify the conclusions suggested by the 
 subsequent comparison between her teaching and the 
 teaching of Philosophy. 
 
 It has long been a matter of general admission 
 that, from the very infancy of the Church, questions 
 of dogma and discipline came to be of paramount 
 importance, whilst purity of life and action fell 
 into a secondary position. A man's Christianity was 
 measured less by his works than by his faith ; and to 
 think wrongly about the Trinity was soon esteemed 
 more unchristian than to deal wrongly with a neigh- 
 bour. Consequently the history of the Church be- 
 came and remained the history of its extreme and 
 more illiterate section ; and, though in its turgid 
 stream there always flowed a thin streak of the truer 
 
vili INTR OD UC TION 
 
 Christianity, and of the spirit of its Founder, the 
 gentler and more rational votaries of the new religion 
 were too few or too weak to affect either its colour 
 or its character ; they either kept in the background 
 or became outcasts and heretics. The fanatics carried 
 all before them, and Christianity came to be repre- 
 sented in history, not by the more tolerant and 
 liberal spirit of Origen, Hosius of Cordova, Synesius, 
 Paul of Samosata, Vigilantius, or Pelagius, men who 
 in becoming Christians still continued to recognise 
 and retain the virtues of Paganism, but by the nar- 
 row, intolerant spirit which has made the names of 
 Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Jerome, Dominic, 
 or Torquemada a disgrace, no less to human nature 
 itself, than to the religion they so shamefully mis- 
 construed and perverted. Whether the world would 
 have fared any better had men of this latter type never 
 been produced, no one of course can say with certi- 
 tude ; but I need not suppress my humble but strong 
 conviction in favour of the opinion that it would. 
 
 The progress of the Church, till at least quite 
 recent times, has ever been one uninterrupted triumph 
 over the Broad Church or Eational school. Since the 
 days when the bones of Origen were exhumed for 
 imputed heresy one of the most hateful incidents 
 in the annals of orthodoxy the more liberal school 
 of theology has been in a constant minority. The 
 purer ideas of the Divine attributes held by Marcion 
 
INTR OD UCTION ix 
 
 gave way before the bad reasoning of Tertullian. 
 The protests of Jovinian and Vigilantius against 
 the abuses of monasticism and relic-worship were 
 drowned in the torrent of Jerome's vituperation. 
 The more rational conclusions of Pelagius succumbed 
 to the narrow notions of Augustine ; whilst Cyril of 
 Alexandria achieved an easy victory over his intel- 
 lectual superior, Nestorius. Of course had it been 
 otherwise, had the broader spirit prevailed, the history 
 of Catholicism might have been, and no doubt would 
 have been, a less appalling narrative than it is ; but 
 for purposes of comparison we must take facts as 
 they are, nor seek to blink their significance by 
 arbitrarily representing what is bad therein as only 
 illustrative of the abuses, and not of the essence, 
 of Catholicism as a factor in history. 
 
 Looking, however, in this way at the history of 
 the Catholic Church as a whole, and perceiving 
 therein between the spirit of Christ and the spirit 
 of historical Christianity a difference amounting to 
 absolute antithesis, I am free to doubt the extent of 
 the benefit claimed for the world as a consequence 
 of the triumph of the Church under Constantine and 
 Theodosius, and to dispute the moral revolution said 
 to have been effected by the final overthrow of Philo- 
 sophy under Justinian. The problem is one chiefly 
 of historical speculation, the interest of which is at 
 least equalled by its complexity, and on which one 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 cannot look for any unanimity of conclusion. I 
 merely indicate the impression enforced by some 
 study of the subject upon my own mind. But a 
 similar impression must have been made upon Dean 
 Milman, when he wrote that "in a great degree, 
 while the Eoman world became Christian in outward 
 worship and in faith, it remained heathen, or even 
 at some periods worse than heathen in its better 
 times, as to beneficence, gentleness, purity, social 
 virtue, humanity, and peace." Which I may trans- 
 late into the plain statement, that Christianity in 
 the form it came to assume did not improve in any 
 essential respects the general state of the world. 
 
 Turning next to the contrast between the literature 
 of Paganism and that of the Church, no one can read 
 the works of the Fathers without perceiving at once 
 that he has passed, not merely from an altogether 
 different, but to an altogether lower, intellectual 
 atmosphere. Painful to the last degree is the change 
 from Cicero or Seneca to Tertullian or Augustine. 
 It is like the change from Italian sunlight to an 
 English fog. The calm, sober argument, the clear 
 thought, the graceful expression, where are they? 
 Gone, gone for ages from the enjoyment of men; 
 and their place taken by tedious prolixity, uncouth 
 language, and by a logic that would be contemptible 
 in a child. By reason of that mental servility in 
 itself the strongest proof of mental inferiority which 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 led most of them to accept without criticism the 
 letter of any Scripture, provided it were from Pales- 
 tine, all the more important arguments of the Fathers 
 simply begged the question in dispute, all their in- 
 terpretations of prophecy revolved in a vicious circle. 
 Such and such an event was foretold by such and 
 such a prophecy, because such and such a prophecy 
 foretold, or might be twisted into foretelling, such 
 and such an event ! Never did their arguments on 
 prophecy rise above this level; but of the sheer 
 irrationality to which they often descended let a 
 single illustration from Tertullian suffice. He is 
 seeking to explain to the Jews the meaning of the 
 passage : " His glory is of a bull, his horns the horn 
 of a unicorn : with them shall he push the nations 
 together into the very extremity of the earth " (Deut. 
 xxxiii. 17). A man of common sense would reject 
 the passage at once as utterly unintelligible, or as 
 applicable to any great conqueror who had troubled 
 the nations ; but with Tertullian the bull must needs 
 mean Christ, and the horns of the bull the extremi- 
 ties of that Cross wherewith he then was tossing all 
 nations through faith, wafting them from earth to 
 heaven, as he would in future toss them through 
 judgment, casting them down from heaven to earth ! 
 Nothing could surely be sillier than this, though, if not 
 surpassed, it is at least matched in the thirty-second 
 chapter of the eighteenth book of the City of God, 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 by Augustine, sometimes called, and quite possibly 
 with truth, the most philosophical of the Fathers. 
 
 Refraining, however, from further illustrations of 
 the mental calibre of the Fathers, who from their fear 
 of thinking freely lapsed into thinking badly, I must 
 also express the opinion that between them and the 
 Philosophers there is a moral no less than an intel- 
 lectual abyss ; that is to say, that a man may derive 
 more mental and spiritual profit, higher aspirations 
 for virtue, toleration, and humanity, from Seneca or 
 Marcus Aurelius than from writers like Augustine 
 and Tertullian. The moral teaching of the Pagans 
 is on a purer and higher level than that of the 
 Fathers, just as the lives of the Pagans, Praetextatus, 
 Themistius, or Libanius, rise far above those of their 
 leading Christian contemporaries. 
 
 In short, the conviction under which the following 
 pages were written, and which they are meant to 
 enforce, is, that the triumph over Paganism of that 
 type of Christianity which issued from the cauldron 
 of theological strife as the only really orthodox form ; 
 which became stereotyped in Eoman Catholicism; 
 which produced the Crusades, the religious orders, 
 and the Inquisition ; and which is now striving to 
 assert its blighting supremacy over Protestant Chris- 
 tianity, has been, not a gain, but a misfortune, to 
 the world, and has retarded rather than promoted 
 civilisation. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGAN MONOTHEISM 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Monotheism not confined to Judaea Antiquity of theism in 
 Greece Polytheism overthrown by Philosophy Theistic 
 phrases in common use among the Pagans High attributes 
 of the Deity in Pagan theology The doctrine of plurality 
 in unity Admission by Arnobius of extra - Christian 
 monotheism Hymn of Aristides to Jupiter Origen's 
 failure to answer Celsus His appeal to magic on behalf 
 of the Christians His belief in the animate life of the 
 sun, moon, and stars Theism as taught by Seneca and 
 Cicero Pagan arguments for theism from design in 
 nature ^Contrast between Hellenic and Hebraic theolog^j 
 High theological ideas of Celsus Deductions from the 
 monotheism of the early Christians {The worship of angels 
 and martyrsJ-The Pagan theory of demons Angels, 
 demons, and gods used as convertible terms Polytheistic 
 language of St. Clement and St. Augustine Polytheistic 
 belief of the early Christians Polytheism of the Jews 
 The Christian polemic against the Pagan mythology 
 inferior to that of the Philosophers ..... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PAGAN THEOLOGY 
 
 International character of ancient religion Universal belief in 
 Providence Seneca's treatise on Providence Epictetus 
 
XIV CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 on the same Providential government through angels or 
 demons jThe Pagan theory of the guardian angelj 
 Maximus oT Tyre on the problem of evil Maximus of 
 Tyre on prayer Pagan prayer for spiritual as well as 
 temporal blessings Seneca and Cicero on the highest 
 mode of worship The place of prayer in Pagan life 
 Marcus Aurelius on the due length of prayer The prayer 
 of Simplicius, the last philosopher . . . . .29 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PAGAN RELIGION 
 
 Belief in the goodness of God the first principle in the reli- 
 gion of Philosophy Man's duty towards God as taught 
 by Epictetus Resignation to the Divine Will : taught 
 alike by Pagans and Christians Religious sentiments of 
 Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius Seneca and Porphyry on 
 the imitation of God High Pagan ideas of attainable 
 moral perfection contrasted with Christian in their effects 
 on conduct Seneca on the equality between a good man 
 and Jupiter The Stoic theory of close relationship be- 
 tween God and man The universal presence of God 
 The conscience as the vicegerent of God Language of 
 the Fathers on human equality with God Porphyry's 
 letter to Marcella General religious sentiment of Pagan- 
 ism Fragmentary nature of Pagan literature Eclectic 
 philosophy Justice done by Zwingli to ancient religion 
 and philosophy . . . . . . . .45 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 PAGAN SUPERSTITION 
 
 The forces of scepticism and superstition in antiquity Plutarch 
 on superstition and atheism Rapid propagation of Ori- 
 ental religions in Rome-Character of the mysteries of 
 Isis and Osiris4-Persecution futile against foreign religions 
 
CONTENTS xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Spread of Jewish superstitions in Rome Pagan ascetic 
 rites condemned by Seneca A good as well as a bad side 
 to the mysteries ^Baptism and purificatory rites in the 
 mysterk^ The mysteries as teaching a future life {Alle- 
 gorical meaning of absurd customs in the mysteriesj 
 Allegorical interpretation of Greek mythology Allegori- 
 cal interpretation of the books of Moses by later Jews, 
 and by the Christian school at Alexandria Illustrations 
 of explanations of Jewish prophecies Pagan prototypes of 
 the Hermits and Flagellants jjThe higher Pagan feeling 
 concerning temples and sacrifices The Pagan defence of 
 idolatryV Maximus of Tyre on the true meaning of idolatry] 
 Seneca's ideas about sacrifices Apollonius of Tyana on 
 the same (Sacrifice in Catholic theory and practice Com- 
 parison between Catholic and Pagan superstiti^ny . . 71 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HEAVEN 
 
 -(Pagan theory of the souj^ Its Divine origin and destiny The 
 Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of all men Origen's 
 testimony to the good influence of Philosophy The body 
 as the prison of the soul The soul destined to return to 
 God and heaven Antiquity of the belief in the soul's im- 
 mortality Cicero's faith in a future life Seneca and 
 Plutarch on the same Seneca's consolation to Marcia 
 Apotheosis and canonisation Vividness of Pagan belief 
 in a second life JChristian opposition to Pagan belief in 
 immortality^ Future life as a reward for virtue General 
 Pagan disbelief in a corporeal resurrection Christian alle- 
 gorical acceptance of resurrection Catholic dogma of the 
 damnation of unbaptized infants Xo similar superstition 
 in Paganism ......... 91 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 
 
 Pre-Christian belief in Hell universal Pagan belief in ever- 
 lasting future punishments : proved by words of Celsus and 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Plutarch The idea popularised by art and by the stage 
 Plutarch's dream of Thespesius Plato, Zeno, and Lucian 
 on future punishment Christian admission of identity of 
 Pagan belief with their own The belief intensified by 
 Catholicism, which counteracted the efforts of Philosophy 
 against it Philosophical denial or figurative explanation 
 of Hell Pagan conceptions of death : illustrated from 
 Cicero, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius St. Augustine on 
 the nature of Hell-fire Also Lactantius, Minucius Felix, 
 and Cyprian Heretical views of Origen and John Erigena 
 Fierce intolerance of Tertullian Christianity degraded 
 by the Church Fathers The real origin of the idea of Hell 
 as shown by comparative mythology and folk-lore . .108 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 Stoic belief in the final conflagration of the world Seneca's 
 firm expectation of an end to the world Similarity be- 
 tween Pagan, Jewish, and Persian ideas The idea due to 
 imperfect state of physical science Oriental expectation 
 of a great liberator : and of a mighty Oriental empire 
 Josephus on the expectations of the Jews Jewish hope of 
 overthrowing the Roman Empire : inherited by the 
 Christians The millennium a principal belief of the 
 early Church No real difference between early Christian 
 and Jewish expectations Sensual ideas of millennium in 
 Irenaeus Vision of the New Jerusalem Political aspect 
 of the millennium End of the Roman Empire looked for 
 by the Christians : and threatened in literature of forged 
 prophecies Insulting language applied to Rome Catho- 
 licism acceptable for its hatred of Rome Coincidence of 
 the virtual downfall of Rome with the date predicted 
 by the Church Persecution of the Catholics mainly poli- 
 tical Simplicity of the test of loyalty to the empire 
 Value of Christian apologies against disaffection Chris- 
 tianity regarded as a treasonable conspiracy Roman intol- 
 erance otherwise unaccountable . . . . .129 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Did Catholicism inaugurate a moral revolution ? Two sides to 
 early Christian character Influence of Antinomianism in 
 the early Church Tertullian's evidence of the bad state 
 of the Church : confirmed by Cyprian, Salvian, and 
 Aristides The wide and good influence of Philosophy 
 Philosophy as the culture of the soul The province of 
 Philosophy : co-extensive with religion and morality 
 Philosophical lectures and missions The duty of self-im- 
 provement The duty of self-examination The duty to 
 conscience The real punishment of sin Virtue as its own 
 reward Contrast with Christian ideas Seneca's ideal 
 Stoic Justinian's closing of schools of Philosophy at 
 Athens The glacial period of human intelligence . .151 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAGAN MORALITY 
 
 Influence of self-sacrifice in antiquity Seneca on living for 
 others Philosophy more cosmopolitan than Catholicism 
 The fraternity of mankind a Stoic idea Teaching of 
 Zeno and Epictetus The Pagan duty of charity Seneca 
 on unselfish beneficence Seneca on the etiquette of charity 
 Care of the poor in Pagan societies State charity in 
 Athens and Rome The Pagan duty of forgiveness The 
 Pagan duty of toleration Extracts from Seneca's treatise 
 On Anger Real spirit of Stoicism The Philosophers more 
 Christian than the Fathers .... .172 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 
 
 (1) Improvement in domestic life Catholic disregard for 
 family ties (2) Christianity in relation to slavery Move- 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ment against it of Pagan origin Stories of the slave 
 system Seneca on duty to slafes (3) Christianity and 
 the gladiatorial games Salvian's explanation of their 
 cessation Pagan opposition to them (4) Abolition of 
 human sacrifices The chief triumph of Roman civilisation 
 (5) Christianity and cruelty to animals (6) Christian- 
 ity and cruelty of punishments and torture (7) Christian- 
 ity in regard to war Modern progress a return to princi- 
 ples of Philosophy 193 
 
 CONCLUSION 221 
 
 APPENDIX . 231 
 
CHAPTEK I 
 
 PAGAN MONOTHEISM 
 
 THE basis of theological belief affords an interesting 
 starting-point for comparison between Christianity 
 and Paganism. For the burden of the writings of 
 all the early Christian Fathers who defended their 
 faith against the Pagan theology was that, whereas 
 they only worshipped one God, their opponents 
 worshipped many. Sometimes, indeed, as in the 
 case of Justin Martyr, Lactantius, or Clemens of 
 Alexandria, they would appeal in their arguments 
 or apologies to classical literature itself in favour of 
 monotheism ; but they upheld monotheism neverthe- 
 less as the leading point of difference between the 
 Christian and Pagan schools of thought, and the 
 doctrine of the divinity of Christ, if traceable at all, 
 was regarded by them as a matter of quite secondary 
 importance compared with the remonstrance they saw 
 fit to make with the absurdities of polytheism and 
 the worship of idols. 
 
 1 
 
2 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 And from tna'i iime to this it has always been 
 asserted or Implied that at the birth of Christianity 
 there' was, outside 'the Jewish race, either no belief 
 in nor knowledge of God at all, or no idea of His 
 real attributes. 
 
 But nothing could be farther from the truth. 
 The Pagan world was by no means in that state of 
 theological darkness which the early Christian mis- 
 sionaries, ignorant for the most part of Greek or 
 Eoman literature and philosophy, imagined or be- 
 lieved. The theological difference between the new 
 faith and the old touched rather the surface than the 
 substance of thought ; nor is there a single attribute 
 now ascribed to the Deity that the tomb-inscriptions 
 of Egypt do not prove to have been ascribed to Him 
 fully 6000 years ago. 
 
 To the conception of the unity of God nothing 
 was added by Christianity that had not for centuries 
 before been familiar to the educated classes of the 
 world. The Fathers themselves sometimes admitted 
 this, as when Tertullian says that the greater part of 
 the human race, though they knew not even the 
 name of Moses, yet knew the God of Moses. 1 
 
 But the admission requires some supplementary 
 proof from a glance at the vast mass of evidence 
 contained in classical literature. 
 
 The conception of God as the formative or crea- 
 
 1 Against Marcion, i. 10. 
 
PAGAN MONOTHEISM 3 
 
 tive power of the universe was present in the very 
 infancy of Greek thought ; for though Thales, the 
 earliest Greek philosopher, and famous for his con- 
 jecture that water was the beginning of all things, 
 is declared by St. Augustine to have had no idea of 
 a divine mind ruling the world, and is classed by 
 Clement among the atheists, we have the prior and 
 better evidence of both Cicero and Plutarch that he 
 also postulated the existence of God, who formed all 
 things out of water. 1 But probably he only availed 
 himself of an idea that was already current in his 
 time ; his speculation about water as the origin of 
 things, like those of others about air or fire, referring 
 rather to the mode of the formation of nature than 
 to its creation, and no more excluding the idea of God 
 than did the physical speculations of Descartes or 
 Laplace. If Anaxagoras were really the originator 
 of the idea in Greek philosophy, how was it that 
 such a saying was attributed to Thales as that God 
 was the most ancient of all things, inasmuch as He 
 had no birth, and that the world was the most beau- 
 tiful of all things because it was the work of God ? 2 
 The idea was never afterwards absent from Greek 
 philosophy, and the fundamental unity of the Deity 
 
 1 Compare the City of God, viii. 3, and Clement's Exhortation to 
 the Heathen, v., with Cicero's De Natura Deorum, i. 10, and Plu- 
 tarch's Ojnnions of Philosophers, 7. Athenagoras, Apol. 23, admits 
 the recognition by Thales of God as the intelligence of the world. 
 
 3 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, i. 9. 
 
4 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 was affirmed as clearly by Xenophanes, Parmenides, 
 Plato, Sophocles, and others, as by any writer of the 
 Hebrew race. " God is one," taught the Pythagoreans, 
 " the giver of light in heaven, and the Father of all, 
 the mind and vital power of the world, the mover of 
 all things." 
 
 The same teaching ruled not merely in the schools 
 of philosophy, but in poetry and on the stage. " One 
 is God, one," wrote Sophocles, " who made both the 
 heaven and the far- stretching earth and the ocean's 
 blue wave and the mighty winds " ; l and even Diphilus, 
 the comic poet, had for a line 
 
 Father of all, to Him alone incessant reverence pay. 
 
 To reproduce all the evidence of this sort would be 
 an endless task, and the frequent confirmation of it 
 in the sequel renders it unnecessary ; suffice it to say, 
 that it amply confirms the admission of an early 
 Christian apocryphal work, attributed by Clement 
 of Alexandria to St. Peter, to the effect that the 
 Greeks worshipped the same God as the Christians, 
 and that the only difference between them lay in 
 the manner, not in the object, of their worship. 2 
 The notion favoured by the early Fathers Origen, 
 Clement, Justin Martyr, and Ambrose that there 
 existed a Greek translation of the Pentateuch prior 
 
 1 Clemens, Stromata, v. 14 ; Athenagoras and Justin Martyr 
 also quote the passage, and the doubts thrown on its authenticity 
 seem uncalled for. 2 Ib. vi. 5. 
 
PAGAN MONOTHEISM 5 
 
 to the Septuagint version, and that thence Plato and 
 other Greek thinkers became familiar with the theo- 
 logy of the Hebrews, need only be mentioned to be 
 rejected as entirely destitute of evidence. 
 
 Philosophy, in fact, achieved its aim. It purified 
 Zeus or Jupiter from all the gross stories of the 
 popular mythology or folk-lore ; it propagated the 
 conception of one Supreme Beneficent Deity ; and it 
 reduced the multitude of other gods either into so 
 many phases or attributes of the Deity or into alle- 
 gorical interpretations of Nature. It established, in 
 short, a rational theology out of the crudest possible 
 materials. 
 
 Hence it came to pass that from an early time 
 the terms Zeus, Jupiter, and God became convertible, 
 connoting the same ideas. " The knowledge of one 
 God is possessed by all," Tertullian admits ; and he 
 quotes such phrases in common use among the Pagans 
 as " God sees," " God knows," "Good God," "I com- 
 mend you to God," " God is good," " As God will," to 
 show their essential belief in one sole Deity, above 
 and beyond all other gods. 1 
 
 Cyprian and Minucius Felix also allude to the 
 frequent employment of the same name by the com- 
 mon people in similar phrases ; 2 and Lactantius calls 
 
 1 De Testimonio Animae, 2 ; Apologeticus, 17 ; Eesurredio 
 Cariiis, 3 ; De Anima, 42. 
 
 2 Cypriau, Vanity of Idols, 9 ; Felix, Octavius, 18. 
 
6 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 special attention to the fact that on occasions of 
 thanksgiving or of distress, as in time of war, pesti- 
 lence, drought, or poverty, the language of praise or 
 prayer was raised directly to God, by name, and not 
 to Jupiter. 1 Hence it is idle to talk of Theism as 
 confined in pre-Christian times to the philosophical 
 few ; language proves it to have been universal. 
 
 This evidence of early Christian writers bears 
 witness to the fundamental agreement between 
 Christian and pre-Christian thought on the first 
 article of theology. But the agreement applied 
 not only to the name, but to the very attributes of 
 Divinity. This is proved by such common expres- 
 sions as " God is good/' " God is great," or " God is 
 true." Cornutus the Stoic derived Zeus, the world- 
 ruling soul, either from aw^ew, "to Save," or from 
 V}z>, " to Live," according as God might be thought of 
 as the Saviour of men or as the First Cause of Life. 2 
 It was as the cause of the generation or preservation 
 of all things that He was called the common Father 
 of men and gods, and Dion Chrysostom named Him 
 the great King of kings, as Seneca named Him the God 
 of gods. Plutarch and Pindar, no less than Isaiah 
 (xlv. 21) applied to Him the term Saviour, and by this 
 title it was common to address Him in prayer, as we 
 
 1 Divine Institutes, ii. 1. Compare the Clementine Recognitions, 
 v. 30, where St. Peter alludes to the Pagan custom of praying for 
 rain to Almighty God, and not to images, in time of drought. 
 
 2 De Natura Deorum, 11. 
 
PAGAN MONOTHEISM 7 
 
 know from the prayer of Sirnplicius, the last of the 
 philosophers, at the end of his commentary on the 
 Manual of Epictetus. He was also the Father of 
 Justice, Equity, and Peace; 1 and among his many 
 epithets was that of Gracious or Merciful (/le/Xt^o?), 
 from His readiness to become reconciled to men 
 as soon as they turned them from the ways of 
 injustice. 2 
 
 One cannot protest too often against the sup- 
 position that these ideas were confined to the few, 
 and that Pagan society generally was not impreg- 
 nated with them. The language of the stage and 
 of common life is conclusive to the contrary. It 
 proves too much to say that a plurality of gods 
 continued to be recognised in a thousand ways, for 
 even the higher writers, like Plutarch or Seneca or 
 Plato, whose monotheistic belief was often expressed 
 without doubt, continued to speak of the " gods," or, 
 even if they used the singular number, often used it 
 generically, as we use the word man as a synonym 
 for all men. This they did partly from force of 
 habit, and partly from their wish to purify the 
 popular theology without openly assailing or offend- 
 ing it; and puzzling as it may often be to us to 
 meet in the same paragraph or even in the same 
 sentence with the words God or Gods used as con- 
 
 1 Plutarch, Contradictions of Stoics, 32. 
 
 2 Cornutus, De Natura Deorum, 11. 
 
8 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 vertible terms, the polytheism of the language of the 
 writers need not conceal from us the real monotheism 
 of their meaning. 
 
 Thus in the time of Sylla, the Latin poet Valerius 
 Soranus wrote of Jupiter the following lines : 
 
 Jupiter omnipotens, rerum rex, ipse Deusque, 
 Progenitor genetrixque, Deum Deus, unus et omnes. 
 
 And long before his time, Janus, who then occupied 
 the place in Eoman theology afterwards accorded to 
 Jupiter, was addressed in the hymns of the Salii as 
 Deorum Deus ; l so that the expression God of gods 
 was a Pagan before it became a Christian one, and 
 Jew, Christian, and Pagan meant the same thing 
 when they spoke of the Deity as Supreme. The con- 
 ception of plurality in unity practically identified 
 monotheism and polytheism. The Christian doctrine 
 of trinity in unity renders the earlier conception 
 intelligible. 
 
 And how easy it was for educated men to re- 
 concile their belief in one God with time-honoured 
 traditions by explaining the several gods as the 
 different manifestations of the First Cause and 
 Creator of all things ! Bacchus, Hercules, or Mer- 
 cury were so many synonyms for God, according to 
 Seneca ; the name Bacchus referring to Him as the 
 parent of all things, the name Hercules referring to 
 
 1 Macrobius, Saturnalia, i. 9. 
 
PA CAN MONO THEISM 9 
 
 His insuperable power, and the name Mercury re- 
 ferring to Him as the source of reason, numbers, 
 order, and knowledge. 1 Or what can be clearer than 
 Maximus of Tyre, when he says of the gods that 
 though their names are many, their nature is one, 
 and that we only from our ignorance call them by 
 different names, just as, though there is really only 
 one sea, we speak of the Aegean, Ionian, or Cretan 
 seas ? 2 
 
 These ideas were common property in the days 
 when philosophy permeated every class of society, 
 down even to the very slaves, as we know from the 
 cases of Epictetus and Phaedo. The words of the 
 grammarian, Maximus of Madaura, in his letter to 
 St. Augustine, may be taken to express the almost 
 universal attitude of Pagan thought: "That there 
 is one Supreme God, without beginning or posterity, 
 that there is a great and glorious Father, who is 
 so mad or so prejudiced as to deny as a most certain 
 truth ? His virtues, scattered through the work of 
 creation, we invoke under many names, because we 
 are all of us ignorant of His real name. For God is 
 a name common to all religions . . . Who is that 
 God of yours, of whom you Christians claim, as it 
 
 1 De Beneficiis, iv. 8. Compare Diogenes Laertius, vii. 62, where 
 Minerva, Juno, Vulcan, Neptune, and Ceres are all mentioned as 
 synonyms of God, according to different attributes of His nature, 
 in the philosophy of the Stoics. 
 
 2 Dissertation xxxix. 5. 
 
io PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 were, the exclusive possession and first dis- 
 covery ? " 1 
 
 St. Augustine, in his ill-tempered reply, forgot 
 or was unable to answer the main question of his 
 correspondent. 
 
 But there exists no stronger admission of the 
 widely - spread monotheistic thought of Paganism 
 than is afforded by one of the ablest of the Christian 
 apologists in the midst of a polemic against the old 
 mythology, in which he, like others of his school, 
 was simply slaying what had been twice or thrice 
 slain by philosophy. " Who," asks Arnobius, " is 
 that one God? Perhaps we, instructed by true 
 authority, might say; but lest you should not be 
 willing to believe us, let my opponent ask the 
 Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Chaldeans, Armenians 
 . . . then you will learn who is that one God, 
 and who the very many under Him are who 
 pretend to be gods and make sport of man's ignor- 
 ance." 2 
 
 When therefore the Pagans, in answer to the 
 charges of the Christians, declared that in their use 
 of the term Jupiter- they were really at one with the 
 Christians and meant the same thing, the latter had 
 no effective reply. To object to the identification, 
 as Arnobius did, on the ground that Jupiter had 
 
 1 "Quis sit iste Dens, quern vobis Christian! quasi primum 
 vindicatis ? " etc. 2 Adversus Gentes, iv. 13. 
 
PA CAN MONO THEISM 1 1 
 
 parents, grandparents, and other relations, and that 
 therefore he could not be called everlasting, 1 was 
 altogether disingenuous, for he must have known 
 that the Jupiter of the later Eoman religion had 
 long ceased to have anything in common but the 
 name with the Jupiter or Zeus of the primitive 
 mythology. The hymn to Jupiter by Aristides the 
 Sophist (176 A.D.) may be quoted in proof: "Jupiter 
 made all things ; all things whatever are the works 
 of Jupiter, rivers, and the earth, and the sea, and the 
 heaven, and whatever is between or above, or beneath 
 them ; and gods, and men, and all living things, and 
 all things visible or intelligible. First of all He 
 made Himself; nor was He ever brought up in the 
 caverns of Crete ; nor did Saturn ever intend to 
 devour Him; nor did He swallow a stone in His 
 stead ; nor was Jupiter ever in any danger, nor will 
 He ever be. ... But He is the First, and the most 
 ancient, and the Prince of all things, and Himself 
 from Himself." This single quotation is an answer 
 to half the criticisms of the Fathers against the 
 Pagan theology. 
 
 But less satisfactory even than such criticism as 
 that indulged in by Arnobius was the answer of 
 Origen to Celsus. The latter urged that it made no 
 difference whether the Supreme Being (6 V-^LO-TOS) 
 were called Zeus, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or 
 
 1 Adversus Gentes, i. 34. 
 
12 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Ammoun, or Pappaeus, if all the people who used 
 these names meant identically the same thing. But 
 Origen insisted that the Christians were right in 
 struggling even to death to avoid calling God Zeus, 
 although he could adduce no better reason than a 
 gross superstition from the philosophy of magic ! 
 The names of one language, he contended, had no 
 longer the same power when translated into another ; 
 so that, for instance, an incantation that might be 
 performed on a Eoman name could not be performed 
 on the same name in Greek, and conversely ! If, 
 then, that was the case even with the names of men, 
 what must it not be with those of the Deity? 
 An invocation or oath, therefore, by the God of 
 Abraham, or of Isaac, or of Jacob, would produce a 
 result that would fail with other names ; and the 
 word Sabaoth, so potent in incantations, would ac- 
 complish nothing when translated into Lord of Hosts 
 or Almighty. It was for reasons such as these that 
 Christians were and should be ready to suffer any- 
 thing rather than admit an identity between Jupiter 
 and God I 1 
 
 Nothing surely could be weaker than this ; or 
 again, than Origen's answer to Celsus, on the ground 
 of the irreverence shown by the Christians to the 
 heavenly luminaries, which so many of the ancients 
 regarded or worshipped as actual gods. " Being per- 
 
 1 Against Celsus, i. 25 and v. 41. 
 
PA GAN MONO THEISM 1 3 
 
 suacled," he says, "that the sun himself, and the 
 moon, and stars pray to the Supreme God through 
 His only-begotten Son, we think it improper to pray 
 to these beings who themselves offer prayers to God, 
 seeing even they themselves would prefer we should 
 send up prayers to the God to whom they pray, 
 rather than send them down to themselves or dis- 
 tribute our power of prayer between God and them- 
 selves." l Evidently therefore Christians on the in- 
 tellectual level of Origen regarded the luminaries, if 
 not as gods, yet as animated beings ; so that on this 
 point there was no fundamental divergence between 
 themselves and their opponents. 
 
 In those days, just as in our own, the world was 
 divided between theistic, atheistic, and agnostic 
 schools of thought ; nor has Christianity added any- 
 thing to the following argument of Seneca against 
 the Epicurean theory of the indifference of God to 
 the welfare of mankind : " God confers no benefits ! " 
 he exclaims. " Whence, then, all the things that you 
 possess ? . . . Whence all those countless objects that 
 delight your eyes, your ears, your mind? Whence 
 all that bounty that furnishes you with luxury, seeing 
 that it is not only our necessities that have been pro- 
 vided for, but that love is shown to us, even to our 
 
 1 Against Celsus, v. 11. Compare viii. 67 : v^vov^v 76 debv Kal 
 TOV HovoyevT} avrov, us Kal 7/Xios Kal ffeXfyr] Kal darpa Kal irdffa 
 T] ovpavla (TTpaTLa, etc. 
 
14 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 most fanciful wants ? . . . And when what you have you 
 highly prize, you are so ungrateful as to say you owe 
 it to no one ! Whence have you that breath you 
 breathe, or that light by which you dispose and 
 order the actions of your life, or the coursing blood 
 that sustains your vital heat ? . . . It is Nature, you 
 say, which bestows these things upon man. But do 
 you not perceive that in saying Nature you but give 
 another name to God, for what else is Nature than 
 God and the divine reason that pervades the world 
 in whole and part ? You may at your pleasure call 
 by any other appellation the Author of the things we 
 see, and may rightly address Him as Jupiter the 
 Best and Greatest, or Jupiter the Thunderer, or 
 Jupiter the Stator, and Stabilitor, so called, not, as 
 historians have handed it down, because in accord- 
 ance with prayer He caused the Eoman army to stay 
 its flight, but because through His goodness all 
 things stay firm and stand. Nor if you also call 
 Him Fate will you speak amiss; for since Fate is 
 nothing else than a complicated series of causes, He 
 is the First Cause of all, on which all other causes 
 depend. Whatever names you please will be fitting, 
 provided they connote some of the force and influ- 
 ence of heavenly things : His names may be as 
 numerous as his attributes ... To no purpose, then, 
 most ungrateful of mortals, do you deny your debt 
 to God but admit your debt to Nature, for neither is 
 
PAGAN MONOTHEISM 15 
 
 Nature without God, nor God without Nature, for 
 they are identical and have the same functions. . . . 
 Call Him Nature, Fate, Chance all are names for 
 the same God in the various manifestations of His 
 power." l 
 
 There is not the smallest proof that Seneca was a 
 Christian, nor that he ever saw St. Paul at Eome. 
 The Christian who forged a correspondence between 
 him and the Apostle forged it in vain. Seneca simply 
 expressed the common opinions of his day, with 
 which the Stoics more especially had made the world 
 familiar, in a literature of which unfortunately little 
 more than fragments remain. And at all events no 
 suspicion of Christian influence can rest upon Cicero, 
 who in sentiment is as much a Christian as Seneca. 
 " What so plain and evident," he makes a Stoic say, 
 " when we look up at the sky and contemplate the 
 heavens, as that there is a Divinity of surpassing 
 intelligence who governs them ? " : 
 
 And as the argument from Nature was as com- 
 plete in the hands of the Pagan philosophers as it has 
 ever been since, so was the argument from Design or 
 the argument from the Universal Belief of mankind. 
 " Who, then, is it," asks Epictetus, " that has fitted 
 this to that and that to this; that has fitted the 
 sheath to the sword and the sword to the sheath? 
 Is it no one ? From the very construction of per- 
 
 1 De Beneficiis, iv. 5. - De Natura Deorum, ii. 2. 
 
1 6 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fected things we are wont to show that the work is 
 of some workman and not constructed to no purpose, 
 and does each of these things demonstrate the work- 
 man, but visible things and sight and light not 
 demonstrate that other?" And for the other argu- 
 ment: "The strongest reason to be adduced," says 
 Cicero, " for our belief in the gods seems to be that 
 no people is so savage, no single man so monstrous, 
 as not to have their or his mind embued with a 
 notion of the gods." 1 Or Seneca : " We deduce the 
 existence of the gods from this among other reasons, 
 that all men have an innate conception of them, and 
 that no race of men has ever been so far removed 
 from all legal and moral restraint as not to believe in 
 the gods." 2 
 
 The supreme merit of Pagan philosophy lies in the 
 transition it effected from the more primitive notion 
 of the stupendous might of God to that of His super- 
 human goodness and beneficence. This change or 
 advance of thought the world owes far more to the 
 Greeks than to the Hebrews ; a fact, in the history 
 of theology, which has only failed to be recognised 
 by reason of the long persistence of the idea that the 
 Jews, a small branch of the whole human family, 
 were in a more special sense than other members of 
 that family the objects of the divine love and solici- 
 tude. Now that we recognise the moral and intel- 
 
 1 Tusc. Quaest. i. 13. 2 Epist. 117. 
 
PAGAN MONOTHEISM 17 
 
 lectual necessity of regarding Jews, Greeks, Eomans, 
 and others as all equal in the eyes of Him, whom 
 all alike addressed as their Father, we are able to see 
 that, in regard to the attributes of Divinity, the Greeks 
 and Eomans were at least on a level with, and on 
 many points in advance of, the Jews ; and the debt 
 of the Hellenising Jews to the Greeks is beyond all 
 comparison in excess of any we know of as due from 
 the Greek race to the Hebrew. 
 
 Marcion, the Christian, from his inability to recon- 
 cile the Jehovah of the Old Testament with his idea 
 of perfect goodness, postulated the existence of 
 another and greater God, to whom Jehovah occupied 
 a subordinate position ; and many other of the early 
 heretics did the same. Plutarch actually refers to 
 the Jews and Syrians as forming exceptions to the 
 general belief of mankind in the goodness of the gods 
 and their kindness to men. 1 One of the most famous 
 passages in Plato is where he argues that God, as 
 being good, can only be the Cause of good, not of 
 bad ; and Maximus of Tyre, in discussing the origin 
 of evil, protests vehemently against connecting it 
 with God : " Not from Heaven, by Zeus, not from 
 Heaven ! " 2 Seneca well expressed the conclusion of 
 Eoman theology when he wrote : " No man in his 
 senses fears the gods, for it were madness to fear 
 what is good for us, nor does any one fear whom he 
 
 1 Contradictions of Stoics, 38. 2 Dissertation xli. 2. 
 
 2 
 
1 8 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 loves " ; or again : " By the aid of Philosophy we shall 
 neither fear death nor the gods ; we shall know that 
 neither is death an evil, nor the gods bad " ; or 
 lastly : " What cause constrains the gods to confer 
 blessings on us ? Their nature. It is a mistake to 
 think they have not the will to do injury they have 
 not the power ; they can neither feel injury nor 
 inflict it." l 
 
 Clearly we are here in as different an atmosphere 
 as possible from that of the older Pagan or Hebrew 
 theology. Any one, indeed, can see that there is more 
 difference between the earlier and later Paganism than 
 between the latter and Christianity. The following 
 extracts may fitly conclude this part of the subject : 
 
 " God is the God of all, good, and in need of 
 nothing, and without jealousy." 
 
 " We must in no wise ever lose our hold of God, 
 neither by day nor night, neither in public nor in 
 private, neither in word nor deed; but whatever 
 we do, let the soul always be directed to God." 
 
 " Should any worshipper of God be commanded 
 to do anything impious, or say anything base, such 
 command should in no wise ever be obeyed, but we 
 must rather bear any kind of torture or submit to 
 any kind of death before we not merely say but even 
 think anything unholy about God." 
 
 These extracts are from no Christian Father, nor 
 
 1 De Beneficiis, iv. 19 ; Epist., 75, 95. 
 
PAGAN MONOTHEISM 19 
 
 from any Christian at all, but from Celsus, the anti- 
 Christian philosopher, who wrote a book against the 
 new religion, to which Origen replied, with argu- 
 ments less remarkable, it must be admitted, for their 
 relevancy than for their length. And the same high 
 conception of the Supreme Deity was upheld by 
 other Pagan writers, who, like Hierocles or Longinian, 
 either took an active part in opposition to Christianity 
 or declined to recognise any fundamental novelty in 
 its theology. In the face of persistent misrepresenta- 
 tion of the past, it is only fair to restate these facts, 
 which of course have no bearing whatever on the 
 more rational Christianity of our own day, but which 
 have a good deal on the Christianity of the early 
 Catholic Church, as established and interpreted by 
 the Fathers. 
 
 The question may next be hazarded whether the 
 difference between the Christians and the Pagans was 
 so very great with regard to the actual worship of a 
 plurality of gods ; whether, in fact, the monotheism 
 of the early Christians has not been as much over- 
 stated as the polytheism of the Pagans. Certain it is 
 that St. Ambrose advocated the direct invocation of 
 angels and martyrs as intermediaries between God 
 and man ; l and the prohibition of angelolatry by the 
 Synod of Laodicea in the fourth century indicates at 
 
 1 De Viduis, ix. 55 : Obsecrandi sunt angeli qui nobis ad prae- 
 sidium dati sunt : martyres obsecrandi, etc. 
 
20 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 all events the common practice and belief of the 
 many. The adoption of Christianity did not neces- 
 sarily involve even the forsaking of actual idols, for 
 Salvian speaks of an idol in Africa which not only 
 the Pagans but the Christians worshipped in the 
 fourth century, when all persecution of Christianity 
 was over. 1 But, idolatry apart, it is clear that the 
 martyrs and angels simply took the place of the old 
 gods and heroes, not merely in the position they were 
 supposed to occupy towards mankind, but in every 
 detail of the service and reverence that mankind was 
 expected to pay to them. St. Augustine's answer to 
 this charge made by Faustus, the Manichaean, is not 
 borne out by an inquiry into the Christian customs 
 of his time. But polytheism for polytheism, that of 
 the Church lacked the poetical charm of the earlier 
 form ; whilst mythology for mythology, the legends 
 of the saints were at best an indifferent substitute 
 for the legends of the gods and heroes. 
 
 Then again we have to remember that there is 
 nothing intrinsically irrational in the polytheistic 
 theory itself, and that it matters less, the Pagans 
 would have argued, in how many gods people believe 
 
 1 viii. Quis enim non eorum qui Christian! appellantur 
 coelestem ilium, aut post Christum adoravit aut, quod est pejus, 
 multo ante quam Christum ? Compare Theodoret, ad Col. ii. 18, iii. 
 17. Theodoret mentions Phrygia and Pisidia as the headquarters 
 of angelolatry. Their view coincided exactly with the Platonic one, 
 that it was only through angels that there could be any mediation 
 or intercourse between God and man. 
 
PA GA N MONO THEISM 2 1 
 
 than in what kind of moral attributes they attach to 
 Divinity. Plato and his followers therefore are blame- 
 less if, conceiving that the purely spiritual and 
 emotionless nature of God precluded Him from direct 
 action upon this world of matter, they imagined a 
 hierarchy of beneficent beings, called demons, par- 
 taking of the divine nature by reason of their im- 
 mortality, and of the human nature by reason of their 
 subjection to emotions, and fitted therefore to act as 
 intermediaries between earth and heaven, between 
 God and man. 1 Maximus of Tyre describes them as 
 a link between human weakness and divine beauty, 
 as bridging over the gulf between mortal and im- 
 mortal, and as acting between gods and men as 
 interpreters acted between Greeks and barbarians. 
 He calls them secondary gods (Oeol Sevrepoi), and 
 speaks of them as the departed souls of virtuous 
 men (" the spirits of just men made perfect," the 
 Christian would have said), appointed by God to 
 overrule every part of human life, by helping the 
 good, avenging the injured, and punishing the unjust. 
 Among other characteristics, he speaks of them as 
 messengers of unseen things (dyye\oc TGOV a<ai>&>z>); 2 
 and Plutarch too calls them messengers or angels 
 between gods and men, and describes them as the 
 spies of the former, wandering at their commands, 
 punishing wrong-doers and guarding the course of 
 
 1 Apuleius, De Deo Socratis, 674. ~ Diss. 14, 15. 
 
22 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the virtuous. 1 So that angels and demons were 
 convertible terms among the Pagans ; and their 
 polytheism was nothing more than angelolatry. 
 
 It was these demons, according to Apuleius, who 
 as gods (divorum numero) were in Egypt pleased 
 with lamentations, or in Greece with dances, and to 
 whom all religious rites were paid. 2 In short, it was 
 into demons, for the most part beneficent, that the 
 gods were resolved, and the words gods, demons, 
 or angels, with Christian no less than Pagan writers, 
 came to be used as synonymous terms. Origen 
 identifies gods, angels of God, good demons, and 
 heroes, and refers to passages in the Psalms to show 
 that angels were sometimes spoken of as gods. 3 
 Arnobius speaks of " gods, angels, demons, or what- 
 ever else their name." 4 Augustine refers to those 
 called gods by the philosophers as identical with 
 beings whom the Christians called angels. 5 And 
 Lactantius, in reference to Seneca's account of mini- 
 sters set by God over the world, only contends for 
 the word messengers or angels as a preferable term, 
 while protesting against their being called or wor- 
 shipped as gods ; and he quotes an oracle of Apollo, 
 in which the gods were called the messengers or 
 angels of God. 6 
 
 1 Cessation of Grades, 13, and Face in Orb of the Moon, 30. 
 
 2 De Deo Socratis, 684. 3 Against Celsus, ii. 37, and v. 4. 
 4 ii. 35. 5 City of God, xix. 3. 6 i. 5, 7. 
 
PA GA N MONO THEISM 23 
 
 It is therefore evident that the Christian theory 
 of angels differed in no degree whatever from the 
 Pagan theory of gods or demons; and that the 
 Pagans themselves probably used the term angels as a 
 synonym for the gods long before there were Christians 
 to use it at all. But it is possible to go even farther, 
 and to say that even Christian converts continued 
 to speak of the gods in a manner proving how very 
 superficial was the distinction between their belief 
 and that of the Pagans, seeing that it did not always 
 extend even to a difference in terminology. Ter- 
 tullian speaks of the Eoman emperor as next indeed 
 to God, but as greater than the gods themselves. 1 
 The Christianity too of Clemens, who from a 
 philosopher became a Christian and head of the 
 catechetical school of Alexandria towards the end of 
 the second century, has never been impeached ; yet 
 he often speaks of the gods as any Pagan might have 
 spoken of them. He refers to the blessed abodes of 
 the gods ; he speaks of angels and gods as spectators 
 of the contest between the true athlete and his 
 passions; he declares all the host of angels and 
 gods to be placed in subjection to the Son of God. 2 
 "Knowledge," he says, "leads to the endless and 
 
 1 Ad Scapulam, 2 : Sic omnibus major est (i.e. Imperator) dum 
 solo vero Deo minor est ; sic et ipsis diis major est dum et ipsi in 
 potestate ejus. 
 
 2 Stromata, vii. 2, 3 : roirry iraaa viroTeTaKrat a-Tparia 
 re /ecu 6euv. 
 
24 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 perfect end, teaching us beforehand the future life 
 we shall lead according to God and with gods," and 
 such as, after purificatory punishment, are admitted 
 to everlasting contemplation, " are called by the 
 appellation of the gods, being destined to sit on 
 thrones with the other gods that have been first put 
 in their places by the Saviour." l 
 
 St. Augustine was as prominent a Christian as 
 Clemens ; but he also speaks of the " good gods who 
 dwell in the holy and heavenly habitation, by whom 
 we mean holy angels and rational creatures, whether 
 thrones or dominations, or principalities or powers " ; 
 and again he says : " We must by no means seek, 
 through the supposed mediation of demons, to enjoy 
 the benevolence of the gods, or rather of the good 
 angels." 2 So that Augustine and Clement were as 
 much polytheists as Seneca or Plutarch ; or rather, 
 their monotheism must be taken with exactly the 
 same reservations. 
 
 Therefore in the sense of angels subordinate to the 
 Supreme God, the only sense of Pagan polytheism, 
 the Christians did not deny a plurality of gods. In 
 this alone they differed from the Pagans, that, whereas 
 the latter regarded most of the demons as beneficent 
 
 1 Stromata, vii. 10 : Beol rty irpoayyopiav K^K^VTCLL ol vvvOpovoi 
 TUV &\\b}v Oe&v r&v VTTO rip "ZwTTJpi Ttp&TUv TTay fj.fr wv yevrjffo/^evoi. 
 
 2 City of God, viii. 24, 25 : Nullo modo igitur per daemonum 
 inedietatem ambiendum est ad benevolentiam deorum, vel potius 
 bonorum angelorum. 
 
PA CAN MONO THEISM 25 
 
 beings, tender and loving towards mankind, they 
 condemned all the Pagan Gods, demons or angels, 
 as either bad or fallen spirits, and, without denying 
 their real existence, maintained as St. Augustine 
 was so fond of maintaining that they only interfered 
 with men at all for the sensual pleasure of licking 
 the blood from the altars. Against the bad angels 
 or demons into which they thus resolved the gods 
 of the Pagans, they set as good angels or gods the 
 gods of the Jews. This is proved by reference to 
 Origen, who, in regard to the expression in Psalm 
 xcv. that God was Lord above all gods, explains 
 these gods to mean, not those of the heathen, but 
 the gods who are spoken of in Psalm Ixxxii. as 
 forming the assembly of gods, in the midst of whom 
 God is there said to stand and judge. 1 He therefore 
 distinguishes between real gods and nominal gods, 
 a distinction which Arnobius, the Christian contro- 
 versialist, also recognises, 2 and which turns apparently 
 merely on the nationality, Hebrew or Gentile, of the 
 people whose Gods they were. The gods of the 
 Jews or Christians were real; those of the Greeks 
 and Eomans only nominal. 
 
 In other words, Origen, in the sense of the identity 
 between gods and angels, frankly recognised the 
 polytheism of the ancient Jews, a polytheism which 
 is plainly enough expressed in such passages as the 
 
 1 Against Celsus, viii. 3. 2 ii. 62. 
 
26 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 following : Psalm Ixxxvi. 8, " There is none like unto 
 Thee among the gods, Lord"; or Psalm cxxxvi. 
 2, "0 give thanks unto the God of gods." And, 
 irrespectively of these gods or angels, it is only to a 
 monotheism in point of worship, not of belief, that 
 the Jews can lay claim, their belief and trust in their 
 own national God, Jehovah, never excluding their 
 belief in, but only their worship of, the gods of other 
 nations, as is shown by Exodus xv. 11, " Who is like 
 unto thee, Lord, among the gods ? " or by Exodus, 
 xviii. 11, where Jethro says, "Now I know that the 
 Lord is greater than all gods." 
 
 In fact, a precisely similar religious development 
 may be traced in Jewish history to that traceable in 
 Greek, a gradual evolution of purer conceptions of 
 the Deity starting from conceptions of the rudest 
 anthropomorphism. The Christians reaped the ad- 
 vantage of all that generations of thinkers had done 
 to purify men's ideas on theism, but of thinkers 
 among whom the Hebrew prophets were certainly 
 not more influential than the Pagan philosophers. 
 Especially did they owe to the latter a clearer defini- 
 tion of the divine attributes than the Hebrews, with 
 their greater indifference to logical precision, ever 
 achieved. We owe them of course an infinite debt 
 for their share in the liberation of the world from the 
 enormous weight of absurd theology which in certain 
 quarters of heathenism still held sway ; but the 
 
PA CAN MONOTHEISM 27 
 
 Christian polemic against the Pagan gods was only 
 longer, not more effective, than the polemic of the 
 Pagans themselves. There is nothing against them 
 in Lactantius or Arnobius or Augustine or Tertullian 
 that was not also in Plato or Cicero or Seneca or 
 Varro ; nor is it likely that the former would have 
 ever succeeded in their work -at all but for the 
 efficiency with which the philosophers had done 
 theirs. In later times, when the contest had become 
 embittered between Christianity and Paganism, many 
 Pagans would not so much as hear Cicero's De Natura 
 Deorum read, and even wished the senate to destroy 
 his writings, for the countenance they were held to 
 give to the Christian hostility to the gods. 1 But 
 this need not have been ; for with a little more for- 
 bearance, a little more toleration for the traditions of 
 ages on the part of the Christian reformers, the Pagan 
 gods would have vanished from the earth more 
 peaceably than they did ; the absurd rites and super- 
 stitions would have died a natural death just as the 
 oracles did ; and if persecutions and martyrdoms 
 attended their departure, it was because, unhappily, 
 from a very early age, the propagation of Christianity 
 passed out of the control of its more tolerant first 
 teachers into that of men who, like Tertullian and 
 Tatian, substituted intolerant contempt for calm 
 reason, and who in their bigotry hesitated not to heap 
 
 1 Arnobius, iii. 7. 
 
28 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 on the most sacred convictions of their contemporaries 
 the language of the bitterest insult and defiance. 
 
 It was not the spirit of real Christianity that 
 prevailed over Paganism, but the spirit of extreme 
 fanatics who claimed the name of Christians, without 
 any true appreciation of its meaning. 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 PAGAN THEOLOGY 
 
 FOR several centuries before Christianity the brisk 
 interchange of ideas between all the countries of the 
 then known world produced what amounted to a 
 system of International Philosophy or Pteligion, which, 
 overriding all subordinate sects, prevailed from India 
 to Gaul, and in which it is hopeless to trace or ap- 
 portion the claims of the several nations to priority 
 of conception. Whether the tradition is true or not 
 that Pythagoras derived instruction from Egypt, 
 Chaldaea, Persia, Gaul, and Iberia, in his objection to 
 the taking of oaths, to the custom of prayers and 
 sacrifices, to the slaughter of animals, as well as in his 
 belief in the transmigration of souls, it is difficult not 
 to believe, that through him, as perhaps also through 
 Plato, the teaching of the great Buddha travelled at 
 least as far as Greece and Italy. To what precise 
 degree, if at all, the Greeks were influenced by Egypt 
 and India, or the Jews were indebted to Persia and 
 Assyria, we may never know; but it is beyond 
 
30 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 question that, at the beginning of the Christian era 
 and for some time before, there was a great amalgama- 
 tion of philosophical and religious ideas, uniting, as 
 they have never been united since, India, Persia, 
 Egypt, Greece, Italy, and probably France and Spain. 
 
 The belief in the overruling all-seeing Providence 
 of God was among these universal ideas, and it is 
 pleasing to remember that the Jew possessed it no 
 more than the Greek or the Eoman. Apuleius uses 
 the phrase, Divine Providence, precisely as he might 
 have done had he been a Christian. 1 The new 
 religion added absolutely nothing new on the subject 
 to the teaching we still find in Plato or Cicero ; nor 
 can we do better, if we would realise how very little 
 speculation or controversy has varied on this problem 
 within the last two thousand years, than trace in 
 Seneca the presence of the very same reasonings, the 
 very same doubts and difficulties, that still perplex 
 the subject in modern times, and seem likely to per- 
 plex it for ever. 
 
 "What was for our good," says Seneca, "God, 
 who is also our Father, placed ready to our hand." 2 
 " Whatever has been denied to us, it was impossible 
 to give ... we were and still are the favourite 
 creatures of the immortal gods." It is better there- 
 fore for us, he urges, to contemplate and give 
 
 1 Golden Ass, ix. 177 : Divinae Providentiae fatalis dispositio. 
 2 Epist. 110. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 31 
 
 thanks for the many and great benefits we enjoy 
 than to complain because in some respects we are 
 inferior to other animals or have no knowledge of 
 the future. 1 
 
 Anticipating, however, modern science, Seneca 
 places the laws of natural phenomena apart from 
 the providential government of man. He protests 
 against the folly of attributing to the gods such 
 things as storms at sea, excessive rains, or long 
 winters ; and holds it a mistake to suppose that any 
 of them occur from reference to ourselves : " We are 
 not the cause of the return of summer and winter to 
 the world; all such phenomena follow their own 
 laws, and we esteem ourselves too highly if we deem 
 ourselves worthy of the operation of such mighty 
 occurrences." 2 Or again : " It is not by the anger of 
 the gods that heaven and earth are shaken ; such 
 phenomena have their own causes, nor rage at any 
 behest." 3 Man in short, though the favourite, is not 
 the sole care of God. "How many bodies besides 
 those we see in the heavens follow their secret courses 
 unseen of mortal eyes, for God has not made all 
 things for man." 
 
 But it is still more interesting to follow Seneca in 
 his speculations on the moral government of the world. 
 Why, for instance, did Providence place a man like 
 
 1 De Beneficiis, ii. 29. 2 De Ira, ii. 27. 
 
 3 Naturales Quaestiones, vi. 3. 
 
32 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Caligula at the head of the civilised world ? Seneca's 
 suggestion is that such anomalies are allowed out of 
 regard for the virtues of a man's ancestors or parents, 
 or sometimes perhaps from consideration for the 
 virtues of his posterity. "For the gods know 
 beforehand the whole series of future events, and 
 what we think sudden and unaccountable is to them 
 foreseen and expected." : Why, again, on the theory 
 of a Providence, do as many calamities befall the good 
 as the, bad? Seneca answers that in this way God 
 tries the good man, hardens him, and prepares him for 
 Himself. The shocks of adversity can no more change 
 the mind of a brave man than all the rivers and 
 waters can change the saltness of the sea. They are 
 all trials. " Not what you bear, but how you bear it, 
 is of importance." Towards good men God has the 
 mind of a Father, and loves them in a strong 
 manner, wishing them to gain strength by work, grief, 
 and loss. Desiring them to rise to the highest pitch 
 of excellence, He sends them a fortune which shall 
 exercise their powers. A brave man struggling with 
 misfortune is a spectacle worthy of God. And things 
 that are called hard are for the good, first of all, of 
 those to whom they happen, and then, of all men 
 generally, the gods being more concerned with the 
 general than the individual welfare. The good man 
 may be called wretched, but he cannot be so. Exile, 
 
 1 De Beneficiis, iv. 31. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 33 
 
 or the loss of children, or the loss of husband and 
 wife, may be beneficial, just as a surgical operation 
 may be ; and that was a good remark of Demetrius, 
 that he never saw anything more unhappy than a 
 man who had never suffered adversity. Were it not 
 for bad fortune there would be no great samples of 
 conduct ; nor has human depravity yet fallen so low 
 but that most men would rather be born to the 
 destiny of a Eegulus than to that of a Mecaenas. A 
 man's greatness cannot be shown without opportuni- 
 ties for its display. To suffer is part of the glory of 
 virtue. Those whom God loves He hardens and tries ; 
 and those whom He seems to favour and spare, He 
 preserves without defence against future evils. No 
 one is exempt; and the man who has long been 
 happy will have his share. If called on to suffer, we 
 should rejoice that God should have thought worthy 
 to try in our own persons how much human nature 
 can endure. As masters with their pupils, so the 
 gods with good men : they require more labour from 
 those of whom they have the highest hopes. 
 
 Also it is for the good of all that the best men 
 should bear the brunt of the toilsome campaign of life. 
 Wishing to show the falsity of the common distinction 
 between good and evil things, God could not dp so 
 better than by letting so-called good things fall to 
 the lot of the bad, and so-called evil things to that of 
 the good. Labour is the portion of the best men ; and 
 
 3 
 
34 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in the great republic of life it is ever the good who 
 toil and sacrifice themselves and are voluntarily 
 sacrificed. One reason for resignation is that all is 
 predestined : " Our destinies lead us, and the time of 
 life that remains to each was settled at his natal 
 hour. Cause hangs on cause ; a long chain of events 
 draws public and private affairs; and so we shall 
 bear all with patience, for things do not, as we think, 
 happen, but come. Your joys and griefs were long 
 ago prefixed, and however various may seem the 
 lives of individuals, the whole matter comes to this : 
 perishable ourselves, we are the recipients of perish- 
 able gifts. Why then are we angry ? why do we 
 complain? It is for this we are prepared. Let 
 Nature use the bodies that are hers as she will ; but 
 let ourselves, glad in every event, and brave, reflect 
 that nothing that is really our own perishes." More- 
 over, God does not suffer any real evil to happen to 
 the good. Things really evil he has removed from 
 them, such as wickedness, crimes, evil thoughts, 
 ambition, lust, or avarice ; and good men suffer 
 willingly the afflictions sent to them by God. They 
 suffer in order to teach others to suffer. They are 
 born as an example to men. 1 
 
 And as to the objection that the ungrateful, as 
 well as the good, share in the favours of Heaven, the 
 answer is, that they only so share them, because it 
 
 1 De Providentia. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 35 
 
 was impossible for the benefits of sunshine and rain 
 and the seasons to be apportioned according to good- 
 ness and badness. Also it was better to benefit even 
 the bad for the sake of the good than to fail the good 
 on account of the bad. As men have their share in 
 the public corn, not as good or bad men, but simply as 
 citizens, so as human beings, and not as good or bad 
 men, . do all share alike in the blessings of existence. 
 God gave certain gifts to the whole human race 
 without exception ; the same wind that was favour- 
 able to the good could not also have been injurious 
 to the bad, nor could falling showers have been 
 forbidden to water the fields and crops of the 
 wicked. 1 
 
 In all this it will be seen that Seneca's belief did 
 not differ in any essential respect from that which 
 has ever been current since. Yet it was not merely 
 Seneca's belief, but the common belief of his time, 
 and especially of the Stoic philosophy from its very 
 earliest days. This we know from the titles or 
 fragments of the treatises of the earlier Stoics ; and 
 Epictetus but stated a commonplace when he argued 
 that even such small things as the production of 
 milk from grass, of cheese from milk, or of wool 
 from skins, was enough to make a man perceive the 
 providence of God. " Who made and devised these 
 things ? " he exclaims. " No one, you say ! 
 
 1 DC Eenefitiis, iv. 28. 
 
36 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 amazing shamelessness and stupidity I" 1 " Has the 
 world no governor ? How, if a city or family cannot 
 exist the shortest time without a governor and 
 guardian, shall so great and beautiful a system be 
 administered with such order, and yet without a 
 purpose and by chance ?" ' " Who made the sun, and 
 the fruits of the earth, and the seasons, and the con- 
 nection and fellowship of men with one another ? " : 
 " Is the sun able to illuminate so large a part of the 
 all and to leave only without light so much as is 
 occupied by the earth's shadow, and cannot He, who 
 made the sun itself, a small part of Himself when 
 compared with the whole, see all things ? " 4 
 
 Implicit trust in the goodness of Providence 
 afforded the common consolation under bereavement 
 to the Pagans, as it still does to Christians. Plutarch, 
 writing to Apollonius to console him for the death 
 of a son, suggests that the Deity, with a fatherly 
 providence and out of tenderness to mankind, fore- 
 seeing the future, takes some of us purposely from 
 the world by an untimely death ; and urges that it 
 would have been only according to human nature 
 for the father to have died first, "but Providence 
 hath other measures, and the supreme order that 
 governs the world is very different." 
 
 As a rule, the providence that overruled humanity 
 was held to be entrusted to the demons or angels 
 
 1 Discourses, i. 16. 2 76. ii. 14. 3 76. iv. 1. 4 76. i. 14. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 37 
 
 who acted on earth as the guardians and overseers of 
 human actions ; and the guardian angel, who was set 
 over each soul that was born into the world, was a 
 commonly accepted article of pre-Christian belief. 
 Sometimes it was thought of as a spirit apart from 
 the soul, but more often as the soul itself, or even as 
 conscience. Apuleius, for instance, speaks of the 
 god which is each man's soul, and which, though 
 immortal, is born with a man ; * whilst Olympiodorus, 
 following Plato, identifies the guardian angel with 
 the conscience, the sinless part of our soul, the incor- 
 ruptible judge and witness to the judges after death 
 of the things done in the soul, and so the cause of 
 salvation to us by always turning the soul to what is 
 right, and suffering it not to fall under the dominion 
 of sin. The Christian belief of the guardian angel 
 accompanying the soul into the presence of its judge 
 was simply the old belief as laid down in the Phaedo 
 of Plato, that the demon or genius that attends a 
 man in life leads him after death to the place of 
 judgment. 
 
 To reconcile with the belief in Providence the 
 existence of moral and physical evil in the world was 
 one of the great problems of ancient, as it is still 
 of modern, philosophy. There has been neither 
 change nor advance in either the statement or the 
 
 1 De Deo Socratis, 687 : Is Deus qui est animus sui cuique, 
 quamquam sit immortalis, cum homine gignitur. 
 
38 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 solution of the problem. "Why did God," Cicero 
 makes his sceptic argue, " if, as you Stoics will have 
 it, He made all things for our sake, make so great a 
 quantity of serpents and vipers ? Why did he 
 scatter over sea and land so many destructive 
 things ? " l No one ever stated more clearly all the 
 evils incident to human life than did Maximus of 
 Tyre, nor did any one ever protest more strongly 
 against attributing to them a Divine causation. His 
 explanation was just the same that is popular still ; 
 partly that the evils of individuals may really con- 
 duce to the good of the whole, partly that they are 
 a natural consequence of human wickedness. The 
 explanation of evil practically resolved itself into a 
 denial of its existence. Nothing was really evil, 
 argued the Stoics, that was according to Nature, and 
 therefore death itself was no evil. Or else evil was 
 but a means to a good end, and Chrysippus could see 
 in so dreadful a calamity as the Trojan war an inter- 
 position on the part of the gods to check over- 
 population : an argument which Plutarch justly and 
 indignantly rejected as quite incompatible with the 
 humane and beneficent character of the Divine 
 nature. 2 
 
 Perfect faith in the goodness of Providence, and 
 perfect resignation to God's will, cast from some 
 minds the idea of the necessity of prayer alto- 
 
 1 Acad. Quaest. iv. 38. 2 Contradictions of Stoics, 32. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 39 
 
 gether ; and one of the most interesting dissertations 
 of Maximus of Tyre gives us a good insight into 
 the question of prayer, of its efficacy and rightful 
 objects, as it presented itself to Pagan thought. 
 That God could be influenced by prayer would, he 
 contends, argue His changeability, an idea incom- 
 patible with the idea of Divine goodness. And 
 further : " He that prays either is worthy of the 
 things he prays for, or he is not. If he is, he 
 will obtain them, even though he prays not; and 
 if he is not, he will not obtain them, even though 
 he prays. For neither does he that is worthy and 
 neglects to pray become unworthy through the 
 fact of not praying, nor does he that is unworthy 
 but prays to obtain become worthy by the fact of 
 praying; but, on the contrary, he that is worthy 
 to obtain is so much the more worthy by not being 
 importunate, whilst he that is unworthy adds to his 
 
 unworthiness by his importunity God 
 
 therefore will neither give to those who pray, con- 
 trary to their deserts, nor refuse to those who pray 
 not, according to their deserts." 
 
 And then again prayer is inconsistent with Pro- 
 vidence; for the Providence of God either applies 
 to the universe of things, and is indifferent to 
 particulars, or else to particulars as well ; in neither 
 case is prayer necessary, for in the former it will be 
 refused, if contrary to the good of the whole, whilst 
 
40 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in the latter, to pray is to do as a sick man who 
 should beg his doctor for some particular medicine 
 or food, not resting assured that if it be good for him 
 it will be given to him, though he ask not, but that 
 if bad for him, not even though he ask. 
 
 Again, it is wrong to pray for wealth br victory 
 or success in trade ; " for God says : if thou askest 
 for good things for a good object, and art worthy to 
 ask for them, receive them. So thou hast no need 
 of prayer, and shalt receive them, even though thou 
 keepest silence. And if it be said that Socrates and 
 Pythagoras and Plato used to pray, their prayer was 
 not a petition for things that were wanting to them, 
 but an intercourse and communing with the gods 
 about the things they possessed, and an exercise of 
 virtue. Socrates prayed the gods not for wealth nor 
 power, but for a virtuous soul, a tranquil life, a 
 blameless existence, a death of good hope (evehirw 
 Odvarov). But if a man shall pray for such things 
 as a fair voyage from shore, or for plenty of fish 
 from the sea, he will depart without obtaining the 
 gifts for which he prayed." ] Ask the gods, he 
 says elsewhere, not about your ravaged fields, or 
 pirates at sea, or your walls besieged, or your bodies 
 destroyed, for these are trifles, and ephemeral ; but 
 ask about virtue, when your soul is injured, robbed, 
 besieged, or diseased. 2 
 
 1 Dissert, xi. 2 Dissert, xxviii. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 41 
 
 The sum of all this is, that prayer should be for 
 moral and spiritual, and not for temporal, blessings. 
 We are constantly told that this was an exclusively 
 Christian conception, and therefore some more evi- 
 dence may be adduced to that wherewith Maximus 
 of Tyre has already supplied us. Plutarch speaks of 
 prayers as customary to the gods, not only for 
 health, wealth, concord or peace, but for direction to 
 the use of the best words and actions. 1 He men- 
 tions with approval such vows in prayers as to 
 abstain from wine for a year and to serve God with 
 temperance, or to be careful not to disregard truth 
 even in jest ; and he traced his own power of self- 
 control to the habit he thus imposed on himself 
 of avoiding anger on certain sacred days, a habit 
 that in a few months' time rendered him much 
 more patient of evil and more courteous in language 
 and behaviour. 2 When the Eoman consul, Telesinus, 
 asked Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorean, what 
 he prayed for at the altars, the philosopher replied, 
 " That justice may prevail, the laws not be broken, 
 that wise men may be poor, and the rest rich, 
 but honestly " ; and when he was further asked 
 whether he thought that his prayer would be 
 heeded, he answered, " Yes ; for when I approach 
 the altars, I include all in one prayer, ' Grant, 
 
 God, all that is good for me.' " This prayer 
 
 1 Superstition, iv. 2 Cure of Anger, xvi. 3 Philostratus, iv. 40. 
 
42 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 he thought enough for all who came to the altar 
 with a good conscience, in the presence of the all- 
 knowing gods. 1 So Seneca bade Lucilius pray for 
 a good conscience and good health of soul before 
 asking for health of body; and, commending the 
 precept of Athenodorus to ask nothing of God that 
 could not be asked openly, he condemned the prac- 
 tice of some who dared to whisper most disgraceful 
 prayers to the gods, and who told to God what they 
 would not like a man to know. He finished his 
 letter with words that no Christian writer has ever 
 surpassed : " So live with men as if God saw you, 
 so speak with God as if men heard you." 2 " That 
 worship of the gods," says Cicero, " is the best and the 
 most chaste, the holiest and the most religious, when 
 we reverence them ever with purity and perfect 
 innocence both of thought and word. 3 
 
 Few traces remain of pre-Christian or Pagan 
 prayer. The public prayers of the temple services 
 of Eome or Athens are as little known to us as the 
 prayers of the Chinese. In point of length and 
 frequency they probably differed very little from 
 what has since been customary. We find Marcus 
 Aurelius bidding himself on all occasions to call on 
 the gods, and not to trouble about the length of 
 time so spent, for that even three hours of prayer 
 
 1 Pliilostratus, Life of Apol. i. 11. 2 EpisL 10. 
 
 3 De Natura Deorum, ii. 28. 
 
PAGAN THEOLOGY 43 
 
 would be enough ; a fact which intimates that three 
 hours was rather below than in excess of the time 
 generally devoted to private prayer. 
 
 It would be more interesting to judge of the 
 quality of the prayers; but for that the data fail, 
 and we can only conjecture that, as with regard to 
 their frequency and duration, so with regard to their 
 subject-matter, their spirit, and their sentiments, the 
 change effected by Christianity was less than we are 
 apt to suppose. It is a distinct probability that, 
 in the fusion that ultimately took place between 
 Paganism and Christianity, many of the prayers that 
 we still use passed with very little change from the 
 religious services of Pagan to those of Christian 
 Eome ; for the inducement would have been irresist- 
 ible to try to reconcile men to the new religion as 
 often by the use of the old familiar words as by 
 the use of the old familiar ceremonies. 
 
 But, to leave the ground of conjecture, we may 
 fitly conclude this subject with a translation of the 
 prayer to Zeus, with which Simplicius, the last of 
 the philosophers, ended his commentary on Epic- 
 tetus. If we may regard it as typical of pre- 
 Christian prayer generally, we shall see that there 
 cannot have been that lack of genuine piety of 
 feeling which those who have nothing but black on 
 their palettes for the Pagan world would fain have 
 us believe. It runs as follows : 
 
44 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 " I beseech Thee, Lord, the Father and Guide 
 of our reason, to make us mindful of the noble 
 origin Thou hast thought worthy to confer upon us ; 
 and to assist us to act as becomes free agents ; that 
 we may be cleansed from the irrational passions of 
 the body and may subdue and govern the same, 
 using them as instruments in a fitting manner ; and 
 to assist us to the right direction of the reason that 
 is in us, and to its participation in what is real 
 by the light of truth. And thirdly, I beseech Thee, 
 my Saviour, entirely to remove the darkness from 
 the eyes of our souls, in order that we may know 
 aright, as Homer says, both God and man." 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 PAGAN RELIGION 
 
 NEXT to the fundamental unity of God, His perfect 
 and absolute goodness was the most important 
 principle dwelt upon by philosophical theology, a 
 principle not foreign, of course, to the higher religious 
 conceptions of the ancient Jews, but a principle of 
 such difficult reconcilement with many of their 
 doctrines, as well as of those of the early Christian 
 Church, as to have been one of the main grounds for 
 which numbers from the very first deserted the 
 Christian fold. Whatever doctrine conflicts with 
 this first principle of the goodness of God, Philosophy 
 asserted, as she still asserts, to be false; and the 
 gross superstitions that have filled the world from 
 the neglect of that plain and simple rule compel our 
 admiration for the wisdom of Seneca, Epictetus, or 
 Plutarch, who never tired of insisting on a right 
 conception of God as the beginning and chief part of 
 piety. " He worships God who knows Him " (Deum 
 
46 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 colit qui novit), said Seneca ; and hence he deduced 
 the vanity of lighting lamps on the Sabbath or 
 paying morning devotions in the temples, and scorned 
 the idea of the Deity standing in need of certain 
 human services, on the ground that He could be in 
 no need of servants who was Himself at the service 
 of all men everywhere. 1 In reference to the 
 worship of God, his words that "Love cannot be 
 mingled with fear," 2 correspond exactly with the 
 Christian utterance, "Perfect love casteth out 
 fear." 
 
 From this primary axiom of philosophical theology 
 several consequences flowed of great importance in 
 the religious sentiments of the Pagan world. First, 
 a fervent feeling of love for God ; secondly, a spirit 
 of absolute but hopeful resignation to His will ; and 
 thirdly, the aspiration to imitate as far as possible 
 His perfections. It is worth while to glance at 
 each in turn, in order to understand aright the 
 higher religious conceptions current among men who 
 owed nothing to Jewish or Christian influences. 
 
 1. The conception of the all-pervading goodness of 
 God is perhaps more apparent in Epictetus than in 
 any other Pagan writer ; certainly no other so 
 clearly expressed man's duty of love and thankful- 
 ness for all the blessings of Providence. " For if we 
 had understanding," he exclaims, " what else ought 
 
 1 Epist. 95. 2 Ib. 47. 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 47 
 
 we to do publicly or privately than to sing hymns 
 and give thanks to the Deity ? " On every occasion 
 we ought to sing a hymn, lauding the greatness of 
 God ; but since most of us are blind, " should there 
 not be some one man to fulfil this office, and to sing, 
 on behalf of all, the hymns to God ? For what else 
 can I, a lame old man, do than sing hymns to 
 God? If I were a nightingale, I should act as a 
 nightingale, and if a swan, as a swan ; but since I am 
 a rational being, it behoves me to praise God ; this 
 is my work ; I do it, nor will I desert my post so 
 long as I am allowed to keep it, and I exhort you to 
 join in the same song." 1 It would be absurd to 
 suppose that Epictetus was alone in the possession 
 or the expression of such feelings ; as large a 
 proportion of the world probably possessed them 
 then as possess or give utterance to them now. 
 
 2. From the love of God, flowing from the most 
 perfect faith in His goodness, flowed as a necessary 
 consequence a spirit of the most complete trust 
 in His ordering of things, a spirit of the most 
 implicit resignation to His will. This was the 
 meaning of the old Pythagorean and Stoic precept, 
 " Follow God," nor did the new Christian faith add 
 anything to the sure guidance of life or to the consola- 
 tion for its evils with which the recognition of this 
 principle had for ages supplied pre-Christian society. 
 
 1 Discourses, i. 16. 
 
48 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Of this let a few quotations from Seneca and Epic- 
 tetus supply the proof. 
 
 "It is best," says Seneca, "to suffer what you 
 cannot amend, and to follow God, the Author of all 
 things, without murmuring ; he is a bad soldier who 
 groans as he follows his general." l " What is the 
 principal thing ? To be able to bear adversity with 
 a cheerful mind ; so to bear whatever happens as if 
 you wished it to happen, for you ought to have 
 wished it to happen, had you known that all things 
 happen by the decree of God ; to weep, to lament, to 
 groan, is to rebel." 2 "A good man, being of the 
 highest piety towards the gods, will bear with 
 equanimity whatever happens to him, knowing that 
 it happened by the Divine law from which all things 
 flow." 3 " In all circumstances which seern opposed 
 to me and hard, I am constituted in this wise : I do 
 not merely obey God, but I yield assent to Him. I 
 follow Him from my heart, not from necessity. 
 Nothing shall ever happen to me which I will take 
 sadly or with a bad face." 4 
 
 This was the faith, the common sentiment of 
 thousands, in whatever school of philosophy they 
 were reared, in days when philosophy was practically 
 identical with religion, and supplied men no less 
 with a high standard of moral action than with 
 
 1 Epist. 17. 2 Prolegomena to Naturales Quaestiones. 
 
 3 Epist. 76. 4 76. 96. 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 49 
 
 support for the present and hope for the future life ; 
 when philosophy sent its missionaries to all parts of 
 the world, to promote virtue and oppose vice, even, 
 if need were, at the peril of their lives, missionaries 
 like Apollonius, Diogenes, Dion Chrysostom; and 
 when philosophers, instead of confessors, lived in 
 kings' and nobles' houses, to counsel them in life and 
 to educate their children. Epictetus, on the duty of 
 merging the human will in the Divine, will bear 
 comparison with the author of the Imitatio Christi 
 or with any other Christian writer. And yet we 
 only have the faint reflection of his actual teaching, 
 only notes worked up from his lectures by Arrian, 
 the historian, who attended them ! 
 
 " Dare to look up to God and say : Do with me 
 henceforth as Thou wilt. I am of one mind with 
 Thee. I am Thine. I decline nothing that seems 
 good to Thee. Lead me whither Thou wilt. Clothe 
 me as Thou wilt. Wilt Thou that I hold office or 
 live a private life, remain at home or go into exile, 
 be poor or rich, I will defend Thy purpose with me 
 in respect of all these." l 
 
 In the same spirit he only professes himself as 
 desirous, when disease or death shall overtake him, 
 of being able thus to address God : " Have I trans- 
 gressed Thy commandments ? Have I used amiss 
 the means Thou gavest me? ... Have I ever 
 
 1 Discourses, ii. 16. 
 
50 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 blamed Thee ? Have I ever found fault with Thy 
 government ? I have been ill, because it was Thy 
 will, and so have others, but I willingly. At Thy 
 will I became poor, but cheerfully. If I never held 
 office, it was that Thou didst not will it, and so I 
 never desired it. Didst Thou ever behold me the 
 sadder on this account? Have I ever approached 
 Thee with a sad countenance,' I ready to follow Thine 
 orders and signals ? And now dost Thou wish me 
 to depart from Thine assembly? I depart, giving 
 Thee all thanks that Thou hast thought me worthy 
 to take part in Thy festival, to behold Thy works, 
 and to appreciate Thy government." l 
 
 Elsewhere he expresses the hope that death may 
 find him engaged in some work of human interest, 
 something beneficent, of public utility, and noble ; 
 but that otherwise he may be found engaged in a 
 work that nothing can hinder, the work of self- 
 improvement (efjiavrbv eiravopOwv). Then would he 
 be content to stretch forth his hands to God and 
 say : " The means that Thou gavest me to understand 
 Thy government I have not neglected. I for my 
 part have not dishonoured Thee. . . . Have I ever 
 blamed Thee ? Have I ever been ill-pleased with 
 anything that has happened or wished it to be other- 
 wise ? . . . That Thou hast brought me into life I 
 thank Thee, and for what Thou hast given. I am 
 
 1 .Discourses, iii. 5. 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 51 
 
 content to have enjoyed for so long the things that 
 were Thine. Eeceive them back again, and dispose 
 of them where Thou pleasest. For Thine they all 
 were. It was Thou who gavest them to me. Is it 
 not enough to depart in such a spirit, and what life 
 is better and more becoming than one so ordered, or 
 what close of life more happy ? " x 
 
 Epictetus therefore would have men talk, not of 
 losing things, but of restoring them. " Is your child 
 dead ? It has been restored. Is your wife dead ? 
 She has been restored." - Man's freedom and happi- 
 ness depend on his looking to God in all things, small 
 or great, and in submitting his own will uncondi- 
 tionally to that of the Deity. Epictetus professes 
 himself ready to follow God's will, even to death 
 upon the rack ; 3 and his ideal of the perfect Stoic is 
 of a man ever desirous to be of the same mind with 
 God, and of assenting submission to His decrees. 
 
 This idea of resignation is impressed on almost 
 every page of Epictetus. It is the dominant spirit of 
 all that remains of his life and teaching, as it is also 
 of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who set him- 
 self for the guiding principle of his life the precept, 
 " Love mankind. Follow God." 4 On every occasion 
 the Emperor would have a man reflect, This comes 
 from God. 5 Such is his faith in the wisdom and 
 
 1 Discourses, iv. 10. " Encheiridion, ii. 3 Discourses, iv. 1. 
 4 vii. 31. 5 Ib. iii. 11. 
 
52 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 benevolence with which things have been arranged 
 for mankind, that he is content to leave the question 
 unsolved whether good men who have led pious 
 and religious lives in constant communion with the 
 Divinity will be extinguished by death, in perfect 
 trust that in whichever way it is destined to be, it 
 has been ordered by the higher powers for the best. 1 
 
 3. " Would you propitiate the gods ? " exclaims 
 Seneca. " Then be like them. He worships them 
 enough who imitates them." 2 And this had been 
 one of the commonplaces of philosophy from at least 
 the time of Plato, who said, " He who would be dear 
 to God must be like Him and such as He is." 3 It is 
 a fine passage which Augustine quotes from Porphyry, 
 who wrote a long but lost work against the Christians : 
 " God being the Father of all, is in need of nothing ; 
 but for us it is good to adore Him by means of Justice, 
 Chastity, and other virtues, and thus to make life 
 itself a prayer to Him by inquiring into and imitat- 
 ing His nature. For inquiry purifies, and imitation 
 deifies us, by moving us nearer to Him." 4 
 
 Nothing perhaps more completely shows the fal- 
 sity of the common assertion that the religious ideas 
 of Paganism left men's lives and morals uninfluenced 
 and unelevated than this idea of the human endeavour 
 to imitate the Divine nature. Such an imitation was 
 
 1 Meditations, xii. 5. 2 Epist. 95. 
 
 3 Laws, iv. 716 ; Thcaetetus, 133. 4 City of God, xix. 23. 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 53 
 
 only possible, said Seneca, by the possession of an 
 upright, good, and great soul, which was nothing else 
 than God resident in a human body. "By the 
 attainment of perfect virtue, which is the chief good, 
 you begin to be the companion of the gods, and not 
 their suppliant. . . . The way is safe and pleasant, 
 and one for which Nature has equipped you. If you 
 but hold fast to what she has given you, you will rise 
 equal to God." l To raise a man to an equality with 
 God was therefore the promise of philosophy ; 2 and 
 philosophy he declared to be inseparable from religion, 
 justice, piety, and all other virtues ; philosophy that 
 taught men to worship the gods and to love mankind 
 (colere divina, humana diligere). 3 
 
 Perfect mental happiness was the sign and conse- 
 quence of the attainment of this state. " If you are 
 never sad, and no hope perturbs your soul with future 
 anxiety, if by day and night the tenor of your mind 
 is equable, upright, self-satisfied, you have attained 
 the sum of human felicity." 4 
 
 In all this what is admirable is the proud reliance 
 on human nature and the strong belief in its high 
 capacities for virtue ; a reliance and belief which 
 must not only have served of themselves as powerful 
 incentives to good, but have acted also as powerful 
 safeguards against great moral debasement. Whether 
 the keen sense of personal and general sinfulness, 
 
 1 Epist. 31. 2 Ib. 48. 3 Ib. 90. 4 Ib. 59. 
 
54 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 which came into the world with the Oriental religions, 
 ever proved as efficient, may well be doubted ; the 
 habit of dwelling on the higher possible attainments 
 of our nature would seem to have a better tendency 
 than that of always harping on its lower depths. The 
 Stoic doctrine, that the human soul or reason was a 
 part of, or emanation from, the Divinity, led certainly 
 to as high conceptions of the moral and spiritual 
 elevation, attainable by assiduous discipline and 
 effort, as was ever promoted by the Hebrew doctrine 
 of the fallen and corrupt nature of humanity. But 
 at all events between the two points of view, which- 
 ever we prefer, there was a perfect abyss, as the 
 following passages from Seneca will show. 
 
 " You ask what constitutes a wise man. The same 
 as constitutes God, for you must allow the former to 
 possess something divine, heavenly, and magnificent. 
 . . . You ask, What is the locality of the sovereign 
 good ? The soul ; which, unless it is pure and holy, 
 cannot receive God." l 
 
 " Between good men and the gods there is a friend- 
 ship founded on virtue. Friendship, do I say ? nay, 
 rather an intimacy and likeness, for a good man only 
 differs in point of time from God, whose disciple he 
 is, and imitator, and also His real offspring." 5 
 
 " In what does Jupiter surpass a good man ? In 
 the longer duration of his goodness ; a wise man does 
 
 1 Epist. 87. 2 De Providentia, 1. 
 
PA CAN RELIGION 5 5 
 
 not think less of himself because his virtues are in- 
 cluded in a shorter space of time. As of two wise 
 men he that dies the oldest is not happier than the 
 other, whose virtue is ended within a few years, so God 
 does not surpass a wise man in felicity, albeit he does 
 in length of time. The virtue is not greater in itself 
 which is longer in time. . . . We should follow 
 Sextius, who points the road to heaven through 
 frugality, temperance, and fortitude. The gods are 
 not fastidious or jealous ; they admit and stretch out 
 their hands to those who ascend to them. Do you 
 wonder that a man should go to the gods ? It is 
 God who comes to men, nay, rather comes into men, 
 for there is no good mind without God." x 
 
 There are few writers who have not held up to 
 scorn the apparent arrogance of these words. Yet 
 the idea of the innate divinity of man flowed neces- 
 sarily from that theory of the soul which regarded it 
 as originally emanating from God, and as ultimately 
 destined to return to its source. It was in this sense 
 that men were accustomed to think and speak of 
 themselves as the sons of God. Epictetus calls 
 man a portion separated from the Deity, a portion 
 of Him. 2 " Why," he asks, " should not a man who 
 has observed the government of the world, and the 
 generation of all beings on the earth from God, call 
 himself a citizen of the world and a son of God ; 
 1 Epist. 73. 2 Discourses, ii. 8. 
 
56 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and if kinship with Caesar or any other great Eoman 
 enables us to live without fear, shall not the fact of 
 God being our Maker and Father and Guardian 
 release us from sorrows and anxiety ? " l " Zeus has 
 set me free," he exclaims; " do you think He intended 
 His own Son to be enslaved ? " He argues that a 
 man who realised the doctrine that we are all sprung 
 from God would have no mean or ignoble thoughts 
 about himself, and he makes the consideration a 
 constant appeal to playing a noble and worthy part 
 in life. 
 
 This, then, explains Seneca's language when he 
 speaks of the truly good man equalling the gods, 
 and, ever mindful of his origin, raising himself up to 
 them. There can be nothing wrong, he urges, in a 
 man's endeavour to ascend to the place whence he 
 originally descended; and something divine may 
 assuredly be held to exist in a man who is part 
 of God. " For this whole in which we are contained 
 is both one and is God ; and we are His associates 
 and members." "And as our body is erect and looks 
 heavenwards, so our soul is capable of infinite ex- 
 pansion, and has been so formed by nature as to 
 have the same wishes as the gods." 3 
 
 In the same sense he writes : " We should so live 
 as if we lived in the public gaze, and so think as if 
 some one could inspect our inmost heart; and so 
 
 1 Discourses, i. 9. - Ib. i. 19. 3 Epist. 92. 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 57 
 
 some one can, for what is the use of anything being 
 concealed from man, when nothing is closed to God ? 
 He is present in our souls, and enters into our inmost 
 thoughts. Enters, do I say, as if He were ever absent 
 from them." * Or when again he tells Lucilius that 
 there is no need to raise his hands in prayer to 
 heaven, nor to beg the sacristan to admit him to the 
 ears of the idol in order to be better heard, it is for 
 the reason that "God is near you, is with you, is 
 within you. Yes, a holy spirit resides within us, 
 who watches our good and evil actions and also 
 watches over us." 2 
 
 It is necessary here to quote some parallel pass- 
 ages from Epictetus, which will still further serve 
 as an answer to the common denial of the existence 
 of any religious feeling in Pagan antiquity. " If you 
 always remember that whatever you are doing in 
 soul or body God stands by as an inspector, you 
 will never err in all your prayers or acts, but you 
 will have God dwelling with you." 3 Zeus "has 
 placed by every man a demon or guardian who never 
 sleeps nor is deceived. . . . When then you have 
 shut the doors and made darkness within, never say 
 you are alone, for you are not, but God is within, and 
 your demon, and what need have they of light to see 
 what you are doing ? " 4 " The philosophers say that 
 
 1 Epist, 83. 2 Ib. 41. 3 Fragment 120. 
 
 4 Discourses, i. 14. 
 
58 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 we ought first to learn that there is a God and that 
 He provides for all things ; and that it is impossible 
 to conceal from Him our acts, or even our intentions 
 and thoughts." 1 "When you are going to see any 
 great person, remember that another also from above 
 sees what is going on, and that you ought to please 
 Him rather than the other." 2 "You are carrying 
 a God with you, and you know it not. Do you 
 think I mean some god of silver or gold, and ex- 
 ternal ? You carry Him within yourself, and you do 
 not perceive that it is Him you pollute by impure 
 thoughts and dirty deeds. And if an image of God 
 were present, you would not dare to do any of the 
 things which you are doing ; but when God Himself 
 is present within and sees all and hears all, you are 
 not ashamed of thinking such things and doing such 
 things, ignorant as you are of your own nature and 
 subject to the anger of God." 3 "Live with the 
 gods," says Aurelius, " and He does live with them 
 who constantly shows them that His own soul is 
 satisfied with what is assigned to Him, and that 
 it does all that the demon wishes, which Zeus hath 
 given to every man for his guardian and guide, a 
 portion of Himself : and this is every man's under- 
 standing and reason." 4 
 
 It is moreover noteworthy that Seneca's language 
 about the possible equality of man with God is 
 
 1 Discourses, ii. 14. 2 II. i. 30. 3 Ib. ii. 8. 4 v. 27. 
 
PA CAN RELIGION 59 
 
 equalled not only by other Pagan writers, but at 
 least by two of the most philosophic of the Christian 
 Fathers. Cicero has a fine passage in his Republic : 
 " So consider it, that it is not thou who art mortal, 
 but only this body of thine. . . . The soul of each 
 man constitutes himself, not that figure which can 
 be shown by the finger. Know, therefore, that thou 
 art a god, since he is a god who flourishes, who 
 feels, who remembers, who uses foresight, who rules 
 and governs that body over which it is set, just as 
 that Supreme God rules and moves this world." 1 
 Elsewhere he speaks of piety, justice, and the other 
 virtues as constituting a happy life, "equal and 
 similar to that of the gods, yielding in nothing to 
 the celestials save in immortality." 2 
 
 But it is more surprising to find similar language 
 in St. Clement, Lactantius, and Tertullian. Lactantius 
 speaks of a man who masters his passion as becoming 
 the equal of God (Hie erit consimilis Deo, qui 
 mrtutem Dei cepit.) 3 Clement declares that the 
 man who leads his life on the true Gnostic principles 
 is worthy to be called the Lord's brother, and at the 
 same time His friend and son ; 4 and in another place, 
 after describing the virtues of the perfect Gnostic in 
 language that throughout closely resembles the Stoics' 
 descriptions of their ideal wise man, he concludes : 
 
 1 vi. 17. 2 De Natura Deorum, ii. 61. 3 vi. 23. 
 
 4 Stromata, iii. 10. 
 
60 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 " In this way it is possible for the Gnostic already 
 to have become God." 1 Tertullian, in praise of 
 fasting, actually goes so far as to say that it makes 
 God tent-fellow with man, peer in truth with peer. 2 
 
 The principle of striving to imitate the Divine 
 perfection was applied by the philosophers to every 
 detail of moral action. From the nature of God, and 
 the duty of man to strive to imitate it, Epictetus 
 deduces the subordinate duty of being faithful, 
 beneficent, and magnanimous in every word and act 
 of life. 3 And Plutarch says : " There is no greater 
 benefit men can enjoy from God than by the imita- 
 tion and pursuit of His perfections and sanctity to 
 be excited to the study of virtue " ; whence he urges 
 it as one reason for the slowness of God to punish, 
 that men, imitating His mercy and forbearance, may 
 be slower to take revenge on their fellows, nor hasten 
 to inflict chastisement upon them 4 
 
 A portion of a letter by Porphyry, the ISTeo- 
 Platonist, to Marcella, his wife, may fitly close this 
 part of the subject. "The best honour thou canst 
 pay to God is to make thy soul resemble God ; and 
 
 1 Stromata, iv. 23, retry dvvarbv r$ rp6?ry rbv yvuanKov i$8r) 
 yevtcrdai 6e6v. 
 
 2 On Fasting, 6. Tanta est circumscripti victus praerogativa ut 
 Deum praestet liomini contubernalem, parem revera pari. Si enim 
 Deus aeternus non esuriet, ut testatur per Esaiam, hoc erit tempus 
 quo homo Deo adaequetur cum sine pabulo vivet. 
 
 3 Discourses, ii. 14. 4 Slowness of God to Punish, 5. 
 
PA CAN RELIGION 6 1 
 
 this resemblance will be possible only by virtue, for 
 virtue alone draws the soul upwards towards its like. 
 And nothing else is accounted great with God than 
 virtue, but God is greater than virtue, and strengthens 
 the well-doer, but a bad spirit is a guide to bad deeds. 
 A bad soul therefore flees from God and will not 
 admit there is a providence of God, and utterly 
 rejects the Divine law which punishes every wicked 
 man. But the soul of a wise man conforms itself 
 to God, always looks to God, is always with God. 
 God cares and provides for the wise man, and there- 
 fore the wise man is blessed, because he is under 
 God's protection. It is not the utterances of the 
 wise man that God values, but his works, for the 
 wise man, even though silent, honours God, whilst 
 the illiterate man, even when he prays and sacrifices, 
 profanes the Divinity. The wise man therefore 
 alone is a priest, alone beloved of God, alone knows 
 how to pray. He who practises wisdom practises 
 the knowledge of God, not by always praying and 
 sacrificing, but by showing by works his piety to- 
 wards God. For one makes himself pleasing to God, 
 not by behaving according to the opinions of man or 
 the empty phrases of sophists, but a man makes 
 himself pleasing to God and deifies himself by assi- 
 milating his own soul to the Being who enjoys an 
 incorruptible beatitude. A man makes himself 
 pleasing or displeasing to God, nor does he suffer 
 
62 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 evil at the hands of God. For he is not so impious 
 who does not worship the statues of the gods, as he 
 who attaches to God the opinions of the multitude. 
 But do thou be persuaded that we cannot form an 
 high enough idea of God, of His beatitude and 
 incorruptibility. . . . And it is not by certain rites 
 nor opinions that we rightly worship God. God is 
 not moved either by tears or supplications ; sacrifices 
 do not honour him, nor are a multitude of offerings 
 an ornament to Him, but the soul that is well 
 governed and full of the Divine spirit enters into 
 union with God, for like must join with like. And 
 the sacrifices of the senseless are food for fire, and 
 their offerings are a prey for the sacrilegious. But 
 do thou, as I have said, make of thine own mind the 
 temple of God ; let it be prepared and adorned as a 
 fitting receptacle for Him." 
 
 From the same letter some detached sentences will 
 tend still further to support the inference, sought to 
 be enforced, of the fundamental identity between 
 the higher Christian religious sentiment and that of 
 the pre-Christian or extra -Christian world. They 
 are the more interesting as coming from an avowed 
 enemy of Christianity and a writer of a voluminous 
 work against it, all copies of which were burnt by 
 the Christians in the reign of Theodosius. " Wherever 
 forgetfulness of God creeps in, there the bad spirit 
 (o /caicbs Sal/jicov) must dwell. For the soul is the 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 63 
 
 habitation of either gods or demons." " Of every 
 action and every deed and word let God be present 
 as observer and overseer, and of all our good deeds 
 let us deem God the cause." "The labour which 
 other people undergo for the sake of the body, so 
 much does the wise man and God-loving undertake for 
 the benefit of his soul." " Great training is required 
 for -the government of the body ; and often for this 
 purpose are certain members cut off. Be thou ready 
 for the salvation of thy soul to cut off thy whole 
 body." " Let these four principles above all be held 
 firmly as elementary concerning God: faith, truth, 
 love, hope. For it behoves us to believe that the 
 only salvation is conversion to God ; to be zealous 
 above all things to have a right knowledge of Him ; 
 knowing Him, to love Him ; and loving Him, to 
 cherish good hopes about life." l 
 
 The foregoing evidence proves conclusively that 
 in love and thankfulness to God for His goodness, in 
 trustful resignation to His providence and will, in a 
 moral and spiritual endeavour to bring human life 
 into conformity with His perfections, the Pagan world, 
 as represented by its higher teachers, had no lesson 
 to learn of the Christian missionaries, nor any reason 
 for transferring its allegiance from the religion incul- 
 cated by Philosophy. A few more extracts from 
 
 1 For Porphyry's letter to Marcella see Orelli's Opuscula, i. 
 282-314. 
 
64 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Epictetus will minimise yet more the difference 
 between the rival spiritual forces. Speaking of the 
 struggle with temptation, he says : " Great is the 
 combat, divine the work ; it is for kingship, freedom, 
 happiness, tranquillity. Eemember God; call on Him 
 as a helper and protector, as men at sea call on the 
 Dioscuri." l " Desire to be in purity with your own 
 pure self and with God." 2 " Wish nothing else but 
 what God wishes." 3 "From your mind cast out 
 . . . sadness, fear, desire, envy, malice, avarice, 
 effeminacy, intemperance. But it is only possible to 
 cast them out by looking to God, by fervent attach- 
 ment to Him, by devotion to His commands." 4 
 " Let your talk of God be renewed every day rather 
 than your food." 5 "Think 'of God more frequently 
 than you breathe." 6 
 
 And then we must remember that all this is 
 but from the merest surface of Pagan literature, 
 and that the secrets of its real depths rest with the 
 flames that destroyed the famous library at Alexandria, 
 or with the fires that raged against Pagan literature 
 during and probably long after the Christian perse- 
 cution under Theodosius, or with the monks who 
 scraped the old parchment manuscripts of the Pagans 
 in order to cover them with their own legends. To 
 judge of the influence and quality of pre-Christian 
 
 1 Discourses, ii. 18. 2 Ib. ii. 18. 3 Ib. ii. 17. 
 
 4 Ib. ii. 16. 5 Fragment 118. 6 Ib. 119. 
 
PA CAN RELIGION 65 
 
 religion we are reduced to an amount of published re- 
 mains, which, compared with the books of the religion 
 that finally prevailed, is suspiciously insignificant. 
 To obtain any idea of the real religious feeling of 
 antiquity, we are forced to gather it as best we may 
 from moral or philosophical treatises, or from the 
 poets, or from the fragments scattered through the 
 pages of the Christian Fathers. We catch glimpses 
 of it in Plato, or in the Neo-Platonists like Porphyry, 
 Plotinus, or Jamblicus; albeit obscured in all the 
 latter by their metaphysical speculations. We find 
 more of it in the remains of Epictetus or Seneca the 
 late representatives of that Stoic school to whose philo- 
 sophy the civilised world and afterwards the Christian 
 world was so largely indebted for its higher moral 
 and religious ideas. Yet how little, after all, remains 
 of that philosophy ! Of Zeno, its founder, the titles 
 of some of his works ; of the seven hundred and five 
 treatises of Chrysippus, nothing but their titles or 
 fragments ; of Cleanthes, only that noble hymn to 
 Zeus which rises to the highest level of the Hebrew 
 Psalmists. All we know, from fragments or from 
 allusions to the titles of their works, is that a large 
 part of their writings, in other words their philosophy, 
 was what we should now call religious, inculcating 
 those duties towards God and mankind which man 
 owed by virtue of his relationship to God. Even of 
 the lectures of Epictetus, whereof we get a faint 
 
 5 
 
66 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 reflection of the original from the second-hand re- 
 production of Arrian, only four books have been 
 preserved out of eight : whilst of Seneca, the titles of 
 his lost works seem to show that we only possess a 
 fraction of his total productions ; and of him, as of 
 Marcus Aurelius, it may be said, that his noblest 
 thoughts, in his letters to Lucilius, were in the nature 
 of private confidences, and not written with a view 
 to publication at all. But enough remains to reveal 
 the existence, even in the worst days of the Eoman 
 Empire, of a spiritual and religious life which it has 
 suited most historians purposely to ignore, in order 
 to account, by the theory of the religious destitution 
 of Paganism, for the rapid progress of Christianity. 
 
 It is so much the custom to speak of Seneca and 
 Epictetus as Stoics, that we are apt to overlook the 
 fact that, in the sense of adopting the best doctrines 
 of all philosophical schools alike, they have as much 
 right as Cicero to be called Eclectics. The best ideas 
 of Plato, Pythagoras, and Epicurus mingle in their 
 teaching ; and Seneca, who expressly disclaims any 
 rigid adherence to a particular philosophical sect, 
 quotes no other writer with more approval or more 
 frequency than Epicurus. This Eclectic philosophy 
 was the great triumph of Pagan thought; and the 
 position it held, and the influence it had, may well 
 be illustrated by a remark of Clement, the most 
 liberal of the Christian Fathers, who claimed the 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 67 
 
 inspiration of God as much for Greek philosophy as 
 for the two Testaments, and who protested against 
 the fear of it felt by his co-religionists as no better 
 than that of children for ghosts : " By philosophy 
 I do not mean the Stoic, or the Platonic, or the 
 Epicurean, or the Aristotelian; but whatever has 
 been finely said by each of these sects, teaching 
 righteousness with pious knowledge, this eclectic 
 whole I call philosophy." 1 Origen not only bears 
 witness to the immense benefits conferred by philo- 
 sophy, but admits that but for it Christianity would 
 never have prevailed : " How was it possible for the 
 Gospel doctrine of peace, not allowing us even to 
 take vengeance on our enemies, to have prevailed in 
 the world, unless at the advent of Jesus a milder 
 spirit had been introduced ? " 2 Justin Martyr did 
 not scruple to count among the elect of God philo- 
 sophers like Socrates, Heraclitus, or Musonius ; and 
 this more liberal attitude of Christianity towards the 
 Pagan philosophy which had prepared the way for it 
 was one of the marked characteristics of the earlier 
 Church, as compared with the religious antipathy 
 towards classical literature which reached its climax 
 with Jerome, and which the Catholic Church has 
 displayed from his day to our own. 
 
 After the mental nightmare, which with the 
 triumph of Catholicism brooded over the world for 
 1 Stromata, i. 7. 2 Against Celsus, ii. 30. 
 
68 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 some thousand years, the classical spirit of Hellenism 
 began again to reassert itself. With the Swiss more 
 than with the German Beformation, with Zwingli 
 rather than with Luther, Greek thought again came 
 into competition with Hebrew, colouring, enlarging, 
 and ennobling Christianity. Sacred literature, rightly 
 so called, included, according to Zwingli, Greek and 
 Latin, as well as Hebrew writers. In a treatise on 
 Providence he appealed in the same sentence to Plato 
 and Seneca as of equal authority with Moses and 
 St. Paul. He held that if the Pagan philosophers 
 dared not profess a monotheistic belief, they never- 
 theless possessed it ; and, as a corollary of the funda- 
 mental identity between profane and sacred literature, 
 he openly taught in church that as many samples of 
 noble lives might be found in profane as in Hebrew 
 history. Socrates and Seneca, he boldly affirmed, 
 " though they were ignorant of religion in the strict 
 or sacramental sense of the word, yet in reality were 
 more religious and holy than all the Dominicans and 
 Franciscans that ever lived." To Francis I. of France 
 he held out the hope of the enjoyment after death of 
 the society of all the good and wise men who had 
 ever been since the world began, not only of the 
 Biblical celebrities, but of Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, 
 Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos, the Scipios, 
 and others. " No good man has ever been," he con- 
 cluded ; " no holy mind or faithful soul shall ever be, 
 
PAGAN RELIGION 69 
 
 from the very beginning of the world to its close, 
 whom you shall not see there in the company of 
 God." 
 
 The slightest knowledge of the history of Christian 
 thought will convince its possessor of the immeasur- 
 able advance over most of his predecessors, contem- 
 poraries, or successors, which was involved in these 
 ideas of Zwingli. Not only was it the orthodox view 
 handed down from Eusebius and Clement that all 
 the higher ideas of the Greeks were, for no other 
 reason than a certain distant similarity and posteri- 
 ority in point of time, direct plagiarisms from Moses 
 and the prophets, but also that all men, whatever 
 their virtue, who lived before Christ, were condemned 
 hopelessly to the punishment of everlasting flames 
 for their share in the sin of Adam, and for their 
 inevitable ignorance of the means of salvation from 
 it ! Zwingli's ideas were accordingly as distasteful 
 to Luther and most of the Protestant theologians as 
 they were to the Catholics; and they proved the 
 greatest stumbling-block in the way of his success as 
 a teacher. Now, of course, they are so commonly 
 held that it is a source of wonder that there should 
 have ever been a time when they were regarded as 
 dangerous or heretical. It is to Zwingli and to the 
 Broad Church school, descended from him, that we 
 owe this progress of thought; and if this chapter 
 should help still further to promote that progress, to 
 
70 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 convince us of the real Hellenic origin of our higher 
 Christian religious ideas, and therefore to turn us 
 from an exclusive study of Persianised Hebrew con- 
 ceptions to the study of the pure and simple thoughts 
 of Greek philosophy, it will not have been written 
 in vain. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 PAGAN SUPERSTITION 
 
 IT is difficult to judge how far the open scepticism 
 of men like Cicero or Varro represented a general 
 revulsion in Roman society from the earlier poly- 
 theistic religion. Our own experience should suffice 
 to show how little correspondence there may be 
 between the wide spread of scepticism over a society 
 and its deep penetration ; and inscriptions from all 
 parts of the world seem to indicate that the people 
 of the Eoman Empire were as little disturbed by the 
 intellectual commotion above them as are the depths 
 of the sea by the winds upon its surface. The ridi- 
 cule of Lucian would have been unmeaning had it 
 not pointed to the extreme vitality or to the renewed 
 vigour of the worst superstitions of the ancient 
 creed. 
 
 Probably the never-ending conflict between scepti- 
 cism and superstition served in those days as in our 
 own to give strength and prominence to extremes in 
 
72 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 either direction ; and Apuleius doubtless gave a fair 
 picture of his contemporaries when he wrote the 
 following : " The profane crowd of people, unskilled 
 in philosophy, destitute of holiness, wanting in true 
 reason, without religion, incapable of truth, most 
 scrupulous in its religious worship, neglects the gods 
 with the most insolent contempt ; part of them super- 
 stitious, part contemptuous, either full of fear or full 
 of pride. All these gods very many worship, though 
 not aright, but all ignorantly fear them, and a few 
 impiously deny them altogether." 1 
 
 The difference between the religious and the 
 superstitious man was happily touched by Maximus 
 of Tyre, when he spoke of the former as the friend, 
 and of the latter as the flatterer, of God. Over 
 against the atheists who overlooked the gods, Plutarch 
 set the superstitious who misunderstood them, wil- 
 fully mistaking their benign affection and providence 
 for tyranny and cruelty, and refusing to listen to 
 philosophers or statesmen who declared them to be 
 good and beneficent; and he wondered at people 
 who, whilst they condemned the atheists for impiety, 
 acquitted the superstitious. " What ! " he exclaims 
 indignantly, " is he who holds that there is no God 
 guilty of impiety, and is not he much more so who 
 describes Him as the superstitious do ? " Would not 
 he himself prefer that people should deny the exist- 
 
 1 De Deo Socratis, 668. 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 73 
 
 ence of Plutarch altogether than describe him as 
 fickle, vindictive, and inhumane, as so many pictured 
 the Deity ? l 
 
 The superstitious element in Pagan life tended 
 ever to prevail over the sceptical. The rapidity with 
 which all religious innovations, especially from the 
 East, spread over the Eoman dominion, in spite of all 
 legal opposition or persecution, proves the receptivity 
 that then possessed the civilised world for new forms 
 of worship. The worship, for instance, of Egyptian 
 deities, like Isis, made its way in defiance of the 
 Eoman senate. Soon after the second Punic war 
 there was a decree for the destruction of the temples 
 of Isis and Serapis, and we hear of the consul Aemilius 
 Paulus taking axe in hand against them when no 
 workman dared to touch the sacred buildings. 2 Even 
 the first temple publicly dedicated to Isis in 43 B.C. was 
 destroyed by Tiberius, and the priests punished ; but 
 all persecution was in vain, for not only did the Isis 
 religion speedily possess itself of the Imperial throne 
 in the persons of Otho, Domitian, Commodus, 
 Caracalla, and Alexander Severus, but inscriptions 
 prove the new faith to have spread all over the Empire 
 to Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, and even to 
 England. The priests with their white linen dresses 
 and bald-shaven heads, the clapping of the sistrum, 
 the baptism with the Nile water, and the pageantry 
 
 1 Superstition, 6, 10. 2 Valerius Maximus, i. 2, 3. 
 
74 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of processions, so graphically painted by Apuleius, all 
 point to a religion admirably calculated to spread 
 among the multitude ; but every part of the ceremonial, 
 absurd as it may seem to us, had a clear symbolical 
 meaning, and it is certain that the central idea of the 
 worship of Isis and Osiris was the achievement of 
 a holier life by means of atonement, fasting, and 
 abstinences of all sorts, and the attainment of a purer 
 life hereafter by withdrawal from the delights of this. 
 " If by sedulous worship," Apuleius makes Isis say 
 to Lucius in his famous story, " and by the services 
 of religion and by constant chastity thou shalt promote 
 my worship, thou shalt know that it rests with me 
 alone to prolong thy life beyond the bounds accorded 
 to it by Fate." 1 And the priest also say to Lucius : 
 " The gates of Hell and the control of salvation are 
 in the hands of the goddess, and her rites are cele- 
 brated in imitation of a voluntary death and difficult 
 recovery; so that, as it were at the close of life and 
 at the very limit of the enjoyment of light, those to 
 whom the great mysteries of religion can be safely 
 entrusted the goddess is wont to choose, and to 
 restore them, born again in some way by her provi- 
 dence, to run the course of a new salvation." 2 
 
 Against the inroad of every conceivable phase of 
 
 1 Golden Ass, xii. 241. 
 
 2 II). xi. 253. The word renatos = " born again" is remark- 
 able in this passage. 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 75 
 
 Oriental religion the educated classes struggled in vain. 
 The Greek mysteries of Eleusis, the Cappadocian 
 worship of Bellona, the Phrygian worship of Cybele, 
 or the Persian Mithra-worship, brooked no opposition. 
 Persecution proved no less futile against them than 
 it proved afterwards against Christianity. In the 
 year 176 B.C. as many as 7000 persons were found 
 guilty of taking part in the secret worship of Bacchus, 
 and of these as many as half were killed. 1 In the 
 reign of Tiberius no fewer than 4000 freedmen were 
 exiled to Sardinia, to fight the brigands there, for 
 participation in the Egyptian and Jewish religions, 
 and probably the number was larger of those who for 
 the same offence were forced to leave Italy or to give 
 up their rites by a certain day. 2 Asceticism in its 
 many forms had become the order of the day long 
 before Christianity gave a fresh impetus in the same 
 direction. Clement speaks of the idol- worshippers as 
 refraining from food and observing a strict chastity. 3 
 Seneca describes people as spending whole days 
 seated or standing before the idols, and sacrificing or 
 throwing money to them. 4 He complains above all 
 of the universal prevalence of Jewish customs, and 
 deplores the loss of a seventh part of life in- 
 volved in the observance of the Jewish Sabbath. 5 
 
 1 Livy, xxix. 8. - Tacitus, Annals, ii. 85. 
 
 3 Stromata, iii. 6 : Ii qui colunt idola a cibis et venere abstinent. 
 
 4 Lactantius, Divine Institutes. 
 
 5 Augustine, City of God, vi. 11. 
 
76 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 This seems to justify Josephus, who declares that 
 no Greek nor barbarian nation or town was so 
 barbarous as not to observe the day of rest, nor to 
 light lamps in God's honour and observe the Jewish 
 fasts and abstinences. 1 The assurance indeed of 
 Clement that the seventh day was regarded as sacred 
 by the Greeks no less than by the Jews, is not borne 
 out by his quotations from Homer, Hesiod, Calli- 
 machus, and the Elegies of Solon ; 2 but Tertullian's 
 allusion to the Eomans as choosing the day of the 
 Sun for rest, for banqueting, and for abstinence from 
 the bath till the evening, 3 seems to indicate a wide 
 observance of the Sabbath previous to the establish- 
 ment of Christianity. 
 
 With keen and just contempt Seneca describes 
 the persons who, to propitiate the gods, cut their 
 arms or mutilated themselves, as if gods who required 
 such services deserved to be worshipped at all ; or who 
 killed themselves in the temples, making their wounds 
 and blood their supplication ; and who did or suffered 
 things so unworthy of free men and so unlike rational 
 beings that no one would have doubted their insanity 
 but for their constituting a crowd instead of a minority. 4 
 
 Tertullian admits in fact that the heathen observed 
 every form of humiliation (raireivo^pov^cn^) that was 
 more in keeping with Christianity : barefooted proces- 
 
 1 Contra Apion, ii. 39. - Stronuita, v. 14. 
 
 3 Ad Nationes, i. 13. 4 Augustine, City of God, vi. 11. 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 77 
 
 sions were publicly proclaimed in time of drought ; 
 in some places it was an annual custom to go in sack- 
 cloth and ashes in supplication to the idols, and to keep 
 all baths and shops closed till three in the afternoon. 1 
 
 The success and spread of these superstitions, in 
 spite of ridicule or persecution, prove that, all evidences 
 of the faithless state of the early Eoman Empire 
 notwithstanding, the real condition was one of extreme 
 religious fermentation, when every new form of faith 
 or ritual met with prompt attention and acceptance. 
 
 With all these new religions, and especially with 
 the religious mysteries, there was of course abundant 
 imposture, knavery, and immorality ; and the 
 evidence on this point of Clement or Augustine adds 
 nothing essential to the evidence of the Pagan writers 
 themselves. Menander ridiculed on the stage the 
 begging priests of Cybele making a living with their 
 noisy cymbals. Apuleius did not spare them. 
 Heraclitus of Ephesus threatened certain partakers of 
 the Eleusinian mysteries with the punishment of fire 
 after death. But it is at least equally clear that 
 the mysteries acted as moral and spiritual forces of 
 no mean efficacy in the Pagan world, and, as the 
 evidence on this point is almost habitually ignored, 
 it is worth some passing attention. 
 
 To all about to take part in the mysteries the 
 opening proclamation was : " Every one who has clean 
 
 1 Fasting, 16. 
 
78 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 hands and a prudent tongue," or " He who is pure 
 from all pollution, and whose soul is conscious of no 
 evil, and who has lived well and justly;" and to such 
 was promised purification from sin. 1 With the 
 mysteries of Mithras were associated baptism by 
 water and fire, penitences, purifications, confessions. 2 
 Baptism, indeed, preceded initiation into the mys- 
 teries of both Isis and Mithras ; it was also in use at 
 the Apollinarian and Eleusinian games ; and it was 
 held to be a means of regeneration, and of remission 
 of penalties for sins like perjury. 3 Even infant 
 baptism was an ordinary Eoman rite, for Macrobius 
 says that the ninth- day after birth, when children 
 were purified (lustrantur) and named, was called the 
 dies lustricus. At the famous Samothracian mys- 
 teries a priest was specially charged with hearing 
 the confessions of great criminals and giving them 
 absolution. 4 The Emperor Julian, in his address to 
 Cybele, refers to the fast which was undergone as a 
 necessary purification of the soul before taking part 
 in the mysteries. Above all, the mysteries held 
 forth the hope or promise of a happy life after death. 
 Plutarch mentions a priest who said that those he 
 initiated were extremely happy after death ; and 
 Isocrates speaks of partakers in the mysteries of 
 
 1 Origen, Against Celsus, iii. 59. 
 
 2 Denis, Idees Morales dans Vantiquite, ii. 281. 
 
 3 Tertullian, Baptism, 5. 4 Boissier, Religion Romaine, i. 384. 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 79 
 
 Ceres as enjoying sweeter hopes thereby about death 
 and eternity. 1 In another work he refers to the just 
 and pious as living with safety in the present and 
 cherishing the sweetest hopes regarding eternity. 2 
 Yet with all this evidence, and doubtless much more 
 before him, St. Augustine had the effrontery to 
 declare it to be an idle boast that purity and probity 
 were inculcated by the mysteries, 3 and to argue at 
 length and repeatedly against any idea or hope of 
 eternal life as connected with the Pagan religion, 
 still less with the celebration of the mysteries. 
 
 It is, moreover, only fair to remember that most 
 of the customs Connected with the worst mysteries 
 had symbolical interpretations which redeemed them 
 to some extent from the charge of foolishness or 
 worse that more rational people were apt to bring 
 against them. To take one example: the cymbals 
 used at the mysteries of the Great Mother, or the 
 Earth, the source of all things, bore reference to the 
 noise of iron utensils employed in agriculture ; the 
 cymbals were of brass because brass implements were 
 in use before the discovery of iron ; and the unbound 
 tamed lion placed at the side of the goddess indi- 
 cated that no land was too wild or barren to be 
 brought into cultivation. That was Varro's expla- 
 nation; 4 and doubtless other absurd or repulsive 
 
 , vi. 2 Ilepl elprivijs, 12. 
 
 3 City of God, ii. 6. 4 2b. vii. 24. 
 
8o PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 practices had meanings of this sort which made them 
 acceptable to the mystics of antiquity. 
 
 This allegorical or figurative explanation was un- 
 doubtedly one of the causes that must account not only 
 for the apparent continuance of the original Pagan 
 theology but for the rapid propagation of foreign 
 creeds. The story of Jupiter and Ceres was let live 
 as an allegory of the Eain and the Earth. The rape 
 of Proserpine by Pluto was taken to allude to the 
 covering of the grain under the clods of the earth ; 
 and the Homeric tale of Vulcan detecting Mars and 
 Venus in adultery was made to convey the moral 
 lesson of reason dominating over lust and anger. 1 
 
 So popular did this allegorical tendency become 
 that it was gladly borrowed from the Greeks by the 
 more educated Jews of Alexandria, whose laudable 
 aim it was to reconcile their Mosaic theology with 
 Greek philosophy and with the dictates of human 
 reason. Aristobulus and Philo frankly surrendered 
 the literal truth of Genesis, and rationalised the 
 Scripture stories of Jehovah just as the Greeks had 
 rationalised the Homeric tales of Zeus. Philo is full 
 of such things as that the preference of Jacob to 
 Esau refers to the ultimate prevalence of reason over 
 sense, though later born than sense; that Noah's 
 drunkenness indicates intellectual arrogance; that 
 the daughters of Lot represent the sophisms of the 
 
 1 Arnobius, iv. 33 ; v. 32, 41, 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 81 
 
 senses and the imagination. It has not always been 
 noticed how greatly this rationalising spirit, with the 
 liberal scope it afforded to free thought, facilitated 
 the acceptance of Christianity, based as it was on 
 the Hebrew books, especially with that minority of 
 the Pagan philosophers who, like Origen or Cle- 
 ment, became Christian Fathers. Passages in the 
 Scriptures assigning to God hands, feet, or eyes, or 
 attributing to Him resentments and threats, Clement 
 refuses to accept in other than a sacred allegorical 
 sense. 1 The Tree of Life planted in Paradise he 
 takes as allegorical of the Divine prudence. 2 Joseph's 
 coat of many colours of which his brothers stripped 
 him before casting him into the pit signifies lust, 
 which takes its way into the yawning pit. 3 The 
 expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and their 
 clothing themselves with skins contains, according to 
 Origen, the mystical doctrine of the soul losing its 
 wings and being borne down to earth. 4 
 
 The application of this theory to the prophecies 
 led to that extravagant mode of exegesis which has 
 ever since marked this branch of study. It must 
 suffice to quote a very few instances. " The ox and 
 the bear shall come together," said Isaiah (xi. 7). 
 This referred, said Clement, to the conversion of the 
 Jews and Gentiles; the ox or clean animal repre- 
 senting the Jews, and the bear, unclean and wild, 
 
 1 Stromata, v. 11. 2 Ib. v. 11. 3 Ib. v. 8. 4 Jb. v. 6. 
 
82 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 representing the Gentile. St. Augustine saw in the 
 ram caught by its horns in a thicket, in the story of 
 Abraham and Isaac, a premonition of Christ, who 
 before his sacrifice was crowned with thorns by the 
 Jews. 1 The verse in Habakkuk, "The sun was 
 raised up, and the moon stood still in her course," 
 meant, according to the same writer, that Christ 
 ascended into heaven, and that the Church was 
 established under her King. 2 
 
 It follows from the evidence already given that 
 the central point and best feature of most forms of 
 pre-Christian religion was a strong sense of sin and 
 the desire of an escape from it to a purer life. That 
 an extravagant expression was often given to this 
 sentiment is only what later customs would lead us 
 to expect. The priests who ministered before the 
 idols, clothed in dirty rags, with their hair matted, 
 their nails as long as wild beasts', their bodies totally 
 unwashed, 3 anticipated the theory and almost the 
 practice of the Christian anchorites. The Christian 
 Flagellants had their prototypes in the Pagan fanatics 
 of Plutarch's day, who sat in sackcloth or rags, or 
 rolled about in the mire recounting their sins, or 
 calling out aloud on the vileness of their offences, 
 that rendered them hateful to God and the angels. 4 
 
 1 City of God, xvi. 32. 2 Ib. xviii. 32. 
 
 3 Clement, Exhortation to the Heathen, x. 
 
 4 On Superstition, vii. 
 
PA CAN SUPERS TITION 83 
 
 With regard again to temples, sacrifices, and 
 prayers, the principles of a pious rationalism 
 prevailed widely in the world long before the 
 new faith made its influence felt in the same 
 direction. 
 
 Thus Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, in a 
 lost work called the Republic, looked forward to the 
 time when it would no longer be necessary to build 
 temples, and when better things should be regarded 
 as sacred than the mere buildings of human work- 
 men. 1 Seneca considered the whole world to be the 
 only temple worthy of the sublimity of the gods, 
 though admitting that there was so much distinction 
 between sacred and profane, that all things which 
 were lawful under the open sky were not lawful in 
 a temple, and that sacrilege was justly punishable, 
 inasmuch as the offender, albeit he could not by his 
 act injure God, yet did it as if to God. 2 And, in short, 
 Origen's excellent answer to the reproach of Celsus 
 against the Christians for not erecting altars, statues, 
 and temples, that every good man was an altar whose 
 incense was the prayers from a pure conscience, was 
 a reply that completely harmonised with the teaching 
 of rational Paganism. 3 
 
 On no subject has there been more exaggeration 
 than on that of the Pagan idolatry. Celsus ridiculed 
 
 1 Plutarch, Contradictions of Stoics, vi. ; Clement, Stromata, 
 v. 11. 2 De Beneficiis, vii. 7. 3 viii. 17. 
 
84 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the Christians for saying that images of stone or brass 
 could not be gods, as if any one who was not utterly 
 childish took them for more than offerings consecrated 
 to the gods, or as images serving to represent them. 1 
 Varro not only declared that the ancient Eomans 
 worshipped the gods without an idol for one hundred 
 and seventy years, but complained that the inventors 
 of idols took away the fear of the gods from the 
 people at the same time that they gave a false con- 
 ception of them. 2 The common argument in defence 
 of the idols was, nor was it without force, that the 
 supposed presence of the gods acted upon many as a 
 deterrent from wickedness ; and when Arnobius said 
 that the argument might have been acceptable, 
 had there been in consequence no wicked men 
 upon the earth, the Pagan had the obvious retort 
 that it was precisely to the neglect inculcated by 
 the Christians for the temples and idols of their 
 ancestors that any peculiar wickedness of the time 
 was due. 
 
 But for the best statement of the Pagan position 
 with regard to idolatry we must go to Maximus of 
 Tyre, the Platonist. Fully admitting that the gods 
 had no more need of statues or temples than good 
 men had of images, he contended that out of con- 
 sideration for the utter weakness of man, and because 
 
 1 Origen, Against Celsus, vii. 62. 
 
 2 Augustine, City of God, iv. 31. 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 85 
 
 the distance between human and divine was as that 
 between earth and heaven, these things had been 
 devised as signs whereby to remember the names 
 of the gods, just as letters had been invented to 
 strengthen human memory, though speech itself had 
 no real need of them. Those whose souls could rise 
 to heaven and unaided grasp the Divine were so few 
 as not to deserve consideration ; and on the ground 
 of the human soul being the nearest similitude to 
 God, the Greeks were amply justified in making the 
 images of the gods in human shape. After referring 
 then to the fire-worship of Persia, the animal- worship 
 of Egypt, the oak -worship of Gaul, and the river- 
 worship of Phrygia, he concluded that God, "the 
 Father and Creator of all things, older than Time 
 and Eternity and all-changing Nature, the unnamed 
 Lawgiver," was neither utterable by words nor visible 
 to men's eyes; and that therefore, through their 
 inability to comprehend Him, men had resorted to 
 various names and to the worship of animals, images, 
 plants, hill-tops, or streams, and through their desire 
 to understand Him had attributed to His nature 
 whatever qualities they deemed honourable in their 
 own. And he finished with these words of beautiful 
 toleration : " Only let the Divine be present to the 
 mind, and if the art of Phidias rouse the Greeks to 
 the memory of God, or the worship of animals the 
 Egyptians, or a river some, and fire others, I mind 
 
86 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 not the discordances, only let them understand, only 
 let them love, only let them remember." l 
 
 Again, the grand teaching of the Hebrew prophets 
 on the ^vanity of all but spiritual sacrifice was a 
 familiar topic with the higher minds of Paganism. 
 The most agreeable offering to the gods, said Plu- 
 tarch, consisted in a right notion of them. 2 It was 
 not, taught Seneca, the sacrifice, but the mind of the 
 sacrificer that signified ; it was the pious intentions 
 of the worshipper that honoured the gods, not the 
 richest offerings of victims or gold. Good people 
 might be religious and offer no more than a little 
 corn and pulse, whilst the bad could not escape the 
 consequences of their impiety though they should 
 cover the altars with blood. 3 The gods, he asserted, 
 did good to mankind for the mere pleasure of doing 
 it, unless, forsooth, they could be thought to find an 
 equivalent for their labours in the smoke of entrails 
 and the smell of frankincense. 4 Or what could be 
 finer than this, quoted by Lactantius from a lost 
 work of the same great writer : " Would you think 
 of God as great and gracious and as merciful as He 
 is majestic, as a friend and always at hand, not to be 
 worshipped with sacrifices and outpourings of blood 
 for what pleasure is there from the slaughter of 
 innocent creatures, but with a pure soul and a good 
 
 1 Dissertation viii. 2 Isis and Osiris, xi. 
 
 3 De JBeneficiis, i. 6. 4 Ib. iv. 25. 
 
PAGAN SUPERSTITION 87 
 
 and upright purpose ; it is not temples of lofty piles 
 of stones that should be raised to Him, it is in the 
 heart of each man that He should be consecrated." l 
 Varro too protested against sacrifices on the ground 
 that the gods neither desired nor asked for them, 
 whilst the false gods made of copper and suchlike, 
 being destitute of feeling, could not care for them. 2 
 And if we go still farther back, we find the same sort 
 of sentiment. "Think this the best sacrifice and 
 highest worship," wrote Isocrates to Mcocles on the 
 virtues of a king, " to show yourself as good and just 
 as possible." And even Menander, the comedian, 
 could teach on the stage, in days when the stage was 
 the vehicle for the expression of the highest truths, 
 how vain it was to try to propitiate God by sacrifices 
 of bulls and kids, by garments of gold or purple, or 
 by images of ivory or emerald, instead of refraining j 
 from adultery, theft, murder, or covetousness ; and 
 declaring that God's delight was in righteous works' 
 could bid his hearers sacrifice to Him by constant 
 justice, and with brightness, not of the dress, but of 
 the heart. 3 
 
 The teaching of Apollonius of Tyana, the Pytha- 
 gorean, may fitly terminate this part of the subject : 
 " The best and the true way of rendering to the 
 divinity suitable worship, and of conciliating to us 
 
 1 Lactantius, vi. 25. 2 Arnobius, vii. 1. 
 
 3 Clement, Stromata, v. 606. 
 
88 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the favour and goodwill of that God whom we name 
 the First, of that one God separate from the universe, 
 and without whom the other gods remain unknown 
 to us, is not to sacrifice victims to Him, nor to light 
 fire, nor to consecrate to Him any of the things of 
 sense, but always to address to Him the best lan- 
 guage, that language which has no need of words, 
 and which is none other than silent thought, pure 
 and unaided intelligence." 
 
 Christianity therefore in its opposition to sacri- 
 fices, an opposition that must ever count among the 
 most signal of its many services to mankind, simply 
 availed itself of and carried farther a phase of thought 
 that had long been in possession of the world at the 
 time of its appearance. The idea of the abrogation 
 of all further sacrifice after the Crucifixion was of 
 comparatively late growth in the Church ; for Gregory 
 the Great spoke of the Eucharist as a " daily sacrifice 
 of immolation " ; and Catholicism to this day calls it 
 a sacrifice ; but certain allusions by the Fathers to 
 sacrifice seem hardly explicable as mere references 
 to the Lord's Supper. What, for instance, did Cle- 
 ment mean when he wrote : " It is said we ought to 
 go washed to sacrifices and prayers, clean and bright ; 
 and that this external adornment and purification 
 are practised for a sign " ? l Or why should Augustine 
 in the fifth century have protested against persons 
 
 1 Clement, Stromata, iv. 22. 
 
PA CAN SUPERSTITION 89 
 
 who maintained that, while visible sacrifices were 
 fitting for other gods, the invisible sacrifice of a pure 
 mind and a holy will was suitable to God ; and have 
 argued that visible sacrifices were signs of the invisible, 
 and that, as in prayer and praise words were offered 
 to God, so in sacrifice there was a visible offering to 
 Him to whom in our hearts we should present our- 
 selves as an invisible sacrifice ? l or why, again, in 
 defending his co-religionists against the charge of wor- 
 shipping martyrs, should he have said : " Who ever 
 heard a priest of the faithful, at an altar built for the 
 honour and worship of God over the holy body of some 
 martyr, say in prayer, ' I offer to thee a sacrifice, 
 Peter, Paul, or Cyprian,' since it is to God that sacri- 
 fices are offered at their tombs " ? 2 The sacrifices 
 alluded to in these and similar passages refer, it is 
 said, to the Eucharist ; but even if so, the Christian 
 character thus given to the sacrifice did not prevent 
 it from being surrounded with the same ideas which 
 attached to that form of religious ceremony in the 
 Pagan worship ; and the sacrifices offered at the 
 tombs of the martyrs appear to have borne a much 
 closer resemblance to those offered by the Pagans at 
 the tombs of their dead at the Parentalia than is 
 implied by the language of St. Augustine. 
 
 But the difficulty is extreme of trying to institute 
 
 1 City of God, x. 19. 
 2 11). viii. 27. Compare Cyprian, Ep. 33, 36. 
 
90 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 any comparison between Christianity and Paganism 
 in the matter of superstition. We may, however, 
 lessen it by drawing a distinction between the 
 higher and the lower Paganism. Instead of compar- 
 ing the higher Christianity with the lower Paganism 
 a course which has vitiated so many conclusions 
 we shall be more likely to hit the truth by contrast- 
 ing only the different levels with one another, in 
 other words, only the higher with the higher and the 
 lower with the lower. The higher Christianity and 
 the higher Paganism may be at once cancelled as 
 equally exempt from and superior to superstition; 
 so that the comparison in this regard remains to be 
 determined between the lower Christianity and the 
 lower Paganism. Was the former an improvement on 
 the latter in the matter of superstitious observances ? 
 Can we answer this in the affirmative when we 
 recall the history of Catholicism ? or when we think 
 even of its present condition in many parts of the 
 world? One can only hint at the answer, without 
 venturing on a dogmatic decision ; but at least the 
 doubt is justifiable whether the difference in this 
 respect was so very great between any country in its 
 Catholic and in its previous Pagan state ; whether, in 
 short, as a result of the change, superstition came 
 very much to diminish in quantity or even to differ 
 in degree, till at least the period of the Eeformation 
 in the countries affected thereby. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HEAVEN 
 
 " ALL will admit that we have a soul," says Seneca, 
 " but what that soul is which rules and governs us 
 no one will explain to you any more than where it is 
 situate ; one will call it a spirit, another a certain 
 harmony, another a divine force and part of God, 
 another very thin air, another incorporeal power, nor 
 will there be wanting others to call it even blood 
 or heat." l 
 
 At most he is content to call it himself a certain 
 kind of spirit (quodam modo se habens spiritus). 2 
 
 And to the present day we can define it no better. 
 All we know of it is still its existence, not its nature. 
 
 The most generally received belief in antiquity 
 about the soul of man was that it was an emanation 
 from the Divine Soul, something of heavenly origin, 
 and thereby constituting the link by virtue of which 
 all men might acknowledge God as their Father, and 
 
 1 Naturales Quaestiones, vii. 25. 2 Epist. 50. 
 
92 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 speak of themselves as the sons of God. "The 
 ancients thought/' says Macrobius, " that souls were 
 given by Jupiter, and returned to him again after 
 death." 
 
 This belief in the divine nature of the soul, and in 
 the fatherly relation of God to man, supplied a con- 
 stant and forcible motive for virtuous living and 
 purity of thought to an extent that has been seldom 
 appreciated. Seneca, with his purely Pagan training, 
 says, " Unless the soul is pure and holy it cannot 
 receive God." * " If a man," says Epictetus, " could 
 worthily realise this opinion, that we are all in a 
 special sense the children of God, and that God is the 
 Father both of men and gods, I imagine he would 
 think nothing mean or vulgar about himself " ; and 
 he goes on to regret that so many men, thinking more 
 of that lower relationship which, by virtue of the 
 body, connected them with the animals, than of that 
 which, by virtue of the soul, connected them with 
 God, esteemed themselves wretched instead of highly 
 favoured. He would have every man remember, in 
 eating, or in conversation, or in anything else, not 
 only that he in a sense carries God within him, but 
 that as the special work of God it behoves him not 
 to dishonour his Maker : " Being the work of such 
 an artificer, do you dishonour Him ? And not only 
 did He make you, but He gave you in charge and 
 
 1 Epist. 87. 2 Discourses, i. 3. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 93 
 
 trust to yourself alone. Will you not even remember 
 this, but also dishonour your trust ? But if God 
 gave an orphan into your charge, you would not so 
 neglect him ; yet He has given yourself to yourself, 
 and says, I had no one more trustworthy than your- 
 self, keep him for me such as he was born, reverent, 
 faithful, high-minded, unperturbed, free from passions 
 and disturbance." l From the same doctrine flowed 
 the other Stoic doctrine, subsequently borrowed by 
 Christiana, of the brotherhood of all men, and the 
 consequent duty of a charitable bearing towards all 
 men, even towards slaves : " Slave yourself, will you 
 not bear with your own brother, who has Zeus for his 
 progenitor, and is like a son from the same beginnings 
 and of the same descent from above ? . . . Will you 
 not remember who you are and whom you rule ? that 
 they are kinsmen, that they are brethren by nature, 
 that they are the offspring of Zeus." 2 
 
 Christianity never inculcated a higher teaching, 
 nor ever supplied higher motives to virtue than we 
 thus see to have been inculcated and supplied by the 
 schools of Pagan philosophy. Xor must we restrict 
 the influence of those schools to the narrow limits 
 sometimes suggested by the complaints of the Pagans 
 themselves. If Seneca complained of the general 
 desertion or neglect of philosophy, it was probably 
 as preachers have in all ages complained of the 
 
 1 Discourses, ii 8. 2 Ib. L 13. 
 
94 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 numbers or zeal of their audience. At all events we 
 have the admission of Origen that the philosophers 
 did not pick their hearers, but conversed in public 
 with all or any who cared to listen to them ; that 
 they invited the young to their lectures, and en- 
 couraged them, often with much success, to exchange 
 a bad life for a better; and that they sought to 
 make even slaves learners of philosophy. 1 Surely 
 their influence cannot have been contemptible, if it 
 produced teachers like Epictetus, or propagated 
 teaching like that of Epictetus over every city and 
 country of the civilised world. Nor is there any 
 doubt but that this is what it did do. 
 
 The doctrine that the soul was an emanation from 
 the Divine mind, and that its ultimate lot was to be 
 reabsorbed in the same on its emancipation from the 
 body, and that in this sense the soul was immortal, 
 was a belief which, descended originally from the 
 Brahminical theosophy of India, was widely spread 
 over the world at the appearance of Christianity. It 
 constituted the faith and hope of the whole educated 
 Pagan world ; and in consequence of it, Plato and 
 Seneca and Maximus of Tyre learnt to speak of the 
 body in its relation to the soul in precisely the same 
 language that was common to the Buddhists or the 
 Gnostics. " Our soul," says Seneca, " will then have 
 cause to rejoice when, sent forth from these shades in 
 
 1 Against Celsus, iii. 51, 54. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 95 
 
 which it is immersed, it shall see things no longer 
 dimly, but with the light of perfect day, and shall 
 have been restored to its heaven, and shall have 
 received the place which is its birthplace." 1 Or again, 
 " The body is the prison and chain of the soul, and is 
 tossed hither and thither, the sport of punishments 
 and robberies and diseases, but the soul is sacred and 
 eternal, nor can any man lay his hands upon it." 2 
 So general was this belief that we even find Titus 
 assuring his soldiers at the siege of Jerusalem that 
 the souls of those that fell in battle would be received 
 by the pure ether and have their place among the 
 stars. 
 
 Maximus of Tyre is a good exponent of the same 
 belief: "The generous soul is not averse to the 
 destruction of the body, but looks forward to its 
 liberty and to the pure light of heaven with as much 
 delight as the prisoner sees fall the walls of his 
 prison. Flesh and bones are to the soul but the 
 apparel of a day, which the soul, if good, neglects, and 
 from which it only desires to be released as quickly 
 as possible." 3 " What men call death therefore is 
 the beginning of immortality, when the soul is called 
 up to its own place, to enter on a new life." 4 " And 
 when the soul has thus departed from earth to 
 heaven (evOevbe e/cere), and has cast off the body and 
 left it to corrupt in the earth, from constituting a man, 
 1 EpisL 79. 2 lb. 16. 3 Discourses, 13. 4 Ib. 14. 
 
96 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 it becomes a demon (or angel), and beholds with 
 pure eyes sights appropriate to it, being no longer 
 obscured by the flesh nor disturbed by the senses. In 
 that condition it looks back with pity on its former 
 life, and rejoices in its present existence, commiserat- 
 ing those other souls whom it has left on earth, and 
 desiring from its love towards them to attend upon 
 and support them." l 
 
 Nothing therefore is falser than the common 
 notion that in pre-Christian times men died without 
 hope. Otherwise how could Maximus have written 
 as follows : " How can a man swim out and behold 
 God ? In brief, thou shalt then behold Him when 
 thou art called to Him, and thou shalt be called in 
 no long time; await the summons. Old age shall 
 come to lead thee, and death, of which the coward 
 bewails and dreads the approach, but which the lover 
 of God receives gladly and courageously." 
 
 According to the same author, Pythagoras was the 
 first among the Greeks to say that, though man's 
 body would die, his soul would fly upwards, to dwell, 
 immortal and insensible of time, where it existed 
 originally. According to Gicero, however, the first 
 teacher of the soul's immortality was Pherecydes, the 
 Syrian, of whom Pythagoras was the disciple. 2 But 
 this is merely an antiquarian point. The important 
 thing is the antiquity of the belief, connected with 
 
 1 Discourses, 15. 2 Tusc. i. 16. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 97 
 
 which Macrobius mentions a remarkable ancient 
 custom, whereby a holy man might rightfully be 
 killed, that his soul might the sooner return to the 
 gods. " Those souls," he says, " which for their sanctity 
 it was thought could be sent to Heaven, they were 
 willing should be released from the body and go 
 thither as soon as possible." 1 At all events from the 
 time of Pythagoras the belief in the survival of the 
 soul was as prevalent in the world as the alternative 
 theory of the essential unity of the soul and body, 
 and of the extinction of one with the other. 
 
 It must suffice to give typical illustrations of this 
 belief, as a substitute for a complete collection of the 
 evidence. Cicero may without doubt be taken as 
 fairly expressing the common faith of his time in 
 the dream of Scipio that occurs in the sixth book of 
 his Republic, wherein Paulus Scipio instructs his son 
 Publius how in Heaven there is a certain definite 
 place where all who have served their country, or 
 cultivated music or other divine studies with great 
 ability, enjoy a blessed existence. " Of a truth they 
 enjoy real life who have flown from the chains of 
 their bodies as from a prison ; but that which you 
 call life is death." The road to Heaven is by the 
 cultivation of justice, and by piety towards one's 
 relations and neighbours and country ; but the souls 
 
 1 iii. 7 : airimas quas sacras in coelum mitti posse arbitrati sunt, 
 viduatas corpore quam primum illo ire voluerunt. 
 
 7 
 
98 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of those who are given up to pleasure and who violate 
 the laws of gods and men hover round the earth on 
 quitting the body, nor return to Heaven till after the 
 lapse of ages. In another treatise Cicero says : " If 
 aught should make it appear to be indicated by God 
 that we should depart from life, let us obey joyfully 
 and thankfully, and let us think that we are dismissed 
 from prison and released from our chains, either to 
 return to that eternal home which is clearly meant 
 for us, or to be free from henceforth from all sensa- 
 tion and trouble." 1 So he speaks of our hope of a 
 happier life than the present, 2 and, calling our life 
 here death, says we shall only then really live when 
 we have come to that heavenly life hereafter. 3 
 
 In the sense of man being thus by nature an 
 inheritor of Heaven, a writer as old as Empedocles 
 speaks of him as a pilgrim, a stranger, and an exile ; 
 insinuating, says Plutarch, by the, soft name of pil- 
 grimage the origin of the soul, that it came to us 
 from above. 4 " Endowed with pious mind," says 
 Epicharmus, the comic poet, " you will not in dying 
 suffer aught evil ; the spirit will dwell in Heaven 
 above." 5 This was the general, if not the universal, 
 Pagan belief. Cicero alludes to Socrates conversing, 
 just before he drank the poison, as if he were about, 
 not to be put to a compulsory death, but to ascend 
 
 1 Tusc. i. 49. 2 Ib. i. 34. 3 76. i. 31. 
 
 4 On Banishment, xvii. 5 Clement, Stromata, iv. 26, 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 99 
 
 to Heaven. 1 If the belief was not expressed upon 
 the Pagan tombs, we know from every consolation 
 addressed to bereaved friends that it was firmly im- 
 pressed upon their hearts. It is the hope expressed 
 in the consolation by Seneca to Marcia for the death 
 of her son, or to Polybius on the death of his brother, 
 or by Plutarch to Apollonius on the loss of his son. 
 He has only, says Plutarch, made a digression from 
 this life to eternity, and if, as is probable, it is true 
 that honours and dignity await the righteous after 
 death, Apollonius should cherish very high hopes for 
 his son. Elsewhere Plutarch refers to the joy lost 
 by the Epicureans in not looking forward to a reunion 
 with their dear departed ones. If the dead feel not, 
 Seneca argues with Polybius, his brother has been 
 restored to the place where he was before birth, and 
 has no more to fear or desire or suffer ; but if the 
 soul survives the body, his brother, freed as it were 
 from a long imprisonment, rejoices to contemplate 
 the great spectacle of Nature, and to look down on 
 human affairs from a higher standpoint, but with a 
 much clearer insight into heavenly things ; at length 
 he is free, safe, and eternal, enjoying the free and 
 open Heaven, raised up to that place, wherever it is, 
 which receives souls that have cast their chains, and 
 where he wanders at will, beholding with the greatest 
 rapture all the wonders of Nature. It were an error 
 
 1 Tiisc. i. 30. 
 
ioo PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to think he has lost the light ; on the contrary, he 
 has gained a more certain light ; and on the journey 
 we have all to undertake, he has only gone before, 
 not forsaken us. 
 
 He assures Marcia that only the image of her son 
 has perished, but that he himself is eternal and in 
 the enjoyment of a better condition, since the soul 
 and the flesh are in constant warfare on earth, the 
 soul perpetually striving to regain its birthplace, 
 where eternal peace awaits it. Her son, after a short 
 sojourn above the earth, there to be purged of the 
 inherent vices of the mortal state, has been raised to 
 the heights of Heaven, where he wanders in company 
 with the Scipios and Catos and other souls of the 
 blessed, and learns with certainty to understand the 
 ways of the stars and all the most intimate secrets of 
 Nature. Sometimes, with Marcia's own father, he 
 looks down on earth ; for which reason their survivor 
 should not only blush to do any mean or ignoble 
 action, but also refrain from weeping for those who 
 have undergone a change for the better. 
 
 When therefore we are told that before Christianity 
 men died without hope of any future life, we are 
 confronted with this fact that the fragmentary litera- 
 ture of Pagan times bears striking evidence of that 
 hope on almost every page. That the body acted as 
 a restraint on the soul; that death was the soul's 
 escape to a purer life of contemplation and know- 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A YEN 101 
 
 ledge; that the scene of* fica ptjjer life -was in 
 Heaven; and that parted friends-/ woulcl tfejifete-be 
 reunited, these were the cUrcfroai ' points "of "f agan 
 belief, which Christianity did no more than inherit. 
 We have the statement of Apuleius that to all who 
 died after a just life the expression Manes deus was 
 applied for the sake of honour, 1 and this was ap- 
 parently all that was really meant by the apotheosis 
 of the Eoman emperors. The senate decreed them 
 divine honours, that is, gave expression to the hope 
 or belief that they had gone to Heaven, much as in 
 later times the Christian Church canonised its saints, 
 whom she as often called Divi as Sancti. It was 
 therefore with no shock to Christian feeling that 
 Constantine and his successors were divinised by the 
 senate, and had temples raised and priests appointed 
 to them ; and if with the Emperor Gratian the custom 
 ceased, the Christian emperors were for some time 
 afterwards still spoken of as gods. 2 It was in this 
 way that Cicero believed all the gods of antiquity 
 to have arisen, and his question accorded with the 
 popular belief : " Is not almost the whole of Heaven 
 filled with the human race ? " 3 And, speaking gener- 
 ally of the dead, Seneca says to Marcia, " We have 
 sent them away, nay rather, have sent them on before 
 us, and we shall follow them." Often his expressions 
 
 1 Golden Ass, xi. 2 Boissier, Religion Romaine, i. 5. 
 
 3 Tusc. i. 13. 
 
102 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 might be taken "xdr; a Clinstian's, as where he speaks 
 of .ouf ?ii'e li'ire.as- the prelude to a better and longer 
 life, as a' preparation : for another birth; or where he 
 says, " Another origin awaits us and another condi- 
 tion of things " ; or exclaims, " That day which you 
 dread as your last is the birthday of eternity." ] 
 
 According to Cicero, the Stoics only believed in 
 a future life that would be long, but not immortal. 
 But the Stoics never formulated any uniform system 
 of belief, and as far as we can judge from their 
 language, some believed in immortality, and some in 
 no future life at all. The belief in immortality was 
 nevertheless common to most sects of philosophy, 
 and to the general mass of the people in the later 
 days of Paganism. 
 
 The strength and vividness of the belief are proved 
 by the story of Cleombrotus, who, after reading the 
 Phaedo of Plato, was seized with so great a desire for 
 the immortality therein foreshadowed, that, bidding 
 the sun farewell, he leapt from a high wall to certain 
 destruction. 2 A somewhat similar effect was pro- 
 duced by the teaching of the neo-Platonist Plotinus 
 upon his pupil Porphyry ; the latter being so possessed 
 with the idea of a disembodied existence that, but for 
 the dissuasion of his master, he would have starved 
 himself out of the world. 
 
 1 Epist. 102. 
 2 Callimachus, Epig. 24. Cicero, Tusc. Quaest. v. 34, 84. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 103 
 
 The arguments on which the Pagans based their 
 belief in the soul's immortality are of less importance 
 than the fact that subsequent reasoning has added no 
 single fresh one to those they adduced. By vast 
 numbers of men, not of course by all, the doctrine 
 that after death men's purified souls enjoyed endless 
 felicity was accepted without doubt; and of such 
 farce were the well-known arguments in its favour, 
 that even a Christian writer like Lactantius, seeking 
 to demonstrate the immortality of the soul, based it 
 entirely on the old Platonic arguments about the 
 nature of the soul and of virtue, without once re- 
 ferring to the resurrection of Christ. 1 
 
 Another Christian writer, Arnobius, bears striking 
 testimony to the universality of the belief, and reveals 
 the Church in an attitude of opposition towards it. 
 As a Christian, he protests against the common 
 notions of the divine origin and consequently im- 
 mortal nature of the soul. " What man," he asks, 
 " who, when he hears it said by the wisest that the 
 soul is immortal, would not throw himself headlong 
 into all manner of vices and fearlessly set about un- 
 lawful things ? How shall he be overcome by any 
 fear who has been persuaded that he is immortal ? " 2 
 He says to the Pagans : " You rest the salvation of 
 
 1 Divine Institutes, vii. 18. 
 
 2 ii. 29. Tatian in his address to the Greeks (c. 13) makes a 
 similar protest against the natural immortality of the soul. 
 
104 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 your souls upon yourselves, and are assured that by 
 your own exertions alone you become gods. . . . 
 You think that as soon as you pass away, freed from 
 the bonds of your carnal members, you will find 
 wings wherewith you may rise to Heaven and to the 
 stars." 1 
 
 Here we have as clearly expressed as it could be 
 the difference between the teaching of Philosophy 
 and of Christianity on the future destiny of the soul ; 
 and an admission that the view which came to be 
 deemed orthodox was a limitation of that theretofore 
 entertained in the world. But it is evident from the 
 second quotation from Arnobius that the immortality 
 promised by Philosophy was not dissociated from 
 moral virtue and exertion. It has already been 
 shown from Cicero, that only after the lapse of ages 
 were the bad thought capable of admission to 
 Heaven. Even so, Catholicism offered nothing better. 
 And Plutarch speaks of those who have led pious 
 and just lives as especially entitled to look forward 
 to rewards after death, and of such hopes as constitut- 
 ing strong incentives to virtue. 2 Clement himself 
 admits that the barbarian wisdom was well acquainted 
 with the hope after death, a good hope to the good, 
 but to the bad the reverse. 3 So that when Dean 
 Milman, seeking to correct Gibbon, speaks of notions 
 
 1 ii. 33. 2 Pleasure according to Epicurus, 26. 
 
 3 Stromata, iv. 22. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 105 
 
 of future retribution and of the life after death as 
 operating on the thoughts and feelings, and some- 
 times on the actions of Christians, in a way that 
 constituted a profound difference between Christian 
 and Pagan polytheism, it is certain that he must 
 have forgotten or ignored the abundance of classi- 
 cal testimony which reduces that difference to a 
 minimum. 
 
 The only real difference between Christian and 
 Pagan thought regarded the future fate of the body, 
 not that of the soul. Eegarding as he did the body 
 as impure, as partaking of the evil that lay in every 
 form of matter, the Pagan looked generally to a 
 future existence which should be purely spiritual, to 
 a life emancipated from, and no longer trammelled 
 by, the body. For this reason anti-Christian writers 
 like Celsus and Porphyry protested against and 
 opposed the Christian dogma of the resurrection of 
 the body, a dogma, which from the point of view of 
 the essential antagonism between soul and body, spirit 
 and matter, appeared to them to bind together for all 
 eternity the pure with the impure. But the idea of 
 a corporeal resurrection was itself no new one in the 
 world ; for the prediction of the ultimate resurrection 
 of the dead, at the coming of Soshyos, the Saviour, 
 was not only one of the peculiar tenets of the Persian 
 Zoroastrian religion, but it even found some favour 
 in the Greek schools of philosophy. Pliny, who dis- 
 
106 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 believed in a future life of any sort, speaks with 
 some contempt of the hope of Democritus in a future 
 state for the body ; * and, if Clement may be credited, 
 Heraclitus and those of the Stoics who shared his 
 belief in a final purification of the world by fire, held 
 that each individual would rise again exactly as he 
 was before. 2 
 
 It is also noticeable that many of the early 
 Christians themselves accepted or explained the 
 resurrection of the body in an allegorical sense, 
 making it to refer, for instance, to the flight or escape 
 of the soul from the bondage of the body, which was, 
 as it were, its prison or grave ; or again, to the restora- 
 tion through baptism from the death of ignorance to 
 real truth. 3 And it was characteristic of most of the 
 Gnostic Christians to deny the resurrection of the 
 body, and only to believe in the future life of the 
 soul, Tertullian asserting such denial and belief of 
 such heretics as Marcion, Basilides, Carpocrates, 
 Valentinus, Marcus, Cerdo, and Apelles. 4 Provided 
 the soul were immortal, they regarded as indifferent 
 the fate of the body. 
 
 There is yet another point on which the Pagan 
 could have seen no reason to prefer the Christian 
 teaching. He habitually poured libations and made 
 
 1 Nat. Hist. vii. 56 : reviviscendi promissa Democrito vanitas. 
 
 2 Stromata, v. 1. Compare Athenagoras, Apol. 36. 
 
 3 Tertullian, Resurrection of the Flesh, 19. 
 
 4 Ib. Against Heresies. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HE A VEN 107 
 
 sacrifices for the dead in order to benefit their future 
 lot. But for dead children no libations nor sacrifices 
 were offered, for the reason that it was thought an 
 impious thing to lament those whose souls passed 
 immediately to a better and diviner state. The 
 Christian, on the other hand, to his everlasting shame, 
 held and taught that innocent infants, if they died 
 unbaptized, passed at once and for ever to a state of 
 misery, of which no human mind could form any con- 
 ception, amid dungeons and tortures and flames. 
 " Hold most firmly, and by no means doubt," wrote 
 St. Fulgentius, " that little children, whether they die 
 before or after birth, pass, without the holy sacrament 
 of baptism, from this world, to be punished with the 
 everlasting punishment of eternal fire." This was for 
 ages, and, for the majority of the Christian world, is 
 still the orthodox doctrine ; a fact which goes far to 
 explain how it came to pass that to the more intel- 
 lectual classes of antiquity the teaching of the Church 
 never commended itself, and that Philosophy never 
 yielded its allegiance to, and still raises its protest 
 against, its creed, which, making such a doctrine its 
 fundamental basis and starting-point, replunged the 
 world into grosser and more terrific superstitions 
 than any it displaced, and reduced human reason to 
 so miserable a level, that its total and universal ex- 
 tinction seemed at one time as desirable as it seemed 
 imminent. 
 
CHAPTEK VI 
 
 THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 
 
 HAVING shown in the last chapter that with regard 
 to the belief in Heaven, in the immortality of the 
 soul, in the reunion of the dead, and in a future 
 retribution, the Pagan world differed from the Chris- 
 tian in nothing save in the grounds for such beliefs, 
 it remains to show that with regard also to the 
 darker side of the faith in a future life, Christianity 
 imported into the world no essentially novel doctrine. 
 The Indian ideas of Hell, surpassing in horror any- 
 thing with which the imagination of Christian monks 
 and Fathers familiarised Europe, had been current in 
 the world long before the oldest Greek literature; 
 and to the infernal torments of the popular Greek 
 and Latin faith, of which we get clear enough indica- 
 tions in Homer and Plato and Virgil, an Indian or 
 Egyptian origin may with much probability be 
 assigned. At all events, the ideas of a judgment and 
 punishment after death were common to India, 
 Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Italy, for very 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 109 
 
 many centuries before Christianity, so that Celsus 
 used a perfectly fair argument against the new faith 
 when he objected to the Christian doctrines of a resur- 
 rection, of a judgment, of rewards for the just, and 
 of fire for the unjust, that they were stale (e&ika) 
 opinions. 1 He says to the Christians : " Just as you 
 believe in eternal punishments, so do the priests, 
 who interpret and initiate into the sacred mysteries." 2 
 And again, when he is protesting against the idea of a 
 corporeal resurrection : "I shall address those who hope 
 for the enjoyment of eternal life with God through 
 their soul or mind . . . and they are rightly persuaded 
 that those who live well shall be blessed, and the un- 
 righteous shall all suffer everlasting punishment." 3 
 
 Clearly, therefore, the belief not merely in future 
 punishment, but in everlasting punishment, belonged 
 to the Pagan creed before it passed over into the 
 Christian religion. Plutarch on this point confirms 
 the evidence of Celsus when he refers to persons 
 who regarded death as an evil on account of eternal 
 torments and horrible punishments suffered under- 
 ground in Hell. 4 And in another place he argues 
 against the Epicureans, that men will not be at all 
 happier than brutes for mere unconcern at the stories 
 
 1 Origen, Against Celsus, ii. 5. 2 Ib. viii. 48. 
 
 3 Ib. viii. 49 : aluviois KO.KOIS. 
 
 4 On Moral Virtue, x. : riju-wpfais atwvlois VTT& yyv. The Greek 
 word in Celsus and Plutarch is the same as in the New Testament 
 for everlasting. 
 
i io PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of Hell, and for not fearing endless sorrows and 
 everlasting torments hereafter. 1 The hope, he con- 
 tends, entertained by the common people of an 
 eternal existence exceeds in pleasure their dread of 
 Hell ; and when they lose their wives, children, or 
 friends, they would prefer to think of them as exist- 
 ing even in misery than as for ever annihilated. 2 
 
 The popular belief was sustained in antiquity, as 
 it has been since, by the skill of the artist and by 
 the influence of the stage. "Often have I seen 
 pictures of the manifold torments of Acheron," 
 Plautus makes an actor say in one of his plays. 3 
 And Pausanias describes a picture by Polygnotus, 
 wherein some of the punishments of the underworld 
 were vividly displayed. 4 On the stage we catch 
 glimpses of the same thing, as in the following frag- 
 ment ascribed to Philemon or to Diphilus, both 
 comedians, wherein it is urged that the dead do not 
 escape the Deity : 
 
 "There is an eye of Justice, which, sees all. 
 For two ways we think to Hades lead, 
 One for the just, the other for the impious. 
 But if the earth hides both for ever, 
 Go rob, steal, plunder, riot. 
 
 But be not deceived, for there is a judgment in Hades, 
 Which God, the Lord of all, will execute ; 
 Whose name I dare not mention, 
 
 1 Of Pleasure according to Epicurus, 8. 2 Ib. 26. 
 
 3 Captivorum, v. 4. 1. 4 x. 28. 
 
THE PA CAN BELIEF IN HELL \ 1 1 
 
 Who gives to sinners length of life. 
 
 If any mortal thinks that day by day 
 
 While doing ill he eludes the gods' keen sight 
 
 His thoughts are evil, and when Justice has 
 
 The leisure, he shall then be detected 
 
 So thinking. Look, whoe'er you be that say 
 
 That there is not a God. There is, there is. 
 
 If one by nature evil does evil 
 
 Let him redeem the time, for such as he 
 
 Shall by-and-by due punishment receive." 
 
 The dream of Thespesius, in the treatise by 
 Plutarch, On the Slowness of God to Punish, reveals a 
 popular conception of future punishment in Hell that 
 fully equals the most horrible imaginings of the 
 Buddhist or the Christian. The demons, plunging 
 the souls of the avaricious into a lake of molten 
 gold, and then, when almost consumed by the fur- 
 nace, transferring them to an equally cold lake of 
 lead, thence to a lake of iron, and thence back again 
 to the lake of molten gold, prove that the Pagans 
 had nothing further to learn on this head, and, more- 
 over, that they anticipated the Christians in the evil 
 connotation which ultimately came to be the sole 
 one with reference to the word demon. It is 
 unnecessary to do more than refer to the well-known 
 story of Er, with which Plato ends his Republic, and 
 seeks to connect the pursuit of virtue or vice on 
 earth with either glorious rewards in Heaven after 
 death or with the most dreadful torments in Hell. 
 
ii2 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Even Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, taught 
 that the good and bad were separated in the under- 
 world ; the former in pleasant regions, the latter in 
 dark and miry places. 1 Lucian in his True History, or 
 imaginary visit to the other world, wherein he refers to 
 the five islands, with fires ever burning on them, as the 
 habitations of the wicked, or to three rivers of mire, 
 blood, and fluid fire respectively, meant to ridicule 
 not the Christian, but the common Pagan belief, as is 
 proved by another passage where he protests against 
 the poets for the tortures, fires, and devouring vultures 
 with which they threatened the unfortunate dead. 
 
 Death itself, says Plutarch, puts no end to the 
 fears of the superstitious man, for superstition extends 
 his fears beyond the grave, and adds the imagination 
 of immortal, never-ending, evil after the sorrows of 
 this life. "I know not what gates of Hell open 
 themselves from beneath, rivers of fire and Stygian 
 torments ; a gloomy darkness appears, full of ghastly 
 spectres and horrid shapes, with dreadful sights and 
 doleful groans, and judges and tormentors, full of 
 millions of miseries and woes." 2 The Christians had 
 no better explanation to offer for the resemblance 
 between the heathen notions and their own than the 
 utterly unsound one of plagiarism. "We get our- 
 selves laughed at," says Tertullian, " for proclaiming 
 that God will one day judge the world. For, like 
 
 1 Lactantius, vii. 7. 2 Superstition, 4, 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 113 
 
 us, the poets and philosophers set up a judgment- 
 seat in the realms below. And if we threaten 
 Gehenna, which is a reservoir of secret fire under the 
 earth for the purposes of punishment, we are laughed 
 to scorn (decachinnamur). For so too they have 
 their Pyriphlegethon, a river of flame in the regions 
 of the dead. And if we speak of Paradise . . . the 
 Elysian plains have taken possession of their faith. 
 Whence is it that you have all this so like us in the 
 poets and philosophers ? The reason simply is that 
 they have been taken from our religion." l We may 
 admit the similarity, but we shall be nearer the 
 truth if we reverse the explanation and make the 
 Christian belief derivative from the Pagan, not the 
 Pagan from the Christian. But a passage from the 
 Christian Arnobius will establish beyond all possi- 
 bility of cavil the argument that in their doctrine of 
 Hell and everlasting future punishment the Chris- 
 tians rather intensified the popular belief of ages 
 than taught any new thing regarding it. " Do you 
 dare laugh at us," he asks, " when we speak of Hell 
 and unquenchable fires ? . . . Does not your Plato 
 speak of Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, and Pyriphlege- 
 thon, and assert that in them souls are rolled along, 
 engulfed, and burned up? ... This is man's real 
 death when souls which know not God shall be 
 consumed in long -protracted torments with raging 
 
 1 Apologeticus, 47. 
 8 
 
1 14 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 fire, into which certain fiercely cruel beings shall cast 
 them, unknown before Christ and brought to light 
 only by His wisdom." l 
 
 Clearly therefore the early Christians, at least as 
 interpreted by Arnobius, regarded their faith in Hell 
 as something far more fearful than had theretofore 
 haunted human imagination. We know from Celsus 
 and Plutarch that their claim to originality with 
 regard to the everlasting duration of future punishment 
 cannot be allowed ; but at least they had the will 
 and the intention to preach a doctrine on this subject 
 which should appeal more cogently to the superstitious 
 fears of mankind ; and it would even appear that 
 this very fact was one of the causes of their rapid 
 success. Origen, for example, speaks of converts to 
 Christianity despising every kind of torture and even 
 death through their fears of what was called in the 
 Word everlasting punishments ; nor was it the very 
 wicked so much as people of average morality who 
 were so affected. 2 One of the charges brought by 
 Celsus against the Christians was their resort to this 
 religious terrorism, though he deprecated the idea of 
 himself rejecting the doctrine of the future punish- 
 ment of the wicked, and of the reward of the good. 3 
 Celsus was perfectly justified in this charge, for the 
 teaching of the new creed undid all that Philosophy 
 had achieved in the way of emancipating men's 
 
 1 ii. 4. 2 Against Celsus, iii. 78. 3 Ib. iii. 16. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 115 
 
 minds from the degrading fears of cruel and purpose- 
 less tortures after death. 
 
 Although Plutarch appears to defend the belief in 
 Hell against the Epicureans, he admits that not many 
 believed in the stories about it, and himself speaks of 
 them as the tenets of old women, or as the fables of 
 mothers and nurses. " Almost every one knows," he 
 says, " that the stories about the dead are suited to 
 popular apprehensions, and that spectres and 
 phantasms of burning rivers and horrible regions and 
 tortures with frightful names are all mixed with 
 fable and fiction as poison with food." l 
 
 This result was distinctly the work of philosophy, 
 for which even antagonistic schools, like the Stoics 
 and Epicureans, worked together. "No one," says 
 Seneca, " is such a child as to be afraid of Cerberus 
 and the shades." 2 He reminds Marcia that the dead 
 are afflicted by no evil, that the representations of the 
 lower regions as terrible are the fables of poets, and 
 subterranean shades and prisons and rivers of fire and 
 dread tribunals only fictions invented for the terror 
 of mankind. In the same way Cicero calls them the 
 horrors (portenta) of the poets and painters. 3 There 
 was no difference in this respect between Seneca and 
 Lucretius, between Epictetus and Epicurus. " When 
 God," says Epictetus, " gives a man the signal for re- 
 treat from life, and bids a man come, whither is it that 
 1 De audiendis Poetis, ii. 2 Epist. 24. 3 Tusc. Quaest. i. 5, 6, 21. 
 
ii6 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 he is called ? To nothing terrible, but to the place 
 whence he came, to his friends and kinsmen, and to 
 the elements, whatever was in him of fire or earth or 
 air or water returning to its respective element, but 
 to no Hades, nor Acheron, nor Pyriphlegethon." l 
 
 Philosophy either denied in this way the exist- 
 ence of Hell altogether, or explained it away as a 
 figurative expression for the human body or the 
 condition of the soul, much as the Broad Church 
 school of our times is wont to do. "It was this 
 body," says Macrobius of the philosophers, " that they 
 called the sepulchre of the soul, the cave of Dis, or 
 Hell ; and all that a fabulous mode of thinking held 
 to happen there, they tried to assign to ourselves, 
 and to our human bodies ; asserting that the Eiver 
 of Oblivion was nothing else than the straying of a 
 soul, which forgot the majesty of its former existence 
 that it had before it was compelled to live in a body, 
 and which thought its corporeal life to be its only 
 one. By a similar interpretation they taught that 
 Phlegethon signified the heats of anger and desires ; 
 that Acheron signified whatever we repented having 
 done or said ; that Styx was whatever drowned men's 
 souls in the whirlpool of mutual hatred ; and that the 
 vulture devouring an imperishable liver alluded to 
 the torments of conscience." 2 
 
 From the point of view therefore inculcated by 
 
 1 iii. 13. 2 i. 10. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 117 
 
 Philosophy, death presented only two possible alter- 
 natives, one of them bright with hope, and the other 
 at least exempt from terror. For it meant either the 
 transference of the soul to a better life, or the close 
 of all human ills in what Seneca calls a great and 
 eternal peace. Seneca's ideas on the happier alter- 
 native have already been quoted ; his ideas on the 
 Other were such as afford an obvious consolation to 
 human reason still He argues that if death replaces 
 us in the tranquil state we enjoyed before birth, it 
 were as reasonable to pity the not-yet-born as the 
 already dead. To die in that case was simply not to 
 be, wherein, if there were any torment, we must have 
 felt it also before we were born. What more foolish 
 than to think it were worse for a lamp after it was 
 put out than before it was lit ; and were not we too, 
 like lamps, lighted and extinguished, suffering indeed 
 somewhat between while, but enjoying profound 
 security at either term ?* 
 
 In the same spirit Cicero makes Cato say of death, 
 that either it is to be regarded as a matter of no concern, 
 if it entirely extinguishes the soul, or to be wished 
 for, if it conducts the soul to a place where it is to 
 exist for all eternity. "Any third possibility can 
 certainly not be found" - Marcus Aurelius says to 
 himself : " Thou hast embarked and made the voyage 
 and come to shore, so get out ; if indeed to another 
 
 54. - Df Srwofcife, m 
 
Ii8 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 life, there is no want of gods even there, but if to a 
 state of unconsciousness, thou wilt cease to be held 
 in bondage by pleasure and pains." 1 "Who fears 
 death either fears the loss of sensation or a 
 different kind of sensation; but if thou shalt have 
 no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm, and 
 if thou shalt have another kind of sensation, thou 
 wilt be a different kind of being and wilt not cease to 
 live." 2 Though he would look on death as, at its 
 worst, a natural process, a dissolution of the body 
 into its elements, and therefore nothing to be afraid 
 of, his moral sense clearly rebelled against the darker 
 alternative. Was it possible that the gods who had 
 arranged all things well and benevolently for man- 
 kind should suffer it that the best men, who had 
 held most communion with divinity, should after 
 their death never exist again, but be completely 
 extinguished ? His reply is the humble but faithful 
 one of sound human reason, that if it were so, the 
 gods would have ordered it otherwise had it been for 
 the best, and that their ordering of it either way 
 should be implicitly trusted. 3 There is no indication 
 that Epictetus believed in any conscious survival of 
 the soul after its separation from the body. Like 
 Aurelius, he compares life to a voyage, and proceeds 
 thus : " What can I do ? Choose the captain, the 
 sailors, the day, the time. Then a storm comes on. 
 1 ii. 3. 2 viii. 58. 3 xii. 5. 
 
THE PA CAN BELIEF IN HELL 1 1 9 
 
 What more care then have I, who have done my part ? 
 The business is now another's the captain's. But the 
 ship is sinking. What then have I to do ? I only do 
 what I can, I drown without fear, not screaming, nor 
 accusing God, but with the knowledge that what has 
 been produced must also perish, for I am not eternal 
 (aitov) but a man, a part of the whole as an hour is 
 part of the day. I must be present like the hour 
 and pass like the hour." l 
 
 Yet in face of such a conclusion, leading logically 
 on high authority to a mere life of sensual pleasure, 
 no one ever upheld more firmly than Epictetus the 
 beacon of virtuous and noble conduct as an end in 
 itself worth living for, even though death should be 
 its absolute termination, nor any remembrance nor 
 reward be in store for it. " Why should not a man," 
 asks Aurelius, " wait tranquilly for his end, whether it 
 be extinction or removal elsewhere, content till then 
 to reverence and bless the gods, to do good to men, and 
 to practise toleration and self-restraint ? " 2 He would 
 have himself end his journey with content, like a ripe 
 olive that falls to the ground, blessing Nature which 
 produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew. 3 
 
 How different all this from the teaching of the 
 Christian Lactantius, who argues that the pursuit of 
 virtue without the hope of immortality is the greatest 
 folly, and that, but for the compensation of everlast- 
 
 1 Discourses, ii. 5. 2 v. 33. 3 iv. 48. 
 
120 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ing life, virtue with all its hardships cannot be 
 deemed a good thing at all ! l 
 
 One would fain dwell longer on the philosophical 
 treatment of this great problem, so awful is the con- 
 trast between it and the teaching of the fanatics, 
 who, claiming to represent the religion of Christ, 
 which they were less capable of understanding 
 than of misinterpreting, revived, with superadded 
 terrors, the old Pagan notions of Hell, and plunged 
 the world back into mental barbarism. It is almost 
 enough to make one despair of human sanity to 
 think that some seven centuries after Epicurus such 
 a book should have been written as the twenty-first 
 of Augustine's City of God. Conceive one of the 
 greatest luminaries of the Catholic Church arguing 
 from the nature of the salamander, and from the sup- 
 posed antiseptic nature of the peacock, in favour of 
 the possibility of human bodies lasting for ever in 
 burning flames ; contending that a God who could 
 perform such a miracle as to create the world with 
 all its countless miracles of earth and sky, could 
 easily cause the bodies of the dead not only to rise 
 but to be susceptible of torment in everlasting fire ; 
 maintaining that the same material fire of Hell will 
 be equally adapted to prey upon the solid bodies of 
 men and the aerial bodies of devils ; and suggesting 
 that in that eternal fire the due proportion may be 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 121 
 
 observed between punishment and desert by the 
 graduation of the temperature of the fire to in- 
 dividual cases, or by different degrees of sensibility 
 to the intensity of the torment ! 
 
 It is surely time that a man who could descend to 
 such appalling nonsense as this should come down 
 from the pedestal he has occupied for so long as the 
 most philosophical of the Christian Fathers ! It is a 
 profanation to philosophy to mention it in connection 
 with him. But the speculation was a favourite one 
 with most of the early Christian writers, and must 
 affect our estimate of their intellectual calibre. Lac- 
 tantius, who deserted philosophy for the Church, 
 describes the wicked rising with indestructible bodies, 
 capable of holding out against tortures and everlast- 
 ing fire, a fire so far unlike the earthly element that 
 it is self-fed, and fluid like water, and in no danger of 
 being extinguished for want of sustenance ! l Minu- 
 cius Felix, speaking of the endlessness of Hell-tor- 
 ments, says, "The intelligent fire burns limbs and 
 restores them, feeds on them, and nourishes them." 2 
 Cyprian regards it as sure to be the great compensating 
 joy for believers at the Day of Judgment that " an 
 ever-burning Gehenna will burn up the condemned, 
 and a punishment devouring with living flames ; nor 
 will there be any source whence at any time they 
 may have either respite or end to their torments. 
 
 1 vi. 21. 2 Odavius, 35. 
 
122 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Souls with their bodies will be reserved in infinite 
 tortures." l 
 
 There is no need to quote more of the repulsive 
 evidence, which proves that real and material fire 
 was, as it still is among most of the sects, an essential 
 belief of historical Christianity, and that all figurative 
 relaxations, either as to the nature or duration of that 
 fire -penalty, such as from time to time have been 
 ventured on by Christians like Origen or John 
 Erigena, are genuine heretical departures from the 
 original Christian faith. Strange to say, the vivid- 
 ness of the revised or intensified belief appears to 
 have been one of the contributory causes to the 
 'rapid propagation of the faith, partly from the sheer 
 influence of terror, when brought to bear on unphilo- 
 sophical minds, and partly from the speedy prospect 
 of revenge which it held out for the blood of the 
 martyrs sacrificed in the various persecutions. It is 
 difficult to think that but for this latter cause the 
 gentler spirit that ushered in the new religion would 
 have ever degenerated into the ferocious character 
 it assumed under the influence of Tertullian or 
 Augustine. Tertullian, who in one place claims for 
 Christians the sole possession of the virtue of loving 
 their enemies, 2 indulges, at the close of his treatise 
 on the public spectacles, in a foretaste of the joy and 
 
 1 Letter to Demetrianus, 24. Compare his Glory of Martyrdom, 20. 
 2 Ad Scapulam, 1. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 123 
 
 derision that will be shortly afforded him at the Day 
 of Judgment, when he shall behold illustrious monarchs 
 groaning in the lowest darkness with the great Jupiter 
 himself; persecuting provincial governors in fires 
 fiercer than those which, in the days of their pride, 
 they caused to rage against the Christians ; philoso- 
 phers covered with shame as the fire consumes them ; 
 charioteers glowing in their chariots of fire; and 
 wrestlers tossing in the fiery billows. These are the 
 spectacles which this great Christian apologist pro- 
 mised to his co-religionists as compensation for the 
 idolatrous spectacles which he earnestly wished them 
 to forgo. 1 It is needless to say that the spirit of 
 fierce, unforgiving vengeance never expressed itself 
 with greater emphasis than in this African Christian's 
 vision of Hell ; and it was doubtless this desire and 
 need of vengeance which led to that intensification 
 of future torments which gave so distinctive a feature 
 of terrorism to the new religion, and against which 
 to this day we have still to battle. 
 
 When we think of the millions upon millions of 
 our race for whom the joys of life have been em- 
 bittered, and the physical pains of whose last hours 
 or years have been intensified a thousandfold by the 
 prospect of those coming torments which they were 
 led to regard as the just merits of their sins, at the 
 hands of a God as loving as He was omnipotent, we 
 
 1 De Spectaculis, 30. 
 
124 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 shall better appreciate that degradation from its 
 original purity which Christianity underwent at the 
 hands of the Church Fathers, who threw philosophy 
 and common sense to the winds, to revel in con- 
 ceptions as impious as they were coarse ; and when 
 we compare their teaching on that point with the 
 beauty and simplicity of the Eeligion of Philosophy, 
 the religion of Seneca and Cicero, which, irrespective 
 of any certain reward or retribution beyond the grave, 
 could yet teach men to live each day as if their last, 1 
 and could bid all men to depart from life with 
 equanimity, assured that death either put an end to 
 all evil or was the portal to a happier state, we shall 
 be inclined to call in question the commonly received 
 opinion that Christianity added perceptibly to the 
 happiness or mental progress of the human race, and 
 we shall be tempted to wish either to liberate that 
 religion from the deadly stain of its superstitious 
 accretion, or to restate and re-assert the claims of 
 human reason as they were stated and asserted by 
 Philosophy more than two thousand years ago. 
 
 And since they are still legion who insist on the 
 literal and everlasting Hell-fire as the essential doc- 
 trine of Christianity, presuming therewith on the 
 innocence of children or the ignorance of the un- 
 educated, it is worth while to trace to its source the 
 idea of posthumous punishment in a subterranean 
 
 1 Seneca, JEpist. 12, and Aurelius, vii. 69. 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 125 
 
 world, so as to account for its presence, not only in 
 pre-Christian Paganism, but in modern extra- Christian 
 barbarism. In comparative mythology, as revealed 
 in the fancies of common folk-lore, we shall succeed 
 in finding the explanation. 
 
 The custom that still survives in Bavaria of 
 speaking of the sun and moon as Frau Sonne and 
 Hcrr Mond, and the tale which in the same district 
 accounts for their celestial movements by their rela- 
 tionship as man and wife, carry us back to a time 
 when, as is still attested of several modern savage 
 races, men could think of the two great luminaries 
 as actual human persons of one gender or the other. 
 The human attributes ascribed to them account for 
 the worship that came to be paid to them, often with 
 so much cruelty, in so many parts of the world, belief 
 in their humanity being a natural and almost neces- 
 sary preliminary to the belief in their divinity. The 
 stories, so numerous in European folk-lore, of the 
 sun or moon taking persons up to themselves as a 
 punishment, as in the Edda the moon takes up two 
 children for merely carrying water -pots on their 
 shoulders, point equally to the old state of thought 
 which regarded them as actual living human beings, 
 and to the beginning of the later conception of them, 
 as places rather than as persons. 
 
 For just as in Greek mythology Hades and 
 Orcus from being persons became places; just as 
 
126 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Hel, the Norse goddess of death, who received the 
 departed below, gradually lost her personality and 
 became the receptacle of the dead, the place where 
 they were punished ; so the Sun and Moon from 
 being persons able to punish, became the places 
 where men were punished, as in the case of the man 
 eternally visible in the moon for gathering sticks on 
 the Sabbath or for working in his vineyard by moon- 
 light. In Swabia one may still hear it said against 
 the practice of spinning or sewing in the moonlight, 
 " Leave off working, or you will go to the moon " ; 
 and it is still a common German formula for the 
 asseveration of innocence to exclaim, " May I go to 
 the moon if I did it." The idea is clearly apparent 
 that the moon is a place of punishment ; and in 
 accordance with this, in the folk-lore of countries 
 like Eussia and North Germany, where cold is more 
 dreaded than heat, the moon figures as the place for 
 future punishment, in the case at least of Sabbath- 
 breakers. With this we may connect the fact that 
 in Norse mythology Niflheim, where Hel received 
 the dead, was imagined to be a world of cold that 
 lay to the north, whilst over against it to the south 
 lay a world of heat ; which two worlds we may 
 respectively identify with the moon and the sun, 
 and thence infer, that as Niflheim, the place of 
 future punishment by cold, was in northern climates 
 suggested by the icy cold associated with the moon, 
 
THE PAGAN BELIEF IN HELL 127 
 
 so in hotter regions the sun gave birth to the idea of 
 a world where excess of fire and heat would form the 
 basis of future penal suffering for the wicked. And 
 according as either luminary suggested an intensifica- 
 tion of the heat or cold, endured in this world, as the 
 probable punishment of the next, so would the other 
 luminary come naturally to be thought of as revers- 
 ing those conditions, and therefore as a place of 
 sensational delight, reserved only, like the Elysium 
 of the Greeks, or the Indian's happy hunting-grounds, 
 for those who by their bravery or other virtues might 
 be so fortunate as to deserve it. 
 
 The one obvious difficulty in the way of this specu- 
 lation affords really the strongest proof in its favour : 
 namely, that places of future purgatory are invariably 
 subterranean, whereas the sun and moon are aerial 
 bodies. For when we consider that the sun and moon 
 are both seen to rise apparently out of, and again to 
 sink into the earth or sea, and that in the state of 
 thought prior to the conception of space round and 
 below the earth their reappearance is obviously sugges- 
 tive of a journey under and through the earth during 
 their absence from sight, we see at once that they would 
 themselves be the first cause of the ideas of a sub- 
 terranean world at all, such as we find in the Egyptian 
 Book of the Dead, where departed souls descend with 
 the Sun-god through the western gate and traverse 
 with him the infernal regions ; whilst it would only 
 
128 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 be natural that the ideas of punishment, originally 
 associated with the sun and moon, would in time 
 become attached to that more mysterious, because 
 unseen, world through which they were thought to 
 travel, and with which existing tradition still con- 
 nects them in popular tales. To that subterranean 
 world would no less naturally become attached an- 
 other attribute of future suffering, over and above the 
 fire or frost derived from the sun or moon, namely, its 
 eternity of duration, an idea easily suggested by the 
 unceasing regularity of the solar and lunar movements, 
 and still preserved in European myths, which insist 
 on the everlastingness of the punishment of the un- 
 fortunate sinner whose presence and fate is writ large 
 in the moon as an eternal warning to mankind. 
 
 It is curious to think that on so childish a con- 
 ception of primitive thought as this supposed frequent 
 visit of the sun or moon to an underground world has 
 been reared the most terrific superstition which has 
 ever weighed upon the human mind ; a superstition 
 which has probably done more to promote human 
 misery than all other evils combined ; but a super- 
 stition which will not survive the day when for men 
 to simulate assent to doctrines they disbelieve, and 
 to teach as true such doctrines to others, is seen to be 
 as fatally at variance with the simplest postulates of 
 truth and honesty as it is indefensible on the ground 
 of expediency. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE END OF THE WORLD 
 
 As early as the sixth century before Christ, Hera- 
 clitus, the famous philosopher of Ephesus, who traced 
 the origin of all nature to fire, speculated also on its 
 periodical reconsumption by the same element ; and 
 this idea was afterwards generally adopted by the 
 Stoics, though some of them, like Panaetius and 
 Posidonius, believing that matter itself was from 
 everlasting, believed consistently in the world's eter- 
 nal duration. The Stoics thought, says Cicero, " that 
 at the end the whole world would be burned, when, 
 after the loss of all moisture, neither the earth would 
 admit of nourishment nor the air of water, the very 
 existence of the latter being rendered impossible by 
 the exhaustion of all water ; so that nothing would 
 be left but fire ; and that God again giving life to 
 this, the world would be renewed and refurnished as 
 it was before. 1 
 
 1 De Natura Deorum, ii. 46, 
 9 
 
130 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 So familiar to the world was this notion of the 
 destruction of the earth by fire that Berosus the 
 Babylonian historian, in the fourth century before 
 Christ, even went so far as to predict the actual date 
 of the final conflagration. 1 Seneca, although he 
 seems to have hesitated between a final cataclysm 
 by a conflagration or by a deluge, entertained so 
 little doubt of a violent end to the world, that he 
 used as a consolation under bereavement the con- 
 sideration that neither the earth, nor the sky, nor 
 the universe, though under the direct guidance of 
 God, were exempt from ultimate destruction. 2 " At 
 that time," he says, " the tides will be released from 
 their bounds. How, you ask ? Just in the same 
 way as the future conflagration. Either will happen 
 when it pleases God that the better order of things 
 shall begin and the old order finish. Water and fire 
 rule all earthly things. From these is their begin- 
 ning, and from these their end. Therefore, when the 
 new state of things is to begin, the sea will be poured 
 down upon us from above just as heat and fire will 
 be when another mode of destruction is chosen." 3 
 
 In another place he describes how at the last 
 deluge all the race of men and animals will be 
 destroyed, and then, when the waters have subsided, 
 every animal will be reproduced after its kind, and 
 
 1 Seneca, Quaest. Nat. iii. 28. 2 Epist. 71, 
 
 3 Quaest. Nat. iii. 28. 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 131 
 
 man occupy the earth again for a season, innocent of 
 crime and born under happier auspices. 1 
 
 In his letter to Marcia, after describing how stars 
 will fall on stars, and the earth burn with ardent 
 heat, he expresses the belief that at the time of that 
 great convulsion, the human race, as blessed spirits 
 and destined to immortality (felices animae et aeterna 
 sortiti), will, when it seems good to God, be restored 
 again to life. 2 
 
 The interest of these ideas is, that the belief in 
 the final triumph of good over evil at the close of 
 the present dispensation of things, together with the 
 belief in the simultaneous resurrection of the dead 
 and the renovation of nature, were among the main 
 tenets of the Persian Zoroastrian religion and of the 
 Jewish expectation of the Messiah ; a proof not only 
 of the great interchange of thought between Greece, 
 Italy, and the East in the pre-Christian period, but 
 of the borrowed nature of those early Christian 
 notions concerning the millennium and the end of 
 the world which constituted so strongly marked a 
 feature in the earlier literature of the Church, and so 
 fundamental an article of her original creed. 
 
 With regard to the final conflagration of the 
 world there was little if any difference between the 
 Christian and the Pagan belief. It was a belief that 
 sprang naturally from the imperfect knowledge of 
 
 1 Quaest. Nat. iii. 30. 2 26. 
 
132 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 nature possessed by the world at that time, a belief 
 to which modern science lends no countenance what- 
 ever, associating fire, as it does, with the beginning 
 rather than the end of planetary life, and deducing 
 millions of years to come from the evidences, derived 
 from astronomy and geology, of millions of years 
 in the past history of our globe. But whereas the 
 Pagan or the Stoic only contemplated the physical 
 destruction of the earth, with the Jew, and con- 
 sequently with the Christian, a political aspect added 
 itself from the first to the physical speculation of 
 that catastrophe, till at last the end of the world 
 came to mean primarily the political termination of 
 the Eoman Empire and the transfer of supreme 
 power from the West to the East. It will appear 
 from the sequel with what tremendous consequences 
 to the destinies of civilisation this physical specula- 
 tion was fraught. 
 
 The time of the origin of Christianity was marked 
 by a state of great mental fermentation, the political 
 agitation of centuries having reduced multitudes, 
 especially in the East, to a condition bordering on 
 actual craziness; and from the political anarchy of 
 the time sprang hopes, and from hopes prophecies, of 
 a mighty deliverer who should end the existing 
 dispensation of things, shake off the dominion of 
 Rome, and vest in the East itself the imperial 
 sceptre of the world. Other nationalities besides the 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 133 
 
 Jewish indulged in the same dream, and that the 
 expectation was well known to the Eoman world is 
 proved by its mention by both Tacitus and Suetonius. 
 "An old and fixed opinion," says the latter, "had 
 prevailed through the whole East, to the effect that 
 it was fated that at that time men from Judaea 
 (Judaea profecti) should gain supreme power, and a 
 prophecy which, as the event showed, referred to the 
 Eoman emperor, the Jews applied to themselves, 
 and rose in rebellion." It was the general Pagan 
 belief that this prophecy was fulfilled in the person 
 of Vespasian, who was proclaimed emperor during 
 his command of the campaign in Judaea. "Many 
 were persuaded," says Tacitus, "from the ancient 
 books of the priests, that it was indicated that at 
 that very time the East should wax strong, and men 
 from Judaea should gain supreme power: which 
 ambiguities predicted Vespasian and Titus." Even 
 Josephus, who as a Jew must have been well versed 
 in the Jewish prophecies purporting to relate to the 
 Messiah, only spoke of it in the following cold terms: 
 " AY hat chiefly encouraged them (the Jews) to the 
 war (with the Eomans) was an ambiguous oracle 
 found also in their sacred writings that about this 
 time some one from their country should obtain the 
 empire of the world. This they understood to 
 belong to themselves, and many of the wise men 
 were mistaken in their judgment about it, for the 
 
134 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 oracle intended the government of Vespasian, who 
 was proclaimed emperor in Judaea." 
 
 It is passing strange that Josephus should have 
 spoken in this way if the educated Jews generally 
 had entertained that expectation of the Messiah 
 which later Christian criticism has always based on 
 certain passages of Moses and the prophets. Evi- 
 dently Josephus and some of the learned Jews did 
 not interpret those passages as justifying the belief 
 in a coming Liberator. But the belief was common, 
 if it was not universal, among the Jews. In the 
 days of the expected Messiah the righteous were to 
 be raised from the dead and clothed again with 
 flesh : an idea derived apparently from the Zoroas- 
 trian religion of Persia, of which it was one of the 
 tenets, that in the end the Good Principle of Light, 
 Ormuzd, should prevail over Ahrimam, the Bad 
 Principle of Darkness ; that he should then summon 
 the children of light from their graves, remove all 
 evil from the -face of nature, and establish definitely 
 the kingdom of the righteous and of virtue upon 
 earth. It is far more probable that these ideas, 
 which subsequently governed the Christian dogma 
 of the millennium, were derived by the prophet 
 Daniel and the Jews from Zoroaster and the Persians 
 than from Daniel by Zoroaster ; * but, be that as it 
 
 1 The best modern Parsi researches place Zoroaster's date as 
 far back at least as 1300 B.C. The later date of 521 B.C. arose 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 135 
 
 may, it would seem that, after the Eoman conquest 
 of Judaea, the expectation of the Messiah who was 
 to raise the righteous from the dead and establish 
 their supremacy assumed a stronger political tinge, 
 and passed into the expectation of a Messiah who 
 was not only to be the great Liberator of the nation 
 from the Eoman rule, but to establish a great Jewish 
 empire, with Jerusalem for the capital of the world. 1 
 The early Christians, who inherited the general 
 system of Jewish beliefs, inherited of course this 
 one ; and the confused Jewish idea of the final 
 triumph of righteousness and of a temporal kingdom 
 passed with no essential change of any sort into the 
 creed of the primitive Church. 
 
 The Eoman conquest of Judaea by Pompey 
 (74 B.C.) gave of course new life and meaning to this 
 tradition of a Liberator which the Jews adopted 
 from Persia. Josephus tells of numerous false 
 prophets who, before the final revolt, claimed to be 
 the Messiah with a mission from God to deliver the 
 people from the Eomans, and who offered to 
 authenticate their mission by the performance of 
 signs and wonders in the wilderness. Even after the 
 disastrous revolt, due to this expectation, had resulted 
 in the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion 
 
 from a slight mistake of about eight centuries ; a king Gushtasp, 
 in whose reign Zoroaster lived, having been wrongly identified 
 with Darius Hystaspes ! Framji Karika's Parsis, ii. 148. 
 1 Edersheim's Life and Times of Jems, ii. 431-452. 
 
136 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of the people, a certain weaver called Jonathan again 
 induced a number of the poorer Jews to follow him 
 into the wilderness by the promise of signs and 
 wonders, so strong was the faith of the people in 
 their ultimate delivery. 
 
 We are bound to remember this obstinate belief 
 of the Jews, if we would understand the attitude of 
 the Pagans towards the Christians, who to all 
 outward appearance were no more than a sect of the 
 Jews. How could the Christians but inherit the 
 hatred felt for the Jews, when they adhered above 
 all things to that expectation of a temporal kingdom 
 which, based as it was on the anticipated ruin of 
 Eome, was so particularly offensive in the case of the 
 Jews ? Looking back, as we can, through the ages, 
 it is easy to see that the Jews misinterpreted their 
 Scriptures in their expectation of a temporal king- 
 dom ; but the early Christians misinterpreted them 
 no less, for they expected the immediate return of 
 Christ, and looked forward to a temporal kingdom, 
 and to the overthrow of the powers then in existence. 
 The current idea of the physical destruction and 
 renovation of the world mingled with their expecta- 
 tion of a political revolution, and the dread of the 
 end of all things was surpassed by their hope of a 
 somewhat sensual millennium. Of the early Christians 
 of any distinction, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, 
 Papias, Justin Martyr, Montanus, and Cerinthus 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 137 
 
 were all fervent millennarians. The resurrection of 
 the elect from the dead to spend one thousand years 
 in a restored and beautified Jerusalem was Justin 
 Martyr's conception of the orthodox Christian belief 
 of his time. " We confess," wrote Tertullian, " that 
 a kingdom is promised to us upon the earth, though, 
 by heaven, only in another state of existence, 
 forasmuch as it will be after the resurrection 
 for one thousand years, in the divinely built city 
 of Jerusalem let down from heaven." The Mon- 
 tanists, that wild Phrygian sect which Tertullian 
 joined, had a prophecy which foretold the pre- 
 vious manifestation of this very city for a sign ; and 
 Tertullian actually believed that this prophecy had 
 been fulfilled during the expedition of the Emperor 
 Severus against the Parthians, when in Judaea 
 every day for forty days was seen suspended in 
 the sky a city which vanished regularly as the day 
 advanced ! * 
 
 The Persian ideas of the abundance of renovated 
 nature mixed themselves strangely with the reign of 
 the righteous upon earth under the new dispensation 
 expected by the Church. Paradise itself is a word 
 of Persian origin, and thoroughly Persian was the 
 Christian anticipation of it. Irenaeus, when describ- 
 ing the resurrection of the dead, the reign of the 
 righteous, and the new powers of nature, traces back 
 
 1 Against Mar don, iii. 24. 
 
138 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to elders who were personally acquainted with 
 St. John the assurance that the days were coming 
 when vines should have ten thousand branches, each 
 branch ten thousand twigs, each twig ten thousand 
 shoots, each shoot ten thousand clusters, and each 
 cluster ten thousand grapes ; and when, if any saint 
 were about to pick one of the clusters, another 
 would cry out amidst the profusion, " Take me, I am 
 a better cluster." 
 
 These despicable ideas are only worth noticing 
 for their almost absolute identity with those enter- 
 tained by the Jews at the same period. The Jew 
 looked for the entire rebuilding of the sacred city of 
 Jerusalem, when it should have become the capital 
 of the whole world in that empire of the Messiah 
 which was to be raised on the ruins of the empire of 
 Eome. The city itself was to be raised to a height 
 of nine miles, and extend from Joppa to Damascus. 
 It was to be as large as Palestine, and Palestine 
 was to be as large as the world. Its windows and 
 gates were to be of precious stones, its walls of 
 silver and gold, and the jewels strewed in its streets 
 every Jew would be free to gather. In those days 
 not only would peace and holiness reign, but the 
 wheat would grow as high as palm trees on the 
 mountains, every tree bear fruit daily, and all 
 sickness and disease pass away. To attempt to 
 formulate any definite system of these wild ideas 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 139 
 
 connected with the coming of the Messiah and the 
 end of the world would be manifestly hopeless ; all 
 that can be proved is the extreme similarity be- 
 tween the Jewish and the Christian notions on the 
 subject, and of both with the Zoroastrian notions, 
 a similarity which, as between the Jews and 
 Christians, touches actual identity only on the all- 
 important point of the impending downfall of the 
 Eoman Empire. 
 
 As with the Jews, so with the Christians, the 
 political aspect of the kingdom of the righteous 
 gradually superseded the physical and spiritual 
 aspect, which had been the primary one in the 
 primitive Zoroastrian system. The second coming 
 was expected from year to year, if not from day to 
 day, and the prospect of speedy redress emboldened 
 the Christians to mix denunciations and menaces 
 freely with their predictions of their approaching 
 triumph. Did it embolden a fanatical handful of 
 them to set fire to Rome in the year 64 during the 
 reign of Nero ? An affirmative answer is certainly 
 suggested by the language of Tacitus, who appears 
 to have had no doubt of their guilt in connection 
 with that famous conflagration, though he con- 
 demned the excessive and extraordinary cruelty of 
 their punishment. 1 At all events, from that time 
 forth the breach was widened between the Chris- 
 
 1 *Annals, xv. 44. 
 
I 4 o PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 tians and the Koman authorities ; and the revolt of 
 the Jews two years after the burning of Eome must 
 have further confirmed the latter in their belief of 
 the disloyalty of a body of men who were only 
 regarded as Jewish sectaries. The result was, that 
 the end of the world became more closely than ever 
 identified with the end of the Eoman Empire, as 
 in the Apocalypse attributed to St. John or to 
 Cerinthus ; and a few references to the Fathers will 
 prove beyond all doubt how by the early Church 
 the one consummation was as little doubted as the 
 other was eagerly desired. 
 
 Tertullian explains the passage, " That day shall 
 not come unless first there be a falling away," as an 
 allusion to the end of the Eoman Empire ; and on 
 the words, " He who now hinders must hinder until 
 he be taken out of the way," his comment is, " What 
 obstacle is this but the Eoman State, the falling 
 away of which, by being scattered into ten king- 
 doms, shall introduce Antichrist ? " Irenaeus also 
 refers to the allusion in the Apocalypse to the ten 
 kings, who would arise in the last times, and among 
 whom the empire then ruling the earth would be 
 partitioned. 2 And Jerome, in reference to Daniel's 
 vision of the four beasts, says distinctly : " Let us 
 say what all ecclesiastical writers have handed 
 down : At the end of the world, when the kingdom 
 
 1 Resurrection of the Flesh, 24. 2 Against Heresies, v. 26. 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 141 
 
 of the Romans is to be destroyed, there will be ten 
 kings, who will divide the Eoman world among 
 themselves/' 
 
 In the condition of the Eoman Empire, with its 
 different provinces in constant revolt, and the 
 supreme office of the State at the mercy of the 
 military, the prediction of the dissolution of the 
 political edifice was amply justified by its extreme 
 probability ; but to expect that the men who had 
 reared that edifice, and did their best to conserve it, 
 should listen patiently to the Christian anticipations 
 of its speedy disintegration, and of the substitution 
 of ten separate kingdoms for the unity of the 
 empire, is to expect of them not only indifference 
 to their own immediate interests, but disregard for 
 the obvious advantage of the world. The destruc- 
 tion of contemporary civilisation by fire and blood, 
 as foretold in one of the visions of Hernias, in a 
 work originally as well accredited as any of the 
 existing New Testament Canon, or as prophesied in 
 some of those Sibylline Oracles which were forged in 
 the supposed interests of Christianity, and are 
 quoted by most of the early Fathers, notably by 
 Lactantius, without the least suspicion, as of equal 
 authority with the Gospels themselves, cannot have 
 conduced to a more charitable consideration of the 
 Church on the part of those who had everything to 
 lose by the fulfilment of the prophecy. No term of 
 
142 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 insult was too gross for the Christians to apply to 
 Imperial Borne. They habitually spoke of her, in a 
 literature of foolish visions scattered broadcast over 
 the empire, as Babylon, the Harlot, or the Beast, 
 and they omitted no imaginary evil from the 
 pictures they drew of her impending ruin. Of the 
 wildly comminatory and insolent nature of this 
 literature we may form some idea from the still 
 extant Book of Enoch, the Fourth Book of Ezra, the 
 so-called Sibylline Oracles, and the Testament of 
 the Twelve Patriarchs ; and from these we may 
 judge of the purport of such lost apocryphal works 
 as the Apocalypses of Elijah, of Zephaniah, of 
 Zechariah, of Abraham, of Moses, of St. Peter, of St. 
 Paul, of St. Thomas, and of St. Stephen. The age 
 of the Antonines was particularly rich in these 
 forged prophetical writings predicting the end of 
 the empire ; and every impartial mind must admit 
 not only that the Pagans must have been more than 
 men to have borne these menaces with patience, 
 but that the Eoman magistrates would have been 
 political imbeciles had they looked on nascent 
 Christianity, formed largely of Jews in the different 
 cities of the empire, as other than a hostile political 
 force, and an association or conspiracy of more than 
 usual danger to the State. 
 
 The prediction of the end of the Eoman Empire 
 would naturally commend itself to more than one 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 143 
 
 subject nationality ; and Christianity, falling in with 
 a widespread longing for successful revolt, would 
 nourish with the extension of the hopes it en- 
 couraged. There was likely to be no part of the 
 world where, on the terms of a great political revolu- 
 tion, the Christians might not hope to make converts. 
 Predictions of the ruin of the empire had an 
 obvious tendency to self-fulfilment ; and it is re- 
 markable that the invasion of the barbarians and the 
 virtual downfall of the empire in the fifth century 
 occurred at about the time when, according to the 
 computation of an absurd chronology, it was pro- 
 phesied to take place. The Christians adopted 
 from the first the Jewish notion that the world 
 would end after as many thousand years as it had 
 taken days to be created. "In six days," said 
 Irenaeus, " created things were completed ; it is 
 evident therefore that they will come to an end in 
 the 6000th year." This triumph of reasoning was 
 generally accepted as conclusive by the Church, and 
 if other Christians agreed with Julius Africanus that 
 5531 years had elapsed between the creation of the 
 world and the birth of Christ, the year 469 must 
 clearly have been the year of the anticipated final 
 catastrophe. But allowing for variations of chrono- 
 logical calculation, it must have been expected about 
 the time when under Alaric, Attila, and the rest, the 
 Boman Empire came virtually to an end. We may 
 
144 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 perhaps never know how far this coincidence was 
 accidental, but the Christianity of Alaric and his 
 invading Goths is a proof of the signal efficacy 
 with which the Church had trained the enemies and 
 ultimate conquerors of Imperial Eome. 
 
 If we thus suppose that the political hope of the 
 Church became to a great extent her aim, that from 
 passive contemplation of the end of the Eoman 
 Empire she passed to active promotion of the same, 
 and that by so doing she responded to a general 
 desire for political autonomy permeating the provinces 
 of the Eoman Empire, we explain in a very natural 
 way much that is otherwise mysterious or inexplic- 
 able. We have here, in other words, the main key, 
 first, to the extremely rapid propagation of Chris- 
 tianity ; secondly, to the cruel persecution of it by a 
 power previously noted for its usual broad toleration ; 
 and lastly, to the ultimate downfall of the Eoman 
 Empire, and to its partition, as predicted, among the 
 previously subject nationalities. Without deny- 
 ing that for all these facts there were many other 
 contributory causes, we may well account the political 
 aspiration the primary cause of all, the overruling 
 factor in the historical problem of the early centuries 
 of our era. 
 
 Against this theory must be set the fact that 
 Pliny in his famous letter to Trajan makes no direct 
 allusion to the charge of disloyalty against the 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 145 
 
 Christians, and that similar lack of testimony marks 
 the brief references to them of other Pagan writers 
 like Tacitus and Suetonius. Perhaps in those early 
 days the anti-imperial tendency of the new move- 
 ment was less apparent or more carefully concealed 
 than it was in later times when the Christians had 
 become a powerful association, ramifying through 
 the whole empire and powerfully organised ; but 
 even in Pliny's day sacrifice in honour of the emperor 
 was one of the three tests in the trial of Christians, 
 and it had been precisely this refusal to offer sacrifice 
 for the Eoman Empire in the person of the emperor 
 which, according to Josephus, had been one of the 
 immediate causes of the Jewish and Eoman war. 
 Eleazar, the son of the high priest, then governor, 
 persuaded the Jewish priests to refuse the gift or 
 sacrifice of a foreigner ; and this was the origin of 
 the war with the Eomans, for they rejected the sacri- 
 fice of Caesar. 1 The Christians, originally identified 
 as they were with the Jews, naturally shared the 
 suspicion of disaffection which attached to the Jews ; 
 and so they were called upon to exculpate themselves 
 in the same way, as in the story of the martyrdom 
 of Polycarp, when the authorities, striving their 
 utmost to save him, entreated him to swear by 
 Caesar's Fortune, and asked what harm it could do 
 him to say, Lord Caesar, and to sacrifice. It was the 
 
 1 Jewish War, ii. 17. 
 10 
 
146 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Christians' disloyalty that was suspected ; and if 
 their religion was hated and persecuted, it was more 
 on account of their obstinate refusal to dissociate it 
 from the Jewish taint of disaffection than of any 
 essential doctrine contained in the religion itself. It 
 must too be admitted that their motives for not con- 
 forming to the usual oaths of loyalty were often of 
 the most superstitious kind. They had no scruples, 
 according to Tertullian, in swearing by the Safety of 
 Caesar ; but to swear by his Fortune or his Genius 
 was impossible, because on the one hand fortune was 
 an unreal and fickle thing, and therefore an oath by 
 it was a light and vain oath, whilst on the other hand 
 a genius was a demon, and an oath by a demon was 
 a wicked oath. Surely there was some excuse for 
 the Pagans if they failed to understand these super- 
 fine distinctions and objections, and attributed to 
 downright disloyalty what was really an absurd 
 superstition ! 
 
 The very fact of the frequent occurrence of pleas 
 in the Christian apologies against the charge of dis- 
 loyalty proves at least the general Pagan belief in the 
 truth of the charge, for people never defend them- 
 selves against accusations that are not propounded. 
 "We pray also for the emperors," said Tertullian, 
 " for their ministers and powers, for the stability of 
 things (pro statu seculi}, for tranquillity, and for the 
 postponement of the end (pro mora finis) " ; or again : 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 147 
 
 " We offer sacrifice for the health of the emperor, 
 but to our God and his, and, as God has commanded 
 us, by prayer alone. For God, the Creator of the 
 universe, needs not the savour nor the blood of any- 
 thing." Justin Martyr, with less vehemence but 
 equal earnestness, protested against the idea that the 
 Christians were looking for a temporal kingdom ; 
 but in another treatise he admitted that he himself 
 and many, though not all, of his co-religionists ex- 
 pected the rebuilding of a beautified Jerusalem and 
 the reign therein of the righteous for 1000 years. 1 
 This expectation could only have come about by a 
 tremendous political convulsion, so far as the non- 
 Christian could understand it, nor was there anything 
 in the Christian apologies at all calculated to reassure 
 him, whilst the literature that was not apologetic 
 but claimed to be apocalyptic contained everything 
 that was calculated to alarm him. 
 
 The simple rite of sacrifice on behalf of the 
 emperor and of respect for the national gods would 
 have removed the suspicion of treason ; and the 
 Pagan, accustomed himself to take a part in such 
 rites as the mere forms of the State service involving 
 no necessary assent to the polytheism presupposed in 
 them, was at least excusable if he interpreted the 
 conscientious objection of the Christian to idolatry 
 as the transparent pretext and proof of participation 
 
 1 Dialogue, with Trypho, 80, 81. 
 
148 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 in a treasonable conspiracy. Even if the Christians 
 prayed, as Tertullian declares, for the postponement 
 of the end, the mere expectation of that end, which 
 meant above all things the end of the empire, must 
 have been difficult enough to distinguish from the 
 actual hope of it, which they were at so little pains 
 to conceal, and which was the one point of the new 
 religion whereon there was something like unanimity 
 of opinion amongst its votaries. We must remember 
 that it was not merely the empire, the political 
 edifice, which the Christians opposed, but the whole 
 state of the civilisation of their day. As Vopiscus, a 
 heathen historian of the fourth century, remarked, 
 the Christians made themselves conspicuous for the 
 extraordinary license with which they criticised and 
 condemned the times they lived in ; and that at a 
 period when their own lives, as painted by their own 
 writers like Salvian or Cyprian, offered so very little 
 justification for self-gratulation in the matter of supe- 
 riority of morals. 1 
 
 If we regard, then, the spread of Christianity as to 
 a great extent a political movement looked upon by 
 the authorities as a treasonable conspiracy against 
 the empire, it is no longer unintelligible why the 
 mere name of Christian, apart from any proved 
 criminality, came to be treated as punishable, and 
 why the mere renunciation of Christianity became a 
 
 1 Compare with Salvian, Cyprian, De Lapsis, 5, 6. 
 
THE END OF THE WORLD 149 
 
 passport of impunity. This could not have been the 
 case, had they been seriously accused of those crimes 
 of infant sacrifice and nocturnal debauchery with 
 which the popular imagination often charged them. 
 Nor could it have been the case, had their primary 
 offence been their disbelief in the popular gods and 
 the neglect of sacrifice, for a similar atheism on the 
 part of the Stoics and Pythagoreans had long been 
 patiently tolerated. But if the renunciation of 
 Christianity was the equivalent of returning to the 
 ways of good citizenship, of disavowing sympathy 
 with those denunciations of wild revenge, or belief 
 in those prophecies of the impending ruin of the 
 empire which accompanied the spreading faith into 
 the farthest corners of the Eoman dominions, this 
 anomaly of judicial procedure admits of explanation. 
 It is otherwise incredible that the Eomans, who in 
 their rule over subject nations had so well learnt and 
 practised religious toleration that the friends of 
 toleration have ever since appealed to their example 
 as the golden rule, and who bore in Judaea or Persia 
 with precisely the same dislike of polytheism and 
 idolatry that afterwards characterised the Christians, 
 should have suddenly developed a taste for religious 
 persecution for its own sake, and exhibited the ab- 
 normal cruelty which, even if we could suppose that 
 such tales as the martyrdom of Polycarp and of the 
 Christians at Lyons were forgeries palmed upon 
 
150 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Eusebius, still clings to their historical dealings with 
 the Church of the first three centuries. This is the 
 fact that requires explanation, and no explanation 
 meets it so well as the theory that the primary 
 offence of the Christians was less the novelty of 
 their religious doctrines than the disaffection in- 
 volved in their political opinions. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII 
 
 PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ONE of the commonest traditions that has acquired 
 some semblance of truth by persistent reiteration is 
 that the pre-Christian religions at their best had 
 little to do with or little power to enforce morality, 
 and that the conversion to Christianity effected no 
 less a moral than a theological revolution in human 
 society. But if the theory of a theological revolution 
 fails to survive an inquiry into the mass of theo- 
 logical thought which, whether we call it Orientalism, 
 Gnosticism, or Platonism, was prevalent over the 
 whole world from the Ganges to the Tiber at the 
 birth of Christianity, and out of which the evolution 
 of Christian theology is easily traceable, still less will 
 the theory of a great moral revolution survive an 
 impartial inquiry into the higher religious teaching 
 of Philosophy with regard to virtue when the Chris- 
 tians began to take that teaching out of its hands. 
 
 The early converts to Christianity forsook no 
 doubt many of the vices of their Pagan state, and 
 became better men than many who remained uncon- 
 
152 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 verted ; there is no reason to doubt on this point the 
 testimony of their own apologists. The immediate 
 expectation of the Judgment Day, with its tremendous 
 menaces or promises, cannot have been without effect 
 in restraining from vice or in promoting virtue ; and 
 the moral conversion so caused was doubtless of 
 equal value with that which often followed lectures 
 on Philosophy or initiation into the mysteries of 
 Isis or of Mithra. But there is no evidence that it 
 was of much higher value ; though this proposition 
 needs some justification in the face of the high 
 moral excellence that ecclesiastical writers of all 
 times have claimed for the primitive Church. 
 
 We have of course Pliny's evidence that the 
 Christians of Bithynia bound themselves by oath 
 not to commit theft, robbery, adultery, or breach of 
 trust; we have the reluctant admission of Julian 
 that in their care for the poor the Christians set an 
 example to their Pagan contemporaries; and there 
 is other abundant proof that great numbers of them 
 were distinguished by the sincerest philanthropy and 
 a strong desire for the moral and social improvement 
 of society. All this may and must be admitted un- 
 grudgingly. But there is a reverse side to the picture, 
 and a side which, in justice to the Pagan opposition, 
 it is only fair to recollect. 
 
 The appalling depravity which St. Paul rebuked 
 in the Corinthian Church proves that some other 
 
PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 153 
 
 motive than the pure love of virtue must have 
 attracted men to the new religion ; and if that motive 
 was the expectation of a political Eastern Empire, 
 founded on the ruins of the Koman power, the other- 
 wise inexplicable presence in the Church, at the 
 earliest date of her history, of a set of men whose 
 lives were a discredit and a scandal, not merely to 
 the Christian brotherhood, but to civilised Pagan 
 society, admits of explanation. The humane and 
 laudable charity displayed from the first by the 
 Church to the worst of sinners, a charity which is 
 said to have been shown to Constantine when the 
 heathen priests had pronounced the murder of his 
 son Priscus an inexpiable sin, must have tended of 
 itself to give a bad moral complexion to the Church 
 in the eyes of the outer world, even if we take no 
 account of the probably numerous cases of relapse 
 into sin and crime. Antinomianism, moreover, or 
 the doctrine that a state of spiritual perfection ex- 
 empted men from the obligations of the moral law, 
 and that it was lawful to sin that grace might 
 abound, undoubtedly produced in the early Church 
 the same revelling in sin that the same doctrine 
 produced afterwards among the Anabaptists. Only 
 by these considerations is it at all possible to account 
 for the failure of the educated Pagans to be struck 
 by the asserted high moral excellence of the early 
 Church. Christianity had been some time before the 
 
154 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 world before the reign of Marcus Aurelius, yet what 
 impressed him about the Christians was not their 
 virtue so much as their obstinacy. 1 Pliny only saw in 
 them a bad and excessive superstition ; Tacitus the 
 same; Suetonius the same. 2 Yet unless these men 
 were demented, they must have had some justifica- 
 tion, not merely for their blindness to the merits of 
 the Christians, but for their positive bad opinion of 
 them ; and that this justification lay in the conduct 
 and character of at least a large minority of the 
 Christians themselves is practically admitted by 
 Tertullian, for this is how he meets the Pagan re- 
 proach of moral depravity : " As for your saying that 
 we are a most shameful set, steeped in luxury, avarice, 
 and aepravity, we will not deny it is true of some, 
 but it cannot be said of all, not even of a majority of 
 us." 3 A defence surely so faint as almost to amount 
 to a plea of guilty ! Only a bare majority of Chris- 
 tians who were not morally depraved ! 
 
 Tertullian's evidence is supplemented by Cyprian, 
 who lived about fifty years later. Cyprian distinctly 
 gives it as his opinion that the Decian persecution 
 had been amply deserved by the Christians on ac- 
 count of their sins. His description of the Church is 
 as bad as possible. Each man thought only of in- 
 
 2 Nero, 16 : genus hominum, snperstitionis novae et maleficae. 
 3 Ad Nationes, 5. 
 
PA CAN PHIL OSOPHY 1 5 5 
 
 creasing his property ; among the priests there was 
 no devotion, among the ministers no sound faith ; in 
 their works there -was no mercy, in their manners no 
 discipline ; false swearing, evil-speaking, and quarrel- 
 ling were rife; many bishops became secular agents, and 
 left their flocks in order to seek merchandise abroad, 
 and were eager in the pursuit of hoarding money. 1 
 
 The interest of this evidence is that it applies to 
 the third century. In the fifth and subsequent 
 centuries, of course, the awful pictures of the state 
 of Christianity by Christian writers like Salvian or 
 Chrysostom leave not a point of advantage on the 
 side of the Church as against the Paganism of any 
 period ; but it would seem that moral corruption set 
 in much earlier than is usually supposed, and a de- 
 scription of the Christians by the Sophist Aristides, 
 in corroboration of Tertullian and Cyprian, shows at 
 all events in what moral light they presented them- 
 selves to the judgment of contemporary Paganism. 
 Aristides describes them as praising but not practising 
 virtue ; as insatiable and avaricious, calling indigence 
 communion, singularity philosophy, and poverty con- 
 tempt of riches ; as making great pretensions to 
 humanity but benefiting no one ; as travelling to the 
 ends of the earth to gain rich men ; as dexterous at 
 disturbing the peace of families and obtaining control 
 of their affairs ; as never saying nor doing any good 
 
 1 On the Lapsed, 5, 6. 
 
156 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 thing, neither promoting the welfare of cities, nor 
 contributing to festivals, nor comforting the afflicted, 
 nor reconciling those at variance. Then we must 
 remember that the immoral rites with which the 
 Pagans charged the Christians as a body, the 
 Christian sects charged one another with, nor is it 
 fair to expect that the Pagans should have dis- 
 tinguished from the general Christian body the 
 sectarian followers of Carpocrates, Basilides, or 
 Montanus. On the whole the evidence seems con- 
 clusive that from the very first the lives of a large 
 minority of the Christians were so bad as fully to 
 justify educated Pagans in their suspicion and dislike 
 of the whole body ; and we must consign to the limbo 
 of historical mythology the old ecclesiastical tradition 
 that there was a period of the Church's history when 
 she was not only beyond reproach, but when she held 
 aloft in a depraved world the beacon of a higher 
 morality. If she did so, it would be interesting to 
 know both the date and the place. 
 
 It is worth while, in support of this conclusion, 
 to adduce some evidence to show that on all the 
 essentials of virtue and morality the Church taught 
 nothing that had not been taught for centuries before 
 her existence, because so many of the historians of 
 early Christianity are apt, in speaking of the in- 
 fluence of Philosophy at that time, to confer on it at 
 best their contemptuous approval, as an influence of 
 
PA CAN PHIL OS PHY 1 5 7 
 
 no wide nor deep operation in the world, and as 
 altogether inferior in kind to that of the new 
 religion. This they have done generally from a 
 studied abstinence from the few remaining works 
 of the philosophers, often from sheer indifference 
 to them, and to some extent from a misunder- 
 standing of the different meaning and scope of 
 Philosophy in ancient and modern times. Philo- 
 sophy nowadays is in common use confined to 
 metaphysics and logic, and is supposed to represent 
 speculative and recondite opinions concerning the 
 universe and all the manifold mysteries of existence. 
 But formerly it meant this and much more ; it 
 covered the whole ground now covered by Eeligion, 
 and consisted not only of speculations about the world 
 and life, but of a code of moral rules reaching to the 
 minutest details of conduct. It represented mental 
 and spiritual cultivation, as when Cicero called it 
 "the culture" or "the medicine of the soul," 1 or 
 when Plutarch spoke of it as the one remedy for 
 the diseases of the soul. " Let no one delay," said 
 Epicurus, "to study philosophy while he is young, 
 and when he is old, let him not become weary of it ; 
 for no man can ever find the time unsuitable or 
 too late to study the health of his soul." This, the 
 spiritual health of the soul, was its primary concern. 
 Its function was to educate men first to the right 
 
 1 Tusc. Quaest. ii. 5, cultura animi ; iii. 3, medicina animi. 
 
158 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 worship of the gods, and secondly, to right conduct 
 towards men. According to Seneca, its function was 
 to teach us to obey God, to follow Him, and to submit 
 to Fortune ; x its light shone not for the few, but for 
 all men, without distinction of persons, inasmuch as 
 a good conscience lay within the reach of all men ; 2 
 if we owed gratitude to the gods for our lives, we 
 owed it to Philosophy for the possibility of living 
 well, for it led us to the truth concerning divine and 
 human things ; and, inseparable as it was from Ee- 
 ligion, Justice, and Piety, it taught us to worship the 
 gods and to love mankind. 3 
 
 Philosophy covered not only the whole ground now 
 covered by Keligion,but the whole ground now covered 
 by Morality. According to Plutarch, it taught us not 
 merely to distinguish between the just and the unjust, 
 the honest and the dishonest, but to conduct ourselves 
 properly to the gods, to our parents, to our elders, to 
 the laws, to strangers, to governors, to our friends, to 
 our wives, to our children, to our slaves. 4 
 
 Moral progress was the object set up by Philosophy 
 as the great aim of life. Men sought after it with 
 a zeal which the Christians, if they rivalled, never 
 surpassed. It was taught at all the schools of Philo- 
 sophy as well as in the public schools scattered 
 over the whole empire, wherein Philosophy was an 
 
 1 Epist. 16. 2 Ib. 44. 3 lb. 90. 
 
 4 Training of Children, 10. 
 
PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 159 
 
 essential part of the curriculum. The lecturers dealt, 
 like the preachers after them, with such familiar 
 themes as Anger, Superstition, Quarrelling, or Love, 
 and it was open to any man to frequent any discourse 
 likely to be applicable to his own particular case. 
 Plutarch's exhortation to the hearers of such lectures 
 to examine themselves afterwards, and see whether 
 their affections were moderated, their afflictions light- 
 ened, their constancy confirmed, or their souls stirred 
 effectually to virtue and goodness, is a strong indica- 
 tion of the extent to which Philosophy controlled 
 and coloured men's lives in those days, doing for 
 them, in fact, exactly what the pulpit or the con- 
 fessional has done since. 1 Philosophy indeed was 
 everywhere, not only in the schools and public lec- 
 ture-rooms, but in the palaces of the rich, where it 
 conferred spiritual guidance and training of the heart 
 and head, and in the market-place or forum, or where- 
 ever else it could reach the crowd. We hear, for 
 instance, of Apollonius of Tyana addressing crowds 
 in the porch of the Temple at Olympia on Fortitude, 
 Wisdom, Temperance, and other virtues. Philosophy, 
 in short, had not merely its preachers, but its mis- 
 sionaries, men like Apollonius and Dion Chrysostom, 
 who, shrinking from no danger nor labour, visited all 
 the cities of the empire, preaching, rebuking, reform- 
 ing, missionaries whose travels, whose perils, and 
 
 1 On Hearing, 8, 12. 
 
160 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 whose energy recall and help to explain those of St. 
 Paul and the Apostles. 
 
 The letters of Seneca to Lucilius afford a good 
 example of the moral advancement which the votaries 
 of philosophy sought to attain by that medium of 
 communication. Seneca bids his friend to persevere 
 in that which was his sole pursuit the study of be- 
 coming better day by day ; * he advises him to keep 
 before his mind the thought of some good man, 
 and so to act as if always in his presence ; 2 to have 
 for his intimates men who are capable of improving 
 him or of being improved by him; 3 and he reminds 
 him that those must fall back who do not continue 
 to advance, and that retrogression is the inevitable 
 consequence of a relaxation of moral effort. 4 Yet 
 are we not constantly told that in the days of Seneca 
 philosophy was altogether powerless for good ? 
 
 In the same spirit Epictetus taught that, im- 
 possible as it was to be without fault, it was possible 
 to direct our efforts to the attainment of faultlessness. 5 
 Certain signs, he thought, indicated a man in a state 
 of progress : for instance, that he should blame, accuse, 
 or praise nobody ; that he should say nothing about 
 himself; that he should secretly despise praise be- 
 stowed upon himself; that if censured he should 
 make no defence ; that he should free himself from 
 
 1 Epist. 5, 6, and 50. 2 II. 11. s II. 1. 4 11. 71. 
 
 5 Discourses, iv. 12. 
 
PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 161 
 
 desires; that he should not care whether others 
 thought him wise or foolish ; and that he should keep 
 watch upon himself as upon an enemy lying in ambush. 1 
 From the task of Self-improvement that of Self- 
 examination is inseparable ; and accordingly we find 
 that this latter was a regular practice with the fol- 
 lowers of Philosophy. Jamblichus assures us that 
 it was a practice of the Pythagoreans to form resolu- 
 tions for the day in the morning, and to compare 
 performance with promise in the evening. The 
 Stoics laid special stress upon this habit. It was 
 the wont of the Stoic Sextius, on retiring to rest for 
 the night, to make daily inquiry of his soul of what 
 evil it had cured itself during the day, what vice it 
 had resisted, or in what respect it had become better. 
 Seneca describes how every night his wife would 
 keep a respectful silence whilst he looked back 
 upon the whole of the past day, and reconsidered his 
 deeds and words, hiding nothing from himself, and 
 passing over nothing. He strongly advocated this 
 daily compelling of the soul to give an account of 
 itself : " Anger will cease or become more moderate 
 which knows it will have daily to come before a 
 judge. What then more beautiful than this habit 
 of beating out a whole day ? What a sleep is that 
 which follows such an examination ! How tranquil 
 and profound and free when the soul has been either 
 
 1 Manual, 48. 
 11 
 
1 62 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 commended or admonished ! " Plutarch also urged no 
 less strongly the duty of constant self-examination. 1 
 
 No Christian writer therefore surpassed the philo- 
 sophers on the value to be set upon an upright 
 conscience. "You ask," says Seneca, "what the 
 real good is, and whence it comes ? It comes from a 
 good conscience, from honest purposes, from upright 
 actions, from a contempt for things of accident, from a 
 placid and constant course of life evenly conducted." 2 
 " Let us give that peace to our soul which the con- 
 stant meditation of wholesome precepts will give, 
 and good actions, and a mind only desirous of what 
 is honourable. Let conscience be satisfied. Let us 
 not labour for reputation, or let even bad reputation 
 follow us, provided we really deserve well." 3 He 
 would have a man, falsely accused of ingratitude, be 
 content with the voice of his own conscience, which 
 in the face of a vast crowd of dissentients counts not 
 the number of votes, but triumphs in its own verdict. 4 
 " My own conscience," said Cicero, " is of more im- 
 portance to me than what men say." And long 
 before Cicero, Isocrates urged Demonicus not to hope 
 to hide any shameful action, for though he might 
 hide it from others, his own conscience would be 
 aware of it (a-eavra) owe^cret?). 
 
 Sometimes the conscience was identified with that 
 
 1 Inqiiisitiveness, 1. 2 Epist. 23. 
 
 3 De Ira, iii. 41. 4 De Benef. iv. 21. 
 
PA CAN PHIL SOPHY 163 
 
 deity or demon within each man's breast which he 
 held as a gift from, and as a living portion of, the 
 Deity, to guide and guard him through life. In this 
 sense, in which it is so often used by Epictetus and 
 Aurelius, the conscience was the same as the guardian 
 angel which would ultimately lead the soul to judg- 
 ment after death. Therefore it was the Pagan long 
 before it was the Christian ideal "to have a con- 
 science void of offence before God." " What use is 
 it," says Seneca, " to hide oneself and avoid the eyes 
 and ears of man ? A good conscience challenges a 
 crowd, a bad one even in solitude is anxious and 
 alarmed. If your actions are honourable, let all men 
 know ; if they are disgraceful, what does it matter, 
 if you know yourself? wretched man that you 
 are, if you despise this last witness." 1 " We should 
 live as if we were living in public, and should think 
 as if some one could see into our inmost heart. And 
 so some one can. For what does it profit that a thing 
 is hid from man ? nothing is hid from God." 2 " Let 
 no one think he gains, if nobody shall be aware of 
 his crime. For He knows all things, in whose sight 
 we live ; nor if we can conceal it from all men, can we 
 do so from God, from whom nothing can be hidden or 
 secret." 3 
 
 A fine passage on the same subject is attributed 
 to Apollonius of Tyana : " If the soul chooses virtue 
 
 1 Epist. 43. 2 Ib. 83. 3 Lactantius, of Seneca, vi. 24. 
 
1 64 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 for its object, conscience attends the possessor with 
 pleasure into temples and streets and sacred groves 
 and busy haunts of men. She forsakes him not in 
 his sleep, but bids a chorus of dreams to join in 
 sweetest harmony of song around him. If the state 
 of the mind inclines to do wrong, conscience suffers 
 not the culprit to look fixedly on men, nor to address 
 them with unfaltering tongue. She will not suffer 
 him to approach the temples nor to offer up his 
 prayers in them. She restrains him from raising his 
 hands to the images of the gods." * 
 
 The logical corollary of this doctrine of conscience 
 was that sin was its own chief punishment, and that 
 no further terrors were really necessary for the en- 
 forcement of morality. "The first and greatest 
 punishment of sinners is to have sinned," wrote 
 Seneca, who argued that no wickedness, however 
 prosperous, went unpunished, since the penalty of 
 wickedness lay in the wickedness itself, and the fear 
 of detection was only a secondary penalty. 2 " As 
 Zeus has ordained, so act," said Epictetus, " otherwise 
 you will be punished and injured. What will be the 
 injury ? Nothing else than not having done your 
 duty. You will lose your character as a faithful, 
 reverent, and well-conducted man. Do not look for 
 greater injuries than these." 3 
 
 1 Philostratus, Life ofApollonius, vii. 14. 2 Epist. 97. 
 
 3 Discourses, iii. 
 
PAGAN PHILOSOPHY 165 
 
 And as sin was thus its own punishment, so virtue 
 on the other hand was held out as its own reward. 
 Cicero says finely : " All actions seem to me more 
 praiseworthy which are done without ostentation and 
 without the witness of the people. . . . There is no 
 greater theatre for virtue than the conscience." l So 
 too Seneca : " The reward (pretiuiri) of all the virtues 
 lies in themselves, for they are not practised for 
 remuneration (praemium), the profit (mewes) of having 
 acted rightly is to have acted so " ; and he thought 
 that no one set a higher value on virtue than the 
 man who would even lose the character of a good 
 man rather than lose the self-consciousness of his own 
 goodness. 2 In pursuit of virtue no sacrifices could 
 be too great. Wherever it called or sent one, virtue 
 must be followed, regardless of all advantages or the 
 loss of private fortune. Her commands were never to 
 be declined, though obedience should be at the cost 
 of life. " What shall I gain, you say, if I do this 
 thing bravely or that readily ? To have done it, I 
 reply ; no further promise is held out to you." 3 
 
 Surely there is nothing contemptible in this Philo- 
 sophy, for all Tertulliau's insolent sneers at the philo- 
 sophers as "animals of some considerable wisdom." It 
 is hard to see for what reasons Seneca should have 
 become a disciple of St. Paul, or what ethical truths 
 he could have learnt from him. It is a common 
 
 1 Tusc. Quaest. ii. 26. 2 Epist. 81. 3 De Benef. iv. 1. 
 
1 66 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 assertion that Philosophy was only for the few ; 
 wherein lies at least this much of truth, that a 
 system which held up the pursuit of virtue as its own 
 reward could not hope to compete numerically with 
 the disciples of the teaching of Lactantius, that virtue 
 without the reward of everlasting life were a foolish 
 desire. 1 But Philosophy addressed itself to the many, 
 and many were its converts ; above all it taught that 
 virtue was attainable by all the world. That deplor- 
 able conception of goodness as something altogether 
 extraneous to a man, and dependent rather on grace, 
 election, or sudden conversion, than on his own 
 efforts, a conception which has cost the world so 
 dear in bitter and imbecile contention, was of course 
 altogether alien to the ethics of Paganism. Virtue, 
 argued Seneca, was not the gift of nature, for to 
 become good was an art and required discipline and 
 education, but if we were born without it, we were 
 born for it; 2 nor were any debarred from its attain- 
 ment, for it was not only the wise man's single real 
 possession, but it was the one thing that lay open to 
 all alike; the one thing that welcomed all men, in- 
 vited all men, whether freeborn, freedmen, slaves, 
 kings, or exiles ; and that, indifferent to lineage or 
 wealth, asked only for the man himself. 3 
 
 Not only was virtue thus held out as within the 
 range of all men, but as attainable without im- 
 
 1 Divine Institutes, vi. 8. 2 Epist. 90. 3 De Constantia, v. 
 
PA CAN PHIL OSOPHY 1 67 
 
 moderate difficulty : " There is no vice which 
 cannot be eradicated ; the ills we suffer from are 
 curable, and Nature herself, who produced us for 
 good, helps us if we desire to improve. Nor, as some 
 have thought, is the road hard and difficult; the 
 approach to it is on the level . . . easy is the way 
 to a happy life, only begin it under good auspices 
 and with the power of the gods." 1 
 
 Such teaching, it is here contended, is far better 
 calculated to promote the cause of virtue than that 
 which came into vogue with those who claimed to, be 
 the interpreters of Christianity, and who were never 
 wearied of dwelling on the proneness of man's heart 
 to evil continually and on the hard and narrow w 
 The Pagan's ethical system was in every respect the 
 better for not regarding men as born in sin nor as 
 the children of wrath. Standing entirely aloof and 
 apart from the beliefs or superstitions of the Jews, it 
 knew nothing of the supposed fall of man nor of 
 original sin, but it regarded man always and every- 
 where as the child of divine love and solicitude. 
 " You are wrong," says Seneca, " if you think our 
 vices are born with us ; they are aftergrowths. . . . 
 Nature accommodates us to no vice, but brings us 
 forth pure and free." *' Epictetus assumes that we 
 are by nature of noble origin, and that we are 
 constituted by nature to do good, to work for others, 
 
 1 De Ira, v. 13. 2 Epist. 94. 
 
1 68 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and to wish them well. Indeed, the mere fact of 
 man's human nature is throughout classical literature 
 used as in itself the strongest incentive to virtue, 
 instead of, as in the hands of the Fathers, a reason 
 for discouragement or for grovelling moral abasement. 
 Which of these two ways of regarding it is better 
 fitted to have an ennobling effect on character may 
 be judged by comparing the Stoics, who were the 
 products of the one, with the monks, who were the 
 products of the other. The monkish ideal is suffi- 
 ciently well known; the resolutions which Seneca 
 attributes to the perfect Stoic may well serve to 
 assist the comparison. 
 
 " I will look," he is supposed to say, " on death 
 with the same countenance I hear it spoken of; I 
 will obey whatever labours shall come. ... I will 
 despise riches, whether present or absent. ... I will 
 be sensible neither of the approach nor of the 
 departure of fortune. I will so live as if I knew 
 myself born for others, and I will thank Nature on 
 this account, for how could she better have provided 
 for my welfare than in giving rne to the service of 
 all, and all to my service ? . . . I will do nothing for 
 opinion's sake, all for conscience' sake. Whatever I 
 do, I will do as if all men beheld me. ... I will be 
 pleasant to my friends, to my enemies gentle and 
 conciliatory. I will pardon before I am prayed to do 
 so, I will anticipate fair entreaties. I will know that 
 
PA CAN PHIL OSOPH Y 1 69 
 
 the world is my country, and the gods its rulers, 
 and that they stand above and about me, the 
 judges of my acts and words. And whenever 
 Nature shall reclaim, or Eeason dismiss my spirit, I 
 will depart with the testimony of having loved 
 a good conscience, and good pursuits, and of 
 having diminished no one's liberty, least of all mine 
 own." 1 
 
 This then presents us with the real picture of 
 Philosophy, not that philosophy, falsely so called, of 
 the later Platonists, wherein magic and superstition 
 abounded, but of Philosophy as seen in its best light 
 and at its best period ; and when we look at its 
 ideal with minds free from the traditional contempt 
 cast upon it by its enemies, we at once see that it 
 aimed at a character which combined all the best 
 features of the Christian ideal. In regard to resigna- 
 tion, unselfishness, public spirit, a forgiving and 
 tolerant spirit, the ideally perfect Pagan had nothing 
 to learn from the Christian of the highest type, 
 whilst words fail to measure his superiority to the 
 Christian of the monkish type, with his purely selfish 
 asceticism, his anthropomorphic theism, his ridiculous 
 dread of demons and hell. And how great was Philo- 
 sophy as a reforming influence, how second to no 
 other in its power to reclaim the individual from 
 sin ! Who can suppose that the story of Polemon, 
 
 1 De Vita, Beata, 20. 
 
i;o PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the young profligate, who went to scoff at a lecture 
 of Xenocrates, and hearing him discourse on temper- 
 ance, became then and there a convert to better 
 courses, was unique in the history of Philosophy ? 
 Or what Christian can forget that it was to Philo- 
 sophy, as represented by the Hortensius of Cicero, 
 that one of the greatest Christians of his own or any 
 age, Augustine, owed his reclamation from a life of 
 disgusting debauchery and his awakening to the 
 claims of intellectual interests ? Truly Apollonius 
 of Tyana uttered a good word when, in answer to 
 the question whether there was anything greater 
 in the world than the Colossus at Ehodes, he replied : 
 "A man, whose whole mind is devoted to Philo- 
 sophy"; and Cicero expressed the sentiment of a 
 liberal age when he said that one day spent well and 
 in accordance with Philosophy was preferable to an 
 eternity of error. 
 
 With the closing of the schools of Philosophy at 
 Athens by Justinian, Philosophy, degenerate as it in 
 many respects had become from its earlier state, 
 ceased to operate as a moral influence over the lives 
 of men ; and human reason was given over entirely 
 to the uncontrolled tyranny of priests and monks and 
 to the wasting debility of insoluble theological dis- 
 cussions. If, as Gibbon says, Plato would have 
 blushed to acknowledge those who last bore his name 
 and supported his opinions, what would he have 
 
PA CAN PHIL OSOPH Y 171 
 
 thought, could he have foreseen that centuries after 
 his death the sole or the chief intellectual human 
 interest would centre in the monophysite or mono- 
 thelite controversy ? Fortunately for him he was 
 spared the prophetic vision of the coming glacial 
 period of human intelligence, of the time when men 
 would account monasticism, as Chrysostom accounted 
 it, the only true philosophy. And fortunately for us, 
 that glacial period has begun to pass away, and 
 already there are signs that Philosophy may again 
 come to occupy her place as of old, may again, in 
 the wreck of the superstitions and ignorance that 
 have passed over her like a flood, rise to her 
 legitimate place of power and influence, and, when 
 men know not whither to turn for guidance and 
 consolation, may reconduct them to the principles of 
 a rational piety and to the simple rules of a sound 
 morality. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAGAN MORALITY 
 
 HAVING given some idea of the general moral teaching 
 of Paganism, and of the higher ethical principles of 
 Philosophy, it remains to make the picture more 
 complete by going so far into detail as to examine 
 some of the ideas of pre-Christian or Pagan writers 
 with regard to self-sacrifice, charity, toleration, 
 liberality, forgiveness. These virtues are those which 
 have ever been specially inculcated and illustrated 
 by Christianity, not of course in its history, but in 
 the private life of individuals, or at least of its higher 
 representatives; and if a comparison between the 
 Christian and Pagan ideals of virtue be instituted on 
 these aspects of conduct, at least the ground will not 
 have been chosen which primd facie is to the advan- 
 tage of Paganism. 
 
 1. It may be said, however, to begin with, that the 
 duty of self-sacrifice, the duty of the individual to 
 merge all private or selfish interests in the wider 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 173 
 
 interests of his community, was the first principle of 
 all political life in antiquity. The whole history of 
 Athens, Sparta, or Eome, is nothing else than the 
 illustration of that principle in practice; and the 
 idea of, no less than the word, " devotion" is of Pagan 
 Eoman, not of Christian Eoman origin. Still it is 
 claimed that the idea of the moral beauty of self- 
 sacrifice did not illuminate the world before the 
 Christian era ; and therefore it is desirable that Philo- 
 sophy should speak for herself in a matter whereon 
 her shortcomings have so often been held up to 
 reproach. 
 
 To live as if he knew himself born for others has 
 already been alluded to as one of the characteristics 
 in Seneca's picture of the ideal Stoic ; and his other 
 references to the subject deserve attention. "It is 
 required of a man to be of benefit to men, to many 
 if he can, failing that to a few, failing that to those 
 nearest him, failing that to himself." l " No man 
 can live happily who regards himself alone, who 
 turns everything to his own advantage ; it behoves 
 you to live for another, if you would live for your- 
 self." 2 And, comparing the Stoic with the Epicurean 
 view of happiness, he says : " Our pleasure is to 
 benefit others, even at our own labour, provided we 
 lighten the labours of others ; or at our own peril, 
 provided we save others from peril ; or at our own 
 
 1 De Otio, 30. 2 Epist. 48. 
 
174 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 loss of fortune, provided we alleviate the necessities 
 and distresses of others." l " See the force of what 
 is honourable : it will lead you to die for the com- 
 monwealth, even though you shall have to do so at 
 the very moment you know it must be done. Some- 
 times from a very beautiful deed a great joy is 
 derived in the shortest moment of time, and albeit 
 no advantage from it shall reach its doer after death 
 and his removal from earthly interests, nevertheless 
 the mere contemplation of the deed he is about to do 
 delights him, and the brave and just man, when he 
 places before himself the rewards of his death, the 
 liberty of his country, the safety of all, for which he 
 sacrifices his life, is in the highest state of happiness 
 and derives enjoyment from his personal peril." 2 
 All this in the supposed degenerate days of the early 
 Eoman Empire ! 
 
 How different from Tertullian who, pouring con- 
 tempt on the old sentiment of its being a man's 
 duty to live for his country, empire, and state, 
 declares that none is born for another, because he 
 is destined to die for himself alone ! 3 
 
 Aurelius, too, never wearies of reminding himself 
 that man is by nature a rational and social animal, 
 whose function and true work is to labour for his 
 fellow-man, his fellow-kinsman, as the child of the 
 same God. It is utterly false to say that this idea 
 
 1 De Benef. iv. 13. 2 Epist. 76. 3 Ascetics Mantle, 5. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 175 
 
 of the brotherhood of all men rests on the teaching 
 of Christianity. It was one of the dominant ideas 
 of Philosophy, especially of Stoicism, long before 
 the foundations of the Church were laid. Marcus 
 Aurelius rises from the conception of the political 
 community to that of the wider community of 
 humanity with a breadth of spirit that at no time 
 of her history has belonged to the Church, regarding 
 as she ever has done all who are ignorant of or 
 indifferent to her teaching as aliens and enemies 
 and outcasts. 
 
 " The whole world is in a manner a state," he 
 concludes ; and " my city and country as far as I 
 am Antoninus is Eome, but so far as I am a man it 
 is the world. The things then which are useful to 
 these cities are alone useful to me." The idea of 
 humanity as a whole, of all mankind as one frater- 
 nity, independent of all barriers of race or language, 
 was first grasped by the philosophers ; the hold of it 
 was rather relaxed than tightened by the Church ; 
 and the narrow nationalism of modern Europe con- 
 trasts poorly with the cosmopolitanism of the pre- 
 Christian world. The supreme pontiff of Pagan 
 Eome offered up prayers for the whole human race. 
 We have the testimony of Plutarch that the Pagan 
 priests prayed not only for whole communities, but 
 for the whole state of mankind. 1 It was Cicero, 
 
 1 Philosophers conversing with great men, 3. 
 
176 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and no Christian, who said : " Nature ordains that a 
 man should wish the good of every man whoever he 
 may be, and for this very reason, that he is a man." l 
 When Socrates was asked to what city he belonged, 
 he answered, " To the World " ; nor was his concep- 
 tion of moral duty as conterminous with humanity 
 ever afterwards lost. It was upheld by Diogenes 
 the Cynic, as by Zeno t the Stoic. Seneca only 
 professed an axiom of philosophy when he wrote : 
 "We ought to devote our soul to no particular 
 place. This is the conviction with which we must 
 each live : I was not born for one corner, my 
 country is this whole world." ' Plutarch, speaking 
 of the lost work of Zeno, called the Republic, says : 
 " The much-admired Republic of Zeno aimed singly 
 at this, that neither in cities nor towns we should 
 live under distinct laws one from another, but 
 should look on all men as our fellow-countrymen 
 and citizens, observing one manner of life and kind 
 of order, like a flock feeding together with equal 
 rights in a common pasture." 3 
 
 Moreover, this conception of human brotherhood 
 was distinctly based on the prior conception of the 
 relation of the sonship of all men to God, through 
 participation in His reason. Hear Epictetus : 
 " Never, in reply to the question to what country 
 
 1 De Offidis, iii. 6. 2 Epist. 27. 
 
 3 The Fortune of Alexander, 6. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 177 
 
 you belong, say you are an Athenian or a Corinthian, 
 but that you are a Cosmopolitan (/cocyuo?). . . . Why 
 should not a man call himself a citizen of the world, 
 why not a son of God, when he has intelligently 
 observed the government of the world, and learned 
 that the greatest and highest and broadest com- 
 munity is that composed of men and God, and that 
 from God have descended the seeds not only to my 
 father and grandfather, but to all beings generated 
 on earth, and particularly to rational beings, who 
 alone by their nature have communion with God ? " l 
 Nor were these principles confined to the lecture- 
 room or the cabinet. They bore magnificent fruit 
 in that conception of a law of nature, applicable to 
 all classes and nations of men, upon which the 
 whole later system of Eoman law was founded. 
 How different the tendency and result of Catholi- 
 cism, which has ever withdrawn men from the ties 
 of family and country, not to the service of humanity 
 at large, but to the servitude of the Church ! and 
 whose votaries, in ceasing to be patriots, have be- 
 come not cosmopolitans but sectarians, with no 
 broader horizon for their sympathies or affections 
 than that of their creed and their sect ! Of all the 
 historical conventional myths still current in the 
 world there is none with so little foundation in fact 
 as that of a broad Christian spirit of unity, or of a 
 
 1 Discourses, i. 9. 
 12 
 
178 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 world-embracing Christian charity. That idea of 
 the brotherhood of mankind was an idea which, as 
 it had its origin from Philosophy, so perished with 
 Philosophy ; nor has the history of the Church from 
 the time of its conquest under Constantine onwards 
 for more than a millennium been anything else but 
 the history of cruelties, riots, wars, and persecutions, 
 the horror of which in its entirety the human mind 
 is incompetent to grasp, but the like of which may 
 be searched for in vain in the pre-Christian annals 
 of the world. 
 
 2. The duty of charity was of course involved in 
 the doctrine of humanity, nor did the Church ever 
 inculcate it with more earnestness than writers like 
 Seneca. It is necessary to prove this, in order that 
 the following description of Pagan society may be 
 judged at its proper value : " The instinctive im- 
 pulse of the human heart prompted men to isolated 
 acts of kindness, and even the more deliberate 
 practice of benevolence is recommended by many of 
 the philosophers. But it is recommended on selfish 
 grounds." 1 Why then did Seneca write : " This is 
 the mark of a great and good mind, to aim, not at 
 any fruit from its kind deeds (beneficiorum) but at 
 the kind deeds themselves. . . . Virtue consists 
 in conferring benefits not as destined to return, 
 benefits the fruit of which the good man reaps at 
 
 1 Croslegh, Christianity judged by its Fruits, 67. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 179 
 
 the moment of conferring them." 1 Considerations 
 of gratitude were to be absent from charity ; and 
 Seneca would have a man imitate in that respect 
 the gods, who bestowed their gifts even on men who 
 ignored their existence, or accused them of neglect, 
 injustice, or idleness ; and who yet, like the best of 
 parents, smiling at the rude speeches of their little 
 ones, ceased not to heap up benefits on those who 
 doubted the existence of the giver. " Let us be like 
 them, let us give, though we give much in vain." 2 
 
 Lactantius does not scruple to claim for Chris- 
 tianity the teaching of the duty of benevolence for 
 its own sake, and to charge Cicero with advocating 
 the practice of liberality only towards persons who 
 can give something in return. Cicero indeed advo- 
 cates discriminate charity as against indiscriminate, 
 by which many had ruined themselves, but on 
 behalf of deserving persons, not, as Lactantius 
 implies (by mistranslating idoneis hominibus), of 
 persons suitable because able to make a return. He 
 also advocates the virtue of charity entirely on 
 its own merits, without any reference to ulterior 
 benefits. 3 
 
 The more common misstatement is that charity 
 was an unknown virtue altogether before the Church 
 taught it to the world. Here again it is unnecessary 
 
 1 DC Benef. i. 1. 2 Ib. vii. 31. 
 
 3 Lactantius, vi. 11, and Cicero, De Cfficiis, ii. 85. 
 
i8o PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 to do more than translate a few passages from Seneca. 
 " Here is another question. How are we to deal 
 with men ? . . . What commands do we give ? To 
 spare human blood ? A fine thing not to injure him 
 whom it is your duty to benefit ! Highly laudable 
 forsooth for a man to be gentle to man ! Nay, but 
 we will further bid him to stretch out his hand to 
 the shipwrecked, to show the erring their way, to 
 divide his bread with the hungry. But why should 
 I enumerate all that he must do or avoid doing, 
 when I can shortly give him this formula of human 
 duty : all this that you see, the world of gods and 
 men, is one; we are members of a great body. 
 Nature brought us forth as relations when she 
 produced us from the same beginnings and for the 
 same ends. She it is that inspired us with mutual 
 love and made us sociable creatures. She it is that 
 ordained what is fair and just. It is from her 
 ordering that it is more miserable to injure than to 
 be injured, from her command that helping hands 
 are prepared." l 
 
 Nor was this duty of charity confined to narrow 
 bounds, for the Pagan was taught to help also his 
 enemy. The Stoics said : " To the very end of life 
 we will be in action, we will not cease to labour for 
 the common weal, to help individuals, to give aid 
 even to our enemies " (inimicis). 2 
 
 1 Seneca, De Otio, 28. 2 Ib. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 181 
 
 Where again, in what may be called the etiquette 
 of charity, will you find greater tact than in Seneca's 
 discrimination between the benefits to be conferred 
 with publicity and those which secrecy should 
 accompany ? Military rewards and honours and 
 whatever gifts are enhanced by their publicity should 
 be publicly given, but gifts which confer no honour, 
 but are simply in succour to infirmity, poverty, or 
 shame, should be given silently, with no other witness 
 than the giver and the recipient. Sometimes even 
 the latter should be deceived, so as not even to know 
 the name of his benefactor. "It is too little, you 
 say. Too little, if you think to play the usurer, but 
 if you wish to give in the manner most acceptable to 
 the recipient, you will be content with your own 
 testimony. Otherwise it is not the doing of a kind 
 action which delights you, but the fact of its being 
 known. ' I wish him to know,' you say. Then it is 
 a debtor you wish for ! 'I wish him to know,' you 
 say. What ! even if it be better and more becoming 
 and more pleasant for him not to know ! " l Surely 
 this is in the spirit of Christianity, even if it is not 
 the old familiar language. At all events it disposes 
 of the idea that benevolence for its own sake was 
 unknown in pre-Christian days. Or if more is 
 wanted, let there be added this from Aurelius : 
 " What more dost thou want when thou hast done a 
 1 DeBenef. ii. 9. 
 
1 82 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 man a service than the fact of having done it ? Art 
 thou not content to have done something conformable 
 to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it, 
 as if the eye demanded a recompense for seeing or 
 the foot for walking ? " l 
 
 But, it may be objected, at least the practice of 
 charity did not equal the theory ; and in helping the 
 poor or visiting the sick there is no comparison 
 possible between Pagan and Christian. Yet im- 
 mediately the stories recur of Cimon the Athenian 
 giving of his abundance to feed the poor and clothe 
 the naked; of the Lacedaemonians supplying the 
 people of Smyrna with food in time of scarcity, and 
 replying, when thanked for it, that they only deprived 
 themselves and their cattle of a dinner ; of Apollonius 
 reminding Vespasian that the supply of the needs of 
 the poor was one of the best uses of a sovereign's 
 wealth ; of Arcesilaus visiting Apelles, and to relieve 
 him of the indigence to which sickness had reduced 
 him, placing twenty drachms under his pillow, whilst 
 pretending to make him more comfortable; of the 
 Koman nobles, after the accident to the amphitheatre 
 at Fidenae whereby 50,000 persons were killed or 
 wounded, opening their houses and procuring doctors 
 and relief for the victims ; of all the cities of Asia 
 relieving with money or shelter the victims of the 
 great earthquake in Smyrna in 177 A.D. 2 Seneca's 
 1 ix. 42. 2 Aristides, i. 260. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 183 
 
 description of the wise man offering aid to the ship- 
 wrecked, hospitality to the exile, money to the needy, 
 redeeming prisoners from their chains, releasing them 
 from the arena, and giving sepulture to the criminal, 1 
 is clearly a picture drawn from nature and daily life, 
 not from his imagination ; and to suppose that such 
 deeds required the impulse of the Church to make 
 them more common is to suppose that human nature 
 itself changed with the change that came over 
 religion. 
 
 But it involves something more than an assump- 
 tion of extreme intrinsic improbability, and that is a 
 spirit of wanton disregard for the historical evidence 
 which alone is enough to dispel the assumption. For 
 whether we glance at Athenian or Eoman society, 
 we may detect a constant solicitude for the welfare 
 of the poor. In the best days of Athens none of 
 her citizens were in want for the necessities of life ; 
 for the rich, according to Isocrates, regarding the 
 poverty of their fellow- citizens as a disgrace to them- 
 selves and the city, helped all who were in need, 
 sending some abroad as traders, letting lands to others 
 to cultivate at fair rents (eVl /jLerplais pio-Bobo-eat), 
 and enabling others to engage in different occupa- 
 tions. The Areopagus too checked pauperism by 
 providing public works. 2 In the same direction 
 operated such customs or institutions as the free 
 
 1 De dementia, ii. 6. 2 Areopagiticus, 12, 21, 38. 
 
1 84 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 schools; the exemption of orphans from the State 
 charges ; the maintenance at the public expense of 
 the children of citizens killed in war ; the payment 
 from the treasury of a few obols a day to the poor, 
 the wounded, or the incapable; the donation of a 
 portion of the sacrificial victims to the poor; and 
 the repasts set out in the streets by the rich each 
 new moon, nominally in honour of Hecate, but practi- 
 cally for the benefit of the poor. 
 
 The objections that economists might urge against 
 the socialist tendency or nature of these measures 
 would apply with tenfold more force to the monthly 
 distributions of corn to the people that became 
 customary in Eome, and after a time, not merely of 
 corn, but of cheese, bacon, oil, and even clothes. 
 But whether these distributions prevented or pro- 
 moted pauperism, there is no question of the intention. 
 Under Nerva and Trajan the monthly distributions 
 of food became extended to the children of poor 
 families all over Italy ; a portion of the interest of 
 money lent by the State to the landlords on mortgage 
 serving to defray the expense. Alexander Severus 
 founded free schools for indigent children. Nerva 
 and Trajan made laws in favour of orphans. Every 
 quarter of Rome had its archiater, or paid medical 
 officer, whose function it was to attend on the sick ; 
 and a law compelled every one who gave a feast to 
 make some provision first for the poor of his district. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 185 
 
 3. From the seventh century before Christ the 
 story of Pittacus, one of the seven wise men, was 
 famous in the Pagan world. When he had it in his 
 power to avenge himself on some one who had 
 wronged him, he let him go, saying, " Forgiveness is 
 better than revenge, for whilst the former is the 
 sign of a gentle nature, revenge is that of a savage 
 one." l Nor have the Jews any finer story to tell 
 than the Pagan story of Gescon the Carthaginian, 
 who, having been recalled from exile and made 
 chief general, when his enemies were given over to 
 his revenge, contented himself with treading gently 
 on their prostrate necks, and saying, when he had 
 sent them away, " I have not returned evil for evil 
 but good for evil." 2 When Caesar made an edict to 
 build and restore the statue of his enemy Pompey, 
 Cicero told him that he had erected an everlasting 
 monument in his own honour. 
 
 The whole current of Pagan teaching was in 
 unison with these stories, to an extent that has been 
 purposely ignored. When Diogenes was asked how 
 a man might best revenge himself upon his enemies, 
 he replied, " By becoming himself a good and honest 
 man." 3 Epictetus, when consulted as to the best 
 means by which a man might give pain to an enemy, 
 answered, "By preparing to lead himself the best 
 
 1 Epictetus, Frag. 68. 2 Polyoeuus, v. 2. 
 
 3 Plutarch, On hearing the Poets, 4. 
 
1 86 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 life he can." 1 The conclusion of Plato was that 
 we should never return injustice for injustice, nor 
 repay with evil the evil done to ourselves. 2 His 
 later disciple, Maximus of Tyre, pleaded for the 
 forgiveness of injuries on the ground that the aveng- 
 ing of them was worse than the original offence. 3 
 His other disciple, Plutarch, wrote as follows : " It 
 is eminently humane, and a clear sign of a truly 
 generous nature, to bear the affronts of an enemy 
 when you have a fair opportunity to revenge them. 
 For if a man sympathises with his enemy in his 
 affliction, relieves him in his necessities, and is ready 
 to assist his sons and family if they desire it, any 
 one that will not love this man for his compassion, 
 and highly prize him for his charity, must have, as 
 Pindar says, a black heart made of adamant and 
 iron." 4 From Seneca comes : " Some one is angry 
 with you, provoke him in return with kindnesses. 
 . . . Some one has struck you, withdraw ; by striking 
 back you will give both an occasion and an excuse for 
 many blows " ; or again : " A great mind that truly 
 respects itself does not revenge an injury, because it 
 does not feel it." 5 
 
 All these passages must count for more, as show- 
 ing the general forgiving spirit of Paganism, than the 
 one bit of bad advice given by Isocrates to Demonicus, 
 
 1 Frag. 130. 2 Crito, 49. 3 Diss. xviii. 
 
 4 How to profit by our Enemies, 9. 5 De Ira, ii. 34 ; iii. 5. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 187 
 
 where he says : " Think it equally disgraceful to be 
 surpassed by your enemies in injuries as by your 
 friends in good actions." Isocrates in this instance 
 fell below his ordinary level. He it was, at all 
 events, who advised Nicocles king of Crete so to 
 behave to weaker states than his own as he would 
 wish more powerful states to behave to himself ; and 
 who also wrote as one exhortation for Nicocles to 
 make to his subjects : " That which it angers you to 
 suffer from others, that do not to others yourselves." 1 
 4. If regarding the virtues of self-sacrifice or 
 attention to duty, of charity or of forgiveness, the 
 Pagans had as much to say, and said it as well, as 
 the Christians, they seem even to have surpassed 
 them in the degree to which they inculcated the 
 humane virtue of toleration and leniency. When we 
 remember the attitude of uncompromising hostility 
 of early Christianity towards Paganism, and then 
 the intense bitterness of its sects towards one 
 another, we shall appreciate the full value of the old 
 tolerant Pagan spirit of gentleness which breathes in 
 almost every line of a treatise like that of Seneca 
 On Anger, and of which the following extracts may 
 give some idea. " If we would be fair judges of all 
 things, let us first persuade ourselves of this, that no 
 mortal is without fault. . . . Perhaps you hear that 
 
 1 Nicocles, 13 : & Trdaxovre^ v<f>' er^puv 6pyie<r6e TO.VTO. robs 
 #\Xovs /jiT] Trocetre. 
 
1 88 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 some one has spoken ill of you ; think whether you 
 did not so first of him, think of how many you speak 
 so. ... The vices of others we have before our eyes, 
 our own behind our backs. ... A great part of 
 mankind are angry not with the sin but with the 
 sinners. Looking to ourselves will make us more 
 moderate, if we ask ourselves, Have we never done 
 anything of the kind, have we never erred in like 
 manner ? " l 
 
 " Why should a good man hate sinners when it is 
 error that drives them into wrong? It is not the 
 part of a wise man to hate those that err, else will 
 he be an object of hatred to himself. Let him think 
 how many things he does himself contrary to good 
 conduct, how many of his actions need pardon, then 
 will he be angry with himself. For a just judge 
 passes the same sentence in his own case as in that 
 of others. No one will be found who can acquit 
 himself, and whoever calls himself innocent regards 
 external testimony, not his own conscience. How 
 much more humane it is to show a gentle and 
 paternal mind towards sinners, not to persecute but 
 to recall them. If you meet a man astray in the 
 fields from ignorance of his road, it is better to direct 
 him aright than to drive him away." 2 
 
 " In order not to be angry with individuals, you 
 must forgive the whole world and pardon the human 
 
 1 De Ira, ii. 28. 2 Ib. i. 14. 
 
PAGAN MORALITY 189 
 
 race. If you will be angry with young men and old 
 for sinning, you will be angry with children, who 
 will sin in their turn. Yet who is angry with 
 children, whose age precludes them from a just dis- 
 crimination of things ? and yet it is greater and fairer 
 excuse to be a man than to be a child. . . . The 
 wise man will not be angry with sinners. Why ? 
 Because he knows that wisdom is not born with a 
 man, but is the product of time. He knows that 
 very few in every age grow to be wise, because he 
 has a clear vision of the conditions of human life. 
 . . . The wise man therefore, lenient and just towards 
 sinners, goes abroad daily with this thought : ' I shall 
 meet many men given over to wine or to their lusts, 
 many ungrateful, many avaricious, many mad with 
 ambition.' All such things he will look upon as 
 kindly as a physician looks upon his patients." l 
 
 " We are all inconsiderate and improvident, all 
 uncertain, querulous, ambitious. Why hide the 
 common sore with soft words ? we are all bad ; and 
 whatever fault we find in another each of us will 
 also find in his own breast. Why notice the pale- 
 ness of this man, or the thinness of that one ? It is 
 the general ailment. Therefore let us be more lenient 
 one to another ; bad ourselves, we live with the bad. 
 One thing only can make us quiet, a treaty of mutual 
 toleration " (facilitatis). 2 
 
 1 De Ira, ii. 10. 2 Ib. iii. 26. 
 
190 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 " Let his age be the excuse of a child, her sex of a 
 woman, his liberty of a stranger, his intimacy of a 
 domestic. In this his first offence let us think for 
 how long he has satisfied us. Or has he offended us 
 in other ways? Let us bear with what we have 
 borne for so long. Is he a friend? He did it 
 against his will. Is he an enemy ? He but played 
 his part." x 
 
 In all this we see the Stoic philosophy shorn of 
 the severe austerity with which it was commonly 
 associated, and from which Seneca was at pains to 
 defend it. " I know," he says, " that the sect of the 
 Stoics has a bad reputation among the unlearned as 
 too severe ... for it is objected to it that it denies 
 that the wise man can pity or pardon . . . but no 
 sect is more kind or lenient, none more philanthropic 
 and attentive to the common welfare, as having for 
 its aim to be of use and assistance, and to consult 
 the welfare not of itself alone, but of all men collect- 
 ively and singly." 2 Of course the same spirit cor- 
 responds with the better spirit of Christianity. But 
 the important thing to notice is, that the spirit of 
 charity, toleration, and humanity, which is fondly 
 claimed by the Church as her own special product, 
 was really the product of Philosophy, and especially 
 of Stoicism, and that the Church simply claimed for 
 herself what her utter inability to appropriate would 
 
 1 De Ira, iii. 24. 2 De dementia, ii. 5. 
 
PA CAN MORALITY 1 9 1 
 
 alone prove to have been foreign to her. The bor- 
 rowed plumage of Philosophy never sat well on the 
 ecclesiastics. If you want to find the true spirit of 
 the Founder of Christianity, you will find more of it 
 in the fragmentary literature of Paganism than in 
 all the works of the Fathers put together ; and more, 
 not merely of its spirit, but of its actual expression, 
 in Seneca, Plato, Aurelius, or Plutarch, than in 
 Augustine, Jerome, and all their tribe, the difference 
 between the respective histories of the Church and 
 of Philosophy being only too amply reflected in their 
 literature. There is indeed no fact more patent in 
 history than that with the triumph of Christianity 
 under Constantine the older and finer spirit of 
 charity died out of the world, and gave place to an 
 intolerance and bigotry which were its extreme anti- 
 thesis, and which still unhappily rule in its stead. 
 
 It was perhaps owing to some vague sense of this 
 fact that arose the Christian legend of the conversion 
 of Seneca and the fictitious correspondence between 
 him and St. Paul. But the same theory would 
 have to be applied to most of the philosophers, 
 who expressed themselves in precisely the same 
 spirit. Several centuries divided Plutarch from 
 Plato, but the former would still advise people, when 
 inclined to anger with any one, to repeat to themselves 
 the philosopher's question, " Am not I perhaps such 
 an one myself?" His plea for the humane treat- 
 
192 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 ment of slaves might still be often urged on behalf 
 of modern servants ; and his confession, that in this 
 department of life the pressure of his wife or friends 
 had too much incited him to anger, is atoned for by 
 the recommendation of the deferring of punishment 
 and of the greater reformative efficacy of pardon. 
 Epictetus too uses Plato's doctrine, that every soul is 
 deprived of truth unwillingly and therefore errs from 
 a wrong opinion, as a motive for a man to be gentle, 
 tolerant, and ready to pardon. 1 
 
 Aurelius constantly refers to the same doctrine 
 for reminding himself of the same rule of conduct. 
 "When offended at another's fault, think in what 
 manner thou dost err thyself. By attending to this 
 thou wilt quickly forget thine anger, if thou con- 
 siderest this also that the man is compelled." 2 " It 
 is no way right to be offended with men, but it is 
 your duty to care for them and bear with them 
 gently." 3 " Shall any one hate me, let him look to 
 it; but I will be gentle and benevolent towards 
 every man and ready to show even him his mistake." 4 
 Had these men anything to learn from a Church 
 which counts among her highest products men of 
 such relentless bigotry as Athanasius, Cyril, or 
 Augustine ? 
 
 1 Discourses, ii. 22. 2 Discourses, x. 30. 3 ix. 3. 
 
 4 xi. 13 ; and compare vii. 26, 63 ; ix. 42 ; x. 436 ; and xi. 
 
 18. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 
 
 A WIDER subject of comparison between Paganism 
 and Christianity now meets us, regarding their 
 respective contributions to the progress of civilisa- 
 tion. How far did Philosophy improve daily life, 
 and how far was it capable of ameliorating the 
 worst customs of Pagan society ? 
 
 At least we need find no difficulty from the mean- 
 ing of the terms. Each man, of course, has his own 
 ideal of civilisation ; but the general use of the term 
 is fair enough which measures it by reference to 
 certain broad and well-defined aspects of life and 
 conduct. If we desire, for instance, to judge of the 
 civilisation of a given nation or epoch, we invariably 
 ask, what is, or was, the character of its domestic 
 life ; what its attitude with regard to women, to 
 slaves, to criminals, to animals ; or to customs like 
 war or the sacrifice of human victims. Nor is any 
 other method possible, however arbitrary the standard 
 
 13 
 
194 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 of measurement may seem. Even so restricted, the 
 problem is complicated enough as between Philosophy 
 and the Catholic Church ; although the comparison, 
 to be complete, should properly include their respect- 
 ive services to material and mental progress, that is 
 to say, to all arts and inventions on one side, and to 
 science and literature on the other. But on such 
 points as those reserved for comparison, each subject 
 is in itself of such magnitude, that the impossibility 
 of dealing exhaustively with it in a short space makes 
 it necessary to direct our attention solely to certain 
 leading facts and considerations in connection with 
 it rather than to all the evidence which could be 
 brought to bear upon it. We must be content to 
 skim the surface, trusting that even so we may not 
 fail of reaching the real heart of the questions as they 
 arise. 
 
 1. First, then, we may ask 
 
 To what extent did the change from Paganism to 
 Christianity affect or improve the ties of domestic 
 life? There are those who point to the changes 
 effected in this direction as the greatest of all ; and 
 the low legal status of sons, the degradation of women, 
 and the facility of divorce, in the time of Pagan Eome, 
 constitute apparently impregnable arguments in their 
 favour. 
 
 But, happily for humanity, laws are not always a 
 fair index of facts, but possess such a change-resisting 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 195 
 
 force that the practice and life of any people are in 
 general in advance of its legislation. The Eoman 
 laws affecting sons tended constantly to improve, and 
 the son's power over property to increase as against 
 his father. But throughout Pagan history a man's 
 duty to his parents ever ranked next to his duty 
 towards the gods. The theory of his whole duty in 
 life was summed up in the exhortation of Isocrates 
 to Demonicus : " Fear the gods, honour your parents, 
 respect your friends, and obey the laws." Epictetus 
 laid it down as a man's duty to take care of his father, 
 to yield to him in all things, and to submit even to 
 his blows or reproaches ; to look upon all he himself 
 possessed as his father's, never to blame him, nor to 
 say nor do anything to injure him. 1 For the purposes 
 of a fair comparison, we must contrast this old-world 
 theory of duty with that which came widely into vogue 
 with the triumph of Catholicism, that a man owed 
 no duty to his father or mother where it conflicted 
 with his private notions of the interests of his own 
 soul or of the Church ; nor is there anything more 
 distressing or repulsive in the annals of the Church 
 than the countless stories, with which the lives of the 
 saints and hermits are full, of their cold-blooded 
 desertion of parent, wife, husband, or child, of their 
 heartless disruption of family ties, of their selfish dis- 
 regard for the claims of affection. So highly, indeed, 
 
 1 Discourses, ii. 9, and Manual 30. 
 
196 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 did the merit of this course of conduct come to be 
 regarded, so thoroughly did it come to pass current 
 for the highest ideal of virtue, that there is scarcely 
 a life or legend of a saint in which the desertion of 
 his nearest relations is not recorded as one of the 
 leading features of his sanctity, as one of his chief 
 titles to honour. 
 
 Many writers seem to imply that family affection 
 of any sort was as foreign to pre-Christian life as a 
 knowledge of modern astronomy ; whereas the evi- 
 dence of all classical literature and of monumental 
 inscriptions suffices to show that in this respect 
 human nature was precisely the same two thousand 
 years ago as it is to-day. The same evidence may 
 be appealed to in disproof of the common assertion 
 of a wide difference between the two periods in the 
 relationship of husband and wife. Let it be granted 
 that divorce became easy, and, in spite of legislative 
 efforts to the contrary, common ; let it be admitted 
 that Juvenal reveals some black features in the Pagan 
 society of the time of Trajan ; but let the brighter 
 side be also kept in view, if we have any concern 
 for a truthful judgment. 
 
 Against the society depicted in the Satires of 
 Juvenal must be set the society, or state of 
 society, depicted in the Letters of his contem- 
 porary Pliny. The two seem to live in and yet 
 to see two wholly different worlds. It is about as 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 197 
 
 reasonable to judge of the age of the Antonines by 
 the sole evidence of a satirist as it would be to judge 
 of our modern life solely by the light of our society 
 journals or the chronicles of our divorce court. 
 The Eomans at all events looked back at a period of 
 six hundred years during which there was no recorded 
 case of divorce. In the worst times it was never 
 more than the exception. Plutarch speaks of thou- 
 sands of men and women who observed an inviolable 
 community of affection and fidelity to their lives' 
 ends. His short work on Conjugal Precepts proves 
 not only the mutual affection on which the matri- 
 monial tie was based, but reveals the close similarity 
 both in theory and practice between the marriages of 
 pre-Christian and Christian times. The monumental 
 inscriptions of every period of Paganism, couched in 
 terms of the tenderest affection, and often recording 
 not merely the number of years, but also the number 
 of months, days, or minutes during which the union 
 of life and love lasted, thoroughly endorse the im- 
 pression conveyed by Plutarch. And Tertullian 
 himself alludes, in a letter written to his wife 
 against the custom of a second marriage, to the 
 numbers of heathen women who devoted an uninter- 
 rupted widowhood to their love for their husbands' 
 memory. 
 
 2. Considering the very recent abolition of slavery 
 in the colonies of the leading nations of Europe, and 
 
198 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 the system of serfage till a few years ago prevalent 
 in Russia, it is easy to press too far the influence of 
 the Church in the movement which ended in this 
 conspicuous triumph of humanity. The opposition 
 of the Church to slavery was always rather fitful 
 than constant. The early Church never called 
 slavery in question at all ; the Fathers, in their 
 Hebrew bondage, held it to be amply justified by the 
 legend of the curse of Ham. The Pagan emperors 
 did more to mitigate its abuses than the Christian 
 emperors. The appointment of a magistrate by 
 Nero to hear the complaints of slaves against their 
 masters, in order to restrain the cruelty of the latter 
 and to compel them to give their slaves sufficient 
 maintenance, 1 shows the sensitiveness of the Pagan 
 conscience to the evils of the system, and the deter- 
 mination to remedy them. By a law of Claudius, a 
 master who omitted to tend his slave when sick lost 
 all rights over him. Hadrian took away the master's 
 right of life or death over his slave ; the murder of 
 slaves was made punishable by law ; private prisons 
 for slaves were suppressed ; the Petronian law for- 
 bade their exposure to fight with wild beasts. On 
 the other hand, the Christian emperors between 
 Constantine and Justinian did nothing to mitigate 
 the master's right to torture his slave, nor to give 
 legal recognition to slave marriages. Legislation 
 
 1 Seneca, De Benef. iii. 22. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 199 
 
 returned rather to its old severities. Therefore the 
 inference is a fair one that had Paganism been pro- 
 longed, the influence of Philosophy would in eighteen 
 centuries have effected in this respect whatever the 
 Church can claim to have done in that long period 
 of time. 
 
 Horrible stories of the old Pagan slave -system 
 abound. Four hundred slaves were executed in 
 accordance with law for a murder committed by 
 one of their number living under the same roof. 1 
 The Emperor Augustus is said to have had a slave 
 crucified for eating a quail which had never been 
 worsted in a quail-fight. But it is to the credit of 
 the same emperor that, when he was dining with 
 Vedius Pollio, and the latter ordered a slave to 
 be thrown to the lampreys in his fish-pond for the 
 fracture of a crystal vase, he not only had the man 
 set free, but the fish-pond filled up, and all his host's 
 vases broken in his presence. 
 
 But Plato's remark, that many a man had found 
 his slaves better in every way than his brothers and 
 sons, and that slaves had often saved their masters' 
 lives and property, reveals the existence of a brighter 
 side even to slavery. 2 There is the story of the 
 slave who in one of the civil wars hid his master, 
 and then personating him by taking his dresses and 
 rings, gave himself up to the other side to be slain. 
 
 1 Tac. Ann. xiv. 42. 2 Laws, 776. 
 
200 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 When Asinius Pollio promised liberty to the slaves 
 of Padua if they would betray the hiding-place of 
 their masters' arms or money, or of their masters 
 themselves, not one slave was faithless to his trust. 
 When Philip at the siege of Chios invited the slaves 
 to revolt by promising them liberty and their mis- 
 tresses in marriage, the women and the slaves rushed 
 with one consent to the walls and repulsed the 
 enemy. 1 Against the fact of the Servile war must 
 be fairly set the voluntary offer by the slaves of 
 military service in the second Punic war. Many 
 were the monuments raised by masters to their 
 slaves, or by slaves to their masters, whose mutual 
 affection and gratitude are attested by inscriptions to 
 this day. 
 
 The footing between the two classes was one of 
 considerable familiarity. Masters and slaves seem 
 habitually to have had their meals together ; and if 
 Cato advised the selling of old slaves, he ate and 
 drank with them himself, and had them tended when 
 ill by his wife. At the Saturnalia masters laid meals 
 for their slaves, and so did the ladies on the first 
 of March. 2 But of course the fashion was neither 
 uniform nor permanent. Seneca praises Lucilius for 
 living on familiar terms with his slaves, and ridicules 
 those who thought it a disgrace to take supper with 
 them. He reminds him that they are men, fellow- 
 
 1 Plutarch, Virtues of Women, 3. 2 Macrobius, i. 12. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 201 
 
 lodgers, humble friends, and, since fortune is supreme 
 over all conditions, in reality fellow-slaves. He con- 
 demns the growing fashion of his time of not allow- 
 ing them to speak, and declares that the slaves of 
 earlier times, who were free to speak not only before 
 but with their master, were ready to be executed on 
 his behalf, and to turn upon themselves the danger 
 that threatened him : " They talked at meals, but 
 they kept silence at torture." He deprecates the 
 proverb, " So many slaves, so many enemies." If 
 they were enemies, they were of their master's mak- 
 ing. And he sums up his precepts, and presumably 
 his own practice, on this subject with these words : 
 " So live with your inferior as you would have your 
 superior to live with you. . . . Live gently and kindly 
 with your slave, and admit him to conversation with 
 you, to council with you, to a share in your meals." 1 
 
 Elsewhere he says : " It is praiseworthy to exer- 
 cise a moderate mastery over slaves, and we shall 
 think not how much they can be made to suffer with 
 impunity, but how much is allowed by the nature 
 of the Good and Equitable, which bids us even 
 spare captives and men bought for money. ... If 
 all things are legally permissible against a slave, 
 there are things which the common law of animate 
 life forbids to be done against a man." 2 
 
 It is important to notice that the later Christian 
 
 1 Epist. 47. 2 De Clementia, i. 18. 
 
202 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 arguments against slavery really originated with the 
 Philosophers, especially with the Stoics. Before the 
 test of virtue there was no distinction of persons, 
 neither bond nor free. Seneca decided that a slave 
 could be a benefactor to his master, "because the 
 question is not of what station the benefactor is, but 
 of what mind : no one is precluded from virtue ; it 
 lies open to all, welcomes all, invites all, whether 
 well born, freedmen, slaves, kings, or exiles ; is in- 
 different to family or income, and content with the 
 actual man. ... A slave can be just and brave and 
 magnanimous, therefore also he can confer a benefit." l 
 " It is an error to think that servitude descends into 
 the whole man ; the best part of him is exempt. 
 Men's bodies may be subject and assigned to masters, 
 but the mind remains independent. ... It is the 
 body which fortune gives over to a master, this he 
 can buy and sell; but that inward part cannot be 
 given in ownership." 2 These and similar arguments 
 contained nothing new. They had been the com- 
 monplaces of Philosophy, irrespective of sect, since 
 Socrates. There were many in the days of Aristotle 
 who contended that slavery was contrary to nature, 
 and so iniquitous. It was formally condemned by 
 Zeno, the first Stoic. And even on the stage Euri- 
 pides, Sophocles, and Menander expressed the same 
 sentiments that have been quoted from Seneca. 
 
 1 De Benef. iii. 18. 2 Ib. iii. 20. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 203 
 
 The conclusion suggested by these facts is, that 
 where Christianity insisted on the better treatment 
 of the slave, as it did of course often in noble lan- 
 guage, it only carried on the ideas and movement 
 begun by Philosophy. And making allowance for 
 exceptional instances of barbarous treatment, and 
 remembering the numbers of slaves who not only ob- 
 tained emancipation but rose to positions of honour, 
 comfort, or even wealth, one cannot but doubt 
 whether a fair comparison between their status and 
 that of servants or day-labourers in modern Europe 
 would result in so positive a verdict in favour of the 
 latter as is commonly believed. It is sufficient to 
 have glanced at the nature of the evidence on either 
 side to perceive that the picture of the Pagan system 
 of slavery as painted by modern Christian writers 
 is far blacker than that evidence would justify, if, 
 instead of being intentionally mutilated, it were given 
 in its entirety. 
 
 3. Nothing in Christian Europe but the burnings 
 and tortures of men for their religious opinions can 
 compare for atrocity with the Pagan gladiatorial 
 games. Even if most of the victims were criminals, 
 the institution of the games will ever remain the 
 darkest blot on Paganism, just as their abolition 
 will ever remain one of the brightest records of 
 Christianity. Every one knows the story, from 
 Theodoret, of the monk Telemachus, who travelled 
 
204 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 all the way from the East to Kome, and, leaping into 
 the arena to part two gladiators, fell a victim to the 
 fury of the spectators. That was in the year 404, 
 and the Emperor Honorius from that time put a stop 
 by edict to the custom. 
 
 But it was only to combats between man and 
 man that the edict can have applied, for the more 
 brutal and cruel combats between men and beasts 
 long survived Telemachus, and one of the laws of 
 this same Honorius provided for the supply of wild 
 animals for the amphitheatre at Constantinople. 
 Salvian, who was presbyter of Marseilles in the fifth 
 century, and who has left a most woeful picture of 
 the moral condition of the whole Christian Church 
 of his time, complains, among other things, of the 
 delight his co-religionists took in seeing their fellow- 
 men torn and devoured by wild beasts in the amphi- 
 theatres ! He speaks of " numberless thousands of 
 Christians " as daily spectators of the obscenities of 
 the theatres or of the cruelties of the circus ! The 
 Church festivals competed in vain with the public 
 games, which constituted the special mode of thanks- 
 giving for prosperity or victory. If this was not the 
 case in all cities, it was due to some obvious reason, 
 but not to the growth of Christian feeling. Thus it 
 was not the case at Metz, for it had been destroyed 
 by the barbarians ; nor at Cologne, for it was full of 
 enemies ; nor at Treves, for it had been four times 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 205 
 
 devastated. A similar reason applied to most of the 
 cities of Gaul and Spain ; whilst in the Eoman towns 
 the cessation of the games was due, not to the increas- 
 ing humanity, but to the increasing poverty of the times. 
 The low state of the treasury (calamitas fisci et mendi- 
 citas Ronw.ni aerarii) no longer allowed of them. They 
 did not take place in all the cities, because the cities 
 where they used to take place no longer existed. That 
 they were no longer universal was to the credit of the 
 misery of the times, not to that of the Christian disci- 
 pline (miseriae est beneficium non disciplinae). 
 
 "We have here undoubtedly the real key to the 
 explanation of the gradual abolition of the gladia- 
 torial games in Europe. No doubt the feeling of the 
 better Christians was against them ; but that Chris- 
 tians as a body never systematically absented them- 
 selves is proved, not only by Salvian, but by the 
 treatise to remonstrate with them for attending them 
 by Tertullian, in which the objection to them is 
 based far less on their cruelty than on their inci- 
 dental connection with idolatry ; by the well-known 
 story in Augustine's Confessions of the Christian who 
 went to them at the solicitation of his friends ; and 
 by the story of the Christians interrupting Constan- 
 tine at the celebration of the games with shouts of 
 " One God, one Christ, one bishop ! " But the better 
 feeling of the Pagans was against them no less ; nor 
 is it possible to believe that the heroic act of Tele- 
 
206 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 machus would have been as successful as it was had 
 not a large force of Pagan opinion coincided with the 
 Christian on the subject. 
 
 There is distinct evidence of this Pagan opposition 
 to the games reflected in classical literature. Cicero 
 attests the fact that some of his contemporaries 
 thought them cruel and inhuman, and he implies 
 his own consent to that opinion. 1 The proposal to 
 establish the games at Athens was effectually stopped 
 for some time by the remark of the philosopher 
 Demonax, that before doing so they would have 
 first to overthrow the altar of Pity. Apollonius of 
 Tyana, the Pythagorean, not only openly rebuked the 
 Athenians for the gladiatorial fights, to see which they 
 ran in crowds to the theatre on the Acropolis, but 
 himself refused to go to their assembly as a place 
 polluted with blood. There is no mistake of Seneca's 
 dislike to the games ; and he contrasts the early 
 Eomans who spared the lives of dumb animals with 
 his own contemporaries, who scrupled not to kill one 
 another, and that not from motives of anger or fear, 
 but merely for a spectacle. 2 
 
 Add to this the laws passed from time to time to 
 check the frequency of the shows or the number of 
 combatants, or such facts as that Nerva prohibited 
 matches and contests of gladiators, 3 and that Marcus 
 
 1 Tusc. Quaest. ii. 17. 2 Epist. 90 and 7. 
 
 3 Zonaras says : " gladiatorum composition es et certamina vetuit." 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 207 
 
 Aurelius compelled them to fight with blunted swords, 
 and it is evident that there must have heen a strong 
 current of Pagan feeling against the popular pastime, 
 a current strong enough in itself to have brought it 
 to an end, even though no Christian opposition, or 
 still more, no scarcity of funds, had arisen to promote 
 the process of abolition. 
 
 4. But no triumph of civilisation caused by or 
 connected with Christianity can compare in import- 
 ance with the abolition of human sacrifice under the 
 influence of Pagan civilisation. Traces of the gradual 
 disappearance of this custom over the world are 
 clearly marked in history long before Christianity, 
 for which Eusebius claimed the credit of its abolition 
 in or about the reign of Hadrian. At one place 
 Diphilus, a king of Cyprus, abolished it, substitut- 
 ing an ox for the human victim. At Heliopolis in 
 Egypt, Amasis abolished it, substituting the sacrifice 
 of three figures of wax. At Carthage, Iphicrates the 
 Athenian abolished it, if on this point we may credit 
 Porphyry. In Italy one tradition was that human 
 sacrifices to Pluto and Saturn had been common, 
 till Hercules came and persuaded the people to offer 
 instead figures in human shape ; whilst another tradi- 
 tion pointed to Junius Brutus, after the expulsion of 
 the Tarquins, instituting the sacrifice of the heads of 
 onions and poppies for those of men and children. 1 
 
 1 Macrobius, i. 7. 
 
208 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 Eoman civilisation consistently opposed the custom. 
 It is probable that the decree of the senate, alluded 
 to by Pliny as passed in the year 96 B.C., definitely 
 prohibiting human sacrifices, a custom openly prac- 
 tised to that time, 1 applied to the provinces of 
 the Eepublic, not to Eome itself ; for Livy, referring 
 to the extraordinary sacrifice in the year 216 B.C. of 
 two Gauls and Greeks of either sex, in obedience to 
 the command of the Sibylline Books, says that they 
 were buried alive in the cattle -market, a place which 
 had been previously stained with human sacrifices, 
 a rite by no means Eoman (minime Romano sacro). 2 
 It seems incredible that this burial of foreigners in 
 the cattle-market can have survived to the time of 
 Pliny, though we have his word for it, 3 in the face 
 of the law of 96. Pliny himself, referring to the 
 steps taken by Tiberius to stop the practice in Gaul, 
 declares it impossible to estimate the debt of the 
 world to the Eomans for their efforts to put it down. 4 
 Thus children were sacrificed to Saturn in Africa, 
 till Tiberius as proconsul hanged the priests on the 
 sacred trees above the temples, 5 and Hadrian pro- 
 hibited the sacrifice of men to Jupiter in Cyprus. 6 
 
 1 Hist. Nat. xxx. 1 ; "ne homo immolaretur. " 2 xxiii. 57. 
 
 3 Hist. Nat. xxviii. 2 ; and Plut. Marcellus, 3. Plutarch, refers 
 to certain, rites still performed every November in consequence 
 of the human sacrifice at the time of the Gallic war. 
 
 4 Hist. Nat. xxx. 1. 5 Tertullian, Apol. 9. 
 6 Lactantius, i. 21. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 209 
 
 Cicero could scarcely have spoken of the practice as 
 a monstrous one, still disgracing Gaul in his day, 1 
 unless the sentiment of Eoman civilisation had 
 been energetically pronounced and directed against 
 it. 
 
 In order to support the claims of the Church in 
 the matter of human sacrifice, stress is generally laid 
 on. Pliny's account of superstitious people, who, to 
 cure themselves of epilepsy, were wont to descend 
 into the arena, to drink the blood of the slaughtered 
 gladiators ; 2 or on the 300 Perugian captives slain 
 by Octavius on an altar sacred to the deified Julius. 3 
 The latter case was probably an act of military 
 barbarity cloaking itself under a religious disguise. 
 It rests on the authority of Lampridius that the 
 Emperors Commodus and Heliogabalus indulged in 
 human sacrifice, in connection apparently with the 
 Mithraic religion ; but this was a charge habitually 
 made with reference to religions of which the 
 mysteries were little understood. The sacrifice of 
 children was a charge habitually made against the 
 early Christians, not only by the Pagans, but by the 
 Christians against one another ; and it was doubtless 
 in the same spirit that the ecclesiastic, Gregory of 
 Nazianzen, declared that the vaults of Julian's 
 palace at Antioch were positively crammed with the 
 
 1 Pro Fonteio, 10. 2 Hist. Nat. xxviii. 2. 
 
 3 Suetonius, 15. 
 14 
 
2io PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 bodies of children and virgins sacrificed by the 
 Emperor Julian for purposes of divination. 1 
 
 There remains, however, another case. Lactan- 
 tius declares that even in his time Jupiter Latiaris 
 was still worshipped by the Latins with human 
 blood. 2 Tertullian says that Jupiter had still blood 
 given to him to taste in Latium ; 3 and Minucius 
 Felix speaks of Jupiter Latiaris as still worshipped 
 with the blood of a criminal. 4 The Fathers on this 
 point appear to be corroborated by Porphyry, when 
 he says : " Who does not know -of the festival cele- 
 brated in the great city in honour of Jupiter Latiaris 
 where a man is sacrificed ? " 5 It is difficult, however, 
 to believe that even here more was meant than that 
 a libation of the blood of a gladiator, slain in the 
 arena, was offered to Jupiter ; for Dionysius Halicar- 
 nassus, who, in writing on the antiquities of Korne, 
 had occasion to make special mention of the annual 
 festival of the Feriae Latinae, refers to nothing more 
 than the offering of lambs, milk, and cheese, and the 
 sacrifice of a bull, in honour of Jupiter Latiaris. 
 We may therefore conclude that in this matter the 
 
 1 Oratio i. 92. Mr. King has the following significant note on 
 this passage in his Julian the Emperor : "It was a common trick of 
 the monks to hide human bones in temples, and then point them 
 out as evidences of human sacrifice. A notorious example is the 
 Mithraeum at Alexandria. Nothing is more likely than that the 
 same stratagem was practised in Julian's palace at Antioch by some 
 zealot." 2 i. 21. 3 Scorpiace, 7. 4 Octavius, 30. 
 
 5 On Abstinence from Animal Flesh. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 211 
 
 repulsive survival of an abominable custom has been 
 exaggerated to mean the actual continuance of that 
 custom itself; and that the real abolition of that 
 custom was due to the progressive civilisation of 
 ancient Eome. 
 
 5. With regard to cruelty to animals, the Church 
 has at no time recognised the existence of any moral 
 duties outside the human species. Whatever feel- 
 ing of that sort has grown up within the last century 
 must be credited to a more humane growth of mind, 
 which is the consequence rather of increased science 
 than of Christian sentiment ; and in spite of the 
 enormous cruelty of Pagan society that was involved 
 in the games, it may be doubted whether the culture 
 of the few was not, even in the worst days, as much 
 in advance of the general sentiment as it is in our 
 own times. In none of the Fathers would you be 
 likely to find a sentiment at all approaching to this 
 of Marcus Aurelius : "As for the animals that have no 
 reason . . . since thou hast reason and they have none, 
 make use of them with a generous and liberal spirit." l 
 
 The ever-humane Plutarch is strong on behalf of 
 the animals. He resents the notion that no justice 
 is due to dumb animals, and insists that if they 
 must be killed to be eaten, they should be killed 
 \vith sorrow and pity, and not by such torments as 
 were involved in running red-hot spits through pigs, 
 1 vi 23. 
 
212 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 or in shutting up cranes or swans to be fatted. 1 He 
 traces elsewhere a connection between human in- 
 humanity and the custom of seeing and taking 
 pleasure in the slaughter of beasts in the chase. 
 He also makes the curious suggestion that one of 
 the reasons for the Eoman custom of always letting 
 a candle burn out, instead of extinguishing it, was 
 that fire, being regarded as a kind of animal, men 
 were thence to learn the lesson of not killing any 
 harmless animated creature. 2 He also thinks it 
 easy to show from the writings and religion of the 
 ancients that they thought it sinful to eat or kill a 
 harmless animal, and he ascribes to this motive of 
 justice the abstinence of Pythagoras from fish. 3 
 
 The Pythagorean rules for refraining from certain 
 kinds of food are of course connected commonly 
 with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, 
 and many at all times have been the jokes about 
 eating a grandparent in eating a bean. But other 
 motives must have operated, for we have it on the 
 authority of Jamblichus, who wrote the Life of 
 Pythagoras, as well as on that of Diogenes Laertius, 
 that the Pythagoreans held it wrong to slay or 
 injure animals that were harmless ; that for this 
 reason they disapproved of hunting ; 4 and that one 
 of the motives Pythagoras had in prohibiting the 
 
 1 On Eating of Flesh. 2 Roman Questions, 75. 
 
 3 Sympos. viii. 8. 4 Life of Pythagoras, 21. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 213 
 
 slaughter of animals was that, in consequence of 
 such restraint, men might be more inclined to think 
 it unlawful to slay one another and to engage in 
 war. 1 Consequently the Pythagoreans always op- 
 posed animal sacrifice, the tradition being that the 
 only altar at which Pythagoras ever worshipped 
 was the altar at Delos to Apollo the Parent, for the 
 reason that on that altar no animal had ever been 
 sacrificed. 2 
 
 This abhorrence of animal sacrifice was one of 
 the most prominent features in the career of Apol- 
 lonius of Tyana, the disciple or rival of Pythagoras 
 in the time of Vespasian. But his protest against 
 cruelty is even more remarkable. At Ephesus he 
 endeavoured to turn the people from their cruel 
 sports to intellectual and philosophical studies. 3 
 And at Babylon, when the King Bardanes invited 
 him to join in a chase of lions, bears, and panthers, 
 in an enclosure reserved for that purpose, Apollonius 
 replied that it would ill become one who had never 
 even been present at sacrifices to lie in ambush in 
 order to see wild beasts put to needless pain. 4 What 
 would he have thought of modern England, where so 
 many still derive their highest pleasure from the 
 pain of defenceless animals ? 
 
 Nothing was more common in Eoman society 
 
 1 Life of Pythagoras, 30. 2 Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii. 6. 
 
 3 Philostratus, Life of Ajjollonius, iv. 2. 4 II. i. 38. 
 
214 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 than this point of view, even in the worst days of 
 the amphitheatre. Abstinence from animal food 
 was openly taught and practised for the very same 
 reasons that influence our modern vegetarians. 
 Seneca in his youth was so strongly impressed with 
 the teaching of Sextius, the Stoic, to the effect that 
 man had quite enough food without the shedding of 
 blood, and that the laceration of animals for the 
 service of our pleasures led to habits of cruelty, that 
 he abstained from animal food altogether for a year, 
 and only returned to it to please his father, who, at 
 a time when Tiberius had proscribed all foreign 
 religions, and a vegetable diet seemed to savour of 
 them, entreated his son to discontinue a practice 
 that was fraught with so much danger to his 
 liberty. 1 
 
 The feeling therefore against cruelty to animals 
 came into existence before and independently of 
 Christianity the feeling which led Cicero to write 
 that it was a wickedness to hurt an animal ; 2 nor is 
 there any proof or indication that the Church in 
 the course of her long reign has contributed in the 
 least degree to the strengthening of that honourable 
 feeling. 
 
 6. One fair test of civilisation is the relation 
 between crime and punishment; the absence of 
 cruelty in the latter and of torture to detect the 
 
 1 Epist. 108. 2 Eep. iii. 8 : Scelus est nocere bestiae. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 215 
 
 former. Punishments and tortures in the days of 
 Pagan Home were of frightful barbarity ; though we 
 have the remarkable testimony of Seneca that an 
 increase of cruelty in this respect had followed the 
 increase of the national prosperity. Pompey was the 
 first to cause criminals to fight with elephants in the 
 arena. 1 The civil wars of Marius and Sylla intro- 
 duced punishments of thitherto unknown savagery. 2 
 The cross, the fiery tunic, the wooden horse (eculeus), 
 and similar penalties came into vogue. But Seneca, 
 representing doubtless in this every school of 
 philosophy, protested constantly and with all his 
 power against this state of things : " Whilst we are 
 among men, let us cultivate humanity ; let us not be 
 an object of fear or danger to any man." And his 
 whole theory of penology, expressed with as much 
 lucidity as humanity in his treatises on Anger and 
 on Mercy, was more rational and philanthropic than 
 anything that was written with any effect before 
 Montaigne. It is true that Augustine used the same 
 common-sense arguments against Torture 3 that were 
 first listened to by the rulers of the world when 
 urged by Beccaria fourteen centuries later ; but the 
 Church, as a body, never headed the slightest move- 
 ment against the atrocious system of tortures and 
 punishments which disgraced Europe during all the 
 
 1 De Brevitate Vitae, 13. 
 2 De Sen. iii. 18. 3 City of God, xix. 6. 
 
216 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 centuries of her supremacy. The movement in 
 favour of the mitigation of punishments and of the 
 abolition of torture was begun and carried to a 
 successful issue by the French Encyclopaedist school 
 of Voltaire and Diderot and Beccaria, on principles 
 that were simply a return to the principles advocated 
 ages before by Seneca and the Philosophers; and the 
 Church, if of any force at all in the matter, mani- 
 fested rather open hostility than inert indifference to 
 a reform of permanent importance to the increased 
 happiness of the world. 
 
 7. The same has been her attitude with regard to 
 war. Arnobius in the third century boasted that 
 since Christianity had taught men the duty of the 
 non-requital of injuries, wars had diminished in the 
 world ; 1 and Eusebius also claimed for the new 
 religion an effect that may be more reasonably 
 ascribed to the military supremacy of the Eoman 
 Empire. But it is notorious that many of the 
 Fathers looked on war as unchristian, for its close 
 connection with both idolatry and bloodshed; a 
 feeling which went so far that the early Christians 
 would not even suffer the inscription on their seals 
 of swords or bows. 2 Yet from the days of Constan- 
 tine to our own what has Christianity as a religion 
 done for the cause of peace on earth? A little 
 during the Middle Ages, but absolutely nothing since 
 
 1 i. 6. 2 Clemens Alex. Paidagogus, iii. 2. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 217 
 
 the Keforrnation. Wars in Europe are as frequent 
 and well-nigh as ferocious now as they ever were in 
 pre-Christian days; and the movement that has 
 risen to make them less frequent and ferocious is 
 distinctly due to philosophers like Voltaire, Bentham, 
 and Kant, and not to the Church in any appreciable 
 degree whatsoever. 
 
 But here again Philosophy has simply returned 
 to the point it had reached in the old Pagan days. 
 After an interruption of about fifteen centuries, we 
 are returning to the position and principles of Cicero, 
 Seneca, Plutarch and others. For the Philosophers 
 no less than the Fathers were on the side of peace to 
 a degree that has never been recognised. When Titus 
 had taken Jerusalem and refused the crown offered 
 him by the neighbouring nations, Apollonius of 
 Tyana wrote a letter offering him instead the crown 
 of moderation for refusing to be crowned for a 
 military success and the destruction of his enemies. 
 Celsus, the anti- Christian, disapproved of inter- 
 national wars. 1 Plutarch thought there was nothing 
 more disgusting than the mutual killing of men in 
 war ; 2 and he held that Mcias, the Athenian, for his 
 love of peace, must have stood in point of honour 
 above all comparison with Crassus, though the latter 
 should have made the Caspian Sea or the Indian 
 Ocean the boundary of the Eoman dominion. Cicero 
 
 1 Origen, Against Celsus, iv. 83. 2 Contradictions of Stoics, 33. 
 
2i8 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 deemed it necessary to protest against the common 
 opinion which attached more importance to military 
 than to civil matters ; and of the two methods of 
 settling disputes, namely, by argument or by force, 
 he contended that the former method alone was 
 worthy of men, the latter only of wild beasts. 1 
 Dicaearchus, a disciple of Aristotle, wrote a book, un- 
 fortunately lost, on Human Destruction, wherein, after 
 estimating the loss of human life by floods, pestilence, 
 devastation, and wild beasts, he showed that more 
 men were destroyed by one another in wars and 
 seditions than by all other causes put together. 2 
 
 Lastly, we come to Seneca, always foremost on the 
 side of humanity. What protest against the war-spirit 
 of his own or later days could have been stronger 
 or truer than the following : " We punish murders 
 and individual homicides ; what of wars and the 
 glorious wickedness of slaughtered nations ? Neither 
 our avarice nor our cruelty knows a bound. Such 
 crimes when committed secretly or by individuals 
 are less injurious and less appalling; but it is by 
 senatorial decree and the vote of the people that 
 our cruelties are exercised, and what is forbidden 
 in private life is commanded by public ordinance. 
 Actions which, if committed by stealth, would meet 
 with capital punishment, we praise because com- 
 mitted by soldiers. Men, the gentlest species of the 
 
 1 De Officiis, i. 11, 22, 23. 2 Cicero, DC Off. ii. 5. 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILISATION 219 
 
 animal race, are not ashamed to find delight in 
 mutual slaughter, to wage wars, and to transmit 
 them to be waged by their children, when even 
 dumb animals and wild beasts live at peace with one 
 another." J 
 
 With all this evidence before us of the strong 
 anti-military feeling of the leaders of Pagan thought, 
 evidence quite as clear as that of the anti-military 
 feeling of the early Christians, and with the recol- 
 lection not merely of the little that the Christianity 
 of at least a thousand years has contributed to the 
 cause of peace, but of the number of wars for which 
 the Church herself has been primarily responsible, 
 and of the vigour with which she has almost invari- 
 ably fanned the war- spirit, the conclusion must force 
 itself upon every impartial mind, both that the world 
 owes no progress to the influence of the Church in 
 this direction, and that it probably would have owed 
 more to Philosophy, had its beneficent influence pre- 
 vailed to later times. 
 
 Under all the seven foregoing heads therefore 
 it is clear that the debt of civilisation to the 
 Church, indisputable as it is in some respects, is 
 not so great as most Church historians would have 
 us believe. The progress that in certain lines has 
 accompanied Christianity is not necessarily for that 
 reason its consequence ; and the ideas that preceded 
 
 1 Epist. 95. 
 
220 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 and conditioned such progress were mainly of Pagan, 
 and especially of Stoic, origin. In the eclectic 
 philosophy of Seneca lie the germs of every reform 
 or advance that has occurred since ; the feeling 
 against slavery, against cruelty to animals, against 
 cruelty to criminals, against war, was not only openly 
 expressed, but readily and widely received. Whether, 
 if the course of history had been uninterrupted, the 
 arms and philosophy of Rome would have carried 
 civilisation in Europe to its present pitch we can 
 only amuse ourselves by speculating ; but there is 
 at least no evidence that it would not have done so, 
 and had there been no invasion by the barbarians, 
 nor overthrow of the Eoman Empire, the world 
 would have been spared the fearful history of its 
 Dark and Middle Ages ; and the light of the 
 Grecian humanity, instead of having now to be 
 revived, might never have been extinguished. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 FROM the evidence collected in the preceding chapters, 
 we are now in a position to estimate at their real 
 value the differences between Catholicism and Pagan- 
 ism, and the debt of civilisation to Catholicism as a 
 factor in history. That both those differences and 
 that debt have been unfairly exaggerated by partisan 
 writers is a conclusion supported by a comparison of 
 the ecclesiastical Fathers of the first ages with the 
 Pagan Philosophers who were their contemporaries 
 and often their adversaries ; but it may be well to 
 recapitulate briefly the general results of the survey 
 we have concluded. 
 
 In the Pagan world the uneducated classes had 
 of course a large numerical preponderance, but so 
 splendid was the system of education in the Eoman 
 Empire that the educated minority bore probably a 
 far greater proportion to the majority than, till our 
 own time, has ever been the case in the world. And 
 in this educated class it is easy to discern a general 
 monotheistic belief, underlying all the polytheistic 
 
222 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 superstructure; for the Christians themselves ad- 
 mitted that the Philosophers taught the unity of God, 
 whilst countenancing the worship of many gods out 
 of deference for human frailty or ancient custom. 1 
 The rightful attributes of the Supreme Deity, His 
 omnipotence, goodness, and mercy, were no less con- 
 nected in the civilised world with the names of Zeus 
 or Jupiter than they were or came to be in Palestine 
 with the name of Jehovah. Between the several 
 nations of the earth the main religious difference had 
 become one rather of nomenclature than of funda- 
 mental belief ; and so little had the Greek or Eoman 
 to learn of either the Jew or the Christian on the 
 great problems of Providence or design in nature, 
 that the vast masses of Christian literature subse- 
 quently devoted to those subjects contain no argu- 
 ments that may not still be found in abundance 
 in the fragmentary literature of the pre-Christian 
 classical world. 
 
 Still less did Catholicism introduce any change 
 into the Pagan theory of secondary or subordinate 
 divine agencies. Only a change of diction ensued, 
 the word angels or messengers, which had long been 
 in use as a synonym for the gods, coming at last to 
 supersede the latter term altogether. The saints and 
 martyrs displaced the gods and heroes, but the new 
 angel - worship differed to no appreciable degree, 
 1 Clementine Recognitions, x. 48. 
 
CONCLUSION 223 
 
 theoretically or practically, from the old polytheism 
 it supplanted. 
 
 AYith the purified and rationalised theology of 
 Paganism co-existed an earnest spirit of religion and 
 devotion, of which the main features were a strong 
 sense of the duty of humble trust and reliance in 
 the goodness of God, of patient resignation to His 
 will, and of spiritual endeavour to approximate His 
 perfection. Not long ago it was said by Cardinal 
 Maiming that the Old World " destroyed man by a 
 distorted theology, a perverted morality, and a deifi- 
 cation of human power." l But it is time that this 
 Catholic misreading of history received its despatch. 
 It was a primary article of the higher Pagan faith 
 that every man, inasmuch as he shared the spirit of 
 God, might and should consider himself as a Son of 
 God, and that therefore it behoved him to conduct 
 himself in a manner befitting a temple of God, and 
 to regard all his fellowmen as his brethren by virtue 
 of their belonging to the same family with himself. 
 The morality and dignity of daily life flowed to a 
 great extent from this consideration, and the rightful 
 dealing with his fellowman was a religious duty of 
 only secondary importance to a rightful conception 
 of the real attributes of the Deity. That the philo- 
 sopher Longinian could have written to Augustine 
 that the best way to God was by words and deeds 
 
 1 Sermon in Pro- Cathedral, llth October 1885. 
 
224 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 that were pious, pure, just, chaste, and true, is a 
 proof that the Pagan and Christian ideals of duty 
 coincided more than they differed. 
 
 The hope of a future existence encouraged the 
 Pagan to perseverance in well-doing during his life, 
 and the prospect of heaven and immortality pre- 
 sented itself to him as the only possible alternative 
 to the prospect of unending repose in death. Only 
 to the illiterate or the ignorant remained any fear of 
 those everlasting punishments in hell, which, having 
 originated none knew how, added a terror the more 
 to man's natural fear of the cessation of physical 
 consciousness. 
 
 The spirit of hostility to superstition was one of 
 the first principles of true philosophy, nor need we 
 turn from Seneca to Tertullian and the Fathers to 
 acquire any fresh or greater contempt for the poly- 
 theism, the idolatry, or the love of magic, that were 
 rife among the uneducated classes of the Old World. 
 The Fathers in their fulminations against superstition 
 said nothing that the Philosophers and Poets had not 
 said much better before them. It is possible that 
 among the lower social strata Catholicism spread 
 purer ideas of religion than any that filtered down to 
 them from the upper strata of Paganism ; but that 
 the grossly superstitious practices of the Pagan 
 multitude had their full counterpart in the Church 
 itself from the earliest period it would require a bold 
 
CONCLUSION 225 
 
 or an indifferent controversialist to deny. The 
 sensual love-feasts of one place or period, the wild 
 asceticism at another or the same, the idolatrous cult 
 paid to the bones of martyrs and to images, the pro- 
 cessions and pilgrimages to shrines, the exorcising of 
 demons, the fraudulent miracles ; these and other 
 practices, still regnant in Catholic countries with a 
 vigour little abated by either the lapse of time or 
 the growth of knowledge, justify the doubt, not only 
 whether superstition, in consequence of the conver- 
 sion, came to differ much, if at all, either in intensity 
 or volume from the pre-Christian standard, but even 
 whether it underwent much change in its actual out- 
 ward form. Polytheism changed in expression more 
 than in character. Like the colossal image of Apollo 
 that surmounted the famous image of the first 
 Christian emperor at Constantinople, Paganism con- 
 tinued to retain the topmost place in the system that 
 nominally superseded it. 
 
 With regard to special virtues, abundant proof has 
 been adduced that Platonists, Pythagoreans, and 
 Stoics preached and practised the duties of charity, 
 beneficence, toleration, and forgiveness with quite as 
 much earnestness and success as distinguished the 
 Catholics after them. So effectually, indeed, had 
 Philosophy advocated the claims of the great prin- 
 ciples of humanity, that in Paganism, before there 
 was any Church at all, there was a party audible ill 
 
 15 
 
226 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 its outspoken opposition to slavery, to cruelty to 
 criminals or to animals, to the gladiatorial games, 
 and to war. 
 
 If then between the higher Paganism and the 
 higher Christianity there was so little moral or 
 spiritual difference, how, it may be asked, did 
 Catholicism come to assert itself at all, to say 
 nothing of its rapid and easy conquest of the forces 
 of Philosophy arrayed against it? The answer, 
 forced upon us by so much as is still extant of its 
 apocalyptic literature, is, Because it coincided and co- 
 operated with a long-smouldering political movement 
 against the Eoman Empire, a movement which, 
 unhappily for the world, only too well succeeded, 
 involving, as it did, in the ruin of Rome, the ruin of 
 civilisation, of order, of peace, of prosperity, and 
 above all of sound and simple theological ideas, 
 based on healthy reason and common sense. From 
 this point of view no friend of progress and science, 
 looking back at the consequences of the triumph of 
 Catholicism over Paganism, can fail to regard it as a 
 distinct and immeasurable misfortune to the world ; 
 he has only to read side by side with one another 
 the early Christian Fathers and their contemporaries 
 the Pagan Philosophers to perceive that the inferiority 
 of the former to the latter reaches not merely to the 
 language and style but to the reasoning and moral 
 sentiment ; and he will fervently regret that the long 
 
CONCLUSION 227 
 
 contest between Hellenic and Judaic thought ended 
 so completely in the victory of the latter. 
 
 In the pre-Christian world there was evil enough, 
 revealed on many a black page of history, but its 
 better aspects are no less impressive, and equally 
 claim our recognition. To ignore them purposely is 
 to sin against historical truth, without really ad- 
 vancing the cause of Christianity. But in addition 
 to the justice of bringing this better side into promi- 
 nence, the field we have traversed opens up vistas of 
 no small speculative interest. The truths of religion 
 are eternal, but not the dogmas of theology ; and if, 
 as other theologies have passed before it, Catholicism 
 is destined to pass in its turn, a rational curiosity 
 may well lead us to wonder what will be the faith 
 that will come one day to rule in its stead. Histor- 
 ical and literary criticism, and above all the growth 
 of more scientific and entirely new ideas both of 
 man's place in the world and of the world's place in 
 the universe, have sapped and are still sapping the 
 intellectual bases of the Church, causing secessions 
 that are none the less real for their not being overt 
 or declared. A silent but far-reaching transforma- 
 tion, very different from the violent Eeformation of 
 three centuries ago, is taking place before our eyes 
 and all are asking : What will be its result ? In the 
 early days of the struggle of the Church with poly- 
 theism her adversaries complained, with every 
 
228 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 appearance of justice, that many were driven to the 
 extremes of irreligion and immorality through the 
 overthrow of their belief in the ancestral gods ; and 
 who will say that the intellectual revulsion of our 
 own epoch threatens us with no similar danger ? Is 
 there no probability that with thousands the loss of 
 their faith will prove at the same time the loss of 
 their restraints from vice no less than of their in- 
 centives to virtue ? 
 
 If this danger is not an imaginary one, how to 
 meet it becomes a question of the highest practical 
 importance. Our sacerdotalists would have us seek a 
 remedy from the malady itself, by returning to that 
 very Catholic tradition which has been the main 
 source of the evil. Others think we may find a 
 substitute in esoteric Buddhism, in Indian theoso- 
 phies, or even in the so-called manifestations of 
 spiritualism. But has not the religion of Philosophy 
 a religion which failed not to solace and ennoble 
 the highest minds of ancient Greece and Eome 
 better claims than any of these ? Is it beyond the 
 bounds of possibility or of hope that the religion of 
 rational piety, which was before Catholicism and is 
 quite independent of it, may some day take its place, 
 a religion free from dogmas, and based solely on pure 
 monotheism and on that belief or hope of immortality 
 which we have seen to have been so real and general 
 in the old pre-Christian world ? 
 
CONCLUSION 229 
 
 Happily it is in this direction that Protestant 
 Christianity has long been tending. The intel- 
 lectual breach between Protestants and Catholics 
 has widened into an abyss. Their divergence 
 touches no longer merely the details but the very 
 fundamentals of belief. From orthodox Catholicism 
 most Protestants are as far removed as they are from 
 Confucianism ; all recognising, at least in theory, the 
 claims of reason, and only differing in the degree to 
 which they use it. But the gulf is scarcely less wide 
 between the Protestants of to-day and the Protestants 
 of the Eeformation. Many of us, Protestants though 
 we are, have no more in common with the theology 
 of Luther or of Latimer than with that of St. Augus- 
 tine or St. Simeon Stylites. Stronger religious affini- 
 ties connect us with Seneca or Porphyry than with 
 any of the early Christian theologians ; and, to put 
 the matter truthfully, our rationalised Christianity 
 is simply the higher philosophy of Paganism, with a 
 different phraseology of course, but the same in sub- 
 stance with that which was taught and preached in 
 the Eoman Empire by Stoic, Platonist, and Pytha- 
 gorean, in the days before the fanatics, who miscalled 
 themselves Christians, drowned the sound reason of 
 the world in the torrent of their all-overwhelming 
 ignorance. The name of Christian is our only point 
 of union with the primitive or with the reformed 
 Church ; nor is there any reason why the old name 
 
230 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 should cease to be borne, when it shall be openly 
 and honestly avowed that the only sense in which 
 it is used, outside the pale of Eome, is as a word 
 significative of a mode or spirit of life, not of assent 
 to certain articles of belief, formulated by Councils 
 of unphilosophical theologians, who quarrelled about 
 everything that was immaterial and settled nothing 
 that was intelligible. The Christianity of the 
 coming time need be none the less true and real 
 for its frank admission of the fact that, as hitherto 
 used in history, the word has been misapplied and 
 misappropriated, having been the appellation of men 
 whom historical records prove to have failed as 
 signally in acting up to the Christian standard as 
 in appreciating or comprehending its meaning. And 
 thus, while in one sense the world may seem to grow 
 less Christian, in another and better sense it may be- 
 come more so ; for the further we place ourselves from 
 Christianity as revealed in history, the nearer shall 
 we approximate in spirit to Christianity as origin- 
 ally propounded. In this way Christianity and 
 Philosophy, which need never have been divided, 
 may come, to the great benefit of the world, to be 
 reunited and reconciled. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 As some aid to the memory of the chief religious and 
 moral ideas contained in the works of the principal 
 Pagan writers in the first ages of Christianity, I have 
 done my best to reproduce them in the following verses. 
 It is only necessary to say that I have hardly used a 
 phrase, and certainly not a sentiment, that is not to be 
 found in the original works. It is better of course to 
 read the authors themselves, either in the originals or in 
 the admirable translations which exist of them, arid I 
 only pretend to minister in this respect to those who 
 have not the leisure that admits of a more extensive 
 study of these great authors. As regards Epicurus, my 
 authority is almost entirely the quotations from him or 
 the references to him scattered through the works of 
 Seneca. The terms "God" and "the gods" are used 
 throughout as synonymous, as in the originals. 
 
 EPICTETUS 
 
 This problem first and most perplexes man, 
 Is there a God 1 or hath His rule a plan ? 
 For some His Being, some His love deny, 
 Deeming His action bounded by the sky. 
 
232 APPENDIX 
 
 But who can doubt of God's good Providence, 
 Who blinds not to its proofs his every sense 1 
 Who made the eye made things for it to see ; 
 What need, without it, for such things to be "? 
 And if the parts of objects made by man 
 Reveal their maker's purpose and his plan, 
 How shall not Nature point to His design 
 Who made not sight without the sun to shine ? 
 Take lesser things : Who made it come to pass 
 That wool should come from skins, or milk from grass ? 
 Who made so many things together fit 
 With greater art than ever chance could hit ? 
 Thou durst say, No one ! Shameless that thou art 
 To use thy reason in so poor a part ! 
 
 See man alone endowed with power of mind ; 
 See brutes without it for his use designed, 
 Fulfilling these, as food or tools, their end, 
 Whilst ours is God's great works to apprehend. 
 
 What should we then, but one and all upraise 
 From grateful hearts to God glad hymns of praise ? 
 And if all others fail to bless His name, 
 There shall be one who will, though old and lame ; 
 I for all others will the greatness sing 
 Of God, our common Father, Saviour, King, 
 Deeming so spent my human reason best 
 And so persisting till He bids me rest. 
 
 Eound all His sons rests God's paternal care, 
 To each imparted for his guardian here 
 Part of Himself, small fraction of the whole, 
 Call it thy reason, conscience, or thy soul. 
 
APPENDIX 233 
 
 Be then in all things mindful of thy birth, 
 Offspring of Heaven, no mere child of earth. 
 A God thou bearest, not of man's device, 
 Mere gold or silver, bought at trifling price, 
 But Zeus Himself ; Him darest thou pollute 
 By shameful thoughts or actions dissolute ? 
 Shall that pure reason, intellect Divine, 
 Not all things see who made the sun to shine 1 
 Shall thy closed doors ensure thee solitude, 
 Or darkened room thine infamies seclude ? 
 God and thy conscience will be there with thee, 
 Needing no light thine acts or thoughts to see. 
 If God's mere image would thy guilt restrain, 
 Shall His all-seeing presence prove more vain ? 
 Wilt thou His noblest workmanship debase, 
 And live to His as well as thy disgrace ? 
 Wilt thou whom He made thine own guardian here, 
 And bade keep free from passion, lust, and fear, 
 False to thy nature and thy trust no less, 
 Prove by thy life thine own un worthiness ? 
 
 An all-providing Deity confessed, 
 Who sees thine every thought, thine inmost breast, 
 To imitate, so far as mortal can, 
 His sublime virtues thy clear task as man. 
 Make His perfections thine unceasing aim ; 
 Is God beneficent ? Be thou the same. 
 Is He magnanimous, pure, faithful, free ? 
 Be the same attributes displayed by thee. 
 
 As well, where robbers haunt the road, essay 
 To pass unaided, as on life's rough way, 
 
234 APPENDIX 
 
 Without a friend in whom thou durst confide 
 
 Against the foes who lurk on every side. 
 
 So seek a faithful comrade for thy life, 
 
 To guide thee safely through its storm and strife ; 
 
 Yet trust not Man, frail as thyself at best, 
 
 Ca3sar himself as mortal as the rest. 
 
 Trust God ; attach thyself to Him alone ; 
 
 " How % " By conforming to His will thine own. 
 
 " Have I a fever ? " 'Tis God's will and mine, 
 
 My will a reflex of the will Divine, 
 
 His wish my wish, e'en though it be to die, 
 
 Or under torture on the rack to lie ; 
 
 Only my body have men power to kill, 
 
 Not Zeus Himself can dominate my will. 
 
 Nature produced thee noble, modest, free, 
 Wouldst thou be happy, follow her decree ; 
 Thy weal or woe she placed in thy control . 
 When she made both dependent on thy soul ; 
 Value that higher than all else besides 
 Wherein alone true happiness resides ; 
 Set not thy greatest good, thy greatest ill, 
 In aught that lies external to thy will ; 
 Eank, riches, health, may flee thee in an hour, 
 Virtue alone rests always in thy power. 
 
 How wide thy duties ! thy domain how great ! 
 All men thy brothers, and the world thy state ! 
 For all are parts of one connected whole 
 Who from one Father share His reasoning soul. 
 As member then of that great brotherhood, 
 Before thy private seek the general good. 
 
APPENDIX 235 
 
 As son or brother, whatsoe'er thou art, 
 Act in each station as becomes thy part ; 
 Thy very slave treat gently, as divine 
 God is his Father, who is also thine. 
 
 Let this thought help thee bear thy wrongs on 
 
 earth, 
 
 Error, not malice, gives injustice birth. 
 Men err from imperfection of the will, 
 'Mistaking ill for good or good for ill ; 
 The bad need pity like the deaf or blind 
 No blackness like the blackness of the mind. 
 Let not then fruitless anger fill thy breast, 
 Forgiveness, not revenge, becomes thee best. 
 For thou art human, born no savage brute ; 
 Does Nature bid thee kick, bite, execute 1 
 Nay, but to aid and benefit thy kind, 
 Endowed for this with sympathetic mind. 
 
 Xor seek from virtuous action further gain 
 Than to have done a just act or humane ; 
 Who at Olympia his strength essays 
 Seeks no reward beyond the victor's bays, 
 But thou must combat in a sterner strife, 
 The real Olympian contest is with life ; 
 No grander combat, no sublimer goal 
 Than for the sovereign freedom of thy soul. 
 As sailors to the Dioscuri kneel 
 When raging tempests toss their fragile keel, 
 So call on God thy saving aid to be, 
 Who only can be, through life's stormier sea, 
 Where false appearances the soul assail, 
 And fiercest passions blow a fiercer gale. 
 
236 APPENDIX 
 
 If such God's laws, obey them, or expect 
 The penalties assigned to their neglect ; 
 No greater (yet what greater could there be T) 
 Than to fall short of man's humanity. 
 
 Life's but a voyage ; I choose the ship, the crew, 
 Come storm, come wreck, what more have I to do 1 
 Fearless to drown, with no blaspheming cry, 
 Knowing myself a mortal, born to die. 
 To me to throw the dice ; to fate the rest ; 
 My part to use the numbers for the best. 
 My prayer but this : that death find me intent 
 On some great work, humane, benevolent, 
 Or on mine own soul's culture, so that I 
 Stretching my dying hands to God may cry : 
 " Well have I used the powers I had from Thee, 
 Thine was my life, all things Thy gift to me, 
 Freely I render, grateful for their loan, 
 To Thy disposal what was ne'er mine own, 
 In this rejoicing, that no act of mine 
 Has once disgraced Thy government Divine, 
 That never thought of mine at Thy decree 
 Has murmured blame at what was sent from Thee." 
 
 Mortal, esteem thyself not meanly blest 
 With sight and reason to have been the guest 
 At God's great festival of life and light, 
 A brief spectator of that glorious sight. 
 Admire, applaud, but when the feast is o'er, 
 Depart adoring, not demanding more ; 
 Make place for other claimants to their right 
 To all once ministrant to thy delight. 
 
APPENDIX 237 
 
 Kesist not God, His signal prompt obey, 
 Wife, children, goods, He gave who takes away ; 
 All from the first belonged to Him alone ; 
 Thou losest nothing who hast naught thine own. 
 
 These are the terms of entrance to life's show ; 
 Should they displease thee, thou art free to go ; 
 For He who bade thee bade no grumbling guest ; 
 A glad spectator pleases Him the best. 
 
 It best behoves thee tarry here below 
 Till God the signal gives that bids thee go ; 
 At longest, short the time thou must remain, 
 At greatest, small thy share of human pain. 
 But, come the worst, wide open stands the door, 
 Go, cease to suffer ; or, complain no more. 
 As little children, tired, desist from play, 
 No moment longer than thou choosest stay. 
 If only slightly smokes thy room, submit, 
 If beyond bearing thou art free to quit ; 
 God in His mercy left the egress wide ; 
 Only with reason, not in haste, decide. 
 
 When God recalls thee, go, nor be dismayed, 
 For only gods the universe pervade ; 
 No Styx nor flames of Hell await thee there, 
 Who but returnest whence thou earnest here ; 
 Thy body dead and given back to earth 
 Rejoins the elements that gave it birth ; 
 Thy soul, dissevered from its earthly chains, 
 To Soul returning, its real home regains ; 
 Death, the last refuge, ultimate release, 
 For all the portal of eternal peace. 
 
238 APPENDIX 
 
 MAECUS AUEELIUS 
 
 I 
 
 One doom, the same, for all on earth, 
 
 Oblivion for evermore ! 
 
 In endless time behind, before, 
 Thy task to make thy life of worth. 
 
 All things are borne time's stream adown 
 Too swiftly overmuch to prize ; 
 As well desire yon bird that flies, 
 
 And is no sooner seen than flown. 
 
 Across the desert's changeless face 
 
 The drifting sands still look the same ; 
 Men follow men, yet all their fame 
 
 Is constant only to their race. 
 
 Springs come and go, and from the trees 
 The fresh green leaves soon sere and fall ; 
 Like leaves we pass, and leaves are all 
 
 Who cast their praises on the breeze, 
 
 Who hold the keys of shame or fame, 
 Frail vessels, doomed themselves to die, 
 To whom we trust our memory, 
 
 And just the knowledge of our name. 
 
 Then what remains 1 This, this alone : 
 To bless the gods with reverent soul, 
 And, with broad tolerant self-control, 
 
 To make the good of all thine own ; 
 
APPENDIX 239 
 
 To live in word and thought sincere ; 
 
 To friends, to slaves, to kinsmen kind ; 
 
 Thy soul at peace, thine heart resigned 
 To all that God hath ordered here. 
 
 II 
 
 Know ; Zeus, the Greatest and the Best, 
 A portion of His glorious mind 
 Hath lent to guard and guide mankind, 
 
 A god to dwell within thy breast. 
 
 Philosophy but teaches this : 
 To reverence that God within, 
 To keep that Reason pure from sin, 
 
 In godlike calm and godlike bliss. 
 
 He fights the noblest fight, he prays 
 Best to the gods who, passionless, 
 Untouched by pleasure or distress, 
 
 Preserves his reason all his days ; 
 
 Whose soul admits no thought of shame ; 
 Who hopes no good, who fears no ill 
 From aught beyond his power or will, 
 
 From life, death, health, wealth, want, or fame ; 
 
 Who makes his soul retreat more sure 
 Than are for others hills or seas, 
 Xor seeks from trouble gentler ease 
 
 Than flows from tranquil thoughts and pure. 
 
240 APPENDIX 
 
 III 
 
 That pleases me which pleases Thee, 
 Great Universe ; I murmur not, 
 But deem the evils of my lot 
 
 Part of the world's grand harmony. 
 
 This is to follow God to bend 
 Freely and gladly to His will, 
 Without complaint, and trustful still, 
 
 Though all thine hopes in grief should end. 
 
 The gods must rule things for the best, 
 Or if the evil thought be hence 
 There are no gods, nor Providence, 
 
 And praise and prayer rise all unblest, 
 
 Still to thy Nature be thou true ; 
 Koine is thy State as Antonine, 
 But, as a man, the world is thine, 
 
 That larger State demands thee too. 
 
 Thy Nature teaches : Live for others ; 
 Like branches on the self-same tree 
 Men form but one community ; 
 
 Love thy compatriots and brothers. 
 
 Their good in all thine acts pursue ; 
 
 Live every day as if thy last ; 
 
 Thy conduct, till life's warfare's past, 
 Calm, kind, contented, just, and true. 
 
APPENDIX 241 
 
 IV 
 
 The gods, with loving, untired mind, 
 
 Long ages through, men's faults forgive ; 
 Thou, with thy few short years to live, 
 
 Learn to be patient of thy kind. 
 
 Should men injure or revile thee, 
 Eequite with love their hatred still ; 
 Show them they know not good from ill ; 
 
 Think not they wrong thee wittingly. 
 
 Thy soul, thy self, is made no worse, 
 For all the malice men may show, 
 Than is the crystal fountain's flow 
 
 Polluted by some careless curse. 
 
 Who wrongs thee, does himself the wrong ; 
 
 Forgiveness is the nobler part ; 
 
 Passion betrays the wounded heart, 
 Wrath proves thee weak, as mercy strong. 
 
 Let this thought, too, for others plead, 
 To bear their wrongs with gentleness : 
 That thou, like them, dost oft transgress, 
 
 That thine own failings pardon need. 
 
 So live thine hour ; nor count it loss 
 To go to dwell with gods above, 
 Or if there be no gods that love 
 
 To leave a world of Chance and Force. 
 16 
 
242 APPENDIX 
 
 Thy life-voyage ended, disembark, 
 And either wake to happier life, 
 Or, freed for ever from the strife, 
 
 Be thankful for the restful dark. 
 
 Death is a passage or a close ; 
 
 Each stage of life is bridged by death, 
 Each moment's giving of the breath 
 
 Prepares thee for thy last repose. 
 
 What were a few years more or less \ 
 
 The players change ; their parts are old 
 The play a thousand times retold 
 
 Were naught but grief and weariness. 
 
 What has been, is ; what is, will be ; 
 
 Things circle in a changeless groove ; 
 
 Ten thousand years in forty move ; 
 To-day contains eternity. 
 
 To each his hour. All future time 
 Will bring to bloom no lovelier rose 
 Than this spring in thy garden blows ; 
 
 No fruit more splendid at its prime. 
 
 Change is life's law, and death the last ; 
 
 Nor gods nor Nature wish thee ill ; 
 
 Where is no fault of heart or will, 
 No shame upon the soul is cast. 
 
 So wait, with patient willing heart, 
 (Thy life-post held, thy duty done), 
 The signal of thy warfare won, 
 
 The final summons to depart ; 
 
APPENDIX 243 
 
 And then, with grateful sweet content, 
 As the ripe olive falls to earth 
 Blessing the tree which gave it birth, 
 
 To Nature render what she lent. 
 
 SENECA 
 
 If, with our reason we attempt to scan 
 Of this great world the fundamental plan, 
 We reach at last one all-pervading Soul 
 God, who created and preserves the whole, 
 First Cause of causes. Call Him as we will, 
 Fate, Chance, or Providence proclaim Him still ; 
 His presence fills His whole creation's frame, 
 And God and Nature differ but in name ; 
 The myriad phases of His single might 
 The gods but show in number infinite ; 
 Though Jove or Bacchus serve Him for a name, 
 Under a thousand names He rests the same. 
 
 Who rightly know God, worship Him the best, 
 His power no greater than His love confessed ; 
 No need to raise to Heaven thine hands in prayer, 
 Or vex with foolish vows an idol's ear, 
 God is close to thee, ever at thy side, 
 With thee, within thee, witness, guardian, guide ; 
 Naught it avails to hide thyself from men, 
 No thought nor act is hidden from His ken. 
 He needs no temples reared aloft of stone, 
 Who in each hallowed heart prefers His throne ; 
 He asks no reeking victims at thine hand ; 
 A soul pure, upright, is His sole demand. 
 
244 APPENDIX 
 
 We do God wrong to fear Him ; love alone 
 Is due to Him by whom but love is shown. 
 The gods are good, the source of nothing ill, 
 Nor could they injure, even with the will ; 
 Man from the first has been their constant care, 
 Their aim his welfare, and their guide his prayer : 
 'Tis not their anger shakes the earth, nor tears 
 The skies with tempests or men's hearts with fears. 
 
 If God thus rules, how comes it, some complain, 
 The good are not exempt from grief and pain, 
 But suffer countless variants of woe 
 Which oft the wicked neither feel nor know 1 
 Enlarge thy vision, and this truth thou'lt see, 
 Wretched they may be called, but cannot be ; 
 From all real evils God protects them still 
 Who count no evils real but those of will. 
 The good as special objects of His love 
 God fits by trial for their life above, 
 The more the ills wherewith they have to strive, 
 The more the force wherewith their virtues thrive ; 
 Nor less the salt sea changes for the rain 
 Than they from evil feel or take the stain. 
 
 The gods give life, Philosophy gives more, 
 Teaching to live that life by virtue's law. 
 Wouldst thou from all man's greater ills live free, 
 Give thyself wholly to Philosophy ; 
 Thy soul to all, by God ordained, resigned, 
 Thy conduct ruled by love for all mankind. 
 Make, like the gods, beneficence thine end, 
 Freely for others thy best powers expend ; 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 245 
 
 The want or burthen under which they groan 
 At thine own cost and labour make thine own. 
 Nor let thy native country bound thy zeal, 
 But deem the world itself thy commonweal ; 
 Let thy forbearance no exception know, 
 Xor grudge the asked-for mercy to thy foe ; 
 Shelter the exile, liberate the slave, 
 Here from misfortune, there from hunger save. 
 Though man, ungrateful, doubts the gods' goodwill, 
 True to their nature they shed blessings still ; 
 Despite of all thy gifts bestowed in vain, 
 Like them, unwearied, freely give again. 
 
 Count all men equal, fellow-slaves of fate, 
 One common bondage holds us, small or great ; 
 Nobles or slaves all have one origin, 
 One common Father makes us all akin ; 
 And all alike, or high or low our birth, 
 One common Virtue makes of equal worth. 
 Man's mind, not birth, determines his degree ; 
 No slave so mean but virtue sets him free. 
 What if his body's bound ! His soul can rise 
 On wings of thought unfettered to the skies. 
 What if his body's bought ! His soul is free ; 
 No servitude can mar its liberty. 
 Deem that not held by local bounds of space 
 Which has the universe for dwelling-place ; 
 Nor bound by time, which has the power to see 
 Through ages past and ages yet to be. 
 
 Nature made Virtue man's chief aim and goal 
 When she made Conscience mistress of his soul, 
 
246 APPENDIX 
 
 For all our good deeds no more grateful praise 
 
 Than that which conscience to itself conveys ; 
 
 No penalty for crime we have to fear 
 
 Worse than an injured conscience makes us bear. 
 
 Virtue calls all, and easy of access, 
 
 Spreads smooth the road that leads to happiness ; 
 
 Mountains may crumble, Etna fall away, 
 
 True virtue only suffers no decay, 
 
 But, like the stars, bright with eternal light, 
 
 Still guards the same unalterable height, 
 
 Whereon as harmless as on seas the rain 
 
 Falls with full force misfortune, grief, or pain. 
 
 It takes no increase from reward or praise, 
 
 Nor weighs felicity by length of days, 
 
 But from the moments of each act sublime 
 
 Enjoys the fulness of eternal time. 
 
 For good, not long, life is the wise man's prayer ; 
 Not when, but how, he dies, his only care. 
 Too high the price at which life may be bought ; 
 He lives not whilst he can, but whilst he ought, 
 Holding it true, that each man rightly dies 
 Who thus from danger to right living flies. 
 To live in na one's power to man alone 
 God gave by placing death within his own, 
 With this great solace softening every ill, 
 That no man's held to life against his will. 
 Should o'er thy reason ceaseless pain prevail, 
 Or cureless malady thy strength assail, 
 Should age take from thee all of life but breath, 
 What nearer refuge couldst thou wish than death 1 
 
APPENDIX 247 
 
 Nor few the roads that lead to liberty 
 
 Yon precipice, well, river, or the sea ; 
 
 From all incurable disease or pain 
 
 An easy outlet flows through every vein. 
 
 Yet shouldst thou still, for love of friend or wife, 
 
 Bear to its end at worst the load of life ; 
 
 No greater proof of love that thou canst give 
 
 Than for another to consent to live. 
 
 But of the evils which we suffer here 
 The worst are those our follies make us bear. 
 What greater madness than for no just cause 
 To rush to senseless sanguinary wars, 
 And at a price for peace itself too dear 
 Ten thousand evils to inflict and bear 1 
 If wild beasts kill, 'tis not without a cause, 
 Hunger or vengeance whets their teeth and claws ; 
 But man alone, endowed with gentler mind, 
 Joys in the causeless bloodshed of his kind. 
 No bounds our cruel avarice heeds or knows, 
 For lust of gain we make the world our foes ; 
 Deeds which as crimes are branded by the law 
 Whole senates sanction or command in war, 
 And murders foul for which the felon dies 
 Done by the soldier all applaud and prize. 
 
 Death has no after terrors for the wise ; 
 No flaming rivers haunt his closing eyes ; 
 For him mere faftles all that poets tell 
 Of future judgments, or of pains in Hell ; 
 For him the faith, that death or ends all woes 
 Or leads to life exempt from grief or close. 
 
248 APPENDIX 
 
 Of these two ends (no third or worse in view) 
 'Tis fair and best to hope the brighter true : 
 That life's a prelude to a happier state, 
 Where brighter destinies, thy soul await. 
 The day thou fearest as thy last on earth, 
 Of life immortal is the day of birth. 
 Then shall thy soul, freed from the body's chain, 
 Its birthplace, Heaven, purified regain, 
 Finding no strangeness in that boundless air, 
 Where first it sojourned ere it sojourned here ; 
 There shall thy mind in greater light, not less, 
 Trace Nature's secrets to their last recess, 
 Learn the great mystery of that wondrous force 
 Which set the stars, and keeps them, in their course 
 And mindful still of those whom late it fled, 
 Hold commune with the spirits of the dead. 
 
 So count the dead not lost for evermore ; 
 They have not left us, only gone before. 
 The death that severs, does not end, our love, 
 Who are but pilgrims to a home above, 
 Where, reunited, neither hill nor plain, 
 Distance nor discord, shall divide again. 
 
 Nor mourn the shortness of the life of man ; 
 The world itself endures but for a span. 
 Not man alone declines from stage to stage ; 
 The very stars advance from youth to age ; 
 The time may differ, but the law is one 
 Which kills a mortal or puts out a sun. 
 Nor hold for perished any life that's closed ; 
 Nothing is ended, only decomposed. 
 
APPENDIX 249 
 
 Things pass from life to life, and nothing dies 
 But life itself to some fresh form supplies. 
 So, too, when God, destroying every trace 
 That ever proved the presence of our race, 
 By flame or flood, shall once again disperse 
 Back to its elements this universe, 
 Another world shall from that ruin rise, 
 And other stars shed splendour from the skies, 
 Then shall another race their course begin, 
 Blameless of crime and innocent of sin, 
 And all things else shall come again to birth 
 To glory in a renovated earth. 
 
 EPICURUS 
 
 Wouldst thou as man live truly free 1 
 Then, setting store by naught beside 
 Of all that claims to aid or guide, 
 
 Serve as a slave Philosophy. 
 
 To these two things alone thy prayer 
 Of all men covet be confined : 
 A body free from pain ; a mind 
 
 Unruffled by desire or care. 
 
 Avoid to mingle in the strife 
 
 That rages round the helm of State, 
 But, undisturbed by praise or hate, 
 
 Live out the nobler hidden life. 
 
250 APPENDIX 
 
 Pleasure is all men's aim and goal ; 
 
 They find it most who seek it least, 
 
 Less in the riot or the feast 
 Than in contentment of the soul. 
 
 Happy his life who asks but this ; 
 No fortune can his peace destroy, 
 Loud shall he still proclaim his joy 
 
 Though in the bull of Phalaris. 
 
 Full rich is he who seeks no more 
 Than Nature to his need supplies ; 
 He who, with much, for more still sighs, 
 
 Though master of the world is poor ; 
 
 And many they who live to find, 
 In riches heaped up year by year, 
 Changed, but not ended, all their care, 
 
 And new the trouble of their mind. 
 
 They badly live who life begin 
 
 With each fresh hope that Chance inspires, 
 And with ne'er-satisfied desires 
 
 Count nothing won, but all to win. 
 
 For few there be who come to die 
 But part from life as just begun, 
 Counting their course as still to run, 
 
 Regardless of the years that fly. 
 
 Nor wise are they who trembling view 
 The chances of the days to be, 
 And like the ever-changing sea, 
 
 Each day begin their lives anew. 
 
APPENDIX 251 
 
 But greater folly still is theirs 
 
 Who, tired of life, cut short its thread, 
 If to this consequence has led 
 
 Mere misuse of the passing years. 
 
 Be thou more grateful for thy past ; 
 
 Count all wherewith thou hast been blest 
 Though past, not gone, but still possessed, 
 
 Thy best possession to the last ; 
 
 And, to live well thy span of days, 
 Hold some good man in memory, 
 And deeming him still watching thee, 
 
 His blame eschew, deserve his praise. 
 
 When round thee throngs the multitude 
 With pressure of its speech and law, 
 Then chiefly in thyself withdraw 
 
 And in thy soul seek solitude. 
 
 Leave to the crowd its faiths, its fears, 
 
 Its dread of angry gods on high ; 
 
 The gods in calm passivity 
 Care naught for praises nor for prayers. 
 
 Leave to the crowd its fears of death, 
 
 Or terrors that beyond may lie ; 
 
 The worst can come to all who die 
 Is but cessation of the breath. 
 
 Who thus will his desires confine 
 To healthful sense and fearless soul, 
 Holds happiness in his control 
 
 And leads as man the life divine. 
 
252 APPENDIX 
 
 PLUTAKCH ON SUPERSTITION 
 
 Few of the ills we mortals bear 
 Excel or equal those we fear ; 
 But worst his lot of all mankind 
 Whom superstitious terrors bind. 
 He dreads no storm who stays on shore, 
 Nor battle, who goes not to war ; 
 But he who thinks of God with dread 
 Has terror always overhead, 
 And draws one long unending fear 
 Alike from land, and sea, and air. 
 For him no respite nor release, 
 For him in sleep itself no peace, 
 Sleep from which even felons gain 
 A moment's respite from their pain ; 
 New torments each fresh night supplies 
 New fears from each last dream arise. 
 
 A slave may always hope to find 
 A master of a gentler mind ; 
 But he who fears the gods above, 
 Who reads malevolence for love, 
 Who dreads that Power to whom we owe 
 The countless blessings here we know, 
 And for whose aid in prayer we plead 
 To excellence in thought and deed, 
 That man, fly wheresoe'er he will, 
 His tyranny shall hold him still. 
 
 Death to his misery sets no end 
 Whose fears beyond this life extend, 
 
APPENDIX 253 
 
 Who after all life's ills are past 
 Dreads never-ending ones at last ; 
 In Hell before him yawning wide 
 Sees all known pains intensified, 
 Shudders at streams of liquid fire, 
 Grim spectres, judges, tortures dire, 
 From such vain fancies suffering more 
 Than ever from real ills he bore. 
 
 Not such the atheist, whose mind 
 To all Divinity is blind ; 
 Blind where it least becomes to be, 
 Blind where it most concerns to see, 
 Not knowing aught of God above, 
 Who rules us with a Father's love. 
 For him exist no powers divine ; 
 No need to heed them, if benign ; 
 Beneath misfortune's rude assault 
 At least he holds no gods at fault, 
 But frets at worst at Chance or Fate, 
 Whose blows he yet may palliate, 
 Nor looks, for all he may endure, 
 Beyond himself for cause or cure. 
 
 But he who deems no chance so slight 
 But Providence had him in sight, 
 Who, if his body somewhat ails, 
 Or children die, or fortune fails, 
 Of sinners cries himself the worst, 
 Of God and angels both accursed, 
 Accepts his malady or grief 
 As penalty beyond relief, 
 
254 APPENDIX 
 
 In sackcloth courts the public gaze, 
 
 Rolls prostrate, sacrifices, prays, 
 
 If haply so he may atone 
 
 For the great sin that makes him groan, 
 
 In that he tasted such a meat, 
 
 Or found perchance such wine too sweet ; 
 
 What can one such a man proclaim 
 
 But atheist in all but name ? 
 
 For God exists against his will 
 
 Who charges Him with every ill, 
 
 And fear, not love, inspires his prayer 
 
 Who fain would doubt could he but dare. 
 
 If irreligion thrives on earth, 
 'Twas superstition gave it birth ; 
 No faults in Nature led mankind 
 To doubt in God, whose ruling mind 
 First gave and still supplies the force 
 That moves the stars in ordered course, 
 That through fixed seasons draws the year 
 Turns day to night, makes trees to bear ; 
 No imperfections here gave rise 
 To disbelief and dark surmise, 
 No, 'twas the foolishness of priests, 
 The services of slaughtered beasts, 
 The long procession wending slow 
 Round altars with dull chants of woe, 
 The senseless charm, the magic prayer, 
 The penances of sinful fear, 
 The body smeared with mud, to show 
 The whiteness of the soul below ; 
 
APPENDIX 255 
 
 These were the things that made men say 
 
 Better no gods to whom to pray 
 
 Than gods like those to whom the crowd 
 
 In this vile servitude is bowed ; 
 
 Gods of no higher nobler worth 
 
 Than their mean worshippers on earth. 
 
 Were it not better if the Gaul 
 Believed there were no gods at all 
 Than in his terror feigned them such 
 That naught but human blood can touch 
 Their hearts with pity, or assuage 
 The fire of their remorseless rage 1 
 Or what of that worst scene of vice, 
 The Carthaginian sacrifice, 
 When round the image of the god 
 The pious crowd exultant trod, 
 And mothers gave, nor thought it shame, 
 Their little ones to feed the flame 
 In Saturn's honour, whilst the sound 
 Of hymn, and prayer, and music drowned 
 The feeble unavailing cry 
 Of infants doomed for God to die ? 
 Ah ! better had they never heard 
 The name of God than thus been stirred 
 To make the glory of His name 
 The pretext for their deeds of shame ! 
 
 The sage, who thought the sun to be 
 A stone, was charged with blasphemy, 
 But none would the Cimmerians blame 
 For calling it an empty name ; 
 
256 APPENDIX 
 
 And so, methinks, they wrong God less 
 Who doubt or disbelief confess 
 Than they who worse of God believe 
 Than of a man they could conceive, 
 And every^vice to Him assign 
 To prove Him fickle, false, malign ; 
 As I would rather men should say 
 " There is no Plutarch " than that they 
 Should speak of Plutarch as so mean, 
 So full of petty spite and spleen, 
 That, if you vexed him in the least, 
 Into your crops he'd turn his beast. 
 
 From superstition then to flee 
 Should he resolve who would live free, 
 And shunning piety's excess 
 To shun its contrary no less, 
 Careful to hold that golden mean 
 Which lies the two extremes between, 
 Not negligent of Him whose care 
 Is round us always everywhere, 
 Nor serving Him like slaves, whose zeal 
 But indicates the fear they feel 
 But worshipping with pious trust 
 The All-beneficent and Just, 
 Love the sole tribute to be paid 
 For all the love to us displayed. 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh. 
 
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