Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

Retracing the ground we have traversed, we find that the Church, between the Day of Pentecost and the Edict of Toleration, passed unscathed and victorious through five great trials, which were calculated to test to the utmost the power vested in her. Two of these conflicts – that with Judaism and that with heresy – were internal, and three – the conflict with idolatry, that with Greek and Oriental philosophy, and that with the civil power of the Roman Empire – were external. Moreover, while one of these conflicts – that with the enmity of the unbelieving Jews, and the spirit which urged the obligation of the ceremonial law upon the Christian Church – raged chiefly in the first forty years, and was greatly assuaged in its influence by the destruction of the city and temple of Jerusalem, the remaining four contests lasted continuously, and acted with collective force against the Church during the whole period. For as to heresy, it was rife from the time of the Apostles themselves. Those who became Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles, were all themselves exposed to the danger of intellectual and moral seduction: we find, indeed, that some of the most distinguished converts yielded to it, such as Tatian and Tertullian. Those especially who in middle age had passed over from heathen customs and a youth perhaps spent in the study of Hellenic literature and philosophy into the Christian confession, would naturally remain all their lives liable to the danger of false teaching, if they were not guarded from it by the utmost purity of life, and not only sincerity but humility of mind. Certainly no period of the Church’s history shows a greater number of sects than this.

Another enemy which the Church had from the beginning, and which continued in the utmost force through the whole time, was idolatry, and that whole contexture of life of which it was first the prolific source, then the vigilant nurse and the constant support. Every part of Gentile life was flavoured by the spirit of the false worship – the passions of the young, the ambitions of middle life, the avarice of age. Its power was all around the Church, to corrupt morals, to pervert belief, to sensualise worship. As we have seen above, Christian writers dwell upon the fact that vast numbers of those who became Christians had previously been stained with heathen vices: those who had yielded to all manner of sensual passions became chaste: those who had revelled in pride of intellect became humble. But what a force of opposition to the spread of the Christian religion did the moral state of the great cities in which it had its principal seats present! Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth and Carthage were the very centres of all moral corruption when the Christian seed was dropped upon them. This glamour of the heathen life was an enemy the intensity and ubiquity of whose power lasted without intermission from the beginning to the end of the time.

From the beginning likewise to the end the heathen philosophy, whether Greek or Oriental, or in that amalgam of both which probably formed the texture of cultured minds in this period, was a most dangerous and influential foe. Against this also the Apostles themselves warn their converts. From a very early time indeed the Gnostic sects put up the pantheistic unity of the philosophic God against the Christian Trinity in Unity. They tried to convert the Divine Logos into an æon. Led by their doctrine that the essential seat of evil was in matter, they attacked Christ in His human nature, denying the verity of His Body. They constructed divine theogonies with all the brilliance of the Eastern imagination and all the cleverness of Greek subtilty; and many who resisted the foulness of heathen idolatry were led away by fantastic schemes of spiritual unity – by pantheism in one of its many shapes. This enemy also lasted through the whole period: the Gnostic systems passed into the Neoplatonic, perhaps the most dangerous enemy which the Church encountered in the three hundred years, and Arianism itself was but a modification of Gnostic error.

But heresy, idolatry, and philosophy were helped throughout by that jealousy of the Civil Power, the most marked perhaps in the best rulers, such as Trajan and Decius, which abhorred above all things the formation of an independent religious community in its bosom. How would an emperor of cultivated tastes and incessant curiosity, such as Hadrian, exult over the divisions of heresies and the varying systems of philosophy, looking down on them all from his superior height! Irenæus observed that heresies had no martyrs – the State did not persecute them. And philosophy did not die for its belief; its essence was free thought – that is, the license to change to-morrow what it asserted to-day. But how would a monarchy which scrupled to authorise a guild of firemen in a provincial city, lest it should form the nucleus of a secret society, abhor the growth of a Church which had its centre in Rome and a governor in every city, bound to the centre at Rome by the accord of a common faith, a common worship, and the undivided rule of a single people, the corpus Christianorum! Therefore heresy, idolatry, and philosophy were the friends and allies of the Civil Power throughout this time. It patronised them, and it could use all their influence, their resources, and their intellect against the insurgent Church, while all the time it had at its command every punishment which force can inflict on those who disregard the laws of an empire. To be a Christian was to violate the Roman majestas.

Over against these five enemies the Church received her spiritual authority from the Person of her Lord; she planted it through her episcopate over the earth; she maintained her one doctrine in the teaching of that episcopate, her one worship in the sacrifice which it everywhere offered; she worked out her independence in her organic growth of structure, in the mode of her teaching, in her resistance to error of every sort and kind; and, finally, the empire which had used every arm against her, acknowledged her doctrine, her worship, and her government, and her essential independence in all these as the kingdom of Christ, when Constantine appeared at the Nicene Council, not to control, but to carry into effect its decision, and when he wrote concerning it, “The sentence of the three hundred bishops is nothing else but the decision of God; especially since the Holy Spirit, by His action upon the minds of such men, has brought into full light the divine will.”²¹⁰

When the Emperor of Rome, the successor of Tiberius, gave official utterance to such words, he showed that the blood of martyrs shed through ten generations, the endurance of confessors, the labours of priests who refused the joys of domestic life in their imitation of the Virgin’s Son, the continence of those who carried out in themselves the vow of the Virgin Mother of that Son, and what is included in all these, the generation of the Christian people, had done their appointed work; and so the kingdom of Cæsar recognised the kingdom of Christ.