Just at the end of this time, on the point of being thrown into prison, whence he only emerged to martyrdom, Paul was at Rome with Peter, and he describes in imperishable words the work which had been already accomplished. Again it is not only dogma but history, not only that which was always to be but that which already was, which he set forth as it were with his dying voice: the one Body, and the one Spirit, the one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism, as there is one God. That Body in which Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers were fixed, that the visible structure might grow up to its final stature, in whose accordant unity was the perpetual safeguard against error. When Paul so wrote,294 the Body was formed, and its headship was incontestably with Peter. He had no need to remind them of the man with whom he was labouring, of whose work the whole Church from Rome to Antioch and Alexandria was the fruit. But he places the maintenance of truth, and the perpetual fountain of grace, in the unity of the Church, which was before those to whom he wrote an accomplished fact.
Two generations pass and the aged S. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom, attests the same fact. “Where is Jesus Christ,” he says, “there is the Catholic Church.” The King is in His Kingdom; the Master in His House; the Lord in His Temple. The bishops throughout the world inseparably linked together are His mind: and the presidency of charity, which is the inner life of all this spiritual empire, is at Rome. S. Ignatius and the author of the letter to Diognetus write just after the expiration of the apostolic period; and they both regard Christians as one mass throughout the world, living under a divine form of spiritual government. No one who studies their words can doubt that the one Body and the one Spirit were as visible to their eyes and as dear to their heart as to S. Paul.
We pass two generations further and S. Irenæus repeats the same testimony. The interval has been filled by incessant attacks of heresies, and the Bishop of Lyons dwells upon the fact that the Church speaks with one voice through all the regions of the earth as being one House of God, and that the seat of this its unity is in the great See founded by the Princes of the Apostles at Rome. He reproduces at great length the statements of S. Paul that the safeguard of truth lies in the one apostolic ministry, for which he runs up to the fountain-head in Rome. It is in the living voice and the teaching office of the Church that he sees a perpetual preservative against whatever error may arise. Thus it has been up to his time, and thus it will ever be.
Another period of seventy years runs on, and we come to the just-cited testimony of Cyprian, who therefore said nothing new, nor anything exaggerated; but when the truth was assailed in its very citadel, he spoke out and described wherein its strength lay. He gathers up and gives expression to the two hundred and twenty years between the day of Pentecost and his own time. Here are the creative words of our Apostle and High-priest explained and attested and exhibited as having passed into fact by four witnesses, first S. Paul, then S. Ignatius, thirdly S. Irenæus, fourthly S. Cyprian. Between all the five there is no shadow of divergence, between the Master who designed the building and the servants who described its erection; between the Prophet who foretold and the historians who recorded. The one said, Upon this rock I will build my Church; the others pointed out that the work was accomplished.
The original and fundamental conception of all this work is expressed by S. Matthew and S. Mark when they speak of our Lord at His first going forth as “proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.” His three years' ministry is the germ and type of the perpetual mission which He founded. It was to be from first to last a work of personal ministry, beginning from above, not spreading from below; its power and virtue descending from Him through those whom He chose, the people being the work of the Prince, their government a delegation from Him, as their moral condition lay in following Him, and their life and support in feeding on Him. And He declared that the original conception should be carried out to the end, and that “the gospel of the kingdom” should be proclaimed through the whole world as a witness to all nations, until the consummation should come.295
The chief events of the third century brought out more and more the unity of the Church and the Primacy of S. Peter's See as the power within the Church by which that unity is produced and maintained.
With this century the great persecutions begin. That of Septimius Severus arose in the year 202. Now a persecution which assaulted the mass of Christians was the occasion of fall and apostasy to some, of martyrdom to others. Hence the question became urgent how those should be treated by the Christian society who through fear of suffering had failed to maintain the confession of their faith. It was necessary to lay down more distinctly rules as to what crimes should be admitted to penance, and what that penance should be. The practice here involved doctrine; it raised immediately the question of the power which the society itself had to grant pardon, and to receive the guilty back into its bosom. And here the authority of the chief Bishop was at once called out. We find as a matter of fact Pope Zephyrinus in the first years of this century determining the rules of penance, and a small party of rigid disciplinarians, among whom Tertullian was conspicuous, who considered his rules as too indulgent. It is in the vehement pamphlet with which Tertullian assails the Pope that we have one of the earliest expressions of the great authority claimed by him. “I hear,” he exclaims, “that an edict has been set forth, and a peremptory one. The Pontifex Maximus, in sooth, that is, the Bishop of Bishops, issues his edict: I pardon to those who have discharged their penance the sins both of adultery and of fornication.”296 Twenty years later Pope Callistus carried the indulgence yet further, receiving to penance those who had committed murder or idolatry.297 Once more, after a period of thirty years, the breaking out of the Decian persecution raised afresh the question of admitting great sinners to penance, and the actual discipline of the Roman Church, as established under Zephyrinus and Callistus, is set forth in a letter to Cyprian by Novatian, then one of the most esteemed presbyters of that church. By the discipline which these facts attest it is determined that the Church has lodged in her the power of pardoning any sin whatsoever according to the rules of the penance which she imposes. And it is the Roman Church which herein takes the guidance. She maintained the ancient faith, severity, and discipline, yet tempered with that consideration which the full possession of the truth alone bestows.298 Thus she received back without hesitation those who returned from heresy or schism, as well as those who had fallen in the conflict with persecution.
For another question of great importance which her guidance determined was that concerning the rebaptisation of heretics; and in this she went against the judgment of Cyprian with his council, of Firmilian, and of other bishops. It had been the custom that those who had received baptism among heretics, provided it was with the proper rite, should, when they sought admission into the Church, be received only by an imposition of hands, not by the iteration of baptism. And though Cyprian and a great majority of African bishops, through their horror of schism and heresy, wished to modify this rule, and to insist that baptism given outside the Church was invalid, Pope Stephen resisted, and maintained the ancient rule, with the decision that nothing save what had been handed down should be done.
It is evident that the question of penance and that of rebaptisation touched the whole Christian society, and here accordingly we find the superior Principate of the Roman Church exert itself. In fact, the right decision as to both these questions involved the right conception of the Church herself, her constitution, power, and prerogatives. The rigorism299 with which some had endeavoured to exclude certain sinners from the faculty of receiving penance, and the view which led them to confine the validity itself of baptism to its reception within the one Church, led when fully developed in the following century to the obstinate schism and heresy of the Donatists. These dangerous tendencies were resisted, when they first appeared, by the Roman See, and we owe to such resistance the application by Tertullian to the Pope of the title of “Pontifex Maximus” and “Bishop of Bishops,” about the year 202, as the expression of the power which he then claimed and exercised.
Another question likewise touching the whole Christian society, which the Roman Pontiff had already decided against the practice of the influential and ancient churches of Asia Minor, was the time of holding Easter. Pope Victor insisted that the practice of the Roman Church must be followed, which kept the day of the Crucifixion invariably on the Friday, and that of the Resurrection on the Sunday, and not the Jewish practice of the Asiatics, which took the 14th and the 16th days of the month Nisan, on whatever days of the week they might fall, for that purpose. And here in the peremptory tone of Pope Victor, and in the threat of excommunication which he issued, the consciousness was shown that the right to determine lay with him, while subsequent times justified his judgment and followed it. Nor was it of little importance that the greatest festival of the Church should be celebrated by all her children both on the same day and in the same spirit.
We have then now traced up to the end of the third century the inner growth and constituent principles of that great institution, which out of every language, tribe, and religion in the empire or beyond it had formed and welded together one people, the bearer of that Truth and that Grace which the Son of God in assuming manhood had conveyed to the world. It remains rapidly to review the relations of the empire with this people during seventy-eight years, from the death of Alexander Severus in 235 to the edict of toleration in 313.
II. The seizure of the empire by Maximin was accompanied by a violent attack upon Christians, whom Alexander was held to have favoured. It is on this occasion that we learn from Origen300 that churches were burnt, and thus their existence as public buildings is attested. The clergy were especially threatened, and amongst them Ambrosius, the friend of Origen, and Origen himself. But Maximin after reigning three years with extraordinary cruelty was slain by his own soldiers. And then during eleven years a period of comparative tranquillity for Christians ensued.
It is with the accession of Decius that the severest trials of the Church commence. In the sixty-four years which elapse from this to the edict of toleration, the force of the empire is five times directed by its rulers against the Christian name. The cause of this is disclosed to us by S. Cyprian mentioning incidentally the very words of that emperor whose name is associated with the bitterest hatred to Christians. He praises Pope Cornelius,301 who when Pope “Fabian's place, that is,” he says, “the place of Peter and the rank of the sacerdotal chair was vacant,” “sat fearless in that chair at Rome at the moment when the tyrant who hated God's priests uttered every horrible threat, and with much more patience and endurance heard the rise of a rival prince than the appointment of God's priest at Rome.” But why should Decius regard with such dislike the nomination of a Roman Bishop? Why, but that the emperors had now come clearly to discern the organisation of the Church as a visible kingdom of Christ, at the head of which the Roman Bishop stood. That kingdom, the whole moral and religious doctrine of which, together with the life founded upon it, they felt to be in contradiction with the heathen life and the maxims of polity on which from time immemorial the empire had been based, that kingdom Decius saw to be summed up and represented in him who held, to use the words of Cyprian, “Peter's place.” With that religious association which Decius saw extending round him on every side, and gradually drawing into its bosom the best of the two sexes, there was no way of dealing but either to yield to those new maxims which it set forth, or to destroy it. In proportion as the emperors were zealous for the worship of the Roman gods, and instinct with the old discipline of the state, they inclined to the latter alternative, and none more decisively than Decius, who prided himself on following the spirit of Trajan. The persecution which he set on foot reached and slew Pope Fabian, and caused the election of a successor to be deferred for sixteen months. When at the end of that time Cornelius was chosen, Cyprian praises him “as to be reckoned among the glorious confessors and martyrs, who sat so long awaiting his butchers, ready either to slay him with the sword, or crucify him, or burn him, or tear open and maim his body with any unheard-of kind of punishment.”302 Decius indeed was slain by the Goths in battle after less than two years' reign, but the persecution was renewed by Gallus, and again by Valerian, so that in ten years no less than five Pontiffs, holding that place of Peter, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius, Stephen, and Sistus, offered up their lives for the faith. Then it was that the ten years' noble episcopate of S. Cyprian after many minor sufferings ended in martyrdom: and then too the deacon Laurence wore out in the agony of fire all the malignity of the enemy, and gained his almost matchless crown.303
The state of things which immediately preceded this grand attack of the empire on the Church is thus described by Cyprian in the interval which followed the persecution of Decius and preceded that of Gallus; and the words of one who not only taught but died for his teaching carry with them no common force. “As long repose had corrupted the discipline which had come down to us from God, the divine judgment awakened our faith from a declining, and if I may so speak an almost slumbering state; and whereas we deserved yet more for our sins, the most merciful Lord has so moderated all, that what has passed has seemed rather a trial of what we were than an actual infliction. Everyone was applying himself to the increase of wealth, and forgetting both what was the conduct of believers under the Apostles, and what ought to be their conduct in every age, they with insatiable eagerness for gain devoted themselves to the multiplying of possessions. The priests were wanting in religious devotedness; the ministers in entireness of faith; there was no mercy in works, no discipline in manners. Men wore their beards disfigured, and women stained their complexion with a dye. The eyes were changed from what God made them, and a lying colour was passed upon the hair. The hearts of the simple were misled by treacherous artifices, and brethren became entangled in seductive snares; ties of marriage were formed with unbelievers; members of Christ abandoned to the heathen. Not only rash swearing was heard, but even false; persons in high place were swollen with contemptuousness; poisoned reproaches fell from their mouths; and men were sundered by unabating quarrels. Numerous bishops, who ought to be an encouragement and example to others, despising their sacred calling, engaged themselves in secular vocations, relinquished their chair, deserted their people, strayed among foreign provinces, hunted the markets for mercantile profits, tried to amass large sums of money, while they had brethren starving within the Church, took possession of estates by fraudulent proceedings, and multiplied their gains by accumulated usuries.”304
Such was the end of the long peace which succeeded the persecution of Septimius Severus, and yet it was followed at once by that ten years' conflict which if stained with apostasies at first, soon became rife in martyrdoms. And as the former relaxation seems to prove that the third century among Christians was no ideal time in which moral corruptions and abuses did not largely exist, so the improvement which trial and suffering at once produced, calling forth some of the greatest triumphs which the Faith has ever known, seems to indicate that the divine power of the Church lies not in forming a community free from imperfections, or even secured from scandals, but in building up a portion of her children to sanctity. At all times the wheat and the chaff lie together on her threshing-floor, and the flail of suffering winnows them. But those who seek for a time when all professing believers were saints, will find it neither when the Apostles taught nor afterwards.
The Emperor Valerian, after being during four years more kindly disposed to Christians than any preceding emperor, and after filling his palace with them, was instigated by an Egyptian magician into becoming a most bitter persecutor.305 This was ended in less than three years through his capture by the Persian monarch, when his son Gallienus restored the sacred places to the Christians, and ordered the bishops not to be disturbed.306 The empire during the following eight years seemed through the supineness of Gallienus to be on the point of dissolution; it is the time when nineteen commanders in various provinces assume the purple, and successively perish. At last Gallienus is put out of the way by a council of officers, and the empire is restored by Claudius and by Aurelian. The latter, after being for some years fair to Christians, ends by persecuting them. But he too is speedily removed by death. It is remarkable that all these persecutions, by Maximin, by Decius, by Gallus, by Valerian, and by Aurelian, are of short duration: none of them continue more than three years. After Aurelian's death in 275 a whole generation ensues in which Christians by the ordinary operation of the empire's laws, according to which their religion was illicit, were liable to suffer much in individual cases. Thus it is in a time not reckoned persecuting, shortly after Maximianus had been made his colleague in the empire by Diocletian, that one of the most merciless acts of tyrannical cruelty took place, which gave an occasion for several thousand men at once to offer up their lives. Unresisting victims, yet brave soldiers with arms in their hands, they endured two decimations, and when remonstrance had proved in vain, piled their arms, and let themselves be massacred to the last man rather than violate their conscience. The place where they suffered took the name of their heroic captain, Maurice; the churches of that Alpine valley to this day bear witness by his figure over their altars to that most illustrious act of Christian sacrifice: and beside the place of their repose rises still a monastery which for thirteen hundred and fifty years has guarded the sepulture of a legion of martyrs, and is become one of the most ancient Christian houses of prayer.
It cannot be doubted that in the last twenty-five years of the third century the number of Christians was being largely increased, and moreover they were daily gaining the higher ranks of society. Diocletian had reigned for eighteen years, and seemed effectually to have stopped that incessant succession of soldiers gaining the throne by assassination and yielding it in turn to their assassins, which for fifty years threatened to destroy the state. At such a moment it was that Diocletian, belying all the past conduct of his life, let loose against the Christian Church the last, the fiercest, and the longest of the heathen persecutions.
It was in truth scarcely less than the rending in pieces the whole social framework when a proclamation of the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, in the year 303, declared that the Christian Faith should cease to exist. How entirely that faith had now penetrated all ranks was shown in Diocletian's own household, wherein his most trusted307 chamberlains, beloved as his children, were cruelly tortured because they refused to worship the heathen gods, while his wife Prisca and his daughter Valeria purchased immunity for the present by compliance. We have the emperor described by an eye-witness of those times as himself sitting in judgment,308 and putting men to the torture of fire. The same power was delegated to the governors throughout the provinces. “It was,” says Eusebius, “the nineteenth year of Diocletian's reign, in the month of March, when the festival of the Lord's Passion was drawing near, that imperial edicts were everywhere published, ordering the churches to be levelled, the scriptures to be burnt, those of rank to be deprived of it, the common people, if they remained faithful, to be reduced to slavery. This was the first edict against us; another soon came enjoining that all those who ruled the churches should first be imprisoned, and then by every means compelled to sacrifice.”309 Lactantius adds that every action at law was to proceed against Christians, while they should not be allowed to claim the law for any wrong inflicted, or spoliation suffered, or dishonour done to their wives.310 Many in consequence of these edicts suffered willingly terrible torments: many others at first gave way. What these torments were Eusebius describes: some were beaten; some torn with hooks.311 “It is impossible to say how many and how great martyrs of Christ might be seen in every city and country.” A man of the highest rank in Nicomedia from an impulse of zeal when the edict first appeared tore it down: he was seized, and not merely tortured but slowly roasted alive,312 which he bore with unflinching patience, preserving joyousness and tranquillity to his last breath. The emperors polluted the provinces subject to them, by the slaughter of men and women who worshipped God, as if it had been in a civil war, with the exception of Constantius,313 who ruled the Gauls and Britain, and preserved his soul pure from this stain. But it was so much worse than a war in which the conquered have only to suffer servitude or at most death, whereas in this case what was committed against those who refused to do wrong passes all description. They used against them every imaginable torture, and thought it little to slay those whom they hated, unless by cruelty having first exposed their bodies to mockery. If they could persuade, by terror, any to violate the faith to which they were bound, and to agree to the fatal sacrifice, these they praised and with their honours destroyed, but on the others they exhausted the whole ingenuity of their butchery, calling them desperate as disregarding their own body.314 For two years the whole Roman world ruled by Diocletian, Maximian, and Galerius was exposed to this misery: when on the retirement of Diocletian and Maximian in 305 Galerius became the chief emperor, the persecution continued in all its intensity, save in the territory subject to Constantius. “It is impossible to describe the individual scenes which took place throughout the world. The several governors having received their commission carried it out according to their own ferocity. Some through excess of fear did more than their orders; some were inspired by personal enmity; some by natural cruelty; some sought to advance themselves; some were precipitate in the work of destruction, as one in Phrygia,”315 where, says Eusebius, the soldiers surrounded a Christian town and burnt it with all its inhabitants, “men, women, and children calling upon the name of Christ, the God of all.”316 “And in devising various kinds of tortures they aim at gaining a victory. They are well aware that it is a struggle between champions. I myself saw in Bithynia a governor beside himself in joy, as if he had subdued some barbarous nation, because one who for two years had with great virtue resisted was seen to fail. They inflict therefore exquisite pains, only avoiding to put the tortured to death, as if it were only death that made them blessed, and not likewise those torments which in proportion to their severity produce a greater glory by the virtue which they exhibit.”317
Eusebius declares that such cruelties were perpetrated not for a short time, but during several years; that ten, twenty, thirty, sixty, and as many as a hundred men, women, and children would be slain in a day by various tortures. “When I was in Egypt myself I saw a crowd in one day, some beheaded, some burnt; with my own eyes I beheld the marvellous ardour, the truly divine virtue and alacrity of those who believed in Christ. Scarcely was sentence passed against the first, when a fresh number hastened before the tribunal, professing themselves Christians: with joy, gaiety, and smiles they received the award of death, singing hymns, and returning thanks to their last breath.”318
Among those distinguished for their learning in all Grecian studies, and for the universal honour in which they had been held, Eusebius mentions especially a bishop of Thmuis named Phileas. While he lay in prison under sentence of death, which was afterwards executed by beheading, he wrote a letter to his people, detailing the scenes in which he bore a part. This letter the historian has happily preserved for us. “Inasmuch,” he says, “as the holy scriptures presented us with so many fair ensamples and lessons, the blessed martyrs who are with me felt no hesitation. They fixed their mind's eye steadily upon the God of all, formed the conception of death suffered for piety's sake, and clung firmly to that to which they were called. For they knew that our Lord Jesus Christ had become man for our sakes in order to cut up all sin by the root, and to supply us with food on that journey by which we enter into eternal life. For He thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a slave, and being found in fashion as a man humbled Himself to death, and that death the cross. Hence it was that the martyrs, bearing Christ within them, in their zeal for the greater gifts endured every suffering and all the various inventions of torture not once, but some of them a second time, and all the threats of their guards, which did not stop with words in their zeal to overcome them, without their resolution being broken, because perfect charity casts out fear. What words can I find to enumerate their virtue and their endurance in each particular trial? Since they were left exposed to anyone's outrage, some being struck with clubs, others with rods, others with scourges, some with lashes, some with ropes. The sight of the tortures presented every variety, but great suffering throughout. These with hands bound behind them were distended on the wood, and had every limb stretched by machinery; and thus their tormentors by command attacked the whole body, tearing them not on the sides alone as murderers are treated, but on the stomach, the knees, and the cheeks. Others were hung by one hand from the portico, and this tension of the sinews and limbs caused a more terrible pain than any. Others were bound to pillars face to face, the feet not reaching the ground, but the weight of the body tightening the bonds, and this they suffered not during the time of examination only, or while the governor was engaged with them, but almost the whole day. For when he went to others, he left his officers watching over these, to see if the extremity of torture should cause any to give way: and he charged them to be bound without mercy, but when at their last gasp to be let down and dragged along the ground. For he said that no account at all was to be taken of us, but we were to be both reputed and treated as non-existent. This last was a second torture which they superadded to their blows. There were those also who after their tortures were put in the stocks with their feet distended to the fourth hole, where they must needs lie down, not being able to hold themselves up through their wounds gaping over the whole body. Others flung on the pavement lay there through the repeated violence of their racking, the many signs of suffering over their body presenting a more fearful spectacle to those who looked on than the racking itself. Thus treated, some died under the torture, putting their adversary to shame by their endurance; some shut up in prison half-dead, after a few days expired through the extremity of their pains; the rest having treatment applied became still more resolute through the time spent in prison. And so when the choice was presented to them either to touch the abominable sacrifice, and depart unmolested, gaining by this course an execrable deliverance, or, not sacrificing, to receive sentence of death, without any doubt they joyfully went to death. For they knew what the sacred writings enjoin: ‘he that sacrifices to other gods shall be rooted out,’ and ‘thou shalt have no other gods but me.’ ”319
This may suffice as a specimen of what was done during a course of years throughout the dominion of Galerius, Maximin, and Maxentius. It is in this persecution especially that the virgin martyrs suffered the extremity of the heathen malignity in the threatened loss of that purity which they valued more than life. And here a fellow-Christian at Alexandria disguising himself as a soldier was to S. Theodora the guardian which her angel himself became to S. Agnes at Rome. In this persecution also S. Vincent repeats in Spain the trial and the triumph of S. Laurence at Rome. The authentic account of his martyrdom shows the utmost point to which the most ingenious and the most ferocious cruelty could reach on the one side, and the most enduring patience on the other. But the numberless details concerning the sufferings of this time preserved to us show that it was indeed a conflict prolonged during eight years, in which the Roman state put forth the utmost strength which unlimited power guided by unhesitating cruelty could exert to destroy the Christian Church and name.