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CHRISTIANITY 537 all the apostles except John, that is, at the close of the 1st century, Christians were found in nearly all the countries bordering on the Medi- terranean sea, especially in Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and the north of Africa. In the next two centuries not only did churches become numerous in all these countries, but they sprang up, here and there, in nearly all the other provinces of the empire. During this whole period Christianity was opposed, some- times by unrestrained popular violence, some- times by the government, and sometimes by men of learning. After the destruction of Jeru- salem, Christians being no longer confounded with the Jews by the emperors, and their num- bers being now mainly increased by converts from paganism, persecutions were directed against them as Christians. Under Domitian, Christians were punished as traitors. Trajan moderated persecution ; Hadrian and Antoninus Pius required that it should be conducted under forms of law ; Marcus Aurelius gave a loose rein to the popular fury. Then ensued a pe- riod of TO or 80 years, during which the em- perors manifested little interest in the subject, and individual magistrates were left to follow their own inclinations. So much the more se- vere was the persecution of Decius, the first that extended throughout the empire, to the Christians who had become accustomed to a comparatively asy and tranquil life. After 50 years of interrupted or mitigated persecu- tion followed the second general persecution under Diocletian, which ended with the change of the ejapire from a pagan to a Christian state. While many men of literary eminence appear to have used their influence against Christiani- ty, Celsus and Porphyry, the former near the middle of the 2d, and the latter toward the end of the 3d century, are the chief antagonists who appeared as authors. The Christian apol- ogists, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Origen, put an end to the false and puerile accusations brought against the Christians, and led to this result, that the great question between the two parties now strug- gling for existence henceforth turned on its real merits. In this period, a distinction ap- pears between the clergy and the laity, as also between presbyter, bishop, and metropolitan; the sees of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch hold a preeminence above others, and provin- cial synods are held. The writers of the church directed their attention chiefly to what were denominated heresies. Among these, the va- rious forms of Gnosticism were prominent. Other questions which began to agitate the church were amply discussed in the next suc- ceeding period. The authorities relied on were Scripture and tradition. A lower tone of mo- rality, both in the clergy and in the laity, had in too many instances begun to prevail. Sec- ond period, from the time of Constantine to that of Luther. There are three things of most extensive influence that mark this period : the new world of thought opened to the specu- lations of an undisciplined age, the new at- titude of Christianity as the religion of the court and of the state, and the new character of the population of the empire, introduced by the invading armies of the barbarians. These three circumstances enter largely into the causes which gave to the middle ages their peculiar character and condition. The first had operated before. But as the former pe- riod was chiefly of a practical character, with but here and there a speculative mind in the first two centuries, and with undeveloped ten- dencies rather than completed results in the 3d century, there will be more unity in the treat- ment of the subject by viewing the whole movement together. Nothing ever so extended the field of human thought, or so aroused the ca- pacities of the mind, as the revelation of Chris- tian truth. It came at a time when almost all systems of philosophy were broken down, when men despaired of ever arriving at certain truth, when the age of profound thought had gone by, and everything tended to intellectual weakness, to decay, and finally to gross barba- rism. Still, in such untoward circumstances, it gave an astonishing impulse to the human mind. What are all the stupendous systems of Gnosticism but attempts of minds still pa- gan in a greater or less degree to strike out theories of the universe that should compre- hend the mediation between the finite and the infinite, after the idea contained in the incarna- tion of the Son of God? The new Platonic philosophy itself might never have been de- veloped in Alexandria had not Christianity rendered a new philosophy absolutely neces- sary. On minds essentially sound and Chris- tian, we see the new scope which Christianity gave to thought in Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement, Origen, and Augustine. If it be the province of Christianity, not only to overcome all absolute evil, whether as opposed to truth or to the right, but to bring out and cure all par- tial evil where error has with it some admix- ture of truth, and wrong associates with itself some things that are right, we shall not be surprised that in the beginning, when Chris- tian philosophy was as much in its infancy as Grecian philosophy was in the days of Thales and Pythagoras, there were ten heresies for every truth, and that the church was like a shrub from which shoot out bristling thorns at almost every point. We have not space even to name every shade of heresy recorded in the annals of the early church. To say nothing of the Cerinthians, Carpocratians, Va- lentinians, Ophites, Patripassians, Artemoni- ans, Montanists, Manichseans, Noetians, &c., of the former period, we have a host of parties more or less connected with the Arian contro- versy, not only the Arians and semi-Arians, but the Eunomians, Aetians, Apollinarists, Adoptians, Nestorians, Eutychians, Monophy- sites, Monothelites, and many others. In the midst of these controversies broke out the Pe- lagian and semi-Pelagian heresies, as they are