polytheistic revival, the ridicule he pours upon galli and flamines, priests and priestesses, itinerant and mendicant propagators of this or that cultus, guilds, processions, festivals, evidences the success and popularity of heathenism. The Apology of Apuleius (end of 2nd cent.) is illustrated by the Apology of Tertullian, and the statements of Dio, Spartian, Herodian, Lampridius, etc., can be compared with those of our writer. Were those heathen works lost, it would be almost possible to reproduce from his pages, shorn of their extravagance, a picture of the religiousness of the age such as they have given.
(b) Tertullian and Christianity.—In passing from heathenism to Christianity, Tertullian believed himself to be passing from darkness to light and from corruption to purity. He embraced it with all the strength of a matured mind and life. All the more intelligible, therefore, is his vehement anger with any form of Christian precept and practice, whether at Rome or Carthage, which fell short of his ideal. The church was to him the Virgin and spotless Bride of the Ascended Lord, and her children—bishops, priests, and people—must worthily reflect her purity and faith. He would permit no shortcomings because he would admit no failure. A writer of the 4th cent. has left on record that the Africans as he knew them were "faithless and cunning. There might be some good people among them, but they were not many" (quoted in Mommsen, The Provinces of the Roman Empire, ii. p. 340). This estimate is reflected a century earlier in Tertullian's pages. It is a summary of his opinion of the spurious devotion which marked the Christian fop (de Poenit. c. xi.; cf. de Cultu Fem. ii. c. viii.), the would-be penitent (de Poenit. c. ix.), the rich Christian lady (de Cultu Fem. i. c, ix., ii. cc. v.–vii.; de Virg. Vel. c. xvii.), the fashionable virgin (ib. c. xii.; in contrast with her holy sister, c. xv.), the drugged and petted martyr (de Jej. c. xii., in contrast with the willing and happy martyr, ad Martyres, cc. i.–iii.); and it explains that final revulsion of mind which, spurning every kind of compromise, heaped indiscriminate abuse on what was best as well as what was worst in the life of the Christians of the church, and turned to find in asceticism and Montanism a seriousness and elevation impossible to him elsewhere. Paradoxical as it may seem, it was the same impulsive spirit which kept him staunch to the faith of that church whose discipline and ritual he abjured or carried with him to a schismatic body. Gnosticism was to Tertullian the embodiment of theological corruption, darkness, and falsehood, and he fought it with all his natural vehemence. His theology, if developed by Montanism, is in substance that which the church accepted, and accepts. The admiration felt for his writings by his countryman Cyprian (200–258), bp. of Carthage, should never be forgotten. Cyprian, says St. Jerome, never passed a day without reading a portion of Tertullian's works; he frequently asked for them with the words, "Da mihi magistrum"; and it is impossible to read Cyprian's existing treatises without seeing how largely the thoughts of Tertullian have been absorbed by him, if the language has been softened and deepened. In our own country Bp. Bull (Defensio Fidei Nicenae) and Pearson (On the Creed) have used many an argument which the Montanist of Africa had prepared for them, and Bp. Kaye's illustrations of the Articles of the Church of England from Tertullian's writings (pp. 246, etc.) concur in establishing the force of Möhler's description of his dogma as "so homelike" (Patr. i. p. 737). It is based on the teaching of Christ as handed down by apostles and apostolic men, and formulated in the "regula fidei una, sola, immobilis et irreformabilis" (cf. de Praes. Haer. cc. viii. ix.; de Virg. Vel. c. i.). Theology owes practically to him such words (int. al.) as Trinitas, satisfactio, sacramentum, substantia, persona, liberum arbitrium, transferred (some of them) from the Latin law courts to take their definite place in the language of Latin divinity (cf. the index verborum at the end of Oehler, vol. ii.).
(c) Tertullian, the Man.—Of no one, says Ebert, is Buffon's saying truer, "the style is the man," and the best illustration of his style he finds in the Apology (Geschichte der Christlich-Lateinischen Literatur, pp. 34–37). Tertullian cared nothing for form save as it best expressed his thought. He said right out from his heart what he had to say about friend or foe, without attempt to clothe his speech with the graceful charm of the Greek or the dignified periods of the Roman. Abrupt and impetuous, eloquent and stern, his sentences follow one another with the sweeping, rushing force of storm-waves. The very exceptions do but prove the. rule. Such tender or beautiful passages as those which depict the life of Christ on earth (de Pat. c. iii.; Apol. c. xxi.; were these written with any acquaintance with the Life of the pagan Christ, Apollonius of Tyana, edited by Philostratus at the command of Julia Domna?), the power and effect of prayer (de Orat. c. xxix.), the virtues and portrait of patience (de Pat. c. xv.), contemporary civilization (de Anima, c. xxx.), the happy marriage (ad Uxor. ii. 8), and faith, the barque of the church (de Idol. c. xxiv.); or the impressive analogies of the resurrection he finds in nature (re Resurr. Carnis, c. xii.), and the illustrations of the Trinity (adv. Prax. c. viii.), come upon the reader as a surprise, as something so unlike one who is more in his recognized element when describing the place-hunter (de Poenit. c. xi.), the traitor (Apol. c. xxxv.), and the knowing Valentinian (adv. Val. end), or painting that ghastliest of his portraits, murder and idolatry crooning over adultery (de Pud. c. v.). His paradoxes are characteristic: To him the unity of heretics was schism (de Praes. Haer. c. xlii.); and heresy itself "tantum valeat quantum si non fuisset" (ib. c. i.). "God is great when little" (adv. Marc. ii. c. ii.); "Lie to be true " (de Virg. Vel. c. xvi.), contain thoughts only a shade less startling than the "Mortuus est Dei Filius; prorsus credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est" (de Carne Christi, c. v.), or the well-known "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church" (Apol. c. i.). His right appreciation of the methods of Scripture
