CHAPTER VIII CHRISTIAN LIFE IN THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH. 205 and moral standard of its first professors. The most perNotes. fect doctrine and life described by unschooled fishermen The rationalistic author of Supernatural Religion of Galilee, who never before had been outside of Pales- (vol. II. 487) makes the following remarkable concestine, and were scarcely able to read and to write! And sion: “The teaching of Jesus carried morality to the subthe profoundest mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, limest point attained, or even attainable, by humanity. the incarnation, redemption, regeneration, resurrection, The influence of his spiritual religion has been rendered taught by the apostles to congregations of poor and illit- doubly great by the unparalleled purity and elevation of erate peasants, slaves and freedmen! For “not many wise his character. Surpassing in his sublime simplicity and after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble” were earnestness the moral grandeur of Sâkya Muni, and putcalled, “but God chose the foolish things of the world, ting to the blush the sometimes sullied, though generally that he might put to shame them that are wise; and God admirable, teaching of Socrates and Plato, and the whole chose the weak things of the world, that he might put round of Greek philosophers, he presented the rare specto shame the things that are strong; and the base things tacle of a life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly noble of the world, and the things that are despised, did God and consistent with his own lofty principles, so that the choose, yea, and the things that are not, that he might ’imitation of Christ’ has become almost the final word bring to naught the things that are: that no flesh should in the preaching of his religion, and must continue to be glory before God. But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who one of the most powerful elements of its permanence.” was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness Lecky, likewise a rationalistic writer and historian and sanctification and redemption: that, according as it of great ability and fairness, makes this weighty remark is written, he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”595 in his History of European Morals (vol. II. 9):, “It was If we compare the moral atmosphere of the apos- reserved for Christianity to present to the world an idetolic churches with the actual condition of surrounding al character, which through all the changes of eighteen Judaism and heathenism, the contrast is as startling as centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an imthat between a green oasis with living fountains and lofty passioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all palm trees, and a barren desert of sand and stone. Ju- ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been daism in its highest judicatory committed the crime of not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest crimes, the crucifixion of the Saviour of the world, and incentive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an inhastened to its doom. Heathenism was fitly represented fluence that it may be truly said that the simple record of by such imperial monsters as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, three short years of active life has done more to regenand Domitian, and exhibited a picture of hopeless cor- erate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of ruption and decay, as described in the darkest colors not philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. This only by St. Paul, but by his heathen contemporary, the has, indeed, been the wellspring of whatever is best and wisest Stoic moralist, the teacher and victim of Nero.596 purest in Christian life. Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution and fanaticism 595 1 Cor. 2:26-31. that have defaced the Church, it has preserved, in the 596 Comp. the well known passage of Seneca, De Ira, II. 8: Omnia sceleribus ac vitiis plena sunt; plus committitur, character and example of its Founder, an enduring prinquam quod possit coërcitione sanari. Certatur ingenti quodam ciple of regeneration.” To this we may add the testimony of the atheistic nequitim certamine: maior quotidie peccandi cupiditas, minor verecundia est. Expulso melioris aequorisque respectu, quocun- philosopher, John Stuart Mill from his essay on Theque visum est, libido se impingit; nec furtiva jam scelera sunt, ism, written shortly before his death (1873), and pubpraeter oculos eunt. Adeoque in publicum missa nequitia est, et lished, 1874, in Three Essays on Religion. (Am. ed., p. in omnium pectoribus evaluit, ut innocentia non rara, sed nulla 253): “Above all, the most valuable part of the effect on sit. Numquid enim singuli aut pauci rupere legem; undique, ve- the character which Christianity has produced, by holdlut signo dato, ad fas nefasque miscendum coörti sunt.” Similar ing up in a divine person a standard of excellence and passages might be gathered from Thucydides, Aristophanes, a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute Sallust, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Tacitus, Suetonius. It is true unbeliever, and can never more be lost to humanity. For that almost every heathen vice still exists in Christian countries, but they exist in spite of the Christian religion, while the it is Christ rather than God whom Christianity has held heathen immorality was the legitimate result of idolatry, and was sanctioned by the example of the heathen gods, and the
apotheosis of the worst Roman emperors.
