The Conversion of the Roman Empire. The Boyle Lecture for the Year 1864. Delivered at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, by Charles Merivale, B.D., Rector of Lawford: Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Longmans.-It is easy to discover in the current literature of the day, that many suppose credence in Christianity, and general ignorance, to be allied. There is an assumption, that adepts in human wisdom are suspicious of the claims of the Gospel. This is not only an unjust reflection upon Christians, but a very remarkable expression of sentiment, or opinion. For, is it not true that some of the most gifted and erudite of men have embraced Christianity, and have offered reasons for their belief? Men who have been versed in historical lore, and who have had special qualifications for the scrutiny and criticism of historical facts, such as Lardner and Arnold, have likewise been devout believers in our holy religion. True, that some historians have been sceptics; but, if Christianity had had no foundation in truth, all sagacious students, all sound reasoners, who have inquired into its claims, would have been sceptics too. How different is the fact! From the most careful and comprehensive survey, Dr. Lardner, for example, has given us his conclusive and unanswerable "Credibility of the Gospel History." Other competent writers have also supplied, in the same line, irrefragable defences of the faith.

The subject of last year's Boyle Lecture "The Conversion of the

Roman Empire"-would be thought by some a hazardous one. Nevertheless, the able writer of the "History of the Romans under the Empire," who has proved himself to be alike sagacious and laborious, undertook this theme; and from it he educes arguments, some of them new, and others old, but afresh burnished, in corroboration of "those things which are most surely believed among us." Christianity crumbles not to pieces, when touched with the wand of modern research. The claim of the Gospel is obvious in the fact of its existence at the present hour; in its growth and diffusion; in its demonstrated superiority to all other systems of spiritual precept and doctrine; and in its perfect adaptation to man. Mr. Merivale insists upon these evidences; judging that the requirements of his contemporaries, as well as the design of the Boyle Lecture, will be met by "the consideration of that spiritual resurrection, that resurrection of faith and genuine piety, which marks the intellectual history of the early centuries of our era." "To men of education, to men of academic training and accomplishments, to all who pretend to ground their religious faith on reasoning and argument, no study can be more interesting than that of the process by which Christianity has actually won its way in the minds of the intelligent and accomplished, the reasoners and philosophers, of ancient and modern times."*

It has been affirmed that the Gospel was first addressed to the

lowest and least intelligent classes of society; and that the era of its introduction was a tame and uncritical one. While this may be admitted as true, (to a greater extent, perhaps, than Mr. Merivale would lead his readers to conclude,) it is likewise true that the apostles and earliest apologists of the Christian faith had to encounter the inquiries of learned and subtle men. Many of the converts were among the wise and prudent. High-born men and women, well-trained reasoners and thinkers, and anxious inquirers, composed the early church at Rome:a thing certified to us by "the direct statements of the apostle himself, the evidence of existing monuments of antiquity, and by infer ences of no little strength from the records of secular history, and from the language and sentiments of contemporary heathens."* The Gospel has been well proved from the beginning; and the men to whom it was first preached could not but know whether the principal facts were faithfully reported. The people in Judea, in Samaria, in Asia Minor, in Greece, and in Rome, were competent judges of events occurring in those regions, and appealing, in their very nature and form, to this kind of popular evidence. The Boyle Lecturer of 1864 set himself the task of answering such questions as these: On what grounds did the early Christian evangelists and writers secure the belief of their statements? How did they obtain the authority they exercised? Addressing themselves to the intelligence and moral sensibilities of their hearers, how did they win the conversion of multitudes, and, among these, of the most refined and the best-informed of mankind?

The misery of the heathen world at the moment of its highest outward culture, when it had lost its faith in

the heathen religions, and not yet acquired faith in Christ, was appalling. The brilliant cities, the joyous country, the temples and the forum, the baths, the festivals, and all the objects of art and of luxury with which the homes of the inquiring Pagans were stored to overflowing; the tranquil ease, the leisure for study and meditation, the security of long-established civilization, and the treasured results of philosophy and science; all were found inadequate to yield the needful light and solace. In his sixth Lecture, Mr. Merivale beautifully describes the need, so deeply felt in the Roman Empire, for a Divine religion, and for communion with God. He shows that there was nothing certain, or authoritative, in the instructions of the sages of antiquity; and that a wide-spread distrust of all human aids was the result. A sense of religious want was, undoubtedly, the experience of the civilized world. The struggles of expiring heathenism are sketched in this volume; and it is shown how, during the second and third centuries, an evident imitation of Christianity was attempted by the more thoughtful Pagans. This plagiarism is indicated in the growing sympathy of man with man, in the development of the spirit of prayer, and in the spread of the Mithraic and Gnostic superstitions. The prevailing state of things is further evidenced by the revival of divination, and of the use of oracles. "The age of heathen prayer and devotion was the antecedent to the age of thaumaturgy and theurgy. The one followed, it would seem, as the immediate corollary, from the other. The natural man had discovered the necessity of a god, of a providence, of a moral authority and sanction, of judgment and retribution; and he rushed precipitately forward to seize upon God,

to bind Him, as it were, and secure the means of access to Him, and of compelling Him to appear at the summons of His votaries. As a ruder age had bound its idols to the citywalls with chains of iron, to prevent their deserting it, so the later Heathens, more refined in their conceptions, but not more truly enlightened, sought to clasp the invisible and impalpable to their souls by the craft of magical incantation. The germ of a spiritual conception of God had been cast into the heathen world by the hands of Jews and Christians; but such was the strange and prodigious harvest it produced, when left to grow untended by the skill of the Divine husbandman."*

But the agitations of the human conscience, and the curiosity of sceptics, could not be allayed by divination and augury. In the midst of religious counterfeits, the heart remained stricken, alarmed, and distressed. The malady lay deep in the spiritual nature of man, deep in the foundations of sentiment and conscience, and in those feelings which are explained to us by a Divine religion. Christian teaching had been making way in the world, and its light served to make more manifest the deceptions and decrepitude of heathenism. The moral discourses of Seneca and Epictetus, of Dion and Juvenal, of Plutarch and Aurelius, could no more tranquillize and ennoble anxious inquirers, than the conjuring, the necromancy, the cruel fanaticism, of the magician and the ecstatic priest. "What yet remained of reason in the heathen world, first staggered, then irritated, at last aroused to strict inquiry by the audacious attempt to master it, tore the veil asunder, and exposed the empty pretension. The records yet remain, (and alas that in these days there should again arise special reason for

* Lecture VI., p. 123.

remembering and referring to them!) records, I say, still remain of the various forms of deception then currently practised, and of the exact way in which they were effected. We are acquainted with some, at least, of the expedients employed to represent the apparition of gods and demons, and the spirits of the departed, to the eye of the half-delirious votary. The ancients, it seems, could employ many of our secret agents of deceit. Sympathetic ink was not unknown to their adepts and impostors. Their conjurors and jugglers were, to the full, as skilful as ours; and their arts were turned to account for objects far more serious than the mere buffoonery of the streets. It is well, even for our use and instruction, that those tricks were exposed at the time, and the record of them perpetuated. The phenomena of modern 'spiritualism,' whatever their actual origin, are, I believe, an exact reproduction of the presumed wonders of the third century; of an age not unlike our own in credulity and in incredulity, in nervous irritability, in impatience of the grave teachings of experience. For our age, as well as for his own, even the scoffer Lucian has not lived in vain. We cannot even yet afford to consign his banter to oblivion."+

Nothing can be clearer than the demonstration which history supplies of the reality of a religious nature in man, and also of the need of religion for nations and human society. No matter what man's condition, knowledge, civilization, natural advantages, and virtues; his religious sentiment is everywhere present in certain definite forms and tendencies, the most powerful and ineradicable feature of his being. What tribe or community has been discovered, that had not a religion of some kind? Most markedly is this disclosed in Grecian and in Roman story. The

+ Lecture VI., p. 125.

traditions of immemorial antiquity preserved in both nations some apprehension of Divine power and human obligation. "The world was made," says one of the early Christian apologists, "that man might be born into it. Man was made that he might recognise God the Maker of the world, and of himself. We recognise Him, that we may worship Him; we worship Him, that we may earn immortality through the works which are His peculiar service; we receive the reward of immortality, that, being made like unto the angels, we may serve our Lord and Father for ever." This is, in substance, the confession, likewise, of the more thoughtful and virtuous Heathens: proving the necessity of a more spiritual and sublime form of doctrine and of worship than human reason can fabricate. For, another truth, which is legibly written on the page of history, is the impotence of all human efforts to benefit and satisfy man's deep yearnings. The story of heathen schemes of religion, morality, and philosophy, is the story of a complete and affecting failure.

When the Gospel presented itself for acceptance in the Roman Empire, it had not to combat a blank negation of all belief, but to encounter a real enemy. There was an active principle of belief, evidenced by temples and ceremonies, by acts of lustration, and of national humiliation before the insulted powers of the unseen world. And we must remember that the Jews were scat tered, in great numbers, through the Empire; and they, cherishing their Hebrew habits of thought and expectancy, were sought to be won to the simplicity of Christ. "We may picture to ourselves the Jewish sy nagogue at Rome as crowded with devotees of Jewish, of Greek, and of Roman extraction; of Jews who had migrated from the land of their origin, perhaps of their birth, to

carry on their business of various kinds in the capital of the Empire ; of Greeks, who, like them, flocked in vast numbers to the same great centre of all employments, of all opinions and teaching, to hear and speak of every new thing; of Romans, who, after conquering and making tributary both Jews and Greeks, began to open their eyes to the wondrous gifts, intellectual and spiritual, of their Hebrew and Hellenic subjects,-to acknowledge that, with all their own power and greatness, they had much, yea, everything to learn, and that it was from Greece and from Palestine that their destined teachers had come. Of the sympathy, indeed, of both the Greeks and Romans with the Jews at this period, history affords abundant evidence. Then, further, the proselytes of the Jewish law, Greek and Roman, scarcely yet recovered from the excitement, the intoxication, of finding themselves admitted to communion with a religion of real signs and wonders, of genuine inspiration and enlightenment from above, were suddenly invited to take a step farther, to penetrate beyond the veil, to receive a higher initiation, to share in a holier covenant, and enjoy a nearer and an ampler manifestation of God. They were called to Christ, and they came to Christ. The synagogues of the law, so lately thronged with admiring converts from Greece and Rome, were again abandoned for the more private and retired churches, the little spiritual reunions, of the converts to the Gospel. The Synagogue itself was carried over to the Church. Even from the names of these earliest disciples whom the apostle'specially greeted, we may fairly infer, (though the argument, I am aware, is not conclusive,) that the Church of Rome, the Church of St. Paul's Epistle, the Church of the first imperial persecution, embraced com