INTRODUCTION.

CRITICISM OF ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS.

The fifteen or sixteen years of religious history comprised in this volume in the embryonic age of Christianity, are the years with which we are best acquainted. Jesus and the primitive Church at Jerusalem resemble the images of a far-off paradise, lost in a mysterious mist. On the other hand, the arrival of St Paul at Rome, in consequence of the step the Author of the Acts has taken in closing at that juncture his narrative, marks in the history of Christian origins the commencement of a profound darkness into which the bloody glare of the barbarous feasts of Nero, and the thunders of the Apocalypse, cast only a few gleams. In particular, the death of the Apostles is enveloped in an impenetrable obscurity. On the contrary, the era of the missions of St Paul, especially of the second mission and the third, is known to us through documents of the greatest value. The Acts, till then so legendary, become suddenly quite authentic; the last chapters, composed in part of the narrative of an eye-witness, are the sole complete historical writings which we have of the early times of Christianity. In fine, those years, through a privilege very rare in similar circumstances, provide us with documents, the dates of which are absolutely authentic, and a series of letters, the most important of which have withstood all the tests of criticism, and which have never been subjected to interpolations.

In the introduction to the preceding volume, we have made an examination of the Book of Acts. We must now discuss seriatim the different epistles which bear the name of St Paul. The Apostle informs us himself, that even during his lifetime there were in circulation in his name several spurious letters, and he often took precautions to prevent frauds. We are, therefore, only carrying out his intentions in subjecting the writings which have been put forth as his to a rigorous censorship.

There are in the New Testament fourteen of such epistles, which it will be necessary at the outset to divide into two distinct categories. Thirteen of these writings bear in the text of the letter the name of the Apostle. In other words, these letters profess to be the works of viiiPaul, so that there is no choice between the following two hypotheses: either that Paul is really the author, or that they are the work of an impostor, who wished to have his compositions passed off as the work of Paul. On the other band, the fourteenth epistle, the one to the Hebrews, does not bear the name of Paul in the superscription)¹¹In a note, the author defines “superscription” to mean the first phrase of the texts, and “title “as the heading of each chapter.—Translator.; the author plunges at once in medias res without giving his name. The attribution of that epistle to Paul is founded only on tradition.

The thirteen epistles which profess to belong to Paul may, in regard to authenticity, be ranged into five classes:—

1. Epistles incontestable and uncontested. These are the Epistles to the Galatians, the two Epistles to the Corinthians, and the Epistle to the Romans.

2. Epistles that are undoubted, although some objections have been taken to them. These are the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, and the Epistle to the Philippians.

3. Epistles of a probable authenticity, although grave objections have been taken to them. This is the Epistle to the Colossians, to which is annexed the note to Philemon

4. Epistle doubtful. This is the epistle addressed to the Ephesians.

5. Epistles false. These are the two Epistles to Timothy, and the Epistle to Titus.

We have nothing to remark here in regard to the epistles of the first category; the most severe critics, such as Christian Baur, accept them reservedly. We shall hardly insist on discussing the epistles of the second class either. The difficulties which certain modern writers have raised against them, are merely those slight suspicions which it is the duty of the critic to point out frankly, but without being determined by them when stronger reasons should sway him. Now, these three epistles have a character of authenticity which outweighs every other consideration. The only serious difficulty which has been raised against the Epistles to the Thessalonians, is deduced from the theory of the Anti-Christ appended in the second chapter of the second Epistle to the Thessalonians,—a theory which seems identical with that of the Apocalypse, and which consequently assumed Nero to be dead when the books were written. But that objection permits of solution, as we shall see in the course of the present volume. The author of the Apocalypse only applied to his times an assemblage of ideas, one part of which went back even to the origins of Christian belief, while the other part had reference to the times of Caligula.

The Epistle to the Colossians has been subjected to a much more serious fire of objection.. It is undoubted that the language used in that epistle to express the part played by Jesus in the bosom of the divinity, as creator and prototype of all creation, trenches strongly on the language of certain other epistles, and seems to approach in style the writings attributed to John. In rending such passages one believes oneself to be in the full swing of Gnosticism. The language of the Epistle to the Colossians is far removed from that of the undoubted epistles. The vocabulary is a little different; the style is more emphatic and more ixround, and less abrupt and natural. At points it is embarrassed, declamatory and overcharged, similar to the style of the false Epistles to Timothy and to Titus. The ideas are hardly those with which one would expect to meet in Paul. Nevertheless, justification by faith occupies no longer the first place in the predilections of the Apostle. The theory of the angels is much more developed; the æons begin to appear. The redemption of Christ is no longer simply a terrestrial fact; it is extended to the entire universe. Certain critics have been able to discern in many passages either imitations of the other epistles, or the desire of reconciling the peculiar bias of Paul to the different schools of his own (a desire so apparent in the author of the Acts), or the inclination to substitute moral and metaphysical formulas, such as love and science, for the formulas of faith and works which, during the first century, had caused so many contests. Other critics, in order to explain that singular mixture of things agreeable to Paul, and of things but little agreeable to him, have recourse to interpolations, or assume that Paul confided the editing of the epistle in question to Timothy. It is certain that when we sift this epistle to the bottom, as well as the one to the Philippians, for a continued account of the life of Paul, we are not quite so successful as in the great epistles of certain authenticity, anterior to the captivity of Paul. In the latter, the operation furnished, so to speak, its own proofs; the facts and the texts fit the one into the other without effort, and seem to recall one another. In the epistles pertaining to the captivity, on the contrary, more than one laborious combination is required, and more than one contradiction has to be silenced; at first sight, the goings and comings of the disciples do not agree, many of the circumstances of time and place are presented, if we may so speak, backwards.

There is, nevertheless, nothing about all this which is decisive. If the Epistle to the Colossians is, as we believe it to be, the work of Paul, it was written during the last days of the life of the Apostle, at a date when his biography is very obscure. We shall show later on that it is quite admissible, that the theology of St Paul, which, from the Epistles to the Thessalonians to the Epistle to the Romans, is so strongly developed, was developed still further in the interval between the Epistle to the Romans and that of his death. We shall show likewise, that the most energetic expressions of the Epistle to the Colossians were only a short advance upon those of the anterior epistles. St Paul was one of those men who, through their natural bent of mind, have a tendency to pass from one order of ideas to another, even though their style and their manner of perception present sentiments the most fixed. The taint of Gnosticism which is to be found in the Epistle to the Colossians is encountered, though less articulated in the other writings of the New Testament, in the Apocalypse, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. In place of rejecting some passages of the New Testament in which are to be found traces of Gnosticism, we must sometimes reason inversely, and seek out in these passages the origin of the gnostic ideas which prevailed in the Second Century. We may, in a sense, even say, that these ideas were anterior to Christianity, and that nascent Christianity borrowed more than once from Gnosticism. In a xword, the Epistle to the Colossians, though full of eccentricities, does not embrace any of those impossibilities which are to be found in the Epistles to Titus and to Timothy. It furnishes even many of those details which reject the hypothesis as false. Assuredly of this number is its connection with the note to Philemon. If the epistle is apocryphal, the note is apocryphal also; yet few of the pages have so pronounced a tone of sincerity; Paul alone, as it appears to us, could write that little master-piece. The apocryphal epistles of the New Testament—those, for example, to Titus and to Timothy—are awkward and dull. The Epistle to Philemon resembles in nothing these fastidious imitations.

Finally, we shell soon show that the so-called Epistle to the Ephesian is in part copied from the Epistle to the Colossians, which leads to the supposition, that the compiler of the Epistle to the Ephesians firmly regarded the Epistle to the Colossians as an original apostolic. Note, also, that Marcion, who is in general so well informed in his criticism on the writings of Paul,—Marcion who so justly rejected the Epistles to Titus and to Timothy,—admits unreservedly in his collection the two epistles of which we have just been speaking.

Infinitely more strong are the objection. which can be raised against the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians. And first of all, note that this designation is nothing if not certain. The epistle has absolutely no seal of circumstance; it is addressed to no one in particular; those to whom it was addressed occupied for the moment a smaller place in the thoughts of Paul than his other correspondents. Is it admissible that Paul could have written to a Church with which he had so intimate relations, without saluting anybody, without conveying to the brethren the salutation of the brethren with whom they were acquainted, and particularly Timothy, without addressing to his disciples some counsel, without reminding them of anterior relations, and without the composition presenting any of those peculiar features which constitute the most authentic character of the other epistles?

The composition is addressed to converted Pagans; now the Church at Ephesus was, in great part, Judæo-Christian. When we remember with what eagerness Paul in all his epistles seized on and invented pretexts for speaking of his ministry and of his preaching, we experience a lively surprise in seeing him throughout the course of a letter addressed to these same Ephesians—“that for the space of three years he did not cease, night and day, to exhort with tears”—lose every opportunity presented to him of reminding them of his sojourn amongst them; in seeing him, I say, obstinately confining himself to abstract philosophy, or, what is more singular, to the lifeless formulas least suited to the growth of the first Church. How different it is in the Epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Thessalonians, even in the Epistle to those Colossians, whom, however, the Apostle even only knew indirectly. The Epistle to the Romans is the only one which in this respect resembles somewhat the epistles in question. Like them, the Epistle to the Romans is a complete doctrinal expos’; whilst in regard to the epistles addressed to those readers who had received from him the Gospel, Paul supposes always the basis of his teaching to be known, and contents himself with insisting upon some point which is related to xiit. How does it come about that the only two impersonal letters of St Paul are, in the one case, an epistle addressed to a Church which he had never seen, and in the other, an epistle addressed to the Church with which he had the most extended and continuous relations!

The reading of the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians suffices, therefore, to awaken the suspicion that the letter in question had not been addressed to the Church at Ephesus. The evidence furnished by the manuscripts changes these suspicions into certainty. The words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ, in the first verse, were introduced about the end of the fourth century. The Vatican manuscript, and the Codex Sinaiticus, both of the fourth century, and whose authority, at least, when they are in accord, are more important than that of all the other manuscripts together, do not contain these words. A Vienne manuscript, the one which is designated in the collection of the Epistles of Paul by the figures 67, of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, presents them erased. St Basil maintains that the ancient manuscripts which he was able to consult did not have these word. Finally, the testimony of the third century proves that at that epoch, the existence of the said words in the first verse was unknown. If then everybody believed that the epistle of which we are speaking had been addressed to the Ephesians, it was in virtue of the title, and not in virtue of the superscription. A man who, in spite of the a priori dogmatic sprit which is often carried into the correction of the holy books, had frequently flashes of true criticism, Marcion (about 150 A.D.), contended that the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians was the Epistle to the Laodicæans, of whom St Paul speaks in the Epistle to the Colossians. That which appears the most certain is, that the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians was not addressed to any special Church, and that if it belongs to St Paul, it is a simple circular letter intended for the churches in Asia which were composed of converted Pagans. The superscription of these letters, of which there are several copies, might present, according to the words τοῖς οὖσιν, a blank destined to receive the name of the Church to which it was addressed. Perhaps the Church at Ephesus possessed one of these copies of which the compiler of the letters of Paul availed himself. The fact of finding one such copy at Ephesus appeared to him a sufficient reason for writing at the head Πρὸς Ἐφεσίους. As it was omitted at an early date to preserve a blank after οὖσιν, the superscription became: τοῖς αγίοις τοῖς οὖσιν, χαὶ πιστοῖς, a rather unsatisfactory reading which may have been rectified in the fourth century, by inserting after οὖσιν, in conformity with the title, the words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ.

This doubt in regard to the recipients of the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians might be very readily reconciled with its authenticity; but critical reflection upon this second point excites new suspicion. One fact which confronts us at the very threshold, is the resemblance which is to be remarked between the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians and the Epistle to the Colossians. The two epistles are copies of one another. Which is the epistle that has served for the original, and which is to be considered as an imitation? It looks indeed as if it were the Epistle to the Colossians which has served for the original, and that it is the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians which is the imitation. The second epistle is the most xiifully developed; the formulas in it are exaggerated; everything that distinguishes the Epistle to the Colossians among the epistles of St Paul is more pronounced still in the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians. The Epistle to the Colossians is full of special details; it has a dictum which corresponds well with the historical circumstances in which it must have been written; the Epistle to the Ephesians is altogether vague. We can understand how a general catechism might be drawn from a particular letter, but not how a particular letter might be drawn from a general catechism. In fine, the 21st verse of chapter vi. of the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians takes it for granted that the Epistle to the Colossians was previously written. As soon as it is admitted that the Epistle to the Colossians is a work of St Paul’s, the question then may be stated as follows:—How could Paul waste his time in counterfeiting one of his own works, repeating himself, to make an ordinary letter out of a topical and special letter?

This is not altogether impossible; but it is not very probable. The improbability of such a conception is diminished if we suppose that Paul delegated that task to one of his disciples. Perhaps Timothy, for example, may have taken the Epistle to the Colossians so as to apply it, and to make of it a general composition which could be addressed to all the Churches of Asia. It is difficult to speak with assurance on this point: for it is also supposable that the epistle may have been written after the death of Paul, at an epoch when people set about seeking out apostolic writings, and when, seeing the small number of such writings, people were not over scrupulous in producing new ones—imitating, assimilating, copying, and diluting writings previously held to be apostolic. Thus, the second general Epistle of Peter was manufactured out of the first epistle, and out of the Epistle of Jude. It is possible that the so-called epistle to the Ephesians owed its origin to the same process. The objections which have been raised against the Epistle to the Colossians, both as regards language and doctrines, are addressed principally to the latter. The Epistle to the Ephesians, in respect of style, is sensibly different from the undisputed epistles; it contains favourite expressions, gradations which only belong to it; words foreign to the ordinary language of Paul, some of which are to be found in the Epistles to Timothy, to Titus, and to the Hebrews. The sentences are diffuse, feeble, and loaded with useless words and repetition, entangled with frivolous incidents, full of pleonasms and of encumbrances. The same difference is apparent in the ideas. In the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians Gnosticism is plainly manifest; the idea of the Church conceived as a living organism, is developed in it in such a way as to carry the mind to the years 70 or 80; the exegesis is foreign to the custom of Paul; the manner in which he speaks of the “holy Apostles” surprises one; the theory of marriage is different from that which Paul expounded to the Corinthians.

On the other hand, it must be said that the aim and the interest the counterfeiter might have had in composing this piece is not altogether apparent, inasmuch as it adds little to the Epistle to the Colossians. It seems, moreover, that a forger would have written a letter plainly addressed and circumstantial, as was the case with the Epistles xiiito Timothy and to Titus. That Paul wrote or dictated this letter is almost impossible to admit; but that some one may have composed it during his lifetime, under his eyes, and in his name, is what cannot be declared as improbable. Paul, a prisoner at Rome, is able to charge Tychicus to go and visit the Churches of Asia and to remit several letters—the Epistle to the Colossians, the Note to Philemon, and the Epistle, now lost, to the Laodicæans; he could, besides, remit to him copies of a sort of circular letter in which the name of the destined Church was left in blank, and which could be the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians. On his way to Ephesus, Tychicus may have shown this open letter to the Ephesians; and it in permissible to suppose that the latter took or retained a copy of it. The resemblance of this general epistle to the Epistle to the Colossians was, as if that a man who had written several letters at intervals of a few days, and who, being pre-occupied, with a certain number of fixed ideas, had relapsed, without knowing it, into the same expressions; or, rather, as if that Paul had charged either Timothy or Tychicus in composing the circular letter to make it fit in with the Epistle to the Colossians, and to exclude everything of a topical character. The passage, Colossians iv. 16, shows that Paul sometimes caused the letters to be carried from one Church to another. We shall see presently that a similar hypothesis must be made use of to explain certain peculiarities of the Epistle to the Romans. It appears that, in these last years, Paul adopted encyclical letters as a form of writing well adapted to the vast rural ministry that he had to fulfil. In writing to one Church, the thought occurred to him that the things which he indited might be suitable for other Churches, and he so arranged matters that the latter might not be deprived of them. We come in this way to regard the Epistle to the Colossians and the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians, taken together, as a pendant to the Epistle to the Romans, as a sort of theological exposition, which was destined to be transmitted in the form of a circular letter to the different Churches founded by the Apostle. The Epistle to the Ephesians had not the same degree of authenticity as the Epistle to the Colossians; but it had a more general application, and it was preferred. In very early times it was taken for a work of Paul’s, and for a writing of high authority. This is proved by the use which is made of it in the first epistle attributed to Peter, a treatise whose authenticity is not impossible, and which, in any case, belongs to the apostolic period. Among the letters which bear the name of Paul, the Epistle to the Ephesians is probably the one which was the first cited as a composition of the Apostle of the Gentiles.

There remain the two Epistles to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus. The authenticity of these three epistles presents some insurmountable difficulties. I regard them as apocryphal productions. To prove this, I would point out that the language of the three writings is not that of Paul. I would take note of a series of turns and expressions either exclusively peculiar, or particularly dear to the author, which being characteristic, ought to be found in similar proportions in the other epistles of Paul, or, at least, in the proportion desired. Other expressions, which bear in a kind of way the signature of Paul, are lacking in xivthis. I would particularly point out that these epistles embrace a multitude of inconsistencies, both as regards the supposed author and the supposed recipients. The ordinary characteristic of the letters fabricated with a doctrinal intention is, that the forger sees the public over the head of the pretended recipient, and writes to the latter about things of which he is entirely conversant, and to which the forger desires the public to listen. The three epistles under discussion partake in a high degree of this character. Paul, whose authenticated letters are so particular, so precise; Paul, who, believing in the near end of the world, never supposed that he would be read in after ages. Paul was herein a general preacher, just enough interested in his correspondent to make sermons to him which had not relation to himself, and to address to him a small code of ecclesiastical discipline in view of the future. But these arguments, which of themselves ought to be decisive, I can afford to pass over. I shall only, in proving my thesis, make use of reasonings which are more or less material. I shall attempt to demonstrate that there is no possible means of putting these into the known frame, or even into a possible frame of the life of St Paul. A very important preliminary observation is the perfect similarity of these three epistles, the one to the other—a similarity which compels the admission that either all three are authentic or all three must be rejected as apocryphal. The particular features which separate them widely from the other epistles of St Paul are the same. The odd expressions in the language of St Paul, which are to be remarked in them, are to be discovered equally in the three. The defects which render the style unworthy of St Paul are identical. It is a curious enough fact that each time St Paul takes the pen to write to his disciples he forgets his habitual mannerisms, falls into the same looseness, the same idioms. The ground-work of the ideas gives rise to a similar observation. The three epistles are full of vague counsels, or moral exhortations, of which Timothy and Titus, familiarised by daily intercourse with the ideas of the Apostle, had no need. The errors which are combatted in them are always a sort of Gnosticism. The predilections of the author in the three epistles do not much vary; we see the jealous and anxious care of an orthodoxy already formed and of a hierarch already developed. The three narratives are sometimes a repetition of one another, and copies of the other epistles of St Paul. One thing is certain, namely, that if the three epistles had been written at the dictation of Paul, they belong to the same period of his life—a period separated by long years from the time when he composed the other epistles. Any hypotheses which place between the three epistles in question an interval of three or four years, for example, or which placed between them some one of the other epistles which are known to us, ought to be rejected. To explain the similarity, the one to the other, of the three epistles, and their dissimilarity to the others, admits of but one possible construction, and that is to suppose that they were written in a space of time somewhat short, and a long time after the others—at an epoch when all the circumstances which surrounded the Apostle had been changed, when he had become old, when his ideas and his style had undergone modification. Certainly one might succeed in proving the possibility of such xvan hypothesis, but that would not resolve the question. The style of a man may change; but from a style the most striking and the most inimitable that ever existed, one cannot fall into a style, prolix and destitute of vigour. In any case, such an hypothesis is formally excluded by what we know for certain of the life of Paul. We proceed now to demonstrate this.

The first Epistle to Timothy in the one which presents the fewest individual traits, and nevertheless, did it stand alone, we would not be able to find in it an incident in the life of Paul. Paul, when he was reputed to have written this epistle, had, for a long time, left Timothy, for he had not written to him since he went away (i. 3). The Apostle quitted Timothy at Ephesus. Paul at that same time had departed for Macedonia. Not having time to combat the errors which had begun to spread at Ephesus, the chief advocates of which were Hymenæus and Alexander (i. 20), Paul had left Timothy in order to combat these errors. The journey which Paul made was to be of short duration; he calculated to return soon to Ephesus (iii. 14, 16; vi. 13).

Two hypotheses have been proposed in order to include this epistle in the contexture of the life of Paul, each as those which are furnished by the Acts, and confirmed by the certain epistles. According to the one, the journey from Ephesus into Macedonia, which separated Paul and Timothy, is the one which is narrated in Acts xx. 1. That journey took place during the third mission. Paul remained three years at Ephesus. He left in order to see once more his churches in Macedonia, and those in Achaia. It was, it is said, from Macedonia or Achaia that he wrote to the disciple whom he had left in Ephesus, giving him full powers. This hypothesis is inadmissible. First, the Acts inform us (xix. 22) that Timothy had gone in advance of his master into Macedonia, where in fact Paul joined him (2 Cor. i. 1). And then is it probable that, almost on the morrow of his departure from Ephesus, Paul should have given to his disciple the instructions of which we read in the first Epistle to Timothy? The errors which he singled out in it he had himself been able to combat. The turn of the verse (1 Tim. i. 3) is not compatible with a man who is about to depart from Ephesus after a long sojourn. Besides, Paul announces the intention of returning to Ephesus (iii. 14; iv. 13); but Paul, in quitting Ephesus, had the fixed intention of going to Jerusalem without passing again through Ephesus (Acts xix. 21; xx. 1, 3, 16; 1 Cor. xvi. 4; ii. 1, 16). Let us add, that if we suppose the epistle to be written at that moment, everything about it becomes awkward; the defect of the apocryphal letters, which are anything but precise, in which the author holds up to his fictitious correspondent things au courant of what was about to be; such a defect, I say, is carried so far as to be absurd.

In order to avoid this difficulty, and above all to explain the intention announced by Paul of returning to Ephesus, some have had recourse to another explanation. It is supposed that the journey from Macedonia, mentioned in the verse (1 Tim. i. 3), is a journey not recounted in the Acts which Paul would have made during his three years’ sojourn at Ephesus. It is certainly permissible to believe that Paul was not all that time stationary. It is supposed, then, that he made a journey xviinto the Archipelago, and through there, at the same sweep, a link was designed to be attached to the Epistle to Titus in a manner more or leas conformable to the life of Paul. We do not deny the possibility of such a journey, although the silence of the Acts presents, it is true, a difficulty: yet, we cannot deny that it is here where the embarrassments begin which are found in First Timothy. By accepting this hypothesis, we understand less than if we had adopted the former one as to the meaning of the verse i. 3. Why does he tell Timothy what he already knows quite well? Paul had just passed two or three years at Ephesus, and he will soon again return there. What signifies these errors he has suddenly discovered at the moment of departure, which he leaves Timothy at Ephesus to settle? By the latter hypothesis, moreover, the first Epistle to Timothy should have been written about the same time as the great authentic epistles of Paul. What! is it on the morrow of the Epistle to the Galatians, and on the eve of the Epistles to the Corinthians, that Paul could have written such a milk-and-water amplification? He must have dropped his habitual style in setting out from Ephesus; he must have found it again on returning there, in order to write the letters to the Corinthians, excepting on one occasion, a few years after, when he took up again the pretended style of the journey for the purpose of writing to the self-same Timothy. The second to Timothy, by the admission of everybody, could not have been written before the arrival of Paul at Rome, a prisoner. Accordingly, there must have elapsed several years between the first Epistle to Timothy and that to Titus, on the one hand, and the second to Timothy, on the other. This could not be. The three narratives have been copied the one from the other; but how are we to suppose that Paul, after an interval of five or six years, in writing to a friend, should make extracts from old letters? Would that be a proceeding worthy of a master of the epistolary art, one so ardent and so rich in ideas? The second hypothesis is then, like the first, a tissue of improbabilities. The verse (1 Tim. i. 3) is a maze from which the apologist cannot extricate himself. That verse raises an impossibility in the biography of St Paul. We must find an instance where Paul, in going into Macedonia, could only have touched at Ephesus; that instance has no existence in the life of St Paul previous to his imprisonment. Let us add, that when Paul is reputed to have written the epistle in question, the Church of Ephesus possessed a complete organisation of elders, deacons, and deaconesses; this Church even presents the usual appearances of a community already grown old with its schisms and errors, nothing of all of which is applicable to the time of the third mission. If the first to Timothy was written by Paul, we must throw it into an hypothetical period of his life posterior to his imprisonment, and beyond the scope of the Acts. This hypothesis, involving also the examination of the two other epistles of which we have just been speaking, will be reserved by us, till later on.

The second Epistle to Timothy furnishes many more facts than the first. The Apostle is evidently in prison at Rome (i. 8, 12, 16, 17; ii. 9-10). Timothy is at Ephesus, (i. 16-18; ii. 17; iv. 14-15, 19), where the false doctrines continue to increase through the fault of Hymenæus and Philetus (ii. 17). Paul has not been long at Rome and xviiin prison, when he gives to Timothy, in the form of news, certain details about a journey into the Archipelago he had just made; at Miletum he has left Trophimus sick (i. 11, 20); at Troas he has left several things with Carpus (iv. 13), and Erastus remained at Corinth (iv. 20). At Rome the Asiatics, among others Phygellas and Hermogenes, have abandoned him (i. 15). Another Ephesian, on the other hand, Onesiphorus, one of his old friends, having come to Rome, sought him out, and found him, and cared for him in his captivity (i. 16-18). The Apostle is filled with a presentiment of his near end (iv. 6-8). His disciples are far removed from him. Demas has forsaken him to pursue his worldly interests, and is departed unto Thessaloncia (iv. 10); Crescens to Galatia (ibid.), Titus unto Dalmatia (ibid.); and he has sent Tychicus to Ephesus (iv. 12); only Luke is with him (iv. 11). A certain Alexander, a copper-smith from Ephesus, did him much harm, and opposed him actively; this Alexander has set out again for Ephesus (iv. 14-15). Paul has already appeared before the Roman authorities; on this occasion no one has assisted him (iv. 16), but God has aided him, and delivered him from out of the mouth of the lion (iv. 17). In consequence of this, he begs Timothy to come before the winter (iv. 9, 21), and to bring Mark with him (iv. 11). He gives him at the same time a commission, which is, to bring him his cloak, the books, and the parchment which he left at Troas with Carpus (iv. 13). He recommends him to salute Prisca, Aquila, and the household of Onesiphorus. He sends to him the greetings of Pudens, of Linus, of Claudia, and of all the brethren (iv. 21).

This simple analysis suffices to point out some strange incoherencies. The Apostle is at Rome; he has just made a journey of the Archipelago, he gives to Timothy the particulars of it, as though he had not written to him since the journey. In the same letter he speaks to him of his prison and of his trial. Will any one say that this journey into the Archipelago was the journey of Paul the captive, narrated in the Acts? But in this journey Paul did not traverse the Archipelago, neither could he go to Miletum, nor to Troas, nor, above all, to Corinth, since at the elevation of Cnide, the tempest drives the vessels upon Crete, then upon Malta. Will any one say that the voyage in question was the last voyage of St Paul, a free man, his return voyage to Jerusalem in company with the deputies charged with accusing him? But Timothy was in that voyage, at least from Macedonia (Acts xx. 4). More than two years rolled away between that voyage and the arrival of Paul at Rome (Acts xxiv. 27). Can we conceive that Paul would recount to Timothy as being news, things which took place in his presence a long time before, when, in the interval, they had lived together, and had hardly been separate? Far from being left sick at Miletum, Trophimus followed the Apostle to Jerusalem, and was the cause of his arrestment (Acts xx. 29). The passage, 2 Tim. iv. 10, 11, compared with Col. v. 10, 14, and with Philemon — 24, forms a contradiction not less serious. How could Demas have forsaken Paul when the latter wrote the second to Timothy, seeing that epistle was posterior to the Epistle to the Colossians and to the Epistle to Philemon? When writing these last two epistles Paul has Mark near him; how, in writing to Timothy, xviiicould he therefore say,—“Take Mark and bring him with thee; for he is profitable to me for the ministry?” On the other hand, we have established the fact, that it is not allowable to separate the three letters; but in the manner it has been treated by some there would be three years at least between the first and the second to Timothy, and it is necessary to place between them the second to the Corinthians and the Epistle to the Romans. One single refuge then remains here for the first to Timothy, and that is to suppose that the second to Timothy was written during a prolongation of the life of the Apostle of which the Acts makes no mention. This hypothesis may be demonstrably possible, but a multitude of inherent difficulties to the epistle would still remain. Timothy is at Ephesus, and (iv. 12) Paul says dryly, “I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus,” as if Ephesus was not the place of destination. What could be more barren than the passage 2 Tim. iii. 10-11? Nay, what could be more inexact? Paul was only associated with Timothy in the second mission, but the persecutions which Paul underwent at Antioch in Pisidia, at Iconium, and Lystra took place during the first mission. The real Paul writing to Timothy would have had many other mutual experiences to put him in mind of. Let us add, that he would not have dreamt of losing his time in recalling them to him. A thousand improbabilities rise up on every side, but it is useless to discuss them, for the hypothesis itself is in question, and according to which our epistle would be posterior to the appearance of Paul before the council of Nero. This hypothesis, I say, ought to be discarded, as we shall demonstrate when we come to discuss, in its turn, the Epistle to Titus.

When Paul wrote the Epistle to Titus, the latter was in the island of Crete (i. 5). Paul, who had just visited that island, and had been very much dissatisfied with the inhabitants (i. 12, 13), left his disciples there, in order to complete the organisation of the churches, and to go from city to city to establish presbyteri or episcopi (i. 6). He promised Titus to send him soon Artemas and Tychicus; he begged his disciples to come, when he had received these two brethren, to rejoin him at Nicopolis where he calculated to pass the winter (iii. 12), The Apostle next recommends his disciple to bring diligently Zenas and Apollos, and to take great care of them (iii. 13).

And here, again, with every phrase, difficulties present themselves. Not a word for the faithful Cretians—nothing but hurtful and unbefitting severity (i. 12, 13)—fresh declamations against errors, the existence of which the churches recently established had not dreamt of (i. 10 et suivi)—errors Paul, absent, saw and was better acquainted with than Titus who was on the spot—details which presumed Christianity to be already old and completely developed in the island (i. 5, 6)—trivial recommendations bearing upon points quite clear. Such an epistle would have been useless to Titus, as it did not contain a single word that he ought not to have known by heart. But it is by direct arguments, and not by plausible inductions, that the apocryphal character of the document in question can be made clear.

If it is wished to connect this letter with the period in the life of Paul known through the Acts, the same difficulties are experienced as in those xixwhich precede. According to the Acts, Paul only touched at Crete once, and that was when shipwrecked. He made but a very short stay there, and during the stay he was a captive. It is surely not at this moment that Paul was able to commence the founding of churches in the island. Besides, if it were the voyage of Paul as a captive which is related (Tit. i. 5), Paul, when he wrote, ought to be a captive at Rome. How could he say from his prison at Rome that he intended to pass the winter at Nicopolis? Why did he not make, as wan his custom, some allusion to his being in the condition of a prisoner?

Another hypothesis has been tried. It has been attempted to connect the Epistle to Titus and the Epistle to Timothy the one with the other. It has been premised that these two epistles were the results of the episodical voyage, which St Paul might have composed during his sojourn at Ephesus. No doubt this hypothesis may go a very little way to explain the difficulties in the first to Timothy, but we most investigate it to see whether the Epistle to Titus can lend it any support.

Paul was at Ephesus for a year or two. During the summer he formed the project of making an apostolic tour, of which the Acts has made no mention. He left Timothy at Ephesus, and took with him Titus and the two Ephesians, Artemas and Tychicus. He went first into Macedonia, then from there to Crete, where he founded several churches. He left Titus in the island, charging him to continue his work, and to repair to Corinth with Artemas and Tychicus. He made there the acquaintance of Apollos, whom he had not seen before, and who was on the point of setting out for Ephesus. He begged Apollos to go a little way out of his straight route so as to pass through Crete, and to carry to Titus the epistle which has been preserved. His plan at that moment was to go into Epirus, and to pass the winter at Nicopolis. He sends to inform Titus of that plan, announces to him that he will see again Artemas and Tychicus in Crete, and begs him, as soon as he shall have seen them, to come and rejoin him at Nicopolis. Paul then made his journey into Epirus. He wrote from Epirus the first to Timothy, and charged Artemas and Timothy to take it with them; he enjoined them likewise to pass through Crete, so as to give at the same time the notice to Titus to come and join him at Nicopolis. Titus repaired to Nicopolis, and the Apostle and his disciple returned together to Ephesus.

With this hypothesis we can in a fashion give an account of the circumstances contained in the Epistle to Titus, and the first to Timothy. Nay, more, we obtain two apparent advantages by it. It serves to explain the passages of the Epistles to the Corinthians, from which it appears, at first glance, to result that St Paul, in going to Corinth at the end of his long sojourn at Ephesus, went there for the third rime (1 Cor. xvi. 7; 2 Cor. ii. 1; xii. 14, 21; viii. 1); it serves further to explain the passage in which St Paul pretends to have preached the Gospel as far away as Illyrium (Rom. xv. 19). There is nothing substantial about these advantages, nor anything to compensate for the injuries done to probability in order to obtain them!

First, this pretended episodical voyage, so short that the author of the Acts did not judge it proper to speak of it, must have been very considerable, xxsince it embraced a journey into Macedonia, a voyage to Crete, a sojourn at Corinth, and wintering at Nicopolis. This must have taken almost a year. Why, then, does the author of the Acts say that the sojourn of Paul at Ephesus extended over three year. (Acts xix. 8, 10; xx. 31)? Doubtless these expressions do not exclude short absences, but they exclude a series of journeys. Besides, in the hypothesis we are discussing, the voyage to Nicopolis should have taken place before the second Epistle to the Corinthians. Yet, in that epistle, Paul declares that Corinth is, at the date when he wrote, the extreme point of his missions towards the west. Finally, the itinerary which has been traced of the journey of Paul is not very natural. Paul went first into Macedonia—the text is formal (1 Tim. i. 3)—and thence he repairs to Crete. In going from Macedonia into Crete, Paul must have cruised about the coast, either at Ephesus—in which case the verse, 1 Tim. i. 3, is denuded of meaning—or at Corinth, in which case we cannot conceive why he wanted to return there immediately after. And how is it that Paul, in desiring to make a journey from Epirus, speaks of the winter which he must pass, and not of the journey itself? And this sojourn at Nicopolis, how is it that we do not know more about it? To suppose the Nicopolis in question to be the one in Thrace, on the Nestus, only adds to the confusion, and does not possess any of the apparent advantages of the hypothesis discussed above.

Some exegites think to remove the difficulty by modifying a little the journey required by this hypothesis. According to them, Paul went from Epirus into Crete, from there to Corinth, then to Nicopolis, then to Macedonia. The fatal verse, 1 Tim. i. 3, is opposed to that. Let suppose a person starting from Paris, with the intention of making a trip to England, following the banks of the Rhine in Switzerland and Lombardy. Would that person, having arrived at Cologne, write to one of his friends in Paris: “I have left you at Paris, and am going to Lombardy?” The conduct of St Paul, in any of these suppositions, is not less absurd than the route of such a one. The journey of Tychicus and Artemas into Crete is not susceptible of proof. Why did Paul not give to Apollos a letter for Timothy? Why did he delay writing to him through Tychicus and Artemas? Why did he not fix a time with Titus when he should come to join him, seeing that his projects were arrested? These journeys from Corinth to Ephesus, all made by way of Crete, for the lack of an apology, are not at all natural. Paul, in this hypothesis of the episodical journey, in whatever manner we may regard the itinerary, gives and holds back perpetually; he does things without due consideration; he extracts only from his wanderings a portion of their advantages, reserving for future occasions that which he could very well accomplish at the moment. When these epistles are in question, it seems that the ordinary laws of probability and of good sense are reversed.

All attempts to include the Epistles to Titus and Timothy in the work of the life of St Paul traced by the Acts are tainted with insoluble contradictions. The authentic epistles of St Paul explain, suppose, and permeate one another. The three epistles in question may be compared to a small round which has been punched out by a xxisevere critic; and this is so much the more singular when two of them, the first to Timothy and the one to Titus, should happen just in the middle of that whirl of affairs, so very consecutive and so well known, which have reference to the Epistle to the Galatians, the two to the Corinthians, and that to the Romans. Several also of the exegites who defend the authenticity of these three gospels have had recourse to another hypothesis. They pretend that these epistles ought to be placed at a period in the life of St Paul of which the Acts makes no mention. According to the latter, Paul, after having appeared before Nero, as is implied in the Acts, was acquitted, which is very possible, nay, even probable. Set at liberty, he resumed his apostolic career, and went into Spain, which is likewise probable. According to the critics, of whom we are speaking, Paul, at that period of his life, made a fresh journey to the Archipelago—the journey which is referred to in the Epistles to Timothy and Titus. He returned again to Rome, and was there made prisoner a second time, and from his prison wrote the second to Timothy.

All this, it most be owned, resembles much the artificial defence of an accused person who, in order to answer objections, is driven to vent an assemblage of facts which have no connection with anything that is known. These isolated hypotheses, without either support or force, are in the eyes of the law a sign of culpability, in criticism the sign of apocryphy. Even admitting the possibility of that new voyage to the Archipelago, it would take no end of pains to bring into accord the facts related in the three epistles; these goings and comings are susceptible of very little proof. But such a discussion is useless. It is evident, in fact, that the author of the second to Timothy knew well how to speak of the captivity mentioned in the Acts, and to which allusion is made in the Epistles to the Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. The similarity of 2 Tim. iv. 9-22 with the endings of the Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, proves it. The personnel which surrounded the Apostle is nearly identical in both cases. The captivity, from the midst of which Paul is reputed to have written the second to Timothy, finishes with his liberation (2 Tim. iv. 17-18). Paul in this epistle is full of hope; he meditates new schemes, and is pre-occupied with the thought, which, in fact, he is full of during the whole of his first (and only) captivity, namely, to perfect evangelical preaching—to preach Christ to all nations, and in particular to peoples of the far west. If the three epistles were of so far advanced a date, we cannot conceive why Timothy should always be spoken of in them as a young man. We are able, besides, to prove directly that the voyage to the Archipelago, posterior to the sojourn of Paul at Rome, did not take place. In such a voyage, indeed, St Paul would have touched at Miletum (2 Tim. iv. 20). Now in the fine discourse which the author of the Acts attributes to St Paul at the end of the third mission, while passing through Miletum, he makes Paul say, “And now, behold, I know that ye all, among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my face no more” (Acts xx. 25). But it is not argued that Paul was deceived in his previsions, so that he had to change his opinions, and to see again a church to which he thought he had said a final adieu. This is not the question, however. It matters little to us xxiiwhether Paul may or may not have uttered these words. The author of the Acts was well acquainted with the routine of Paul’s life, although, unfortunately, he has not judged it proper to inform us of it. It is impossible that he could have put into the mouth of his master what he knew very well could not be verified.

The letters to Timothy and to Titus are therefore refuted by the whole contexture of the biography of Paul. When they are forced into it by one party, they are thrust out of it by another party. Even if an express period in the life of the Apostle were created for them, the result would not be any more satisfactory. These epistles refute themselves; they are full of contradictions; the Acts and the authentic epistles would be lost if we could not succeed in creating another hypothesis to uphold the epistles of which we are speaking. And may it not be alleged that a forger could not have thrown a little more sprightliness into these contradictions? Demo of Corinth, in the second century, has a theory not less chimerical in regard to the journeys of St Paul, inasmuch as he makes him arrive at Corinth and to depart from Corinth for Rome in the company of St Peter—a thing utterly impossible. There is no doubt that the three epistles in question were fabricated at a period when the Acts had not yet gained full authority. Later, the canvas of the Acts was embellished, like as did the author of the fable of Theckla about the year 200. The author of our epistles knew the names of the principal disciples of St Paul; he had read several of his epistles; he had formed a vague idea of his journeyings; justly enough, he is struck by the multitude of disciples which surrounded Paul, and whom he sends out as messengers in every direction. But the details which he has invented are false and inconsistent: they always represent Timothy as being a young man; the imperfect notion he has of a journey Paul made into Crete makes him believe that Paul had founded churches there. The personnel which he introduces into the three epistles is peculiarly Ephesian; we are tempted at moments to think that the desire to exalt certain families of Ephesus and to depreciate some others belonging to it was not altogether singular in a fabricator.

The three epistles in question, were they apocryphal from one end to the other? or were they made use of for the purpose of composing authentic letters addressed to Titus and to Timothy, that they should have been diluted, in a sense, to conform with the ideas of the times, and with the intention of leading the authority of the apostles to the developments which the ecclesiastical hierarchy took? It is this that is difficult to decide. Perhaps, in certain parts, at the close of the second to Timothy, for example, letters bearing different dates have been mixed up; but even then it must be admitted that the forger has given himself plenty of scope. Indeed, one consequence which is derived from what precedes, is that the three epistles are sisters, that, to speak accurately, they are one and the same work, and that no distinction can be drawn between them in anything that regards their authenticity.

It is quite otherwise with the question of finding out whether some of the data of the second to Timothy (for example, i. 15-18; ii. 17, 18; xxiiiiv. 19-21) have not a historical value. The forger, though not knowing all the life of Paul, and not possessing the Acts, might have, notably in the last days of the Apostle, some original details. Especially do we believe that the passage in the second of Timothy (iv. 19-21) has much importance, and throws a true light upon the imprisonment of St Paul at Rome. The fourth gospel is also, in one sense, apocryphal; yet we cannot say that on this account it is a work destitute of historical importance. As to that which it possesses of chimera, according to our ideas of such supposititious works, it must, on no account, be discarded from the New Testament. This ought not to occasion the least scruple. If the pious author of the false letters to Timothy and to Titus could be brought back and made to assist amongst us in the discussions of which he has been the cause, he would not be forbidden; he would respond, like the priest of Asia, author of the Romance of Theckla, when he found himself pressed into a corner: convictum atque confessum id se amore Pauli fecisse.

The time of the composition of these three epistles may be placed about the year 96 to 100. Theophilus of Antioch (about the year 170) cited them expressly. Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian admitted them also. Marcion, on the contrary, rejected them, or did not know them. The allusions which are believed to have been found in the epistles attributed to Clement of Rome, to Ignatius, to Polycarp, are doubtful. There were floating about at that epoch a certain number of hemitetic phrases, all facts; the presence of those phrases in a writing does not prove that the author has borrowed them directly from some other writing in which he has found them. The agreements which we remark between certain expressions of Hegesippe and certain passages in the epistles in question, are singular; one does not know what consequence to draw from them, for if, in those expressions, Hegesippe has in his eye the first Epistle to Timothy, it would seem that he regarded it as a writing posterior to the death of the Apostles. However that may be, it is clear that when he had collected the letters of Paul, the letters to Titus and to Timothy, he enjoyed full authority. Where were they composed? Probably at Ephesus; probably at Rome. The partisans of this second hypothesis may say that, in the East, people do not commit errors which are remarked on. Their style bristles with Latinisms. The intention which prompted the writing, to wit, the desire of augmenting the force of the hierarchical principle, and of the authority of the Church, in presenting a model of piety, of docility, of “ecclesiastical spirit,” traced by the Apostle himself, is altogether in harmony with what we know of the character of the Roman Church from the first century.

It only remains for us now to speak of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As we have already said, that epistle does not belong to Paul; but it ought not to be put in the same category as the two epistles to Timothy and the one to Titus, the author not seeking to pass off his work for a writing of Paul. What is the value of the opinion which is established in the Church, and according to which Paul is the author of this maudlin epistle? A study of the manuscripts, an examination of the ecclesiastical tradition, and a searching criticism of the work itself, will xxivenlighten us on that point. The ancient manuscripts bear simply at the head of the epistle, Πρὸς Εβραίους. As to the order of transcription, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus representing the Alexandrine tradition, place the epistle among those of Paul. The Græco-Latin manuscripts, on the contrary, exhibit all the hesitation which still remained in the West during the first half of the middle ages, as to the canonicity of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and, by consequence, its attribution to Paul. The Codex Bœrnerianus omits it; the Codex Augiensis gives it only in Latin after the epistles of Paul. The Codex Claramontanus puts the epistle in question outside the list, as a sort of appendix, after the stichometry general of the writing, a proof that the epistle was not found in the manuscript from which the Claramontanus was copied. In the aforesaid stichometry (a very ancient composition) the Epistle to the Hebrews does not appear, or, if it appears it is under the name of Barnabas. In fine, the errors which abound in the Latin text of the Epistle of the Claramontanus are sufficient to awaken the suspicion of the critic, and prove that that epistle was only included gradually, and as if surreptitiously, in the canon of the Latin Church. But there is uncertainty even as to the tradition. Marcion did not have the Epistle to the Hebrews in his collection of the epistles of Paul: the author of the canon attributed to Muratori omits it in his list. Irenæus was acquainted with the writing in question, but he did not consider it as belonging to Paul. Clement of Alexandria believed it was Paul’s; but he felt a difficulty in attributing it to him, and, to get out of the embarrassment, had recourse to a not very acceptible hypothesis: he assumes that Paul wrote the epistle in Hebrew, and that Luke translated it into Greek. Origen admits also, in a sense, the Epistle to the Hebrews as belonging to Paul, but he recognised that many people denied that it had been written by the latter. Nowhere in it could he discover the style of Paul, and supposes, almost as Clement of Alexandria did, that the origin of the ideas belonged only to the Apostle. “The character of the style of the epistle,” says he, “has not the ruggedness of that of the Apostle.” This letter is, as regards the arrangement of the words, much more Hellenic, as everybody must avow who is capable of judging of the difference of styles. . . . As for me, if I had to express an opinion, I should say that the thoughts are the Apostle’s, but that the style and the arrangement of the words belong to some one who has revoked from memory the words of the Apostle, and who has reduced to writing the discourse of his master. If, then, any church maintains that this epistle belongs to Paul, it has only to prove it; for the ancients must have had some reason to go on handing it down as the work of Paul. As to the question—Who wrote this epistle? God alone knows the truth. Amongst the opinions which have been transmitted to us by history, one appears to have been written by Clement of Alexandria, who was Bishop of the Romans; another by Luke, who wrote the Gospels and the Acts. Tertullian does not observe the same discretion: he unhesitatingly puts forward the Epistle to the Hebrews as the work of Paul. Gaius, a priest of Rome, St Hippolytus, and St Cyprian did not place it among the epistles of Paul. During the novatianistic quarrel, xxvin which, for many reasons, this epistle might have been employed, it is not even mentioned.

Alexandria was the centre where the opinion was formed that the Epistle to the Hebrews should be intercalated in the series of the letters of Paul. Towards the middle of the third century Dionysius of Alexandria appeared to entertain no doubt as to Paul being its author. From that time this became the opinion most generally accepted in the East; nevertheless, protestations did not cease to make themselves heard. The Latins especially protested vigorously; particularly the Roman Church, who maintained that the epistle did not belong to Paul. Eusebius hesitated much, and had recourse to the hypothesis of Clement of Alexandria and of Origen; he was inclined to believe that the epistle had been composed in Hebrew by Paul, and translated by Clement of Rome. St Jerome and St Augustine have been at pains to conceal their doubts, and rarely cite that part of the canon without a reservation. Divers documents insist always in giving as the author of the work either Luke, Barnabas, or Clement. The ancient manuscripts of Latin production sufficed, as we have seen, to attest the repugnance which the West experienced when this epistle was put forward as a work of Paul’s. It is clear that when we have made, if we may so speak, the editio princeps of the letters of Paul, the number of letters must be fixed at thirteen. People were no doubt accustomed very early to place after the thirteen epistles the Epistle to the Hebrews—an anonymous apostolic writing, whose ideas approached in some respects those contained in the writings of Paul. Hence, one had only a step to take to arrive at the conclusion that the Epistle to the Hebrew’s belonged to the Apostle. Everything induces the belief that this induction was made at Alexandria, that is to say, in a Church relatively modern as compared with the Churches of Syria, Asia, Greece, and Rome. Such an induction is of no value in criticism, if the clear, intrinsic proofs are perverted by another party in attributing the epistle in question to the Apostle Paul.

Now, this is in reality what has taken place. Clement of Alexandria and Origen, very good judges indeed of the Greek style, could not find in our epistle any semblance of the style of Paul. St Jerome is of the same opinion; the fathers of the Latin Church who refused to credit that the epistle was Paul’s,—all gave the some reason for their doubts; propter styli sermonis que distantiam. This is an excellent reason. The style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is, in a word, different from that of Paul; it is more oratorical, more periodic; the diction contains a number of idiomatic expressions. The fundamental basis of the thoughts is not far removed from the opinions of Paul, especially Paul as a captive; but the exposition and the exegesis are quite distinct. There is no nominal superscription, which was contrary to the usage of the Apostle; characteristics which one always expects to find in an epistle of Paul’s are wanting in the former. The exegesis is particularly allegorical, and resembles much more that of Philo than that of Paul. The author has imbibed the Alexandrian culture. He only makes use of the version called the Septuagint; from the text of this he adduces reasons which exhibit a complete ignorance of Hebrew; his method of xxviciting and of analysing Biblical texts is not in conformity with the method of Paul. The author, moreover, is a Jew; he fancies himself to be extolling Christ when he compares him to a great Hebrew priest; Christianity is to him none other than perfected Judaism; he is far from regarding the Law as abolished. The passage ii. 3, where the author is placed among those who have only indirectly heard of the mysteries of the life of Christ from the mouth of the disciples of Jesus, does not accord at all with one of the most fixed pretensions of Paul. Let us remark, finally, that, in writing of the Christian Hebrews, Paul must have deviated from one of his most fixed rules, which was, never to perform a pastoral not upon the soil of churches Judæo-Christian, so that the apostles of circumcision might not, on their side, encroach upon the churches of uncircumcision.

The Epistle to the Hebrews was not, therefore, written by St Paul. By whom and where was it written? and to whom was it addressed? We shall examine all these points in our fourth volume. For the present, the simple date of a writing so important interests us. Now, this date has been determined with sufficient decision. The Epistle to the Hebrews was, according to all probability, anterior to the year 70, inasmuch as the Levitical service of the Temple is represented in it as being regularly, and without interruption, continued. On the other hand, at xiii. 7, and even at v. 12, there would appear an allusion to the death of the apostles,—of James, the brother of the Lord, for example; at xiii. 13, there seems to be recorded a deliverance to Timothy posterior to the death of Paul; at x. 32, and suivi, and probably at xiii. 7 there is, I think, a distinct mention of the persecutions of Nero in the year 64. It is probable that the passage xiii. 7, and following, contains an allusion to the commencements of the revolt of Judea (year 66), and a foreboding of the misfortunes which are to follow; this passage implies, moreover, that the year 40, after the death of Christ, had not passed, and that this term was drawing near. Everything, therefore, combines to support the hypothesis that the compiling of the Epistle to the Hebrews took place between the years 65 and 70, probably in the year 66.

After having discussed the authenticity, it remains now for us to discuss the integrity of the epistles of Paul. The authentic epistles have never been interpolated. The style of the Apostle was so individual, and so original, that every addition would drop off from the body of the text by reason of its own inertness. In the labour of publication which took place when the epistles were collected, there were, nevertheless, some operations, the import of which must be taken into account. The principle upon which the compilers proceeded appears to have been; 1st, to add nothing to the text; 2d, to reject nothing which they believed to have been dictated or written by the Apostle; 3d, to avoid repetitions which could not fail, especially in the circular letters, but contain identical statements. In like manner, the compilers would appear to have followed a system of patching up, or of intercalating, the aim of which seems to have been to save some portions which would otherwise have been lost. Thus the passage (2 Cor. vi. 14; viii. 1) forms a small paragraph which breaks so singularly the sequence of the epistle, and which xxviidisposes one to believe that it has been clumsily pieced in there. The last chapters of the Epistle to the Romans presents facts much more striking, and which will require to be discussed with minuteness; for many portions of the biography of Paul depend upon the system which is adopted in regard to these chapters.

In reading the Epistle to the Romans, after quitting chap. xii., we experience some astonishment. Paul appears to have departed from his habitual maxim, “Mind your own business.” It is strange that he gives imperative counsels to a Church he has not founded, and which resembles so closely the impertinence of those who seek to build upon foundations established by others. At to the close of chap. xiv., some peculiarities still more capricious make their appearance. Several manuscripts—que suit Gresbach—according to St John Chrysostom, Theodoretus, Theophylactus, Œcumenius, fix on that place as the finale of chap. xvi. (verses 25-27). The Codex Alexandrinus, and some others, repeat twice this finale—once at the end of chap. xiv., and once more at the end of chap. xvi. Verses 1-13 of chap. xv. excite anew our surprise. These verses repeat and take up tacitly again what has preceded. It is hardly to be supposed that they would be found in the same letter as the one which precedes. Paul repeats himself frequently in the course of the same disquisition; but he never returns to a disquisition in order to repeat and to enfeeble it. It must also be added that verses 1-13 appear to be addressed to Judæo-Christians. St Paul therein makes concessions to the Jews. How singular it is that, in verse 8, Christ is called δάχουος Περιτογης? We might say that we have here a resumé of chapters xii., xiii., xiv., for the use of Judæo-Christian readers, which Paul has seized on, to prove by texts that the adoption of the Gentiles did not exclude the privilege of Israel, and that Christ had fulfilled the ancient promises.

The portion, xv. 14-33, is evidently addressed to the Church of Rome, and to this Church only. Paul expressed himself there without reserve, was proper in writing to a Church which he had not seen, and the majority of which, being Judæo-Christians, was not directly under his jurisdiction. In chapters xii., xiii., xiv., the tone of the letter is firmer; the Apostle speaks there with mild authority; he makes use of the verb Παραχαλῶ, a verb, no doubt, of a very mitigated nature, but which is always the word he employs when he speaks to his disciples.

Verse 33 makes a perfect termination to the Epistle to the Romans, according to Paul’s method of making terminations. Verses 1 and 2 of chapter xvi. might also be admitted as a postscript to the Epistle to the Romans; but what follows verse 3 creates veritable difficulties. Paul, as though he had not closed his letter with the word Amen, undertakes to salute twenty-six persons, not to speak of five churches or groups. In the first place, he never thus puts salutations after the benediction and the Amen as the finale. Besides, the salutations here are not the common salutations that one would employ in addressing people one has not seen. Paul had evidently had the most intimate relations with the persons he salutes. Each of these persons has his or her special characteristics; these have laboured with him; those have been imprisoned with him; another has been a mother to him (doubtless in caring for him when he was sick); he knows at what date each has been converted; all are his xxviiifriends, his fellow-workers, his dearly beloved. It is not natural that he should have so many ties with a Church in which he had never been, one that does not belong to his school, with a Church Judæo-Christian which his principles forbade him labouring for. Not only does he know by their names all the Christians in the Church to which he is addressing himself, but he knows also the masters of those who are slaves, Aristobulus, Narcissus. Why does he designate with so much assurance these two houses, if they are at Rome, a place he has never seen? Writing to the Churches which he has founded, Paul salutes two or three persons. Why does he salute so considerable a number of brothers and sisters of a Church which he has never visited?

If we study in detail the persons he salutes, we shall discover still more evidence that this page of salutations was never addressed to the Church at Rome. Amongst them we find no persons that we know who formed part of the Church at Rome, and we find amongst them many persons who assuredly never belonged to it. In the first line we encounter Aquila and Priscilla. It is universally admitted that only a few months elapsed between the compilation of the first chapter of the Corinthians and the compilation of the Epistle to the Romans. Now, when Paul wrote the first chapter to the Corinthians, Aquila and Priscilla were at Ephesus. In the interval, that apostolic couple were able, it is said, to set out for Rome. This is very singular. Aquila and Priscilla were of the party which was at first driven from Rome by an edict; we find them afterwards at Corinth, then at Ephesus; they return to Rome without their sentence of expulsion having been revoked, on the morrow of the day when Paul had just said adieu to them at Ephesus. This is to attribute to them a life much too nomadic; it is the accumulation of improbabilities. Let as add, that the author of the second apocryphal epistle of Paul to Timothy supposes Aquila and Priscilla to be at Ephesus, which proves that tradition has located them there. The little Roman martyrology (the source of posterior compilations) has a memorandum, of date the 8th July—“in Asia Minori, Aquilæ et Priscillæ uxoris ejus.” This is not all. At v. 5, Paul salutes Epenetus, “the first-born of Asia in Christ.” What! the whole Church of Ephesus has gone to Rome to take up its abode! The list of names which follows, applies equally as well to Ephesus as to Rome. Doubtless the first Church at Rome was principally Greek by language. Amongst the world of slaves and freedmen from which Christianity was recruited, the Greek names even at Rome were ordinary ones. Nevertheless, in examining the Jewish inscriptions at Rome, P. Garrucci has found that the number of proper Latin names doubled that of Greek names. Now here, of twenty-four names, there were sixteen Greek, seven Latin, one Hebrew, so that the number of Greek names is more than double that of Latin names. The names of the chiefs of the houses of Aristobulus and Narcissus are Greek also.

The verses, Romans xiv. 3-16, were therefore not addressed to the Church at Rome; they were addressed to the Church at Ephesus. The verses 17-20 could not have been addressed to the Romans either. St Paul there makes use of the word, which is habitual to him, when he gives an order to his disciples (παραχαλῶ); he expresses himself with xxixextreme acerbity in regard to the divisions sown by his adversaries; we see that he is there en famille; he knows the condition of the Church to which he addresses himself; he is delighted with the good reputation of this Church; he rejoices over her as a master would over his pupils (ἐφ᾽υμῖν καὶρω). These verses have no meaning, if we suppose them addressed by the Apostle to a church which must have been strange to him. Each sentence proves that he had preached to those to whom he wrote, and that they were solicited by his enemies. These verses could only have been addressed to the Corinthians or to the Ephesians. The epistle, at the end of which they were found, was written from Corinth; these verses, which constitute the close of a letter, had, therefore, been addressed to Ephesus. Seeing that we have shown that the verses 3-16 were likewise addressed to the faithful at Ephesus, we obtain than a long fragment (xvi. 3-20), which most have formed part of a letter to the Ephesians. Hence it becomes more natural to connect with these verses, 3-20, verses 1, 2 of the same chapter—verses which might be considered as a postscript after the Amen, except that it is better to attach them to that which follows. The journey of Phoebe becomes thus more probable. Finally, the somewhat imperative commands of xvi. 2, and the motive with which Paul applied them, are better understood when addressed to the Ephesians, who were under so many obligations to the Apostle, than to the Romans, who were not indebted to him for anything.

The verses 21-24 of chapter xiv. could not, any more than that which precedes, have made a part of the Epistle to the Romana. Why should all these people, who had never been to Rome, who had never known the faithful at Rome, salute the latter? What could these unknown person say to the Church of Rome? It is important to remark that all the names are those of Macedonians or people who could have become acquainted with the Churches of Macedonia. Verse 24 is the close of a letter. The verses (xvi.) 21-24 can then be made the close of a letter addressed to the Thessalonians.

The verses 25-27 give on a new finale, which contains nothing topical, and which, as we have already said, is found in several manuscripts at the end of chapter xiv. In other manuscripts, particularly in the Bœrnerianus and the Augiensis (the Greek part), this termination is wanting. Assuredly that portion did not constitute a part of the Epistle to the Romans, which terminates with verse (xv.) 33, nor of the Epistle to the Ephesians, which terminates with verse (xvi.) 20, nor of the Epistle to the Churches of Macedonia, which finishes with the verse (xvi.) 24. We arrive, then, at the curious result that the epistle closes four times, and in the Codex Alexandrinus five times. This is absolutely contrary to the practice of Paul, and even to good sense. Here, then, is a difficulty proceeding from some peculiar accident. Must we, with Marcion and with Baur, declare the two last chapters of the Epistle to the Romans to be apocryphal? We are surprised that a critic so acute as Baur should be contented with a solution so crude. Why should a forger invent such insignificant details? Why should he add to a sacred work a list of proper names? In the first and second centuries the authors of apocrypha had almost all some dogmatic motive; apostolic writings were xxxinterpolated either with a view to some doctrine, or to establish some form of discipline. We believe we are able to propose a theory more satisfactory than that of Baur. In our view, the epistle addrexsed to the Romans was (1) not addressed entirely to the Romans, and (2) was not addressed to the Romans only.

St Paul, advancing in his career, had acquired a taste for encyclical epistles, designed to be read in several churches. We presume that the intention of the Epistle to the Romans was an encyclical of this kind. St Paul, when he had reached his full maturity, addressed it to the most important churches, at least to three of them, and, as an exception, addressed it also to the Church of Rome. The four endings falling at verses, xv. 33, xvi. 40, xvi. 24, xvi. 27, are the endings of different copies despatched. When the epistles came to be published, the copy addressed to the Church of Rome was taken as a basis; but in order not to lose anything, there was annexed to the text thus constituted the various parts, and notably the different endings of the copies which were set aside. In this way many of the peculiarities are explained:—(1) The double use made of the passage xv. 1-13, with the chapters xii., xiii., xiv., chapters which, being appropriate only to the Churches founded by the Apostle, are not to be found in the copy sent to the Romans, whilst the passage xv. 1-13, not being appropriate to the disciples of Paul, but, on the other hand, perfectly adapted to the Romans; (2) Certain features of the epistle which were only partially adapted to the faithful of Rome, and which went even the length of indiscretion, if they had been addressed only to the latter; (3) The hesitation of the best critics on the question in distinguishing whether the epistle was addressed to the Pagan converts or to the Judæo-Christiana, a hesitation quite simple by our hypothesis, since the principal parts of the epistle had been composed for the simultaneous use of several churches; (4) What surprises is, that Paul should compose a letter so singularly important for a Church with which he was not acquainted, and in respect of which his title could be contested; (5) In a word, the capricious peculiarities of the chapters xv. and xvi., these nonsensical salutations, these four endings, three of which are certainly not to be found in the copy sent to Rome. We shall see, in the course of the present volume, how far this hypothesis is in accord with all the other necessities of the life of St Paul.

We must not omit the testimony of an important manuscript. The Codex Bœrnerianus omits the name of Rome in the verses 7 and 15 of the first chapter. We must not say that the omission is there made in view of its being read in the churches; the Bœrnerian manuscript, the work of the philologers of St Gall, about the year 900, proposed to itself a purely exegetic aim, and was copied in a very old manuscript.

I regret that I have not been able to find room in the present book to give an account of the last days of the life of St Paul: to have done that, it would have been necessary to largely increase the size of this volume. Moreover, the Third Book would have thus lost somewhat of the historical solidity which characterises it. After the arrival of Paul at Rome, in fact, we cease to tread on the ground of incontestable data; we begin to grope in the obscurity of legends and of apocryphal xxxidocuments. The next volume (fourth volume of the beginnings of Christianity) will contain the end of the life of Paul, the occurrences in Judea, the arrival of Peter at Rome, the persecutions of Nero, the death of the apostles, the apocalypse, the taking of Jerusalem, the compilation of synoptic gospels. Then, a fifth and last volume will comprise the compilation of writings more ancient than the New Testament, the interior movements of the Church of Asia Minor, the progress of the hierarchy and of discipline, the birth of the gnostic sects, the definitive constitution of a dogmatic orthodoxy and of the episcopate. When once the last book of the New Testament has been reduced to writing, when once the authority of the Church constituted and armed with a sort of touchstone to discern truth from error, when once the small democratic confraternities of the early apostolic age have abdicated their power into the hands of the bishop, then is Christianity complete. The infant will grow still, but he will have all his members; he will no longer be an embryo: he will acquire no more essential organs. At the same time, however, the last bonds which attached the Christian Church to its mother, the Jewish synagogue, has been snapped; the Church exists as an independent being; she has nothing left for her mother but aversion. The History of the Origins of Christianity ends at this moment. I trust that I shall be spared for five years to finish this work, to which I have wished to devote the most mature years of my life. It will cost me many sacrifices, especially in excluding me from the instruction of the College of France, a second aim I had proposed to myself. But one must not be too exacting; perhaps he to whom, of two designs, it has been given to realise one, ought not to rail against fate, the rather if he has understood these designs as DUTIES.

CHAPTER I.

FIRST JOURNEY OF PAUL—THE CYPRUS MISSION.

Journeying from Antioch, Paul and Barnabas, accompanied by John-Mark, reached Seleucia. The distance from Antioch to the latter city is a short day’s journey. The route follows at a distance the right bank of the Orontes, winding its way over the outermost slopes of the mountains of Pieria, and crossing by fords the numerous streams which descend from the heights. On all sides there are copses of myrtles, arbutus, laurels, green oaks; while prosperous villages are perched upon the sharply-cut ridges of the mountains. To the left, the plain of Orontes unfolds to view its splendid cultivation. On the south, the wooded summits of the mountains of Daphne bound the horizon. We are now beyond the borders of Syria. We stand on soil classical, smiling, fertile, and civilised. Each name recalls the powerful Greek colony which gave to these regions so high a historical importance, and which established there a centre of opposition that sometimes assumed a violent form against the Semitic genius.

Seleucia was the port of Antioch, and the chief northern outlet of Syria towards the west. The city was situated partly in the plain and partly on 2the abrupt heights, facing the angle made by the deposits of the Orontes at the foot of the Coryphas, about a league and a half to the north of the mouth of the river. It was here that the hordes of depraved beings, creatures of a rotten secularism, embarked every year to invade Rome and to infect it. The dominant religion was that of Mount Casius—a beautiful, regularly-formed summit, situated on the other side of the Orontes, and with which was associated various legends. The coast is inhospitable and tempestuous. The wind descending from the mountain tops, gives the waves a back stroke, and produces almost always a deep ground swell. An artificial basin, communicating with the sea by a narrow channel, shelters ships from the recurring shocks of the waves. The quays, the mole formed of enormous blocks are still standing and waiting in silence the not far distant day when Seleucia shall again become what she was formerly—one of the grandest termini in the globe. Paul, in saluting for the last time with his band the brethren assembled on the dark sands of the beach, had in front of him the beautiful section of the circle formed by the coast at the mouth of the Orontes; to the right, the symmetrical cone of the Casius, from which was to ascend three hundred years later the smoke of the last Pagan sacrifice; to the left, the rugged steeps of Mount Coryphas; behind him, in the clouds, the snows of Taurus, and the coast of Cilicia, which forms the Gulf of Issus. The hour was a solemn one. Although Christianity had for several years extended beyond the country which was its cradle, it had not yet reached the confines of Syria. The Jews, however, considered the whole of Syria, as far as Amanus, as forming part of the Holy Land, and sharing its prerogatives, its rights and duties. This, then, was the moment when Christianity really quitted its native soil, and launched forth into the vast world.

Paul had already travelled much in order to spread the name of Jesus. He had been for seven years a Christian, and not for a single day had his ardent conviction been lulled to rest. His departure from Antioch with Barnabas, marked, however, a decisive change in his career. He began then that Apostolic life, in which he displayed unexampled activity, and an unheard-of degree of ardour and of passion. Travelling was then very difficult, when it was not done by sea; for carriage roads and vehicles hardly existed. This is why the propagation of Christianity made its way along the banks of the large rivers. Pozzuoli and Lyons were Christianised when a multitude of towns in the vicinity of the cradle of Christianity had not heard tell of Jesus.

Paul, it seems, journeyed almost always on foot existing doubtless on bread, vegetables, and milk. What a life of privations and of trials is that of a wandering devotee! The police were negligent or brutal. Seven times was Paul put in chains. Hence, he preferred, when practicable, to travel by water. Certainly, when it is calm, these seas are delightful; but they have also suddenly their foolish caprices; the ship may run aground in the sand, and all that one can do is to seize on a plank. There were perils everywhere. “In labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in death oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep. In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils on the sea, in perils among false brethren. In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness: I have known all” (2 Cor. xi. 23-27). 4The Apostle wrote that in the year 56, when his trials were far from being at an end. For nearly ten years longer he must lead that existence, which death alone could worthily crown.

In almost all his journeys Paul had companions; but he systematically refused the assistance from which the other Apostles, Peter, in particular, drew much consolation and succour—I mean, a companion in his Apostolic ministry, and in his labours. His aversion to marriage proceeded from a feeling of delicacy. He did not wish to burden the Church with the support of two persons. Barnabas followed the same rule. Paul reverted often to that fact—he cost the Churches nothing. He deemed it perfectly just that the Apostle should live upon the community,—that the catechist should share everything in common with the catechumen; but he was sensitive on the point; he had no desire to make capital out of that which was legitimate. His constant practice, with one single exception, was to earn his subsistence by his own labour. With Paul this was a question of morals and of good example; for one of his maxims was: “That if any one would not work, neither should he eat” (2 Thess. iii. 10-12). He added to it likewise a naïve sentiment of personal economy, fearing that people might reproach him with what he cost, and exaggerated his scruples, in order to anticipate murmurs; for people had come to be very circumspect in regard to questions of money, because of having to live among those who thought much of it. In every place where Paul took up his abode, he settled down and returned to his trade of tent-making. His exterior life resembled that of an artisan who makes a tour of Europe, and scatters about him the ideas with which he is permeated.

Such a mode of life, which has become impossible in our modern society for any but a working man, was easy in societies in which either religious confraternities 5or commercial aristocracies constituted a species of freemasonry. The life of Arab travellers—d’Ibn-Batoutah, for example—greatly resembled that which must have been led by St Paul. They wandered from one end of the Mahometan world to the other, halting in every large town, engaging there in the avocation of judge or physician, getting married, finding everywhere a hearty welcome, and the chance of employment. Benjamin de Tudela, and the other Jewish travellers of the Middle Ages, led a similar life, going from Jewry to Jewry, and entering at once upon terms of intimacy with their hosts. These Jewries were distinct quarters, enclosed often by a gate, having a religious chief, who had an extended jurisdiction. In the centre there was a common court, and a place ordinarily used for meetings and for prayers. The relations which exist amongst the Jews in our own day, present still something of the same character. In every place where Jewish life is established and well-organised, the journeys of Israelites, who bear with them letters of recommendation, are made from ghetto to ghetto. That which takes place at Trieste, at Constantinople, at Smyrna, is, in this respect, the exact picture of that which took place in the time of St Paul at Ephesus, at Thessalonica, and Rome. The new-comer who presents himself on Sabbath at the synagogue, is remarked, surrounded, and questioned. He is asked where he hails from, who his father is, and what news he brings. In almost all Asia, and in a part of Africa, the Jews have thus exceptional facilities for travelling,—thanks to the species of secret society which they form, and to the neutrality they observe in the intestine quarrels of the different countries. Benjamin de Tudela travelled over the whole world without having seen any other thing save Jews; Ibn-Batoutah without having seen any one except Mahometans.

These little coteries constituted excellent mediums for the propagation of doctrines. Each knew his neighbour well, each closely watched the other; nothing could be further removed from the vulgar freedom of our modern societies, in which men come in contact with each other so little. The divisions of parties in a city were always made according to religion, when politics was not the paramount consideration. A religious question falling into one of these faithful Israelitish communities, set everything on fire, and settled schisms and strifes. Most frequently a religious question was but a firebrand which was eagerly laid hold of by reason of previous hatreds—a pretext which was seized upon for reckoning up and denouncing one another.

The establishment of Christianity was not discussed outside the synagogues, with which latter the coasts of the Mediterranean were already covered, when Paul and the other Apostles set out upon their missions. These synagogues had ordinarily little to distinguish them; they were like the other houses, forming with the quarter of which they were the centre and link a small vicus (village) or aingiport (small alley). One thing distinguished these quarters; this was the absence of ornaments of sculpture vivant, which necessitated recourse for decoration to expedients, crude, pronounced, and false. But that which more than anything else designated the Jewish quarter to new-comers disembarking at the port of Seleucia or Cæsarea, was the type of race—young women decked in gaudy colours, white, red and green, without medium tints; matrons with pleasing figures, rosy cheeks, slightly embonpoint, with kindly, maternal eyes. Having landed, and received a warm welcome, the Apostles awaited the Sabbath. They then betook themselves to the synagogue. It was a custom, when a stranger appeared intelligent or eager to make himself know, 7to invite him to address to the people a few words of edification. The Apostle took advantage of this custom, and expounded the Christian thesis. Jesus had proceeded precisely in the same manner. Astonishment was at first the general feeling. Opposition did not manifest itself until a little later, not until some conversions had taken place. Then the elders of the synagogues resorted to violence; forthwith they ordered to be applied to the Apostle the cruel and shameful chastisements which were inflicted on heretics; on other occasions they made an appeal to the authorities to have the innovator either expelled or beaten. The Apostle did not preach to the Gentiles until after he had preached to the Jews. The converts from Paganism were in general the least numerous, and yet they almost all were recruited from the classes of the population which were already in contact with Judaism, and had been brought to embrace it.

This proselytism, as we see,. was confined to the towns. The first apostles of Christianity did not preach in country places. The countryman (paganus) was the last to embrace Christianity. The local patois, which the Greek had not been able to root out in the country districts, was in part the cause of this. To tell the truth, the peasant living outside the towns, was quite a rare thing in the country, at the time when Christianity first began to spread. The organisation of that Apostolic religion, consisting of assemblies (ecclesia), was essentially urban. Islamism, in like manner, is also par excellence a religion of the town. It is not complete without its grand mosques, its schools, its ulemas (doctors), its muezzins (the callers to prayers).

The gaiety, the sprightliness of heart, which these evangelical odysseys breathed, were something new, original, and charming. The Acts of the Apostles, 8the expression of that first transport of the Christian conscience, is a book of gladness, of serene fervency. Since the Homeric poems, no work so full of such genuine sensation had appeared. A morning breeze, an odour of the sea—if I may be permitted to say so—inspiring a sort of cheerfulness and force, permeates the whole book, and made it an excellent compagnon de voyage, an exquisite breviary for him who followed the ancient landmarks along the Southern seas. It was the second poem of Christianity. The lake of Tiberias and its fishing barques had furnished the first. Now, a current more powerful, aspirations towards lands more distant, allure us on to the high seas.

The first point at which the three missionaries touched, was the island of Cyprus, an ancient, mixed settlement where the Grecian race and the Phœnician race, planted at first side by side, had ended by nearly exterminating one another. It was the native country of Barnabas, and that circumstance doubtless had much to do in determining the direction in which the mission should make its first advance. Cyprus had already received the seeds of the Christian faith; in any case, the new religion embraced several Cypriotes in its fold. The number of Jewries there was considerable. It should, however, be remembered that the whole circle of Seleucia, Tarsus, and Cyprus was by no means extensive; and the small group of Jews scattered over those points, represented nearly what would be the parent families established at St Brieuc, Saint-Malo, and Jersey. Paul and Barnabas, then, set out for the countries with which they were already more or less familiar.

The Apostolic band disembarked at the ancient port of Salamis. They traversed the whole island from east to west, inclining towards the south, and probably following the sea coast. It was the most Phœnician portion of the island, containing the towns of Citium, Amathontus, and Paphos, old Semitic 9centres whose original customs had not yet been effaced. Paul and Barnabas preached in the synagogues of the Jews. Only a single incident of the journey has been left on record. It occurred at Neo Paphos, a modern town, which had been built at some distance from the ancient town, so celebrated for the worship of Venue (Palæpaphos). Neo Paphos was at that time, as it would seem, the residence of the Roman pro-consul who governed the island of Cyprus. This pro-consul was Sergius Paulus, a man of illustrious birth, who, it appears (although it occurred often with the Romans), permitted himself to be amused with enchantments, and the superstitious beliefs of the country in which chance had placed him. He had near him a Jew named Bar-jesus, who passed himself off for a magician, and gave himself a title which is translated as elim, or “sage.” He produced there, it is said, scenes analogous to those which took place at Sebaste between the Apostles and Simon the magician. Bar-jesus raised a bitter opposition against Paul and Barnabas. Later tradition asserts that the occasion of this feud was the conversion of the pro-consul. It is related that in a public discussion, Paul, in order to silence his adversary, was obliged to strike him with temporary blindness, and that the pro-consul, moved by that great wonder, was converted.

The conversion of a Roman of that order at this epoch is a thing absolutely inadmissible. Paul, doubtless, took for faith the manifestations of interest which Sergius evinced towards him; mayhap even he mistook irony for favour. The Orientals do not understand irony. Their maxim, moreover, is that he who is not for them is against them. The curiosity exhibited by Sergius Paulus was in the eyes of the missionaries regarded as a favourable disposition. Like many other Romans, Paulus might be very credulous. Probably the sorceries to which Paul and 10Barnabas had more than once recourse, but which we are unfortunately precluded from believing, appeared to him very striking and more wonderful than those of Bar-jesus. But, from a feeling of astonishment to conversion, is a long step. The legend appears to attribute to Paulus Sergius the reasonings of a Jew or of a Syrian. The Jew and the Syrian regard the miracle as the proof of a doctrine preached by the Thaumaturgus. The Roman, if he was enlightened, regarded the miracle as a trick by which he could amuse himself, and, if he was credulous and ignorant, as one of those things which happened now and then. But the miracle to him was no proof of doctrine. Absolutely destitute of theological sentiment, the Romans could not imagine that a dogma could be the aim that a god proposed to himself in working a miracle. The miracle was to them either a fantastical, although natural, thing (the idea of the laws of nature was foreign to them, unless they had studied the Grecian philosophy), or an act revealing to them the immediate presence of divinity. If Sergius Paulus had actually believed in the miracles of Paul, the reasoning that he would have employed would have been: “This man is very powerful: he is perhaps a god;” and not, “The doctrine which this man preaches is the truth.” In any case, if the conversion of Sergius Paulus rested upon motives so flimsy, we believe we are doing an honour to Christianity in not calling it a conversion, and in striking off Sergius Paulus from the number of the Christians.

What is probable is that he had for the mission a benevolent regard; hence the mission retained for him the remembrance of a wise and good man. The supposition of Saint Jerome, according to whom Saul should have taken from Sergius Paulus his name of Paul, is but mere conjecture: we must not say, however, that that conjecture is improbable. It was 11from this moment that the author of the Acts constantly substituted the name of Paul for that of Saul. Perhaps the Apostle adopted Sergius Paulus as his patron, and took his name in token of clientship. It is possible, too, that Paul, following the example of a great many Jews, had two names—the one Hebrew, the other obtained by vulgarly Grecianising or Latinising the first (in like manner as the Josephs called themselves Hegesippus, etc.)—and that it was only at the moment when he entered into more intimate and more direct relations with the Pagan world, that he began to bear the single name of Paul.

We do not know how long this Cyprus mission lasted. The mission possessed, evidently, no great importance, inasmuch as Paul never speaks of it in his epistles; and as he never dreamt of seeing again the churches that he had founded in the island, probably he regarded the latter as belonging to Barnabas more than to himself. The first essay of apostolic journeying, in any case, was decisive in the career of Paul. From that time he assumed the tone of master: till then he had been as a subordinate of Barnabas. The latter had been longer in the Church: he had been his introducer and his guarantor; people were more certain of Barnabas. In the course of this mission the rôles were exchanged. The talent of Paul for preaching necessitated that the office of speaking should devolve almost entirely on him. Henceforward, Barnabas was no more than a companion of Paul,—one of his suite. With admirable self-abnegation, that truly holy man lent himself to everything, and left everything to his intrepid friend, whose superiority he recognised. Not so with John-Mark. Disagreements, which soon ended in a rupture, broke out between him and Paul. We do not know the cause of them. Probably the teachings of Paul as to the relations of the Jews 12and the Gentiles shocked the Jerusalemitish prejudices of John, and appeared to him in contradiction with the ideas of Peter, his master. Perhaps, also, that ever-increasing self-sufficiency of Paul was insupportable to those who each day saw it become more pervading and more imperious.

Nevertheless, it is not probable that Paul, from this time, either took, or allowed himself to be given, the title of Apostle. Up till now, that title had only been borne by the Twelve of Jerusalem; it was not considered as transferable; it was believed that Jesus alone had the power to bestow it. Perhaps Paul had already often said to himself that he also had received it directly from Jesus, in his vision on the road to Damascus; but he had not yet openly arrogated to himself so lofty a pretension. It required the grossest provocations of his enemies to constrain him to an act which at first he would have regarded as one of temerity.

CHAPTER II.

CONTINUATION OF THE FIRST JOURNEY OF PAUL—THE GALATIAN MISSION.

The mission, satisfied with what it had accomplished at Cyprus, resolved to attack the neighbouring coast of Asia Minor. Alone amongst the provinces of that country, Cilicia had heard the new gospel, and possessed churches. The geographical region that we call Asia Minor was by no means united. It was composed of peoples greatly diverse both as regards race and social status. The western part and the entire coast were embraced, from a remote 13antiquity, in the great vortex of that common civilisation of which the Mediterranean was the centre. Since the decadence of Greece, and of the Ptolemaic Egypt, these countries were held to be the countries the most lettered that then existed, or, at least, countries which produced the greatest number of men distinguished in literature. The province of Asia, notably the ancient kingdom of Pergamus, was, as is said to-day, at the head of progress. But the centre of the peninsula had been partly civilised. Local life had continued there as in the times of antiquity. Many of the indigenous languages had not yet disappeared. The state of public opinion was very backward. To speak the truth, the whole of these provinces had but one common characteristic, and that was boundless credulity and an extreme penchant for superstition. The ancient religions, under their Hellenic and Roman transformation, retained many of the features of their primitive form. Several of those religions still enjoyed great popularity, and possessed a certain superiority over the Greco-Roman worships. No other country has produced so many theurgists and theosophists. Apollonius of Tyana was preparing there, at the period at which we are now arrived, his strange fate. Alexander of Aboniticus and Peregrinus Proteus began soon to seduce the provinces; the one by his miracles, his prophecies, and his great demonstrations of piety, the other by his legerdemain. Artemidorus of Ephesus and Ælius Aristides presented the strange spectacle of men combining sincere and truly religious sentiments with ridiculous superstitions and the ideas of charlatans. In no part of the empire was the pious reaction which was brought about at the end of the first century in favour of the ancient religions, and opposed to positive philosophy, more pronounced. Asia Minor was, next to Palestine, the most religious country in the world. Entire regions, such as 14Phrygia, cities such as Tyana, Venasium, Comana, Cæsarea in Cappadocia, Nazianzus, were equally wedded to mysticisms. In many places the priests were still all but sovereigns.

As for the life politic, there was not even a trace of it. All the towns, as if in emulation, were striving to outdo each other in their immoderate adulation of the Cæsars, and of the Roman functionaries. The appellation of “friend of Cæsar” was prized. The cities were disputing with childish vanity the pompous titles of “metropole,” of “very-illustrious,” conferred by imperial rescripts. The country had submitted to the Romans without a violent conquest, at least without national resistance. History does not mention a single serious political rising. Brigandage and anarchy, which for a long time had erected in Taurus, Isauria, Pisidia impregnable strongholds, had come to an end by yielding to the power of the Romans and their allies. Civilisation had spread with surprising rapidity. The traces of the beneficent actions of Claudius, and of the gratitude of the population towards him, despite certain tumultuous agitations, were encountered at every turn. It was not as in Palestine, where the ancient institutions and manners offered a furious resistance. If we except Isauria, Pisidia, the parts of Cilicia which still retained a shade of independence, and up to a certain point in Galatia, the country had lost all national sentiment. It had never had a dynasty proper. The old provincial individualism of Phrygia, Lydia, and Caria had been dead for a long time as political units. The artificial kingdoms of Perigamus, of Bithynia and of Pontus were likewise dead. The whole peninsula had gladly accepted the Roman domination.

We might add with thankfulness; for never, in fact, had domination been legitimatised by so many benefits. “Providence Augustus” was, in good truth, the tutelary genius of the country. The cult 15of the Emperor, that of Augustus in particular, and of Livia, were the dominant religions of Asia Minor. The temples to those terrestrial gods, always associated with the divinity of Rome, were multiplied everywhere. The priests of Augustus, grouped by provinces, under archbishops (ἀρχιερεῖς, a sort of metropolitans or primates), succeeded later in forming a clergy analogous to that which became, beginning with Constantine, the Christian clergy. The political Testament of Augustus had become a kind of sacred text, a public teaching as of beautiful monuments, which were entrusted with making offerings on behalf of all, and of perpetuating them. The cities and the tribes were rivals for the epithets which attested the recollection that they preserved of the great Emperor. Ancient Ninoē di Caria argued with his old Assyrian religion of Mylitta, in order to establish his connection with Cæsar, son of Venus. In all this there was servility and baseness; but over and above, there was the sentiment of a new era—a happiness which they had not up till now enjoyed, and which, in fact, endured unchanged for centuries afterwards. A man who probably assisted at the conquest of his country, Denis of Halicarnassus, wrote a Roman history, to demonstrate to his countrymen the excellencies of the Roman people, to prove to them that that people was of the same race as themselves, and that its glory formed a part of theirs.

After Egypt and Cyrenica, Asia Minor was the country in which there were most Jews. There they formed powerful communities, jealous of their rights, easily alarmed by persecution, having the vexatious habit of always complaining of the Roman authority, and of fleeing for protection outside the city They had succeeded in making themselves important toll-gatherers, and were in reality privileged, as compared with other classes of the population. Not only, in 16fact, was their religion free, but many of the ordinary imposts, which they pretended they could not pay conscientiously, were not exacted from them. The Romans were very favourable to them in these provinces, and almost always took their part in the conflicts which they had with the inhabitants of the country.

Embarking at Neo Paphos, the three missionaries sailed towards the mouth of the Cestrus in Pamphylia, and, ascending the river for a distance of from two to three leagues, arrived at the eminence of Perga, a great and flourishing town, the centre of an ancient worship of Diana, almost as much renowned as that of Ephesus. This religion had a great resemblance to that of Paphos, and it is not impossible that the relations of the two towns, establishing between them a line of ordinary navigation, may have determined the sojourn of the Apostles. In general, the two parallel coasts of Cyprus and Asia Minor seemed to correspond the one to the other. These were the two divisions of the Semitic populations, mixed with divers elements, and which had lost much of their primitive character.

It was at Perga that the rupture between Paul and John-Mark was consummated. John-Mark left the mission and returned to Jerusalem. This incident was doubtless painful to Barnabas, for John-Mark was his relative. But Barnabas, accustomed to submit to everything on the part of his imperious companion, did not abandon the grand design of penetrating into the heart of Asia Minor. The two Apostles plunged into the interior, and travelling always to the north, between the basins of Cestrus and of Eurymedon, traversed Pamphylia, Pisidia, and pressed on as far as mountainous Phrygia. It must have been a difficult and perilous journey. That labyrinth of rugged mountains was guarded by a barbarous population, habituated to brigandage, and 17whom the Romans had with difficulty subdued. Paul, accustomed to the aspect of Syria, must have been surprised at the romantic and picturesque Alpestrine regions, with their lakes, their deep valleys, which may be compared to the environs of Lake Maggiore and of Tessin. At first one is astonished at the singular route of the Apostles—a route which shunned the large centres of population and the routes the most frequented. There is, moreover, little doubt that they followed in the tracks of the Jewish emigration. Pisidia and Lycaonia had towns, such as Antioch in Pisidia, and Iconium, in which great colonies of Jews had established themselves. There the Jews made many conversions; far away from Jerusalem, and freed from the influence of Palestine fanaticism, they lived on good terms with the Pagans. The latter came to the synagogue; and mixed marriages were not infrequent. Paul had been able to learn from Tarsus what advantageous conditions the new faith would find here, in order to establish itself and to fructify. Derbe and Lystra are not very far from Tarsus. The family of Paul might have had some relations, or, at all events, have been well known in these scattered cantons.

Departing from Perga, the two Apostles, after a journey of about forty leagues, arrived at Antioch in Pisidia or Antioch-Cæsarea, in the very heart of the high plateaux of the peninsula. This Antioch had continued to be a town of mediocre importance until it was raised by Augustus to the rank of a Roman colony, with Italian jurisdiction. It then became very important, and changed in part its character. Till now it had been a town of priests, similar, it would seem, to Comana. The temple which had rendered it famous, with its legions of temple slaves and its rich domains, was suppressed by the Romans (twenty-five years before Christ). But this grand religious establishment, as is always the case, left deep traces 18on the manners of the population. It was doubtless in the train of the Roman colony that the Jews had been drawn to Antioch in Pisidia.

According to their custom, the two Apostles presented themselves at the synagogue on the Sabbath. After the reading of the Law and the prophets, the presidents, seeing two strangers who had the appearance of being pious, sent to them inquiring whether they had a few words of exhortation to address to the people. Paul spoke, and expounded the mystery of Jesus, his death and his resurrection. The impression made was marked, and they besought him to come the following Sabbath and continue his discourse to them. A great multitude of Jews and of proselytes followed them out of the synagogue, and during the whole week Paul and Barnabas did not cease to exercise an active ministry. The Pagan population were informed of this incident, and their curiosity was excited.

The following Sabbath the whole city assembled at the synagogue; but the sentiments of the orthodox party had much changed. They repented of the tolerance they had shown the previous Sabbath; the eager multitude irritated the notables; a dispute accompanied with violence began. Paul and Barnabas bravely withstood the tempest; they were not permitted, however, to speak in the synagogue. They retired protesting. “It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you,” said he to the Jews; “but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles” (Acts xiii. 46). From that moment, in fact, Paul became more and more confirmed in the idea that his future was not for the Jews but for the Gentiles; that his ministry on new soil bore much better fruit; that God had specially singled him out to be the Apostle to the nations, and to spread the glad tidings to the ends 19of the earth. His great soul had the special characteristic of enlarging and expanding itself incessantly. The soul of Alexander is the only one I know that had that gift of perennial buoyancy, that indefinable capacity of wishing and of embracing.

The disposition of the Pagan population was found to be excellent. Many were converted and were found at the first attempt to be perfect Christians. We shall see the same thing take place at Philippi, at Alexandria Troas, and in the Roman colonies in general. The attraction that a refined worship had for these good and religious peoples—an attraction which up till then had been manifested through conversions to Judaism—was evinced now through conversions to Christianity. Despite its foreign religion, and perhaps on account of a reaction against that religion, the population of Antioch, like that of Phrygia in general, had a sort of penchant in the direction of monotheism. The new religion, not exacting circumcision and not insisting upon certain paltry observances, was much better calculated than Judaism to attract the pious Pagans; thus, favour was quickly brought over to its side. These scattered provinces, lost amongst the mountains, little accustomed to authority, without historical celebrity and without any importance whatever, were excellent soils for the faith. A Church, somewhat numerous, was established. Antioch in Pisidia became a centre of propagandism whence the doctrine irradiated all around.

The success of the new Gospel amongst the Pagans culminated in putting the Jews into a fury. A pious intrigue was formed against the missionaries. Several of the women of the highest class in the city had embraced Judaism; the orthodox Jews prevailed upon them to speak to their husbands, so as to obtain the expulsion of Paul and Barnabas. The two Apostles, in short, were banished from the city, 20and from the territory of Antioch in Pisidia, by a municipal decree.

Following the apostolic usage, they shook the dust off their feet against the city. They then directed their steps towards Lycaonia, and reached, after a march of about five days across a fertile country, the city of Iconium. Lycaonia was, like Pisidia, an illiterate country, little known, and which had conserved its ancient customs. Patriotism had by no means died out there; manners were pure, and the minds of men, serious and honest. Iconium was a city of ancient religions and of old traditions—traditions which, in many points, approached even those of the Jews. The city, still very small, had just received, or was about to receive, from Claudius, when Paul arrived there, the title of Colony. A high Roman functionary, Lucius Pupius Præsens, procurator of Galatia, had been called the second founder of it, and the city hence changed its ancient name for that of Claudia or of Claudiconium.

The Jews, doubtless because of that circumstance, were numerous there, and had gained over many partisans. Paul and Barnabas spoke in the synagogue: a Church was organised. The missionaries made Iconium a second centre of a very active apostleship, and dwelt there a long time. It was there that Paul, according to a very popular romance during the first half of the third century, must have conquered the most beautiful of all his disciples, the faithful and tender Theckla. But the story has no foundation to rest on. One asks oneself why, if it was by an arbitrary choice, the Asiatic priest, the author of the romance, selected for the scene of his narrative the city of Iconium. Even to-day the Greek women of that country are celebrated for their charms, and exhibit the phenomena of endemic hysteria, which the doctors attribute to the climate. Be that as it may, the success of the Apostles was 21very great. Many Jews were converted; but the Apostles made always more proselytes outside the synagogue, from amongst those sympathetic populations who were no longer satisfied with the old religions. The spotless morality of Paul charmed the good Lycaonians; their credulity, moreover, disposed them to receive with admiration that which they regarded as miracles, and the supernatural gifts of the Spirit.

The tempest which had forced the preachers to quit Antioch in Pisidia, broke out afresh at Iconium. The orthodox Jews sought to stir up the Pagan population against the missionaries. The city became divided into two parties. There was a riot: people spoke of stoning the two Apostles. They took flight, and quitted the capital of Lycaonia.

Iconium is situated near an intermittent lake, at the entrance of the great steppe which forms the centre of Asia Minor, and which has, even up till now, rebelled against all forms of civilisation. The route towards Galatia, properly speaking, and Cappadocia, was closed. Paul and Barnabas essayed to compass the foot of the arid mountains which form a semicircle round the plain on the south side. These mountains are none other than the northern back of the Taurus; but the central plain being raised considerably above the level of the sea, Taurus attains on that side only a moderate elevation. The country is cold and bleak; the soil, now swampy, now sandy, or cracked by the heat, is painfully dismal. Alone, the mass of the extinct volcano, called now Karadagh, stands like an island in the middle of that boundless sea.

Two small, obscure towns, the position of which is uncertain, became then the theatre of the activity of the Apostles. These two small towns were called Lystra and Derbe. Dropped down in the valleys of the Karadagh, in the middle of poor people devoted to the raising of flocks, in the neighbourhood 22of the most notorious haunts of brigands that antiquity had known, these two towns stood entirely isolated. A civilised Roman felt himself there to be in the midst of savages. The people spoke Lycaonian. Few Jews were to be found there. Claudius, by the establishment of colonies in the inaccessible regions of Taurus, gave to these outlandish cantons more order and security than they had ever before had.

Lystra was the first to be evangelised. A singular incident happened there. In the first days of the sojourn of the Apostles at that town, the rumour spread that Paul had performed a miraculous cure on a lame person. The credulous inhabitants, and the friends of the person on whom the miracle had been wrought, were thereupon seized with a singular idea. It was believed that the Apostles were two divinities who had taken human form in order to walk about among mortals. The belief in their descent from the gods was widely spread, especially in Asia Minor. The life of Apollonius of Tyana became soon to be regarded as the sojourn of a god upon earth. Tyana was not far from Derbe. As an ancient Phrygian tradition—consecrated by a temple, and annual feast and pretty recitations—made Zeus and Hermes to wander thus about in company, people applied to the Apostles the names of these two divine travellers. Barnabas, who was taller than Paul, was Zeus; Paul, who was the chief speaker, was Hermes. There was just outside the gate of the town a temple of Zeus. The priest, warned that a divine manifestation had taken place, and that his god had appeared in the town, took steps to make a sacrifice. The bulls had already been led out and garlands placed on the front of the temple, when Paul and Barnabas arrived on the scene, rending their clothes and protesting that they were but men. The Pagan races, as we have already said, attached to a miracle a 23totally different sense than did the Jews. To the latter, the miracle was a doctrinal argument; to the former, it was the immediate revelation of a god. The aim of the Apostles, when they were preaching to people of that kind, was less of preaching Jesus than of preaching God; their preaching thus became again purely Jewish, or rather deistical. The Jews who have become proselytes, have always felt that that which in their religion is adapted to the universality of mankind is at bottom only monotheism; that all the rest, Mosaic institutions, Messianic ideas, etc., form, as it were, a secondary series of beliefs, constituting the peculiar appanage of the children of Israel, a sort of family heritage, which is not transmissible.

As Lystra had only a few or no Jews of Palestine origin, the life of the Apostle there was for a long time very tranquil. One family in that town was the centre and the school of the highest piety. It was composed of a grandmother named Lois, of a mother named Eunice, and of a young son named Timothy. The two women professed, undoubtedly, the Jewish religion as proselytes. Eunice had been married to a Pagan, who probably was dead before the advent of Paul and Barnabas. Timothy, in the society of these two women, advanced in the study of sacred literature, and in the sentiments of the most ardent devotion; but as he frequently visited the houses of the most devout proselytes, his parents had not had him circumcised. Paul converted the two women. Timothy, who might be fifteen years of age, was initiated into the Christian faith by his mother and his grandmother.

The reports of these conversions spread to Iconium and to Antioch in Pisidia, and re-awakened the anger of the Jews of these two cities. They sent emissaries to Lystra, who provoked a disturbance. Paul was seized by the fanatics, dragged outside the city, 24stoned, and left for dead. The disciples came to his rescue. His wounds were not serious. He re-entered the town, probably by night, and on the morrow set out with Barnabas for Derbe.

They made here a long stay, and won over a great many souls. These two Churches of Lystra and of Derbe were the first Churches which were composed almost entirely of Pagans. We can understand what a difference there must have been between these Churches and those of Palestine, formed in the bosom of pure Judaism, or even that of Antioch, encircled by a Jewish leaven and in a society already Judaised. Here there were subjects completely unprejudiced, honest country folks who were very religious, but of a turn of mind quite different from that of the Syrians. Till now, the preaching of Christianity had prospered only in the large towns, where resided a numerous population, plying their trades. Hence-forward, churches were planted in the villages. Neither Iconium, nor Lystra, nor Derbe was considerable enough in which to found a Church to be compared to that of Corinth or of Ephesus. Paul was in the habit of designating the Christians of Lycaonia by the name of the province in which they dwelt. Now, this province—we mean Galatia—understood the word in the administrative sense in which the Romans had applied it.

The Roman province of Galatia, in fact, by no means embraced simply that country, peopled with Gallic adventurers, of which the town of Ancyra was the centre. It was an artificial agglomeration, corresponding to the transient reunion which was effected at the hands of the Galatian King Amyntas. This personage, after the battle of Philippi, and the death of Dejotarus, received from Antony, Pisidia, then Galatia, together with a part of Lycaonia and of Pamphylia. He was confirmed by Augustus in this possession. At the end of his reign (twenty-five 25years B.C.) Amyntas possessed, outside of Galatia properly speaking, Lycaonia and Isauria, including even Derbe, the south-east and the east of Phrygia, with the towns of Antioch and Apollonia, Pisidia and Cilicia Trachæa. All these countries at his death formed a single Roman province, with the exception of Cilicia Trachæa and the Pamphylian towns. The province which bore the name of Galatia in the official nomenclature, at least under the first Cæsars, included therefore for certain—(1) Galatia, properly speaking, (2) Lycaonia, (3) Pisidia, (4) Isauria, (5) Mountainous Phrygia, with the towns of Apollonia and Antioch. This state of things lasted for a long time. Ancyra was the capital of this large group, comprising almost the whole of central Asia Minor. The Romans were thus not sorry in order to decompose nationalities, and to efface recollections, to change the ancient geographical acceptations and to create arbitrary administrative groups analogous to our departments.

Paul was accustomed to make use of the administrative name to designate each country. The countries he had evangelised, from Antioch in Pisidia to Derbe, were called by him “Galatia;” and the Christians of these countries were to him “Galatians.” That name was to him extremely dear. The Churches of Galatia were embraced amongst those for which the Apostle had the most affection, and which in turn had for him the greatest personal attachment. The recollection of the friendship and the devotion which he had found at the houses of these good people, was one of the deepest impressions of his apostolic life. Several circumstances enhanced the keenness of these recollections. It appears that during his sojourn in Galatia, the Apostle was subject to attacks of weakness, or of the malady which frequently overtook him. The solicitude, the attentions of the faithful proselytes, 26touched him to the heart. The persecutions that they had to suffer together served to create between them a strong bond. That little Lycaonian centre had in its way great importance: St Paul loved to revert to it, as being his first achievement; it was from there that he drew later on two of his most faithful companions, Timothy and Gaius.

He was for four or five years thus absorbed within a quite limited circle. He thought less then of those great rapid journeys, which towards the end of his life became with him a sort of passion, in order to establish firmly the Churches which might serve him as a base of operations. We do not know whether during that time he had any relations with the Church at Antioch, whose mission he had received. The desire of seeing again that Mother Church was awakened in him. He determined to make a journey thence, and proceeded by the opposite route to the one he had already gone by. The two missionaries visited for the second time Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch in Pisidia. They took up anew their abodes in these towns, confirming the faithful in the faith, exhorting them to perseverance, to patience, and teaching them that it was only through tribulation that they could enter into the Kingdom of God. For the rest, the constitution of these scattered Churches was very simple. The Apostles chose from amongst each of them elders who after their departure were the depositaries of their authority. The ceremony of their departure was touching. There were fastings and prayers, after which the Apostles recommended the faithful to God, and departed.

From Antioch in Pisidia, the missionaries once more attained to Perga. They made there, moreover, it appeared, a mission which was crowned with success. The city processions, pilgrimages, and grand annual panegyrics, were often favourable to the preaching of the Apostles. From Perga, after a day’s journey, 27they reached Attalia, the great port of Pamphylia. There they embarked for Seleucia; then they returned to great Antioch, where they had, by the grace of God, been liberated five years before.

The mission field was by no means a wide one. It embraced the Island of Cyprus in the sense of its length, and in Asia Minor a broken line of about a hundred leagues. It was the first instance of an apostolic journey of that kind: nothing had been pre-arranged. Paul and Barnabas had to wrestle with the greatest external difficulties. We must not compare these journeys with those of a Francis Xavier or of a Livingstone, backed up by rich associations. The Apostles resembled much more the Socialist workmen, spreading their ideas from tavern to tavern, than the missionaries of modern times. Their trade was forced upon them as a necessity; they were compelled to halt in order to pursue it, and to regulate their movements according to the localities in which they could find work. Hence from delays, from dull seasons, there was much time lost. In spite of the enormous obstacles, the general results of that first mission were immense. When Paul had re-embarked for Antioch, there were several churches of Gentiles. The great step had now been made. All steps of that kind which had taken place anteriorly had been more or less undecided. For all that, they were obliged to give an answer, more or less plausible, to the pure Jews at Jerusalem, who maintained that circumcision was the preliminary obligation of the Christian profession. Moreover, the question had assumed a different form. Another tact of the highest importance was again brought to light; that was the excellent disposition which they had been able to discover among certain races, attached to mythological religions, to receive the gospel. The doctrine of Jesus was evidently about to profit by the species of charm which Judaism 28had until now exercised upon the pious Pagans. Asia Minor, in particular, was destined to become the second Christian soil. After the disasters which were soon to strike the Churches of Palestine, she was destined to be the principal home of the new faith, the theatre of the most important transformations.

CHAPTER III.

FIRST AFFAIR IN REGARD TO CIRCUMCISION.

The return of Paul and Barnabas was hailed in the Church of Antioch with a shout of joy. The whole street of Singon was en fête: the Church was assembled. The two missionaries related their adventures and the things which God had done by them. “God Himself,” said they, “had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles” (Acts xiv. 27, 28). They spoke of the Churches of Galatia, which were almost wholly composed of Pagans. The Church of Antioch, which had for a long time on his account recognised the legitimacy of the baptism of the Gentiles, approved their conduct. They remained there several months, resting from their labours, and refreshing themselves at that source with the apostolic spirit. It was then, it appears, that Paul converted and adopted as a disciple, companion, and fellow-worker, a young uncircumcised man named Titus, who had been born of Pagan parents, and whom we find henceforth always with him.

A serious dissension, which nearly destroyed the work of Jesus, broke out at that time, and threw the nascent Church into great disorder. This dissension embraced the very essence of the situation. It was 29inevitable. It was a crisis that the new religion could not fail but pass through.

Jesus, in raising religion to the highest summit it had ever attained, had not stated very distinctly whether or not he would remain a Jew. He had not indicated what he desired to conserve of Judaism. Sometimes he asserted that he had come to confirm the Law of Moses, at others, to supplant it. To speak the truth, this was, for a great poet like him, an insignificant detail. When one has reached the point of knowing the Heavenly Father, Him whom one adores in spirit and in truth, one no longer belongs to any sect, to any particular religion, or to any school; one has the true religion: all practices become of no account; one does not despise them, for they are the symbols of what has been or is still respectable; but one ceases to impute to them an intrinsic virtue. Circumcision, baptism, the Passover, unleavened bread, sacrifices, all these become equally secondary matters: one thinks no more about them. None of the uncircumcised, moreover, had identified themselves with Jesus, or his life; the question did not hence call for solution. Like all men of genius, Jesus concerned himself with mind alone. Practical questions of the highest importance, questions which appeared paramount to inferior minds, questions which caused the acutest pain to men of application, had no existence for him.

At his death the confusion was general. Abandoned to themselves, deprived of him who had been for them all a living theology, they returned to the practices of Jewish piety. There were men who were in the highest degree devout; but the devotion of the times was Jewish devotion. They preserved their customs, and fell again into those petty observances that ordinary persons looked upon as the essence of Judaism. The world esteemed them as holy men; and by a singular change of front, 30the Pharisees, who had served as a butt for the keenest satires of Jesus, became almost reconciled to his disciples. It was the Sadducees who showed themselves to be the irreconcilable enemies of the new movement. The minute observance of the Law appeared to them the first condition of being a Christian.

Very soon people encountered, in looking at things from this point of view, the greatest difficulties. For, as soon as the family of Christians increased in numbers, it was exclusively amongst the people of non-Israelitish origin, amongst the sympathetic adherents of Judaism who were uncircumcised, that the new faith found the readiest access. To oblige these to become circumcised was out of the question. Peter, with admirable practical good sense, recognised this clearly. On the other hand, timorous persons, such as James, the brother of the Lord, looked upon it as supreme impiety to admit Pagans into the Church, and to eat with them. Peter put off as far as he was able all solution of the question.

For the rest, the Jews, on their part, found themselves in the same situation, and had taken up a similar position. When proselytes or partisans came to them from all parts, the question presented itself to them. Some advanced minds, honest laymen ignorant of science, and removed from the influence of the doctors, did not insist upon circumcision. Sometimes even they dissuaded the new converts from the practice. These simple-minded and good souls desired only the salvation of the world, and sacrificed all the rest to this. The orthodox, on the contrary, with the disciples of Schammai at their head, declared circumcision to be indispensable. Opposed to the proselytising of the Gentiles, they did nothing to facilitate the cause of religion; on the contrary, they exhibited towards the converts a certain coldness; Schammai drove them out of his 31house we are told, with a bâton. This division was clearly manifested in respect of the royal family of Adiabene. The Jew named Ananias who converted her, and who was by no means a savant, strongly dissuaded Izate against circumcision. “One can live as perfectly,” said he, “as a Jew can, without circumcision; to adore God was the really important thing.” The pious Helene was of the same opinion. A rigorist, named Eleazar, declared, on the contrary, that if the king did not undergo circumcision he was an impious person; that the reading of the Law was of no avail if one did not observe it, and that the highest precept was circumcision. The king, at the risk of losing his crown, followed this advice. The petty kings who embraced Judaism, in view of the rich marriages that the family of Herod offered, submitted to the same rite. But true piety was of a less facile composition than politics and avariciousness. Many of the pious converts led the Jewish life without being subjected to the rite which was reputed by the vulgar as the opening of the door to excesses. It was indeed for them a source of perpetual embarrassment. Society bigots, in whom prejudices are strong, are accustomed to represent their religious practices as matters of good taste, of superior education. Whilst in France the devout man, in order to avow his piety, is compelled to conquer a sort of shame, and of human respect, with the Mussulmans, on the other hand, the man who practices his religion is the gentleman; he who is not a good Mussulman is not the person that he ought to be; his position is analogous to that of a boorish, ill-mannered country man with us. Similarly, in England and in the United States, he who does not observe the Sunday, is put to the ban in good society. Amongst the Jews, the position of the uncircumcised was still worse. Contact with such a being was in their eyes something insupportable; circumcision 32appeared to them as obligatory on every one who wished to live amongst them. He who would not submit to it, was a creature of low quality; a sort of impure animal that people avoided; a wretch with whom a man of good standing could hold no relations.

The grand duality which is the essence of Judaism, was revealed in this. The Law, which was essentially restrictive, and made for the purpose of isolating, was totally different in spirit from the Prophets who dreamt of the conversion of the world, and embraced the widest fields. Two words borrowed from the Talmudic language well defines the difference that we have indicated. The agada, the opposite of the halaka, designates popular preaching, proposes to itself the conversion of the heathen, in opposition to the learned casuistry which only thinks of the strict execution of the Law, without aiming at converting any one. To use the phraseology of the Talmud, the gospels are the agadas; the Talmud, on the contrary, is the highest expression of the halaka. It is the agada which has conquered the world and made Christianity; the halaka is the foundation of orthodox Judaism, which still endures without seeking to extend itself. The agada is represented as a thing principally Galilæan; the halaka as a thing peculiarly Jerusalemitish. Jesus, Hillel, the authors of apocalypses and apochryphas, are agadists, pupils of the Prophets, inheritors of their infinite aspirations; Schammai, the Talmudists, the Jews posterior to the destruction of Jerusalem, are the halakistes, the adherents of the Law, with its strict observances. We shall see, up to the time of the supreme crisis of the year 70, the fanaticism of the Law increasing each day, and, on the eve of the great national disaster, terminating in a sort of reaction against the doctrines of St Paul; in those “eighteen measures” which afterwards rendered impossible all intercourse between 33the Jews and the non-Jews, and opened the sad history of exclusive Judaism, hateful and hated, which was the Judaism of the Middle Ages, and is still the Judaism of the East.

It is clear that, for nascent Christianity, here was the point upon which its future depended. Judaism—did it or did it not impose particular rites upon the multitudes which professed it? Did it establish a distinction between the monotheistic basis which constituted its essence, and the observances with which it was surcharged? If the former party had triumphed, as the Schammaites wished it should, the Jewish propaganda would have been wiped out. It is quite certain that the world would not have become Jewish, in the narrow sense of the word. That which constituted the attraction of Judaism, was not its rites, which did not differ in principle from those of other religions: it was its theological simplicity. We accept it as a sort of deism, or religious philosophy; and, in fact—in the mind of a Philo, for example—Judaism was itself very closely associated with philosophical speculations. With the Essenians it had reassumed the form of a social Utopia; with the author of the poem attributed to Phocylides, it had become a simple catechism of good sense and of honesty; with the author of the treatise of “The Empire of Reason,” a sort of Stoicism. Judaism, like all religions founded primarily upon caste and tribalism, was encumbered by practices destined to separate the believer from the rest of the world. These practices were no longer an obstacle on the day when Judaism justly aspired to become the universal religion, without either exclusion or separation. It was as Deism and not as Mosaicism that it was to become the universal religion of humanity. “Love all men,” said Hillel, “and draw them together with the Law; act not otherwise than you would not wish that others 34should act to you. Here is the whole Law, the rest is the commentary of it.” When we read the treatises of Philo, entitled, “Of the Contemplative Life,” or, “That Every Honest Man is Free;” when we read even the Sibylline verses written by the Jews, we are transported into an order of ideas which contain nothing specially Jewish, into a world of general mysticism which is not more Jewish than Buddhist or Pythagorean. The Pseudo-Phocylides goes the length of abolishing the Sabbath. We perceive that all these men, ardent for the amelioration of humanity, seek to reduce Judaism to a general morale, to strip it of all that it possesses of individuality, and of everything that would make of it a restricted religion.

Three capital reasons, in fact, rendered Judaism a thing very exclusive. These were, circumcision, the prohibition of mixed marriages, and the distinction between meats permissible or forbidden. Circumcision was for adults a painful ceremony; a ceremony, moreover, not free from danger, and disagreeable to the last degree. That was one of the reasons which interdicted the Jews from leading a life in common with other races, and made of them a separate caste. At the baths and at the gymnasiums, most important places in ancient cities, circumcision exposed the Jews to all manner of affronts. Every time that the attention of the Greeks or the Romans was drawn to the subject, it was the signal for outbursts of pleasantry. The Jews were very sensitive on the point, and avenged themselves by cruel reprisals. Many, in order to escape the ridicule, and wishing to pass themselves off for Greeks, attempted to dissimulate their original mark by a surgical operation, the details of which have been preserved to us by Celsus. As for the converts who submitted to that initiatory ceremony, there was only one course they could take—that was, to conceal themselves 35to escape the sarcasms. No man of the world could resign himself to such a situation, and this was doubtless the reason that the conversions to Judaism were much more numerous among the women than among the men, the former not being subjected at first to an experience, shocking and repulsive in every respect. We find many instances of Jewish women being married to Pagans, but there is not a single instance of a Jew being married to a Pagan woman. Hence the origin of much of the jeering. The necessity made itself felt by a broad casuistry which brought peace into troubled households.

Mixed marriages were the origin of difficulties of a similar kind. The Jews regarded these marriages as pure fornication. It was the crime that the kanaīm punished with the dagger, simply because the Law in not prescribing any particular punishment for it, left its repression in the hands of zealots. Although united by faith and love to Christ, two Christians could thus be prevented from contracting marriage. The Israelite converted to Jesus who wished to espouse a sister of the Grecian race, expected that union, holy in his eyes, to be called by the most outrageous names.

The prescriptions as to meats being pure or impure were not of the least consequence. We can judge of this by that which still takes place in our own time. Nudity being no longer a part of modern manners, circumcision no longer subjects Israelites to these inconveniences. But the necessity of slaughtering for themselves continues to be very embarrassing for them. It requires of those who are strict not to eat with Christians, and, consequently, to be sequestered from general society. That precept is the principal cause which still places Judaism, in many countries, in the position of an exclusive sect. In countries where Israelites are not separated from the rest of the nation, it is a rock of offence; for, to 36understand it, it is sufficient on this point to have seen Puritan Jews arrive from Germany or Poland, who are shocked at the licences their co-religionists permit on this side of the Rhine. In cities like Salonica, in which the majority of the population is Jewish, and where the wealth is in the hands of the Jews, the actual trade of the community is on this account rendered impossible. Even in ancient times these restrictions were irksome. A Jewish law, the relic of innumerable centuries during which the responsibilities of property were an essential part of religious legislation, stamped the pig with a brand of infamy, which had no raison d’être in Europe. That old antipathy, having its origin in the East, appeared puerile to the Greeks and the Romans. A multitude of other prohibitions had descended from a time when one of the pre-occupations of the leaders of civilisation was to constrain their subordinates from eating things unclean, or from touching carrion. The hygiene of marriage, in fine, had given room for the enacting of a code of legal impurities for women sufficiently complicated. The peculiarity of these kind of prohibitions is their survival from times when they had a raison d’être, and of their becoming at length so vexatious that they might have had their origin in what was proper and salutary.

One particular circumstance gave to the prohibitions in regard to meat much importance. The flesh provided for the sacrifices made to the gods was considered as impure. Now these meats, after the sacrifices, were often carried to the market, where it became very difficult to distinguish them; hence the inextricable scruples. The strict Jews did not regard as lawful the indiscriminate provisioning of them-selves in the market. They held that the seller should be questioned as to the origin of the meat, and that before accepting the dish the host should be questioned as to how it had been supplied. The imposing 37of that load of casuistry upon converts had evidently been carried to excess. Christianity would not have been Christianity if, like the Judaism of our day, it had been compulsory to have slaughtering done separately, or if the Christian could not, without violating his conscience, eat with other men. When one has discovered in that network of difficulties religions surcharged with prohibitions pertaining to life; when one has seen the Jew in the East; the Mussulmans separated by their ritualistic laws, as if by a wall, from the European world, where they might take their place, one can comprehend the immense importance of the questions which were to be decided at the time at which we are now arrived. The question to be decided was, whether Christianity should be a religion of formulas and rituals, a religion of ablutions, of purifications, of distinctions between things pure and things impure, or, on the other hand, the religion of mind, the idealistic cult, which has killed or shall kill by degrees religious materialism, all formularies, all ceremonies. Or, better still, the question to be decided was whether Christianity was to be a petty sect or a universal religion; whether the idea of Jesus should be overshadowed by reason of the incapacity of his disciples; or whether that idea, by virtue of its original force, should triumph over the scruples of backward and narrow minds, which were ready to have it replaced and obliterated.

The mission of Paul and Barnabas had presented the question with such a force that there was no way of avoiding a solution. Paul, who in the first period of his ministry had, it appears, preached circumcision, now declared it useless. He had surreptitiously admitted Pagans into the Church; he had constituted Churches composed of Gentiles; Titus, his intimate friend, had not been circumcised. The Church at Jerusalem could not longer close its 38eyes to facts so notorious. Broadly speaking, this Church was, on the point with which we are now engaged, hesitating, or favourable to the party the most backward. The conservative senate was there. In close proximity to the Temple, in perpetual contact with the Pharisees, the old Apostles, timid and narrow-minded, could not lend themselves to the profoundly revolutionary theories of Paul. Many of the Pharisees, however, had embraced Christianity without renouncing the essential principles of their sect. To such persons, the supposition that one could be saved without circumcision was blasphemy. To them the Law seemed to remain in its entirety. They had been told that Jesus had come to fulfil the Law, not to abrogate it. The privileges of the children of Abraham appeared to them intact: the Gentiles could not enter into the kingdom of God without being previously affiliated with the family of Abraham; in a word, before becoming a Christian, it was necessary to be made a Jew. Never, we can see, had Christianity had to resolve a more fundamental doubt. If one might credit the Jewish party, the love feast even, the common repast, would have been impossible; the two sections of the Church of Jesus would not have been able to commune the one with the other. From the theological point of view, the matter was still more serious; the question was to know whether one could be saved through the works of the Law or by the grace of Jesus Christ.

Some members of the Church of Judæa having arrived at Antioch without, as it would appear, any mission from the apostolic body, provoked discussion. They proclaimed loudly that one could not be saved without circumcision. It is necessary to recall that the Christians, who had at Antioch a name and a distinct individuality, had nothing of the kind at Jerusalem; that which did not oppose whoever came from Jerusalem had not in the whole Church much force, 39for the centre of authority was there. People were greatly excited. Paul and Barnabas resisted in the most energetic manner. There were long disputes. To bring it to an end, it was decided that Paul and Barnabas should go to Jerusalem to consult with the Apostles and the Elders on the subject.

The question had for Paul a personal importance. His action until now had been almost entirely independent. He had only spent a fortnight at Jerusalem since his conversion, and for eleven years he had not put a foot in it. In the eyes of many he was a sort of heretic, teaching on his own account, and scarcely in communion with the rest of the faithful. He declared proudly that he had had his revelation, his apostleship. To go to Jerusalem was, in appearance at least, to forfeit his liberty, to subject his apostleship to that of the Mother Church, to learn from others what he knew through his own and personal revelation. He did not deny the authority of the Mother Church; but he defied it, because he was acquainted with the obstinacy of some of its members. He therefore took precautions so as not to compromise himself too much. He declared that in going to Jerusalem he would not submit to any dictation; he even feigned, indulging a pretension that was habitual to him, that in this he was obeying a command of Heaven, and of having had a revelation on the subject. He took with him his disciple Titus, who shared all his opinions, and who, as we have said above, was not circumcised.

Paul, Barnabas, and Titus set out on their journey. The Church at Antioch accompanied them on their route as far as Laodicæa-on-the-sea. They followed the coast of Phœnicia, then traversed Samaria, finding at every step brethren, to whom they recounted the marvels of the conversion of the Gentiles. There was great joy everywhere. In this way they reached Jerusalem. This was one of the most 40solemn hours in the history of Christianity. The grand doubt was now to be solved. The men upon whom rested the whole future of the new religion were going to be ranged face to face. Upon their grandeur of soul, upon their uprightness of heart depended the future of humanity.

Eighteen years had rolled on since the death of Jesus. The Apostles had grown old. One of them had suffered martyrdom. Others probably were dead. We know that the deceased members of the apostolic college were not replaced; that the college became extinct when they had disappeared. On the part of the Apostles, they formed themselves into a college of elders, in which authority was divided. The “Church,” the reputed depository of the Holy Spirit, was composed of the Apostles, of the elders, and of all the brotherhood. Amongst the simple-minded brethren themselves there were degrees. Inequality was perfectly admissible; but that inequality was altogether moral; it was neither a question of external prerogative nor of material advantage. The three principal “pillars,” as we have said, of the community were still Peter, James, the brother of the Lord, and John, the son of Zebedee. Many Galileans had disappeared. They had been replaced by a certain number of persons belonging to the party of the Pharisees. “Pharisee” was synonymous with “devotee”; but all the best saints of Jerusalem were also strong devotees. Lacking the mind, the finesse, the grandeur of Jesus, they had, after his death, fallen into a kind of stupid bigotry, a state similar to that which their master so strongly combated. They were incapable of irony; they had almost forgotten the eloquent invectives of Jesus against the hypocrites. Some had developed into a sort of Jewish Indian priests, after the manner of John the Baptist and of Banou, monks totally addicted to formulas, and at whom Jesus certainly, if 41he had been still alive, could not have aimed sarcasms enough.

James, in particular, surnamed the Just, or “the brother of the Lord,” was one of the most exact observers of the Law that there was. According to certain traditions—very doubtful, it is true—he was even an ascetic, practising all the Nazarene abstinences, observing celibacy, drinking no intoxicating liquors, eschewing flesh, never cutting his hair, forbidding himself anointings and baths, wearing neither sandals nor garments of wool, clothed in plain linen. Nothing, we see, was more contrary to the idea of Jesus, who, at least from the death of John the Baptist, declared affectations of that kind perfectly vain. Abstinence—already in favour with certain branches of Judaism—became the fashion, and formed the dominant trait of the fraction of the Church which, later on, was to be connected with a pretended Ebion. The pure Jews were opposed to those abstinences; but the proselytes, particularly the women, inclined much to them. James did not stir from the Temple; he remained there alone, it is said, for long hours in prayer, until the callus of his knees had contracted, like those of the chamois. It is believed that he passed his time there after the manner of Jeremiah, a penitent for the people, weeping for the sins of the nation, and turning aside the chastisements that threatened them. He had only to raise his hands to heaven to perform miracles. He had been surnamed the Just, and also Obliam, that is to say, “Rampart of the people,” because it was supposed that it was his prayers which prevented the Divine wrath from sweeping everything away. The Jews, as we are assured, held him in the same veneration as the Christians. If that singular man was really the brother of Jesus, he must have been at least one of those inimical brothers who abjured him and wished him arrested; and it is probable to 42such recollections that Paul, irritated by a mind so narrow, made allusion when he wrote concerning these pillars of the Church at Jerusalem:—“Whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me; God accepteth no man’s person” (Gal. ii. 6). Jude, the brother of James, was, it seems, in entire agreement with his ideas.

To sum up, the Church at Jerusalem had been more and more broadened by the spirit of Jesus. The dead weight of Judaism had borne it down. Jerusalem was for the new faith an unwholesome centre, and would have ended by destroying it. In that capital of Judaism, it was very difficult to cease being a Jew. Moreover, new men, like St Paul, all but systematically avoided residing there. Forced now, under pain of being separated from the primitive Church, to come to confer with their elders, they found themselves in a position full of hardship; and the work, which could not live except by the power of concord and of abnegation, ran an immense risk.

The interview, in fact, was singularly protracted and embarrassing. People listened favourably at first to the account that Paul and Barnabas gave of their missions; for every one, even the most Judaised, was of opinion that the conversion of the Gentiles was the harbinger of the Messiah. The curiosity to see the man of whom so much was being said, and who had led the sect into so new a path, was at first very lively. They glorified God for having made an Apostle out of a persecutor. But when they came to circumcision, and the obligation of practising the Law, dissension broke out in all its force. The Pharisean party set forth its pretensions in the most uncompromising manner. The party in favour of emancipation responded with triumphant force. They cited the cases of several uncircumcised persons who had received the Holy Ghost. If God made no distinction between Pagans and 43Jews, how could they have the temerity to do it for Him? How could that be held for unclear which God had purified? Why impose a yoke on the converts that the race of Israel had not been able to bear? It was through Jesus that one was saved, and not through the Law. Paul and Barnabas advanced in support of that thesis the miracles which God had wrought for the conversion of the Gentiles. But the Pharisees objected with no less force that the Law was not abolished; that one never ceased to be a Jew; that the obligations of a Jew remained ever the same. They refused to hold relations with Titus, who was uncircumcised; they openly accused Paul of infidelity, and of being an enemy of the Law.

The most admirable characteristic in the histories of the origins of Christianity is that that radical and serious division, embracing a question of the first importance, did not occasion in the Church a complete schism, which would have been its ruin. The eager and impulsive mind of Paul had here a splendid opportunity of displaying itself; his sound practical sense, his sagacity, and his judgment, remedied everything. The two parties were eager, excited, almost harsh to one another; nobody rejected his advice; the question was not yet shaped; people remained united in the common work. A superior bond, the love that every one had for Jesus, the remembrance which all entertained for him, were stronger than the divisions. The most fundamental dissension that was ever produced in the bosom of the Church, did not lead to reprobation. This is a great lesson that succeeding centuries have seldom been able to imitate.

Paul understood that in large and heated assemblies he could never succeed, because that there narrow minds would always have the sway, and because Judaism was too long at Jerusalem for one 44to hope to be able to extort from it a concession of principles. He went and saw separately all personages of consideration, in particular, Peter, James, and John. Peter, like all men who exist for the most part on elevated sentiment, was indifferent to questions of party. These disputes grieved him; he wished for union, concord, and peace. His timid and rather contracted mind detached itself with difficulty from Judaism; he would have preferred that the new converts had accepted circumcision, but he saw the impossibility of such a solution. Deep and tender natures are always undecided; they sometimes even have to resort to a little dissimulation. They desire to please everybody—no question of principle seems with them to outweigh the value of peace. They let themselves be carried away by different parties, and to making contradictory promises and engagements. Peter sometimes committed this by no means heinous fault. To Paul, he was for uncircumcision; to the strict Jews, be sided with the partisans of circumcision. The soul of Paul was so grand, so sincere, so full of the new zeal which Jesus had brought into the world, that Peter could not fail to sympathise with him. They loved each other, and when they were together, it was as sovereigns of the entire world of the future, which they divided between them.

It was doubtless at the close of one of their conversations that Paul, with the exaggeration of language and the verve that were habitual to him, said to Peter, “We quite understand one another; yours is the gospel of circumcision; mine is the gospel of uncircumcision.” Paul laid hold of these words later on as a sort of regular treaty, which ought to be accepted by all the Apostles. It is difficult to believe that Peter and Paul should dare to repeat outside their private conversations words which would have injured to the highest degree the pretensions 45of James, and probably even those of John. But the words were uttered. These large schemes, which were hardly those of Jerusalem, struck greatly the enthusiastic soul of Peter. Paul made upon him the greatest impression, and won him over completely. Up to this time Peter had travelled little; his pastoral visits had not, it seems, been extended beyond Palestine. He must have been about fifty years of age. Paul’s eagerness for travelling, the recitals of the apostolic journeys, the projects that had been communicated to him in regard to the future, fired his zeal. It was from this time that Peter was seen to absent himself from Jerusalem, and to lead in his turn the wandering life of apostleship.

James, with the sanctity of a life so equivocal, was the chief of the Judaistic party. It was through him that almost all the conversions of Pharisees had been made: the exigencies of that party were imposed on him. Everything tends to the belief that he did not make any concession upon the dogmatic principle; nevertheless, a moderate and conciliatory opinion soon began to make itself manifest. The legitimacy of the conversion of the Gentiles was admitted; it was declared that it was useless to be disquieted in regard to what concerned circumcision; it was only necessary to maintain a few interesting prescriptions, the morale or the suppression of which would shock too keenly the Jews. In order to reassure the Pharisean party, it was remarked that the existence of the Law was not for the sake of compromise, seeing that Moses had from time immemorial, and would always be, for the people to be read in the synagogues. The converted Jews thus remained submissive to the entire Law, and the exemptions only concerned the converted Pagans. In practice, however, people were to avoid shocking those who had more contracted 46ideas. It was probably these moderate persons, the authors of that harmless contradiction, who counselled Paul to induce Titus to let himself be circumcised. Titus, in fact, had become one of the principal difficulties of the situation. The converted Pharisees of Jerusalem willingly supported the idea that, far removed from them, at Antioch, or in the depths of Asia Minor, there were Christians uncircumcised. But in their midst at Jerusalem, to be obliged to associate with them, and thus to commit a flagrant violation of that Law to which they were attached to the bottom of their hearts, this was what they could not consent to.

Paul took the most infinite precautions in acceding to this demand. It was indeed owned that it was not as a matter of necessity that the circumcision of Titus was demanded, as Titus would remain a Christian even if he did not submit to that rite; but it was asked of him as a mark of condescension for the brethren whose consciences were pledged, and who otherwise could not hold relations with him. Paul consented, but not without uttering some severe words against the authors of such an exaction, against those false brethren who only had entered the Church to diminish the extent of the liberties created by Jesus. He protested that be would in nothing submit his opinions to theirs; that the concession he had made was for once only, for the sake of the general good, and of peace. With such reservations he gave his consent, and Titus was circumcised.

That concession cost Paul much, and the sentence in which he spoke of it is one of the most original that he ever wrote. The language that it cost him seemed not to be able to run off his pen. The sentence, at first sight, appeared to mean that Titus was not circumcised, whilst it implied that he was. The remembrance of that painful moment often returned to him; that semblance of returning to Judaism appeared 47to him sometimes as a denying of Jesus; he re-assured himself by saying,—“And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.” Like all men who possess a multiplicity of ideas, Paul set little store by forms. He perceived the vanity of everything which was not a thing of the soul, and when the supreme interests of conscience were at play, he, usually so stubborn, abandoned all else.

The capital concession which involved the circumcision of Titus, appeased much of the ill-feeling. It was admitted that in distant countries in which the new converts had no daily intercourse with the Jews, it would be sufficient if they abstained from blood, together with meats offered in sacrifice to the gods, or suffocated, and that they observed the same laws as the Jews in regard to marriage, and the relations between the sexes. The use of pork meat, the interdiction of which was everywhere the symbol of Judaism, was left free. It was almost the embodiment of the Noachic precepts; that is to say, which it was supposed had been revealed to Noah, and which were imposed on all proselytes. The idea that the blood was the life, that the blood was life itself, inspired in the Jews an extreme horror for meats from which the blood had not been let. To abstain from these was for them a precept of natural religion. Demons were supposed to be particularly greedy of blood, so in eating meat not bled people ran the risk of having for companion of the food they partook of a demon. A man who about that period wrote under the usurped name of the celebrated Greek moralist Phocylides a short course of Jewish natural morals, simplified the usages of the non-Jews, by seizing upon similar solutions. That bold impostor did not essay to convert his reader to Judaism; he sought merely to inculcate on him the “Noachical precepts,” with some greatly modified Jewish rules in regard to meat and to marriage. The first of these rules 48was altered by him to accord with hygienic requirements and alimentary convenience, to the abstaining from things forbidden or unclean; the second had reference to the regulating and the purifying of sexual relations. All the rest of the Jewish ritual went for nothing.

For the rest, that which issued from the assembly at Jerusalem was only agreed to by word of mouth, and was not even stated in very strict terms, for we shall see them frequently set aside. The idea of dogmatic canons emanating from a council was not yet heard of. By reason of profound good sense, these simple people attained to the loftiest pinnacle of policy. They saw that the only way of escaping great questions was to leave them unresolved, to take a middle course which would please no one, and to leave problems to wear themselves out, and to die from lack of a raison d’être.

People were content to be divided. Paul explained to Peter, James, and John the gospel that he preached to the Gentiles; the former entirely approved of it, finding nothing in it to reprimand, and not attempting to add anything thereto. Paul and Barnabas were heartily given the right hand of fellowship; their immediate right divine to the apostleship of the Pagan world was admitted; people recognised in them a sort of peculiar grace for what was the special object of their vocation. The title of Apostle of the Gentiles, which Paul had already assumed, was, as he assures us, officially conferred on him; and without doubt people accorded to him, at least by tacit assent, the fact which he prized the most, to wit, that he had had his special revelation as direct as those who had seen Jesus; in other words, that his vision on the way to Damascus was of as much importance as the other appearances of Christ risen from the dead. All that was required of the three representatives of the 49Church of Antioch in return, was not to forget the poor at Jerusalem. The Church of that city, in fact, by reason of its communistic organisation, its peculiar responsibilities, and the misery which reigned in Judea, appeared to be nearing its last gasp. Paul and his party accepted gladly that idea. They hoped by a kind of contribution to shut the mouth of the intolerant Jerusalemitish party, and to reconcile it with the thought that he existed for the Church of the Gentiles. By means of a trifling tribute they purchased liberty of thought, and remained in communication with the central Church, outside of which one did not dare hope for salvation.

In order that no doubt should remain as to the reconciliation, it was decided that Paul, Barnabas, and Titus, in returning to Antioch, were to be accompanied by two of the principal members of the Church at Jerusalem, Judas Bar-Saba and Silvanus or Silas, who were charged with disavowing the brethren from Judæa who had created the trouble in the Church at Antioch, and to render witness to Paul and Barnabas, whose services and devotion were recognised. The joy at Antioch was very great. Judas and Silas held the rank of prophets: their inspired speech was appreciated extremely by the Church at Antioch. Silas was so much charmed with that atmosphere of life and of liberty, that he had no desire to return to Jerusalem. Judas alone returned to the Apostles, and Silas attached himself to Paul by bonds of brotherhood, which every day became more intimate.

CHAPTER IV.

SLOW PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY: ITS INTRODUCTION AT ROME.

An idea which, above all things, it is necessary to get rid of, when the question at issue is the propagation of Christianity, is that that propagation had to be made by succeeding missionaries, and by preachers similar to those of modern times, who have to go from city to city. Paul and Barnabas and their companions were the only ones who sometimes proceeded in this manner. The rest was done by workmen whose names remain unknown. Alongside the Apostles who attained celebrity, there was thus an obscure apostleship, whose agents were not dogmatists by profession, but who were none the less most efficacious. The Jews of the period were nomads par excellence. Merchants, servants, small tradesmen, they visited all the large towns of the coast, and pursued their calling. Active, industrious, polite, they brought with them their ideas, their good example, their exaltation, and dominated these populations, degraded in point of religion, with all the superiority that the enthusiastic man possesses over those that are indifferent. Those affiliated to the Christian sect travelled like the other Jews, and carried the glad tidings with them. It was a sort of familiar preaching, and much more persuasive than any other. The gentleness, the gaiety, the good humour, the patience of the new believers, caused them to be received gladly everywhere, and conciliated their minds.

Rome was one of the first points attacked in this manner. The capital of the Empire had heard the name of Jesus long before all the intermediate countries could have been evangelised, just as a high 51summit is illuminated when the valleys lying between it and the sun are still in darkness. Rome was, in fact, the rendezvous of all the Oriental religious, the point of the Mediterranean with which the Syrians had the most intercourse. They arrived there in enormous bands. Like all poor populations going up to attack the large cities in quest of fortune, they were obedient and humble. With them disembarked troops of Greeks, Asiatics, and Egyptians, all speaking Greek. Rome was literally a bilingual city. The language of the Jewish world and of the Christian world of Rome was for three centuries Greek. Greek was at Rome the language of all that was most wicked and most honest, of all that was the best and the most base. Rhetoricians, grammarians, philosophers, noble pedagogues, preceptors, servants, intriguers, artists, singers, dancers, brokers, artisans, preachers of new sects, religious heroes—they all spoke Greek, The old Roman burgess class lost ground each day, swamped as it was by this flood of strangers.

It is in the highest degree probable that about the year 50 several Jews from Syria, already Christians, entered the capital of the Empire, and disseminated their ideas there. In fact, among the good administrative measures of Claudius, Suetonius placed the following: “He expelled the Jews from Rome, who, at the instigation of Chrestus, indulged frequently in riots.” Certainly, it is possible that there might have been at Rome a Jew named Chrestus who fomented troubles amongst his co-religionists, and which led to their expulsion. But it is much more probable that the name of Chrestus was none other than that of Christ himself. The introduction of the new faith provoked, doubtless, in the Jewish quarter at Rome, altercations, quarrels, scenes analogous, in a word, to those which had already taken place at Damascus, at Antioch in Pisidia, and at Lystra. Wishing to 52put an end to these disorders, the police were compelled to take measures for the expulsion of the perturbators. The chiefs of police may have inquired superficially into the nature of the quarrel, which interested them so little; a report addressed to the Government may have proved that the agitators called themselves Christiani, that is to say, partisans of a certain Christus; that name being unknown, it may have been changed into Chrestus, in consequence of the custom of unlettered persons giving to the names of strangers a form appropriate to their habits. Hence, in order to come to a conclusion that there existed a man of that name, who had been the provoker and the leader of the riots, was but a short step to take; the inspectors of police might have overlooked the fact, and, without further inquiry, pronounced sentence of banishment against the two parties.

The principal Jewish quarter in Rome was situated on the other side of the Tiber; that is to say, in the part of the city the poorest and the most filthy, probably in the neighbourhood of the actual Porta Portese. Here was situated formerly, as in our own times, the port of Rome, the place where merchandise was unloaded which had been brought in flat boats from Ostia. It was the quarter of the Jews and of the Syrians, “nations born to servitude” as is remarked by Cicero. The first nucleus of the Jewish population at Rome had, in fact, been formed of freedmen, descendants, for the most part, of those who had been carried prisoners to Rome by Pompey. They had undergone slavery without changing any of their religious habits. That which is admirable about Judaism, is that simplicity of faith which makes the Jew, though transported a thousand leagues from his country, at the end of many generations a Jew still of the purest type. The intercourse between the synagogues of Rome and those of Jerusalem was 53continual. The first colony had been reinforced by numerous emigrants. These poor people disembarked by hundreds at Ripa, and lived there by themselves in the quarter adjacent to Transtevere, serving as street porters, engaging in small commerce, exchanging matches for broken glasses, and presenting to the haughty Italian population a type which, later, should become to them too familiar —that of a mendicant skilled in his art. A Roman who respected himself never put his foot into these debased quarters. It was treated as a suburb given over to contemned classes, and to disreputable avocations; tanneries, sausage factories, steeping troughs, were relegated there. So the unfortunates lived quite tranquilly in that despised corner, in the midst of bales of merchandise, infamous taverns, and of litter porters (Syrians), who had here their general quarters. The police did not enter it except when the quarrels were bloody, or when they were too often repeated. Few of the quarters of Rome were so free; politics had nothing to do with it. Not only was religion practised in ordinary times without opposition, but every facility was afforded for active propagandism.

Protected by the contempt which they inspired, little sensitive, moreover, to the railleries of the people of the world, the Jews of Transtevere led thus a very active, religious, and social life. They possessed a few kakamin (schools); nowhere was the ritual and ceremonial of the Law more scrupulously observed; the synagogues had the most perfect organisation that ever was known. The titles of “father” and of “mother of the synagogue” were much prized. Some rich converts took biblical names; they converted their slaves along with themselves; the Scroll was explained by the doctors; they built places of prayer, and showed themselves to be proud of the consideration they enjoyed in that little world. The poor 54Jew, when begging, found the opportunity, in a trembling voice, to whisper into the ear of the grand Roman dame a few sentences of the Law, and often gained over the matron, who had given him a handful of small change. To observe the Sabbath and the Jewish feasts was, according to Horace, the characteristic which classes a man amongst the weak-minded, that is to say, with the multitude, unus multorum. Universal benevolence, the felicity of reposing with the just, assisting the poor, purity of manners, the sweetness of family life, the mild perception of death, which was considered as a sleep, are the sentiments which are found on the Jewish inscriptions, together with that special note of touching unction of humility, certain hope, which characterises Christian inscriptions. There were many Jews, men of the world, rich and powerful, such as Tiberius Alexander, who attained to the highest honours of the Empire, and who twice or thrice exercised an influence of the first order in public affairs, and had even, to the great chagrin of the Romans, his statue in the Forum; but the latter were no longer good Jews. The Herods, although ostentatiously practising their religion at Rome, were also far from (it was only through their relations with the Pagans) being true Israelites. The poor remained faithful, esteeming these worldlings as renegades; in like manner, we see in our day the Polish or Hungarian Jews treat with severity the aristocratic French Israelites who have deserted the synagogue, and have had their children educated in Protestantism, so as to make their circle more exclusive.

A world of ideas were thus propounded on the common wharf where was unloaded the merchandise of the whole world; but all this is lost in the tumult of a large city like London or Paris. Certainly the proud patricians, who, in their promenades upon the Aventine 55cast their eyes to the other side of the Tiber, could not suspect that the future was being prepared in the pile of poor houses erected at the foot of Janiculum. The day when, under the reign of Claudius, a certain Jew, initiated in the new beliefs, placed foot on the ground opposite the Emporium, that same day no one knew in Rome that the founder of a second Empire, another Romulus, lodged at the gate on a bed of straw. Near the gate was a kind of lodging-house, well known to the people and the soldiers, which went under the name of Taberna meritoria. There was shown here, in order to attract the credulous, a pretended fountain of oil, issuing from the rocks. Very soon that fountain of oil was regarded by the Christians as symbolical. It was pretended that its appearance had coincided with the birth of Jesus. It appears that later on the Taberna was made into a church. Who knows whether the oldest souvenirs of Christianity were not connected with that resort! Under Alexander Severus we see the Christians and the tavern-keepers contending for a certain spot which had formerly been public, and which that good Emperor adjudged to the Christians. One feels that one is here upon the natal soil of an old popular Christianity. Claudius, about that time, struck with the “progress of foreign superstitions,” believed that he was performing an act of good conservative policy in re-establishing the soothsayers. In a report made to the Senate, complaint was made of the indifference of the times for the ancient usages of Italy, and for good discipline. The Senate had invited the Pontiffs to see whether it was possible to re-establish the old customs. Everything went well, in consequence, and it was believed that these respectable impostures were saved for all eternity.

The great question of the moment was the attainment of Agrippa to power, the adoption of Nero by 56Claudius, and his ever-increasing fortune. No one thought of the poor Jew who uttered for the first time the name of Christus in the Syrian colony, and expounded the faith which brought happiness to those amongst whom he was living. Others soon arrived. The letters from Syria, brought by the newcomers, spoke of the movement which was increasing more and more. A small circle was formed. Everybody “smelled the garlick.” These ancestors of the Roman prelates were poor proletariats, filthy, undistinguished, ill-mannered, clothed in dirty smock-frocks, and had the bad breath of people who are ill-fed. Their hovels had that odour of misery which exhales from persons poorly nourished and clothed, and huddled up in a small room. They soon became numerous enough to make a noise. They preached in the ghetto, and the orthodox Jews resisted them. What with the tumultuous scenes which were taking place; what with the scenes recurring night by night; what with the Roman police being interviewed; what (little caring to know what was the cause of the trouble) with addressing a report to the superior authority, and laying the troubles to the account of a certain Chrestus, whom it was impossible to get hold of; what with the expulsion of the agitators having been decided on—there was nothing in that which was not plausible. The passage in Suetonius, and, better still, that of the Acts, would seem to imply that all the Jews were driven out on that occasion; but such a thing is not to be supposed. The likelihood is that the Christians, the partisans of the seditious Chrestus, were alone expelled. Claudius, in general, was favourable to the Jews, and it is even not impossible that the expulsion of the Christians, of which we have just been speaking, took place at the instigation of the Jews—the Herods, for example. These expulsions, however, were always only temporary and conditional. The tide, arrested for the 57moment, always returned. The edict of Claudius was, in any case, of little consequence, since Josephus does not mention it, and in the year 58 Rome had already a new Christian Church.

The founders of this first Church at Rome, destroyed by the decree of Claudius, are unknown. But we know the names of two Jews who were exiled in consequence of the emeutes of the Porta Portese. They were an old pious couple, the one Aquila, originally a Jew from Pontus, following the same calling as St Paul, that of an upholsterer, the other Priscilla, his wife. They sought refuge at Corinth, where we soon see them en rapport with St Paul, whose intimate friends and zealous fellow-workers they became. Aquila and Priscilla are hence the two oldest known members of the Church at Rome. But they are hardly remembered. Legend, which is always unjust, because it is always swayed by political motives, has expelled from the Christian Pantheon these two obscure workers, in order to attribute the honour of the foundation of the Church of Rome to a name more illustrious, corresponding better to the proud pretensions of universal dominion which the capital of the Empire, now become Christian, could not abdicate. For us, it is not at the theatrical basilica which has been consecrated to St Peter, it is at the Porta Portese, that ancient ghetto, where we really find the starting-point of Western Christianity. It is the traces of those pier wandering Jews, who carried with them the religion of the world,—those men who hardly dreamt, in their misery, of the kingdom of God—we must search out and embrace. We do not contest with Rome its essential title; Rome was probably the first spot of the Western world, and even of Europe, where Christianity was established But in place of these proud and magnificent churches, in place of these insulting devices, Christus vincit, Christus regit, Christus imperat—Christ conquers, 58Christ reigns, Christ governs—it would be much better to erect a little chapel to the two good Jews of Pontus who were expelled by the police of Claudius for belonging to the party of Chrestus.

After the Church of Rome (if it was not even anterior) the most ancient Western Church was that of Pozzuoli. St Paul found Christians there about the year 61. Pozzuoli was in a certain sense the port of Rome; it was at least the place where the Jews and the Syrians who came to Rome disembarked. This strange soil undermined by fire; these Phlegreens fields; that sulphur bed; these caverns full of burning vapours, which seemed the breath of hell; these sulphurous waters; these myths of giants, and of demons buried in the burning valleys, a sort of Gehennas; these baths, which appeared to the austere Jews and the enemies of total nudity the acme of abomination—greatly impressed the imaginations of the new emigrants, and have left a deep trace on the apocalyptic compositions of the times. The follies of Caligula, of which we still see traces, left also in these places terrible recollections.

In any case, one capital feature, as we have already had occasion to remark, is, that the Church at Rome was not, like the Churches of Asia Minor, of Macedonia and of Greece, a foundation of the school of Paul. It was a Judæo-Christian creation, connected directly with the Church at Jerusalem. Paul was never here on his own ground; he found in that great Church many shortcomings, which he treated with indulgence, but which offended his exalted idealism. Attached to circumcision, and to exterior practices; ebionite by its taste for abstinences, and by its doctrine, more Jew than Christian, in regard to the person and the death of Jesus; strongly attached to millenarianism, the Roman Church presented in its early days the essential features which have distinguished it during its long and marvellous 59history. The direct daughter of Jerusalem, the Roman Church has always had an ascetic, sacerdotal character, and been opposed to the Protestant tendency of St Paul. Peter was its veritable chief; then, being penetrated by the political and hierarchical spirit of old Pagan Rome, it became, in truth, the new Jerusalem, the city of the pontificate, of religion, hierarchical and solemn, of material sacraments, which are their own justification, the city of ascetics, after the manner of Jacques Obliam, with its callosities on the knees and its plates of gold on the forehead. She was to be the church of authority. If it can be believed, the special sign of the apostolic mission was the showing of a letter signed by the Apostles, the producing of a certificate of orthodoxy. The good and the evil that the Church at Jerusalem did for infant Christianity, the Church of Rome did for the Church universal. It was in vain that Paul addressed to them his beautiful epistle, in order to explain to them the mystery of the cross of Jesus and of salvation by faith alone. This epistle the Church at Rome but vaguely comprehended. But Luther, fourteen and a half centuries later, comprehended it, and opened a new era in the secular series of the alternative triumphs of Peter and Paul.

CHAPTER V.

SECOND JOURNEY OF PAUL—ANOTHER SOJOURN AT GALATIA.

Hardly had Paul returned to Antioch, when he began forming new projects. His ardent soul could not brook repose. On the one hand, he proposed to enlarge the rather limited field of his first mission: on the other, the desire to see again his dear Churches 60of Galatia, to confirm them in the faith, pursued him incessantly. The tenderness which that strange nature appeared in some respects to lack, had been transformed into a powerful faculty of loving the communities which he had founded. He had for his Churches the sentiments that other men have for that which they love the most. This was indeed a special gift of the Jews. The feeling of association with which they were imbued caused them to give to the esprit de famille applications altogether novel. The synagogue and the church were thus what the monastery was to the Middle Ages, the beloved home, the hearth of the warmest affections, the roof under which people sheltered that which they held most dear.

Paul communicated his design to Barnabas. But the friendship of the two Apostles, which had been proof against the severest tests, which no susceptibility of amour propre, no freak of character had been able to lessen, received now a cruel blow. Barnabas proposed to Paul to take John, surnamed Mark, with them: Paul flew into a passion. He could not pardon John-Mark for having abandoned the first mission at Perga, at the moment when it had entered upon the most perilous stage of the journey. The man who had once refused to go on with the work, appeared to him as unworthy of being enrolled anew. Barnabas defended his cousin, whose motives, in fact, it is probable Paul judged with too much severity. The quarrel waxed very hot: it was impossible to come to an understanding. That old friendship which had been the condition of the evangelic preaching, gave place for a time to a miserable question of individuals. To speak truly, it is allowable to suppose that the rupture was based on deeper reasons. It is a miracle that the always increasing pretensions of Paul, his pride, his eagerness to be absolute chief, had not already twenty times rendered relations 61impossible between two men whose reciprocal positions had entirely changed. Barnabas had not the genius of Paul; but who can tell whether in the true hierarchy of souls, which is regulated by the order of goodness, he did not occupy a still higher rank? When we recall what Barnabas had been to Paul; when we think that it was he who at Jerusalem had silenced the not altogether groundless defiances of which the new convert was the object;—who went to seek at Tarsus the future Apostle, as yet isolated and uncertain as to his path;—who introduced him into the young and active life of Antioch;—who, in a word, made him an Apostle,—one cannot help seeing in that open rupture a motive of secondary importance, a gross act of ingratitude on the part of Paul. But the exigencies of the work were too powerful for him. What man of action is there that has not once in his life committed a great crime of the heart?

The two Apostles then separated from each other. Barnabas and John-Mark embarked at Seleucia for Cyprus. History from this point loses sight of his wanderings. While Paul marches on to glory, his companion, falling into obscurity the moment he quitted him who illuminated him with his rays, wears himself out with the labours of an unrecorded apostleship. The enormous injustice which often regulates the things of this world, presides over history like as over everything else. Those who undertake the rôle of self-devotion and unostentation, are ordinarily forgotten. The author of the Acts, with his ingenuous conciliatory policy, has, without wishing it, sacrificed Barnabas to the desire that he entertained of reconciling Peter to Paul. By a sort of instinctive lack of the principle of compensation, on the one hand diminishing and subordinating the importance of Paul, on 62the other, the author has enhanced the importance of Paul at the expense of a modest fellow-worker, who had not a part cut out for him, and who was not weighted in history with the unequal weights which result from the arrangements of parties. Hence arises the ignorance in which we are placed as to what belongs to the apostleship of Barnabas. We only know that that apostleship continued to be very active. Barnabas remained faithful to the grand rules which Paul and he had established during their first mission. He did not take with him in his peregrinations female companions; he lived always by his work, never accepting anything from the Church. He again encountered Paul at Antioch. The imperious temper of Paul provoked a fresh discord between them; but the nature or sentiment of the holy work carried all before it; the communion between the two Apostles remained intact. Labouring each in his own way, they remained in communication the one with the other, mutually informing one another of their labours. In spite of the greatest dissensions, Paul continued always to treat Barnabas as a fellow-worker, and to consider him as dividing with himself the work of the apostleship of the Gentiles. Ardent, hot-headed, and susceptible, Paul soon forgot, when the great principles to which he had devoted his life were not in question.

In place of Barnabas, Paul selected for his companion Silas, the prophet of the Church at Jerusalem, who had remained at Antioch. He was probably not sorry at the defection of John-Mark, who, it seems, wished to be near Peter. Silas possessed, it is said, the title of a Roman citizen, which, joined with his name of Silvanus, induces the belief that he was not of Judea, or that he had already had occasion to familiarise himself with the world of the Gentiles. Both departed, recommended by the brethren to the grace of God. These forms were not at that time 63vain. People believed that the finger of God was everywhere; that each step of the Apostles of the new kingdom was directed by the immediate inspiration of Heaven.

Paul and Silas journeyed by land. Taking to the north, across the plain of Antioch, they traversed the defile of Amanus, the Assyrian passes; then rounding the end of the Gulf of Issus they crossed the northern ridge of Amanus by the Amanida pass; they then traversed Cilicia, passing probably through Tarsus, emerging from Taurus doubtless by the celebrated Cilician passes—one of them the most frightful mountain pass in the world; penetrating thence into Lycaonia; finally reaching Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium.

Paul found his dear Churches in the same state in which he had left them. The faithful had persevered, and their numbers had increased. Timothy, who was but an infant at the time of his first journey, had become an excellent subject. His youth, his piety, and his intelligence, delighted Paul. All the faithful of Lycaonia testified highly of him. Paul attached him to himself, loved him tenderly, and always found in him a zealous collaborateur, or, rather, a son (it is Paul himself who uses this expression). Timothy was a man of great candour, modesty, and reserve. He had not assurance enough to undertake the chief rôles; he lacked authority, especially in Greek countries, where the minds of the people were frivolous and fickle; but his self-denial made of him an unequalled deacon and secretary to Paul. Paul moreover declared that he had not another disciple who was so completely according to his heart. Impartial history is compelled to withhold, to the advantage of Timothy and of Barnabas, a portion of the glory monopolised by the all-absorbing personality of Paul.

Paul, in attaching Timothy to himself, foresaw 64grave embarrassments. He feared that, in his communications with the Jews, Timothy, uncircumcised as he was, could only be a source of repulsion and of trouble. It was, in fact, known everywhere that his father was a Pagan. A multitude of timorous people would decline to hold intercourse with him: the quarrels, which had hardly been laid to rest by the interview at Jerusalem, would be revived. Paul recalled the difficulties he had experienced in regard to Titus. He resolved to anticipate these; and, in order to avoid being brought later to make a concession to the principles he had recoiled from, he circumcised Timothy himself. This was altogether in conformity with the principles which had guided him in the affair of Titus, and which he always practised. But he had never been induced to say that circumcision was necessary to salvation; for, in his eyes, that would have been an error of faith. Yet circumcision being in itself not a wicked thing, he thought that it might be practised, in order to avoid scandal and schism. His great rule was that an apostle ought to be all things to all men, and to yield to the prejudices of those whom he wished to gain over, when these prejudices in themselves were merely frivolous, and did not contain anything absolutely reprehensible. But, at the same time, as if he had a presentiment of the tests that the faith of the Galatians was about to be put to, he made them promise never to listen to another teacher than himself, and to anathematise all other teaching save his own.

From Iconium Paul probably went to Antioch in Pisidia, and completed thus the visit of the principal Churches in Galatia, founded during his first journey. He resolved then to enter upon new territory; but grave doubts restrained him. The thought of attacking the West of Asia Minor, that is to say, the province of Asia, came into his mind. It was the 65part of Asia the most populated. Ephesus was the capital of it; it contained the beautiful and flourishing cities of Smyrna, Pergamos, Magnesia, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Colossus, Laodicæa, Hierapolis, Tralles, Miletus, in which the centre of Christianity was soon to be established. It is not known what turned St Paul away from carrying his efforts in that direction. “The Holy Spirit,” says the writer of the Acts, “forbade him going to preach in Asia.” The Apostles, it must be borne in mind, were reputed to obey, in choosing the direction of their courses, inspirations from on high. Sometimes there were real motives, reflections, or positive indications which they dissimulated under this language. Sometimes there was also the absence of motives. The opinion that God made known to man his volitions by means of dreams, was widespread, just as it is still in our day in the East. A dream, a sudden impulse, an unpremeditated movement, an inexplicable noise (bath kôl), appeared to them as the manifestations of the Spirit, and decided the route of the mission.

What is certain is that, from Antioch in Pisidia, instead of going in the direction of the brilliant provinces of the south-east of Asia Minor, Paul and his companions plunged more and more into the heart of the peninsula, which contained provinces much less celebrated and less civilised. They traversed Phrygia Epictetus, passed probably through the towns of Synnada and Æzana, and reached the confines of Mysia. There, their indecision returned. Should they turn to the north towards Bithynia, or continue west and enter Mysia? They essayed first to enter Bithynia, but untoward events supervened, which they took for the indications of the will of Heaven. They imagined that the spirit of Jesus did not wish that they should tarry in that country. They then traversed Mysia from one end to the other, and arrived at Alexandria-Troas, a considerable 66port almost opposite Tenedos, and not far from the site of ancient Troy. The apostolic band made thus, in almost a single journey, a distance of more than a hundred leagues, across a country little known, and which, destitute of Roman colonies and Jewish synagogues, did not offer them any of the facilities they had found elsewhere.

These long journeys in Asia Minor, full of sweet ennuis and mystical dreams, are a singular mixture of sadness and of charm. Often the route is hard; certain cantons are peculiarly rugged and barren. Other parts, on the contrary, are full of freshness, and do not correspond at all to the ideas that we are accustomed to embrace in that vague phrase, the East. The mouth of the Orontes marks, both in relation to nature and in relation to races, a well-defined line of demarcation. Asia Minor, both for aspect and for the style of landscape, recalls Italy or our South, at the eminence of Valence and of Avignon. The European is not out of his native climate there, as he is in Syria or in Egypt. It is, if I may say so, an Aryan, not a Semitic country, and it is not to be doubted that one day it will be occupied anew by the Indo-European race (Greeks and Armenians). Water there is abundant: the towns are as if inundated by it. Certain points, such as Nymphi, Magnesia in Siplyus, are veritable paradises. The smooth mountain slopes which bound almost everywhere the horizon, present such varieties of infinite forms, and sometimes of fantastic shapes, that they would be regarded as idle fancies if an artist dare to imitate them. There are summits indented like the teeth of a saw, sides torn and slashed, strange cones, and perpendicular walls, in which are finely exposed to view all the beauties of the stone. Thanks to the numerous chains of mountains, the waters are living and sparkling. Long rows of poplars, small 67plane-trees, in the wide surface of the winter torrents, superb stumps of trees, where the feet plunge into pools, and which jut out in dark tufts from the foot of each mountain, these are the solace of the traveller. At the source of each stream the caravans stop to water. The journey continues for days and days upon the narrow lines of antique pavement which for centuries have borne travellers so diverse, and oftentimes fatigued; but the halts are delicious. A repose of an hour, a piece of bread eaten upon the banks of these limpid streams, running in beds of pebbles, sustains one for a long time.

At Troas, Paul, who in certain parts of that journey seems not to have followed any well-defined plan, became once more irresolute as to which route he should choose. Macedonia appeared to him to offer a fine harvest. It appears that he was confirmed in that idea by a Macedonian whom he encountered at Troas. He was a doctor, an uncircumcised proselyte, by the name of Lucanus or Lucas. This Latin name would lead one to believe that the new disciple belonged to the Roman colony of Philippi; his rare knowledge, in fact, of nautical geography and of navigation would, however, rather incline to the idea that he was a Neapolitan: the ports and all the coast of the Mediterranean appear to have been remarkably familiar to him.

This man, to whom was reserved so important a part in the history of Christianity, seeing he was to be the historian of the Christian origins, and seeing his judgment, self-deceptive as to the future, was to regulate the ideas that were formed in the early times of the Church, had received a sufficiently careful Jewish and Hellenic education. He had a gentle and conciliatory mind, a tender and sympathetic soul, a modest temperament, inclining to self-effacement. Paul loved him much, and Luke, on his part, was always faithful to his master. Like Timothy, Luke 68appeared to have been born expressly to be the companion of Paul. Submission and blind confidence, unbounded admiration, a desire to be submissive, unlimited devotion, were his habitual sentiments. It might be said that it was this absolute abnegation of self that made le moine hibernais in the hands of his abbot. The ideal of “the disciple” was never so perfectly realised. Luke was literally fascinated by the superiority of Paul. His affability as a man of the people proclaimed itself incessantly; his idle fancy showed him always to be a model of perfection and of happiness; an honest man, a good master in his family, of which he was the spiritual head; a Jew at heart, who was converted with all his house. He esteemed the Roman officers, and unhesitatingly believed them to be virtuous. One of the objects he admired the most was a good centurion, pious, benevolent towards the Jews, well served, well obeyed. He had probably studied the Roman army at Philippi, and had been much struck with it. He naturally supposed that discipline and the hierarchy were things of a moral order. His esteem for the Roman functionaries was also great. His title of doctor implies that he possessed medical knowledge, which is proved besides by his writings, but does not imply a scientific and rational culture, which few doctors possessed then. What Luke was par excellence was “the man of firm will”—the true Israelite at heart, he to whom Jesus brought peace. It is he who has transmitted to us, and who probably composed, those delicious canticles of the birth and of the infancy of Jesus, those hymns of the angels, of Mary, of Zachariah, of old Simeon, in which shone out in tones so clear and so joyous the happiness of the new alliance, the Hosanna of the pious proselyte, the accord re-established between the fathers and the sons in the enlarged family of Israel.

Everything tends to the belief that Luke was 69touched by grace at Troas; that he was attached from that time to Paul, and persuaded him that he would find in Macedonia an excellent field. His words made a great impression upon the Apostle. The latter believed he saw in a vision a Macedonian, standing up, who invited him, saying unto him, “Come over and help us.” This was received by the apostolic group as a command of God that they should go to Macedonia, and they waited only a favourable opportunity to depart thence

CHAPTER VI.

CONTINUATION OF Tl9E SECOND JOURNEY OF PAUL—THE MACEDONIAN MISSION.

The mission at this point entered upon entirely new ground. It was what was called the province of Macedonia; but these regions had not formed a portion of the Macedonian kingdom since the time of Philip. They were, in reality, portions of Thracia, anciently colonised by the Greeks, then absorbed by the powerful monarchy the centre of which was at Pella, and which was included for two hundred years in the great Roman unity. Few countries in the world were, in fact, purer in race than the countries situated between Hæmus and the Mediterranean. That they were composed of diverse branches was true, but each genuinely belonged to the Indo-European family, which were superimposed on it. If we except some Phœnician influences coming from Thasos and from Samothracia, almost nothing foreign had penetrated into the interior. Thracia, which was in great part Celtic, had remained faithful to 70the Aryan life: she preserved the ancient religions, under a form which appeared barbarous to the Greeks and Romans, but which, in reality, was only primitive. As for Macedonia, it was probably the region the most honest, the most serious, the most pious of the ancient world. It was originally a country of feudal boroughs, not of large independent towns; now, the latter is, of all administrations, that which has best conserved human morality, and placed the most forces in reserve for the future. Monarchical through steadfastness of mind and through abnegation, filled with antipathy for charlatanism, and for the frequent barren agitations of small republics, the Macedonians presented to Greece the type of a society analogous to that of the Middle Ages, founded upon loyalism, upon faith in legitimacy and heredity, and upon a conservative spirit, equally removed from the grovelling despotism of the East, and from that democratic fever which, inflaming the blood of the people, wears out quickly those who abandon themselves to it. Thus disencumbered from the causes of social corruption that democracy almost always brings in its train, and yet free from the iron chains which Sparta had invented to fortify herself against revolution, the Macedonians were the people of antiquity who most resembled the Romans. They recall in some other respects the German barons, brave, dissipated, rude, proud, faithful. If they realised but for a moment what the Romans knew how to establish in a durable manner, they would have had less honour in having survived their attempt. The little kingdom of Macedonia, without factions or seditions, with its good interior administration, was the most solid nationality that the Romans had to combat in the East. A strong patriotic and legitimist spirit reigned there to such a degree that after their defeats we see the inhabitants take fire with a 71singular facility against the impostors who pretended to continue their old dynasty.

Under the Romans, Macedonia remained a land worthy and pure. It furnished to Brutus two excellent legions. We do not see the Macedonians, like the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Asiatics, rushing to Rome in order to enrich themselves with the fruits of their evil practices. Despite the terrible substitution of races which followed, it may be said that Macedonia has always preserved the same character. It is a country placed under the normal conditions of European life,—wooded, fertile, watered by splendid rivers, possessing interior sources of wealth; whilst that Greece, meagre, poor, singular in everything, has nothing left it but glory and beauty. A land of miracles, like Judæa and Sinai, Greece flourished once, but can never flourish again. She has created something unique, which cannot be reproduced. It seems that when God has once manifested Himself in a country, He blasts it for ever. A laud of klephtes and of artists, Greece cannot again take an original part on the day when the world enters into the channels of wealth, of industry, of abundant consumption: she can only produce genius. In passing through it one is astonished that a powerful race was able to live upon that pile of arid mountains, in the middle of which is a somewhat humid and deep valley, a little plain, a kilometre in extent—all this compels our wonder. Never has there been so plainly seen the opposition which exists between opulence and high art. Macedonia, on the contrary, will one day resemble Switzerland or the south of Germany. Its villages are like clumps of gigantic trees. She has everything that is required for becoming a country of great culture, and of great industry—vast plains, rich mountains, verdant prairies, extended prospects, very different from 72those charming little mazes of the site of Greece. Solemn and grave, the Macedonian peasant has no longer anything of the assurance and the vivacity of the Hellenic peasant. The women, beautiful and chaste, work in the fields like the men. We might say, a country of Protestant peasants: it is a beautiful and strong race, laborious, steady, loving its country, and full of the future.

Embarking at Troas, Paul and his companions (Silas, Timothy, and probably Luke) set sail with a fair wind, touched the first evening at Samothracia, and the morrow approached Neapolis, a town situated upon a small promontory opposite the Isle of Thasos. Neapolis was the port of the great city of Philippi, situated about three leagues thence in the interior. It was the point where the great Egnatine road, which traversed Macedonia and Thracia from west to east, touched the sea. Taking this road, which they did not need to quit until reaching Thessalonica, the Apostles ascended the stony slope cut in the rocks which overlooked Neapolis, emerged from the little chain of mountains which forms the coast, and entered the beautiful plain in the centre of which stands, detached upon a projecting promontory of the mountain, the city of Philippi.

This rich plain, the lowest portion of which is composed of a lake and of marshes, communicates with the basin of Strymon from behind Pangea. The gold mines which at the Hellenic and Macedonian epoch had made the country celebrated, were now almost abandoned. But the military importance of the position of Philippi, squeezed in between the mountain and the morass, had given to it a new life. The battle which ninety-four years before the arrival of the Christian missionaries had opened its gates, brought to it an unexpected splendour. Augustus had established there one of the most considerable 73Roman colonies, under the jus italicum. The city was much more Latin than Greek; Latin was there the common tongue; the religions of Latium seemed to have been transported thither intact. The surrounding plain, dotted with towns, was equally, at the epoch at which we have now arrived, a kind of Roman canton, thrown into the heart of Thracia. The colony was inscribed in the Voltinian tribune. It had been formed principally of the wrecks of the Antonine party, which Augustus had cantoned on these coasts; it was there mixed with portions of the old Thracian stock. In any case, it was a hard-working population, living orderly and peaceably; besides, it was very religious. The confraternities flourished there, particularly those under the patronage of the god Sylvain, who was considered as a sort of tutelary genius of the Latin domination. The mysteries of the Bacchus of Thracia embraced exalted ideas in regard to immortality, and made the population familiar with the views of a future life, and of an idyllic paradise very similar to that which Christianity had spread. Polytheism was in these countries less complicated than elsewhere. The religion of Sabazius, common to Thracia and to Phrygia, in close rapport with the ancient Orpheism, and yet detached by the syncretism of the times from the Dionysian mysteries, included the germs of monotheism. A certain infantile simplicity of taste prepared the way for the Gospel. Everything indicated habits honest, serious, and amiable. One felt oneself to be in a centre analogous to that in which the agronomic and sentimental poetry of Virgil was created. The ever green plain was favourable for the varied culture of vegetables and flowers. Splendid fountains, gushing from the base of the mountain of shining marble which crowned the city, diffused, when properly applied, wealth, shade and freshness. The thickets of poplars and willows, of fig trees and cherry trees and 74of wild vines, exhaled the sweetest odours, and scented the brooks, which abounded on all sides. Moreover, the prairies, which were overrun or covered with monster roses, exhibited herds of dull-eyed buffaloes, with enormous horns, with their heads just above the water; whilst the bees and the swarms of black and blue butterflies gyrated from flower to flower. Pangaea, with its majestic summits, which were covered with snow till the middle of June, stretched out as if to unite the city across the morass. Beautiful ranges of mountains bounded the horizon on all the other sides, leaving only an aperture through which the sky vanished, and showing in the clear distance the basin of Strymon.

Philippi offered to the mission a most appropriate field. We have already seen that in Galatia the Roman colonies of Antioch in Pisidia and of Iconium had very favourably received the new doctrine. We shall observe the same thing at Corinth and at Alexandria-Troas. The population, which had been for a long time settled there, and possessing ancient local traditions, gave few signs of innovations. The Jewry of Philippi, if there was one, was little important; at most, it was limited probably to the women celebrating the Sabbath. Even in the towns in which there were no Jews, the Sabbath was usually celebrated by some of the people. In any case, it seems clear that there was no synagogue there. When the apostolic band entered the city, it was on the first day of the week. Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke remained some days within doors, awaiting, according to custom, the Sabbath day. Luke, who knew the country, remembered that the people who had adopted Jewish customs were wont to assemble on that day without in the suburbs, upon the banks of a small secluded rivulet, which issued from the ground a league and a half from the city, from an enormous boiling spring, and which was called Gangas 75or Gangites. Perhaps it went then by the antique Aryan name of the sacred rivers (Ganga). What is certain is that the peaceful scenes recounted in the Acts, and which marked the first establishment of Christianity in Macedonia, took place at the same spot where a century before the fate of the world had been decided. Gangites marked the spot in the great battle of the year 42 before Jesus Christ, where were placed the foremost ensigns of Brutus and of Cassius.

In towns where there was no synagogue, the meetings of those who were affiliated to Judaism were held in small hypethral erections, or frequently simply in the open air in enclosed spaces, which were called proseuchæ. People delighted in establishing these oratories near the sea or rivers, so as to have facilities for ablutions. The Apostles repaired to the place indicated. Many women, in fact, resorted there for devotion. The Apostles spoke to them, and proclaimed to them the mystery of Jesus. They were listened to attentively. One woman, in particular, was touched. “The Lord,” says the writer of the Acts, “opened her heart.” She was called Lydia or Lydian, because she was from Thyatira. She traded in one of the principal products of Lydian industry—purple. She was a pious person, of the order of those who were called “believing in God,” that is to say, a Pagan by birth, but observing the precepts denominated “Noachic.” She was baptised, with all her house, and did not rest until, through much entreaty, she induced the four missionaries to take up their abode with her. They remained there some weeks, teaching each Sunday at the place of prayer, upon the banks of the Gangites.

A small Church, almost wholly composed of women, was formed. It was very pious, very obedient, and most devoted to Paul. Besides Lydia, this Church embraced within its bosom Evhodia and Syntyche, 76who with the Apostle fought valiantly for the Gospel, but who sometimes had disputes in regard to the ministry of deaconesses. Epaphroditus, a courageous man, whom Paul treated as a brother, a fellow-worker, a companion in arms; Clement, and others still, whom Paul called “his fellow-workers, and whose names,” said he, “are written in the book of life.” Timothy was also much beloved of the Philippians, and he had for them great devotion. It was the only Church from which Paul accepted pecuniary succour, because it was rich, and was little burdened by poor Jews. Lydia was undoubtedly the principal author of these gifts. Paul accepted them from her, for he knew her to be strongly attached to him. This woman gave from the heart; one had not to fear reproaches on her part, nor for an interested return. Paul preferred, doubtless, to be indebted to a woman (probably a widow), of whom he was sure, rather than to men, in respect of whom he would have been less independent, if he had had some acquaintance with them.

The absolute purity of Christian manners disarmed all suspicion. Perhaps, moreover, it is not too audacious to suppose that it is Lydia whom Paul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, calls “my dear spouse.” That expression can be taken, if one so desires, as a simple metaphor. Is it, nevertheless, absolutely impossible that Paul may have contracted with that sister a union more intimate? The only thing certain is, that Paul did not take this sister with him in his journeys. Notwithstanding this, a whole branch of ecclesiastical tradition has claimed that he was married.

The character of the Christian woman became more and more outlined. To the Jewish woman, sometimes so strong, so devoted; to the Syrian woman, who is indebted to the soft languor of a distempered organisation for flashes of enthusiasm 77and of love; to Tabitha, Mary Magdalen, succeeded the Greek women, Lydia, Phœbe, Chloe, vivacious, gay, active, amiable, distinguished, open-hearted to all, yet nevertheless circumspect, giving themselves up to their master to whom they were subordinate, capable of the greatest things, because they were contented to be the fellow-labourers of the men and their sisters, and to aid them when they performed worthy actions. These Greek women, sprung from a fine and healthy race, experienced at the turn of life a change which transformed them. They became pale, and their eyes wandered languishingly; they then covered the bands of thick hair which bounded their cheeks with a black veil, and devoted themselves to austere cares, and brought to bear on these an animated and intelligent ardour. The “female servant,” or Greek deaconess, surpassed even her of Syria and of Palestine in courage. These women, guardians of the secrets of the Church, ran the greatest dangers, and endured every torment, rather than divulge anything. They created the dignity of their sex, and justly too, because they did not speak of their rights; they did more than the men, in assuming the attitude of limiting themselves to serving the latter.

An incident happened which hastened the departure of the missionaries. The city began to speak of them, and public imagination was engaged already upon the marvellous virtues which were attributed to them. One morning, as they were repairing to the place of prayer, they encountered a young slave—probably a ventriloquist—who passed for a witch, and predicted the future. Her masters made a great deal of money out of that ignoble performance. The poor girl, either because she possessed indeed a spirit of divination, or because she was tired of her infamous calling, had no sooner perceived the missionaries than she started to follow them, uttering 78loud cries. The faithful pretended that she was rendering homage to the new faith and to those who preached it. This was repeated several times. At length, one day, Paul exorcised her. The girl, calmed, pretended to be freed from the spirit which tormented her. But the anger of her masters was extreme. Through the healing of the girl they lost their livelihood. They entered a process against Paul, and Silas as his accomplice, and caused them to be taken to the agora, before the duumvirs.

It would have been difficult to found a claim for indemnity upon such peculiar grounds. The plaintiffs laid special stress on the fact of the trouble caused in the city, and of illegal preaching. “They preach customs,” said they, “that we are not allowed to follow, inasmuch as we are Romans.” The city, in fact, was under the Italian law, and liberty of worship became the more constrained the nearer people were to the Roman city. The superstitious population, excited by the masters of the witch, made, at the same moment, a hostile demonstration against the Apostles. These sorts of petty uprisings were frequent in ancient towns. The newsmongers, the unemployed, the “plunderers of the agora,” as Demosthenes had already denominated them, lived on them. The duumvirs, believing that they were dealing with ordinary Jews, condemned—without informing themselves of, or inquiring into, the position of the accused—Paul and Silas to be beaten. The lictors divested the Apostles of their garments, and beat them cruelly in public. They were next cast into prison, put in one of the innermost cells, and had their feet made fast in the stocks.

Whether they had not been allowed to speak in their own defence, or whether they purposely had courted the glory of suffering humiliation for their Master, it does not appear that either Paul or Silas took advantage of their title of citizens before 79the tribunal. It was during the night in the prison that they declared their rank. The jailor was much troubled. Thus far he had treated the two Jews with harshness; now he found himself in the presence of two Romans, Paulus and Silvanus, unlawfully condemned. He washed their wounds, and gave them to eat. It is probable that the duumvirs were informed at the same time; for early in the morning they sent the lictors to order the jailor to release the captives. The Valerian and the Porcian laws were express. The application of stripes to a Roman citizen constituted a grave offence. Paul, taking advantage of this circumstance, refused thus to leave his confinement. He demanded, it is related, that the duumvirs should themselves come and give him his liberty. The embarrassment of the latter was somewhat great. They came and besought Paul to quit the city.

The two prisoners, once at liberty, repaired to the house of Lydia. They were received as martyrs. They addressed to the brethren a few parting words of exhortation and consolation, and departed. In no city had Paul ever been so beloved, and so much loved. Timothy, who was not implicated in the prosecution, and Luke, who played a secondary part, remained at Philippi. Luke did not see Paul again until five years after.

Paul and Silas, having departed from Philippi, followed the Egnantine road, which led to Amphipolis. This was one of the most beautiful day’s journey Paul ever experienced. In leaving the plain of Philippi, the road enters a smiling valley, dominated by the peaks of Panga. The natives cultivated there flax and the plants of the most temperate countries. Large villages were to be seen in every indentation of the mountain. The Roman road was made of marble flagstones. At each step, almost under every plane tree, deep wells filled with water, 80coming directly from the snowy vicinage, and filtering through the thick layers of permeable earth, presented themselves to the traveller. Through the openings in the white marble rocks issued rivulets of incomparable limpidity. It is in such a locality that one learns to place pure water in the first rank of the gifts of Nature. Amphipolis was a large city, the capital of a province, and about an hour’s journey from the mouth of the Strymon. The Apostles do not appear to have stopped there, probably because it was a purely Hellenic city.

From Amphipolis the Apostles, after quitting the estuary of Strymon, proceeded between the sea and the mountain, across the thick woods and the prairies which extend to the sand on the sea shore. The first halt, under the plane trees, near a cooling fountain which issues from the sand, a few steps from the sea, is a delicious place. The Apostles then entered Aulon of Arethusa, a deep rent, a kind of Bosphorus cut perpendicularly, which served as an outlet from the interior lakes to the sea, and passed, probably without any one knowing it, by the side of the tomb of Euripides. The beauty of the trees, the freshness of the air, the rapidity of the waters, the strong growth of the ferns and shrubs of all kinds, recall the prospect of Grand Chartreuse or of Grésivaudan, thrown into the bottom of a furnace. The basin of the lakes of Mygdonia, in fact, is torrid, having, as we might say, surfaces of molten lead; the snakeweeds, raising their heads out of the water and seeking the shade, imprint there only a few wrinkles. The flocks, towards the south, crowded together round the foot of the trees, seem shrivelled up. If it were not for the hum of the insects and the song of the birds, which alone in creation can resist such oppression, it might be regarded as the kingdom of the dead.

Traversing the small town of Apollonia, without halting, Paul skirted the south side of the lakes, and 81continuing almost as far as the bottom of the plain whose depressed centre they occupy, he arrived at the foot of the small range of heights which form the east side of the gulf of Thessalonica. When one attains the summits of these hills, the outline of Olympus is seen in all its splendour. The base and the middle regions of the mountain are blended with the azure of the sky; the snows of the summit appear as an ethereal dwelling suspended in space. But, alas! the holy mountain had been already disenchanted. Man had ascended it, and had clearly seen that the gods no longer dwelt there. When Cicero, in his exile at Thessalonica, saw their white summits, he knew that there was there only snow and rocks. Paul, doubtless, had no regard for these enchanted places belonging to another race. A great city was before him, and from experience he divined that he would find there an excellent base for establishing something grand.

Since the Roman domination, Thessalonica had become one of the most important commercial ports of the Mediterranean. It was a very wealthy and populous city. It had a grand synagogue, serving as a religious centre to the Judaism of Philippi, of Amphipolis, and of Apollonia, all of which had only oratories. Paul followed here his usual practice. For three consecutive Sabbaths he spoke in the synagogue, repeating his uniform discourse on Jesus, proving that he was the Messiah, that the Scriptures had found in him their fulfilment, that he had to suffer, and that he had risen again. Some Jews were converted; but the conversions were numerous, especially among the Greeks “fearing God.” It was always this class which furnished to the new faith its most zealous adherents.

The women came in crowds. All that was best in the feminine society of Thessalonica had already for a long time observed the Sabbath and the Jewish 82ceremonies; the élite of these pious dames flocked to the new preachers. The ordinary phenomena of thaumaturgy, of glossology, of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, of mystical effusions, and of ecktases were produced. The Church of Thessalonica soon rivalled that of Philippi in piety and in delicate attentions to the Apostle. Paul nowhere expended more ardour, tenderness, and penetrating grace. This man, naturally vivacious and passionate, exhibited in his mission a surprising gentleness and calmness; he was a father, a mother, a nurse, as he himself said; while his austerity and rudeness served but to enhance his charm. Stubborn and stern natures have, when they wish to be unctuous, unequalled powers of seduction. Severe language, never flattery, has much more chance of being made agreeable, with women in particular, than softness, which is often the indication of feeble and interested views.

Paul and Silas lived at the house of one Jesus, an Israelite by race, who, according to the usage of the Jews, had Grecianised his name to that of Jason; but they would accept nothing but lodgings. Paul laboured at his trade night and day, in order to cost the Church nothing. The rich purple merchants of Philippi and the sisterhood would, moreover, have been grieved if others than they had furnished to the Apostle the things requisite for existence. On two occasions, during his sojourn at Thessalonica, Paul received from Philippi an offering which he accepted. That was altogether contrary to his principles; his rule was to maintain himself, without receiving anything from the Churches; yet he would have made a scruple about refusing this present of the heart: the pain that he would have given to pious women prevented him. Perhaps, moreover, as we have already stated, he preferred to contract obligations from the women, who never restrained his action, except in regard to men like Jason, in 83respect of whom he desired to preserve his authority.

Nowhere, it seems, had Paul so much as at Thessalonica succeeded in realising his ideal. The population to which he addressed himself was chiefly composed of laborious workmen; Paul entered into their spirit: he preached to them order, industry, and to hold fast to the good in sight of the heathen. A complete new series of precepts were added to his lessons; to wit, economy, application to business, industrial honour founded upon ease and independence. By a contrast, which ought not to surprise us, he expounded to them, at the same time, the most fantastic mysteries of the Apocalypse that had ever been described to them. The Church at Thessalonica was a model that Paul afterwards delighted to cite, and whose good odour, like a perfume of edification, spread everywhere. There were nominated, besides Jason, among the notables of the Church, Gaius, Aristarchus, and Secundus; Aristarchus was circumcised.

That which had happened twenty times before happened again at Thessalonica. The discontented Jews fomented trouble. They employed a band of idlers, of vagabonds, and of those poor creatures of every description who in ancient cities passed the day and night under the columns of the basilicas, ready to make a noise for whoever paid them for it. They went in a body to assail the house of Jason. They called loudly for Paul and Silas. As they did not find them, the rioters seized Jason, together with some of the faithful, and brought them before the politarcs or magistrates. The most confusing cries were raised. “Revolutionaries are in the city,” said some, “and Jason has received them.” “All these people,” said others, “are in revolt against the edicts of the emperor.” “They have a king they call Jesus,” said a third 84party, The excitement was great, and the politarcs were somewhat alarmed. They compelled Jason and the faithful who had been arrested with him to give bail, then sent them away. The following night the brethren led Paul and Silas out of the city, and had them conducted to Beræa. The persecutions of the Jews against the little Church continued, but that only served to consolidate it.

The Jews of Beræa were more liberal and better educated than those of Thessalonica. They listened willingly, and allowed Paul, without interruption, to expound his ideas in the synagogue. For several days it was to them a lively source of curiosity. They passed the time in perusing the Scriptures, in order to find there the texts cited by Paul, and to see whether they were correct. Many were converted, among others a certain Jew, named Sopater or Sosipater, son of Pyrrhus. Here, nevertheless, as in all the other Churches of Macedonia, the women were in the majority. The converts belonged all to the Greek race, to that class of devout persons who, without being Jews, practised the Jewish ceremonies. Many Greeks and proselytes were also converted, and the synagogue for once remained peaceable. The storm came from Thessalonica. The Jews of that city, learning that Paul had preached with success at Beræa, came to the latter city, and renewed there their plotting. Paul was again obliged to depart hurriedly, and without taking Silas with him. Many of the brethren of Beræa accompanied him as an escort.

The warning given by the synagogues of Macedonia was such that sojourning in this country seemed to have become impossible to Paul. He saw himself tracked from city to city, and the rioters to spring up, as it were, from under his feet. The Roman police were not very hostile to him; but they acted in the circumstances according to the 85habitual practice of police. When there was disturbance in the street, they would blame everybody, and without fretting themselves as to that which served as the true pretext for the excitement, they would beg of people to be quiet or to move on. It was in effect an encouragement to disturbance, and to establish in principle that it only needed a few fanatics to deprive a citizen of his liberty. The policeman never piques himself much on philosophy. Paul hence resolved to depart, and to go to some distant country, where the hatred of his adversaries could not follow him. Leaving Silas and Timothy in Macedonia, he, with the Beræans, directed his steps towards the sea.

Thus ended that brilliant Macedonian mission, the most successful of any that Paul had as yet accomplished. Churches composed of entirely new elements had been formed. It was no longer the easy-going Syrian woman, the good-natured Lycaonian woman; it was the subtle, delicate, elegant, spiritual races, who, prepared by Judaism, now embraced the new religion. The coast of Macedonia was completely covered with Greek colonies. The Greek genius had there borne its choicest fruits. These noble Churches of Philippi and of Thessalonica, composed of the most distinguished women of each city, were unquestionably the two greatest conquests that Christianity had yet made. The Jewish woman was outstripped; submissive, retired, and obedient, participating little in religion, the latter was not easily converted. It was the woman “fearing God,” the Greek woman, wearied of the goddesses brandishing their spears on the summit of the Acropolis, the virtuous woman turning her back on a worn-out Paganism, and seeking the pure religion, who was attracted heavenwards. These were the second foundresses of our faith. Next to the Galileans who followed Jesus and served him, Lydia, Phœbe, the obscure pious women of Philippi and of Thessalonica 86are the true saints to whom the new faith owed its most rapid progress.

CHAPTER VII.

CONTINUATION OF THE SECOND JOURNEY OF PAUL—PAUL AT ATHENS.

Paul, accompanied still by the faithful Beræans, sailed for Athens. From the end of the Gulf of Thermmus to Phalera, or to Piræus, the voyage in a small craft occupies three or four days. The traveller passes the foot of Olympus, of Ossa, and of Pelion; he follows the sinuosities of the interior sea which Eubœa separates from the rest of the Ægæan Sea, and touches the singularly narrow strait of Euripus. On either bank one skirts that truly holy ground where perfection is at once discovered, where the ideal has really existed,—that soil which has seen the noblest of races found at once art, science, philosophy, and politics. Paul, no doubt, experienced on landing there that species of filial sentiment which cultivated men experience when touching this venerated soil. It was another world: his holy ground was elsewhere.

Greece had not recovered from the terrible blows she had received during the previous centuries. Like the sons of Earth, these aristocratic tribunes had torn one another to pieces; the Romans had completely exterminated them; the old families had nearly disappeared; the ancient cities of Thebes and of Argos had become poor villages; Olympus and Sparta had been humiliated; Athens and Corinth were the sole survivors. The country was almost a desert: the images of desolation which we gather from the descriptions of Polybius, Cicero, 87Strabo, and Pausanias are heart-rending. The appearances of liberty which the Romans had left in the towns, and which only disappeared under Vespasian, were little else than irony. The wicked administration of the Romans had ruined everything; the temples were no longer maintained; at each step there were pedestals from which the conquerors had stolen the statues, or which adulation had consecrated to the new rulers. Peloponesus, in particular, had been struck dead. Sparta had killed her; consumed by the proximity of this foolish Utopia, that poor country never sprang into life again. At the Roman epoch, moreover, the administration of the large cities had absorbed and superseded the numerous small ruling centres: Corinth attracted to itself all the life.

The race, if we except Corinth, had, however, remained quite pure; the number of Jews outside of Corinth was inconsiderable. Greece had received but a single Roman colony. The invasions of slaves and of Albanians, which have so completely changed the Hellenic blood, did not take place till later. The old religions were still flourishing. Some women, unknown to their husbands, practised much in secret, at the far corner of the gymnasiums, the foreign superstitions, especially those of the Egyptians. The sages, however, protested. “What a God he must be,” said they, “who is pleased with the surreptitious homage of married women! A wife ought not to have other friends besides those of her husband. The gods, are they not our best friends?”

It seems that, either during the voyage or at the moment of his arrival in Athens, Paul regretted having left his companions in Macedonia. Perhaps that new world astonished him, and he found him-self there too much isolated. What is certain is, that in dismissing the faithful Beræans he charged 88them to request Silas and Timothy to come and join him at the earliest possible moment.

Paul therefore found himself for some days alone at Athens. This had not happened to him for a long time. His life had been as a whirlwind, and he had never journeyed without two or three companions. Athens, to the world, was something unique—at all events, something totally different from anything that Paul had seen before; hence, he was extremely embarrassed. In waiting for his companions, he amused himself by roaming, in the widest sense, over the city. The Acropolis, with the innumerable statues which covered it, and which constituted it a museum such as had never before been seen, must, in particular, have been to him a subject of the deepest reflection.

Athens, although she had suffered much from Sylla, although, like Greece, she had been pillaged by the Roman administrators, and was already in part despoiled by the gross avidity of its masters, had yet the appearance of being ornamented with almost all her master-pieces of art. The monuments of the Acropolis were intact. Some clumsy additions of detail, quite a sufficient number of mediocre works which were already glittering in the sanctuary of high art, some silly substitutions, which consisted in placing Romans on the pedestals of ancient Greeks, had not changed the sanctity of that immaculate temple of the beautiful. Pœcile, with its brilliant decoration, was as fresh as it was on the fast day. The exploits of the odious Secundus Carinas, the purveyor of statues for the gilded House, did not commence until some years after, and Athens suffered less from this than did Delphos and Olympus. The false taste of the Romans for colonnaded cities had not penetrated here; the houses were poor and by no means commodious. That exquisite city was moreover an irregular city, 89with narrow streets which were the conservators of its old monuments, and archaic souvenirs were preferred to streets scientifically laid out. Many of these marvellous things affected Paul but little; he beheld the only perfect objects which had ever existed, which shall ever exist,—the Propylæum, that chef-d’œuvre of grandeur; the Parthenon, which absorbed every other grandeur save its own; the Temple of Victory without wings, worthy of the battles which it consecrated; the Erechthæum, a prodigy of elegance and of finish; the Errhephoræ, these divine young women with a bearing so full of grace; he beheld all that, and his faith was not overcome, nor was he disquieted. With the prejudices of the iconoclastic Jew, insensible to the plastic beauties which blinded him, he took these incomparable figures for idols. “His spirit,” says his biographer, “was stirred in him when. he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.” Ah! thou lovely and chaste images, true gods and goddesses, tremble! Behold him who raised against you the hammer! The fatal words had gone forth: “Ye are idols!” The error of that pitiful little Jew was your death-warrant!

Surrounded by so many things which he did not understand, there were two which greatly struck the Apostle: first, the very religious character of the Athenians, which was manifested by a multitude of temples, altars, and sanctuaries of every description, symbols of a tolerant eclecticism which they carried into religion; in the second place, certain anonymous altars which were erected to the “unknown gods.” These altars were somewhat numerous at Athens and in the environs. Other cities of Greece possessed them also. Those at the port of Phalera (Paul must have seen them on landing) were celebrated; they belonged to the legends of the Trojan War. They bore this inscription:—90“To the unknown gods.” Some of them were even thus inscribed:—

ΑΓΗΩΣΤΩΙΘΕΩΙ

“To an unknown God.” These altars owed their existence to the extreme scrupulousness of the Athenians for things religious, and to their habit of seeing in everything the manifestation of a mysterious and special power. Fearing, without knowing it, to offend some god of whose name they were ignorant, or of neglecting a powerful god, or even of wishing to obtain a favour which might depend upon a certain divinity with whom they were unacquainted, they either erected anonymous altars, or placed up the afore-mentioned inscriptions. It is possible, too, that these fanciful inscriptions were taken from altars which were originally anonymous, to which, in the work of making a general census, had to be affixed some such an epigraph, for lack of the knowledge of that which properly belonged to them. Paul was greatly surprised at these dedications. Interpreting them with his Jewish mind, he imputed to them a meaning which did not belong to them. He believed that they had reference to a God called par excellence “The Unknown God.” He saw in that Unknown God the God of the Jews, the only God, towards whom Paganism itself might have had some mysterious aspirations. This idea was the more natural, because in the eyes of Pagans that which in particular characterised the God of the Jews was, that he was a God without name, a doubtful God. It was further probable that it was in some religious ceremony, or m some philosophical discussion, that Paul heard the hemistiche:—

Τοῦ γὰρ χαὶ γένος ἐσμέν

borrowed from the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter, or from the Phenomena of Aratus, and which was frequently used in the religious hymns. He grouped in his mind those features of local colouring, and sought to compose a discourse on them appropriate to his new auditors: for he felt that here it was necessary for him to modify greatly his preaching.

Certain it is Athens was far from being then what she had been for centuries, the centre of human progress, the capital of the republic of mind. Faithful to her ancient character, this divine mother of art was one of the last asylums of liberalism and of the republican spirit. She was what might be called a city of opposition. Athens was always on the side of the lost cause. She energetically declared for the independence of Greece, and for Mithridates against the Romans, for Pompey against Cæsar, for the republicans against the triumvirs, for Antony against Octavius. She raised statues to Brutus and to Cassius by the side of those of Harmodius and of Aristogiton; she honoured Germanicus to the point of compromising herself; she merited the insults of Piso. Sylla plundered her in an atrocious manner, and dealt the final blow to her democratic constitution. Augustus, although merciful to her, did not show her any favour. Her title as a free city was never taken away, but the privileges of free cities were gradually diminished under the Cæsars and the Flavii. Athens was thus in the condition of a city suspected and disgraced, but justly ennobled through her disgrace. At the advent of Nerva, there began for her a second life. The world, having returned to reason and to virtue, recognised its mother. Nerva, Herod Atticus, Hadrian, Antonine, Marcus Aurelius, restored her, endowing her even with monuments and new institutions. Athens became again for four centuries the city of philosophers, of artists, of genius, the holy 92city of every liberal soul, the pilgrim city of those who loved the beautiful and the true.

But let us not anticipate events. At the sad moment at which we are now arrived, the ancient splendour had disappeared, and the new had not yet dawned. She was no longer “the city of Theseus,” and was not yet “the city of Hadrian.” In the century before our era, the philosophic school of Athens had been very brilliant; Philo of Larissa, and Antiochus of Ascalon, had continued or modified the academy; Cratippus taught there peripatetics, and understood how to be at once the friend, the master, the consoler, or the protégé of Pompey, of Cæsar, of Cicero, and of Brutus. Romans, the most celebrated and most eminent in business, attracted to the Orient by ambition, halted at Athens to listen to the philosophers in vogue. Atticus, Crassus, Cicero, Varro, Ovid, Horace, Agrippa, Virgil, either studied or resided there as amateurs. Brutus passed there his last winter, dividing his time between the peripatetic Cratippus and the academician Theomnestus. Athens was, on the eve of the battle of Philippi, a centre of opinion of the highest importance. The instruction which was given there was entirely philosophic, and much superior to the insipid eloquence of the school of Rhodes. That which was indeed prejudicial to Athens was the advent of Augustus and the universal pacification. The precepts of philosophy were from that time suspected—the schools lost their importance and their activity. Rome, on the other hand, by reason of the brilliant literary evolution which she had achieved, became for some time semi-independent of Greece in regard to matters of thought. Other centres were formed: as a school of varied instruction, Marseilles was preferred. The original philosophy of the four great sects had come to an end. Eclecticism, a sort of flabby, unsystematic 93style of philosophising, had commenced. If we except Ammonius of Alexandria, the master of Plutarch, who founded about that time at Athens a species of literary philosophy, which was to become the fashion, beginning with the reign of Hadrian, there was no one illustrious, about the middle of the first century, in the one city of the world which had produced or attracted the most celebrated men. The figures which were now consecrated with deplorable prodigality on the Acropolis were those of consuls, of pro-consuls, of Roman magistrates, and of members of the imperial family. The temples which were erected there were dedicated to the goddess Rome, and to Augustus. Nero had even his statues there. Artists of talent having been attracted to Rome, the Athenian works of the first century were, for the most part, of a mediocre quality that is surprising. Still monuments, such as the clock of Andronicus Cyrrhesta, the portico of Athene Archegetes, the temple of Rome and of Augustus, the mausoleum of Philopappus, were either a little anterior or posterior to the time when Paul saw Athens. Never had the city, during its long history, been more mute and peaceful.

She still preserved, however, a great portion of her nobility. She still occupied the first rank in the regards of the world. Despite the harshness of the times, the respect for Athens was profound, and every one bowed to her. Sylla, though so terrible in consequence of her rebellion, had pity on her. Pompey and Cæsar, before the battle of Pharsalia, caused it to be proclaimed by a herald that all the Athenians were to be spared, as priests of the goddesses Thesmophores. Pompey gave a large sum of money to adorn the city: Cæsar refrained from avenging himself on her, and contributed to the erection of one of the monuments. Brutus and Cassius, who comported themselves as private persons, 94were received and flattered like heroes. Antony loved Athens, and liked to reside there. After the battle of Actium, Augustus pardoned her for the third time, and his name, like that of Cæsar, was inscribed on an important monument. His family and entourage were looked upon at Athens as benefactors. The Romans were at great pains to prove that they left Athens free and honoured. Spoiled children of fame, the Athenians lived thenceforward on the recollections of their past history. Germanicus, while be resided at Athens, wished to be preceded by only one lictor. Nero, though not superstitious, did not dare to enter the city for fear of the Furies which lived under the Areopagus,—of those terrible “Semnes,” which the parricides dreaded. The recollection of Orestes made him tremble. He dare no more affront the mysteries of Eleusis, at the threshold of which the herald proclaimed that the profligate and the impious were to be careful not to approach. Noble foreigners, descendants of dethroned kings, came to spend their fortunes at Athens, and were delighted to find themselves decorated with high-sounding and mock titles. All the small barbarian kings emulated one another in rendering service to the Athenians, and in restoring their monuments.

Religion was one of the principal causes of this exceptional favour. Essentially municipal and political in its origin, having for its basis the myths relating to the foundation of the city and to its divine protectors, the religion of Athens was at first only the religious consecration of patriotism and of the institutions of the city. It was the cult of the Acropolis. “Aglaure” and the oath which the young Athenians took upon the altar had no other meaning; just as if religion with us consisted in drawing the conscription, in drilling, and in honouring the colours. It soon became insipid enough; it possessed nothing 95infinite, nothing that touched man through his destiny, nothing universal. The railleries of Aristophanes against the gods of the Acropolis proved by themselves alone that these gods could not bring every race under subjection. The women were turned early in the direction of petty foreign devotions like those of Adonis. The mysteries, in particular, were successful; philosophy in the hands of Plato was a kind of delicious mythology, whilst art created for the multitude images really admirable. The Athenian gods became the gods of beauty. The old Athene Poliade was but a mannikin, without apparent arms, swathed in a peplos, like the old virgin of Loretta. Toreutic accomplished an unexampled miracle; she made realistic statues after the model of the Italian and Byzantine Madonnas, adorned with appropriate ornaments, which were at the same time marvellous masterpieces. Athens succeeded in possessing, after a sort, one of the most perfect religions of antiquity. This religion underwent at that time a kind of eclipse, on account of the misfortunes of the city. The Athenians were the first to defile their sanctuary. Lachares stole the gold from the statue of Athene. Demetrius Poliorcetes was installed by the inhabitants themselves in the opisthodome of the Parthenon. He harboured his courtesans near himself, and people were amused by the scandals that such surroundings must have caused to the chaste goddess. Aristion the last defender of the independence of Athens, permitted the immortal lamp of Athene Poliade to be extinguished. Such, however, was the glory of that unique city, that the universe seemed to take to heart the adoption of her goddess, at the moment when she deserted her. The Parthenon, through the action of foreigners, regained her honours. The mysteries of Athens were a religious attraction for the whole Pagan world.

But it was principally as a city of schools that Athens exercised a peculiar prestige. That new destiny which, through the assiduity of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, came to possess a character so decided, had been begun two centuries before. The city of Miltiades and Pericles had been transformed into a university city, a sort of Oxford, the resort of all the young noblesse, who scattered gold in handfuls. It contained nothing but professors, philosophers, rhetoricians, pedagogues of every description, sophmores, tutors, gymnasts, pædotribes, hoplomates, masters of fencing and of riding. From the time of Hadrian the cosmetists or prefects of the students assumed to a certain extent the importance and the dignity of the archons. People fixed the date of the years by them: the old Greek education, destined in principle to form the free citizen, became the pedagogic law of the human species. Alas! she produces henceforth little else than rhetoricians; bodily exercises, formerly a real occupation of the heroes upon the banks of the Illissus, became now a mere matter of pose. A circus grandeur, the gestures of Franconi, have replaced solid grandeur. But it is the peculiar attribute of Greece to have ennobled everything. Even the work of the schoolman became with her a moral ministry. The dignity of the professor, in spite of more than one abuse, was one of her creations. The jeunesse dorée could sometimes remember the fine discourses of its masters. She was, like all youths, republican; she flocked to the appeal of Brutus; she was mown down at Philippi. The day was employed in declaiming on tyrannicide and on liberty, in celebrating the noble death of Cato, and in making a eulogy on Brutus.

The population had always been sprightly, spirituelle, curious. Every one lived in the open air, in perpetual contact with the rest of the world, breathing, 97under smiling skies, a serene atmosphere. The strangers, who were numerous and eager after knowledge, evinced great activity of mind. Publicity, the journalism of the ancient world—if one may be permitted to make use of such an expression—had its centre at Athens. The city not being commercial, everybody had but one care, which was to learn the news, to be made au courant of what was said and of what was being done in the universe. It is very remarkable that the great development of religion did not destroy rational culture. Athens might have been at once the most religious city of the world, the Parthenon of Greece, and the city of philosophers. When we see in the theatre of Dionysius the marble arm-chairs which surround the orchestra bearing each the name of the priesthood the titulary of which came to sit there, we should say that here was a city of priests; and yet it was pre-eminently the city of free-thinkers. The religions in question had neither dogmas nor holy writ. They had not for physics the horror that Christianity has always evinced, and which has led it to condemn positive researches. The priest and the Epicurean atomist, except for a few broils, lived peaceably enough together. The true Greeks were perfectly contented with such accord, founded not upon logic, but upon mutual tolerance and mutual regard.

This was for Paul a species of existence altogether new. The cities in which he had up till now preached were for the most part commercial cities, resembling Leghorn or Trieste, and having large Jewries rather than brilliant centres, cities of the great world and of great culture. Athens was profoundly Pagan; Paganism was bound up with every pleasure, with every interest, with every glory of the city. Paul hesitated a great deal. Timothy at length arrived from Macedonia; Silas, for reasons which we do not know was not able to come.

There was a synagogue at Athens, and Paul disputed in it with the Jews, and with the “devout persons;” but in such a city any successes in the synagogue counted for little. That brilliant agora in which was displayed so much mind, that portico Pœcile in which was asked every conceivable question, tempted him. He spoke there not as a preacher addressing himself to the multitude assembled, but as a stranger feeling his way—putting forth his ideas timidly, and seeking to create for himself some point d’appui. “Jesus and the resurrection” (anastasis) appeared foreign words, and destitute of meaning. Several of them, as it would appear, took anastasis for the name of a goddess, and believed that Jesus and Anastasia were some new divine couple that these Oriental dreamers had come to preach. Some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, it is said, came near and listened.

This first contact of Christianity with Greek philosophy was not very encouraging. We have never seen a better example of how men of mind ought to distrust themselves and to guard against laughing at an idea, however foolish it may seem to them. The bad Greek spoken by Paul, his incorrect and halting phraseology, were not calculated to make him accredited at Athens. The philosophers turned their backs disdainfully at his barbarous speech. “He is a babbler” (spermologos), said some. “He is a preacher of strange gods,” said others. No one could have suspected that this babbler would one day supplant them, and that, four hundred and seventy-four years later, their professorships would be suppressed as useless and injurious, in consequence of the preaching of Paul. What a grand lesson! Proud of their superiority, the Athenian philosophers disdained the questions pertaining to popular religion. In their midst superstition flourished. Athens almost equalled in that 99respect the most religious cities of Asia Minor. The aristocracy of thinkers cared little for the social wants which made themselves felt under the cover of so many unpolished worships. Such a renunciation is always punished. When philosophy declares that she will not occupy herself with religion, religion responds by extinguishing her; and this is just, for philosophy is something only when she shows to humanity the way, when she takes up seriously the infinite problem which is the same for all.

The liberal spirit which reigned at Athens assured Paul of complete security. Neither Jews nor Pagans attempted anything against him; but that tolerance was even worse than hatred. Moreover, the new doctrine produced a lively reaction, at least in the Jewish society; here it could find only curious and blasé auditors. It appears that one day the auditors of Paul, wishing to obtain from him a sort of official exposition of his doctrine, conducted him to the Hill of Mars, and there summoned him to declare what religion he preached. It is indeed possible that there is some legend here, and that the celebrity of the Areopagus may have led the narrator of the Acts, who had not been an eyewitness, to select this illustrious audience to enable him to deliver on his hero a pompous discourse, a philosophic harangue. This hypothesis, nevertheless, is not necessary. The Areopagus had retained, under the Romans, Its ancient organisation. It had even seen its prerogatives increased, as a result of the policy which led the conquerors to suppress in Greece the ancient democratic institutions, and to replace them by the Council of Notables. The Areopagus had always been the aristocratic corporation of Athens: it gained what the democracy had lost. Let us add that people were living in an epoch of literary dilettanteism, and that that tribunal, by its classic celebrity, enjoyed a great prestige. Its moral authority 100was recognised by the entire world. The Areopagus thus became again, under Roman domination, what it had been at different times in the history of the Athenian Republic, a political body, almost divested of judicial functions, the real senate of Athens, intervening only in certain cases, and constituting a conservative nobility of retired functionaries. Beginning with the first century of our era, the Areopagus figures in the inscriptions as head of the powers of Athens, superior to the Council of Six Hundred, and to the people. The erection of statues, in particular, was made by it, or at least with its authorisation. At the epoch at which we are now arrived, it had just decreed a statue to Queen Berenice, daughter of Agrippa I., with whom we shall soon see Paul en rapport. It seems also that the Areopagus exercised a certain superintendence over instruction. It was a chief council of religious and moral censure, before which was brought all that concerned laws, manners, medicine, luxury, ædileship, the religions of the city; and there is no-thing unlikely in the fact that when a novel doctrine was promulgated, that the preacher should be invited to come and make his declarations before such a tribunal, or at least to the place in which it held its sessions. Paul, it is said, stood up in the middle of the assembly and spoke thus:

“Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription:—‘To the Unknown God.’ Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world, and all things therein, seeing that he is lord of earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath, and all things. And hath made of one blood all nations of 101men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation. That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, ‘For we are all his offspring.’ Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, or graven by art of man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent. Because he hath appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead” (Acts xvii. 22-31).

At these words, according to the narrator, Paul was interrupted. Hearing him speak of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, and others said:—“We will hear thee again of this matter.”

If the discourse which we have just related was really delivered, it must indeed have produced a very singular impression upon the cultivated minds which heard it. That almost barbarous speech, now incorrect and formless, now scrupulously correct; that unequal eloquence, strewn with happy fancies and disagreeable failings; that profound philosophy, embracing beliefs the most singular, and extending, seemingly, to another world. Immensely superior to the popular religion of Greece, such a doctrine was in many things below the level of the current philosophy of the age. If, on the one hand, it extended the hand to that philosophy through the elevated notion of divinity and the beautiful theory which it proclaimed of the moral unity of the human mind, on the other, it embraced in part supernatural 102beliefs that no informed mind could admit. In any case, it is not surprising that Christianity had no success in Athens. The motives which were to work the success of Christianity, were elsewhere than in the circle of letters. They were lodged in the hearts of pious women, in the secret aspirations of the poor, the slaves, and the afflicted of every description. Before philosophy could approach the new doctrine, it was necessary that philosophy itself should be much debased, and that the new doctrine should be renounced from the grand chimera of the near judgment, that is to say, from the concrete ideas with which from its first formation it had been enveloped.

Whether it was delivered by Paul, or by one of his disciples, this discourse, in any case, shows us an endeavour, almost the only one in the first century, made to reconcile Christianity with philosophy, and even, in one sense, with Paganism. The author, giving proof of a breadth of views most remarkable amongst the Jews, discovers in all races a sort of innate sense of the divine, a sort of secret instinct of monotheism which might lead to the knowledge of the true God. To be believed in, Christianity is nothing more than natural religion, which one arrives at by consulting simply one’s own heart, and by interrogating oneself conscientiously—the two-sided idea which was soon to reproach Christianity with deism, and to inspire a pride of which it had been shorn. This is the first example given of the tactics of certain apologists of Christianity, in advance of philosophy, using or feigning to use scientific language; speaking with complaisance or politeness of the reason advanced by the other side of wishing to have it believed, by means of skilfully grouped quotations, that in the main it might be understood by lettered people; but which led to misunderstandings that were inevitable, for they plainly declared 103their opinions, and spoke of their supernatural dogmas. One can already perceive the effort to translate into the language of Greek philosophy Jewish and Christian ideas; one can foresee Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Biblical ideas, and those of Greek philosophy, aspired to embrace one another; but in order to that many concessions had to be made; for that God in which we live and move is far removed from the Jehovah of the prophets, and from the celestial father of Jesus.

Be that as it may, the times were far from being ripe for such an alliance; at any rate, it was not to take place at Athens. Athens, at the point which it had reached in history, that city of grammarians, of gymnasts, and of fencing-masters, was likewise as ill adapted as it was possible to be, for receiving Christianity. The power over vassals, the hardness of heart of the schoolman, were unpardonable sins in the eyes of grace. The pedagogue is the least convertible of men; for he has a religion of his own, which is routine, faith in old authors, and a taste for literary exercises. This satisfies him, and extinguishes in him all other desires. There has been found at Athens a series of hermes-portraits of cosmetics of the second century. The latter are splendid men, grave, majestic, with a noble mien, and yet Hellenic. From the inscriptions we learn of the honours and pensions which were conferred on them: the really great men of the ancient democracy never had so many of these. Assuredly if Paul had encountered some of the predecessors of these superb pedants, he could not have achieved much more success than, during the Empire, would have had a romancist imbued with neo-Catholicism, attempting to convert to his views a Universitarian attached to the religion of Horace, or than would in our own days a socialist humanitarian declaiming against English prejudices before the fellows of Oxford or Cambridge.

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In a society so different from that in which he had till now lived, in the midst of rhetoricians and professors of dialectics, Paul found himself indeed from home. His thoughts constantly reverted to the dear Churches of Macedonia and Galatia, where he had discovered such an exquisite religious sentiment. He thought many times of departing for Thessalonica. A lively desire carried him thence, the more so as he had received news that the faith of the young Church had been subjected to many severe tests, and he feared that the proselytes might succumb to the temptations. Some obstacles, that he attributed to Satan, prevented him from carrying out that project. When he could no longer forbear, as he himself said, he separated once more from Timothy, whom he sent to Thessalonica to confirm, to exhort, and to console the faithful, and remained alone again at Athens.

He laboured there with renewed vigour, but the soil was unpropitious. The sprightly Athenian mind was diametrically opposed to that tender and profound religious disposition which produced conversions, and which was predestined to Christianity. The truly Hellenic ground was little inclined to the doctrine of Jesus. Plutarch, living in an atmosphere purely Greek, had not the least wind of it in the first half of the second century. Patriotism, attachment to old recollections of country, turned the Greeks against exotic worships. “Hellenism” became an organised, almost rational religion, which admitted a great part of philosophy. The “gods of Greece” appeared to wish to be regarded as the universal gods of humanity.

That which characterised the religion of Greece formerly, that which still characterises it in our day, is the want of infinity, of the unconfined, of compassion, of feminine softness. The profoundness of German and Celtic religious sentiment is lacking in 105the true Hellenic race. The piety of Greek orthodoxy consists in practices and in exterior signs. The orthodox Churches, sometimes very elegant, have none of the terrors which one feels in a Gothic Church. In that Oriental Christianity there are no tears, prayers, or outward compunctions. The funerals there are almost gay. They take place at night, or at the setting of the sun, when the shadows have become lengthened, and are accompanied by songs set in a medium key, and are a display of bright colours. The fanatical gravity of the Latins is distasteful to those brisk, cheerful, and sprightly races. The infirm one is not cast down; he watches death softly approach; all about him is smiles. Herein lies the secret of that divine gaiety of the Homeric poems and of Plato—the narration of the death of Socrates in Phædon shows hardly a taint of sadness. Life produces its flower, then its fruit; what is wanted more? If, as it can be maintained, the pre-occupation of death is the most important characteristic of Christianity and of modern religious sentiment, then the Greek race is the least religious of races. It is a superficial race, treating life as a thing devoid of the supernatural, and having no future. Such simplicity of conception is owing in great measure to the climate, to the purity of the atmosphere, to the astonishing joy that one breathes, but even more so to the instincts of the Hellenic race, finely idealistic. Anything—a tree, a flower, a lizard, a tortoise, calls up the recollection of a thousand metamorphoses which have been sung by the poets; a jet of water, a small crevice in the rock which is called a cave of the nymphs; a well with a drinking-cup at the brink; an arm of the sea so narrow that the butterflies cross it, and nevertheless navigable for the largest ships, like the Bosphorus; orange groves, cypress trees, whose shades are reflected on the sea; a small pine wood in the midst 106of rocks—suffice in Greece to produce the contentment which is awakened by beauty. People walk in the gardens during the night to listen to the nightingales; sit down in the clear moonlight to play the flute; go to drink the pure mountain water, carrying with them a piece of bread, and a flask of wine, which is drunk while singing. At family feasts, there is suspended above the doors a crown of branches, to match with the headpieces of flowers; on days of public festivals, thyrsi are carried, adorned with leaves; the days are passed in dancing, playing with tame goats; these are the delights of the Greeks, the pleasures of a race, poor, economical, eternally young, inhabiting a charming country, finding its welfare within itself, and in the gifts that the gods have given it. The shepherd’s song or pastoral, after the manner of Theocritus, was in the Hellenic countries a reality. Greece al-ways delighted in that unpretentious species of delicate and amiable poetry, the species the. most characteristic of her literature, the mirror of her own life, though almost always silly and artificial. Good humour and the delights of life are Greek traits par excellence. This race is always twenty years old; for she, indulgere genio is not the deep drinking of the English, or the gross diversions of the French; it is simply to think that nature is kind, that one can and one ought to unbend to it. For Greece, in fact, nature is a counsellor of elegance, a mistress of justice and of virtue:—“concupiscence.” The idea that nature induces us to do evil is to her a not-sense. The taste for personal adornment which distinguishes the palicare, and which is exhibited with so much innocence in the Greek girl, is not the pompous vanity of the barbarian, the vulgar pretension of the bourgeois, swollen with the ridiculous pride of an upstart; it is the pure and delicate sentiment of unsophisticated youth, 107which feels itself to be the legitimate heir of the true inventors of beauty.

Such a race, one can understand, would have received Jesus with a smile. It was a subject these exquisite children were incapable of learning from us—serious, profound, really simple devotion without glory, goodness without parade. Socrates is a moralist of the first order, but he has nothing to do with the history of religion. The Greek always appears to us a little cold and heartless; he has wit, action, subtlety, but has nothing of the pensive or the melancholic. On the other hand, with us Celts and Germans, the source of our genius is our heart. Our deepest recesses (au fond de nous) resemble a fairy fountain, a fountain clear, fresh, and deep, in which is reflected the infinite. With the Greek, love of self and vanity is mixed with everything; vague sentiment is unknown to him; reflection upon his own destiny ap-pears to him unprofitable. Pushed to the length of caricature, so incomplete a mode of understanding life as it is conditioned, at the Roman epoch, the græculus esuriens, grammarian, artist, charlatan, acrobat, physician, amuser of the whole world, greatly resembling the Italian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; at the Byzantine epoch, the theological sophist making religion degenerate into subtle disputes; in our day, the modern Greek, sometimes foolishly vain and ungrateful; the orthodox fathers, with their egotistical and materialistic religion. Unfortunate he who arrests that decadence! Shame upon him who, in front of the Parthenon, dreams of holding it up to ridicule! Nevertheless, this has to be acknowledged: Greece was never seriously Christian, nor is she to this day. No race in our Middle Ages was less romantic, more destitute of chivalrous sentiment. Plato built all his theory of the beautiful en se passant without reference to woman. To think of a woman in order to be incited 108to do great things! a Greek would have been surprised at such language. For him, he thought of men assembled around the agora, he thought of his country. In this respect the Latins were nearer to us. Greek poetry, incomparable in the grander species of it, such as the epic, the tragic, the disinterested lyric poetry, had not, it seems, the sweet elegiac note of Tibullus, of Virgil, of Lucretius, a note so much in harmony with our sentiments, so closely related to that which we love.

The same difference is found between the piety of St Bernard, of St François d’Assisi, and that of the saints of the Greek Church. These splendid schools of Capadocia, of Syria, of Egypt, of the Fathers of the desert, approximate the philosophical schools. The popular holy writings of the Greeks are more mythological than those of the Latins. The majority of the saints represented in the iconostase of a Greek house, before which a lamp burns, are not great authors, great men like saints of the West: they are often fanciful beings, old gods transfigured, or at least a combination of historic and mythological personages, like St George. And that admirable temple of St Sophia! It is an Aryan temple: the whole human species might have made its prayers there. Not having had either people, inquisition, scholasticism, or Middle Age barbarism, having always preserved a leaven of Arianism, Greece rejected with greater facility than any other country a supernatural Christianity, just as those Athenians of former times were at once (thanks to a sort of vivacity which was a thousand times more profound than the seriousness of our dull races) the most superstitious of peoples, and the nearest approach to Rationalism. The popular Greek songs are still to-day charged with Pagan images and ideas. Differing so widely from the West, the East remained during the Middle Ages, and down to modern 109times, true “Hellenists;” at bottom more Pagan than Christian, living on a religion of old Greek patriotism, and of old authors. These Hellenists were, in the fifteenth century, the promoters of the Renaissance in the West, to which they affixed Greek texts, the basis of all civilisation. The same spirit has presided, and will continue to preside, over the destinies of new Greece. When we have fully studied that which made of us bears the caul of a cultivated Hellenist, we see that there is in him very little Christianity: he is Christian in form, as a Persian is a Mussulman, but at bottom he is “Hellenist.” His religion is the adoration of the ancient Greek genius. He pardons every heresy to philo-Hellenism, to him who admires its past: he is much less a disciple of Jesus and of St Paul, than of Plutarch and of Julian.

Wearied by his little success at Athens, Paul, without awaiting the return of Timothy, departed for Corinth. He had not formed at Athens any considerable Church. There were only a few isolated persons, among others a certain Dionysius, who belonged, it is said, to the Areopagus, and a woman, named Damaris, who had adhered to his doctrines. This was, then, in his apostolic career, his first and almost only check.

Even in the second century the Church at Athens is of little importance. Athens was one of the cities which was the last to be converted. After Constantine, she is the centre of opposition against Christianity, the bulwark of philosophy. By a rare privilege she preserved the temples intact. These prodigious monuments, protected through the ages, thanks to a sort of instinctive respect, were to come down to us as an eternal lesson of good sense and honesty, given by artists of genius. Even to-day we feel that the Christian covering which is spread over the old Pagan foundation is very superficial. 110It is hardly necessary to modify the actual names of the churches at Athens to find again the names of the ancient temples.

CHAPTER VIIL

CONTINUATION OF THE SECOND JOURNEY OF PAUL—FIST SOJOURN AT CORINTH.

Departing from Phalera or Piræus, Paul arrived at Cenchrea, which was the port of Corinth on the Ægæan Sea. It is a pretty enough little harbour. It is surrounded by verdant hills and pine woods, and is situated at the extremity of the Gulf of Saronica. A beautiful open valley, nearly two leagues in extent, reaches from that port to the great city built at the foot of the colossal dome from which can be seen the two seas.

Corinth was a field much better adapted than Athens to receive the new seed. It was not like Athens a sort of sanctuary of thought, a city sacred and unique to the world; it was even hardly a Hellenic city. Ancient Corinth had been razed to. its foundations by Mummius. For a hundred years the soil of the Achaian Confederation was desert. In the year 44 B.C. Julius Cæsar rebuilt the city and made it an important Roman colony, which he peopled principally with freedmen. This is equivalent to saying that the population was very heterogeneous. It was composed of a conglomeration of those peoples of every sort and of every origin which loved Cæsar. The new Corinthians remained for a long time strangers to Greece, where they were regarded as intruders. Their entertainments consisted of the brutal games of the Romans, which were repulsive to true Greeks. Corinth became thus a city 111like so many others on the shores of the Mediterranean, very populous, wealthy, brilliant, frequented by many strangers, a centre of commercial activity, one of those conglomerate cities, in short, which no longer contained patriots. The dominant trait which rendered its name proverbial was the exceeding corruption of manners which was remarked there. In this again it constituted an exception amongst the Hellenic cities. The purely Greek manners were simple and gay, and could on no account be held to be luxurious and debauched. The affluence of the mariners who were attracted thence by the two ports, had made of Corinth the last sanctuary of the worship of Venus Pandemos, a remnant of the ancient Phœnician establishments. The great temple of Venus had more than a thousand consecrated courtesans; the whole city was like a vast pandemonium, where numerous strangers, sailors particularly, resorted to spend their wealth foolishly.

There was at Corinth a colony of Jews, which was probably established at Cenchrea, one of the ports which was used in trading with the East. A short time before the arrival of Paul, a colony of Jews, which had been expelled from Rome by the edict of Claudius, had disembarked, and among the number were Aquila and Priscilla, who, it seems, at that time already professed the faith of Christ. From all this there resulted a concomitance of circumstances most favourable. The isthmus formed between the two masses of the Greek continent has always been the seat of a world-wide commerce. It had always been one of those emporiums, quite irrespective of race or of nationality, designed to be the headquarters, if I might say so, of infant Christianity. New Corinth, on account of its having few Hellenic nobility, was a city already semi-christianised. With Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, and Rome, she became an ecclesiastical metropolis of the first rank. But the 112immorality which reigned should at the same time have presaged that the first abuses in the history of the Church would be produced there. In a few years Corinth shall present tows the spectacle of incestuous Christians, and of drunken people sitting down to the table of Christ.

Paul quickly divined that a long sojourn at Corinth would be necessary. He resolved hence to take up there a fixed abode, and to prosecute his trade of upholsterer. Now, strictly speaking, Aquila and Priscilla followed the same trade as Paul. He went there to live with them, and the three set up a small shop, which was stocked by them with ready-made articles.

Timothy, whom Paul had sent from Athens to Thessalonica, soon rejoined him. The news from the Church at Thessalonica was excellent. All the faithful continued in the faith and in charity, and in their attachment to their master. The persecutions of their fellow-citizens had not shaken them; brotherly love prevailed throughout Macedonia. Silas, whom Paul had not seen since his flight from Beræa, had probably been joined by Timothy, and returned with the latter. What is certain is, that the three companions found themselves reunited at Corinth, and that they lived there together for a long time.

The attention of Paul was, as usual, first directed to the Jews. Each Sabbath he spoke in the synagogue. He found there dispositions greatly diverse, One family, that of Stephenephorus or Stephanus, was converted, and were all baptised by Paul. The orthodox resisted energetically, even to the extent of injuring and of anathematising them. One day, finally, there was an open rupture. Paul shook the dust off his raiment upon the incredulous of the assembly, made them responsible for the consequences, and declared to them that, seeing they closed their ears to the truth, he would go unto 113the Gentiles. Having uttered these words, he left the hall. He taught henceforth in the house of one Titus Justus, a man that feared God, and whose house was contiguous to the synagogue. Crispus, the chief of the Jewish community, belonged to the party of Paul; he was converted with his whole house, and Paul baptised him himself, a thing of rare occurrence.

Many others, both Jews and Pagans, and those “fearing God,” were baptised. The number of converted Pagans appeared to be here relatively considerable. Paul displayed prodigious zeal. Several divine visions which came to him during the night fortified him. The fame of the conversions he had made at Thessalonica, nevertheless, preceded him, and had favourably disposed the religious society in his behalf. The supernatural phenomena were not wanting: there were some miracles. Innocence was not the same thing here as at Philippi and Thessalonica. The corrupt manners of Corinth crossed sometimes the threshold of the Church; at any rate, all those who entered it were not equally pure. But, in return, few of the Churches were more numerous; the community of Corinth irradiated the whole province of Achaia, and became the home of Christianity in the Hellenic peninsula. Without speaking of Aquila and of Priscilla—almost received in the rank of apostles—and of Titus Justus, of Crispus, of Stephanus—mentioned above—the Church numbered in its bosom Gaius, who was himself also baptised by Paul, and who extended hospitality to the Apostle during the second sojourn of the latter in Corinth; Quartus, Achaicus, Fortunatus, Erastus, rather an important personage, who was treasurer of the city; a woman named Chloe, who had a numerous household. We have only vague and uncertain notions in regard to one Zenas, a doctor of Jewish law. Stephanus and his household constituted the most influential group, the one 114which had the most authority. All the converts, nevertheless, with the probable exception of Erastus, were simple-minded people, without much instruction, without social distinction, drawn, in a word, from the humblest ranks.

The port of Cenchrea had likewise its Church. Cenchrea was in great part peopled by Orientals. There one could reverence Isis and Eschmoun, while the Phœnician Venus was not neglected. It was like Calamaki in our days, less a city than a mass of shops and inns for seafaring men. In the midst of the corruption of these filthy hovels of seafarers, Christianity produced its miracle. Cenchrea possessed an admirable deaconess, who, one day, as we shall see later on, concealed under the folds of her woman’s garments the whole future of Christian theology, the writing which was to regulate the faith of the world. She was named Phœbe. She was an active person, never at rest, always eager to render service, and who was very precious to Paul.

The sojourn of Paul at Corinth lasted for eighteen months. The beautiful rock of Acrocorinth, the snowy summits of Helicon and of Parnassus, remained for a long time in his regards. Paul contracted in that new religious family some deep friendships, although the taste of the Greeks for disputation displeased him; while on more than one occasion his natural timidity may have been increased by the disposition of his auditors to subtlety. He could not detach himself from Thessalonica, from the simplicity he had found there, from the lively affections he had there left behind him. The Church at Thessalonica was the model which he never ceased to proclaim, and to-wards which he always reverted. The Church at Philippi, with its pious women, its rich and good Lydia, was not allowed to be forgotten. That 115Church, as we have seen, enjoyed a singular privilege; which was, to nourish the Apostle when his labour did not suffice to do so. At Corinth he received from her fresh succour. As if the somewhat sprightly nature of the Corinthians, and of the Greeks in general, had inspired him with distrust, he would not accept anything of this kind from them, although more than once he found himself reduced to want during his sojourn in their midst.

It was with difficulty, nevertheless, that the anger of the orthodox Jews, always so active, was restrained from breaking out. The preachings of the Apostle to the Gentiles, his broad principles in regard to the adoption of all those who believed, and their incorporation into the family of Abraham, irritated to the highest pitch the partisans of the exclusive privilege of the children of Israel. The Apostle, on his part, was not very sparing in hard words. He announced to them that the anger of God was about to break out against them. The Jews had recourse to the Roman authorities. Corinth was the capital of the province of Achaia, comprising the whole of Greece, and which ordinarily was joined to Macedonia. The two provinces had been made senatorials by Claudius, and in virtue of which they had a pro-consul. That position was filled at the time of which we speak by one of the most amiable and best instructed men of the century—Marcus Annæus Novatus, elder brother of Seneca. who had been adopted by the rhetorician L. Junius Gallio, one of the litterateurs of the society of the Senecas: Marcus Annæus Novatus took hence the name of Gallio. He had a great mind and a noble soul, was a friend of the poets and of the celebrated authors. Every one who knew him adored him. Statius called him dulcis Gallio, and probably he was the author of some of the tragedies which proceeded from that literary roof. He wrote, it seems, upon natural philosophy. 116His brother dedicated to him his book on Anger and Happy Life; people attributed to him one of the most intellectual works of the period. It appears that it was his high Hellenic culture which, under the learned Claudius, led to his selection for the administration of a province which all governments, somewhat enlightened, surrounded with delicate attentions. His sanctity obliged him to abandon the post. Like his brother, he had, under Nero, the honour of expiating by his death his distinction and his honesty.

Such a man was little disposed to agree to the demands of fanatics coming to ask the civil power, which they protested against in secret, to rid them of their enemies. One day Sosthenes, the new ruler of the synagogue, who had succeeded Crispus, brought Paul before the judgment seat, and accused him of preaching a religion contrary to the law. Judaism, in fact, which had old authorisations, and all sorts of guarantees, pretended that the dissentient sect, as soon as they had made a schism in the synagogue, enjoyed no longer the charters of a synagogue. The situation was one which would have brought before the French law liberal Protestants on the day they separated themselves from recognised Protestantism. Paul was going to answer, but Gallio restrained him, and, addressing the Jews, said: “If it were a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews, reason were that I should bear with you; but if it be a question of words and of names, and of your law, look ye to it, for I will be no judge of such matters.” This was an admirable response, worthy of being set up as a model to civil governments when they are invited to meddle with religious questions. Gallio, after he had pronounced it, gave orders to drive away both parties. A great tumult ensued. Everybody was seized with the desire to fall upon Sosthenes, and he was beaten 117before the judgment seat, and no one could tell whence the blows proceeded. Gallio paid little heed, and caused the place to be cleared. The sage politician had avoided entering into a dogmatic quarrel; the well-educated man refused to mix himself up with a quarrel of vulgar people; and when he saw violence break out, he sent every one away.

No doubt it would have been wiser not to appear so disdainful. Gallio was well inspired in declaring himself to be incompetent to judge in a question of schism and of heresy; but yet men of mind have sometimes little prescience! It was discovered later that the quarrel of these abject sectaries was the great affair of the century. If, instead of treating a religious and social question with that unceremoniousness, the government had taken the trouble to make an impartial investigation, to make a searching public investigation, and to discontinue giving an official sanction to a religion become completely absurd; if Gallio had been disposed to take into account what it was that constituted a Jew and a Christian, to read Jewish books, to keep himself au courant of what was passing in the subterranean world; if the Romans had not been so narrow-minded, so little addicted to the study of science, many misfortunes would have been avoided. How very singular! There was, in the case now under consideration, on the one hand, a man who was one of the most intellectual and the most studious; on the other, a soul which was one of the most robust and the most original of his time, and they passed the one before the other without either perceiving the fact; and, surely, if the first blows had fallen upon Paul instead of upon Sosthenes, Gallio would have been equally indifferent. One of the things which causes the most faults to be committed by people of the world, is the superficial disgust which badly educated and unmannerly people inspire in them yet 118manners are only a matter of form, and those who have them not are found sometimes not to be destitute of good sense. The society man, with his frivolous sneers, passes continually, without knowing it, the man who is going to create the future; they do not belong to the same world; yet the common error of society people is to think that the world which they see is the entire world.

These difficulties, however, were not the only ones that the Apostle had to encounter. The Corinthian mission was thwarted by obstacles which, for the first time, he had met with in his Apostolic career,—obstacles proceeding from the bosom of the Church itself, from intractable men who had been introduced to it, and who opposed him, or from many Jews who had been attracted to Jesus, but more attached than Paul to legal observances. The false spirit of the degenerated Greek who, starting from the fourth century, corrupted Christianity so much, was already making itself felt. The Apostle then called to mind his beloved Churches at Macedonia, that unlimited docility, that purity of morals, that frank cordiality, which had procured for him at Philippi and Thessalonica such happy days. He was seized with an ardent desire to go and see once more the faithful of the Lord, and when be received from them an expression of the same desire, he could hardly restrain himself. In order to comfort himself in this embarrassment, and to protect himself from the importunities of those with whom he was surrounded, it pleased him to write to them. The epistles dated from Corinth bear the imprint of a kind of sadness,—praises of the most lofty description for those to whom Paul wrote; but these letters were completely silent, or contained some unfavourable allusions to those from whose midst he wrote.

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CHAPTER IX.

CONTINUATION OF THE SECOND JOURNEY OF PAUL—FIRST EPISTLES—INTERIOR CONDITION OF THE NEW CHURCHES.

It was at Corinth that the apostolic life of Paul attained its highest degree of activity. To the cares of the grand Christianity which he was engaged in founding, he had just added the prepossessions of the communities that he had left behind him. A sort of jealousy, as he has told us himself, devoured him. He thought less at that moment of founding new Churches than of caring for those which he had created. Each of his Churches was to him as a bride which he had promised to Christ, and which he wished to preserve pure. The power that he claimed over these little corporations was absolute. A certain number of rules, which he regarded as having been laid down by Jesus himself, was the sole canonical law anterior to himself that he recognised. He was thought to have divine inspiration for adding to those rules all those which the new circumstances called for, and which had to be obeyed. But was not his example a supreme rule to which all his spiritual children might conform themselves?

Timothy, whom he employed to visit the Churches that were far away from him, could not, had he been indefatigable, satisfy the immense ardour of his master. It was then that Paul conceived the idea of supplying by correspondence what he was prevented from saying himself or through his principal disciples. There did not exist in the Roman Empire anything which resembled our postal establishment for private letters; all correspondence had to be 120forwarded incidentally, or by express. St Paul hence made it a point to take everywhere with him persons of a second order, who could be used as messengers. Correspondence between the synagogues already existed in Judaism. The envoy charged with bearing the letters was himself a dignitary drawn from the synagogues. The epistolary style formed amongst the Jews a species of literature which was continued amongst them down to the heart of the Middle Ages, as a consequence of their dispersion. Without doubt, from the period when Christianity was extended to the whole of Syria, Christian epistles existed; but in the hands of Paul these writings, which up till then had not, for the most part, been preserved, were, equally with his speaking, the instruments of progress in the Christian faith. It was held that the authority of the Epistles equalled that of the Apostle himself; they were all to be read before the Church assembled; some of them had even the character of circular letters, and were communicated successively to various Churches. The reading of the correspondence thus became an essential part of the offices of the Sabbath. And it was not merely at the moment of its reception that a letter served thus for the edification of the brethren; deposited in the Church archives, it was taken from there on days of assembling, and read as a sacred document, and as a perpetual source of instruction. The epistle was thus the form of primitive Christian literature. It was an admirable form, perfectly adapted to the conditions of the times, and to the natural aptitude of Paul.

The condition of the new sect, in fact, did not by any means permit of connected discourse. Infant Christianity was wholly disengaged from texts. The hymns even were composed by each for him-self, and were not written. People believed in watching for the final catastrophe. The sacred 121books, which we call the “Scriptures,” were the books of the ancient Law. Jesus had added no new book. He must return to fulfil the ancient Scriptures, and to open an age in which he himself would be the living book. Letters of consolation and of encouragement were the only means which could produce a similar state of mind. If already, about the time at which we are arrived, there had been more than a small booklet, designed to assist the memory in regard to “the sayings and doings” of Jesus, these booklets were of an entirely private character. They were not authentic, official writings, universally received in the community; they were notes of which persons au courant of events took little account, and were considered as altogether an inferior authority to tradition.

Paul, as regarded himself, had not a mind adapted to the composition of books. He had not the patience that is required for writing; he was incapable of system; the labour of the pen was disagreeable to him, and he preferred to delegate it to others. Correspondence, on the contrary, so obnoxious to those who are accustomed to employ art in putting forth their ideas, suited well his feverish activity, and the necessity of expressing on the spur of the moment his impressions. Now brisk, crude, polite, snarlish, sarcastic, then suddenly tender, delicate, almost roguish and coaxing; happily expressed and polished to the highest degree; skilful in sprinkling his language with reticences, reserves, infinite precautions, malignant allusions, and ironical dissimulations, he came to excel in a style which required above everything original impulses. The epistolary style of Paul is the most individual that we have ever had. Its language, if I may say so, is ground up (hoyēe), without a single consecutive phrase. It would be impossible to violate more audaciously, I do not say the genius of the Greek language, but the logic of 122human language. It might be described as a rapid conversation, stenographed and reproduced without corrections. Timothy was quickly trained to fulfil for his master the functions of secretary, and as his language came to resemble somewhat that of Paul, he replaced him frequently. It is probable that in the Epistles and perhaps in the Acts we have more than one page of Timothy; but such was the modesty of that singular man, that we have no certain marks by which to single them out.

Even when Paul corresponded directly, he did not write with his own hand; he dictated; sometimes when the letter was finished he re-read it. His impetuous soul carried him away at such moments; he made marginal additions to it, at the risk of injuring the context, and of producing suspended and entangled sentences. He transmitted the letter thus effaced, regardless of the numberless repetitions of words and of ideas which it contained. With his marvellous fervour of soul, Paul has yet a singular poverty of expression. A phrase besets him, he recurs to it in a page at every turn. It was not sterility, it was contentiousness of mind and complete indifference to the requirements of a correct style. In order to avoid the numerous frauds to which the passions of the times gave rise, the authority of the Apostle and the material conditions of antique epistolography, Paul was in the habit of sending to the Churches a specimen of his writing, which was easily recognisable; this done, it was sufficient for him, according to a usage then general, to put at the end of his letters some words in his own hand as a guarantee of their authenticity.

There is no doubt that the correspondence of Paul was considerable, and that what is remaining of if to us constitutes only a small portion. The religion of the primitive Churches was so detached in every way, so purely idealistic, that people did not realise 123the immense value of such writings. Faith was everything: each one carried it in one’s heart, and cared little for stray leaves of papyrus, which, besides, were not holograph. These epistles were for the majority mere occasional pieces; nobody suspected that one day they would become sacred books. It was only towards the end of the life of the Apostle that people bethought themselves of retaining his letters because of their intrinsic merit,—of passing them on and of preserving them. Then each Church guarded preciously its own, consulted them often, had regular lectures on them, allowed copies to be taken of them; still, a multitude of letters of the first period were irrecoverably lost. As for the letters in response to those of the Churches, all have disappeared; and it could not be otherwise; Paul in his wandering existence never had any other archives than his memory and his heart.

Two letters only of the second mission remain with us: they are the two epistles to the Church at Thessalonica. Paul wrote them from Corinth, and joined with his own name in the superscription those of Silas and Timothy. They have the appearance of being composed at a short interval from one another. They are two productions full of unction, tenderness, emotion, and charm. In them the Apostle does not conceal his preference for the Churches of Macedonia: He made use of the latter to give utterance to that love for glowing expressions, for images the most endearing; he represents himself as the kind nurse cherishing her children in her bosom, as a father charging his children. This was indeed what Paul was for the Churches he had established. He was an admirable missionary, and, what was more, an admirable director of consciences. Never did he appear to better advantage than in having the charge of souls; never did any one take up the problem of the education of 124man in a more enthusiastic and thorough manner. But it must not be thought that he acquired that ascendency through fawning and flattery. No; Paul was blunt, disagreeable, and sometimes ill-tempered. In no respect did he resemble Jesus; he had not his charming indulgence, his habit of excusing everybody, his divine incapacity of seeing evil. He was often imperious, and made his authority to be felt with a haughtiness which shocks us. He commanded, he blamed severely, he spoke of himself with assurance, and unhesitatingly held himself up as a model. But what haughtiness! what purity! what disinterestedness! Upon the last point he is painfully minute. Ten times he reverts with pride to the apparently puerile fact that he had cost no man anything, that he had never eaten gratis the bread of any one, that he had laboured day and night with his hands, although he might well have done like the other Apostles, and lived by religion. The bent of his zeal was, in a manner infinite, a love of souls.

The kindness, the innocence, the fraternal spirit, the unlimited charity of the primitive Churches, are a spectacle which will never again be seen. It was wholly spontaneous, unconstrained, and yet these little associations were as solid as iron. Not only could they resist the perpetual bickerings of the Jews, but their interior organisation possessed surprising force. In order to understand them, it is necessary to think, not of our grand churches open to all, but of religious orders endowed with a most intense individual life,—of confraternities firmly consolidated, in which the members by turns embraced, animated, quarrelled with, loved, hated one another. These Churches had a kind of hierarchy: the oldest members, the most active, those who were en rapport with the Apostle, enjoyed a precedence! But the Apostle himself was the first to repress everything 125which had the appearance of domineering; he held himself to be only “the promoter of the common joy.”

The “elders” were sometimes elected by the common voice,—that is to say, by a show of hands,—sometimes installed by the Apostle, but always considered as chosen by the Holy Spirit, that is to say, by that superior instinct which directed the Church in all its acts. People began already to call them “deacons” (episcopi, a word which in the language of politics had passed into the eranes), and to consider them as “pastors” charged with the conduct of the Church. Certain of them, moreover, were regarded as having a sort of speciality for teaching; these were catechists, going from house to house, and imparting the word of God in private admonitions. Paul made it a rule, at least in particular cases, that the catechumen, during his instruction, was to share all that he possessed in common with his catechist.

Full authority belonged to the Church assembled. This authority was extended to the minutest details of private life. All the brethren watched one another, corrected one another. The Church assembled, or at at least those who were called “the devout,” reprimanded those who were in fault, consoled the cast-down, and undertook the office of skilled directors, versed in the knowledge of the heart. Public penitences had not yet been instituted; but they no doubt already existed in embryo. As no exterior force restrained the faithful, nor prevented them from splitting or abandoning the Church, we should have thought that such an organisation, which appears to us insupportable, in which is only to be seen a system of espionage and of accusation, would speedily have come to an end. But nothing of the kind. We do not find, at the period at which we have now arrived, a single example of apostacy. Every one submitted 126humbly to the sentence of the Church. He whose conduct was irregular, or who had strayed from the traditions of the Apostles, or who was not attentive to his duties, was marked; he was avoided; no one would hold communion with him. He was treated as an enemy, though he was at the same time admonished as a brother. This isolation covered him with shame, and he repented. The gaiety in these little companies of good people living together, always sprightly, occupied, eager, loving and hating much, the gaiety, I say, was very great. Verily the words of Jesus had been fulfilled; the reign of the meek and lowly had come, and had been manifested by the extreme felicity which flowed from every heart.

People had a perfect horror of Paganism, but were very tolerant in their treatment of Pagans. Far from fleeing from them, people sought to attract them and to gain them over. Many of the faithful had been idolaters, or had parents who were; they knew with what good faith one might be in error. They recalled their honest ancestors, who had died without having known saving truth. A touching custom, baptism for the dead, was the consequence of that sentiment. People believed that in being baptised for those of their ancestors who had not received holy water, they conferred on them the merits of the sacrament; thus the hope of not being separated from those that they loved was not frustrated. A profound idea of solidarity dominated every one; the son was saved through his parents, the father through the son, the husband through the wife. People could not be brought to condemn a man of good intentions, or who through any side way whatever clung to the saints.

Manners were severe, though not sad. That virtuous gloom which the rigorists of modern times (Janissaries, Methodists, etc.) preach as a Christian virtue, had no existence then. The relations between 127men and women, far from being interdicted, were multiplied. One of the scoffs of the Pagans was to represent the Christians as effeminate, deserting common society for the conventicles of young women, old women, and children. Pagan nakednesses were severely condemned. The women, in general, were closely veiled: not a single precaution for protecting timid chastity was omitted; but the bashful woman is also a voluptuous woman, and the ideal dream which is in man is susceptible of a thousand applications. When we read the Acts of St Perpetue, the legend of St Dorothy, we see that they are the heroines of an absolute purity; but how little do they resemble a Port Royal female religionist! Here, one-half of the instincts of humanity is suppressed; there, these instincts, which later on came to be regarded as Satanic suggestions, had received only a new direction. It may be said that primitive Christianity was a sort of moral romanticism, a powerful revulsion of the faculty of loving. Christianity did not diminish that faculty; it took no precautions against it; it did not place it under suspicion—it nourished it with air and with light. The danger of these liberties was not yet manifest. In the Church, the bad was, in some sort, impossible, for the root of evil, which is wicked desire, was taken away.

The position of catechist was often filled by women. Virginity was regarded as a state of sanctity. This preference accorded to the celibate was not a negation of love and of beauty, like that which found place in the barren and unintelligible asceticism of later centuries. It was, in a woman, that just and true sentiment which virtue and beauty prize so much the more the more it is concealed; so that she who has not found that rare peril of strong love, guards, by a sort of pride and of reserve, its beauty and moral perfection for God alone, for God 128conceived as jealous, as the co-partner of close secrets. Second marriages, though not forbidden, were regarded as a mark against one. The popular sentiment of the century ran in that groove. The beautiful and touching expression of σύμβιος became the ordinary word for “spouse.” The words Virginius, Virginia, Παρθενιχός, indicating the husbands who had not formed other alliances, became terms of eulogy and of tenderness. The spirit of the family, the union of husband and wife, their reciprocal esteem, the recognition by the husband of the cares and the foresight of his wife, permeated in a touching manner the Jewish inscriptions, which in this only reflected the sentiment of the humble classes amongst which the Christian propaganda recruited converts. It is a singular thing that the most elevated ideas on the sanctity of marriage have been spread in the world by a people amongst whom polygamy had never been universally interdicted. But it required, in the fraction of Jewish society in which Christianity was formed, that polygamy should actually be abolished, since the Church did not seem to think that such an enormity needed to be condemned.

Charity, brotherly love, was the supreme law, and common to all the churches and all the schools. Charity and chastity were par excellence Christian virtues,—virtues which made a success of the new gospel, and converted the entire world. One was commanded to do good to all: nevertheless, co-religionists were regarded as being worthy of preference. A taste for work was held to be a virtue. Paul, a good workman, vigorously reproved indolence and idleness, and repeated often that naïf proverb of a man of the people: “He that would not work, neither should he eat.” The model that he conceived was a punctual artisan, peaceable, applying himself to his work, eating tranquilly—his mind at ease—the bread 129that he earned. But how far are we from the primitive ideal of the Church at Jerusalem, wholly communistic and monastical, or even from that of Antioch, wholly preoccupied with prophecies, with supernatural gifts, with apostleship! Here the Church is an association of honest workmen, cheerful, content, not jealous of the rich, for they are more happy than the latter, for they know that God does not judge like the worldly, and prefers the honest soiled hand to the white and intriguing hand. One of his principal virtues was to conduct his affairs orderly; “that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.” There were some members of the Church, of whom St Paul had heard tell, who worked not at all, but were busy-bodies, and who are severely reprimanded. That combination of practical good sense and of delusion ought not to surprise. Does not the English race in Europe and in America present to us the same contrast, so full of good sense as regards things of this world, so absurd as regards things pertaining to heaven? Quakerism, even, commenced with a tissue of absurdities, and retained them until the day, thanks to the influence of William Penn, it became something practical, great, and fruitful.

The supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as prophecy, were not neglected. But we can well see that in the Churches of Greece, composed of Jews, these fantastic exercises possessed no longer much meaning, and we can believe that they soon fell into desuetude. Christian discipline turned on a kind of deistic piety, which consisted in serving the true God, in praying and in doing good. A powerful hope gave to these precepts of pure religion the efficacy that they of themselves never could possess. The dream that had been the soul of the movement inaugurated by Jesus, continued still to be the fundamental dogma of Christianity; everybody believed 130in the near future of the kingdom of God, in the unseen manifestation of a great glory, from the midst of which the Son of Man would appear. The idea that people had of that marvellous phenomena was the same as in the times of Jesus. A great storm—that is to say, a terrible catastrophe—was near at hand: that catastrophe would strike all those whom Jesus would not have saved. Jesus was to show himself in the heavens as “king of glory, surrounded by angels.” Then the judgment was to take place. The saints, the persecuted, were to go and range themselves about Jesus, in order to enjoy with him eternal rest. The unbelievers who had persecuted them (the Jews especially) were to be the prey of fire; their punishment was to be eternal death. Chased from before the face of Jesus, they were to be hurried away to the abyss of destruction. A destroying fire, in short, was to be lighted and was to consume the world and all those who had rejected the gospel of Jesus. That final catastrophe was to be a kind of great and glorious manifestation of Jesus and his saints, an act of supreme justice, a tardy reparation for the iniquities which had been up to that time the rule of the world.

Objections were naturally raised against this strange doctrine. One of the principal of them arose from the difficulty of conceiving what should be the portion of the dead at the moment of the advent of Jesus. Since the visit of Paul, there had been several deaths in the Church at Thessalonica, and these first deaths had made, on all sides, a very deep impression. Was it necessary to compassionate, and to regard as excluded from the kingdom of God, those who had thus disappeared before the solemn hour? The ideas upon individual immortality and a special judgment were yet too little developed to enable people to sustain auy such objection. Paul responded with remarkable clearness:—

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“That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing. But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”

People sought to discover the day of that grand appearance. St Paul condemned these inquisitive speculations, and made use of them in order to show the almost worthlessness of the words themselves which people had attributed to Jesus.

“But of the times and the season, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.”

The preoccupation of that near catastrophe was extreme. The enthusiasts believed that they had discovered the date by means of special revelations. There existed already several apocalypses; people went even the length of causing forged letters of the Apostle to be circulated, in which this end of things was announced,—

“Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means; for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, 132I told you these things! And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work; only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And then shall the Wicked be revealed, whom that Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming; even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.”

We see that in these texts, written twenty years after the death of Jesus, only a single essential element has been added to the description of the day of the Lord such as Jesus had conceived it, namely, the character of an Anti-Christ, or false Christ, which was to spring up before the grand appearance of Jesus himself—a sort of Satanic Messiah, who was to work miracles, and desire to be worshipped. Apropos of Simon the Magician, we have already met with the singular idea that the false prophets worked miracles exactly like the true prophets. The opinion that the judgment of God would be preceded by a terrible catastrophe, by the spread of impiety and abominations, by the passing triumph of idolatry, by the advent of a sacrilegious king, was, however, very ancient, going back as far as the first origins of the apocalyptic doctrines. Gradually that ephemeral reign of evil, the precursor of the final victory of the good, which would happen to the Christians, would be personified in a man who was conceived to be the exact converse of Jesus, a sort of Christ of the infernal regions.

The type of that future misleader was composed in part out of recollections of Antiochus Epiphanes, such as he is presented in the book of Daniel, combined with the reminiscences of Balaam, of Gog and Magog, of Nebuchadnezzar, and partly from ideas borrowed from the circumstances of the times. The ghastly tragedy that was being enacted at Rome at that 133moment, in face of the world, could not fail but excite greatly the imaginations of men. Caligula, the anti-deity, the first emperor who sought to be worshipped during his life, suggested in all probability the circumstance to Paul, when the aforesaid person exalted himself above all the pretended gods, all the idols, and took his seat in the temple of Jerusalem, desirous of being regarded as God himself. The Anti-Christ was thus conceived in the year 54 as a continuer of the foolish sacrilege of Caligula. Reality affords but too many opportunities to explain away such presages. A few months after Paul wrote that strange passage, Nero came to the throne. It was in him that the Christian conscience should see later on the hideous precursor of the coming of Christ. What was the cause, or rather who was the personage, that alone, in the year 54, still prevented, according to Saint Paul, the appearance of Anti-Christ? This has been left in obscurity. The question’s here asked may perhaps have been a mysterious secret, no strange thing in politics, which the faithful discussed among themselves, but which they did not commit to paper, for fear of compromising one another. The mere seizure of a letter would have sufficed to bring about the most atrocious persecutions. Here, as in other points, the habit which the early Christians had of not writing down certain things, has created for us irremediable obscurities. It has been supposed that the personage in question was the Emperor Claudius, and we have seen in the language of Paul a play of words on his name,—Claudius = qui claudit = ὁ χατέχωυ. At the date when that letter was written, in fact, the death of poor Claudius—circumvented by fatal snares laid by the villainous Agrippa—seemed only to be a question of time; everybody expected it; the Emperor himself spoke of it; dark presentiments showed themselves at every turn; natural prodigies like those which, 134fourteen years later, struck so forcibly the author of the Apocalypse, tormented the popular imagination. People spoke in terror of the monstrous fœtus,—of a son which had the long claws of a sparrow-hawk; all this made people tremble for the future. The Christians, like ordinary people, participated in these terrors; the prognostications, and the superstitious fears of natural calamities, were the essential cause of the Apocalyptic fears.

That which is clear; that which still is revealed for us in these inestimable documents; that which explains the wonderful success of the Christian propaganda, is the spirit of devotion, the high morality which reigned in those little Churches. They might be compared to the reunions of the Moravian brothers, or to pious Protestants addicted to the extremest devotion, or, again, to a sort of third order of a Catholic congregation. Prayer and the name of Jesus were constantly on the lips of the faithful. Before each act, before partaking of food, for example, they pronounced a short benediction or short act of grace. It was looked upon as an injury done to the Church, to bring an action before the civil judges. The belief in the near destruction of the world raised a revolutionary ferment which carried into every mind a great portion of its sourness. The invariable rule of the Apostle was, that it was necessary for one to abide in the state to which one had been called. “Is any person called (being) circumcised, let him not dissimulate circumcision; is any person called uncircumcised, let him not be circumcised; is any one a virgin, let her remain a virgin; is any one married, let such remain married; is any one a slave, seek not to be made free; and even if one can obtain one’s freedom, let such a one remain in slavery. The slave who is called, is the free servant of Christ; the free man who is called, is the slave of Christ.” A marvellous 135resignation had taken possession of souls, which rendered everything indifferent, and shed over all the weariness of that world, extinct and forgotten.

The Church was a permanent source of edification and of consolation. It must not be imagined that the Christian gatherings of those times were modelled after the cold assemblies of our days, in which the unforeseen, the individual initiative, had no part. It is rather of the English Quakers, the American Shakers, and the French Spiritualists, that one must think. During the meeting all were seated, and each spoke when he felt inspired. The inspired one would then rise up, and deliver, through the impulse of the Spirit, discourses of various forms, which it is difficult for us to distinguish to-day—psalms, canticles of acts of grace, eulogies, prophecies, revelations, lessons, exhortations, consolations, and treatises on language. These improvisations, considered as divine oracles, were sometimes chanted, sometimes delivered in a speaking tone of voice. Each invited his neighbour to do this; each excited the enthusiasm of others: it was what was called singing to God. The women remained silent. As every one believed oneself to be constantly visited by the Spirit, every image, every throb which crossed the brain of the believers, seemed to contain a deep meaning, and, with the most perfect good faith in the world, they drew a real nourishment of soul from pure illusions. After each eulogy, each prayer thus improvised, the multitude had a collective inspiration through the word Amen. In order to mark the diverse acts of the mystic seance, the president interposed, either by the invitation Oremus; or by a sigh directed towards heaven—Sursum Corda! or in recalling that Jesus, according to his promise, was in the midst of the assembled—Dominus Vobiscum. The cry Kyrie Eleison was also repeated frequently in a suppliant and plaintive tone.

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Prophecy was esteemed a high gift: some women were endowed with it. In many cases, especially when the matter in hand had reference to philology, people hesitated; people sometimes even believed themselves to be dupes of a cunning device of the evil spirits. A particular class of the inspired, or, as was said, of the “spiritual,” was charged with the interpretation of these fantastic outbursts,—to find sense in them, to discern the minds from which they proceeded. These phenomena had great efficacy in the conversion of Pagans, and were regarded as the most demonstrative miracles. The Pagans, in fact—at least those of them who were supposed benevolent—were drawn into the assemblies. Then there would often follow strange spectacles. One or several of the inspired would address the intruder, address him alternately with rudeness or with gentleness, reveal to him inner secrets which he believed he himself only knew, and unfold to him the sins of his past life. The wicked were astonished, confounded. The shame of that public manifestation, which in that assembly had been exposed in a state of spiritual nudity, created between him and the brethren a strong bond, which was not again to be broken. A sort of confession was sometimes the first act which was done in entering the sect. The intimacy, the affection which such exercises established between the brothers and the sisters, was without reserve: all became indeed as one person. It required nothing less than a perfect spirituality to hinder such relations from springing up, and to check abuse.

We can conceive the immense attraction that a soul-movement so active would exercise amongst a society freed from moral bonds, especially amongst the common classes, who were neglected equally by the state and by religion. Hence the grand lesson which is to be derived from that history for our 137century; the times resemble each other; the future belonged to the party who took up the masses and educated them. But, in our days, the difficulty is indeed greater than it has ever been. In antiquity, upon the coasts of the Mediterranean, material life could be simple: the wants of the body were secondary, and easily satisfied. With us, these wants are numerous and imperative; popular associations are weighed to the earth as with a weight of lead. It was the sacred feast, “the Lord’s Supper” especially, that had an immense moral efficacy; it was considered as a mystic act by which all were incorporated with Christ, and as a consequence united in the same body. There was hence a perpetual lesson of equality, of fraternity. The sacramental words which were connected with the last supper of Jesus were present to all. It was believed that that bread, that wine, that water, were the body and blood of Jesus himself. Those who partook of it were accounted to eat Jesus, were united to him, and bound to him by an ineffable mystery. The prelude to it was the giving of “the holy kiss,” or “kiss of love,” without any of the scruples which came to trouble the innocence of another golden age. Ordinarily the men gave it to one another, and the women gave it amongst themselves. Some Churches, however, pressed the holy liberty to the point of not making any distinction of sexes in the kiss of love. Profane society, little capable of comprehending such purity, made this the occasion of divers calumnies. The chaste Christian kiss awakened the suspicions of the libertines, and soon the Church was constrained to the point of taking severe precautions; but in the beginning it was an essential rite inseparable from the Eucharist, and completing the high signification of the symbol of peace and love. Some abstained from it in youth, and in the time of mourning and of fasting.

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The first monastic Church at Jerusalem broke bread every day. Twenty or thirty years after, people had come to celebrate the holy feast only once a week. This celebration took place in the evening, and, according to the Jewish usage, by the light of numerous lamps. The day chosen for this was the day following the Sabbath, the first day of the week. This day was called “the day of the Lord,” in rememberance of the “resurrection,” and also because it was believed that on the same day God had created the world. Alms were done, and collections made on this day. The Sabbath, which all Christians probably celebrate still in a manner not equally scrupulous, was distinct from the day of the Lord. But without doubt the day of rest tended more and more to be confounded with the day of the Lord, and it is permissible to suppose that in the Churches of the Gentiles, who had no reason to prefer the Saturday, that change was already made. The ébonim of the East, on the contrary, rested on Saturday.

Little by little the supper tended to become purely symbolical in form. At the first it was a real supper, at which one ate as much as one wanted, only with an elevated mystic intention. The supper was prefaced by a prayer. As at the dinners of the Pagan fraternities, each brought his basket and consumed what he brought: the Church, no doubt, furnishing the accessories, such as hot water, pilchards, that which was called the ministerium. People loved to think of two invisible servants, Irene (Peace) and Agapæ (Love), the one pouring out the wine, the other mixing it with hot water; and, perhaps, at certain moments during the repast, one would be heard to say, with a sweet smile, to the deaconesses (ministræ), that from which they derived their names: Irene, da calda (hot water)—Agape, misce me (pour me out). A spirit of delicate reserve and of discreet sobriety presided at the feast. The table 139at which people sat was in the form of a hollow semi-circle, or of a crescent, sigma (a symbol); the elder was placed in the centre; the cups or saucers which were used for drinking out of were the objects of particular care. The bread and the wine, which were blessed, were carried to the absent by the minister of the diocese.

In time the supper came to be no more than a ceremony. People ate at home to appease hunger; at the assembly people eat only a few mouthfuls; drank only a few sups, in view of the symbol. People were led by a kind of logic to distinguish the common fraternal repast from the mystical act which consisted solely of a fraction of bread. The fraction of bread became each day more sacramental; the supper, on the contrary, in proportion as the Church increased, became more profane. Sometimes the supper was reduced almost to nothing, and in being thus reduced, lost all the importance of a sacramental act. Sometimes the two things subsisted, but separately; the supper was a prelude or a sequel to the Eucharist; people dined together before or after the communion. Then the two ceremonies were separated entirely; the pious repasts were acts of charity towards the poor, sometimes the remnants of Pagan usages, and had no longer any connection with the Eucharist. As such, they were in general suppressed in the fifth century. The “eulogia” or “consecrated bread” remained, then, the sole souvenir of a golden age in which the Eucharist was invested with the more complex and less purely analytic forms. For a long time, still, however, the custom was preserved of invoking the name of Jesus in drinking, and people continued to consider as a eulogy the act of breaking bread and of drinking together, which were the last traces, and the traces well-nigh effaced, of the admirable institutions of Jesus.

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The name which, at the first, the eucharistic feast bore, expressed admirably all that there was in that excellent rite of divine efficacy and of salutary morality. They were called agapæ, that is to say, “loves” or “charities.” The Jews—the Essenians especially—had already attached a moral sense to the religious feasts; but in passing into the hands of another race, these Oriental usages took an almost mythological significance. The Mythriatic mysteries which began soon to be developed in the Roman world had as their principal rite the offering of bread and of the cup, over which were pronounced certain words. The resemblance was such, that the Christians explained it as a ruse of the devil, who wished by this means to have the infernal pleasure of counterfeiting their most holy ceremonies. The secret bonds between all these things are very obscure. It was easy to foresee that grave abuses would so quickly be mixed up with such practices, that one day the feast (the agapæ, properly speaking) would fall into desuetude, and that there would only remain the eucharistic wafer, the sign and memorial of the primitive institution. One could no longer be surprised to learn that strange mysteries should be made the pretext for calumnies, and that the sect which pretended to eat, under the form of bread and wine, the body and the blood of its founder, should be accused of renewing the feasts of Thyestes, of eating infants covered with pastry, and of anthropophagistic practices.

The annual feasts were always the Jewish feasts, especially Easter and Pentecost. The Christian Easter was generally celebrated on the same day as the Jewish Passover. Nevertheless, the cause which had transferred the holy-day of each week from the Saturday to the Sunday regulated also Easter, not from usage and Jewish souvenirs, but from the souvenirs of the passion and of the resurrection of Jesus. 141It is not impossible that, from the time of Paul, in the Churches of Greece and Macedonia, that change had already been effected. In any case, the thought of that fundamental feast was profoundly modified. The passage of the Red Sea became a thing of little account after the resurrection of Jesus; people no longer thought of it, except to find in it a figure of the triumph of Jesus over death. The true Paschal Lamb was henceforth Jesus, who had been offered up for all; the true unleavened breads were truth, justice; the old leaven had lost its power, and ought therefore to be rejected. For the rest, the feast of the Passover had indeed more anciently undergone with the Hebrews an analogous change of signification. It was certainly in its origin a feast of spring time, which was connected by an artificial etymology with the remembrance of the flight from Egypt.

Pentecost was also celebrated on the same day as with the Jews. Like Easter, that feast took a signification altogether new, which put into the shade the old Jewish idea. Right or wrong, people believed that the principal incident of the Holy Spirit upon the assembled Apostles had taken place on the day of Pentecost which followed the resurrection of Jesus; the ancient harvest festival of the Semites became thus in the new religion the feast of the Holy Ghost. About the same time that feast underwent an analogous transformation amongst the Jews; it became with them the anniversary of the promulgation of the law upon Mount Sinai.

No edifice had been built or any building rented expressly for the meetings;—no art, consequently no images. The assemblies took place in the houses of the brethren the best known, or who had a room well adapted for the purpose. People preferred for this the apartments which, in Oriental houses, formed the first floor, and corresponding to our 142drawing-room floor. These apartments are high, containing numerous windows, very fresh, very airy; it was here that one received one’s friends, where one held feasts, where one prayed, where one laid out the dead. The groups thus formed constituted “domestic churches,” or pious coteries full of moral activity, and resembling greatly those “domestic colleges,” examples of which were to be found about that time in the bosom of Pagan society. All great things are thus founded in inconsiderable centres, where one is tightly squeezed the one against the other, and where souls are warmed by a powerful love.

Up to this time Buddhism alone had elevated man to this degree of heroism and of purity. The triumph of Christianity is inexplicable, if it is studied only in the fourth century. It happened with Christianity as happens almost always in human things: it succeeded when it began to decline morally; it became official when it no longer had anything to rest upon except itself; it came into vogue when its true period of originality and of youth had passed away. But it did none the less merit its high recompense: it had merited this by its three centuries of virtue, or by the incomparable predilection for the good which it had inspired. When we think of that miracle, no hyperbole about the excellence of Jesus appears illegitimate. It was he, always he, who was the inspirer, the master, the principle of life in his Church. His divine mission grew each year, and this was but just. He was no longer only a man of God, a great prophet, a man approved and authorised of God, a man powerful in works and in speech; these expressions which suffice, which were sufficient for the faith and the love of the disciples of early times, passed now for silly fables. Jesus is the Lord, the Christ, a personage entirely superhuman, not yet God, but very near being it. One lives in him, one dies in him, 143one rises in him; almost everything that one says of God, one says of him. He was in truth already a divine personality, and when it is wished to identify him with God, it is only a question of words, a mere “communication of idioms” as the theologians say. We shall see that Paul himself attained to this: the most advanced formulas that are to be found in the Epistle to the Colossians existed already in germ in the older epistles. “For to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Cor. viii. 6). Again, and Jesus shall be the logos, creator; the most exaggerated of the consubstantialists of the ninth century could already be foreshadowed.

The idea of the Christian redemption in the Churches of Paul underwent a similar transformation. People knew little of the parables or the moral teachings of Jesus: the Gospels did not yet exist. Christ, having lived, is not to the Churches something approaching a real personage: he is the image of God, a heavenly minister, having taken upon himself the sins of the world, charged with reconciling the world to God; he is a divine reformer, creating all things new, and abolishing the past. It is death for all; all are dead through him to the world, and ought no longer to live, except for him. He was rich in all the richness of divinity, and he became poor for us. All Christian life ought hence to be a contradiction of the human sense: weakness is the true strength, death is the true life; cardinal wisdom is folly. Happy he who carries in his body the dying of Jesus, he who is continually exposed to death for Jesus’ sake. He shall live again with Jesus; he shall see his glory face to face, and shall be transformed unto him, rising uninterruptedly from glory to glory. The Christian thus lives in the hope of death, and in a state of perpetual groaning. In 144proportion as the exterior man (the body) falls into ruin, the interior man (the soul) is renewed. One moment of tribulation is worth more to him than an eternity of glory. What matters it that his terrestrial house is dissolved? He has in Heaven an eternal house, not made with hands. Terrestrial life is exile; death is return to God, and equivalent to the absorption of all that is mortal in life, only the treasure of hope which the Christian carries in earthen vessels, and until the great day when all shall be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ, he must tremble.

CHAPTER X.

RETURN OF PAUL TO ANTIOCH—QUARREL BETWEEN PETER AND PAUL—COUNTER-MISSION ORGANISED BY JAMES, BROTHER OF THE LORD.

Paul, however, felt the necessity of revisiting the Churches of Syria. It was three years since he had left Antioch; notwithstanding that his stay there had been shorter than formerly, this new mission had become much more important. The new Churches, recruited from lively, energetic populations, brought to the feet of Jesus homage of an infinite value. Paul had just recounted all this to the Apostles, and bid them attach themselves to the Mother Church, the model of all others. In spite of his taste for independence, he felt sure that, outside of the communion of Jerusalem, there was only schism and dissension. The admirable mixture of opposite qualities which 145could be discerned in him, allowed him to ally, in the most unexpected fashion, docility with pride, revolt with submission, severity with gentleness. Paul chose as a pretext for his departure the celebration of the Passover of the year 54. To give the utmost solemnity to his resolution, and to avoid the possibility of changing his decision, he made a vow to celebrate that Easter at Jerusalem. The mode of performing vows of this kind was to shave the head, and to undertake to say certain prayers, and to abstain from wine during thirty days before the festival. Paul said good-bye to his Church, had his head shaved at Cenchrea, and embarked for Syria. He was accompanied by Aquila and Priscilla, who intended to stop at Ephesus, and perhaps also by Silas. As for Timothy, it is probable that he did not go away from Corinth or from the shores of the Ægæan Sea. We find him again at Ephesus within a year.

The ship stayed for some days at Ephesus. Paul had time to go to the synagogue and to dispute with the Jews. They begged him to stay; but he put forward his vow, and declared that at any cost he would celebrate the festival in Jerusalem; all they could get from him was a promise to return. He took leave then of Aquila and Priscilla, and of those with whom he had already entered into relationships, and took ship again for Cæsarea of Palestine, whence he speedily made his way to Jerusalem.

There he celebrated the festival in the way in which he had vowed to do. Perhaps this Hebrew scruple was a concession, like so many others, that he made to the spirit of the Church at Jerusalem. He hoped by an act of great devotion to obtain pardon for his daring, and to conciliate the Judaisers. The discussions were scarcely pacified, and peace was only kept for the sake of business. It is probable that he profited by the opportunity to remit to the poor people in Jerusalem a considerable 146amount of money as alms. Paul, as usual, stayed for a very short time in the metropolis: here there were susceptibilities which could not have failed to bring about divisions if he had prolonged his stay. He, accustomed to live in the exquisite atmosphere of his truly Christian Churches, found here, under the name of Brethren of Jesus, only Jews. He thought that they did not give a sufficiently exalted place to Jesus; he grew indignant that, after Jesus, people should be found to attribute any value whatever to those things which had existed before him.

The head of the Church of Jerusalem was now James, the brother of the Lord. It was not that the authority of Peter had diminished, but he was no longer resident in the city. Partly in imitation of Paul, he had embraced the active apostolic life. The idea that Paul was the Apostle of the Gentiles, and Peter the Apostle of the Circumcision, had more and more gained ground. In accordance with this idea, Peter went about preaching the Gospel to the Jews all over Syria. He carried about with him a sister, as spouse and deaconess, thus giving the first example of a married Apostle—an example which the Protestant missionaries more lately followed. John, surnamed Mark, appeared always also as his disciple, his companion, and his interpreter, a circumstance which causes it to be generally believed that the Prince of the Apostles knew no Greek. Peter had in some sort adopted John-Mark, and treated him as a son.

The details of the pilgrimage of Peter are unknown to us. What was told about him in later days is mainly fabulous. We only know that the life of the Apostle of the Circumcision was, like that of the Apostle of the Gentiles, a series of trials. It may be believed also that the itinerary which serves as foundation for the fabulous acts of Peter—a journey which conducts the Apostle from Jerusalem to Cæsarea, from Cæsarea 147along the coast by Tyre, Sidon, Beyrout, Byblos, Tripoli, Antaradus to Laodicea-upon-the-sea, and from Laodicea to Antioch—is but imaginary. The Apostle certainly visited Antioch; we think even that he used it as his headquarters after a certain date. The lakes and the ponds formed by the Orontes and the Arkeuthas about the town, which furnished to the lower classes of the people fresh water fish of inferior quality, perhaps afforded him the opportunity of again taking up his old trade of fisherman.

Many of the brothers of the Lord, and some members of the Apostolic College, travelled even from the bordering parts of Judæa. As Peter, and in a different manner to that of the missionaries of the school of Paul, they travelled with their wives, and lived at the cost of the Churches. The trade which they had exercised in Galilee was not, like that of Paul, of a nature to enable them to subsist upon it, and they had abandoned it a long time ago. The wives who accompanied them, who were called “sisters,” were the origin of those novices, a kind of deaconesses and of nuns, living under the direction of a clergyman, who played an important part in the history of ecclesiastical celibacy.

Peter having thus ceased to be the resident chief of the Church of Jerusalem, several members of the Apostolic Council having in the same way taken up with an itinerant life, the first place in the Mother Church was given up to James. He was thus “the bishop of the Hebrews,” that is to say, of that part of the disciples who spoke the Semitic languages. That did not compromise the chief part of the universal Church: no one had been exigent enough to claim the right to such a title, people being divided between Peter and Paul; but his presidency of the Church at Jerusalem, joined to his quality of brother of the Lord, gave James an immense power, since the Church at Jerusalem always remained the centre of concord. James was, moreover, very old; some ambitious movements, 148too much prejudice, were the consequences of such a position. All the faults which must later make the Court of Rome the flail of the Church, and the principal agent of its corruption, were already germinating in this primitive community of Jerusalem.

James was a worthy man in many respects, but with a narrow mind, that Jesus would have assuredly pierced with his keenest railleries, if he knew him, or even if be knew him as he has been represented to us. Was he really the brother, or only a cousin-german, of Jesus? All the witnesses in this respect agree so well together, that one is forced to believe the latter hypothesis. But, in that case, Nature must have played one of her most fantastic tricks. Perhaps this brother, being converted only after the death of Jesus, possessed less of the true tradition of the Master than those who, without being his relations, had accompanied him in his lifetime. It is less surprising that two children born of the same mother, or of the same family, should have been at first enemies, then reconciled; should remain so profoundly diverse, that the only known brother of Jesus would have been a kind of Pharisee, an ascetic exterior, a devotee tainted with all the absurdities that Jesus attacked without mercy. One thing is certain, namely, that the person who has been called up to this time “James, brother of the Lord,” or “James the Just,” or the “Rampart of the People,” was in the Church of Jerusalem the representative of the most intolerant Jewish party. Whilst the active Apostles travelled all over the world, in order to conquer it for Jesus, the brother of Jesus at Jerusalem did all that was possible to destroy their work, and to contradict Jesus after his death, in a more profound fashion perhaps than he had done in his life-time.

This society of half-converted Pharisees, this world 149which was in reality more Jewish than Christian, living around the temple, preserving the old practices of the Jewish religion, as if Jesus had not declared them vain, formed unbearable company for Paul. That which particularly annoyed him was the opposition of all this class to his missionary work. Like the Jews of the strict observance, the partisans of James did not wish to make proselytes. The ancient religious parties often had such contradictions. On the one hand, they proclaimed that they alone had possession of the truth; on the other, they only wished to enlarge their sphere: they pretended to preserve the truth for themselves. French Protestantism presents in our days a similar phenomenon. Two opposite parties, the one desiring, before everything else, the preservation of old customs; the other capable of gaining to Protestantism a world of new adherents, being produced in the bosom of the reformed Church. The conservative party has waged, in a second ground, a war to the knife. It has repulsed with scandal all that has resembled an abandonment of the family traditions, and it has preferred to the brilliant destinies that are offered to them, the pleasure of remaining a little club, without importance, shut up, composed of well-thinking men,—that is to say, of men partaking of the same prejudices, and regarding the same things as aristocratic. The feeling of defiance that the members of the old party of Jerusalem experienced before the stern missionary who introduced to them multitudes of new brethren without titles of Jewish nobility, must be something analogous. They looked upon themselves as overruled, and instead of falling at the feet of Paul, and thanking him, they found in him a disturber, an intruder who forced his way with men recruited from every place. More than one hard word, it seems, had been exchanged. It is probable that at this moment James, the brother of the Lord, conceived the unsuccessful project of overthrowing 150the work of Jesus,—I mean the project of a counter mission charged to follow the Apostle of the Gentiles, to contradict his dogmas, to persuade converts that they must be circumcised, and practise all the Law. Sectarian movements are not produced without schisms of this kind; when one recalls the heads of Saint-Simonianism quarrelling amongst themselves, but yet remaining ardent Saint-Simonians, and as such voluntarily reconciled by the survivors after his death.

Paul avoided these scandals by setting out as soon as possible for Antioch. It was probably then that Silas left him. The latter was the founder of the Church at Jerusalem. He remained there, and henceforth attached himself to Peter. Silas, as the compiler of the “Acts,” appears to have been a conciliatory man, oscillating between the two parties, and in turn attached to each of the two chiefs; a thoroughly good Christian, and of the opinion which in triumphing saved the Church. Never, in fact, did the Christian Church bear in its bosom a cause of schism so deep as that which agitated it at this moment. Luther and the most fossilised scholar differed less than Paul and James. Thanks to some gentle and generous spirits—Silas, Luke, Timothy—all the attacks were softened, all the heartburnings concealed. A beautiful tale, calm and dignified, has not allowed it to be seen that the fraternal understanding in these years was traversed by such terrible rents.

At Antioch Paul breathed freely. He there met with his old companion Barnabas, and without doubt they felt great joy at seeing each other; for the motive which had separated them for a short time was not a question of principle. Perhaps Paul also found at Antioch his disciple Titus, who had not shared the second journey, but who henceforth attached himself to him. The recital of miraculous conversions wrought by Paul astonished the young and active Church. Paul, for his part, felt a lively 151joy at revisiting the town which had been the cradle of his apostleship—the places where, ten years before, he had conceived the Church which had conferred on him the title of Missionary of the Gentiles. An incident of the greatest gravity was soon to interrupt these sweet effusions, and to revive with a degree of gravity those divisions which up to then had been lulled for a moment.

Whilst Paul was at Antioch, Peter arrived there. This at first only redoubled the joy and cordiality. The Apostle of the Jews and the Apostle of the Gentiles loved each other as very good and very ardent natures always love each other, when they found themselves in relation to each other. Peter communicated without reserve with the converted Pagans, and even, in open violation of the Jewish Law, he did not object to eating with them; but soon this good understanding was disturbed. James had executed his fatal project. Some brethren, provided with letters of recommendation signed by him as the chief of the Twelve, and as the only one who had the right to authorise a mission, set out from Jerusalem. Their pretext was that one could not preach the doctrine of Christ if he had not been to Jerusalem to compare his doctrine with that of James, the brother of the Lord, and if he did not carry an attestation from the latter. Jerusalem was, according to them, the source of all faith,—of every apostolic commission: the true Apostles lived there. Whoever preached without a letter of authority from the chief of the Mother Church, and without having sworn obedience to him, ought to be repelled as a false prophet and a false apostle, as an emissary of the devil. Paul, who had no such letters, was an intruder, boasting of personal relations with them without reality, and of a mission the title to which he could not produce. He alleged his visions, contending even that the fact of having seen Jesus in a supernatural fashion was worth much 152more than the fact of having known him personally. “What can be more chimerical?” said the Jerusalemites. No vision was so valuable as the evidence of the senses: visions are not actualities. The spectre that he saw was perhaps an evil spirit: idolaters had visions as well as saints. When the apparition was questioned, it answered all that was wanted: the spectre shone for an instant, and then disappeared quickly; there was no time to talk to it at leisure. The mind of the dreamer was not his own: in that state volition ceases. To see the Son out of the flesh! but that is impossible: one would die of it. The superhuman brightness of that light would kill. Even an angel, to make himself visible, is obliged to assume a body!”

The emissaries cited on this head a number of visions which had been seen by infidels and heretics, and concluded from them that the chief Apostles, those who had seen Jesus, had an immense superiority. They even declared that they could show texts of Scripture proving that visions came from an offended God, whilst to converse face to face was the privilege of his friends. “How can Paul assert that by an interview of an hour Jesus had rendered him capable of teaching? It needed a whole year of lessons for Jesus to form his Apostles. And if Jesus really appeared to him, how did he know that he did not teach the reverse of the doctrine of Jesus? Let him prove the reality of the interview which he had had with Jesus, by conforming himself to His precepts, by loving His Apostles, by not declaring war with those whom Jesus had chosen. If he wished to serve the truth, let him make himself the disciple of Jesus’ disciples, and then he could be a useful auxiliary.”

The question of ecclesiastical authority and of individual revelation, of Catholicism and of Protestantism, showed itself with a real grandeur. Jesus had settled nothing clearly in this matter. So long 153as he lived, and throughout the first years following his death, Jesus was so essentially the soul and body of His little Church, that no idea of government or of constitution offers itself. Now, on the contrary, it was necessary to know if there was a power representing Jesus, or if the Christian conscience remained free; if to preach Jesus, subscription to articles of faith were necessary, or if he had the command received from Jesus sufficed. As Paul did not offer any other proof of his immediate mission than his affirmation, his position was weak in many ways. We shall see with what prodigies of eloquence and of activity the great innovator, attacked in every quarter, will face all assaults and maintain his position without absolutely breaking with the Apostolic College, whose authority he recognised each time that his liberty was not straitened. But the struggle rendered him less amiable to us. A man who disputes, resists, speaks of himself; a man who maintains his opinion and his prerogative, who gives pain to others, who denounces them to their face, such a man is antipathetic to us. Jesus, in such a case, yielded everything, escaped from his difficulty by some charming word.

The emissaries of James arrived at Antioch. James, while admitting that converted Gentiles could be saved without observing the Law of Moses, in no way admitted that a true Jew, a circumcised Jew, could, without sin, violate the law. The scandal of the disciples of James was at its height when they saw the chief of the Churches of the circumcision act like a true Pagan, and destroy those exterior compacts that a respectable Jew looked upon as titles of nobility and marks of his superiority. They spoke keenly to Peter, who was much frightened. This man, profoundly good and just, wanted peace above everything: he scarcely knew how to contradict anybody. This made him changeable: at least he was so to all appearance; he was easily disconcerted, 154and did not know how to find a quick reply. Already, from the life of Jesus, this kind of timidity, coming from awkwardness rather than from want of heart, had led him into a fault which cost him many tears. Knowing little about argument, incapable of holding up his head against contradiction, in difficult cases he was silent and hesitated. Such a kind of temper made him again commit a great act of feebleness. Placed between two classes of people, one of whom he could not content without annoying the other, he isolated himself completely, and lived apart, refusing all communications with the uncircumcised. This manner of acting keenly wounded the converted Gentiles. What was graver still, was that all the circumcised imitated him; even Barnabas allowed himself to follow this example, and avoided uncircumcised Christians.

Paul’s anger was extreme. When we recall the ritual meaning of the meal in common, refusing to eat with a part of the community meant excommunication. Paul broke out into reproaches, treated this kind of thing as hypocrisy, accused Peter and his imitators of falsifying the meaning of the gospel. The Church must soon assemble: the two Apostles would meet there. To his face, and before all the assembly, Paul violently apostrophised Peter, and reproached him for his inconsequence. “If thou,” said he to him, “being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?”

Then he developed his favourite theory of the salvation coming by Jesus, and not by the Law,—of the abrogation of the Law by Jesus. It is probable that Peter did not answer him. Exactly, it was Paul’s advice; as all men who seek by innocent artifices to get out of a difficulty, he did not pretend to be right; he only wanted to satisfy one side, and not to alienate others. In this manner one only succeeds, as a general rule, in being in opposition to everybody.

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Only the removal of the envoys of James made an end to the disagreement. After their departure, good Peter began again without doubt to eat with the Gentiles as before. These singular alternatives of violence and of fraternity are one of the features of a Jewish character. Modern critics conclude from certain passages in the Epistle to the Galatians that the quarrel between Peter and Paul absolutely made them contradict each other, not only in the “Acts” but in other passages from the Epistle to the Galatians. Ardent men pass their life in disputing with each other, without ever actually quarrelling. It is not necessary to judge these tempers after the manner of things whose actions happen in our time between men well educated and susceptible upon the point of honour. This last word, in particular, has scarcely ever had any meaning to the Jews.

It seems certain, nevertheless, the quarrel of Antioch left deep traces. The great Church on the borders of the Orontes was split in two, if we are permitted to explain thus, that in two parishes there was on the one hand the parish of the circumcised, on the other, that of the uncircumcised. The separation of these two portions of the Church continued for a long time. Antioch, as they tell us later, had two bishops, one appointed by Peter and the other by Paul. Evhode and Ignatius are named as having filled up after the Apostles that office.

As for the animosity of the emissaries of James, it only increased. The quarrel of Antioch left them a feeling, the indignant expression of which, a century after, one still finds in the writings of the Judæo-Christian section. The eloquent adversary who had almost destroyed the Church of Antioch, without any real reason became their enemy. They vowed vengeance, which even in his lifetime raised up for him troubles without number, and after his death bloody anathemas and atrocious calumnies. 156Passion and religious enthusiasm are far from overcoming human weaknesses. On leaving Antioch, the agents of the Jerusalemite party vowed to overthrow the foundations of Paul, to destroy his Churches, and to throw down what he had built up with so much labour. It seems that on this occasion new letters were sent from Jerusalem in the name of the Apostles. It is possible that a specimen of those hateful letters may have been preserved for us in the Epistle of Jude, brother of James, and like him “brother of the Lord,” which forms part of the canon. It is a manifesto of the most violent description against nameless adversaries, who are presented as rebels and impure men. The style of this piece, which comes much nearer to classic Greek than that of the greater portion of the writings of the New Testament, has much analogy with the style of the Epistle of James. James and Jude did not probably know any Greek: the Church of Jerusalem had perhaps Hellenic secretaries for communications of this kind. “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to, write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you, that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ. I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterwards destroyed them that believed not. And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like 157manner, giving themselves over to fornication, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities. Yet Michael the archangel, when, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, the Lord rebuke thee. But these speak evil of things which they know not, but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core. These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots. Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever. And Enoch, also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men’s persons in admiration because of advantage. But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ: how that they told you there should be mockers in the last time who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.”

Paul from this moment was for a section of the Church one of the most dangerous of heretics, a false Jew, a false Apostle, a false prophet, a new Balaam, a Jezebel, a villain who prophesied (lit. 158preluded.) the destruction of the temple—in two words, a Simon Magus. Peter was angrier than all, and was always busy in fighting him. They were accustomed to designate the Apostle of the Gentiles by the sobriquet of Nicholas (Conquerer of the People), a name akin to Balaam. This seemed a happy nickname; a Pagan seducer, who had visions although an infidel, a man who persuaded people to sin with Pagan women, appeared the true type of Paul, this false missionary, this partisan of mixed marriages. His disciples for the same reason were called Nicolaitans. Far from forgetting his character of persecutor, they insisted on it in a most odious fashion. His gospel was a false gospel. It was of Paul that the question was raised, when the fanatics of the party talked between themselves in innuendoes of a person whom they called “the apostate,” or “the enemy,” or “the impostor,” the forerunner of Anti-Christ, that the chief of the Apostles follows in his footsteps to repair the evil which he does. Paul was “the frivolous man” of whom the Gentiles, having seen their ignorance, have received the doctrine which is opposed to the Law; his visions, which he calls “depths of God,” they qualified as “the depths of Satan,” his Churches, they named “the synagogues of Satan;” in spite of Paul, they proclaim boldly that the Twelve only are the foundation of the Church of Christ. A whole legend begins from this time to be formed against Paul. They refuse to believe that a true Jew could have been capable of committing such an atrocity as that of which he had been guilty. They pretended that he had been born a Pagan, and that he had been made a proselyte. And why? Calumny is never without plenty of reasons for it. Paul was circumcised because he wished to marry the daughter of the High Priest. The High Priest, being a wise man, having refused her to him, Paul, out of spite, began 159to declaim against circumcision, the Sabbath, and the Law. . . . That is the reward which one obtains from fanatics for having served their cause, otherwise than they understand it; let us say rather, for having served the cause which they lost by their narrow spirit and their foolish exclusiveness.

James, on the contrary, became for the Judæo-Christian party the head of all Christianity, the bishop of bishops, the president of all the good Churches, of those that God had truly founded. It was probably after his death that they created for him this apocryphal character; but there is no doubt that legend in this case may be based in several respects upon the real character of the hero. The grave and rather emphatic delivery of James; his manners, which recalled a sage of the old world, a solemn Brahmin or an antique mobed; his pompous and ostentatious sanctity made him conspicuous in the popular eye, an official, holy man, even already a species of Pope. The Judæo-Christians accustomed themselves to believe that he had been clothed with the Jewish priesthood; and as a sign of the High Priest was the pétalon or breastplate of gold, they decorated him with it. “The Rampart of the people,” with his golden breastplate, thus became a sort of Jewish bonze, an imitation High Priest, for the use of the Judæo-Christians. They supposed that, as the High Priest, he entered, by virtue of a special permission, once a year into the sanctuary; they even pretended that he belonged to the sacerdotal race. They asserted that he had been ordained by Jesus the bishop of the Holy City; that Jesus had entrusted him with his own episcopal throne. The Judæo-Christians made a good many of the people of Jerusalem believe that it was the merits of this servant of God which held off the thunderbolt which was ready to burst on the people. They nearly went as far as creating for him as for 160Jesus, a legend founded upon biblical passages, where they pretended that the prophets had spoken of him in parables.

The image of Jesus in this Christian family became smaller year by year, whilst in the Churches of Paul it took more and more colossal proportions. The Christians of James were simple, pious Jews—hasidim—believing in a Jewish mission of Jesus; the Christians of Paul were good Christians in the sense which has prevailed ever since. The Law, the temple, sacrifices, high priests, all became indifferent to them. Jesus has replaced everything else, abolished everything else; to attach a meaning of sanctity to what has been before, is to do injury to the merits of Jesus. It was natural that to Paul, who had not seen Jesus, the wholly human figure of the Galilæan Master should transform itself into a metaphysical type much more easily than for Peter and the others who had talked with Jesus. To Paul, Jesus is not a man who has lived and taught; he is Christ who has died for our sins, who saves us, who justifies us; He is an altogether Divine being: we partake of him; we communicate with Him in a wonderful manner; He is for man Wisdom and Righteousness, Santification and Redemption; He is the King of Glory, All Powerful in Heaven and Earth, which is soon to be delivered to Him; He is only inferior to God the Father. If this school only had written the Scriptures, we should not touch upon the person of Jesus, and we might doubt its existence. But those who know Him, and who guarded His memory, possibly wrote about this time the first notes upon which these Divine writings (I speak of the Gospels) which have made the fortune of Christianity, and which have transmitted to us the essential features of the most important character which has ever been known.

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TROUBLES IN THE CHURCHES OF GALATIA.

The emissaries of James, having left Antioch, bent their steps towards the Churches of Galatia. The Jerusalemites had for a long time known of the existence of these Churches; it was even with regard to them that the question of the circumcision was first raised, and that what was called the Council of Jerusalem was held. James had probably recommended his confidential agents to attack this important point, it being one of the centres of Paul’s power.

Success was easy for them. These Galatians were men readily seduced; the last one who had come to speak to them in the name of Jesus was almost certain to be right. The Jerusalemites had soon persuaded a great number of them that they were not good Christians. They incessantly repeated to them that they ought to be circumcised, and to observe all the Law. With the puerile vanity of fanatical Jews, the deputies represented circumcision as a corporal advantage; they were proud of it, and did not admit that one could be as much a man without this privilege as he ought to be. The habit of ridiculing the Pagans, representing them as inferior beings and badly brought up, introduced these grotesque ideas. The Jerusalemites poured out at the same time against Paul a flood of invective and disparagement. They accused him of posing as an independent Apostle, although he had received his mission from Jerusalem, or else they had seen him at different times betake himself to the school of the Twelve, as a disciple. Was not his coming to Jerusalem a recognition of the superiority of the Apostolic College? What he 162knew he had learned from the Apostles; he had accepted the rules which they had drawn up. This missionary who pretended to dispense with circumcision, knew very well the need of preaching and of practising it. Turning his concessions against him, they alleged cases when they had seen him recognise the necessity of Jewish practices; perhaps they did not recall in particular the facts relative to the circumcision of Titus and Timothy. How could he, who had never seen Jesus, dare to speak in the name of Jesus? It was Peter, it was James, who ought to be held to be the true Apostles—the depositaries of revelation.

The consciences of these good Galatians were troubled. One party abandoned the doctrine of Paul, yielded to the new doctors, and were circumcised; the other party remained faithful to their first master. The trouble, in all these cases, was profound: they said the harshest things to each other.

This news on reaching Paul filled him with anger. Jealousy, which formed the basis of his character, and susceptibility, often already put to the test, were excited in the highest degree. It was the third time that the Pharisaical party of Jerusalem attempted to demolish his work as he accomplished it. The kind of cowardice which there is in attacking weak, docile men without defence, and who only lived in confidence on their master, revolted him. He could restrain himself no longer. At the same time, the daring and vehement Apostle dictated that admirable epistle, that may well be compared, except for the art of writing, with the most beautiful classical works, and in which his impetuous nature is painted in letters of fire. The title of “Apostle” that he had at first taken timidly, he now took as assumed in defiance, to reply to his adversaries, and in the maintenance of what he believed to be the truth.

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“Paul an Apostle (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the Dead); and all the brethren which are with me, unto the Churches of Galatia:

“Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father: to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

“I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed. For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

“But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the Church of God, and wasted it: and profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to 164Jerusalem to them which were Apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the Apostles saw I none, save James, the Lord’s brother. Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.

“Afterwards I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia; and was unknown by face unto the Churches of Judæa which were in Christ; but they had heard only, that he which persecuted us in times past, now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed And they glorified God in me.

“Then, fourteen years after, I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with me also. And I went up by revelation, and communicated unto them that gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to them which were of reputation, lest by any means I should run, or had run in vain. But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: and that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage, to whom we gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour: that the truth of the gospel might continue with you. But of these who seemed to be somewhat (whatsoever they were, it maketh no matter to me. God accepteth no man’s person), for they who seemed to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me; but contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was committed onto me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter (for he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles), and when James, Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace 165that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision. Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was forward to do.

“But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles; but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation. But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter, before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? We, who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid. For, if I build again the things which I destroy, I make myself a transgressor. For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ Liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God, for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.

“O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, 166that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you? This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit are ye now made perfect by the flesh? Have ye suffered so many things in vain? if it be yet in vain. He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham. . . . . . But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster, to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith, but after that faith has come we are no longer under a school-master. For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptised into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye are Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: but when the fulness of the time was come God sent forth his Son made of a 167woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father, Wherefore thou art no more a servant but a son, and if a son then an heir of God through Christ.

“Howbeit then when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.

“Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are; ye have not injured me at all. Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first. And my temptation, which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. Where is then the blessedness ye spake of? for I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me. Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth? They zealously affect you, but not well; yea, they would exclude you, that ye might affect them. But it is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing, and not only when I am present with you. My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you, I desire to be, present with you now, and to change my voice; for I stand in doubt of you. . . . . .

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Behold, I, Paul, say unto you that, if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit 168you nothing. For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law. Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law: ye are fallen from grace. For we, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness by faith. For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith, which worketh by love.

“Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth? This persuasion cometh not of him that calleth you. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. I have confidence in you through the Lord, that ye will be none otherwise minded; but he that troubleth you shall bear his judgment, whosoever he be. And I, brethren, if I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet suffer persecution? Then is the offence of the cross ceased? I would they were even cut off which trouble you.

“For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty: only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now, the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like; of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in times past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But 169the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they which are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. . . . .”

Paul wrote this epistle at a single sitting, as if filled with an interior fire. According to his habit, he wrote with his own hand, in postscript, “Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.”

It seems natural that he should finish with the usual salutation; but he was too much animated: his fixed idea possessed him. The subject being exhausted, he again returns to it with some keen remarks:—

“As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for the cross of Christ. For neither they themselves who are circumcised keep the law, but desire to have you circumcised that they may glory in your flesh. But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. From henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus. Brethren, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.”

Paul despatched this letter at once. If he had taken an hour’s reflection, it is doubtful whether he would have let it be sent. We do not know to whom it was entrusted; Paul doubtless had it carried by one of his disciples, whom he charged with a journey into Galatia. The epistle, in fact, is not addressed to a particular community; each of those little Churches of Derbe, of Lystra, of Iconium, 170of Antioch in Pisidia, was not considerable enough to serve as a metropolis to the others; the Apostle, on the other hand, gives no instruction to the receivers as to the manner of circulating his letter. The effect that the letter produced upon the Galatians is also unknown. Without doubt it confirmed the party of Paul; it probably, however, did not entirely extinguish the opposite party. Almost all the Churches henceforward will be divided into two camps. The Church of Judæa will maintain its pretensions until the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70). It is only at the end of the first century that a true reconciliation will come about, partly at the expense of Paul’s glory, which will during nearly a hundred years be cast into the shade, but for the full triumph of its fundamental ideas. The Judæo-Christians from this moment will only be a sect of old fanatics, dying out slowly and obscurely, and only ending towards the close of the fifth century in the remoter districts of Syria. Paul, in revenge, will be nearly disavowed. His title of Apostle, refused him by his enemies, will be feebly defended by his friends. The Churches which notoriously owe their foundation to him, will wish it to be thought that they were founded by him and by Peter. The Church of Corinth, for example, will do the most flagrant violence to history to show that she owes her origin to Peter as well as to Paul. The conversion of the Gentiles will pass for the collective work of the Twelve; Papias, Polycrates, Justin, Hegesippus, seem to labour to suppress the share of Paul in the work, and nearly ignore his existence. It is only when the idea of a canon of new sacred writings will be established that Paul will regain his importance. His epistles will then emerge in some way from the archives of the Churches to become the base of Christian theology, which they will renew from age to age.

At the distance at which we now stand, the victory 171of Paul appears complete. Paul recounts to us, and perhaps exaggerates, the injuries that have been done to him. Who will tell us the injuries of Paul? The mean intention which he attributes to his adversaries of following in his footsteps to carry away for themselves the affection of his disciples and to glorify themselves afterwards over the circumcision of these simple men, is not this a travesty? May not the recital of his relations with the Church of Jerusalem, different as it is from that of the Acts, be a little arranged for the needs of the moment? The pretence of having been an Apostle by divine right from the very day of his conversion, is it not historically inaccurate! in this sense, that the conviction of his own apostleship slowly took possession of him, and arrived at its completion only after his first great mission. Was Peter really so much to be blamed as Paul asserted? The conduct of the Galilean Apostle, on the contrary, was not it that of a conciliatory man, preferring brotherliness to principle, wishing to content everybody, yielding to avoid scandal, and blamed by all, precisely because he was right. We have no means of answering these questions. Paul was very egotistical; it is not impossible that he more than once attributed to a private revelation what he had learnt from his elders. The Epistle to the Galatians is so extraordinary a work, the Apostle there paints himself with so much artlessness and truth, that it would be absolutely unjust to turn against him a document which does so much honour to his talent and his eloquence. The cares of a narrow orthodoxy are not ours; to others belong the right of explaining how one can be a saint, whilst abusing the ancient Cephas. Paul is not degraded from the companionship of great men when he is proved to be sometimes hasty, passionate, pre-occupied with his own defence, and fighting his enemies. In everything 172that is truly Protestant, Paul has the faults of a Protestant. It requires time and much experience to enable him to see that each dogma is not worth the trouble of violent resistance and of wounding charity. Paul is not Jesus. How far we are from thee, dear Master. Where is thy tenderness, thy poesy? Thou who didst consider the lilies, dost thou recognise as thy disciples these disputants, these men who are so bitter about precedence, who wish that every body should originate with them alone. They are men, thou wast a God. Where should we be, if thou wert known to us only by the simple letters of him who calls himself thy Apostle. Happily, the perfumes of Galilee still live in some faithful memories. Perhaps already the Sermon on the Mount is written on some secret sheet. The unknown disciple who bears this treasure truly bears the future.

CHAPTER XII

THIRD JOURNEY OF PAUL—FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH AT EPHESUS.

Less great, less possessed by the sacred genius whicn had seized upon him, Paul was made use of in these barren disputes. To reply to little minds, he was obliged to make himself as mean as they were: these miserable quarrels had absorbed him. Paul scorned them as a man of superior genius should. He went straight forward, and left time to decide between him and his enemies. The first rule for a man devoted to great things, is to refuse mediocre men the power of turning him aside from his way. Without discussing with the delegates of James as 173to whether it were right or wrong to preach to the Gentiles and to convert them, Paul only thought of beginning again, even at the risk of encountering new anathemas. After some months passed at Antioch he departed on a third mission, on this occasion to his dear Galatian Churches. At times he was in great perplexity with regard to these Churches; he regretted having grieved them by using harsh language to them; he wished to change his tone, to correct by the gentleness of his words the asperity of his letter. Paul wished above all things to dwell at Ephesus, which he had only touched at first in order to constitute a preaching centre such as there was at Thessalonica and Corinth. The field of that third mission was thus very nearly that of the second. Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Greece were the provinces that Paul in some sort assigned to himself.

He set out from Antioch, accompanied probably by Titus. He followed the same track as on his second journey, and visited for the third time the Churches of the centre of Asia Minor—Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, Antioch in Pisidia. He speedily regained his authority, and soon effaced such false impressions as still remained, and which his enemies had sought to raise against him. At Derbe he took as assistant a new disciple, named Gaius, who followed him. These good Galatians were full of docility, but weak in the faith. Paul, accustomed to express himself with firmness, treated them with a severity that sometimes even he himself was afraid they would take for harshness. He had scruples; he was afraid that he had spoken to his children in a manner that perhaps did not express clearly enough the affection there was for them in his heart.

The motives that had made him in his second journey abstain from preaching the gospel to pro-consular Asia existing no longer, Paul, after having 174finished his tour in Galatia, set out for Ephesus. This was in the middle of the summer. From Antioch in Pisidia, the most natural route to follow should have led him to Apamea-Cibotus, and thence into the basin of the Lycus, to the three neighbouring towns of Colosse, of Laodicæa, of Hierapolis. These three towns for some years will form an active centre of Christian work, and Paul will be in close communication with them. But for the moment he did not stop here, and made acquaintance with no one. Going round the rock of Cadmas, he passed into the valley of Meander, towards the inns of Carura, a great highway of the roads of Asia. Thereçe, a beautiful and easy route, leads, in three days, by Nysa, Tralles, and Magnesia, to the summits of the chain which separates the waters of the Meander from those of the Caystrus. A ravine, where the ancient road and the torrent dispute the narrow space, descends into “the prairie of Asia,” sung of by the Homerides, that is to say, into the plain where the Caystrus forms a lagoon before reaching the sea. It is a beautiful Greek site, with a clear horizon, formed sometimes of from five to six mountain heights, or bounded by low hills. The swans and the beautiful birds which met there at that time even as now gave all the charm of antiquity. There, partly in the marshes, partly hanging to the declivities of Mount Coressus, supported, besides, by Mount Prion and its surroundings on another little isolated hill, rose the immense town destined to be the third capital of Christianity after Jerusalem and Antioch.

We have already had occasion several times to remark that Christianity was most readily accepted in the smaller towns of the Roman Empire. The policy of that Empire had been to multiply isolated municipalities; isolated as regards race, religion, and patriotism. Ephesus was like Alexandria, Antioch, and Corinth, a typical town of this kind. It is easy 175thus to imagine what are still, in our days, the great towns of the Levant. What strikes the traveller when he goes through these labyrinths of infectious bazaars, of narrow and filthy courtyards, of temporary structures, which do not seem expected to last long?—it is the litter of a noble, of a political, and even of a municipal spirit. In these swarms of men, vulgarity and good instincts, idleness and activity, impertinence and amiability, meet each other: everything is found there excepting what constitutes an old local aristocracy; I would say glorious remembrances cultivated in common. With all that, there is much gossiping, prattling, levity; nearly everybody knows everybody else, and the people for ever occupy themselves with each other’s business; there is something active, passionate, unsteady,—a vain curiosity of frivolous folk, greedy after the smallest novelty, ever ready to follow the fashion, never capable of setting it. Christianity was a fruit of that species of fermentation which usually arises in societies of this kind, where men, freed from the prejudices of birth and race, take up more readily the philosophical attitude which calls itself cosmopolitan and humanitarian, than the peasant, the burgess, the noble, or feudal citizen can do. Like the Socialism of our days, like all new ideas, Christianity germinates in what may be called the corruption of great towns. This corruption, in fact, is often only a plainer and freer life, a greater indication of the hidden forces of humanity.

Formerly, as now, the Jews in such mixed towns held a very conspicuous position. That place was, to a small extent, what Smyrna and Salonica are at the present day. Ephesus especially possessed a very populous Jews’ quarter. The Pagan inhabitants were fanatical enough, as happens in all towns which are centres of pilgrimages and famous rites. The devotion to Artemis of Ephesus, spreading over 176the entire world, supported several considerable industries. But the importance of the town as the capital of Asia, the movement of business, the wealth of the people, of every race, made Ephesus a very useful centre for the diffusion of Christian ideas. These ideas found nowhere a better reception than in the populous commercial cities, full of strangers, visited by Syrians, Jews, and that population of uncertain origin who from time to time have commanded all the ports of the Mediterranean.

For centuries Ephesus had been nothing more than a purely Hellenic town. Formerly Ephesus had shone in the first rank, the least artistic among the Greek cities; but now and then she had allowed herself to be seduced by the manners of Asia. The town always had a bad reputation among the Greeks. Corruption, the introduction of luxury, was, according to the Greeks, a result of the effeminate manners of Ionia; at this time, and in this way, Ephesus was the centre and the abridgment of Ionia. The domination of the Lydians and of the Persians had destroyed energy and patriotism alike. Ephesus, like Sardis, was the most advanced point of Asiatic influence upon Europe. The excessive importance which the worship of Artemis took there, extinguished the scientific spirit, and favoured the over-flowing of all superstitions. It was an almost theocratic town; the fêtes there were numerous and splendid; the right wing of the temple peopled the town with courtesans. The scandalous sacerdotal institutions maintained there appeared each day more devoid of all sense of shame. That brilliant country of Heraclites, of Parhasius, perhaps of Apella, was only a town of porticoes, of stadia, of gymnasia, of theatres, a town of common-place sumptuosity, in spite of the masterpieces of painting and of sculpture that she still guards.

Although the gate had been spoilt by the engineers 177of Attains Philadelphus, the town increased rapidly, and became the principal emporium of the region on this side of the Taurus. It was the port of landing for what came from Italy and Greece, a sort of hostelry or mart on the threshold of Asia. Produce of every kind was heaped together there, and the town became a cosmopolitan one, where the socialistic ideas gained ground among the men who had lost all idea of patriotism. The country was extremely rich; the commerce immense; but nowhere was public spirit at a lower ebb. The inscriptions breathed the most shameful servility, the most absolute submission to the Romana.

It has been called the meeting-place of harlots and their prey. The town swarmed with magicians, diviners, mummers, and flute players; eunuchs, jewellers, sellers of amulets and medals, and romancers. The title of “Ephesian novels” designated, like that of “Milesian fables,” a species of literature, Ephesus being one of the towns which was especially chosen as the scene of love romances. The softness of the climate, in fact, put aside serious things: dancing and music remained the sole occupation. Public life degenerated into bacchanalian festivities: there was no such thing as study. The most extravagant miracles of Apollonius are reputed to have happened at Ephesus. The most celebrated Ephesian of the time at which we have now arrived was an astrologer named Balbilas, who possessed the confidence of Nero and Vespasian, and who appears to have been a scoundrel. A beautiful Corinthian temple, whose ruins can be seen at the present day, was raised about the same period. It was perhaps a temple dedicated to poor Claudius, whom Nero and Agrippa had just “drawn to heaven with a hook,” according to the happy word of Gallio.

Ephesus had already been reached by Christianity when Paul went to sojourn there. We have seen 178that Aquila and Priscilla had remained there, after having set out from Corinth. This pious couple, to whom, by a singular destiny, it was reserved to figure in the origin of the Churches of Rome, of Corinth, of Ephesus, formed a little nucleus of disciples. Of this number, doubtless, was that Epasnetus whom St Paul calls “the first-fruits of Achaia unto Christ,” and whom he loved so much. Another much more important conversion was that of a Jew named Apollonius or Apollos, originally of Alexandria, who had settled at Ephesus a little after the first journey of Paul. He had acquired in the Jewish schools of Egypt a profound knowledge of the Scriptures, an ingenious manner of interpreting them, a sublime eloquence. He was a kind of Philo, in quest of new ideas which then dawned on all parts of Judaism. In his journeys, he found him-self of the same belief with the disciples of John the Baptist, and had received their baptism. He had also heard them speak of Jesus, and it seems certain that from that time he accorded to the latter the title of Christ; but his idea of Christianity was incomplete. On his arrival at Ephesus he betook himself to the synagogue, where he had much success by his lively and inspired delivery. Aquila and Priscilla heard him, and were enraptured to receive such an auxiliary. They took him aside, instructed him more fully, and gave him more precise ideas upon certain points. As they were not very clever theologians themselves, they did not dream, it seems, of re-baptising him in the name of Jesus. Apollos formed around him a little group, whom he taught his doctrine, corrected by Aquila and Priscilla, but on whom he merely bestowed the baptism of John, the only one he knew. After some time he wished to pass into Achaia, and the brethren of Ephesus gave him a very warm letter of recommendation to those of Corinth.

179

It is under these circumstances that Paul arrived at Ephesus. He lodged with Aquila and Priscilla, as he had already done at Corinth; associated himself anew with them, and worked in their shop. Ephesus was justly celebrated for its tents. The artisans of this trade probably inhabited the poor suburbs which extended from Mount Prion to the steep hill of Aiā-Solouk. There doubtless was the first Christian household; the apostolic basilicas were there, the venerated graves of all Christianity. After the destruction of the temple of Artemis, Ephesus having exchanged its Pagan celebrity for an equally celebrated Christianity, and having become a town of the first order in the memories and legends of the new worship. Byzantine Ephesus was wholly grouped round a hill which had the advantage of possessing the most precious monuments of Christianity. The old site being exchanged from an infectious marsh, where an active civilisation had ceased to regulate the course of the waters, the old town had been abandoned little by little; its gigantic monuments, in consequence of their nearness to navigable canals and the sea, had been made use of as quarries, and thus the town had been displaced for nearly a league. Perhaps the choice of a domicile which some poor Jews in the reign of Claudius or Nero had made was the first cause of this removal. The most ancient Turkish conquest continued the Byzantine tradition; a great Mussulman town succeeded to the Christian town, which still exists in the midst of so many memories of ruin, fever, and oblivion.

Paul was not here, as he was in his first missions, in the midst of a synagogue, ignorant of the new mystery, which he must endeavour to gain over. He had before him a Church which had been formed in the most original and spontaneous fashion, with the aid of two good Jewish merchants, and of a strange doctor, who was still only half a Christian. The company 180of Apollos was composed of about twelve members. Paul questioned them, and perceived that their faith was still incomplete: in particular, they had never heard of the Holy Ghost. Paul completed their instruction, re-baptised them in the name of Jesus, and “laid his hands on them.” The Spirit immediately descended on them; they spake with tongues, and prophesied like perfect Christians.

The Apostle sought to enlarge this little circle of believers. He was not afraid of finding himself here in the presence of the intellectual and scientific spirit which had stopped him short at Athens. Ephesus was not a great intellectual centre. Superstition reigned there without any control; everybody lived in foolish preoccupations of demonology and theology. The magic formulas of Ephesus (Ephesia Grammata) were celebrated, books of sorcery abounded, and a number of men employed their time in these foolish puerilities. Apollonius of Tyana was at Ephesus about this time.

Paul, according to his habit, preached in the synagogue. During the space of three months, he did not cease each Sabbath to teach the Kingdom of God. He had little success. They did not come against him with riotings or severities, but they received his doctrine with insulting and scornful words. He then resolved to renounce the synagogue, and re-united himself to part of his disciples in a place which they called Σχολὴ Τυράννου, “The school of one Tyrannus.” Perhaps it was a public spot there, one of those scholæ or semicircular vaults (or apses) which were so numerous in ancient towns, and which served as xystes for conversation and free instruction. Perhaps, on the other hand, it served as a private hall of a personage—of a grammarian, for example—named Tyrannus. In general, Christianity profited very little by these scholæ, which nearly always formed parts of the hot baths and gymnasia. The favourite 181place of the Christian propaganda, after the synagogue, was the private house, the chimney corner, In this vast metropolis of Ephesus. preaching might, however, be done openly. During two years, Paul did not cease to speak in the Schola Tyranni. This prolonged teaching in a public place, after a little time, made noise enough. The Apostles supplemented it by frequent visits to the houses of those who had been converted or touched. All pro-consular Asia heard the name of Jesus, and several Churches, subordinate to Ephesus, were established around. They also spoke of certain miracles effected by Paul. His reputation as a worker of miracles had reached such a point that people eagerly sought for the “hand-kerchiefs and aprons” which had touched his garment, to apply them to the sick. They believed that a medical virtue was exhaled from his body, and was so transmitted.

The taste of the Ephesians for magic introduced episodes still more shocking. Paul was believed to have a great power over devils. It appears that the Jewish exorcists sought to steal his charms and to exorcise “in the name of Jesus whom Paul preacheth.” There is a legend of the misadventure of these quacks, who pretended to be sons or disciples of a certain High Priest named Scæva. Having wished to drive out an evil spirit by means of the aforesaid formula, they were grossly insulted by the possessed man, who not content with that, threw himself upon them, tore their clothes in pieces, and beat them soundly. The degradation of the popular mind was such, that many Jews and many Pagans believed in Jesus for such a poor motive. These conversions took place above all among the men who occupied themselves with magic. Struck by the superiority of Paul’s formula, the lovers of occult sciences came to him to exchange confidences concerning their practices. Many even brought their 182books of magic and burnt them; they valued at fifty thousand pieces of silver (drachmæ) the price of the Ephesia Grammata burnt in this manner.

Let us turn our eyes away from these sad shadows. All that is done by the popular ignorant masses is spotted with unpleasantness. Illusion, chimera, are the conditions of the great things created by the people. It is only the work of wise men which can be pure; but wise men are usually powerless. We have a physiology and a medicine very superior to that of Paul; we are disengaged from a crowd of errors of which he partook, alas! and it is to be feared that we may never do a thousandth part of what he did. It is only when humanity as a whole shall be instructed, and reach a certain point of positive philosophy, that human affairs will be led by reason. One would never understand the history of the past if one did not refuse to treat as good and great movements in which many mean and equivocal features are mixed up.

Page
INTRODUCTION		vii
chap.
I.	First Journey of Paul—The Cyprus Mission.	1
II.	Continuation of the First Journey of Paul—The Galatian Mission.	12
III.	First Affair in regard to Circumcision.	28
IV.	Slow Propagation of Christianity: Its Introduction at Rome.	50
V.	Second Journey of Paul—Another Sojourn at Galatia.	59
VI.	Continuation of the Second Journey of Paul—The Macedonian Mission.	69
VII.	Continuation of the Second Journey of Paul—Paul at Athens.	86
VIII.	Continuation of the Second Journey of Paul—First Sojourn at Corinth.	110
IX.	Continuation of the Second Journey of Paul—First Epistles—Interior Condition of the New Churches.	119
X.	Return of Paul to Antioch—Quarrel between Peter and Paul—Counter-Mission organised by James, Brother of the Lord.	144
viXI.	Troubles in the Churches of Galatia.	161
XII.	Third Journey of Paul—Foundation of the Church at Ephesus.	172
XIII.	Progress of Christianity in Asia and Phrygia.	182
XIV.	Schisms in the Church of Corinth—Apollos—First Scandals.	191
XV.	Continuation of the Third Journey of Paul—The Great Contribution—Departure from Ephesus.	219
XVI.	Continuation of the Third Journey of Paul—Second Stay of Paul in Macedonia.	229
XVII.	Continuation of the Third Mission—Second Stay of Paul at Corinth—The Epistle to the Romans.	240
XVIII.	Return of Paul to Jerusalem.	261
XIX.	Last Stay of Paul at Jerusalem—His Apprehension.	267
XX.	Captivity of Paul at Cæsarea of Palestine.	282
XXI.	Paul’s Voyage as a Prisoner.	290
XXII.	A Glance over the Work of Paul.	296

THE HISTORY

OF THE

ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY.

BOOK III.

SAINT PAUL.

BY

ERNEST RÉNAN

London:

MATHIESON & COMPANY

CONTENTS.