1.] TO THE LAST OF THE TWELVE CÆSARS, hopelessness of the moral decay. We may feel, work too enables us to judge of the cold 'consolations' Dion 17 tom, Pliny Maximus There was a sort of instinct, at times, in the later Arrian, Roman Stoics towards religion of a dim kind; Chrysosbut their reason paused. In truth, the Neo-plato- the younger, nicians of the following age were the first heathen of Tyre, in whom the ethical and religious spirit re-appeared Apuleius. as one. Individual examples of theistic aspiration may be seen here and there, as in Epictetus and Arrian, as well as in Plutarch. Dion too, the friend of the younger Pliny, may be named as an exception; but scarcely Pliny himself. Maximus of Tyre, and Apuleius, were no doubt believers in one God; but we can add no other names. It seemed as if the fulfilment of the solemn words of the apostle were still to go on, 'God suffered all men to walk in their own ways.' We must reserve to a later page some of the The Twelve well-known outlines which may be traced of the Twelve Cæsars themselves, which Suetonius and Tacitush enable us so fully to appreciate. The most profligate and cruel of them all was the greatest Ad Uxorem; and also in the Moralia. h Suetonius, Nero, 10; and Tacitus, Ann. xiii. 50, 51. C Cæsars. T favourite in Rome, and, long after his death, the people clung to the thought that Nero was alive. The story of that Imperial line as a whole, from Augustus down to Domitian, is one of almost incredible baseness; while reign after reign is crowned with a 'deification' of the emperor, amidst universal applause. But at length a worthier ruler appeared; and at the close of the century, it almost seemed as though the clouds might clear. The letters of the younger Pliny give us so fair a view of the character of the Times of Emperor Trajan, that the thought is suggested that an era of justice and goodness might yet dawn on the Empire. But hope arises only to be quenched in the revelations of the satirist, exhibiting in the reign of Trajan an audacity of universal crime never surpassed. Trajan; Yet in the letters of Pliny to which we refer there are signs of a different order of things-signs which neither Trajan nor his proconsul understood-telling indeed that another moral life was rising among men, though the heathen 'knew not how.' Writing to the Emperor, Pliny says, that in Bithynia, (bordering on the sphere, as we know, of apostolic labours), he found certain persons, not only natives of that prowith Chris- vince but some who had come from Rome, who were tianity, in Bithynia, called Christians,' and were vaguely accused of Proconsul. illegal practices in their assemblies. He had not yet been present at the trials of any of these men, though the rise of their sect was by no means recent, and he had known cases of Christians of twenty who comes in contact through his 1.] CHRISTIANITY RECOGNIZED AS A SOCIETY. years' standing. Their numbers, he continues, were considerable, and both in country places and in towns enthusiastically increasing. He intimates a desire to put down these Christians;' and some of them had been detected by the operation of an imperial law regulating certain assemblies in private houses; Christians being best known as members of Communities meeting together under some rules of their own. Pliny further persuaded himself that he saw signs that the Pagan worship, which had been failing in Bithynia, might yet revive. 19 anity first known as a Society. It appears singular that the Proconsul was so little informed as to the origin of these Christians; and it shows how silent had been their growth. They had Christi now been brought before him indirectly, and as a new sodality or company. There had been for ages, under both the Grecian and Roman laws, numerous municipal and social guilds (as we should call them) allowed though scarcely regulated by the State at any time. Synagogues among the Jews came under the shelter of this general permission, and in them, and offshoots from them, Christianity first took refuge. As a specimen of these tolerated societies, Pliny mentions a charitable club of the Amisenians which had then obtained a legal status with rights secured to it. But at this crisis, some such provincial associations had been abused to purposes of sedition, and stricter measures were therefore contemplated to test their loyalty. It was perhaps unavoidable that such tests should be of a mixed political and religious character. Thus unconsciously and blindly the representative of the Emperor came into collision with Christians; for this religious test they could not take. Pliny's apparent ignorance of Christianity is the more remarkable, because he was acquainted with Tacitus, whose annals of the reign of Tiberius included the now-lost portion, which recorded the The moral procuratorship of Pilate in Judæa. Enough however is said to show, that in the Society of Christians recognized. Pliny soon recognized a moral stand made by them against the corruption of the times: a fact which in many cases must have won his sympathy. aims of Christianity also Rumours as to Apollonius of Tyana, and others after him; whose Pagan missions arose; and died. For among the acuter minds of heathenism, the consciousness of wide moral ruin began to incline some very favourably towards new efforts at goodness. In a few instances, their own virtuous zeal took a kind of missionary character. We may refer perhaps, in illustration of this, to the story of Apollonius of Tyana, (who by no means is a solitary case), the object of whose career was the religious and moral reform of Heathenism; and whose imitators are found in the following century. If we may trust the account of him, written however some generations after his times, it was the aim of his life to become a strict Pythagorean; and in all places where he sojourned or travelled, he desired to lead back the minds of the people to the temples of the forsaken gods, and the practice of ascetic virtue, which was the heathen ideal of goodness. He was i The lost portions of Tacitus are those of the times of our Lord's Death, A.D. 29-31; those of S. Paul's first ten years, A.D. 37-47 ; and those of the fall of Jerusalem. k Note C. brought up in the famed schools of Tarsus, and must have been there with Athenodorus the Stoic, if not also when S. Paul was in that city before his departure for Antioch. He is said to have practised abstinence and observed celibacy with a strictness which elevated him in the eyes of the populace above mortality!. Nothing was wanting, apparently, to perfect his influence among them. dorus of 21 B.C. 100. But there was no result. Not the least rumour remains, in all the age in which he lived, of the success of his efforts for his faith or virtue. His name is absolutely unmentioned by any writer till eighty years after his death; nor of all the moral missions (Artemiattributed either to him, or others before and after Ephesus, him, is any historical trace to be found. At the end Elius of the century the desolation of philosophic no less Alex. Abothan popular paganism is complete. Only in Egypt, and -at Esneh, Ombos, Dendera, and Hermonthis,- grinus there was a transient re-founding of heathenism, A.D. 117which quickly perished. Aristides, noteichos, Pere Proteus, 150. Aulus Gellius, Noctes, xii. 11.) III. civilization III. It was evident, on all hands, that in the separation of Religion and morals in human life were involved problems of which natural society could find no solution m. But we must not forget The Jews' that there was scattered throughout the world, and must not had been for many ages, another form of civilization, looked. holding itself everywhere apart from the nations. It claimed to have been constituted on a supernatural basis, organized by God Himself a thousand years 1 Lect. III. p. 95. m Lect. VI. p. 211. be over |