HEATHENISM AND CHRISTIANITY. 



165 



For Christianity and humanity it was well 

 that these political sentiments did not constantly 

 assert themselves on the throne of the Cassars. 

 Although it was a great exaggeration to say of 

 the Christians, as Celsus did, that only one and 

 another of them were still wandering about, and 

 that they were in constant danger of prosecu- 

 tion, the rigid measures of Marcus Aurelius 

 against them seem for the time to have met with 

 considerable success. But the renewed attacks 

 of the Marcomans, which, after a. d. 178, de- 

 manded all the forces of the empire, must have 

 diverted attention from the Christians, and after 

 the emperor had died in camp at Vienna in a. d. 

 180, the Christian Church under his successors 

 enjoyed seventy years of rest, which was not dis- 

 turbed till the middle of the third century by the 

 severe persecution for a few years under Decius 

 and Valerian. The followers of Christ increased 

 so greatly during this period, their mode of life 

 and worship emerged so completely from its pre- 

 vious obscurity, that, in spite of the laws against 

 unauthorized religions, they had become a power 

 which had to be taken account of, or at any rate 

 to be recognized as a fact. The attitude assumed 

 by the public opinion of the Greco-Roman world 

 toward Christianity was inevitably influenced by 

 it. We hear no more of the secret excesses of 

 the Christians after they became more generally 

 known. Hatred of the enemies of the gods 

 became appeased in time, as people had become 

 more accustomed to see Oriental divinities fifling 

 a large place beside the ancient gods of Greece 

 and Rome, not only in the religion of individuals, 

 but even in public worship. The aversion of the 

 heathen to Christianity of course continued; 

 jealousy could but be fostered by its successes. 

 But the professors of a religion who formed so 

 large a portion of the population of the empire 

 could no longer be regarded as " enemies of the 

 human race ; " and even political distrust gradu- 

 ally disappeared to so large an extent that toward 

 the end of the third century many Christians 

 served in the army, were intrusted with posi- 

 tions of command, important political offices, 

 and places at court. 



Under these circumstances, the attacks upon 

 Christianity took a different form. After the 

 middle of the third century the last learned 

 champion of polytheism arose in the neo-Platonic 

 philosophy. But decidedly as it was opposed to 

 Christian doctrine, up to the sixth century, and 

 long after it had gained its outward victories, the 

 neo-riatonists did not venture to deny that there 

 was some truth in these doctrines. The Chris- 



tian religion had gained so much by its successes 

 and its obvious moral effect, that it could no lon- 

 ger be regarded simply as an imposture or a prod- 

 uct of superstition by serious and truth-loving 

 opponents, such as the neo-Platonists mostly were. 

 They even recognized in it a kernel of truth, 

 round which, doubtless, much error and impost- 

 ure had grown. The founder of Christianity, said 

 these neo-Platonists, was a good and wise man, 

 but his disciples had distorted his doctrine. It 

 was they who first gave out that Christ was a 

 God, and introduced the worship of him as op- 

 posed to the popular deities. He himself had 

 worshiped these gods, and with their aid, by 

 means of magic arts, had worked the miracles, 

 the reality of which the philosophers did not dis- 

 pute ; but he did not, therefore, claim to be more 

 than a man, as other sages were on whom the 

 gods had conferred similar powers. 



From this point of view, rhilostratus, in his 

 " Life of Apollonws of Tyana," about a. d. 230, 

 had, without naming Christ, compared the Gos- 

 pel representation of him with the neo-Pythago- 

 rean ideal of an Hellenic philosopher and prophet ; 

 and his disciple, the Emperor Alexander Severus, 

 placed a statue of the founder of Christianity 

 side by side with Orpheus and Abraham, Py- 

 thagoras and Apollonius, in his private chapel. It 

 was on similar assumptions that, half a century 

 later, the neo-Platonist Porphyry proceeded in 

 that famous polemical treatise against the Chris- 

 tians, which their hatred caused them so effect- 

 ually to destroy, that only isolated indications 

 of its contents have come do^n to us. We learn 

 from these fragments that Porphyry, a learned 

 man, skilled in logic and philosophy, chose just 

 such points for his attack as have, in more recent 

 times, been selected by the opponents of super- 

 natural religion. He asked, with a Reimarus, 

 why had not Christ appeared before, if salvation 

 depended upon him ? He thought it incompre- 

 hensible that the Christians should reject sacri- 

 fice, when God himself had enjoined it on the 

 Jews, [n the oft-discussed contest between Peter 

 and Paul at Antioch, he saw a proof that a faith, 

 over which its most enlightened advocates dis- 

 puted, must be based upon a fiction. He accused 

 even Jesus of dissimulation, because he said he 

 was not going to the feast in Jerusalem, and af- 

 terward went. 1 He stumbled at many of the nar- 

 ratives in the Old Testament, and, rightly enough, 

 would not permit the Jews to get over them by 

 allegoric interpretations. With keen eye he de- 

 tected in the prophecies of the Book of Daniel a 

 1 John vii. 8, 14. 



