institutions of Rome. As these were connected with the religion of the state, and as the Christians, whose faith was most strongly opposed to that religion, were now become exceedingly numerous, he saw that he must suppress their doctrine before he could hope to carry his design into effect. He accordingly issued an edict, requiring all his subjects, under heavy penalties, to return to the ancient religion, and a persecution of the church, more severe than any that had yet occurred, was the immediate result. The fervid declamation of St. Cyprian, or the highly-coloured fancy-piece of St. Gregory Nyssen on this subject, cannot be relied on with implicit confidence; but from the fact that numbers (including priests and even prelates) apostatised, and from the constancy of the tradition, there can be no doubt but that the persecution was both general and severe. The bishop of Rome suffered martyrdom, those of Jerusalem and Antioch died in prison. The celebrated Origen was also among those who suffered imprisonment and torture in this calamitous period.

Valerian is said to have been at first extremely favourable to the Christians; but when he was in the East, influenced by Macrianus, he wrote to the senate, ordering the severest measures to be adopted against them. The persecution which ensued was terminated by the captivity of the emperor in the year 260, and Gallienus wrote circulars to the bishops, authorising them to resume the public exercise of their offices, and assuring them of his protection.

Among the martyrs in the time of Valerian the most illustrious was St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage.

This able, zealous, and eloquent prelate had prudently concealed himself during the persecution of Decius. When Valerian's first edict was issued, the proconsul summoned him before him, and informed him that the emperor required all who had abandoned the religion of the state to return to it*. Cyprian replied that he was a Christian, and a bishop, a worshiper of the true and only God. A sentence of banishment was then pronounced against him, and he was sent to Curubis, a city on the sea-coast, about forty miles from Carthage. On the arrival, however, of a new proconsul, he was allowed to return to Carthage, and reside in his gardens near the city. He had not been there long when (258)

* The prelate had been a convert.

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the proconsul received positive orders to proceed capitally against the Christian teachers. An officer was therefore sent with some soldiers to arrest Cyprian and bring him before the tribunal. As his cause could not be heard that day the officer took him to his own house for the night, where he treated him with much attention, and allowed his friends free access to him. The Christians kept watch all through the night, in the street before the house. In the morning the bishop was conducted before the proconsul's tribunal. Having answered to his name, he was called on to obey the emperor's mandate, and offer sacrifice. He replied, "I do not sacrifice." The proconsul urged him, but he was firm; and that magistrate, having consulted with his council, read from a tablet his sentence in the following words: "That Thascius Cyprianus should be immediately beheaded, as the enemy of the gods of Rome, and as the chief and ringleader of a eriminal association, which he had seduced into an impious resist. ance against the laws of the most holy emperors, Valerian and Gallienus." The bishop calmly responded, "God be praised!" the Christians, who were present in great numbers, cried out, "Let us too be beheaded with him." Cyprian was then led away to the plain before the city; the presbyters and deacons accompanied him, and aided him in his preparations for death; he took off his upper garment, and directing them to give the executioner five-and-twenty pieces of gold, laid his hands on his face and bent his head, which was struck off at a single blow. In the night his body was conveyed, amidst a multitude of lights, to the burial-place of the Christians, and there deposited, the government giving no opposition*.

After the reign of Valerian the church had rest for nearly half a century, when its last and greatest persecution broke out. We will relate that event in its proper place.

On reviewing the history of the church for the first three centuries, various subjects of reflection present themselves. We may, for example, observe, as we have already done, that the sufferings of the Christians have been greatly exaggerated by the frauds and fictions of succeeding ages; that the persecutions on the part of the Roman government were political rather than religious, as they occurred in the reigns of the best emperors, who were evidently prompted by the desire of

*There is a very circumstantial account of the martyrdom of Cyprian by the deacon Pontius, who was in attendance on him; the proconsular acts also remain, and the two accounts harmonise.

restoring the ancient institutions to which the Roman greatness was ascribed; that finally, the greatest sufferings of the Christians were caused by the fanatic spirit of the populace, especially in the cities of Asia, and at the instigation of the Jews; and were sometimes brought on by their own imprudence. It may further be observed, that the charge made against the heathen priesthood of exciting the fanaticism of the people out of regard to their own gains, does not seem to be well-founded. They did not, in fact, except in Asia Minor, form a separate caste or order; and they therefore had not the corporate spirit which would inspire them with jealousy and fears. Finally, we would observe that the popular saying, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," should be received with great limitations. That many were led to view Christianity with a favourable eye when they saw the constancy with which even women and children met torture and death, is not to be denied; the same effects were observed in England in the time of queen Mary Tudor. But false religion, heresy, even atheism itself, have had their martyrs, and the progress of Christianity should be ascribed to its true causes, namely, its purity, and the other causes already enumerated.

It is a melancholy reflection, that giving the greatest extent consistent with truth and probability to the number of Christians immolated by the policy or the intolerance of heathen Rome, it still falls infinitely short of that of the victims sacrificed to the bigotry of papal Rome. When we think of the crusade against the Albigenses, of the 50,000 or 100,000 protestants destroyed in the Netherlands, the St. Bartholomew massacre in France, the 100,000 persons burnt by the Inquisition, and the other dreadful deeds of the church of Rome, the persecutions of Aurelius, of Decius, and even of Diocletian, shrink into absolute insignificance; and we are forced to acknowledge that the perversion of true religion can outgo any false religion in barbarity. At the same time we must protest against the acts of popery being laid to the charge of genuine Christianity.

The evils of persecution were only transient; but those inflicted by heresy and false doctrine were deep and permanent, and their ill effects are felt even at the present day. The pride of the human intellect, and the desire to discover those secrets which are not to be known to man, gave origin to most of those opinions which we find recorded as mon

strous heresies by the Fathers of the Church. These may be all comprehended under the term Gnosis (Pvwots, knowledge), the word used to designate the false philosophy which then prevailed, and which had been derived from the sultry regions of India and Persia. To this is to be added the New Platonism of the Greeks, which however had borrowed largely of the oriental philosophy, and the Judaism or corrupted religion of the people of Israel. From these various sources flowed all the corruptions of the pure and simple religion of the Gospel; and so early did their operation commence, that it may be said that the stream had hardly burst from the sacred mount when it was defiled with mundane impurities.

It is not our intention to treat of all the heresies enumerated by the Fathers. We shall only touch upon the principal ones, commencing with those which originated in Judaism*.

From the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul, we learn that the Jewish converts in general, from devotion to their law, whose precepts they regarded as of everlasting obligation, and from their ignorance of the true nature and spirit of Christianity, held that the observance of the ceremonial law was necessary for salvation. Against this erroneous notion the apostle Paul exerted himself with the utmost vigour; and he succeeded in checking its progress among the gentile converts. It still, however, continued to prevail among the Christians of Judæa; and after the destruction of Jerusalem in the reign of Hadrian, those who persisted in maintaining it withdrew to Peræa, or the region beyond the Jordan, and formed there a church of their own. They soon, however, split into two sects named Nazarenes and Ebionites+; each of which had its peculiar Gospel, differing from those which have been received by the church in general. The former, who held that the Mosaic law was binding only on Jews, were not regarded as heretics; but the latter, denying the miraculous conception of Christ, and asserting that the Mosaic law with all the additions made to it by the traditions of the Pharisees was binding on every one,

* In the remainder of this chapter our immediate authority has been the learned, candid and judicious Mosheim. The references to Irenæus and other writers will be found in his works.

That is, The Poor, as the term signifies in Hebrew. The best-founded opinion as to its origin is, that it was adopted by themselves on account of their humility or poverty.

were naturally placed under that denomination. Neither attained to any importance, and after no very long time their names alone remained to testify their former existence.

On looking through the ancient religions of Europe, from the Frozen Ocean to the Mediterranean, one is struck with the absence of all purely malignant beings: in those of Asia, on the contrary, we usually encounter one or more deities whose delight is in the production of evil, or whose office is destruction. In the Mosaic religion the evil power is justly represented as the mere servant of the supreme God; but in some of the uninspired creeds, he is exalted into the rival and enemy of the great Author of good. This system received its fullest development in the ancient religion of Persia, where, beside the original cause of all, there was a hierarchy of good spirits ruled over by a prince named Ormuzd, who were engaged in ceaseless conflict with Ahriman the prince of darkness, and his subordinate spirits. The Apocryphal books of the Jews show that during the Captivity they had imbibed many ideas from the religion of their conquerors; and at the time when Christianity was first promulgated, the Oriental philosophy or Gnosis, as this system is denominated, was widely spread over western Asia.

The doctrine of the two principles evidently arose from the wish to explain the origin of evil. Nature and reason lead man to regard the supreme being as purely good. That evil could not proceed from him was manifest; whence, then, the ills of nature and the vice and pains of man? Matter which composed the parts of the world and the bodies of man was an apparent cause; but matter, sluggish and inert, could hardly be supposed to have organised itself and produced the beauty, order and harmony so conspicuous in the material world; and if that task was assigned to the Deity, he became by necessary inference the author of all the evil that thence resulted. There must therefore have been some intelligent being the author of evil. On the subject of the nature of this being there was much difference of opinion. Some regarded him as equal to and co-eternal with the good Deity; others held him to be generated of matter; others again maintained that he was the offspring of the Deity, who from pride and envy had rebelled against the author of his being, and erected a separate state for himself. Many viewed the creator of the world as one of the spirits generated by the Deity who was moved to his work by a sudden impulse, and acted with the