CONVERSION FROM PAGANISM TO CHRISTIANITY,
BROUGHT ABOUT ENTIRELY BY A TRANSFER OF PROPERTY
Notwithstanding the conversion of Constantine to the Christian faith, title, the ensigns, and the [p.144] prerogatives of sovereign pontiff were accepted without hesitation, by seven successive Christian emperors. Gratian was the first who refused the pontifical robe187, and threw off the badges of Paganism; for though he retained the title of Sovereign Pontiff, he performed no part of its functions.188 From motives no doubt of the most disinterested piety, "this emperor seized the lands and endowments which had been allotted to maintain the priests and sacrifices of the ancient Paganism, and appropriated them to his own use."189 A.D. 382.
We have yet extant, and happily I have here on my table, the
celebrated oration delivered by Julius Firmicius Maternus, to the Emperors Constantius and Constans, the sons and successors of Constantine the Great; calling on those holy Emperors, to seize all the remaining property of the professors of Paganism, which his father had spared, and thus by reducing them to beggary, to starve them into salvation."
Take away, take away, in perfect security, (exclaims this disinterested Christian orator.) O! most holy emperors, take away all the ornaments of their temples. Let the fire of the mint, or the flames of the mines, melt down their gods. Seize upon all their wealthy endowments, and turn them to your own use and property.190 And O! most sacred emperors, it is absolutely necessary for you to revenge and punish this evil. You are commanded by the law of the Most High God, to persecute all sorts of idolatry with the utmost severity: hear and commend to your own sacred understandings, what God himself commands. He commands you not to spare your son, or your brother; he bids you plunge the avenging knife even into the heart of your wife that sleeps in your [p.145] bosom; to persecute your dearest friend with a sublime severity, and to arm your whole people against these sacrilegious Pagans, and tear them limb from limb. Yea! even whole cities, if you should find this guilt in them, must be cut off. O! most holy emperors! God promises you the rewards of his mercy, upon condition of your thus acting. Do therefore what he commands—complete what he prescribes."Nothing can be more orthodox and truly Christian than this oration. It presents us a faithful picture of the genius and character of primitive Christianity. The reader will perhaps think he has enough of it. The Orator of the Areopagus, however he might have transgressed the laws of his country, transgressed not the fair sense of historic fact and license of oratorical figuration, when he said, "Astonished Paganism grew pale, when she saw the bloodstained banner of the cross, and from her innocent hand, the flowery chaplets of the chaste Diana, and of the hospitable Jupiter, down dropt, and bloody treason triumphed over them!"
We have, of the same age, a beautiful contrast to this spiritual oration of Firmicius, in an epistle of the Pagan orator, LIBANIUS, in which he discovers at the same time, what the tempers and dispositions of a Pagan were, towards those who left the faith of their ancestors, and embraced the new-fangled doctrines of Christianity. "ORION, (writes he), was my friend, when he was in prosperity, and now he is in affliction, I have the same disposition towards him. If he thinks differently from us, concerning the deity, he hurts himself, being deceived; but it is not fit that his friends should therefore look upon him as an enemy."191 Alas! since one who had once been a minister of the gospel, but is now prisoner for his conscientious opposition to it, fell into affliction and difference of opinion, concerning the deity, it was not only forgotten that he had once been a friend, but that he had ever been a fellow creature, a brother, or a son.192
We have also still extant, the petition of SYMMACHUS, the high priest of Paganism, which he presented to the Emperors Valentinian, Theodosius and Arcadius, and for having delivered which, the Emperor Theodosius commanded the reverend orator to descend from the pulpit, and go immediately into exile—Oakham!)
[p.146] But impious and unreasonable as it was held to be in Christian ears, it was not worse than of a piece with the extract which I here subjoin:—
"Does not the religion of the Romans come under the protection of the Roman laws! By what name shall we call an alienation of rights, which no laws or circumstances of things ever justified? Freed men receive legacies, nor are even slaves deprived of the privilege of receiving what is left to them by will—they are only the noble Vestals, and the attendants on the sacred rites upon which the public welfare depends, who are deprived of the privilege of receiving estates legally bequeathed to them. The Treasury detains the lands which were given to the Vestals and their officers by our dying progenitors. Do but consult your own generous minds, and you will not think that those things belong to the public, which you have already appropriated to the use of others. If length of time be of weight in matters of religion, surely we ought to preserve that faith which has subsisted for so many ages, and to follow our parents, who have so happily followed theirs. We ask for no other state of religion than that which secured the empire to your blessed Father, and gave him the happiness of a legitimate issue to succeed him. That blessed prince now looks down from heaven, and beholds the tears of the priests, and considers the breach of their privileges as a reflection upon himself."193
The Holy Father and Bishop St. Ambrose, strenuously opposed this petition, and ingeniously argued from a text of scripture, which served to carry the point in his days, but which since has become apocryphal, and consequently is no longer to be found; but this it was, "all the earth belongeth unto the righteous,194 but to the infidels not one penny," (obelus).
Lardner is anxious to vindicate the disinterestedness of St. Ambrose, who opposed himself to this unreasonable remonstrance of "these poor blind benighted Pagans;" and puts in proof, the letter written to the Emperor Eugenius in the year 392, in which St. Ambrose declares, that "those revenues had not been taken away by his advice, only he had advised that when once they were taken away, they should not be given back again." That’s Christian all over! as much as to say, "I’ll have nothing to do with thieving, but I’ll go your halves!"
[p.147] The reader has only to turn his eye to our table of the Ecclesiastical Revenues at this day, and he may solve as he shall please, the important question— whether, if these revenues were taken away from the church, and transferred to the professors of as false a religion as ever was on earth, our churchmen would not run after the revenues, and leave Christianity to the fate of Paganism. It is a remarkable fact, that in the Corpus juris, or whole body of Roman law, notwithstanding all the dreadful stories of persecutions and martyrdom, which Christians relate that they have endured from the Pagan magistrates, there never was on record any law whatever, that had been enacted against Christians—while there were and have been the most sanguinary laws enacted for the prosecution and eternal persecution of unbelievers.
By a law of the Emperors Valentinius and Theodosius, whoever had been known to have apostatised from the Christian religion, was debarred from the right of bequeathing property by will—nor was the Pagan religion effectually suppressed, till the profession of it was prohibited under the penalty of death. Thousands suffered that penalty, whom we are not allowed to consider as martyrs. It is well known, that the most holy and truly Christian Emperor Theodosius, put in practice the advice of Julius Firmicius, upon the heterodox citizens of Thessalonica, to the letter. He put the whole city to the sword, and "utterly destroyed every thing that breathed, even as the Lord God of Israel commanded."—An example which was followed in like manner, on the ever memorable day of St. Bartholomew, August 24, 1572, when seventy thousand Protestants, subjects of the most Christian Charles IX., were butchered throughout France, at the instigation of his pious mother, Catherine de Medicis. Mr. Higgins, a sincere believer, thus concludes his beautiful work:—"Look at Ireland, look at Spain, in short, look every where, and you will see the priests reeking with gore. They have converted, and are converting, populous and happy nations into deserts, and have made our beautiful world into a slaughter-house, drenched with blood and tears."—Celtic Druids, p. 299.
Great book, highly recommend:
The Diegesis: being a discovery of the origin, evidences, and early history of Christianity ... By Robert Taylor 1829
http://books.google.com/books?id=4N4NAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q=&f=false
