LECTUREVI.THE TWO RELIGIONS IN HISTORY.
In His apostles, and the disciples who gathered round them, endowed with the memory of His words and deeds, two simple sacraments, and a promise that He would be with them to the end of the æon, while they fulfilled His commission to evangelise and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, the continuance of the Church which our Lord had founded was secured. Buddha left behind him neither sacrament to signify and seal the benefits which he had conferred, nor any promise of personal fellowship with or interest in his followers; but he was survived by the Monastic Order which he had founded, by a law containing the essentials of his system, and a form of discipline containing the customs to be observed in their assemblies, and the rules to which all the brethren were to besubject. Though the personal guide to Nirvana was lost to them, they still in the law possessed his way to it, and by observing the law, and following his way, they would fulfil his last stirring exhortation,[319]“Be ye lamps unto yourselves, be ye a refuge to yourselves, O monks.”
So much importance being attached to the law, his disciples, immediately after his decease, according to the tradition, set about collecting the materials of it, in his remembered discourses, decisions, and in all that he said; and this labour of recalling, determining, and perpetuating his teaching seems to have occupied them for several generations. There is no trace of any corresponding anxiety on the part of the Christian Church to collect the words of the Lord Jesus. The Gospels are not the earliest of our scriptures, and they were produced more for the edification of Jewish and Gentile converts, than to secure for the Church a standard of belief and of discipline. The function of the Church was not so much to recall and perpetuate the teaching of its Lord as to interpret the significance of His life, and death, and resurrection. No written or remembered instructions were required, for the apostles believed that they had Himself to tell them on every occasion what they should do and teach. From the very first theyprayed to Him in full assurance that He heard and answered them. They believed that He had shown Himself to some of them, and that He was witnessed for in all of them by a new possession. The Gentile world had been familiar with the μανία of the medium through whom a Divine oracle was supposed to be given, and with therabiesof the howling priests of the goddess Cybele, but the Christians professed to be inspired by the πνεῦμα ἅγιον. In some instances this inspiration manifested itself in extravagant forms and in mysterious utterances,[320]but those who were most under its control had complete possession of themselves; their speech was intelligible, and sober, and most convincing, making “manifest the secrets of the heart.”
Unquestionably this belief in the presence of Christ in the Spirit—whether truly founded or not—was universal in the Church. All the utterances of primitive Christianity, the scriptures of its apostles, the treatises of its fathers and doctors, and all the monuments of the first ages, bear witness not to a Christ who once lived and had died, but who was living triumphant and glorified, reigning for them, and in them to reign. Unquestionably also in this belief was the hiding of that power which enabled the Church to confront the whole world, endure the full weight of its persecutions, andfinally win the victory over it. It also explains the appearance in the Church, from the first, of that succession of persons who, because of their strongly marked individualities, gave both direction and impetus to its progress. Buddhism, though both its southern and northern scriptures record a patriarchal succession, and though probably not deficient in highly cultured disciples, seems to have lacked from the very first men who had genius to organise or intellect to command its forces. Its own early writings disclose a movement which very speedily congealed, because ruled only by a remembered law, interpreted by very adulterated traditions. Christianity represents quite a different movement; it was not the perpetuation of a system, but the development of a new inspiration, of a life manifested in Christ and communicated to all who believed on Him. Consequently it never was without its heroes, whom it had the power to produce; and consequently also it never could stiffen into a tradition, for where its leaders attempted to fix it, in either confession or in ritual, it was sure to evade them. It has been appropriately described as “the most changeable of religions,”[321]—mutable in its forms, immutable in its essence. For Christianity is not a system either of philosophy or theology;it is a perpetually reforming spirit, fed by faith in One who is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.
Both religions entered the world as missionaries bent upon its conversion, and though Buddhism was afterwards to eclipse Christianity in the superficial extent of its conquests, the annals of the primitive Church record a much more rapid extension. The early development of Christianity, even taking into account the circumstances which helped or facilitated its progress, remains one of the marvels of history. In the New Testament the Church is seen to have gained a footing almost wherever the waves of the Diaspora had reached.St.Paul found Christians not only in Rome, but in little Puteoli, and his letters imply that there were churches in Spain and in southern Gaul.St.Peter wrote from Babylon to a wide circle of Christian communities gathered out of the regions of Asia Minor.[322]There seem to have been even then churches in most of the chief cities, and in a multitude of minor towns all over the Empire; and there is no reason to distrust the tradition, that before the last of the apostles fell asleep, the gospel had called multitudes living far beyond the bounds of the Empire to make good their citizenship in the kingdom of God.
The churches may have been small in respectof membership, for the rapid diffusion of Christianity by no means involved the conversionen masseof the people. Facts will hardly bear out the glowing testimony of Gregory Thaumaturgus, who found in the populous metropolis of a large province only seventeen Christians, and in twenty-five years reported that he could find only seventeen heathens.[323]With Gibbon we may have to discount as “splendid exaggeration” the testimony of Tertullian,“Hesterni sumus, et vestra omnia implevimus.”Still the direct testimony of Tacitus as to the multitude of Christians in Rome, the evidence of the Catacombs, and many other indications, point to the conclusion that the rapid numerical increase of Christians was as singular as was the territorial diffusion of their religion. The whole Empire must have been sensibly leavened, and the converts must for long have been gathered from other than the lower classes of society, before the conversion of Constantine became possible. Emperors—even Roman ones—follow in such matters, and do not lead their subjects; and so we may be sure what had at first been glad tidings to the slaves and the poor must for some time have become the consolation of many a noble Pudens and Linus, and of many a Claudia of royal descent, before it could be recognised as the religion of the State.[324]
Many circumstances undoubtedly contributed to this result. A consolidated empire, with nearly all the representative nations fused into a union, comprising all the existing elements of culture and forces of civilisation; the great Roman highways, with means of easy communication so abundant as to be surprising to us; the widespread understanding of the two leading languages, making virtually of one speech a great section of the most important part of the world; the innumerable communities of Jews, everywhere tolerated, and “cutting channels through the adamantine mass of heathen society,”[325]immensely aided the missionary activities of the apostles and their followers. Moreover, the moral and religious condition of the Empire, the bankruptcy of the old faith, the despair and confusion and perplexity of people, everywhere seeking mightier or better deities than they knew, everywhere trembling “between the two immensities of terror,” rendered possible the victory of Christianity. Multitudes were thus prepared to welcome a Deliverer who had come in the name, not of Jupiter Maximus Tonans, but of the Father in heaven, to give peace in this world’s tribulations, and sure hope of joy in the world beyond it.[326]And yet all this, even when added toGibbon’s five causes, will not account for the historical puzzle, that a faith, originating in a manger in a Syrian cattle-shed, brooded over for thirty years of a life of poverty and toil, preached for three, with the result of being almost universally rejected, and quenched to all appearance in the blood of crucifixion, should immediately after the death of its Founder have broken out all over the Roman world. Converting its agents from farms, and harbours, and prisons, it called them to martyrdom; for it sent them—poor “weavers, and shoe-makers, and fullers, and illiterate clowns”—to proclaim “barbarous dogmas,” and “extravagant hopes,” “universally detested” by Jew and Gentile, and to bear the full weight of a prolonged series of persecutions involving indescribable tortures and disgrace.[327]Yet somehow it never paused for a moment, never abated one iota of its claim, till in the course of a few generations it was found upon the throne. We never will explain this wonder by showing how, as a system of ethics, or as a new theory of life, it found the condition of the world favourable to its reception. The correlation of the state of the world to the new faith has been claimed as providential,—an indication of a Divine purpose making all things work together, for thismanifestation of a new power or principle of life in society, which as yet has had no historical counterpart.[328]
The early scriptures of Buddhism, though preserving a tradition that in twelve years from the time in which the doctrine was first preached it had spread over sixteen kingdoms, disclose no such rapidity of diffusion. The kingdoms referred to are not to be regarded as kingdoms in our sense of the word, for in extent and influence they would not equal a German principality, and were probably only tribal communities. After the death of Buddha the many Sanghas that had arisen seem to have suffered for lack of a central governing power. If his Order is to be called a Church, it had manifestly no church-government. It had synods, and assemblies, and councils, but not one with the authority of an Œcumenical as representative of the whole. It was more Congregational than Presbyterian in its constitution, and for this very reason it was weak when compared with the compact organisation of Brahmanism, with which it competed for supremacy. Disorder and dissension are traceable in it from the first, and the early texts, though containing many admonitions against schism, warnings that offences must come, and woes upon those who would cause them, record no practical steps toprevent or remedy them.[329]Vigorous expansion was consequently not to be looked for, and for two centuries we may safely infer that Buddhism represented only a struggling sect, which, beyond the limits in which it was first preached, had made little, if indeed any, progress.
At the close of this period, when its literature was reaching a canonical form, and its manuals of discipline and common order were generally in use, it found its Constantine in the conqueror Chandragupta. In opposition to the Brahmans, who despised him for his low-caste origin, he seems to have lifted it from obscurity into the sunshine of really imperial favour. His grandson Asoka, who consolidated his conquests, proved its Theodosius, in not only greatly endowing it, but in establishing its supremacy. There were no quarrels between him and the Sanghas as to their independence, as afterwards between the Emperors and the Popes, for, like a true son of the Church, he acknowledged their authority. By obeying in appearance, he in reality became, what Buddhism since the death of its founder sorely needed, the head of the system, and under his wise and energetic rule, the religion emerged into a vigour which it was to maintain for centuries.
An earnest Buddhist, he seems to have been something better. He called himself Pryadarsi,[330]the “beloved of the gods,” and a Daniel indeed he appears to have been, raised up for the blessing of millions. His edicts—stone inscriptions found all over India—the first written testimonies which Buddhism left of itself,[331]all breathe a lofty spirit of righteousness and kindness and toleration, appealing to both Brahman and Buddhist, and commending themselves at this day, “to Jew and Christian and Moslem alike, as part of the universal religion of humanity.”[332]One of them refers to a council which he assembled at Patna, for the pacification and reformation of the Order. During its session the ancient collections of rules and dogmas were rehearsed, and as the list is considerably shorter than the contents of the Tripitaka, we may be sure that the Southern tradition that Buddha himself was the author of all the books comprising that collection has no foundation in fact.[333]A far more momentous act of this ancient council than the recension of the canon, was that of establishing the first great Buddhist missions. To a revived andreformed Order the suggestion of the pious king, that they should go forth and fulfil their great teacher’s original commission, was welcome. Their dissensions, as has often happened in Christendom, were due to their living to themselves. An army inactive in quarters, is more likely to quarrel or mutiny than one in service in the field. These good Buddhists wisely determined to carry the war of deliverance beyond them, and so into the Punjab, Kashmir, the Central Himalayan regions, over into the Malay Peninsula, went the missionaries, armed only with the words of the Law or the legends which had been floating round the memory of their master, and supported only by the offerings put into their alms-dish, to gain whatever victories they could in the fair conflict of reason with reason.[334]
In India they would of course be supported by imperial influence, and indeed the mission to Ceylon, headed by Mahinda, the son of Asoka, seems to have been accredited by royal embassy; but nowhere was Buddhism propagated as Islam subsequently was by Mohammed, or as Christianity was by Charlemagne, with an army at its back. Races ever ready to credit the supernatural would probably be more easily won by the wonders which were then being formulated in reference to Buddha; but whatever be the explanation of it, the success of these missionariesanticipated that of the apostles. In Ceylon there was founded a Sangha, which was destined to nurse and preserve the original creed in somewhat of its purity, when all the others betrayed and corrupted it. Surviving several changes of dynasty, that Sangha, 330 years after Buddha’s decease, is said to have reduced its canon to writing. The result has been somewhat contradictory to the theory, that it matters very little whether a canon be oral or written, for Southern Buddhism, having an authority to which it was thus earlier anchored, has held more closely to the original system, from which, having no such check for long, every section of Northern Buddhism has irrecoverably fallen away.
After the death of Asoka, the empire which he sought to consolidate by the preaching of the Law fell to pieces, and Buddhism was destined to be tested by more than one rude shock. A Brahman reaction took place, which is even supposed to have resulted in the persecution of all Buddhists living in India. If so, it was the first which the religion encountered—so unlike Christianity, which had to endure for three centuries the fierce assaults of its enemies. Persecution by a religion so tolerant as Brahmanism is hard to conceive, but if it took place at this period, it only tended, as in the early Christian trials, to the wider expansion of the persecuted faith. “They that were scattered abroad went everywherepreaching” the Law. Some of them pushed through Afghanistan into the regions of Central Asia, and there, just as Ulphilas and Severinus, centuries later, gained a hold over the wild races that conquered the moribund Empire, so Buddhist missionaries succeeded in sowing the seeds of their Law among the rude Scythian tribes, who were then in great commotion in their vast inland steppes. Driven from their ancestral homes, a branch of the great tribe of Huns about 160B.C.overthrow the Bactrian kingdom, and after generations of struggle they conquered Kashmir, the Punjab, and a considerable part of India. Then just as the Goths and Huns, in the moment of their conquest of Rome, tendered their submission to Christianity, so the conversion of Kaniska, the greatest of the Indo-Scythian kings, a contemporary with Augustus and Antony, enabled Buddhism to enter with fresh vigour upon a second period of very brilliant supremacy.[335]
Though the difference between the Northern and Southern Buddhists was already showing itself, and though soon after it manifested itself in a divergence as complete as that which sundered the Greek Orthodox from the Latin Catholic Churches, monumental evidence, harmonising with that derived from its own literary relics, indicates that for four or five centuries after this Buddhism wasmost successfully propagated almost everywhere save in India. In the land of its origin it was gradually declining, because drawing nearer to the Brahmanism from which it had seceded. Fa-Hian in the end of the fourth century, though describing it as dominant everywhere, found the place of its nativity only a wilderness.[336]Later on, the viharas were deserted, the dagobas in ruins, “the monks were few, the heretics many,” and by the seventh century the process of assimilation with and absorption into Hinduism was in India, save in widely separated and remote localities, almost complete. What it lost in India, however, it was to gain in other directions. Its greatest conquest was in China. In the days of Asoka eighteen missionaries are said to have reached China, where they are held in reverence to this day, their images occupying a conspicuous place in every temple. The faith which they introduced seemed to have struggled with very little success to gain a footing till aboutA.D.68.[337]Thirteen years before this date, in obedience to a vision which appeared to him at Troas,St.Paul brought Christianity from Asia to Europe. On the thirtieth day of the twelfth Chinese month inA.D.68, the Emperor Mingti, in consequence of adream, sent ambassadors to the distant West for Buddhist monks and manuscripts.[338]Travelling in almost royal state, the invited missionaries were accorded in China a welcome in marvellous contrast to the reception of the Christian apostle in the first colonial city he had reached. From this time onwards a perpetual succession of monks and manuscripts entered China; yet, though tolerated from the first, and often royally patronised, centuries elapsed before it succeeded in winning a place as one of the three religions of China, while Christianity, persecuted from the first, succeeded after a fierce struggle in conquering the Empire of Rome, and then by a long process in evangelising Europe.
The conversion of the most of Eastern Asia was the work of the Northern or more corrupt Buddhism. Southern Buddhism, like the orthodox Eastern Church, which contented itself with its evangelistic achievements among the Goths, and its Nestorian missions, soon exhausted its propagative force. The introduction of the religion into Burma, Siam, and the adjacent kingdoms, may be said to sum up its triumphs. Northern Buddhism, on the other hand, ran from the beginning of our era a course of unchecked triumphs. In the close of thefourth century it spread from China to Corea, and in the sixth it reached Japan. Previous to this it entered the isolated regions of Tibet, more welcomed than resisted by the demonolatrous inhabitants on account of the adulterated form in which it presented itself. There, after a struggle for some two centuries, it succeeded, about the period when Islam was beginning its conquests elsewhere, in securing strong royal support. After experiencing for many generations the vicissitudes of popularity and persecution, the conquests of Genghiz, and the strong favour of Kublai, his greatest successor, established its hierarchy as supreme, and in spite of changes of dynasty, it has there dominated the whole relations of life in a manner like unto, but to an extent far beyond, the wildest dreams of Rome’s most ambitious Pope.[339]
It thus appears that Buddhism in the second period of its history, and after it had succeeded in winning the support of powerful kings, reached its furthest extension and achieved its grandest conquests. Christianity, on the other hand, was more rapidly diffused in the primitive than in the subsequent ages. Tested by its intensive hold upon the nations, it had only nominally converted the Roman Empire by the end of the fourth century. Gibbon’s estimate of the number of Christians withinit, is acknowledged by friendly authorities,[340]like Bishop Lightfoot, to err if at all on the side of excess. During the reign of Constantine, probably not a twentieth of the whole population of the Empire were Christians, even by profession. After this period, no doubt, the proportion must have greatly increased, for the barbarous hordes that poured downwards in successive deluges over the South were converted so suddenly and so silently that “scarce a legend remains to tell the tale.” In regard, however, to the conversion of heathen Europe, it is a mistake to suppose that the missionaries had only to come, and see, and conquer. The conversion of England by the Roman monks, and of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales by Oriental and, it is said, Arian missionaries, cannot be said to have been accomplished before the close of the seventh century. Afterwards, the conversion of Central and Northern Germany occupied the Celtic and British missionaries for two centuries. The conversion of the Scandinavians, beginning in the ninth, could not be said to have been effected till the middle of the eleventh century, while that of Slavonia, undertaken in the tenth, did not terminate, if indeed even then, before the sixteenth century. The conquest of Europe was the result of a prolonged and often desultory warfare, in which, while theadvance was slow, Christianity sometimes failed to hold the ground which it had gained. The powerful Churches in Asia, the seats of its great Councils and the capitals of its rule, either died or were swept away; Antioch and Constantinople, once its citadels, became the strongholds of an alien and hostile faith; the mighty Churches of Egypt and Abyssinia dwindled into a condition of immedicable disease, and the flourishing Church of Africa, with its more than six hundred bishoprics, was simply, because ripe for destruction, obliterated by the forces of Islam. Toward the latter half of the tenth century it seemed as if Christianity in Europe was surely following the fate of Buddhism before its disappearance from India. On all sides it was pressed in the deadly grip of Pagan and Moslem alike, while its bishops, and priests, and nobles, oblivious of the danger, were living in sinful self-indulgence. It seemed as if Christendom was being surely blotted out from the geography of the world; and yet as by a miracle it survived, or was preserved, till came the Renaissance, and that marvellous emergence of missionary zeal, which sent Christianity, Reformed and Unreformed, to the very ends of the earth, and which, increasing in every generation since then, was never more abundant nor more fervent than now.[341]
Christianity, unlike Buddhism, came very early into collision with the most advanced civilisation and highest culture of the world, while Buddhism for centuries encountered only the religions of inferior peoples. The only equal or superior civilisation which it met was that of China, and there, though tolerated and even patronised from the first, it seems for centuries to have been regarded as an exotic. Natives of India, like the Jews in the Roman Empire, were allowed to build Buddhist temples, but only in the fourth centuryA.D.did Chinese people begin extensively to be converted to the Buddhist religion. As it rose into favour its conflicts with the Confucianists began, and the issue of its varied fortunes has been, that though indirectly it has greatly influenced, it has only subdued a section of the Chinese people.[342]While other inferior races came quickly under its influence, the most civilised of Eastern peoples resisted it, and have at most only been leavened by it.[343]Christianity had also its easy conquests, as when some northern tribes were converted in a day by the baptism of their chiefs; but its principal struggle with the historic Paganism of aristocratic Rome was fierce and obdurate. There the position, as in the case of Hinduism to-day, was not carried by assault, butby slow and almost imperceptible approaches. The Church at Rome for two centuries was more a Greek than a Latin one. The names of its bishops were Greek, and the Catacomb inscriptions sufficiently indicate that Greek was the language of its members. Slowly and indirectly, however, it gained the hold upon ancient thought and custom, operating like an alterative in the system, supplanting what was good, by simply taking possession of it and inspiring it with a new life, while that which was decaying and waxing old gradually vanished away.
In this respect, therefore, there is a significant difference between the two religions. Christianity, with all the world against it, and in spite of three centuries of unparalleled persecutions, succeeded in vanquishing the highest, while yet approving itself as a gospel to the lowest civilisation. Buddhism, with the greatest powers of the Eastern world in its favour, and never, perhaps, save in China, called to bear the shock of a single persecution, has only succeeded in being accepted by inferior branches of the human race. The Hindu Aryans, assimilating what of it they approved, rejected what of it was peculiar and distinctive. The Semitic followers of Islam simply crushed it under foot, and it never rose high enough even to touch the Western Aryans.[344]Very early it withdrew itself entirely within the circles of the Turanian peoples; and if to-day in Mongolia, Manchuria, among the Kalmucs on the Wolga, and the Bunjads on the shores of the Baikal Sea, it may be said to be advancing, the most competent authorities assure us that everywhere else its progress is arrested, and that, even where it is most upheld by local governments, in the regions of its most dominant supremacy, it yields manifest signs of decay.[345]
Another and even more significant contrast is found in the fact that the advance of Christianity has ever been farthest and most rapid when its faith was purely taught and most consistently illustrated. It never sought peace with other religions without being defeated, and never allied itself with superstition without bringing shame and disaster on all concerned. It has had its periods of deterioration and defection, but somehow it has alwayssurvived them. Indeed, its vitality is as truly indicated by the corruptions which it has outlived, as by the external opposition which it has vanquished. Its real conquests are due to the expansive power of its inherent and original principles. The very opposite is the case with Buddhism. Its fundamental principles being unnatural and repugnant to the essential instincts of mankind, it was from the very first a morbid growth, having in it the seeds of decay. It never could have lived in the strength of its own principles, and so the story of its advance is one of perpetual compromise with every popular superstition that it met. The more it assimilated itself to them, the more it seemed to grow; but as foreign influences took possession of it, its own life oozed out of it, till very early it represented a system so perverted that its founder would have repudiated and abhorred it. The Church has often travestied Christianity, but it never fell from the faith so fearfully as Buddhism has everywhere fallen from the original doctrine of Buddha. Religion, worship, even the purest, he intended by his system to supersede, and now his name is employed to support the grossest of all superstitions,[346]a religion with more idols in it than that of the most idolatrous of peoples, a worship founded on the efficacy of magical incantations, and of prayersrendered by machines. Just for this very reason its
is very instructive, and we shall now proceed to consider a few of its most salient points.
Buddhism, in a quiet land and tranquil age, was launched upon the world as a new theory of life—a system so rounded off and completed that its disciples had no other duty than that of believing, obeying, and propagating it. Christianity, on the other hand, began its career amid the convulsions of political revolution, and for three centuries of conflict it had to fight every inch of its way. It was not, however, as a new system that it appeared in history, but as a new principle of life, round which all the moral, and spiritual, and intellectual energies which it found in mankind, and all which itself might awaken, might form and gather strength. It was impossible, therefore, that it ever could remain stationary. Its apostles were commissioned to carry on all that their Lord had “begun both to do and to teach.” He distinctly promised them increase of knowledge and power from on high, and all the changes which increase or growth implies. To-day His religion could no more be made to return to the form in which it was manifested eighteen centuries ago than man could be made to put on the clothes of his childhood. Its development,however, is that of its inherent life, manifesting all the continuity and identity of the sapling with the tree, of the boy with the man. Like all growing things, it has been subject to disease by contagion and infection, but it has always preserved life in sufficient volume to slough off its impurities and to pass onward through reformation to health. Now, the history of Buddhism, on the contrary, reveals only a long process of degradation, without having manifested any power as yet to recover and to reform itself according to its original and essential principles.[347]
The offspring of Brahmanism, from which it differed more in degree than in substance, at no period of its history did it succeed in completely disentangling itself from it. Not only did the forms of the old religion cling to it; its very life was continued in the new. While Buddha rejected all the sacrificial rites and religious observances of Brahmanism, and preached a law subversive of all its faith in revelation, he accepted and continued its ascetism and its hope of deliverance by a process of meditation and of abstraction. It was by himself, therefore, and not by his cousin Dêvadatta,[348]that the heretic leaven was introduced into the lump.Dêvadatta’s attempted changes were not innovations, but a return to the primitive rule, a logical deduction from a law which Gotama never wholly rejected. Just as to the patriarchs of the Greek, the Western or Romish Church “is the chief heresy of latter days,” just as the Pope was branded in their Encyclical of 1848 “as the first founder of German Rationalism,”[349]so the successive advances and orthodox decisions of the Buddhist Councils were denounced as apostasies by men like Dêvadatta. Still these changes were due in great measure to the beliefs which Buddhism had inherited, for when in the inevitable rebound from its unnatural Nihilism the theistic movement set in, the spirit of Brahmanism, which had passed into it at the first, began to assert itself, and, interpenetrating it more and more, prepared it for that issue in which, blending with the popular forms in which Brahmanism was then expressing itself, Buddhism merged into the composite system of Hinduism which confronts us in India to-day.
In Christianity, as in nature, the grafting of the good stock upon the wild conquered the wild. Christ took nothing from Judaism but the universalism of its prophets, its faith in one living and true God, the Heavenly Father of multitudes whom Abraham was ignorant of, and Israel did not acknowledge.His apostles, judged by the literature which they have bequeathed, seem faithfully to have carried out His principles; but many of their converts were strict Jews, who insisted upon some visible connection with the old religion. Just as Dêvadatta, their prototype, held that a true Buddhist must first be a good Brahman in respect of asceticism, so they insisted that Christians were debtors to keep what of the old law was expressed in circumcision, and the observance of certain other commandments and ordinances. The danger of Christianity being reduced to the bondage of the old was serious, but the inspiration ofSt.Paul, the providential destruction of the nation, and the marvellous spread of the religion among the Gentiles, eventually overcame it. The spirit of Judaism, it is true, has never been wholly cast out from the Christian Church. All through its history it is traceable in one form or another of the ritualism and asceticism which, like Brahmanism, it may be held to represent. There have been times when it has attained to portentous and pernicious influence, and such times may happen again; but from the early days there has always been in Christianity vitality sufficient to detect and try and condemn it; and so though Judaism, and even Paganism, to some extent, still taint the theology and worship of the Church, we need have no fear that the geniusof the old religion will ever gain, as it did in the case of Buddhism, permanent ascendency over the new.
The opposite of Ritualism and Asceticism, represented by Judaism and Brahmanism, is the Rationalism which such reforming religions may be said to beget of themselves; and if its spirit of inquiry be uncontrolled, it will certainly dissipate their energy. As early asSt.Paul’s day we see Rationalism working upon the development of Christianity, and necessitating the rise of a theology, which, perhaps inevitably, has often been confounded with, and, in the estimation of many, has supplanted the Christian religion. The many sects which Rationalism produced in the first centuries do not so much indicate hostility to the new faith, as the mighty ferment through which the minds of men were passing in regard to it. Now though Buddhist scriptures manifest rationalistic movements in the Sanghas from the first, they seem to have proceeded in quite a different direction. Of conflict as to fundamentals of creed there appears to be very little trace, but there are abundant indications of considerable controversy as to practice. The first quarrel traceable in the Christian Church arose over the peculiar institution of community of goods; and though the Sanghas avoided that mistake, their earliest troubles were concerningthe possession of property. The original rule enjoined upon the brethren absolute poverty, and the regulations in regard to food and shelter were equally stringent. Very soon after Buddha’s decease a reaction set in, and a feeling began to prevail that his standard of morality and his ideal of the Order were too lofty for all but exceptional men to realise. He may have succeeded as the fully Enlightened One, but common men could not hope to “wind themselves so high;” so out of consideration for human infirmity there commenced a constant and increasing relaxation in their interpretation of his precepts of perfection.[350]The law of absolute poverty was modified to the extent that property might be held in common, and the laws regulating diet, dress, and even meditation, were soon subjected to the same treatment. The wealth which poured in upon them, and the consequent improvement of their position, was not followed by corresponding spiritual growth. The more they prospered, the more the fundamental principles of the Order were neglected, evaded, or explained away. The friendly conferences of the rainy season gave place to controversy, and controversy proved so fruitful of schism, that very early in its career Buddhism is said to haveproduced eighteen different sects, ranged in four great divisions. Yet in no one schism seemed there a great principle to be involved; they were but Pharisee quarrels at best, in which though they strained out the gnat they swallowed the camel.[351]
Side by side with this relaxation of the law advanced the growth of the legends concerning him who first preached it. The further they removed from his decease, the higher, as was natural, he rose in their esteem. As one by one the fathers fell asleep, and the early enthusiasm died, and the law was felt to be more and more burdensome, the less he seemed to be a man of like passions with themselves, till eventually they came to regard him as “omniscient and absolutely sinless.”[352]He had taken away their gods, and disowned their religious cravings. He professed to find no proper divine being to whom any instinct should attach itself—yea, in his dissection and analysis of human nature he found no religious faculty to be relied upon; but he could not unmake his fellow-men,whose religious instinct education can neither originate nor eradicate; and so, defrauded of its natural gratification, it inevitably turned to illegitimate methods of appeasing itself. In the first instance, it found the objects of its reverence in the relics which survived him, the law which he preached, and the Order which he founded. Originally it could not be called worship; it was more an expression of affectionate homage.[353]But so strong is man’s impulse to worship, that very early they expressed it in images of Buddha everywhere, though the images of the Law and of the Order have only been found in the lands where the Northern Buddhism reigns.
This earliest triad of personalities, called “triratna,” the three gems or three holies, seems to have been suggested by, and certainly corresponds with, the primitive triad of deities in the old Indian Pantheon.[354]It was the first indication of the bankruptcy of Buddhism, of its failure out of its own resources to meet the religious wants of its disciples, and it marked only the beginning of a revolt, which was to issue in complete disavowal of every doctrine essential to original Buddhism. The religious conscience and common sense whichrebelled against its unnatural atheism, would not long be satisfied with the worship of the memory of a completely vanished Buddha, or of the idea of an impersonal Law, or of a miscellaneous Order. So pious Buddhists turned readily to a doctrine said to be taught by the Master, and formulated before the settlement of the Southern canon in its present form, according to which Buddha is not a distinctive name of just one person, but a title descriptive of a long series of Enlightened Ones, who, leaving, as he was supposed to have done, the estate of a Bôdhisatva[355]in the Tushita heavens, appeared at distant intervals to proclaim the same truth for the deliverance of men and gods. The names of twenty-four of these Buddhas who preceded Gotama have been handed down, and the name of his successor, to whom, upon the attainment of Buddhahood, he transferred his Bôdhisatvaship, and who is to appear after five thousand years for the rediscovery of the truth, was announced as Mâitrêya. To this coming one, the Buddha of “kindness and mercy”—thought to be a personification by some imaginative poet of the gentle spirit of Buddhism—the thoughts and the hopes of the disciples turned, and out of this hopearose a doctrinal system, which, expanding and enlarging by manifold additions as the time went on, showed that however atheistic the original creed might be, the religion itself had become polytheistic.[356]To Mâitrêya, in his glorious heavens, the deliverer of distant generations, prayers ascended, and worship was rendered by all Buddhists everywhere alike; and out of this cult by far the largest section of them began to evolve deity after deity, till the heavens, in which Buddha could find no superior to himself, were crowded with objects of idolatrous regard.
In this polytheistic development a very great distinction emerged between the Northern or Mahāyāna and the Southern or Hināyāna system of Buddhism. How the divergence originated has not been clearly ascertained, but about the beginning of the Christian era it seems to have been very manifest, and at that time, when sectarian controversy and philosophical speculation threatened to rend the system into fragments, Nâgârdjuna,[357]amonk of Nâlanda, is said to have done for Northern Buddhism what Gregory and Benedict did for the Western Church. Under him, and certainly after him, Northern Buddhism, both in respect of expansive power and of dogmatic and ritualistic development, left Southern Buddhism far behind it. The Hināyāna, or the “little way” of deliverance, is believed to have been applied by the Northern, not without contempt for the Southern school’s arrestment. They did not profess to contradict the Southern faith: they simply included it, and advanced in their “great way” beyond it. To the Southern thesummum bonumof life meant Arhatship, for that once attained there would be no more re-birth. They acknowledged and worshipped only one Bôdhisatva, the coming Mâitrêya; but the doctors of the North, properly conceiving the estate of the Bôdhisatva to be nobler than that of Arhat, propounded it as the goal of aspiration. Arhatship would indeed secure one’s own deliverance; but Bôdhisatvahood would enable them, as possible coming Buddhas, to confer the blessings of deliverance upon countless multitudes. Along with Mâitrêya they discovered many persons who, like Buddha’s great disciples and their successors, had through merit, acquired in a long series of lives,taken his Tushita heavens by violence; but who, unlike him, were under no obligation to quit their celestial abodes, and proceed through Buddhahood to Nirvana. They might enjoy their blessedness to the full, and sit beside their nectar without concern, for they fulfilled every function expected of them in being objects of worship, to whom mortals could appeal for comfort in sorrow and help in time of need.
In India, as early as Fa-Hian’s time, and probably earlier in China,[358]out of these happy gods a new triad was formulated, receiving such worship as Hindus would render to their later triad of deities, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. The title of one of these, Mandjus-ri, was said to have been the name of the monk who, two hundred and fifty years after Buddha, introduced the religion into Nepaul, and founded the system which Nâgârdjuna consolidated.[359]He in this connection is believed to be the personification of that “wisdom” or “spiritual insight” which the Northern school valued so highly. Another deity, Avalôkitês’vara, “the lord who sees from on high,” is supposed to be the mythical term for that “kindly providence” which watched over the whole Buddhist world. AndVajra-dhara, “the thunderer,” represented the power which protected the faithful from the malice of demons. How such a worship, so contradictory to the doctrines of primitive Buddhism, came to be introduced and recognised, is a puzzle to all our scholars. Rhys Davids and Sir Monier Williams are inclined to regard it as suggested by the second Hindu triad of deities already referred to. Professor Max Müller[360]considers it to be a graft from the superstitions of some northern Scythian or Turanian race, while Dr. Beal advances the theory that it was in all probability introduced from a western monotheistic religion, either landward through Persia, or by sea from Arabia. However it came, from this date and onwards, all over the wide extent of territory covered by it, Buddhism rapidly deteriorated. While the Southern system was everywhere yielding to the influence of the popular mythology, and that so unmistakably that it became, wherever it reached, “the unconscious propagator of Hindu doctrine,” the Northern became a heterogeneous mixture of all the superstitions which it met. From this second triad of deities it went on discovering or inventing its five triads of Dhyâni-Buddhas, among whom Gotama was the emanationof Avalôkitês’vara, who again was the æon of Amitâbha, “immeasurable light.” Behind all these again, they professed to find the Adi-Buddha, the primordial Buddha, who, out of himself, by the exercise of five meditations, evolved the Five Dhyâni.[361]Each of these again by “insight” evolved their corresponding æons, who in their turn from out of their immaterial essence produced a material world. It is as if the Gnosticism which had broken out in the West long before this time had also invaded the distant East,[362]and as if its dreams, more restrained by Western sobriety, were in the East free to produce a phantasmagoria more confused still. Certainly it is a convincing proof that, notwithstanding its rich ethical sources, the essential principles of Buddhism had no inherent propagative power. For just as it had to return from its atheism to the deities which it had discarded, so it had to substitute for its Nihilismthe Western Paradise, where, beyond the confines of the world, the pious Buddhist at last hopes to join the one Supreme Amitâbha, and millions of blessed Buddhas discoursing upon all things good, in a state in which there is no sorrow, and, “strangest to say, no Nirvana.”[363]
The more these imaginary deities increased, the more must the earnest moral teachings of Buddha have been obscured. The discovery of the Bôdhisatvas opened the way to a rapid declension from primitive self-culture to a system of “voluntary humility.” Discipleship became easier in proportion as the worship of these shadowy creations extended. It is much easier to idolise than obey, to say, “Lord, Lord,” than to do the thing which he commands. This falling away from the high Buddhist rule of self-control, proceeding step by step with the growth of the legends, is just an illustration of the tendency in every religion to allow the ethical and metaphysical elements so to drift asunder, that instead of being one in holy wedlock they become thoroughly and irreconcilably opposed.
It was inevitable in Buddhism that morality, considered essential to self-rescue, should be supplanted by that debasing belief in the efficacy ofrites which the system was launched to destroy. Its founder went to the unnatural extreme of ignoring man’s craving for reconciliation. He had no faith in Divine forgiveness, or in the grace of repentance, and he never wearied of pouring contempt upon sacrifice and prayer. No Hebrew prophet could be more severe in his scorn of useless rites; but then the Hebrew believed in the efficacy of one sacrifice, a “heart broken by sorrow,” for sin not as a misfortune or a folly, but as an offence to a Holy Being who was ready to forgive, and to be pleased with the worship of a will surrendered in gratitude and in love. Very early in his history man has indicated his sense of alienation from God in his endeavours to discover an atonement. The instinctive sense of wrong relations to the powers that govern life has been liable to fearful perversion, but Buddha, with all his denunciation, could not destroy it, nor reason men out of it. He could induce some to withdraw their imploring cries and glances from the gods, but he could not sweep the heavens clean of them. Belief in the existence[364]of gods, and demons, and fairies, and charms against ill-luck, was strong in his disciples from the first; and when an object of worship was recognised and allowed, an elaborate ritual of worship, and latterly of propitiation, was rapidly developed. In NorthernBuddhism this recoil was most extreme, for there, especially in Nepāl and Tibet, belief in the efficacy of rites deteriorated into belief in spells and incantations, till it issued in the Tantra system—a mixture of magic and sorcery whose abominable doctrines, Burnouf, out of very loathing, refused to translate to us.[365]Christianity has had many corrupters, who have never scrupled to propose or to accept any compromise with heathenism at all calculated to strengthen the power of the priesthood, but it never had its Âsanga,[366]who cleverly succeeded in reconciling the demonolatry of the people of Nepāl and Tibet with the acceptance of the Buddhist system. This he did by placing their male and female devils in the inferior heavens as worshippers of Buddha and Avalôkitês’vara, and by thus making it possible for the half-savage tribes to bring their sacrifices, even of blood, to their congenial shrines, and under cover of allegiance to the priests of the new to continue the old hideous idolatry.
This discovery of Âsanga’s is said to have secured the rapid extension of the Buddhist hierarchyin these half-barbarous regions; but the hierarchy itself indicated a complete reversal of the primitive constitution of the Order. Buddha endeavoured to emancipate his fellow-men from faith in the efficacy of a priesthood to mediate between men and Deity, or to secure deliverance. He never dreamed that either temple or priest would arise in his system; but the temple grew naturally out of the dagoba and the relics which it enshrined, and the priesthood as naturally was evolved from the Sthavira or senior Bikkhu. In Southern Buddhism the priest is more like a Protestant minister of religion than like a priest in the Romish sense of the word; but in Northern Buddhism, and especially in that form of it dominant in Tibet, the people from the seventh century have been completely under the power of the Lamas who alone can work out their salvation. With the exception of a short interval of neglect and persecution, a hierarchy marvellously similar to, and no doubt in some respects suggested by, that of Romish Christianity, has completely controlled all the relations of life,[367]with the terrible result that cruelty and immorality most abhorrent to the good and gentle Buddha have been permitted to assertthemselves unopposed, though a devotee who slaughters his fellow-men in cold blood will shudder with horror if by accident he should tread upon a worm or crush an over-irritating flea.[368]
Only once in that region has it experienced any attempt at reform. In the fourteenth century, when the policy of the Ming dynasty in reducing the predominance of any one sect had prepared the way for him, Tsong-Kapa, “the Tibetan Luther,” endeavoured to effect a revival of the primitive rules of the Order, and succeeded in restoring something of the ancient simplicity in dress, the celibacy of the priests, the fortnightly confession, the season of yearly retreat, and the invitation ceremony at its close. He set his face also against the Shamanism of the Tantra system, adhered to the purer forms of the earlier Mahāyānaschool, and succeeded in creating a new sect, whose leaders in the fifteenth century were by the Chinese Emperor recognised as titular lords over the Church and tributary rulers over the State, under the titles of Dalai Lāma and Pantshen Lāma. The dream of Hildebrand or Leo for the Papacy was for centuries more than realised in the Lāmaism of Tibet, for the Lamas are more than Popes, being re-incarnations of Avalôkitês’vara and of his father Amitabha, who never die, but at the act of dying transfer themselves into another body, born at that very moment, to be found in it in due time through a procedure, according to lot, never yet known to fail. When discovered, he has, however, to be accepted after the Erastian fashion by the Chinese Government or its representative, who, with the Desi or Regent, must also be present when the final lot is drawn.[369]
Never under the Papacy, even in the times when its pretensions were most extravagant, and its power was most unchecked, has Christianitydeteriorated so fearfully as Buddhism has done in Nepāl and Tibet. Not even in the Abyssinian—the most degraded of all the Churches that have worn the name of Christ, in respect of its incorporation of old Jewish rites and Egyptian superstitions—can we find the contrivance of the prayer-wheel, or the poles with their silken flags blazoned with the six sacred syllables, “om mani padme hum,”[370]fluttering their supposed incantations to the heavens. Buddhism’s ages of worship have been only a long sad history of degradation, of perpetual falling from bad to worse.[371]The higher the worship of Buddhists for the founder of their system has risen, the more have they fallen from his virtue; but in Christianity the ages of strongest devotion to Christ have ever been the periods of progress. The more intense man’s reverence for Christ has been, the loftier has been the standard of virtue attained. Worship and pursuit of holiness have gone hand in hand, and we cannot conceive of a life truly offered up in adoration of Christ ever proving immoral or impure.
The story of Buddhism in India, where without much resistance it yielded to the seductions of Vishnaism and Sivaism, the record of its conquests in the surrounding countries, and especially inthose just referred to, present few and slight analogies to the history of Christianity; but the story of Buddhism in China as related by those most competent to testify of the changing forms which it assumed from the fourth century onwards, is significantly akin to that of Christianity after it became the religion of the Empire. China, unlike India, had before the Christian era a very ancient history, marked by distinct epochs. Its annals, even of the eighth centuryB.C., seem to reflect a civilisation similar to that of Europe in the thirteenth centuryA.D.Two thousand yearsB.C.the Chinese are said to have attained to an idea of Deity somewhat equivalent to the El Elion of Melchizedek.[372]Shangti, the highest of all spirits to whom the people sacrificed, was the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of the world, unapproachable by the sinner, but merciful to all penitents; and in this idea of God, and in the morality which sprang from it, we have the secret of that social and political progress whose arrestment and decay Confucius lamented. Living in a degenerate age, he laboured earnestly as a reformer of personal morality and social order; but, departing himself from the ancestral faith in a Supreme Ruler of nature and man, “respecting, but keeping aloof, as he said, from all spiritual beings,” expressively silent as to the future, andrefusing to present motives of conduct drawn from consideration of it, his vigorous ministry, conducted for many years in many of the States, could only have the effect of preparing the way for a real regeneration of society. He had great faith in man, as born good, with an innate moral faculty which only contact with the world and the delusion of the senses prevent from making him virtuous. Man was made for society, and the five relations of which society consists—that of ruler and subject, husband and wife, parent and child, elder brother and younger, and friend and friend—were Divine ordinances. His standard of personal righteousness and social purity, his strong faith in the power of example, his golden rule, “What you would not like to have done to yourself, do not to any other,”[373]his demand, as urgent as was that of Isaiah or Socrates,[374]that language should be used ever with scrupulous care to express only the thing that is, have gone far to form, with beneficial ethical results, the ordinary Chinese character. His ignoring of personalDeity, only referred to under the vague term Heaven, and of the future of man, could not long arrest the degeneracy of society or purge out the secret vices burrowing beneath its surface. If Buddha is to be regarded in his bold metaphysical speculations as the first of Gnostics, Confucius in his pure secularism may be designated the first Agnostic, and the monotonous and stagnant type of humanity which his teaching has produced may be a warning of the kind of civilisation which the world may expect should ever philanthropic secularism supplant or supersede the religion of Christ.[375]
Contemporary with Confucius, though much older in years, was Lao-tsze the Venerable, the author of the celebrated Tâo-teh-King, in which not only Romish missionaries but scholars like Montucci of Berlin (1808) and Remusat[376](1823) professed to find the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the name of Jehovah phonetically expressed. Twenty years later Stanislas Julien[377]dispelled these illusions, and showed that the treatise was as agnostic in its essential teachings as were the Analects of Confucius. A poet and a mystic, he gave his whole strength toenforce the virtue of Tao—theway[378]of man’s return to that spontaneity of action without motive which prevails in nature, and which will manifest itself in man, in humility, gentleness, refusal to take precedence in the world, in accounting the great as the small, the small as the great, andin recompensing injury with kindness.[379]He does not affirm the existence of God, but he does not deny it, and his language seems to imply it. Certainly there is not a word which savours of superstition, and yet he is the reputed founder of a most idolatrous religion, which is found in shape five centuries after his death. The works of his earliest followers are said to be full of the most grotesque and absurd beliefs. As early as 221B.C.some of them were in search of the Eastern Hesperides, where grew the herb of immortality. In the first centuryA.D.another professor of Taoism invented a pill containing the elixir of life, and spells which could tame and destroy by the touch of a pencil millions of demons. All through its history it has been a conglomerate of superstitions so base, and so contrasted with the teaching of the Tâo-teh-King,that to make the author of that literary relic bear the obloquy of even the slightest connection with Taoism, appears to be one of the grossest wrongs of history.[380]
These sages preceded Buddha by a century, whose religion, though it came into contact with China shortly after the reign of Asoka, did not seriously begin to influence it till about the fourth centuryA.D.The Buddhism of that period was the religion of the Northern school, well advanced in its second stage of degeneracy. Wherever it was encouraged, or allowed to maintain itself, it reared monasteries and nunneries, temples and shrines of idols and relics, and established the worship of saints and images, which sometimes, like winking Madonnas, opened their eyes and otherwise worked miracles. Its effect upon Taoism was simply to absorb it; for before then that religion had neither monasteries nor temples, nor any system of worship. All these it borrowed from Buddhism, whose Triratna and endless pantheon of deities it greedily accepted, with the effect that though Taoism has existed nominally distinct from Buddhism in China, it has simply been as Buddhism in a native dress, and thus far the Hindu mind can be truly said to have powerfully influenced Chinese thought.
By the Confucians the reception of Buddhism was very different. They might have laughed at its idolatrous system budding vigorously into life, but they could not endure its full-blown anti-social Monasticism. Its morality they could appreciate, though it seemed inferior to their own; for though its teaching as to future rewards commended itself to the moral instincts of the masses, the Confucians, more logical than Buddhists, averred that to avoid wrong-doing for fear of future punishment was not doing right for its own sake; while to labour for happiness hereafter led to neglect of the present, and promoted lazy inactivity. Such a scheme of religion was by them judged inimical to virtue, which was its own reward, and the manner of life by which it was illustrated was condemned as particularly immoral. The State, the Family, Society, were Divine institutions which ought to be maintained and perfected. Industry, public and private, was essential to their ideal of propriety; and Buddhism, with its religion of inaction, its celibate rule, and abandonment of all secular business, was simply odious to the instincts of a practical and kindly people. There could only be war between two such contradictory systems—a war not of words, but, on the Chinese side at least, of very hard blows. Their hostility manifested itself in repeated and prolonged persecutions. In one of these 250,000monks and nuns were forced to return to social life, while their property was confiscated, and the copper of their images and bells was minted into coin. The Confucians have long ceased to persecute, but they have never withdrawn their first indictment against the Buddhists for teaching what to them is criminal because disloyal, and immoral[381]because anti-social.
To the ethical system of China, as represented by Confucians, Mahāyāna Buddhism could not add much, if indeed anything, of value; but its speculative philosophy seems peculiarly to have fascinated them, and it produced remarkable and permanent changes in their thinking. The literature and the art of China reflect not Chinese but Indian scenes and manners. Its grammatical and arithmetical sciences owe much to Indian tutelage. An educated Chinaman, while avowing himself Confucian in respect of ethics, will in all metaphysical problems reason according to Buddhist methods and enunciate Buddhist ideas. To this extent, therefore, it affected the Confucians, but not with beneficial results. It aided Confucius in his evil work of shaking the faith of “the classes” in the personal Ruler of the Universe, while its effect upon “the masses” was even more injurious, for it draggedthem down to a polytheism from which for centuries they had been free, and put in place of the impersonal principle with which Confucius had supplanted their ancestral faith, those shadowy crowds of Buddhas and Bôdhisatvas, to lead them still further away from the purer works and ways of more reverential ages.[382]
The episodes in the history of Chinese Buddhism from the fourth century onward were marvellously similar to the scenes and incidents witnessed in Europe during the same period in connection with the Christian Church. Cardinal Newman has somewhere said that in “professing to write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon has reluctantly, but actually, written the Rise and Progress of Christianity.” The most zealous defender of the faith, however, must admit that the Christianity which maintained in Europe from the fourth century onward had grievously declined from that of the primitive ages. It is the fashion in some quarters to attribute this degradation to the alliance of the Church with the State, and to aver that had it kept apart from the embraces of the Emperors it would have preserved itself from corruption. Unquestionably Constantine was a “sair sanct” to the Church; a convert more from expedience thanconviction, he and his successors endeavoured to utilise the Christian hierarchy to buttress their own throne. Unquestionably, too, the Church suffered more indignity and harm from the Christian Emperors who patronised it, than ever it did from the heathen Emperors who persecuted it. Candid inquiries will, however, convince most people that the alliance with the Empire was more an incident in than the cause of the Church’s degradation. The transfer of the seat of rule to the Bosporus left the Western Church free from the Imperial influence to regulate its own affairs, and yet it became not less but even more corrupt than its Oriental neighbour. The truth seems to be that the corruption of the Church was due more to its external or material prosperity than to anything else. To churches and to nations that is the real ordeal by fire. In the poverty and struggles they have higher hopes, but when difficulties are surmounted, and they dwell at ease, they mistake or forget their vocation. The adversity and terrible persecution of the Church, coincident with its primitive enthusiasm, did a very great deal to preserve its health and purity; and it was simply natural, and to be expected, that when it emerged into prosperity and popular favour, like Jeshurun in his fatness, it should have rebelled, and instead of serving as it was ordained to do, should have usurped the power to rule.
The iconography of early Christianity reflects even more clearly than its literature the various stages of its deterioration. As long as the world was against it, and it was compelled to use such places as the Catacombs for its shelter and worship, its faith was pure, and its life was full of exhilaration and brightness. Its symbolism was thoroughly ideal and spiritual, in sharp and instructive contrast with every Pagan specimen that has been discovered, and with its own subsequently paganised art. It was a symbolism, moreover, only of its hopes, and not of its one object of faith or of worship. It tolerated no symbol in worship save the water of Baptism and the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. It needed, as yet, no crucifix, not even a cross,[383]and it would not allow any image to reveal to the imagination the present but invisible Christ, or to suggest the profound meaning of His atonement. But when it went forth, the admired of the world, into the sunshine, and began to rear the grand basilicas, and people them with the tombs of the martyrs and the enshrinedrelics of the saints, the very desire to rise led it to fight heathenism with its own weapons, and to copy its splendours.[384]Even before this it was falling back from the simple service of the synagogue to that of the destroyed temple, but now it was found adopting the heathen festivals, or accommodating its own to their dates, and incorporating with its own the more imposing rites of still popular heathen fanes. To “offer the new law’s new oblation” it invented a new ritual and priesthood; and seeing a priesthood must have somewhat to offer, it discovered a new sacrifice in the very sacrament which was the Divine pledge and human thanksgiving for the abrogation of all external sacrifice.[385]Then the government of the Empire became the model of itsorganisation, and soon it was crowned in a Papacy professing to dominate, as vicegerent for Christ, a world which confessedly it has not yet been able to convert.