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.' 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.† 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 !) * Epistle 730, p. 349, Lardnero, citante in loco quo. + See Origines Christianæ, 18th Letter in "The Lion," vol. 1. L 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."* 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, 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 !" Citante in loco, Lardnero. +"The righteous:" who could that be but the orthodox clergy? 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, tothe 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, aud 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. CHAPTER XX. ESCULAPIUS-JESUS CHRIST. ESCULAPIUS. JESUS CHRIST. MR. ADDISON's versification MR. POPE'S versification of Once, as the sacred infant she sur-Ye nymphs of Solyma begin the song! veyed, The god was kindled in the raving maid*; And thus she uttered her prophetic tale, "Hail, great physician of the world! all hail. Hail mighty infant, who in years to Rapt into future times the bard be the most childish and foolish that looked for redemption conceit that could possibly in Israel, Luke ii. 36." cross the mind; a knowledge This is one of the many of future events being no passages which the Unitarian more possible to the human editors of the improved vermind, than to fly in the air is sion wish to have rejected, to the body. We may be told assigning as one among their sometimes of an extraordi- several reasons against it, nary guess, as we may of a that "though found in ali wonderful jump; but neither manuscripts and versions flight nor prophecy are at- now extant, it was introtributes of man-and no ra- duced with a view to elevate tional man will consider the the crucified Jesus to the digpretence to such a faculty, nity of the heroes and demiin any other light, than as a gods of the heathen mythocertain evidence of impos- logy."-p. 121. ture, by whomsoever or in what cause, so ever advanced.* The worship of Esculapius was first established in Egypt, the fruitful parent of all varieties of superstition. The name is derived from the Oriental languages. Eusebius speaks of an Asclepios, or Esculapius, an Egyptian, and a famous physician. He is well known as the God of the art of healing, and his Egyptian or Phoenician origin, leads us irresistibly to associate his name and character with that of the ancient Therapeuts, or Society of Healers, established in the vicinity of Alexandria, whose sacred writings Eusebius has ventured to acknowledge, were the first types of our four gospels. The miracles of healing and of raising the dead, recorded in those scriptures, are exactly such as these superstitious quacks would be likely to ascribe to the founder of their fraternity. A far more specific prediction than any that theology can pretend, occurs in the Medea of Seneca, which seems in the age of Nero, to have foretold the future discovery of America, by Christopher Columbus, an event which occurred not till 1400 years after the publication of the prophecy. This it is "Venient annis sæcula seris, Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum, "The times will come in late years, when ocean may relax the chain of things, and a vast continent may open; the sea may uncover new worlds, and Thule, cease to be the last of lands." |