Callista : a Tale of the Third Century

by John Henry Newman

  CHAPTER II.

  CHRISTIANITY IN SICCA.

  The revellers went on their way; Agellius went on his, and made for hislowly and lonely cottage. He was the elder of the two sons of a Romanlegionary of the Secunda Italica, who had settled with them in Sicca,where he lost their mother, and died, having in his old age become aChristian. The fortitude of some confessors at Carthage in the persecutionof Severus had been the initial cause of his conversion. He had beenposted as one of their guards, and had attended them to the scene of theirmartyrdom, in addition to the civil force, to whom in the proconsulate theadministration of the law was committed. Therefore, happily for him, itcould not fall to his duty to be their executioner, a function which,however revolting to his feelings, he might not have had courage todecline. He remained a pagan, though he could not shake off the impressionwhich the martyrs had made upon him; and, after completing his time ofservice, he retired to the protection of some great friends in Sicca, hisbrother's home already. Here he took a second wife of the old Numidianstock, and supported himself by the produce of a small piece of land whichhad been given to him for life by the imperial government. If trial werenecessary in order to keep alive the good seed which had been sown in hisheart, he found a never-failing supply of that article in the companion ofhis declining years. In the hey-day of her youth she might have beenfitted to throw a sort of sunshine, or rather torchlight, on a militarycarouse; but now, when poor Strabo, a man well to do in the world, lookingfor peace, had fallen under her arts, he found he had surrendered hisfreedom to a malignant, profligate woman, whose passions made her bettercompany for evil spirits than for an invalided soldier. Indeed, as timewent on, the popular belief, which she rather encouraged, went to theextent that she actually did hold an intercourse with the unseen world;and certainly she matured in a hatred towards God and man, which wouldnaturally follow, and not unnaturally betoken, such intercourse. The more,then, she inflicted on him her proficiency in these amiablecharacteristics, the more he looked out for some consolation elsewhere;and the more she involved herself in the guilt or the repute of unlawfularts, the more was he drawn to that religion, where alone to commune withthe invisible is to hold intercourse with heaven, not with hell. Whetherso great a trial supplied a more human inducement for looking towardsChristianity, it is impossible to say. Most men, certainly Roman soldiers,may be considered to act on mixed motives; but so it was in fact, that, onhis becoming in his last years a Christian, he found, perhaps discovered,to his great satisfaction, that the Church did not oblige him to continueor renew a tie which bound him to so much misery, and that he might endhis days in a tranquillity which his past life required, and his wife'spresence would have precluded. He made a good end; he had been allowed totake the blessed sacrament from the altar to his own home on the last timehe had been able to attend a _synaxis_ of the faithful, and thus hadcommunicated at least six months within his decease; and the priest whoanointed him at the beginning of his last illness also took hisconfession. He died, begging forgiveness of all whom he had injured, andgiving large alms to the poor. This was about the year 236, in the midstof that long peace of the Church, which was broken at length by the Decianpersecution.

  This peace of well-nigh fifty years had necessarily a peculiar, and not ahappy effect upon the Christians of the proconsulate. They multiplied inthe greater and the maritime cities, and made their way into positions ofimportance, whether in trade or the governmental departments; theyextended their family connections, and were on good terms with theheathen. Whatever jealousy might be still cherished against the Christianname, nevertheless, individual Christians were treated with civility, andrecognised as citizens; though among the populace there would beoccasions, at the time of the more solemn pagan feasts, when accidentaloutbursts might be expected of the antipathy latent in the community, aswe have been recording in the foregoing chapter. Men of sense, however,began to understand them better, and to be more just to the reasonablenessof their faith. This would lead them to scorn Christianity less, but itwould lead them to fear it more. It was no longer a matter merely for thepopulace to insult, but for government deliberately to put down. Theprevailing and still growing unbelief among the lower classes of thepopulation did but make a religion more formidable, which, as heathenstatesmen felt, was able to wield the weapons of enthusiasm and zeal witha force and success unknown even to the most fortunate impostors among theOriental or Egyptian hierophants. The philosophical schools were impressedwith similar apprehensions, and had now for fifty years been employed increating and systematising a new intellectual basis for the receivedpaganism.

  But, while the signs of the times led to the anticipation that a strugglewas impending between the heads of the state religion and of the newworship which was taking its place, the great body of Christians, laymenand ecclesiastics, were on better and better terms, individually, with themembers of society, or what is now called the public; and without losingtheir faith or those embers of charity which favourable circumstanceswould promptly rekindle, were, it must be confessed, in a state ofconsiderable relaxation; they often were on the brink of deplorable sins,and sometimes fell over the brink. And many would join the Church oninferior motives as soon as no great temporal disadvantage attached to theact; or the families of Christian parents might grow up with so little ofmoral or religious education as to make it difficult to say why theycalled themselves members of a divine religion. Mixed marriages wouldincrease both the scandal and the confusion.

  "A long repose," says St. Cyprian, speaking of this very period, "hadcorrupted the discipline which had come down to us. Every one was applyinghimself to the increase of wealth; and, forgetting both the conduct of thefaithful under the Apostles, and what ought to be their conduct in everyage, with insatiable eagerness for gain devoted himself to the multiplyingof possessions. The priests were wanting in religious devotedness, theministers in entireness of faith; there was no mercy in works, nodiscipline in manners. Men wore their beards disfigured, and woman dyedtheir faces. Their eyes were changed from what God made them, and a lyingcolour was passed upon the hair. The hearts of the simple were misled bytreacherous artifices, and brethren became entangled in seductive snares.Ties of marriage were formed with unbelievers; members of Christ abandonedto the heathen. Not only rash swearing was heard, but even false; personsin high place were swollen with contemptuousness; poisoned reproaches fellfrom their mouths, and men were sundered by unabating quarrels. Numerousbishops, who ought to be an encouragement and example to others, despisingtheir sacred calling, engaged themselves in secular vocations,relinquished their sees, deserted their people, strayed among foreignprovinces, hunted the markets for mercantile profits, and tried to amasslarge sums of money, while they had brethren starving within the Church;took possession of estates by fraudulent proceedings, and multiplied theirgains by accumulated usuries."(1)

  The relaxation which would extend the profession of Christianity in thelarger cities would contract or extinguish it in remote or country places.There would be little zeal to keep up Churches, which could not be servedwithout an effort or without secular loss. Carthage, Utica, Hippo,Milevis, or Curubis, was a more attractive residence than the towns withuncouth African names, which amaze the ecclesiastical student in the Actsof the Councils. Vocations became scarce; sees remained vacant;congregations died out. This was pretty much the case with the Church andsee of Sicca. At the time of which we write, history preserves no recordof any bishop as exercising his pastoral functions in that city. In matterof fact there was none. The last bishop, an amiable old man, had in thecourse of years acquired a considerable extent of arable land, andemployed himself principally, for lack of more spiritual occupation, inreaping, stacking, selling, and sending off his wheat for the Romanmarket. His deacon had been celebrated in early youth for his boldness inthe chase, and took part in the capture of lions and panthers (an act ofcharity towards the peasants round Sicca) for the Roman amphitheatre. Nopriests
were to be found, and the bishop became _parochus_ till his death.Afterwards infants and catechumens lost baptism; parents lost faith, or atleast love; wanderers lost repentance and conversion. For a while therewas a flourishing meeting-house of Tertullianists, who had scared morehumble minds by pronouncing the eternal perdition of every Catholic; therehad also been various descriptions of Gnostics, who had carried off theclever youths and restless speculators; and then there had been the lapseof time, gradually consuming the generation which had survived theflourishing old days of the African Church. And the result was, that inthe year 250 it was difficult to say of whom the Church of Siccaconsisted. There was no bishop, no priest, no deacon. There was the old_mansionarius_ or sacristan; there were two or three pious women, marriedor single, who owed their religion to good mothers; there were some slaveswho kept to their faith, no one knew how or why; there were a vast manypersons who ought to be Catholics, but were heretics, or nothing at all,or all but pagans, and sure to become pagans on the asking; there wereAgellius and his brother Juba, and how far these two had a claim to theChristian name we now proceed to explain.

  They were about the ages of seven and eight when their father died, andthey fell under the guardianship of their uncle, whose residence at Siccahad been one of the reasons which determined Strabo to settle there. Thisman, being possessed of some capital, drove a thriving trade in idols,large and small, amulets, and the like instruments of the establishedsuperstition. His father had come to Carthage in the service of one of theassessors of the proconsul of the day; and his son, finding competitionran too high to give him prospect of remuneration in the metropolis, hadopened his statue-shop in Sicca. Those modern arts which enable an Englishtown in this day to be so fertile in the production of ware of thisdescription for the markets of the pagan East, were then unknown; andJucundus depended on certain artists whom he imported, especially on twoGreeks, brother and sister, who came from some isle on the Asian coast,for the supply of his trade. He was a good-natured man, self-indulgent,positive, and warmly attached to the reigning paganism, both as being thelaw of the land and the vital principle of the state; and, while he wasreally kind to his orphan nephews, he simply abominated, as in duty bound,the idiotic cant and impudent fee-fa-fum, to which, in his infalliblejudgment, poor old Strabo had betrayed his children. He would haverestored them, you may be quite sure, to their country and to theircountry's gods, had they acquiesced in the restoration: but in differentways these little chaps, and he shook his head as he said it, weredifficult to deal with. Agellius had a very positive opinion of his own onthe matter; and as for Juba, though he had no opinion at all, yet he hadan equally positive aversion to have thrust on him by another any opinionat all, even in favour of paganism. He had remained in his catechumenstate since he grew up, because he found himself in it; and though nothingwould make him go forward in his profession of Christianity, no earthlypower would be able to make him go back. So there he was, like a mule,struck fast in the door of the Church, and feeling a gratification in hisindependence of mind. However, whatever his profession might be, still, astime went on, he plainly took after his step-mother, renewed hisintercourse with her after his father's death, and at length went so faras to avow that he believed in nothing but the devil, if even he believedin him. It was scarcely safe, however, to affirm that the senses of thishopeful lad were his own.

  Agellius, on the other hand, when a boy of six years old, had insisted onreceiving baptism; had perplexed his father by a manifestation of zeal towhich the old man was a stranger; and had made the good bishop lose thecorn-fleet which was starting for Italy from his importunity to learn theCatechism. Baptized he was, confirmed, communicated; but a boy's nature isvariable, and by the time Agellius had reached adolescence, the graciousimpulses of his childhood had in some measure faded away, though he stillretained his faith in its first keenness and vigour. But he had no one tokeep him up to his duty; no exhortations, no example, no sympathy. Hisfather's friends had taken him up so far as this, that by an extraordinaryfavour they had got him a lease for some years of the property whichStrabo, a veteran soldier, had held of the imperial government. The careof this small property fell upon him, and another and more serious chargewas added to it. The long prosperity of the province had increased theopulence and enlarged the upper class of Sicca. Officials, contractors,and servants of the government had made fortunes, and raised villas in theneighbourhood of the city. Natives of the place, returning from Rome, orfrom provincial service elsewhere, had invested their gains in long leasesof state lands, or of the farms belonging to the imperial _res privata_ orprivy purse, and had become virtual proprietors of the rich fields orbeautiful gardens in which they had played as children. One of suchpersons, who had had a place in the _officium_ of the quaestor, or ratherprocurator, as he began to be called, was the employer of Agellius. Hisproperty adjoined the cottage of the latter; and, having first employedthe youth from recollection of his father, he confided to him the place ofunder-bailiff from the talents he showed for farm-business.

  Such was his position at the early age of twenty-two; but honourable as itwas in itself, and from the mode in which it was obtained, no one wouldconsider it adapted, under the circumstances, to counteract the religiouslanguor and coldness which had grown upon him. And in truth he did notknow where he stood further than that he was firm in faith, as we havesaid, and had shrunk from a boy upwards, from the vice and immoralitywhich was the very atmosphere of Sicca. He might any day be betrayed intosome fatal inconsistency, which would either lead him into sin, or obligehim abruptly to retrace his steps, and find a truer and safer position. Hewas not generally known to be a Christian, at least for certain, though hewas seen to keep clear of the established religion. It was not that hehid, so much as that the world did not care to know, what he believed. Inthat day there were many rites and worships which kept to themselves--manyforms of moroseness or misanthropy, as they were considered, whichwithdrew their votaries from the public ceremonial. The Catholic faithseemed to the multitude to be one of these; it was only in critical times,when some idolatrous act was insisted on by the magistrate, that thespecific nature of Christianity was tested and detected. Then at length itwas seen to differ from all other religious varieties by that irrationaland disgusting obstinacy, as it was felt to be, which had rather suffertorments and lose life than submit to some graceful, or touching, or atleast trifling observance which the tradition of ages had sanctioned.