T. W. Allies

“ As the great river whose water is the symbol of blessing and the bearer of fertility leaps down a giant birth from its parent lake, ever blazing under the splendour of a tropical sun, yet ever fed by sources springing from snow-crowned mountains, and changes in its course the desert into earth's fruitfulest region, so the river of God, welling forth on the day of Pentecost from the central abyss of the divine love, bore down to all the nations the one water of salvation, and wheresoever it spread, the desert retreated, and the earth brought forth corn and wine in abundance. ”

“ What image is there in nature so striking and awful as the long waves of the Atlantic bearing down in storm upon a helpless ship, and sweeping it upon an iron-bound coast! So broke that wild sea of human error over the individual mind of man. The observer looked round upon all the nations, and it was everywhere the same—a multiplicity of gods filling up the whole circle of human life, many-named, many-natured, but all without truth, purity, and justice ”

“ For Unity, Truth, and Grace, viewed as attributes of the Church, are blended together in the light and warmth of the sun, in the sap which vivifies every branch of the tree, and gives it fruitfulness from the root, in the fountain of water, under which image our Lord has so often summed up His whole gift to man, in the flock which the Shepherd has chosen, and for which He cares, in the house where the master dwells and collects his family, in the one robe which encompassed and contained the virtue of the Wearer, in the prolific womb which gives birth to the whole sacred race. ”

“ It is, then, in the beauty of the Body of Christ that the Christian mind would exult, not merely in the several graces of those who are its members, but in that corporate unity which they present. We see in the course of the world that great image of the prophet, lofty in stature and terrible to behold, whose head is of gold, whose breast and arms of silver, the thighs of brass, the legs of iron, the toes mixed of iron and clay. ”

“ Human nature had never been wanting in the courage to die for the visible goods of human life. But to labour, to combat, to endure pain, sorrow, privations, to suffer in every form for the invisible goods of a future life, to recognise, that is, an inviolable order of religion and morality, so far superior to all that a man can grasp and hold in his possession, to wife, children, goods, friends, freedom, and fatherland, and to life adorned and crowned with these, that any or all of these, and life itself, are to be sacrificed for its preservation ”

“ As neither mind nor body alone make the man, so neither faith nor government alone make the Church, but the coherence of both. The Incarnation is the joining a human soul and body with the Person of the Divine Word; after which pattern the Church, which is His special creation, is the joining of one faith and one government in a moral unity. It is by this force, by the same hierarchy everywhere guarding the same faith, by the principle of authority and tradition planted in this one living organisation throughout the earth, that the attacks of heresy are everywhere resisted. ”

“ Besides, he replies, when we cannot foresee in the future what is good for us, they help us by revealing through divination what is to come, and instructing us as to the best course. Nay, Socrates, rejoins the other, they seem to treat you even more kindly than other men; for without being asked by you they signify before to you what you should do and what leave undone. That I say true, answers Socrates, even you, O Euthydemus, will acknowledge, if you do not wait until you see the forms of the gods, but are contented, when you behold their works, to worship and honour them. ”

“ The language which they used even yet presents a very perfect image of such a race, as not being formed from the corruption of other idioms, but a mother tongue, the most brilliant of the Aryan sisters. In its union of strength with beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense, in its power to convey the most subtle distinctions of philosophic thought, or the most radiant images of sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations of law, or the tenderest dreams of romance, it was well calculated to be the organ of a people wherein bodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated. ”

“ And we set forth this condition of human nature in order to throw light upon our second picture—the first man as he was actually created, possessing, as a gift superadded by the purest divine bounty to this his natural constitution, a divine sonship founded in grace; which transcendant union of the Holy Spirit with his soul kept the soul with all its faculties in a loving obedience to God, and the body in obedience to the soul ”

“ But this natural religion of the Greeks differed from that of others in that neither outward nature as such, nor the sensuous being of man as such, but human nature in its beauty, as illumined by mind, is its point of excellence. The Greek did not, like the Eastern, lose his independence before the powers of nature, nor revel like the northern savage in boundless liberty, but in the full consciousness of his freedom saw its highest fulfilment in obedience to the general order as the law of his own nature. ”

“ There is a yet dearer and more precious gift, which maintains and increases the life so given. Our Lord stands in the midst of His Church visibly forming from day to day and from age to age that Body of His which reaches through the ages; He takes from Himself and gives to us. He incorporates Himself in His children. He grows up in us, and by visible streams from His heart maintains the life first given. Here, above all, is the one Christ, the Head and the Body. This is but an elemental truth of Christian faith, though it is the highest joy of the Christian heart. ”

“ Thus the great Roman lawyer and statesman, robing philosophy in his toga, propounded to his countrymen, full of the greed of universal conquest, with no less lucidity than truth and beauty, the result of stoic thought, that human society in general rested on the similarity of reason in the individual, that we have no ground for restricting this common possession to one people, or to consider ourselves more nearly related to one than another. All men, apart from what they have done for themselves, stand equally near to each other, since all equally partake of reason. ”

“ Reason dictates that those who are really pious and philosophers should love and honour truth alone, declining to follow the opinions of the ancients if they be corrupt. For right reason not only forbids us to assent to those who are unjust either in practice or in principle, but commands the lover of truth to choose that which is just in word and deed in every way, even before his own life, and with death threatening him. ”

“ The mode of the salvation seems to spring from the nature of God Himself, since all paternity in heaven and earth springs from that whereby He is Father of the only-begotten Son, who, descending from heaven with the love of the Bridegroom for the bride, binds together in sonship derived from his own the members of His body, the bride of His heart, the subjects of His kingdom, who are built up as living stones into that unimaginable temple raised in the unity of worshipping hearts to the ever-blessed Trinity. ”

“ What is the courage and self-denial, what is the patience and generosity, what the genius, the learning, the sustained devotion to any work, shown by any human race, compared to those which are to be found in this race of the Divine Mother? How do those who are enamoured of nationalities fail to see the glories of this nation, before which all others pale their ineffectual fires? ”

“ Men are to worship first of all the Olympian gods, and the gods who are the patrons of the city; then the gods of the earth; then demons and heroes; and all these in the traditional way by offerings, prayers, and vows. All good in public life is their gift; everything is to be consecrated to them; to violate their shrines is the greatest of crimes. In fact, after all, but few of mankind are capable of understanding or receiving the philosophic God. ”

“ But they dwell both in Greek and in barbarous cities, as the lot of each may be, following local customs as to raiment and food, and the rest of their life, but exhibiting withal a polity of their own, marvellous and truly incredible. They dwell in their own country, but it is as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens, yet suffer everything as strangers. Every foreign land is to them a country, and every country a foreign land.... In a word, what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. ”

“ In his view the godhead stands in solitary self-contemplation outside the world, the object of admiration and reverence to man. The knowledge of it is the highest task for his intellect. It is the good to which in common with everything that is finite he is struggling; whose perfection calls forth his love: but little as he can expect a return of love from it, so little does he find in it any coöperation distinct from the natural connection of things, and his reason is the only point of immediate contact with it. ”

“ The world which Augustus and Tiberius ruled was not conscious of the fact that there was an order of truth, and of morality based upon that truth, the maintenance of which was to be purchased, and cheaply purchased, with the loss of life, or of all that made life valuable. This world was indeed familiar with the thought and with the practice of sacrificing life for one object—an object which collected all the natural affections and interests of a man together, and presented them to him in the most attractive form, his country. ”

“ It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. ”

“ The culture itself since the time of Alexander might be termed Hellenic, but it embraced Egypt, and Syria, and all Western Asia. And so completely was idolatrous polytheism interwoven with culture, so inextricably was it blended with the bulk, so gradually had it grown with the growth, and wound its fibres about the tree and the branches, that the worship might be absolutely identified with the civilisation. The gods of Greece were the heads of the most illustrious Grecian families; their hero-worship consecrated every city, every grove, every field. ”

“ We have just seen the impassive majesty of Roman law declaring at the chief seat of power that to be a Christian is a capital crime. If we go at the same time to Smyrna, there the voices of a furious populace are demanding that an aged man venerable through the whole region for his innocent life and his virtues, be cast to the lions, because he is “the teacher of impiety, the father of the Christians, the destroyer of our gods, who has instructed many not to sacrifice to them or adore them.” ”

“ But since it were very long, in a volume like this, to enumerate the succession of all the churches, we take the church the greatest, the most ancient, and known to all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles Peter and Paul, and pointing out the tradition which it has received from the Apostles, and the faith which it has announced to men, reaching down to us by the succession of its bishops, we confound all those who form societies other than they ought, in any way, whether for the sake of self-fancied doctrines, or through blindness and an evil mind. ”

“ This human commonwealth enfolds in idea the whole earth. It is the society of man with man. But it closes with this life. It has no respect to anything beyond. It was the Stoics who most completely worked out this system of moral philosophy; who urged the duty of man's obedience to nature, of his voluntary subjection to that one universal law and power which held all things from the highest to the lowest in its grasp; and who likewise most absolutely cut him off from any personal existence in a future state. The virtue in which they placed his happiness was to be complete in itself ”

“ To the conception of a free Creator of spirit and of matter the Greek mind never rose: nor accordingly to that of a free Ruler of the universe: and this is only to say in other words, that the conception of personality—that is, of self-consciousness and moral freedom, as applied to a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness—was imperfect and confused. Plato in his highest flight had seemed to recognise one God, whom to enjoy is the happiness of man; but Plato and all who followed him had endured, had countenanced, had taken part in the polytheistic worship. ”

“ Scarcely a philosopher, scarcely a statesman, scarcely a ruler can be found whose mind, even if proof against a genuine devotion to a divine providence, was not open to one or more manifestations of the dark mysterious power pressing upon the confines of human life, and every now and then breaking through the veil of visible things with evidences of malignant might. A more determined and unscrupulous conqueror than Sylla, a more genuine philosopher than Marcus Aurelius, a more sagacious user of religion than Augustus, we shall not easily find ”

“ King who bears witness to the truth is the God who sanctifies the faithful people by dwelling in them and building them in the truth. It is not merely the individual believer, but the whole mass of the faithful which grows up to be a holy temple; and the ever-abiding Spirit of truth, whose presence is the guarantee of truth, is the equally abiding Spirit of sanctity, whose presence imparts holiness. ”

“ Through the body the qualities of the soul become visible and known; its powers exercise themselves, and personal unity so binds the two together that we love or hate, admire or despise, the one for the sake of the other; the grief of the soul acts upon the body, the sickness of the body depresses the soul. Through the acts of the body we learn the very existence of the soul, and in these acts it portrays itself. Human nature has been so made by its Creator that the qualities of soul and body, of spirit and matter, are imputed in the individual man to each other. ”

“ During thirteen years this son of the most virtuous heathen shows himself the most vicious of tyrants. At a single bound Rome passes from a ruler more just than Trajan to a ruler more abandoned than Nero; and in the palace of Marcus Aurelius endures an emperor who has a double harem of three hundred victims;197 who spares the blood of no senator, and respects the worth of no officer.
When a revolution, similar to that which swept away Domitian, has removed Commodus, the Roman world is not so fortunate as to find a second Trajan to take his place. ”