Latin Christianity

“ Latin Christianity, variously called Papistry, Romanism, Vaticanism, Ultramontanism, or the Roman Catholic Church, is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of civilized man; in spite of the storms that have swept over it, it still exerts a most powerful influence. Of the four hundred and ten million Christians who are scattered over the earth the majority—that is, two hundred and twenty-five millions—are Roman Catholics; there are seventy-five million Greek Catholics and one hundred and ten million Protestants. ”

“ The subtle transcendentalism of the Greek fathers was foreign to Latin Christianity; the characteristics of Roman life as reflected in Roman worship are plainly visible in the Latin fathers. From Minucius Felix onwards, the Christians who wrote in Latin, so far from being imaginative and dreamy, are one and all matter-of-fact; historical, abounding in illustration of life and conduct; ethical rather than speculative; legal in their cast of thought rather than philosophical ”

“ Latin Christianity, which struck at the root of official or civic paganism, has always been tolerant of its rustic cousins, the popular festivals and ceremonies which, unaffected by political and religious revolutions, by the passing of empires and of gods, have been carried on by the people with but little change from time immemorial, and represent in fact the original stock from which the state religions of classical antiquity were comparatively late offshoots. ”

“ Christianity, giving a larger place to the affections than did Stoicism, was already fast winning the hearts of men.
Writers of the Early Latin Church.—The Christian authors of the first three centuries, like the writers of the New Testament, employed the Greek, that being the language of learning and culture. As the Latin tongue, however, came into more general use throughout the extended provinces of the Roman empire, the Christian authors naturally began to use the same in the composition of their works. ”

“ I wish to come down eighteen hundred years later and refer to a remark made by one of the Latin historians. I read it in a translation many years ago, and it comes back to me now with force. It was alluding to a time when people were still living who could have seen the Saviour in the flesh. Christianity was so new that the people of Rome had hardly heard of it, and had but confused notions of what it was. The substance of the remark was this: Some Christians were persecuted in Rome through error, they being 'mistaken for Jews.'
The meaning seems plain. ”

“ There should therefore be no difficulty in distinguishing between the official policy of the Roman See—which has been almost uniformly odious—and the history of the Christian religion in the Latin countries, which has added new lustre to human nature. The Catholic saints did not fly through the air, nor were their hearts pierced with supernatural darts, as the mendacious hagiology of their Church would have us believe; but they have a better title to be remembered by mankind, as the best examples of a beautiful and precious kind of human excellence. ”

“ The church is the purest, most perfect, and most enlightened revelation of the divine Being, and none other understands what is worship. From a religious stand-point the Catholicism of the Latin peoples is the best, the most rational, and the most perfect. Rome, in spite of her repeated and frightful falls, remains the only legitimate church. ”

“ Even the Roman language has remained the official language of the Roman Catholic Church down through the ages. Christianity could not grow up through Roman civilisation and paganism, however, without in turn being coloured and influenced by the rites, festivities, and ceremonies of old polytheism. Christianity not only conquered Rome, but Rome conquered Christianity. ”

“ And they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names there not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is - By the earth is here meant the Latin world; therefore the meaning is, that all who dwell in the Latin world shall adhere to the idolatrous and blasphemous religion of the Latin Church, which is supported by the Latin empire, except those who abide by the sacred Scriptures, receiving them as the only rule of faith and practice. ”

“ But we all know that the religion of the Roman empire was falling into multitudinous confusion when Christianity arose—an austere exclusive faith, with its army of saints, ascetics, and unflinching martyrs, proclaiming worship to be due to one God only, and sternly refusing to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. ”

“ If we possessed a continuous and detailed history of the Christian Faith in any one city, say Rome, or Alexandria, or Antioch, or Ephesus, or Carthage, or Corinth, for the first three centuries, what a wonderful exhibition of spiritual power and material [pg 253] weakness it would offer. By fixing the mind on Christianity as merely one object, as an abstraction, we lose in large part the sense of the moral force to which its propagation bears witness. ”

“ If the Pope be Christ's Vicar, his deeds cannot be evil. If Romanism be Christianity, or rather, if it alone be [Pg 448] Christianity, as its champions maintain, Rome must be the most Christian city on the earth, and the Romans examples to the whole human race, of industry, of sobriety, of the love of truth, and, in short, of whatever tends to dignify and exalt human character. ”

“ Rome, having little national philosophy or native culture, took over Greek culture for its own and boldly adopted Christ as its moral philosophy. Christianity became the moral culture of Rome but hardly its religion in the sense of being the individual experience in spiritual growth of those who embraced the new religion in such a wholesale manner. True, indeed, many individuals did penetrate beneath the surface of all this state religion and found for the nourishment of their souls the real values of the hidden meanings held within the latent truths of Hellenized and paganized Christianity. ”

“ The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races, who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the catacombs to a solemn mass in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on Christianity. ”

“ In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and widespread over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed through some dark and discreditable phases; few writers can be found to excuse the lives of Popes John XI and John XII in the tenth century; they were abominable creatures; but the heart and body of Latin Christendom had remained earnest and simple; the generality of the common priests and monks and nuns had lived exemplary and faithful lives. Upon the wealth of confidence such lives created rested the power of the church. ”

“ Who can deny that the religion of Rome, so far as it is a religion for the common people, is based up on the characters of the gods, as they through history and tradition are held up to them—especially as they are painted by the poets? ”

“ One of the reasons for the rapid acceptance of Christianity among the Romans and its remarkable growth in their dependencies was that for centuries the people had ceased to take their religion seriously. The vulgar masses, undoubtedly then as now, and at all times, unthinkingly swallowed all that was taught them of their deities, but the writings [96] of cultivated men show clearly that for centuries the worship and reverence of their ancestral gods had but slight influence upon their ethical ideas. ”

“ In contrasting, then, the principles, habits, and lives of the Latin subjects of the Roman empire with those inculcated by Christ in the new law, it will be found that the latter were by far the most conducive to physical and mental vigor, material happiness, and longevity. In one example we have a material philosophy, wealth, sensuality, and unlimited self-indulgence; in the other, a Christian code, inculcating virtue, charity, morality, temperance, and moderation in all things. ”

“ With the rival vicars of Christ each showering perdition upon the adherents of the others, the spiritual condition of the faithful was most anxious and a solution of the tremendous question was the most pressing necessity for all who believed what the Latin Church had assiduously taught for a thousand years. ”

“ I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you also that are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith. ”

“ There are religions in which it is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no traces of the process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in view of the peculiar character of ancestor worship in Rome. ”

“ I hear of Athanasius and Miletius, Eusebius, Arius, and numberless other heads of your sects, condemning each other,—the one party refusing to hold communion with the other, while both profess to serve the same Lord, whom you call Christ. Now look at the system of religion which has prevailed undisturbed for centuries in Rome. We have had no quarrels or disputes, and all have submitted implicitly to us, their pontiffs, the directors of their rites and ceremonies. Our men and women have been at liberty to worship the gods and goddesses they have preferred. ”

“ Religion may come to be a thing apart by itself, a great act, a tremendous and awful rite, a magnificent and imposing ceremony, instead of what it is in itself, simply a principle of right action toward man and toward God. This is at present just the character and position of the Roman religion. It is a thing that is to be seen at the temples, but nowhere else; it is a worship through sacrifices and prayers, and that is all. The worshipper at the temple may be a tyrant at home, a profligate in the city, a bad man everywhere, and yet none the less a true worshipper. ”

“ The first element which was absorbed was the least Roman, the Graeco-Oriental cults. Christianity had been originally the worship of God, as he was understood by the Jews, combined with the belief that Jesus was he whom God had appointed, or would appoint, as his representative at the day of judgement. To this were now joined the longings for private salvation of the less fortunate classes in the Roman Empire, and their belief that this salvation could come from sacraments instituted by a Lord who was either divine by nature or had attained apotheosis. ”

“ If some day—may the gods forefend!—if some day the religion of our fathers fall before the religion of Jesus, Rome will pay a noble tribute to her own generous toleration, and I, unhappy I! will be called the instrument of what the Christians call Providence—what we call fate. ”

“ Free thought and free inquiry in almost any direction are fatal to some vital principle of Roman Catholicism. To match metaphors with his Holiness, they are spiritual sappers and miners, whose strokes tell fearfully among the foundation-stones of the Vatican. ”

“ But outside Latin countries it is not one whit more noticeable in the church of Rome than in any other church. The masses of the people on the one hand and the cultured classes on the other are becoming increasingly alienated from the religion of the churches. ”

“ The more closely, then, we study the manner in which Christianity was propagated in the first ages, the more clearly does the mission of the Roman Empire stand out before our eyes. It becomes more and more evident, the longer we look at facts, that Rome’s conquering legions, her great far-reaching roads, her laws, and her one universal language were all made use of by God in a wonderful way, not only to prepare the way for, but also for the establishment of his great spiritual kingdom upon earth. ”

“ Being all of them unable or unwilling to submit to any degree of restraint, and cherishing no other principle than that of yielding to the extravagance of youthful imagination, and the indulgence of their own passions, they formed a plan of renouncing altogether the Christian Religion, and adopting fantastically the creed and manners of the ancient Romans. ”

“ The Latin worship was grounded on man's enjoyment of earthly pleasures, and not on his fear of the wild forces of nature, and it gradually sunk into a dreary round of ceremonies. The Italian god was simply an instrument for the attainment of worldly ends, and not an object of profound awe or love, and hence the Latin worship was unfavorable to poetry, as well as philosophical speculation. ”

“ Among the [Pg 416] disciples of the Church of Rome are many who hold close to the Christian side of her theology, and seem to forget its Pagan side; many who avoid what is material in her cult, and, by aid of that same theology, cherish spiritual worship; many who turn to the noble morals of the Gospel, from the lower and ever deteriorating morals of the schools; and many to whom the secular spirit of the Papacy and the earthly empire aimed at by the Jesuits are repugnant. ”

“ Rome shows excellent judgment in adopting all the gods of the earth, so that if the worship of one god will not bring prosperity to the nation, there are others in plenty to try their fortune with again. Never doubt, brother, that it is because you Christians have no gods, that the populace and others are so hostile to you. Only set up a few images of Christ, and some of the other founders of the religion, and your peace will be made. ”