Tribonian

“ Tribonian has been blamed for the insertions the compilers made in the sentences of the old jurists (the so-called Emblemata Triboniani) ; but it was a part of Justinian’s plan that such insertions should be made, so as to adapt those sentences to the law as settled in the emperor’s time. On Justinian’s own laws, contained in the Codex and in his Novels, a somewhat less favourable judgment must be pronounced. They, and especially the latter, are diffuse and often lax in expression, needlessly prolix, and pompously rhetorical. ”

“ The civilians of the reign of the Antonines had studied the works of their predecessors: their philosophic spirit had mitigated the rigor of antiquity, simplified the forms of proceeding, and emerged from the jealousy and prejudice of the rival sects. The choice of the authorities that compose the Pandects depended on the judgment of Tribonian; but the power of his sovereign could not absolve him from the sacred obligations of truth and fidelity. ”

“ None of these books relate to law; and the better opinion seems to be that there were two Tribonians, apparently contemporaries, though possibly some of the attributes of the jurist have been, by a mistake of the compilers or transcribers of the Lexicon of Suidas, extended to the man of letters of the same name. ”

“ Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, evidently, the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.
Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact, every word. ”

“ Trimblerigg had seen that habit—habit of mind as well as body—is the dead weight in the world’s affairs [307] which separates man from faith, and prevents mountains from being moved. And so with Second Adventism, backed by spiritualism and prophecy, he had routed men’s minds out of their groove, simply by convincing them that on a given date, willy-nilly, the groove was coming to an end. Mr. Trimblerigg’s greatest exploit was not in building a city capable of containing a million souls, but in finding a million souls ready to flock to it. ”

“ Quite early in his examination of the tenets of True Belief, anxious that she should keep him in countenance, Mr. Trimblerigg asked Davidina what she thought of them.
‘My belief is,’ said Davidina, ‘that we can all believe what we want to believe; and if you only believe it enough, it comes true—for you, at any rate. You can believe every word of the Bible is true, or that every word of it is false; and either way, you can live up to it. The True Believers are right there, anyway. ”

“ A race for Heaven without obstacles, and a goal visibly to be won were the materials to make religion once more popular. Spiritualism and Second Adventism run together seemed to meet the demand. The Free Churches Militant began, in an expressive American phrase, ‘to palp with emotion’; and as the new spiritual Combine devised by Mr. Trimblerigg, with joined effects of dark séance and lurid anticipation of coming events, filled its hired halls to overflowing with suffocating converts, the churches grew empty. ”

“ Trimblerigg was not cut to the pattern of True Belief; whereas, for Uncle Phineas to be outside True Belief, was to be spiritually in chaos; and the small ugly chapel which he had built for his own ministry of the Word was to him a veritable city of light. And now he knew that he was leaving it.
‘I’m glad you’ve come, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got a preacher, only one that comes once a month; it’s only praying and reading most Sabbath days now; and there’s some that aren’t faithful. ”

“ In the midst of the Ages of Faith individual emotional outpourings or intellectual speculations would lead to strange results of fanaticism or dogma. There were indeed some that were mainly sensual in origin, but others betokened an earnest desire for a new heaven and a new earth and demanded a moral progression in human affairs not visible in existing human society. Such an aspiration is implicit in all the strange theories connected with ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ and in all the ideas of the Spiritual Franciscans, their offshoots and their companion sects. ”

“ Second Adventism was based on it: if anticipation was to be raised and seals opened, any old box might help; and this one had already attained publicity though not of a very serious kind. ‘Can any real prophecy come from America?’ had been the depreciatory attitude with which the religious communities of the Old World met its claims; and if from America, why this demand for a crowned head to open it? Why not a President, or a millionaire?
Mr. Trimblerigg himself, though doubting the extreme claims made for it, had never entirely rejected prophecy. ”

“ If the Holy Spirit is a distinct Person from God the Father, then the third Person, and not the first person in the Trinity, nor the second person, must on the Trinitarian view be regarded as the Father of Jesus, for it is written, “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” And yet the Trinitarian hypothesis is, that it was neither the third person, nor the first, but the second person in the godhead, that took humanity into union with his deity. ”

“ They never thought of altering their lives, or of living different from the rest of the world; but hope to be devout merely by reading over books of devotion: which is as odd a fancy, as if a man should expect to be happy, by reading discourses upon happiness. When these people dare take Christianity, as it is offered to them in the gospel; when they deny themselves, and renounce the world, they then will have begun devotion.
Trebonius asks how often he shall pray? He thinks the nicety of the question shews the piety of his heart. ”

“ Trimblerigg went out hopefully into the wilderness, drawing a tail of all the Free Churches after him; and though for a time they lacked funds, and found many doors closed against them, they had not to be long in doubt that theirs was the winning cause.
What the world wanted—the religious even more than the secular—was a real bird-in-the-hand; proof positive, quick results, practice not theory, ocular demonstration, moral certainty, wheels which actually went round, whose buzz could be heard to the far ends of earth. ”

“ All religions have in succession sprung out of the superstitions which preceded them, and there is no difficulty in proving that the Christian scheme is no exception to the rule; for, on its very front, it carries the most conclusive evidence of having been drawn out of the exhaustless ethnical magazines of Paganism,* and metamorphosed there is not a vestige—not an iota of Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, that did not belong to Paganism, thousands of years before the reign of Tiberius ”

“ And Trypho replied, "Now, then, render us the proof that this man who you say was crucified and ascended into heaven is the Christ of God. For you have sufficiently proved by means of the scriptures previously quoted by you, that it is declared in the Scriptures that Christ must suffer, and come again with glory, and receive the eternal kingdom over all the nations, every kingdom being made subject to Him: now show us that this man is He." ”

“ He retires for relief with his inquirer to a pleasant place, shadowed by planes, where swallows and nightingales are singing, and a quiet brook is purling. Triephon, his friend, expresses a fear lest he has heard some incantation, and is led by the course of the dialogue, before his friend tells his tale, to give some account of Christianity, being himself a Christian. After speaking of the creation, as described by Moses, he falls at once upon that doctrine of a particular providence which is so distasteful to Plutarch, Velleius in Cicero, and Cæcilius, and generally to unbelievers. ”

“ Mr. Trimblerigg, faced by certified facts which he continued to deny or question, began jumping from the New to the Old Testament and back again with an agility which confused his traducers but did not convince them; and the allegiance of the Free Evangelicals became sharply divided. The reunion of the Free Churches for which Mr. Trimblerigg had so long been working, already adversely affected by the divergencies of the war, was now strained to breaking. ”

“ And I said, "As you wish, Trypho, I shall come to these proofs which you seek in the fitting place; but now you will permit me first to recount the prophecies, which I wish to do in order to prove that Christ is called both God and Lord of hosts, and Jacob, in parable by the Holy Spirit; and your interpreters, as God says, are foolish, since they say that reference is made to Solomon and not to Christ, when he bore the ark of testimony into the temple which he built. The Psalm of David is this: 'The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and all that dwell therein. ”

“ Trimblerigg, he has made another little mistake, and that his creation was really stuffed as full of them as a plum-pudding is stuffed with plums. And I have a hope that when tribal deity becomes properly apologetic for its many misshapings of a divided world, humanity will begin to come by its own, and acquire a theology which is not an [14] organized hypocrisy for the bolstering up of nationalities and peoples. ”

“ For a god who tires of his handiwork is still responsible for it, however disillusioned; and when, employing me as his mouthpiece, Mr. Trimblerigg’s maker mocks at the tribal religions which have brought the world so near to ruin, he remains nevertheless a deity tribal in character, albeit a disgruntled one. ”

“ The conversion of the heathen Trevii to Christianity was, according to the legend, thus effected:—
The people of Trèves worshipped a statue of marble, from whose mouth oracles proceeded; troops of pilgrims came to Trèves to hear from this idol’s lips answers to their questions: but now a foreign priest appeared before the crowd, and with a crucifix in his hand he spoke to them of Christ the Son of God; the people, leaving their idol for the Truth, flocked to his feet, in spite of the threats of the heathen priests. ”

“ I can only think of Christian Science. I don’t think it’s quite right of you, Tibby dear.”
Miss Tibbutt blinked good-humouredly.
“Aren’t they the people who think that the Bible dropped down straight from heaven in a shiny black cover with S. P. G. printed on it?” she asked. 173
Trix shook her head.
“No,” she declared solemnly, “they’re Bible Christians. The Christian Science people are the ones who think we haven’t got any bodies.”
“No bodies!” ejaculated Miss Tibbutt.
“Well,” said Trix, “anyhow they think bodies are a false—false something or other.”
“False claim,” suggested Father Dormer. ”

“ On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the generation of the Son of God, and the procession of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism: or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit's separate personality is not held. The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires. ”

“ Now the Trinitarians must allow us the privilege of taking our faith from ourselves, not from them, and in carving out for us this employment, the Lecturer at Christ Church would set us to the task of disproving our own convictions, of overthrowing our own interpretations, of answering and opposing ourselves. There is only one point of difference between the Trinitarians and ourselves upon this subject, and that is the only point to which their arguments never have a reference. They maintain and we maintain that the Holy Spirit is God. ”

“ Trimblerigg would go.
If ever the human race comes to read its own history, without prejudice, or blindness, or superstition, it will discover as never before what a tremendous part answer to prayer has played in man’s making. As never before: for the strangest part of that discovery will be from which end the answer to prayer has come. Man claims many virtues which he does not possess ”

“ All that he lacked for the moment was the necessary environment, the atmosphere into which a new spiritual movement could be born. In politics it existed; in religion it had still to be found. Mr. Trimblerigg hesitated; and while he hesitated the call came, the spark of inspiration descended from on high, and what thereafter was saved to religion in a revivalism which swept the world, was lost to politics.
Two events, small in themselves, gave to his mind the impetus and direction it required. ”

“ He is the creator of all things, and a pure spirit, answered the Christian catechist. Is not this Trinity a wonderful idea? said the young students to each other, after hearing Saccas. Christianity, said Origen, teaches a Trinity far more awful and wonderful, and far more reasonable, too--a Trinity, not of ideas, but of persons. The new school talked of the inferior gods that ruled the lower world, and of the demons, good and bad, who executed their behests. The Christian philosopher explained the great fact of creation, and laid down the true doctrine of guardian angels and tempting devils. ”