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UNINSPIRED TRADITION WAS RAISED TO THE LEVEL OF SCRIPTURE

A stout contest began in the third century between tradition and the supreme authority of Scripture. Some bowed to the absolute mandates of the Bible, allowing no compromise; while others reduced it to a book of divination, by introducing bibliomancy, or the ‘sacred lots.’ They casually opened the book, and by the first passage that came to hand predicted the future. Tertullian refused to dispute with the heretics out of the Scriptures, because they rejected their authority in part. Yet, when they sustain his position, he quotes them; but when they do not serve him, he appeals to custom and tradition, as in his Corona (p. 337): ‘If thou requirest a law in the Scripture for it, thou shalt find none. Tradition must be pleaded as originating it, custom as confirming it, and faith in observing it.’ On the contrary, Hippolytus condemns all errors opposed to the Scriptures, and binds every article of his faith to their teaching. Speaking of Carpocrates and other heretics, he says, that they brand their disciples ‘in the posterior parts of the lobe of the right ear,’ a practice at which he was rather apt himself, figuratively.

Early in the century Origen had procured a faithful edition of the Septuagint, Lucien a second, and Hesychius a third. Copies of all the Scriptures so abounded that, A.D. 294, Pamphilus had founded what may be called the first Bible Circulating Library, and made numerous copies with his own hands to give away. In their writings at this time, the fathers quote the Scriptures copiously; Origen, alone, making 5,765 quotations from the New Testament. Libraries were founded at Alexandria, Caesarea and other places, and the Sacred Books were put in the church edifices, for all who could to read in their own tongue; besides which there were readers and interpreters in all the congregations. [Townley, Bib. Lit., i, p. 106]

The Churches proved themselves less and less worthy of this heritage. They quarreled with each other like termagants [quarrelsome, scolding women], spent their energies in pious hair-splitting, and were reckless in the extreme. Things were fast setting into a hierarchy, and the Churches were soon brought under thrall to aspiring officers. But, for a long time, powerful voices were raised to arouse the people against this. Even at Rome there was a struggle for Church independency; as Hippolytus says, that when Noetus, the pastor there, was tried for blasphemous utterances, it was ‘before the Church;’ but where the spirit of independence went, its form soon followed, and blind submission or ‘schism’ was the only alternative. Origen wrote a letter to Philip and Severa, urging the freedom of religious opinion; the dominant ‘Catholic’ party began to tyrannize over others, in the interests of uniformity. The empire of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, which tolerated all religions, arose in 267; but Paul, the pastor of Antioch, who held civil office under this remarkable woman, put forth doctrines which other pastors condemned, and when Zenobia succumbed before the hosts of Aurelian, those pastors made a formal appeal to the conqueror to expel Paul from his pastorate. This is the first case on record, where Christians threw aside the dignity of their manhood to seek the aid of the civil power in settling their squabbles, in enforcing Christian doctrine. The emperor, with more regard to decency in the case, left it to the decision of an assembly of pastors at Rome.

Victor was the first bishop of Rome who carried all measures with a high hand, in behalf of the claims of that Church. lie was a busy, hot-headed mischief-maker, who stirred up discord on every trivial matter to carry a point; and before long a strong government was developed in the politics of Christianity. The Clementine and Ignatian forgeries followed, to sustain prelatical authority, in which some scoundrel puts the following into the mouth of Ignatius: ‘We ought to look unto the bishop as unto the Lord himself. . . . Let all reverence the deacons as the command of Jesus Christ, and the bishop as Jesus Christ, being the Son of the Father; and the presbyters as the sanhedrin of God, and college of the Apostles. Without these it is not called a Church.’ [Trall. Cap. 2,3] ‘What the bishop approves of, that is also well-pleasing to God, that whatever is done may be infallible and sure.’ ‘The Spirit proclaimed, saying thus: Do nothing without the bishop.’ ‘He who honors the bishop is honored by God, he who does any thing without the privity of the bishop, worships the devil.’ Cave attributes the Recognitions to Bardesenes, but Justin does not think that ‘he could have been the author of so many shameless lies.’ [Ecc. Hist., i, p. 351]

Thus, by the close of the third century we have the absurdity of Baptism regenerating the soul, and the Supper feeding it, an episcopacy with which is lodged, eternal life, a ‘Catholic Church,’ outside of which all are heretics, and no salvation out of the Church. For this, Cyprian, a converted pagan, rhetorician and bishop of Carthage, is more to blame than any other man. Pupianus, like a simpleton, took it into his head to ‘inquire carefully into our character,’ says Cyprian. But in his reply to that callow brother, the gentle bishop reads him this sweet lecture: ‘What presumption! What arrogance! What pride it is, to call the prelates and priests to account! The bees have their queen; the armies have their generals; and they preserve their loyalty; the robbers obey their captains with humble obsequiousness! How much more upright, and how much better are the unreasonable and dumb animals, and the bloody robbers, and swords and weapons, than you are. There the ruler is acknowledged and feared, whom not a divine mandate has set up, but whom the reprobate rout have appointed of themselves.’ He then warns him that as one who calls his brother ‘Fool’ is in danger of hell fire, he is in greater peril who inveighs against ‘priests.’ [Epis. lxv]

Well may Isaac Taylor say in his Primitive Christianity: ‘The first three (centuries) of the Christian history, comprise a sample of every form and variety of intellectual or moral observation of which human nature is at all susceptible, under the influence of religious excitement. No great ingenuity, therefore, can be needed in watching any modern form of error or extravagance, with its like, to be produced from the museum of antique specimens.’ And he deprecates the abject slavery of so prostrating ‘our understandings before the phantom, venerable antiquity, as to be inflamed with the desire of inducing the Christian world to imitate what really asks for apology and extenuation.’ [Pp., 57,157]

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A HISTORY OF THE BAPTISTS

By Thomas Armitage

1890

[Note from the publisher. This valuable out-of-print book was scanned from an original printing and carefully formatted for electronic publication by Way of Life Literature. We extend a special thanks to our friend Brian Snider for his labor of love in diligently scanning the material so that it might be available to God's people in these days. For a catalog of other books, both current and old, in print and electronic format, contact us at P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, [e-mail] (e-mail), http://wayoflife.org/~dcloud (web site).]

[Table of Contents for "A History of the Baptists" by Thomas Armitage]

POST-APOSTOLIC TIMES

CHRISTIANITY IN THE FOURTH CENTURY

Near Geneva the Rhone flows in swift but calm majesty at the foot of those Alps, which are more majestic than itself. There its waters are a dark blue and beautifully crystal, as they flow from a cool azure lake far up in the region of alternate snow and sunshine. The river Avre comes rushing down from those horrid valleys where the glaciers grow and grind, striking the Rhone at almost right angles. It is a little, furious, brawling, muddy stream worthy of its fountain; it scowls like the brow of a dark villain rushing from his den, and launches its dirty current into the sheet of light. The Rhone, as the daughter of purity, shrinks from its defilement and glides on in disdain, refusing all amalgamation. Long they move on side by side in the same channel, parted by a deep-drawn line between them, but without one spot on the mountain maiden. Thus repelled, the Avre sinks to quiet, softened into decency by the sun-lit side of the Rhone, which melts, first into pity then into compassion. And why? At every rock the impudent intruder breaks into foam and then lulls into murmurs, as if it were pleading for tolerance, till quietly the larger stream consents to absorb the less, eddy by eddy, and so at last it is overcome by importunity and embraces what it first spurned. From that hour the glory of the Rhone is gone, a few leagues below the two are one, and in their turbid dishonor they rush down together as one polluted stream. This is but a faint image of the River of Life, mingled with the tide of pagan philosophy, which have come down to us confluent from the opening of the fourth century.

THE LEAVEN OF GNOSTICISM

It would require a volume to trace the corruption of Christianity with Platonism, for we have this heresy in germ in the Apostolic Churches long before the Gnostics injected it into the truth at Alexandria, as the exalters and defenders of knowledge against faith. Paul found it creeping in at Crete, Colosse and Ephesus. The ideas of Pythagorus had prepared its way in Crete, Ephesus was the center of all pretentious philosophy, and Colosse was full of Phrygian pantheism entwined with the mysteries of Pan, Cybele and Bacchus. All these were dexterously interwoven into Christianity by Simon Magus, the real father of Christianized Gnosticism; others fostered it, and Manes led it to full manhood by the end of the third century. Paul saw its drift and warned Timothy against the opposition of ‘knowledge falsely so called.’ At first it was simple, without system or great power, never arraying itself openly against the truth; hence, its danger lay not in the violence of its attacks, but in its secret aggressions. Hippolytus calls it a ‘hydra,’ which had been pushing its way in the dark for many years; but no error matched it in efficiency. In his time it had corrupted between thirty and forty sects and subsects, who differed amongst themselves, all holding principles contrary to the simple faith of Christ and putting it under the control of Oriental paganism. The Gnosis of Alexandria is not easily defined; for it was a compound of monotheism, materialism, pantheism and spiritualism, taken from the heart of Platonism and the reasoning of Aristotle, with an admixture of native Egyptian thought. It professed to be the essence of intelligence, and so won the learned by its liberal speculations, the rationalist by its mastery of all logic, the superstitious by its many mysteries and the ignorant by its pretense, that it explained every thing. The Greek philosophy was too narrow for its tastes, and the teachings of Jesus too practical for its uses, so it made sad havoc of Homer’s pure literature and Christ’s plain revelations. It refused to take any thing in the proper and natural meaning of its words, and its allegory distorted every thing by the attempt to transfigure its simplicity. Hippolytus says that the whole system reminded him of Thales, who, ‘Looking toward heaven, alleging that he was carefully examining supernal objects, fell into a well; and a certain maid, Thratta, remarked of him derisively that while intent on beholding things in heaven, he did not know what was at his feet.’

At the opening of the fourth century none of the Churches were entirely free from this corrupt leaven. It affected their doctrine and practice, had created an aristocracy in their ministry, pushed aside the letter of Scripture in sublimating its interpretation in relation to the person of God, of Christ, good and evil, incarnation and atonement; and had left but little in the Gospel unchanged, either in theory or experience. Almost all the African fathers had gone after it, and it had produced swarms of monastic orders in Greece, Gaul and Italy. Worse than this, it had destroyed the common bond of brotherhood between the rich and poor; and because of its pomp, ceremony, symbol, mystery and liturgical worship, it had found that favor with the nobles which exalted Christ’s religion into an awful sacredness, and well nigh made the Church a secret society, which now cared little to uplift the slave, the poor and the downtrodden. This explains why Christianity took the shape that it did in its final struggle with paganism. Having corrupted itself and become weak, the steps were easy to popular influence, and the unity of the temporal with the spiritual power.

For forty years the law of Gallienus had recognized the Christians as a legal community. They had become numerous and influential. In the great cities they had large and costly temples furnished with vessels of gold and silver; their faith was much the rising fashion; the army, the civil service, the court, were filled with Christians, and the old Christ-likeness had nearly gone. A century had passed since the Antonines; the Empire was fast breaking up of its own heterogeneous elements; and one more attempt was made to recast it on the old faith and a more absolute model, if possible, by two Emperors after the Oriental fashion. Now we have THE LAST BITTER PERSECUTION, for the modified Christian faith was supplanting heathenism faster than had the simple Gospel. This persecution burst forth Feb. 23, 303, at Nicomedia, where the Imperial Palace was then located. Because the Scriptures were regarded as the source of all Christian aggression, the aim of the persecutors was to destroy every copy and the cry passed up and down the empire: ‘Burn their Testaments!’ This Bible burning was firmly resisted, and at Carthage, Mensurins the bishop removed all copies from the sanctuary, putting worthless MSS. in their place. Afterward he was accused of betraying the Bible, a charge never sustained. Many gave up the sacred book willingly to be burnt in the market-places, and were expelled from the Churches, while others preferred death to this treachery. An African magistrate demanded that Felix should give up his Bible for burning, when he answered that he would rather be burnt himself. He was loaded with chains, sent to Italy and beheaded. In Sicily Euplius was seized with the Gospels in his hand and put on the rack. When asked, ‘Why do you keep the Scriptures forbidden by the Emperor?’ he answered: ‘Because I am a Christian. Life eternal is in them; he that gives them up loses life eternal.’ The Gospels were hung about his neck when led to execution and he was beheaded. At Aelia, in Palestine, Valens, an aged deacon, proved his love for the Scriptures by committing large portions of them to memory, and repeating them with accuracy. John, a blind Egyptian, did the same with such perfection that he could repeat the whole of the books of Moses, the Prophets and the Apostles. Hot irons were thrust into the sockets of his eyes.

This persecution lasted ten years, and was severer than all that had gone before. But it acted like fire on incense, in drawing out the finest and richest essences in Christian character. One day, when it was beginning to abate, the Emperor’s bed-chamber was found in flames. DIOCLETIAN was stricken with terror, and suspecting his Christian servants, he put them to torture and stood by to extort their confessions. Two weeks later a second fire occurred in the same room. He was more enraged than ever, and made closer inquisition for blood in the palace. Several servants were put to death, and the Empress and his daughter, who were Christians, were compelled to sacrifice to the gods. No language can describe the brutality of this persecution under Diocletian, Galerius and Maximian, whom Lactantius calls ‘three ravenous wild beasts.’ It is estimated that 17,000 suffered death in one month, that 144,000 were martyred in Egypt alone; and of the banished, and those condemned to the public works, no less than 700,000 died. In some provinces scarcely a Christian was left. So great was the triumph against Christianity that it was commemorated by striking off a gold coin. On one side was the head of Diocletian, crowned with laurel, and on the reverse, Jupiter, brandishing a thunder-bolt, and trampling upon the genius of Christianity--a human figure with feet of serpents.

This Dance of Death was revived, however, under one Emperor after another, until CONSTANTINE conquered Rome, A. D. 312. At that time he reigned over the Western Empire only, but in 323, after the battle of Chalcedon, he became sole Emperor of the Roman world. He published an edict concerning Christians in 312, at Rome, but this document is lost. In 313 another, issued at Milan, gave toleration to all religions, and restored the confiscated property of Christians; he also gave large sums of money to rebuild their places of worship. But in 324 he inflicted a blow upon the Christian system from which it has not yet recovered, by making it the religion of the State. Between 315 and 323 he had sent forth five edicts admitting Christians to offices of state, civil and military; had taken measures to emancipate Christian slaves; had exempted the clergy from municipal burdens, and had made Sunday a legal day of rest from public work. But in 325 he attempted to settle the disputes in the Church by presiding at the first General Council which ever was held, that of Nicaea, in which Arianism was condemned, the unity of the Catholic party proclaimed, and the last step taken to establish the union between Church and State.

This great historical character has been the subject of malignant depreciation or extravagant laudation, according to the point of view from which he has been seen. Like all other great men, he took type from the character of his times, and the truth will make him human, without magnifying his virtues or blackening his weaknesses. He was born of a Christian mother, who must have been troubled with Baptist notions, for she never had him christened. His disposition was naturally mild and tolerant; and his father, who was not a Christian, being moved by clemency toward Christians, had probably influenced him in the same direction, as well as the counsel and example of his mother. In his early manhood he worshiped at the shrine of the gods, but after the removal of the government to Constantinople he forbade pagan worship in that city, and leveled its temples throughout the Empire. Having renounced that religion himself, he persecuted the unconverted pagan for his constancy therein. He is said to have seen the cross in the sky, but possibly his Christianity had borne a higher character had he discovered love for the true cross of Christ in his soul; crosses in the firmament are of rather light moral worth. Unfortunately, it was years after this traditional vision that his nominal Christianity allowed him to kill his son, his second wife and others of his family. Full of ambition and passionate resentment, it would require considerably more today than a sky miracle, a sword in the hand, and a conquering army at the Malvian Bridge to give him membership ‘in good standing’ in the Baptist Church recently established at Rome. It is said that the cross in the heavens was attended with the inscription: ‘By this sign conquer!’ What, and whom? His own sin? His own soul? It seems not. But rather Maxentius and Rome and a throne. At the beginning Jesus had made himself king in Zion, to disallow all imperialism there; and did he now rise from his throne to hang his cross of peace an ensign of blood in the firmament, and to indicate that he turned over his universal lordship to an unregenerated heathen? This cross story needs thorough revision.

Common sense and the after life of Constantine rather say, that he kenned this cross in the clouds with the eye of a politician and statesman. The ‘eagle’ soared high that day, but he saw the beam of the cross soaring above the head of the Roman bird. Clear-headed and far-sighted, he read the meaning of that noiseless agency, which had quietly struggled for three hundred years to open a new history in the world. Other eyes besides his were turned in the same direction. The men clothed in purple had blindly sacrificed nameless thousands of their purest, wisest and most patriotic subjects to dumb idols. The gods had kept the Empire in a perpetual broil, and had often murdered his predecessors, before the crown had made a dint upon their brows. Constantine was not so blind to the real cross that he needed a miraculous phantom in the skies to interpret for him the signs of the times. He was cool, ambitious, practical ; and knew what the principles of patient integrity must do in a new government, which, through the cross, had well nigh overthrown all the powers of the old government. The new idea of Calvary had awakened a new enthusiasm in man, had created a new order of patriotism, and he saw that the Via Dolorosa had become the Roman highway to unity, elevation, solidity. Long after this he came to embrace Jesus in person ; for as age came and life was about to close, he sought and received baptism at the hands of Eusebius, the Bisilop of Nicomedia, in the baptistery of the church known as Martyrium Christi. He expressed the hope ‘To have been made partaker of the salutary grace in the river Jordan;’ but his violent illness cut off that hope, and left him unable to take the long journey to the sacred river. He died on the 23d of May, A. D. 337, in great peace, at the age of sixty-four, about one month after his immersion. He had delayed this act of obedience to Christ under the absurd notion of his times, that baptism would cleanse away the sins of a life-time at once. Before his immersion he laid aside his purple robes and never donned them again; but from that day wore the white garment of newly immersed believers, until he exchanged it for the shroud in death. [Vit. Constant., lib. Iv, cap. 62]

SPAIN, in the Western Empire, felt little of the Diocletian persecution which convulsed the eastern division, and how did the Spanish Christians use their exemption from suffering? Chiefly in the attempt to consolidate the new system of corporate unity, in place of the isolation of Apostolic Church independency. With this end in view, we find nineteen bishops, twenty-six presbyters and many deacons, holding the Council of Elvira (Eleberis) in the retired district of Baetica, under the lead of Hosins, the great Bishop of Cordova. He was a man of genius and power, born to rule. At Nicaea he took the second seat, Constantine filling the first, but at Elvira, A.D. 305-306, he was the guiding spirit. His prime idea was to put Christianity on a surer footing, by first consolidating it into a catholic body, and then uniting it closer to the national life. This synod was professedly called to restore order in the Churches of Spain, by deciding what to do with those who had ‘lapsed’ from the faith, and to settle other questions of morality and discipline. Its tone and temper were supposed to be in sympathy with Novatiaii; but Hosiua adroitly turned it, not to reconcile the Churches one to another, but to unite the Church with the State. Afterward he was very influential in the private councils of Constantine, and served as his diplomatic agent on many occasions.

Under the frame-work of the new policy, this Spanish Convention of independent assemblies was to issue a general code of decrees which should bind them by concert of action, as if they were one congregation. In this way an organic union could reach the ‘heretics’ and ‘rural’ pastors, could bring them under subjection to the bishops of large cities; and so at one stroke they could keep the Church pure and strong. This was Spanish Catholicity in its infancy. Then, if one nation might have a Church, why not each nation, and if each, why could not all nations form one general Church? This proposed purification of the Church suited the Novatians exactly, but they did not dream that they were weaving meshes for their own feet in this Synod. With all the simplicity of their hearts they united in the XXIVth decree, which demanded that a man who had been baptized in one province should not enter the ministry in another, a long step toward a diocesan system. Heresy was put also on the same basis with deadly sin, and wrong in the laity was to be condoned with a leniency which did not apply to pastors. This claimed preeminent sanctity for the clergy, and conciliated the people to the innovation. The special privileges to the people, however, were attended with larger distinctions of rank amongst the clergy, and the bishop began to assume new functions over his brethren. Others might baptize, but in every case the convert must be brought to the bishop to be confirmed. The XLIId article enjoined two years of probation before a catechumen could be baptized. Non-communion at the Lord’s Table became a retributive act, making exclusion therefrom penal, and men were excommunicated for a given time, from one to ten years.

Christ intended his ordinances as a trowel to build up the Churches, they used them as a sword to cut them down in arbitrary retribution. First they made baptism a magical rite to save from sin, then they withheld it as a penance for sins committed, as in the case of Constantine, who had long been a catechumen. The Supper had been the first festival of joy to the convert on entering the Church; now its refusal to him was to shut the gate of heaven in his face forever, even in some cases when he was penitent. This Synod decreed that any one who, after faith in the baptism of salvation, shall fall into idolatry, or falsely accuse a bishop, priest or deacon, ‘shall not receive communion even to death.’ This is what is meant by the Church ‘arming itself with sacraments!’ And so the Lord’s ordinance of thanksgiving and commemoration of the sacrifice of Jesus, ‘armed’ the Church to punish any one who was absent from the Church for three Sundays with the penalty of denial to the Supper itself.

The whole trend of the Synod was to make the ministry an aristocracy, by building up sacerdotalism; and to this end it was considerate of the dead, while it was harsh toward the living. The XXXIVth article provided that, ‘Tapers shall not be lighted in the cemetery during the day, for the spirits of the saints must not be disquieted.’ Great homage was paid to the martyrs. One good thing was done, however. Baptism had been attended with gifts and offerings from the candidate, a practice which had grown into a regular tax exacted of all who were immersed. The XLVIIIth article forbade this tax, also the custom of washing his feet after the anointing with oil.