INTRODUCTORY NOTICE To LACTANTIUS.

[a.d. 260--330.] Reaching, at last, the epoch of Constantine, perhaps the reader will share my own feelings, as those of--

"One who long, in thickets and in brakes

Entangled, winds now this way, and now that,

His devious course uncertain, seeking home,

But finds at last a greensward smooth and large,

Courageous, and refreshed for future toil."

How strange it seems, after three centuries since John the Baptist suffered, to gain a moment when kings are not actually persecuting Christ in His servants!

How marvelous the change must have been in the experience of the primitive faithful; the Roman Emperor not ashamed of Jesus, and setting up the cross on the standards of his legions! Tertullian, De Fuga, and the troubles of Cyprian about The Lapsed, are matters of the past. As in a moment, God has changed the world for His people, and their perils become as suddenly reversed. The world's favor begins to be the trial of faith, as its hatred before. The mild contemplative attitude of the Church at this period is something surprising. It accepts with little exultation this miracle of the Master; but so long has it been habituated to persecution, that it finds much of its discipline, and not less of its prevailing spirit, neutralized by its very triumph. No more the martyr's heroic testimony and his crown beyond this life; no such call for the celibate as had been enforced before in tomes of the Christian literature; and what need now of Antony's invitation to the desert and the cell? But, on the other hand, these ascetic forms of heroic faith were all that were now left to minister to the martyr-spirit, and to perpetuate the habits enforced upon the early believers. The hermitage and the monastery assumed a new attractiveness, and became dear to sentiment, as to principle before. We must not be surprised, then, at the tendencies of the age now rapidly developed; but let us rejoice for a moment in the times of refreshing from the Lord now at last vouchsafed to that "little flock" to which He had promised the kingdom.

The "conversion of Constantine," as it is called, introduced the most marvelous revolution in human empire, in practical thought, and in the laws and manners of mankind, ever known in the history of the world. It is amazing how little the men of the epoch itself glorified their own introduction to "marvelous light," and how very little the Church has left us, to tell the story of its emotions when first it found itself at rest from fiery persecutions, or when came forth from the Emperor the Edict of Milan for the legal observance of "the Day of the Sun." ¹ What a day that Easter was, when, emerging from the catacombs and other dens and caves of the earth, the Church herself seemed as one risen from the dead!

We may be sure there were tears of joy and warm embraces among kindred long torn asunder by their common exposures to fire and sword. We cannot imagine, indeed, all, that was in the hearts of those Christian families that now kept holyday together in the face of the world, and sang fearlessly in holy places their anthem, "Christ is risen from the dead." But a moment's thought we ought to give, as we pass into a stage of history entirely fresh and new, to the power of God thus manifested. The miracle thus wrought by the ascended Christ needs no aid from the supposed "vision of Constantine" to make it a supernatural exhibition of His glory who is "King of kings and Lord of lords."

Arnobius wrote to the minds of perplexed Pilates asking "What is truth" in a new spirit, and not indisposed to wash their own hands of the blood of Jesus, though not prepared to believe and be baptized. His pupil finds a better sort of Pilate in the Emperor and in his period. Constantine is a pagan still at heart, but he is convinced of the truth that Christ has a kingdom "not of this world;" and he must have this credit, above the Antonines, that he recognized in the Chris tians not only his best and most loyal subjects, but men of a character altogether superior ² to that of the heathen, who had so long been the councillors of the empire. He was one, also, who accepted "the logic of events," and who came to terms with the inevitable in time to turn it to his own advantage.

I think Constantine had read the Apologies addressed to the Antonines ³ by Justin Martyr, and was at first disposed only to accept the plea for Christians so far forth as Justin had urged it. Going so far, he was led beyond his positive convictions to measures of policy which identified him with the Church. That the Church was distrustful of him, and doubted how long the Imperial favor might be relied upon, is also apparent. This doubt accounts, in some degree, for the great moderation of the Church in accepting benefits from him, and in withholding notes of triumph. She instinctively foresaw Julians in the way, and expected reactionary periods. She forbore to baptize the Emperor, and encouraged his disposition to postpone. It was as when "the wolf of Benjamin" was introduced to the disciples: "they were afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple."

Lactantius, moved, perhaps, by Hosius or Eusebius, undertakes the instruction of the Emperor, while seeming only to copy the example of Justin writing to Antoninus Pius. The Institutes, it is true, had been begun at an earlier date; but he economizes, for a new purpose, the material, in which, perhaps, he had only purposed to follow up the work of his teacher, in language better fitted to the polite, for refuting heathenism. I cannot doubt that he aimed, in pure Latinity, to win the Emperor and his court to a deeper and purer conviction of divine truth: to more than a feeble and possibly superstitious idea that it was useless to contend with it, and that the gods of the empire were impotent to protect themselves against Christian progress and its masterly exposures of their shame and nothingness.

In language which has given him the title of the Christian Cicero, Lactantius employs Cicero himself as a defender of the truth; correcting him, indeed, and overruling his mistakes, rebuking his pusillanimity, and justly censuring him, (1) in philosophy, for declaring it no rule of action, however ennobling its precepts; and (2) in religion, for not venturing to profess conclusions to which his reasonings necessarily tend. All this is admirably adapted to carry on the work of Christian Fathers and Apologists under the change of times. He and Arnobius furnish but a supplement to the real teachers of the Church, and are not to be always depended on in statements of doctrine. They write like earnest converts, but not like theologians; yet, although their loose expressions are often inconsistent one with another, it is manifest that their design is to support orthodoxy as it had been defined by abler expounders. I think the large respect which Lactantius pays to the testimony of the Sibyls was addressed to the class with which he had to deal. Constantine was greatly influenced by such testimonies, if we may judge from his own liberal quotations ⁴ and his comments on the Pollio of Virgil, to which, as a Christian oracle, our author may have introduced him. In short, the day had come in which it could no longer be said with strict propriety of phrase, "Not many mighty, not many noble, are called;" and Lactantius accepted, as his mission, the enforcement, before such a class, of despised truths which the great had persecuted in vain for centuries. He drew them thus to the conclusion that God had indeed "chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are." Such was the prophecy of St. Paul, and the Labarum uplifted by Caesar's legions proclaimed the fulfillment.

I have little doubt that Lactantius was of heathen parentage, and was converted late in life. To his eternal honor he was not a "fair-weather Christian," but boldly confessed the faith amid the fires of the last and most terrible of the great persecutions. Its probable date suggests that his treatise on the persecutors may have been a far-reaching effort to dissuade the Caesars of a later age from trying to restore "the gods to Latium." I confess my own partiality to our author, and the interest with which his writings continue to impress me, even now. In youth (Consule Planco) I brought to his pages an enthusiastic appreciation of the genius which had adorned the very dawn of Christian civilization by works of literary merit not inferior to those of the Augustan age. The crabbed Latinity of Tertullian has charms, indeed, of its own sort: it was the shaggy raiment of the ascetic and the confessor, "always bearing about in his own body the dying of the Lord Jesus." It befitted the age and the man, and those awful realities with which Christians had then to deal. Not words, but things, were their one concern. It is pleasant to find, however, that Christianity is not incapable of meeting all sorts and conditions of men; and Lactantius' was doubtless the instrument of Providence in bearing the testimony of Jesus, "even before kings," in language which promised to Roman letters the new and commanding development imparted to its language by Christianity, which has made it imperishable, and more truly "eternal" than Rome itself.