296 DECAY OF PAGANISM. [CHI XXVIII. were never required either to change, or to dissemble, their religious opinions. The Pagans were indulged in the most licentious freedom of speech and writing; the historical and philosophical remains of Eunapius, Zosimus,* and the fanatic teachers of the school of Plato, betray the most furious animosity, and contain the sharpest invectives, against the sentiments and conduct of their victorious adversaries. If these audacious libels were publicly known, we must applaud the good sense of the Christian princes, who viewed, with a smile of contempt, the last struggles of superstition and despair. But the imperial laws, which prohibited the sacrifices and ceremonies of Paganism, were rigidly executed: and every hour contributed to destroy the influence of a religion, which was supported by custom rather than by argument. The devotion of the poet or the philosopher, may be secretly nourished by prayer, meditation, and study; but the exercise of public worship appears to be the only solid foundation of the religious sentiments of the people, which derive their force from imitation and habit. The interruption of that public exercise may consummate, in the period of a few years, the important work of a national revolution. The memory of theological opinions cannot long be preserved, without the artificial helps of priests, of temples, and of books. The ignorant vulgar, whose minds are still agitated by the blind hopes and terrors of superstition, will be soon persuaded by their superiors, to direct their vows to the reigning deities of the age; and will insensibly imbibe an ardent zeal for the support and propagation of the new doctrine, which spiritual hunger at first compelled them to accept. The generation that arose in the world after the promulgation of the impe * Zosimus, who styles himself Count and ex-Advocate of the Treasury, reviles with partial and indecent bigotry, the Christian princes, and even the father of his sovereign. His work must have been privately circulated, since it escaped the invectives of the ecclesiastical historians prior to Evagrius (lib. 3, c. 40-42), who lived towards the end of the sixth century. Yet the Pagans of Africa complained, that the times would not allow them to answer with freedom the City of God; nor does St. Augustin (5, 26) deny the charge. The Moors of Spain, who secretly preserved the Mahometan religion above a century, under the tyranny of the Inquisition, possessed the Koran, with the peculiar use of the Arabic tongue. See the curious and honest story of their expulsion in Geddes. (Miscellanies, rial laws, was attracted within the pale of the Catholic chuch; and so rapid, yet so gentle, was the fall of Paganism, that only twenty-eight years after the death of Theodosius, the faint and minute vestiges were no longer visible to the eye of the legislator.* 66 66 The ruin of the Pagan religion is described by the sophists as a dreadful and amazing prodigy, which covered the earth with darkness and restored the ancient dominion of chaos and of night. They relate, in solemn and pathetic strains, that the temples were converted into sepulchres; and that the holy places, which had been adorned by the statues of the gods, were basely polluted by the relics of Christian martyrs. "The monks," a race of filthy animals, to whom Eunapius is tempted to refuse the name of men, are the authors of the new worship, which, in the place of those deities who are conceived by the understanding, has substituted the meanest and most contemptible slaves. The heads, salted and pickled, of those infamous malefactors, who, for the multitude of their crimes, have suffered a just and ignominious death; their bodies, still marked by the impression of the lash and the scars of those tortures which were inflicted by the sentence of the magistrate; such" continues Eunapius are the gods which the earth produces in our days; such are the martyrs, the supreme arbitrators of our prayers and petitions to the Deity, whose tombs are now consecrated as the objects of the veneration of the people."+ Without approving the malice, it is natural enough to share the surprise, of the sophist, the spectator of a revolution, which raised those obscure victims of the laws of Rome to the rank of celestial and invisible protectors of the Roman empire. The grateful respect of the Christians for the martyrs of the faith was exalted, by time and victory, into religious adoration; and the most illustrious of the saints and prophets were deservedly associated to the honours of the martyrs. One hundred and fifty years after the glorious deaths of St. Peter and St. Paul, the Vatican and the Ostian road were distinguished by the tombs, or rather by vol. i, p. 1-198.) *Paganos qui supersunt, quanquam jam nullos esse credamus, &c. Cod. Theodos. lib. 16, tit. 10, leg. 22, A.D. 423. The younger Theodosius was afterwards satisfied, that his judgment had been somewhat premature. See Eunapius, in the life of the sophist Ædesius; in that of Eustathius he foretels the ruin of Paganism, καί τι μυθῶδες, καὶ ἀειδὲς σκότος τυράννησει τὰ ἐπὶ 298 THE WORSHIP OF [CH. XXVIII. the trophies, of those spiritual heroes. In the age which followed the conversion of Constantine, the emperors, the consuls, and the generals of armies, devoutly visited the sepulchres of a tent maker and a fisherman,† and their venerable bones were deposited under the altars of Christ, on which the bishops of the royal city continually offered the unbloody sacrifice. The new capital of the eastern world, unable to produce any ancient and domestic trophies, was enriched by the spoils of dependent provinces. The bodies of St. Andrew, St. Luke, and St. Timothy, had reposed, near three hundred years, in the obscure graves from whence they were transported, in solemn pomp, to the church of the apostles, which the magnificence of Constantine had founded on the banks of the Thracian Bosphorus.§ About fifty years afterwards, the same banks were honoured by the presence of Samuel, the judge and prophet of the people of Israel. His ashes, deposited in a golden vase and covered with a silken veil, were delivered by the bishops into each other's hands. The relics of Samuel were received by the people with the same joy and reverence which they would have shown to the living prophet; the highways, from Palestine to the gates of Constantinople, were filled with an uninterrupted procession; and the emperor Arcadius himself, at the head of the most illustrious members of the clergy and senate, advanced to meet his extraordinary guest, who had always deserved and claimed. the homage of kings. The example of Rome and Conγῆς κάλλιστα. * Caius (apud Euseb. Hist. Eccles. lib. 2, c. 25), a Roman presbyter, who lived in the time of Zephyrinus, A.D. 202 -219, is an early witness of the superstitious practice. + Chrysostom. Quod Christus sit Deus, tom. i, nov. edit. No. 9. I am indebted for this quotation to Benedict XIV.'s pastoral letter on the jubilee of the year 1750. See the curious and entertaining letters of M. Chais, tom. iii. Male facit ergo Romanus episcopus ? qui, super mortuorum hominum, Petri et Pauli, secundum nos, ossa veneranda offert Domino sacrificia, et tumulos eorum, Christi arbitratur altaria. (Jerom. tom. ii, advers. Vigilant. p. 153.) § Jerome (tom. ii, p. 122) bears witness to these translations, which are neglected by the ecclesiastical historians. The passion of St. Andrew, at Patræ, is described in an epistle from the clergy of Achaia, which Baronius (Annal. Eccles. A.D. 60, No. 34) wishes to believe, and Tillemont is forced to reject. St. Andrew was adopted as the spiritual founder of Constantinople. (Mém. Ecclés. tom. i, p. 317-323, 588-594.) Jerome (tom. ii, p. 122) pompously describes the translation of Samuel, which is noticed in all the chronicles of the times. stantinople confirmed the faith and discipline of the Catholic world. The honours of the saints and martyrs, after a feeble and ineffectual murmur of profane reason,* were universally * The presbyter Vigilantius, the Protestant of his age, firmly, though ineffectually, withstood the superstition of monks, relics, saints, fasts, &c. for which Jerome compares him to the Hydra, Cerberus, the Centaurs, &c. and considers him only as the organ of the dæmon (tom. ii, p. 120-126). Whoever will peruse the controversy of St. Jerome and Vigilantius, and St. Augustin's account of the miracles of St. Stephen, may speedily gain some idea of the spirit of the fathers. [This controversy attracts more particular notice, since it illustrates the most important feature of the age and some other interesting facts. Vigilantius was guilty of the deadly sin of not thinking as Jerome did, respecting the celibacy of the clergy and other points of church discipline, as well as on the subjects mentioned by Gibbon. The heretic was therefore painted in the darkest colours that polemical ingenuity could invent. Although at that time an ecclesiastic of Spain, he was a native of Convenæ, a Gallic canton at the foot of the Pyrenees, denominated Cominges by the modern French. There was a tradition that Pompey, returning from his victorious career in Spain, had planted a colony of his prisoners on this spot and given the community its Latin name. Julius Cæsar (De Bell. Civ. 1. 3, c. 17) referred obscurely to a treaty with some lawless banditti among the wilds of the Pyrenees. In the bitterness of controversial rancour, Jerome availed himself of these grounds, for a furious assault on his adversary. Worthy," he says, "is Vigilantius of his descent from that rabble of thieves, whom Cn. Pompey, on his return to celebrate his triumph for the conquest of Spain, collected among the Pyrenean mountains and planted in one town, to which he gave the name of Convenæ." (Hieron. adv. Vig. Op. tom. i, p. 589.) This vituperative ebullition of provoked sainthood has since been taken by our classical critics, among them Oudendorp and D'Anville, as sound historical evidence of a fact unknown to earlier writers. Neither Strabo nor Pliny had heard of this origin of Convenæ. The former is remarkable for having collected and recorded every current tradition relative to the early history of tribes and cities. In this instance he is silent. But he has used an expression, which, as he seems to have travelled through the region, probably indicates the true derivation of the name. He calls it (lib. 4) Tv Kovové vwv ovykλúdwv, a term which his different editors and annotators are at a loss to explain, and for which they have proposed to substitute various readings. The meaning of it is, confluvium, a flowing together of waters. The whole district is full of torrents rushing down from the heights of the Pyrenees, and successively uniting to form the head of the Garonne. The Aqua Convenarum and streams that are formed in that tract of country are mentioned by Cellarius (tom. i, p. 145). Instead, therefore, of affording the delusive grounds on which Jerome relied, in the gratification of his malignity, it is evident that the Latin Convence and the French Cominges are corrupted forms of the Coman or Covan, by which 300 FABULOUS MARTYRS AND RELICS. [CH. XXVIII. established; and in the age of Ambrose and Jerome, something was still deemed wanting to the sanctity of a Christian church, till it had been consecrated by some portion of holy relics, which fixed and inflamed the devotion of the faithful. In the long period of twelve hundred years, which elapsed between the reign of Constantine and the reformation of Luther, the worship of saints and relics corrupted the pure and perfect simplicity of the Christian model; and some symptoms of degeneracy may be observed even in the first generations which adopted and cherished this pernicious innovation. I. The satisfactory experience, that the relics of saints. were more valuable than gold or precious stones,* stimulated the clergy to multiply the treasures of the church. Without much regard for truth or probability, they invented names for skeletons, and actions for names. The fame of the apostles and of the holy men who had imitated their virtues, was darkened by religious fiction. To the invincible band of genuine and primitive martyrs, they added myriads of imaginary heroes who had never existed, except in the fancy of crafty or credulous legendaries; and there is reason to suspect, that Tours might not be the only diocese in which the bones of a malefactor were adored, instead of those of a saint. A superstitious practice, which tended to increase the temptations of fraud and credulity, insensibly extinguished the light of history and of reason in the Christian world. II. But the progress of superstition would have been much less rapid and victorious, if the faith of the people had not been assisted by the seasonable aid of visions and miracles, to ascertain the authenticity and virtue of the most suspicious relics. In the reign of the younger Theothe Celtic inhabitants designated the meetings of waters in that region. Their language supplied also the name of the river which finally issues from these waters, for the Garonne is their Garwan (see Armstrong's Gaelic Dictionary), the rough water, so graphically and characteristically described by Pomponius Mela (lib. 3, c. 2).-ED.] * M. de Beausobre (Hist. du Manichéisme, tom. ii, p. 648) has applied a worldly sense to the pious observation of the clergy of Smyrna, who carefully preserved the relics of St. Polycarp the martyr. +Martin of Tours (see his Life, c. 8, by Sulpicius Severus) extorted this confession from the mouth of the dead man. The error is allowed to be natural; the discovery is supposed to be miraculous. Which of the two was liable |