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Act Second of the New Drama;

OR,

SCENE THIRD OF THE THIRD ACT OF THE ELDER

DRAMA.

TIME-From the Establishment of Christianity to the Justinian Reformation, or the Organisation of the Papacy, A.D. 323 to 532, 596, 608.*

DURING the three hundred years of the first act of the Christian Drama, the Christians are said to have undergone ten persecutions. The last, under Diocletian-the most fearful of all-immediately preceded the epoch of their triumph. The Emperor Constantine, Diocletian's successor, received the new faith; built a new capital with the spoils of the Heathen temples; transported the statues of the gods to Constantinople, for the decoration of

* These three dates are, first, the date of the Justinian Reformation, when the Roman law was Christianised and the Papal supremacy acknowledged by it; second, the date of the annexation of Britain to the Papal Church, thus including the scene of the Fifth Act and the extremity of the Western Empire, by Gregory the Great, by many esteemed the founder of the Papal Dictatorship; and, third, the date of Mahomet's Mission, in the fortieth year of his age. The three constitute the dawn of the Medieval age, including all the preliminaries necessary for its advent.

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the city as works of art; became the patron of bishops and the umpire of controversies; and was at once the High Priest of the Pagan and the Political Head of the Christian Religion. He tolerated Paganism and recommended Christianity.

The Exodus was now come; the Christians were exhilarated beyond description. Every church resounded with peans of exultation. The most extravagant, false, and absurd hopes were entertained of the glory to God, and the happiness to man, that were now about to be realised by the worldly prosperity of the new faith. The sword was now theirs. They were now invested with power to compel, and even to persecute, if necessary; and with God on their side, success was inevitable. enforcing church had never before been clothed with purple. They knew not what a monster that church would become. Without experience of the folly and the danger of the attempt to impose a unity of belief upon men by physical force, they fearlessly encountered it; and the first step once taken, provocation compelled every one that succeeded.

An

The toleration of Constantine, arising from a Roman habit of mind, was of short duration. In proportion as he studied the mysteries of the Church, he imbibed the spirit of definite and determined one-sidedness and persecution. The Arian controversy, which commenced immediately with the triumph of Christianity, speedily revealed the respective characters of the combatants. Which

ever party gained the ascendancy, it employed the argument of the sword to establish its dogmas. Arius was banished and recalled; Athanasius, his inveterate opponent, was five times exiled from his archiepiscopal diocese, and five times restored. Arian persecuted Trinitarian, and Trinitarian Arian; and General Councils condemned and justified each. Paul, the Trinitarian Patriarch of Constantinople, was five times banished by his rival, the Arian Macedonius, and dragged at last into the desert and strangled. The people took part in the controversies, like Parisians in a Revolution; and 3,150 persons lost their lives in one of the Arian and Trinitarian émeutes in the streets of the capital. In his final triumph Macedonius invented a wooden engine, by which the sacrament was forced into the mouths and down the throats of reluctant Trinitarians; whilst the tender breasts of young virgins were compressed between boards, or burnt with red-hot egg-shells, to enforce their acceptance of the consecrated elements from those whom they were taught dogmatically to regard and resist as heretics. So says Gibbon. It is fearfully, diabolically sublime, the determination on the one hand, and the resistance on the other; for each party in its turn respectively endured what it did not fail to inflict when it could. Each was honest. It was an age of raving, preternatural honesty. The cruelty was regarded as Divine cruelty; and the blessed St.

Hilary abused the Emperor Constantius as a Rebel and Antichrist, because he refrained from inflicting torture on the Arians.

Being in the second act of the Christian Drama, we have now the Greek Empire restored and converted; and the schools of the Philosophers transformed into sects. The sects were innumerable, especially amongst the Arians, who represented the free, but not the liberal or indifferent principle. It is the divisional era of the Church, and the reign of the Greek Fathers; the cycle of Greek Heresies and General Councils. The doctrines of the Church were not only all elaborated in the Greek language, but the very laws or canons of the Church were enacted in Greek Councils. None of the canons of the Primitive or Universal Church were made. in Italy; nor were any of the General Councils called by the Pope. It was not in the order of dramatic succession for the new Religion to pass from the East into the Despotic Peninsula, without a long and a painful ordeal in the divisional and controversial region of Greece; and the Capital seems to have been removed from Rome to Constantinople, as if on purpose to facilitate this arrangement, as well as to prepare for the rupture which succeeded. The Greeks wrangled with the Gospel, as their fathers did with philosophy; but they also fought and bled for the principles of the sects, which their fathers did not, but only debated

And the Romans, more

for those of the schools. quietly, like their forefathers also, with a language better adapted for dictation than debate for synthesis than analysis-persisted in the uniform and prudent system of overcoming by dignity, resolution, and patient endurance, the more feeble and illiterate resistance of the Western nations.

Meanwhile the old Empire and all its institutions were rapidly going to decay. Paganism, tolerated at first, was gradually weakened, and at last extinguished, by a persecution which it had not the faith, the zeal, nor the moral courage to withstand. The Empire itself was divided into two, in seventy years after its first Christian Council; and the Western half was early extinguished by the deluge of Barbarians, its cities plundered, and their inhabitants dispersed.

These Barbarians, singular to say, were all professors of the Arian creed; and thus it happened, that no sooner did the Empire become Christian, than it divided itself into two elements, one representing the Divinity and the other the Humanity of Christ. The Humanity overran and laid waste the Empire of the Divinity, for a period of nearly 300 hundred years, sacked and pillaged the city of the Cæsars, and destroyed the municipal system of the Romans and the Greeks, by the instrumentality of its various representatives, the Goths, the Huns and the Vandals, but was at last subdued by the passive resistance and spiritual supremacy of the