HKB
rendering him suspected of lies and fraud, he was kept back, but shortly afterwards received. We are afraid of leaving him exposed to new temptations. Pray to Christ for him.’
“Socrates(44) speaks of a sophist of Constantinople, called Ecebolus, who conformed with a marvellous facility to all the changes of fortune which Christianity was undergoing. During the reign of Constantine, he affected the greatest zeal for the new belief; but when Julian became emperor, he resumed his ancient devotion to the gods of Paganism. After the death of that monarch, he gave great publicity to his repentance, and prostrated himself before the churches, crying to the Christians, ‘Tread me under your feet, as the salt which has lost its savour!’ Socrates adds:—‘Ecebolus remained what he has always been,—i.e., a fickle and inconstant man.’ St Augustinus could certainly say the same of his astrologer. Is it not surprising to find apostasy still prevalent at a time when no sensible man could believe in the restoration of the ancient worship? The appearance of Julian must have upset many a mind, shaken many a conscience, and given to the triumph of Christianity the character of a transitory event. But, at the end of the fourth century, it was impossible to abandon the church and return to the idols, except by a feeling which could not but excite profound pity. I therefore understand why St Augustinus had consented to plead with the Christians in favour of a wretch already charged with three apostasies: he wished, above all, to take from him the name of a Pagan, being convinced that whoever consented no longer to sacrifice to the false gods would finally belong to the true religion. A neophyte, restrained by the leaven of all the pagan passions, might remain more or less time on the threshold of the church, but sooner or later he was sure to cross it.(45) The leaders of the church considered it always a favourable presumption when a citizen consented to call himself no longer a Pagan. This first victory appeared to them a sure presage of a true conversion; and they recommended to the Christians that they should not apply the dangerous epithet of Pagan to those of their brethren who had failed, but simply to call them sinners. They endeavoured, in short, to make them forget Paganism; and in order to attain this object, they even forbade to pronounce its name.(46)
“The ancient worship was not only obstructing the development of Christianity by covert and insidious attacks, but it was also vitiating the discipline of the church, because its sway upon the manners of the converts was something more like a real tyranny than the natural remnant of its former influence. It is, indeed, surprising with what facility it introduced into the sanctuary of the true God its superstitious spirit, its relaxed morals, and its love of disorder. How little the church was then,—i.e., seventy years after the conversion of Constantine,—resembling what she ought to have been, or what she became afterwards!(47) St Jerome had intended, towards the end of his life, to write an ecclesiastical history; but it was in order to show that the church, under the Christian emperors, went on continually declining. Divitiis major, virtutibus minor (Greater in wealth, smaller in virtue), was the severe sentence which St Jerome must have pronounced with regret, but the justice of which is proved by all the historical documents of that period. This illustrious leader of Christianity, whose mind was more inclined to enthusiasm than dejection, frequently lost all energy, by reflecting on the deplorable condition of the church, declaring that he felt no longer any power to write. A sufficient number of historians have represented in vivid colours the excessive luxury of the bishops during that time, as well as the greediness, the ignorance, and the misconduct of the clergy; I shall therefore choose from this melancholy picture only those parts which refer to the history of Paganism.