y
had urged his fortunately constituted nature to no mistakes, no
offences against humanity. And of his entire freedom from guile one
reward had been this singular happiness, that under his rule there was
no shedding of Christian blood. To him belonged that half-humorous
placidity of soul, of a kind illustrated later very effectively by
Montaigne, which, starting with an instinct of mere fairness towards
human nature and the world, seems at last actually to qualify its
possessor to be almost the friend of the people of Christ. Amiable, in
its own nature, and full of a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often
had its advantage of characters such as that. The geniality of
Antoninus Pius, like the geniality of the earth itself, had permitted
the church, as being in truth no alien from that old mother earth, to
expand and thrive for a season as by natural process. And that charmed
period under the Antonines, extending to the later years of the [120]
reign of Aurelius (beautiful, brief, chapter of ecclesiastical
history!), contains, as one of its motives of interest, the earliest
development of Christian ritual under the presidence of the church of
Rome.

Again as in one of those mystical, quaint visions of the Shepherd of
Hermas, "the aged woman was become by degrees more and more youthful.
And in the third vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty:
only her hair was that of an aged woman. And at the last she was
joyous, and seated upon a throne--seated upon a throne, because her
position is a strong one." The subterranean worship of the church
belonged properly to those years of her early history in which it was
illegal for her to worship at all. But, hiding herself for awhile as
conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt to be no more
than ordinary risk, her natural freedom. And the kind of outward
prosperity she was enjoying in those moments of her first "Peace," her
modes of worship now blossoming freely above-ground, was re-inforced by
the decision at this point of a crisis in her internal history.

In the history of the church, as throughout the moral history of
mankind, there are two distinct ideals, either of which it is possible
to maintain--two conceptions, under one or the other of which we may
represent to ourselves men's efforts towards a better
life--corresponding to those two contrasted aspects, noted above, as
[121] discernible in the picture afforded by the New Testament i