| << | Contents | >> |
Arnobius
————————————
This is a most extraordinary note. The author uses “so to say” (="as it were”) merely to qualify the figure, which a pagan might think extravagant. “This is, as it were, the door of life:” the expression qualifies the rhetoric, not the Scripture, as such. On the contrary, I should adduce this very passage as an instance of our author’s familiarity alike with the spirit and the letter of two most important texts of the Gospel, which he expounds and enforces with an earnest intelligence, and with a spirit truly evangelical.
A heathen might have retorted, had he known the Scriptures, by asking about the “white robes” of angels, and the raiment of the risen Redeemer; e.g., Rev. i. 13. “Curious and unlearned questions” concerning these matters have been stirred by a certain class of Christians. (See Stier[5046] and Olshausen.[5047]) But let us not reason from things terrestrial as regards things celestial: our coarse material fabrics are “shadows of the true.” The robes of light are realities, and are conformed to spiritual bodies, as even here a mist may envelop a tree. Because of men’s stupid and carnally gross ideas, let it be said of “harps” and “phials,” and all like phraseology as to things heavenly, once for all, “it doth not yet appear” what it means; but they intimate realities unknown to sense, and “full of glory.”
Arnobius with remorseless vigour smites Jove himself,—the Optimus Maximus of polytheism,—and, as I have said, with the assurance of one who feels that the Church’s triumph over “lords many and gods many” is not far distant. The scholar will recall the language of Terence,[5048] where the youth, gazing on the obscene picture of Jupiter and Danäe, exclaims,—
“What! he who shakes high heaven with his thunder
Act thus, and I, a mannikin, not do the same?
Yes, do I, and right merrily, forsooth!”
On which the great African Father[5049] remarks pithily, “Omnes enim cultores talium deorum, mox ut eos libido perpulerit, magis intuentur quid Jupiter fecerit, quam quid docuerit Plato, vel censuerit Cato.” And here is not only the secret of the impotence of heathen ethics, but the vindication of the Divine Wisdom in sending the God-Man. Men will resemble that which they worship: law itself is incapable of supplying a sufficient motive. Hence,[5050] “what the law could not do, in that it was weak,…God sending His own Son,” etc. Thus “the foolishness of God is wiser than men,” and “the love of Christ constraineth us.”
“Talk they of morals? O Thou bleeding Lamb!
The grand morality is love of Thee.”
The world may sneer at faith, but only they who believe can love; and who ever loved Christ without copying into his life the Sermon on the Mount, and, in some blest degree, the holy example of his Master?
The early Christians prayed for the departed, that they might have their consummation in body and spirit at the last day. Thus, these prayers for the faithful dead supply the strongest argument against the purgatorial system, which supposes the dead in Christ (1) not to be in repose at first, but (2) capable of being delivered out of “purgatory” into heaven, sooner or later, by masses, etc. Thus, their situation in the intermediate state is not that of Scripture (Rev. xiv. 13), nor do they wait for glory, according to Scripture, until that day (2 Tim. iv. 8). Archbishop Usher, therefore, bases a powerful argument against the Romish dogma, on these primitive prayers for the departed. Compare vol. iii. p. 706, and vol. v. p. 222, this series.
He divides it into five heads, as follows:[5051]—
“(1) Of the persons for whom, after death, prayers were offered;
“(2) Of the primary intention of these prayers;
“(3) Of the place and condition of souls departed;
“(4) Of the opinion of Aerius, the heretic, touching these prayers; and
“(5) Of the profit, to the persons prayed for, of these prayers.”
And his conclusion is, after a rich collation of testimonies, that “the commemoration and prayers for the dead used by the ancient Church had not any relation with purgatory, and therefore, whatsoever they were, Popish prayers we are sure they were not.”
I recall with interest the pine-cone of Dante’s comparison (Inferno, canto xxxi. 59) as I saw it in the gardens of the Vatican. Valuable notes may be found in Longfellow’s translation, vol. i. p. 328. It is eleven feet high, and once adorned the summit of Hadrian’s mausoleum, so they say; but that was open, and had no apex on which it could be placed. It is made of bronze, and, I think, belonged to the mysteries satirized by our author. It is less pardonable to find the vilest relics of mythology on the very doors of St. Peter’s, where I have seen them with astonishment. They were put there, according to M. Valery,[5052] under Paul V.; “and among the small mythological groups,” he adds, “may be distinguished Jupiter and Leda, the Rape of Ganymede, some nymphs and satyrs, with other very singular devices for the entrance of the most imposing of Christian temples.” It is painful to think of it; but the heathenism to which the age of Leo X. had reduced the court of Rome must be contrasted with the ideas of a Clement, an Athenagoras, and even of an Arnobius, in order to give us a due sense of the crisis which, after so many appeals for a reformation “in the head and the members” of the Latin communion, brought on the irrepressible revolt of Northern Europe against the papacy.
Search Comments
This page has been visited 0002 times.
| << | Contents | >> |
10 per page