An excerpt from T R Glover, The Jesus of History, SCM, 1917.
[This book was based on a series of lectures given in India, hence the references to India and its gods.]
He comments on the extraordinary strength and growth of the church in what seemed like very difficult circumstances of the first centuries CE ….
‘Here we touch what I think one of the greatest wonders that history has to show. How did the Church do it? If I may invent or adapt three words, the Christian “out-lived” the pagan, “out-died” him, and “out-thought” him. He came into the world and lived a great deal better than the pagan; he beat him hollow in living.
Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians do not indicate a high standard of life at Corinth. The Corinthians were a very poor sort of Christians. But another Epistle, written to the Corinthians a generation later, speaks of their passion for being kind to men, and of a broadened and deeper life, in spite of their weaknesses. Here and there one recognizes failure all along the line–yes, but the line advances.
The old world had had morals, plenty of morals–the Stoics overflowed with morals. But the Christian came into the world, not with a system of morality–he had rules, indeed–“which,” asks Tertullian, “is the ampler rule, Thou shalt not commit adultery, or the rule that forbids a single lustful look?”–but it was not rules so much that he brought into the world as a great passion. “The Son of God,” he said, “loved me and gave himself for me. That man–Jesus Christ loved him, gave himself for him. He is the friend of my best Friend. My best Friend loves that man, gave himself for him, died for him.” How it alters all the relations of life! Who can kill or rob another man, when he remembers whose hands were nailed to the Cross for that man? See how it bears on another side of morality. Tertullian strikes out a great phrase, a new idea altogether, when he speaks of “the victim of the common lust.” Christ died for her–how it safeguards her and uplifts her! Men came into the world full of this passion for Jesus Christ. They went to the slave and to the temple-woman and told them: “The Son of God loved you and gave himself for you”; and they believed it, and rose into a new life. To be redeemed by the Son of God gave the slave a new self-respect, a new manhood. He astonished people by his truth, his honesty, his cleanness; and there was a new brightness and gaiety about him. So there was about the woman. They sang, they overflowed with good temper. It seemed as if they had been born again. As Clement of Rome wrote, the Holy Spirit was a glad spirit.
The word used both by him and by St. Augustine is that which gives us the English word “hilarious.” There was a new gladness and happiness about these people. “It befits Truth to laugh, because she is glad–to play with her rivals because she is free from fear,” so said Tertullian. Of course, there were those who broke down, but Julian the Apostate, in his letters to his heathen priests, is a reluctant witness to the higher character of Christian life. And it was Jesus who was the secret of it.
The pagan noticed the new fortitude in the face of death. Tertullian himself was immensely impressed with it. He had never troubled to look at the Gospels. Nobody bothered to read them unless they were converted already, he said. But he seems to have seen these Christian martyrs die.
“Every man,” he said, “who sees it, is moved with some misgiving, and is set on fire to learn the reason; he inquires and he is taught; and when he has learnt the truth, he instantly follows it himself as well.” “No one would have wished to be killed, unless he was in possession of the truth.”
I think that is autobiography. The intellectual energy of the man is worth noting–his insistence on understanding, his instant resolution; such qualities, we saw, had won the admiration of Jesus. Here is a man who sacrifices a great career–his genius, his wit, his humour, fire, power, learning, philosophy, everything thrown at Christ’s feet, and Christ uses them all. Then came a day when persecution was breaking out again. Some Christians were for “fleeing to the next city”–it was the one text in their Bible, he said. He said: “I stay here.” Any day the mob might get excited and shout: “The Christians to the lions.” They knew the street in which he lived, and they would drag him–the scholar, the man of letters and of imagination–naked through the streets; torn and bleeding, they would tie him to the stake in the middle of the amphitheatre and pile faggots round him, and there he would stand waiting to be burnt alive; or, it might be, to be killed by the beasts. Any hour, any day. “I stay here,” he said. What does it cost a man to do that?
People asked what was the magic of it. The magic of it was just this–on the other side of the fire was the same Friend; “if he wants me to be burnt alive, I am here.” Jesus Christ was the secret of it.
The Christians out-thought the pagan world. How could they fail to? “We have peace with God,” said Paul. They moved about in a new world, which was their Father’s world. They would go to the shrines and ask uncomfortable questions. Lucian, who was a pagan and a scoffer, said that on one side of the shrines the notice was posted: “Christians outside.”
The Christians saw too much. The living god in that shrine was a big snake with a mask tied on–good enough for the pagan; but the Christian would see the strings.
Even the daemons they dismissed to irrelevance and non-entity. The essence of magic was to be able to link the name of a daemon with the name of one’s enemy, to set the daemon on the man. “Very well,” said the Christian, “link my name with your daemons. Use my name in any magic you like. There is a name that is above every name; I am not afraid.” That put the daemons into their right place, and by and by they vanished, dropped out, died of sheer inanition and neglect. Wherever Jesus Christ has been, the daemons have gone. “There used to be fairies,” said an old woman in the Highlands of Scotland to a friend of mine, “but the Gospel came and drove them away.” I do not know what is going to keep them away yet but Jesus Christ.
The Christian read the ancient literature with the same freedom of mind, and was not in bondage to it; he had a new outlook; he could criticize more freely. One great principle is given by Clement of Alexandria: “The beautiful, wherever it is, is ours, because it came from our God.”
The Christian read the best books, assimilated them, and lived the freest intellectual life that the world had. Jesus had set him to be true to fact. Why had Christian churches to be so much larger than pagan temples? Why are they so still? Because the sermon is in the very centre of all Christian worship–clear, definite Christian teaching about Jesus Christ. There is no place for an ignorant Christian. From the very start every Christian had to know and to understand, and he had to read the Gospels; he had to be able to give the reason for his faith. He was committed to a great propaganda, to the preaching of Jesus, and he had to preach with penetration and appeal. There they were loyal to the essential idea of Jesus–they were “sons of fact.” They read about Jesus,[32] and they knew him, and they knew where they stood. This has been the essence of the Christian religion. Put that alongside of the pitiful defence which Plutarch makes of obscene rites, filthy images, foolish traditions. Who did the thinking in that ancient world? Again and again it was the Christian. He out-thought the world.
The old religion crumbled and fell, beaten in thought, in morals, in life, in death. And by and by the only name for it was paganism, the religion of the back-country village, of the out-of-the-way places. Christ had conquered. “Dic tropoeum passionis, dic triumphalem Crucem”, sang Prudentius–“Sing the trophy of the Passion; sing the all-triumphant Cross.” The ancients thought that God repeated the whole history of the universe over and over again, like a cinema show. Some of them thought the kingdoms rise and fall by pure chance. No, said Prudentius, God planned; God developed the history of mankind; he made Rome for his own purposes, for Christ.
What is the explanation of it? We who live in a rational universe, where real results come from real causes, must ask what is the power that has carried the Christian Church to victory over that great old religion. And there is another question: is this story going to be repeated? What is there about Shiva, Kali, or Shri Krishna that essentially differentiates them from the gods of Greece and Rome and Egypt? Tradition, legend, philosophy–point by point, we find the same thing; and we find the same Christian Church, with the same ideals, facing the same conflict. What will be the result? The result will be the same.
We have seen in China, in the last two decades, how the Christian Church is true to its traditions; how men can die for Jesus Christ. In the Greek Church–a suffering Church–on the round sacramental wafer there is a cross, and in the four corners there are the eight letters, IE, XE, NI, KA, “Jesus Christ conquers.” That is the story of the Christian Church in the Roman Empire. That is the story which, please God, we shall see again in India. “Jesus Christ conquers.”’