The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-07 00:00:00

Paganism Petrified.

The following beautifully written and impressive
article, entitled " Christianity and the New Dis-
coveries at Pompeii," is transcribed with acknow-
ledgment from the Morning Herald of Thursday

The last reports from the excavations at Pompeii tell us
that its inhabitants were making a jest of our Christianity,
and caricaturing on their walls its chief doctrine of a cru-
cified God at the moment Vesuvius was heaving with the
fiery flood that was to submerge for a thousand years the
city of so many graceful fanes and palaces. At this dis-
tance of time, and with our different experience of Chris-
tianity, the memorials are curious beyond any that have
undergone this strange experience of long loss and won-
derful preservation, and so far offer the interest of perhaps
the best of our historical lessons. _ .

What vast changes—many joyous, many how sad !
have taken place in Christianity since the Sabine gentle-
men were thus occupying eventful moments ridiculing it
on the walls of the Edile's palace ! The Apostle we place
in the honour they gave a Theseus was no more to them—
if he touched there in his way from Rhegium to Pateo rl—
" the babbler setting forth strange doctrines" hewas
called a little while before at Athens. There was smash
suspicion among their philoeophers, Stoic or Epicurean,
" that the certain strange notions" which he was preach-
ing formed the birth of a new civilisation—the most im-
portant event in the history of the world. The Pompeiian
admirers of the hero who founded their city guessed not
that the Christianity which was to them no more than a
jest was the true Hercules strangling serpents in his
cradle, and that the world was to owe to it a far more inte-
resting era than any attributed to their demi-gods. If the
practical demonstration we have of the religion shows so
much that is vague as to its how, its where, its what,
and its whither, what standpoint, what data, what ana-
logies had they for a conclusion about what then must have
seemed nearly to everybody an unknown quantity, an
nndetermiued riddle, an incomprehensible novelty ?
Even twenty years later the enlightenment of Trajan
and his Prime Minister Pliny would see nothing
in the " superstition," as they called it, but its
refusal to pay that divine homage to the Emperor they were
the first to laugh at themselves. In the next reign the to-
lerant Adrian, writing from its stronghold, Alexandria, took
up much the same position, and wished the Consulatßome
to believe that Christianity was a philosophical vagary of
no political importance, the amusement of a certain set of
mathematical, soothsaying, and gymnastic empirics, who
hardly knew whether the God they followed was the Chris-
tus of the Israelites or the Serapis of the Egyptians. "Na-
zarenes, Samaritans, or Jews," they were all much alike ;
and the only thing that gave concern to the astute Impe-
rater was to find that the profundity of their idea of a Su-
preme Being was so unworthily imagined in their morals.
But in the year 79 of our era—only 40 years after Christ's
death—how was it in that sacerdotal Alexandria which
formed the most beautiful watering place in old Italy ? As
we descend through the causeway opened to us by a mo-
dern pickaxe, and survey the city as it lies before us em-
balmed as in amber, rich in its rarities, but not less won-
derful that it is there, it costs little effort of fancy to recall
it as it then stood, under a blue sky, in beautiful sunshine,
full of a lazy life of Paganism, and pictare it on the day
when merry amateurs were scoring on one part of the
palace of Pansa humorous abuse against the new creed,
and some sedate artist—won to it, it may be, by the per-
suasiveness of one of the first apostles—was concurrently
sculpturing in another part of the house the devotional
cross that remains unfinished to this hour. But how recall
the conceptions they formed of the newpuzzle which, even
with our commonplace associations, has so many difficul-
ties beyond our solution ? How utterly incomprehensible
must have seemed to their polytheistic levity the scheme
of a crucified Jew dissolving as in a vision the gorgeous
fabric of a mythology that had lasted a thousand years,
and slowly drawing to himself whntever was great or aw-
ful in the attributes of its divinities? How were
they to believe that the young carpenter, who
had just ended a career of a few months in
Judea passed too chiefly among fishermen was
to displace the whole Pantheon, and henceforth
have altars smoking to his honour and priests chanting to
his glory in every land the sun shines upon ? Here near
by at his door, solicitous for the gossip which forms the
chief joy of his life, stands the barber, who has ornamented
the front of his shop with a placard appealing to the Edile
for the honour or his patronage. His compendious idea of
a Christian is that of an eccentric person he saw last
Saturday, given up naked to fight with the lions in the am-
phitheatre, and whose profession of faith, which they can-
not subdue, is held to wage war with those refinements of
luxury on which his successes depend. He believes the
popular calumnies—is sure these atheists burnt down
Rome under Nero has some suspicions that they caused
the earthquake which shook his house and overturned his
neighbours' some 13 years before—and is quite sure that
neither gods nor goddesses will have a word to say to
their worshippers till these offscourings of mankind—the
special enemies of his business—are either devoured in the
amphitheatre or cut asunder in the forum. How little it
could have occurred to him that those who felt so little in-
terest in the cleverness with which he could frizz a fine
lady's hair to the altitude of a Cybele tower would one day
have cities of their own richer than Rome, and a thousand
degrees larger than Pompeii, where the luxuries of its
Sylwrrto 2,,,,z,es would aevaa eec somi-ctvifisecf as against
the higher refinements of their own.

A higher instance. The handsome priest of Jupiter,
who forms the chief object of admiration amid the many
which help to make that shelving beach one of the lcveliest
scenes in the world ; what are his impressions about the
obscure influence that is one day to be the master-power
of the world ?
" Well, what of these Christians?" he asks of the senator
and member of the College of Augurs, by his side, who has
just arrived from Rome in the fleet that lies moored within
sight, and who, devoted to Titus and his politics, is
more interested still in the great volume of animated
nature on which he is so learned an authority—
" What of this medley of renegade Jews, eccentric
Greeks, hungry barbarians, and vagabond Romans ? Does
anybody at Rome fancy that something good is to come out
of such a gang of social supernumeraries ? Are they safer
for you, think you, than for us ? We feel them everywhere
—we see them nowhere. It is no longer the same thing
in the temples. The gods, the altars, the priests, the sacri-
fices, the prayers are there—but the worship, the people,
and the freewill offerings are another affair. The street of
the silversmiths complains that there is no business. We
are all alike : Venus of Cnidus, and Jupiter—Hercules and
and Isis. People ask as much as ever, but there is an un-
pleasant economy in the expression of their obligations.
They seem to fancy that they are conferring favours in
accepting our kindness. It is not that we are less, but they
seem more. Our precision grows more military as they get
more apathetic, but we cannot improve them. Our Jupiter
is with us at least once a quarter, and we have more devo-
tees than ever who have an astonishing success is their
prayers. Yet the result is nil. Do I fear for the system,
you ask ? Frankly, no. What is there to destroy a fabric
that has existed since Italy had a name, and which stands
cemented by ten thousand associations of habit among the
people, and by a common interest that is increasing every
day among ourselves? Certainly not this new-fan led ex-
travagance of over-righteous Jewsandovacgaareborondg Egyptians.
Who can believe its doctrines ? wh
Who knows its writers? Where are its
orators itortss?raorals ? Who
are its leaders ? What is its organisation ? Where
its
o
friends ? And what is :it that people want from it?We
ere all sacerdocy, as you know, in this favoured nook of
Pompeii, and have made it at last the happiest spot in the
universe. We encumber ourselves with no more people
than may suffice for the services; and if we miscalculate,
have not always the resource of a new colony as under
Sylla and Augustus ? What want is there that we fail to
supply? If Christ cured the sick, as they tell us, are we
not doing as much with our Esculapius ? If it was the mis-
sion of the Galilean to deliver men from slavery, and give
high natures an example of preferring
.duty to plea-
sure, and of dying in the cause of duty or a just expiation,
what then? If there be such people amongst us—and 1
40,113 t—have we not the Greek Apollo devoting himself to
the death ?_and and our Hercules—what is our temple to him
but a memorial
of labours carried to the death in the ser-
vice of mankind? With us men may be easy and just, after
Inman ner of Jupiter,
hor bo "(Ins, after the
man of Hercules. great and la ri
provided the gods
easyhatever you
please,
of our Emperor, as
toeir nectar. We are like the Venus
is our mamm—
as to your vices, you wii?ronur virtues, if you have them,
not gods enough in our Pantheoot be without them. Have we
is the use of aceepting a di , ?
Y And if not, what
other, and whose ignominious
did the wonders of
deaY
tru will tolerate none
his life ? And how worship as aherotion
twilllsserneruerictsifiLi°an
as a slave is to be thought a suppleme::
god, and whose chief distinction frombeocthoeor founders o
with a f re-
ligion is that the life of a sage is to
donee too strong for a savage. How, in this beautiful
the cynosure of Italy, tolerate an outlandivirshitiultielifres‘
the spawn of the East, that has no kinship
that disdains the arts, and to which the beauties goraf ces'
temples and the rites of our religion are so many abonaionuar
tions ? We have all we want. We share in the mysteries
of Greece and Egypt, and are in communion with the
priests of all nations. We have an easy faith, no very strin-
gent discipline ; we have pleasant congregations. We live
in the most comfortable of homes, in the most favoured of
climates, near the prettiest of streams emptying itself into
the sweetest of bays. Our soil is fertile, the sea smooth as
a lake. Our cooks good ; our wines beat Chio and Lesbos.
What would you more ? The Paradise these Christians
speak about we have. Eat and drink for to-morrow you
die.

"'Crag ingens iterabimus (equor.ft
Entering the Temple of Venus, paganism represented
by the priestess would tell us much the same story.
" What need of this Christianity ? Are we not happy ?
What want we that people may reasonably pray for 1 The
gods, the goddesses, the priesthood, the temples, do they
nut belong to them ? We live but to administer to their
fin asures. Destroy Venus, and where shall we women
d another ? Without her patronage, as well be out of
the commonwealth. The shrine we decorate to the .most
beautiful of women is most of all a shrine to ourselves.
We are deified irk our deity, and wade a gigtorhind

our union in her honour ; so great as she is, so great are
we. As well ask us to have no Pompeii as ask us to have
no Venus, no priestesses, no rites in honour of woman's
divinity, and resign our power to a religion which rather
than adore a woman finds its only deity in one man—
a man, too, who suffered himself to die the death of a
slave !"
flow great her mistake ! We know now that the in-
fluence of Roman manners in raising women was weak to
that of the benign innovation which the priestess was
unable to understand. Building the hygiene of the body
on that of the soul it enlisted the sympathy of man to
compensate for the weakness of woman by raising the
nature it adorned and freeing the violation it ennobled.
Christianity had to come into the world to teach us how
beautiful woman may be, and make her worthy—rather as
a rule than as an exception—to be the mother of saes and
heroes.

The fact was what neither priest nor priestess, nor
worshipper foresaw that the Christ they despised was the
greatest of legislators, and that the new system he was
offering them united the highest reach of good sense and
philosophy with the utmost perfection of religion. They
could not see that it held within itself those vital elements
of civilisation extinct in all the systems it was to displace,
and that its power was at that moment showing itself in
that reconstruction of that corrupt empire which Vespasian
had upheld to effect, and which—now under beneficent
assistance from Titus—was later to win its best successes
under Nerve, Trajan, Adrian, and the Antonines. Of all
blindness in human judgment, of all childishness in
literary criticism, commend us to the blindness and child-
ishness of the great philosophers of Europe, who about a
century ago immortalised themselves by their success in
representing Christianity as an old wife's fable, invented
without cunning, and palmed on the universe by vulgar
imposture. It was the idea in Christianity, which was
everything ; that is to say, it was its truth, its purity, its
genius, its inborn necessity in the nature of things, that
gave it its signal conquest over the sting of sin and the
powers of all the kingdoms of this world. At the moment
we are speaking of the Christian religion seemed to have
nothing in its favour but itself ; and in itself seemed to
holdmuchth:htnciil it htwtnsgblorm,eep it a stumbling-block to
those among
amongst whom it had to be and a foolishness
bred. itwaai to those
to bea
system a extraordinary miracles, but who in an age of in-
credulity would accept the evidence ? It was known to be
a system of morals. But who in an age of unexampled
immorality would practise them ? It was held forth as a
system of sublime dogmas. But in an epochof secular de-
cay, who could comprehend them as probable, or believe
them as possible? There was no wealth, no numbers, no
apparent influence, no visible organisation in its favour,
and all the
dllelifanedofaliml the thought otuegmhptleosf.the
Yet peopleitwaws
thought anasthias
alien, discredited, and incredible system that by some means
or other was to become dominant over the whole extent of
the Imperial civilisation, although the most extensive, ex-
alted, richest, most prejudiced, and powerful organisation
of the ancient world had first to be subdued and disappear
to permit of the conquest !
At the very moment the good easy people and their
sacerdotal leaders were amusing themselves with philippics
at the expense of a crucified God, and believing that the
worship of their gods and goddesses would endure for
ever, a convulsion was under preparation for the moral
world far more wonderful than that which was on the eve
of submerging the sunny cities of Campania. The gene-
ration that Christ had spoken of on the eve of his cruci-
fixion had yet scarcely passed away, yet the religion which
that great event was to establish was already everywhere
the subject of abuse, no doubt, to the thoughtless many—
but the object of a profound love and energetic propaganda
to the thoughtful few. The veil of the Pagan temple was
no less rent than that of Jerusalem, and tens of thousands
—allowed to see the mysteries that had been there hidden
from the beginning—felt as some of us when admitted
now-a-days to a view of the artificial teeth, false hair, and
cogged dice that have been concealed for a thousand years
in the domestic sanctuary of some Pompeian Beau Brum-
mel. The Messiah prophesied from all time had come, the
veritable seed of Abraham, and had left behind him the 12
sons who.were to renew under his leadership, as under
another Moses, the inheritance of another kingdom of
Israel. "The Twelve" had already done the great work
that was to entitle them to sit on the many thronei judg-
ing the twelve tribes. Titus, the Bishop of Crete, Timothy,
and the other bishops of the seven cities of Asia Minor, had
already their right rev. brethren installed in the chief towns
and islands of the Empire, and the work of the Gospel was
spreading; not with less celerity that it was proceeding for
the most part silently and in secret. The courtesieswhich
a Pontius Pilate, a Festus, a Felix, a King Agrippa, a
Princess Bernice, and so many deputies, chief captains of
the guard, and centurions, with the members of the house-
hold of Aristobulus and of the reigning Caesar—all these
courtesies to the Great Teacher himself or to his Apostles
were only indications of the sympathy with which thenew
religion was received by the civil and military element of
the Empire. The name of Flavia Domitella, a near kins-
woman of the reigning Emperor, was already in the mar-
tyrdom or about to appear in it. The country that had
given Rome her ails, her literature, her civilisation, and
her gods, was already honeycombed by Christian societies
founded by the learned tentmaker and his ever active col-
leagues; and it is probable that at this time, when an unruf-
fled calm seemed to have settled on the whole surface of
l'ativ.riatiz, mac there was scarcely a household of emperor,
king, or pro-consular authority in the Empire, which was
not directly or indirectly reached by the new influence.
The interesting memorial of an unfinished cross which
we have spoken of as yet standing near the side of the
caricatures in abuse of the same symbols, shows that the
sword of division prophesied 40 years before had already
entered Pompeii, and that father and son, or master and
servant, in the most respectable of its mansions, were
already in prominent conflict about the value of the new
revelation. Rome, the mystic Babylon,
whence the priest-
hood of Satan were pouring on the nations libations of
crime and idolatry out of a cup that never emptied, had
already been given up " in ono day to death, and mourn-
ing, and famine, and to be utterly burnt with fire"—some
said by the hand of the Monarch, who above all others
may be supposed to have " hated her," and to have sought
to " make her desolate," and to " eat into her flesh and
burn her with fire ;" some affirmed by the leaders of the
curious people believing the new faith, and hiding them-
selves in the dismal catacombs. -This startling fulfilment
of a prophecy that had no doubt been noised abroad wide
as the Empire, had just been followed by another if pos-
sible still more remarkable. The sacrilegious city which
had dared to lay hands on the Lord of Glory, and give to
the infamous death of the cross the man God, who had
visited it in mercy, devoting his life to the risk and la-
bours of redeeming its people to a new era of freedom and
greatness ; the sacred city, of the faithless brethren who
had received him not, had just been laid flat on the ground,
with not one stone left standing on another, and its im-
pious inhabitants dispersed as slaves under the terrible
vengeance marshalled against itby an Emperor who him-
self was hailed as " the delight of mankind," and who bad
appeared against it at the head of legions gathered from
every part of that world which less prominent agents were
already leavening with a religion which was to save every
country but their own.

Strange ! " The superstition" which was already going
about, conquering and to conquer, and which later won to
its faith every other Roman city, never won Pompeii—
never won it, because amid the last orgies of vice, and to
the music of pipe and tabor, the choicest of the cities of
Satan went down bodily into Hades. As strange is it :
more than a thousand years later—long after Christianity
had become the religion of the state all over Europe—the
Old Sorceress reappeared amongst us with much the same
aspect and garments as those with which she had disap-
peared. The wonderful microcosm that enshrined as in a
model all the marvels of a worship that had degenerated
until it was without soul or life itself ; and priest and
priestess, dead now as once living, are found in mute at-
tendance on deities who, with their fanes and altars, re-
present a system which—thanks to the Crucifixion it
ridi-
culed—is no more a part of the world we live in than we
of the world submerged under Noah.