1. The establishment of Christianity, which divides the history of the world into two distinct periods, was not an isolated fact, unconnected with past ages;—the forty preceding centuries served as a vast avenue leading towards it. “The fall of the earthly Adam,” says St. Augustine, “called forth the heavenly Adam, the Redeemer of the first.” The promise of a Saviour, made in the garden of Eden, was borne with them in their exile by our first parents, and the remembrance of it was perpetuated in the hearts of succeeding generations. God renewed it to the patriarchs; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob transmitted it, with the privilege of seeing the expected Messiah born of their race. By means of a phenomenon unique in history, a people was chosen whose sole mission was to guard the deposit of tradition, the Testament of the covenant made between God and man; and this people, confined within the narrow limits of Judea, obscure, destitute of national renown or military glory, alone survives amid all the vicissitudes of empires. Egyptians, Assyrians, Medes and Persians, Greeks and Romans, succeed each other, then fall and vanish. Sesostris, Nabuchodonosor, Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, made the world resound with the noise of their victories. The Jewish people, sometimes protected, sometimes enslaved by all these conquerors, resisted their oppression or submitted to their yoke without any radical change in their own constitution, or mingling their blood with that of the stranger races; and did not disappear like other conquered nations. Errors the most heterogeneous, modes of worship without end, creeds the most absurd and the most opposite, successively swayed the earth under the banners of the great conquerors of the world. Their religions shared the fate of their empires—Anubis is dethroned by Mithra, who is the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans. The Jewish people, alone, offer no example of variation in their faith. They carry with them everywhere a book dictated to Moses many ages earlier than the epoch assigned by the Greeks to the invention of writing. This book contains a legislation, a ceremonial, and religious, civil, and military codes. Their laws, rites, creeds, subsisted in the same forms, from the epoch of Sinai to that of Cæsar. One hope, one image, one aspiration pervades their history: it is the hope of the Redeemer; the image of the Messiah, represented by the patriarchs and the just of the Old Testament; the aspiration for the promised Christ, son of David and of Abraham, the Pontiff King, whose reign shall have no end. Under whatever point of view we judge this great fact, of a people the most obscure, the least powerful of all, who maintain, in the midst of the overthrow of other nations, their own perpetual duration, we are obliged to recognize in it a miraculous history, without precedent and without imitation. Poets, such as Homer or Hesiod; men of genius, such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, charmed the rest of mankind by their theogonies or philosophic systems. The Jewish people paid no homage to their schools, whose renown extended throughout the earth. They had no part in the altars raised, or sacrifices of victims made, to any idol, for the Jew disdained the wisdom of the sages of Greece. His sacrifices are for Jehovah; his masters, his doctors, are the prophets, from Moses to Malachias, through David, Elias, Eliseus, Isaias, Jeremias, Ezechiel, Daniel, and others; who all portray, in some form, the expected Messiah, and add new traits to His anticipated history, or reveal with greater clearness the date of His advent. The all-absorbing expectation of this people is the coming of a Saviour, whom they are charged to announce to mankind. It is wonderful to observe how this necessity of a Saviour dominates, in spite of them, the pagan religions of antiquity. Among them all, in fact, we find human sacrifices, as if mankind had felt that they must be redeemed, but that they were themselves insufficient for their ransom. Where human blood did not flow, that of bulls and heifers inundated the temples. A perpetual libation of blood was established, which had its source in a confused idea of expiation, or of religious redemption. Ancient civilization was established upon two principles, which were derived from the same idea, viz.: the inferiority of woman, and the common right to hold slaves. To explain the debased condition of the first is impossible, without recurring to the fall of man, as it is related by Moses. Slavery, subsisting without question during forty centuries, implies the principle of universal consent, which flowed from the idea of religious expiation. The Jewish people alone possessed the key to these enigmas, which troubled the entire existence of pagan nations. They alone had the secret of those vague hopes, of those aspirations for an unknown liberator, for the new golden age, sung by Virgil, and mysteriously agitating the East and the West. 2. Christ was to come, said St. Paul, in the fulness of time—Ubi venit plenitudo temporis. The epoch of Augustus seemed to realize the fulness of time of the ancient civilization. The Roman empire, at its summit of power, had for its limits—on the north, the Rhine and the Danube; on the east, the Euphrates; on the south, Upper Egypt, the deserts of Africa, and Mount Atlas; on the west, the seas of Spain and Gaul—nearly three-fourths of the habitable globe. The power of Alexander had, in some measure, approached this immense extent; but the Macedonian conqueror, from his dying-bed at Babylon, might have caught a glimpse of the dismemberment of his empire. Nationalities, for a moment merged under his victorious hand, were reconstituted as soon as his sword was broken. The Romans, on the contrary, had not so suddenly reached universal domination; but, when they had attained this object, the entire world was modelled under their yoke; their pioneers opened roads, which began at the eternal city, to end at the extremities of the earth; their language was adopted, as a mark of servitude, by the conquered nations; and the world, for ages, was Roman. Under the influence of a political condition at once so brilliant and durable, the intellectual powers had acquired the perfection of the age of Pericles, and its splendor was reproduced in that of Augustus. Letters, arts, and sciences were united in marvellous concert. The union of all these advantages, nevertheless, betrayed more fully the impotence of the human race to regenerate itself, and the need of a divine Redeemer. In fact, the religious state of the world, by a progression in an inverse sense, offered a most humiliating spectacle. Gods of wood, or stone, assumed every form; animals, garden vegetables, all had their altars; and a point was reached where nothing had the honors due to the Divinity but sensuality or vice. Two augurs could not look each other in the face without a smile. The family existed only in name; and the emperors were obliged to enact laws to prevent the extinction of the human race through an infamous celibacy. Slavery was the common law, and the wife, in every rank, was only the chief of slaves. Legality of divorce, lawful prostitution, the exposure of infants, authorized murder, at the public festivals or in the family, arbitrary punishment of the condemned; all were characteristic signs of a profound degradation, beyond the reach of any human remedy. The Messiah expected by the Jews could alone regenerate the world. It was for this peaceful Conqueror that the Roman slaves opened vast highways among the nations; it was to hear the glad tidings of His Gospel that all people forgot their foreign idioms and spoke the language of Rome, which was destined to become, at a later period, the language of the Church. 3. Under the twelfth consulate of Augustus, in the 750th year of the founding of Rome, the angel Gabriel was sent to Nazareth, a little city of Judea, to a virgin whose name was Mary, of the tribe of Judah; and of the line of David. He announced to her that by the operation of the Holy Spirit, and apart from the ordinary laws of nature, she would give birth to the Son of David—to the Christ—to the Son of God—to the Messiah, whose reign would be without end. Nine months later, an edict of Cæsar Augustus was published, commanding a census to be made of the inhabitants throughout the world; and Mary went, with Joseph her spouse, a saintly old man, to be registered at Bethlehem, the city of David. “And it came to pass, that, when they were there, her days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him up in swaddling-clothes, and laid him in a manger: because there was no room for them in the inn.” The first who came to adore Jesus Christ, the Sovereign of the world, whose birth was so strange, were shepherds. The Magi from the East, warned by a miraculous star, came in their turn, and laid at the feet of the infant the tributes proper to be offered to a king, to man, and to God—gold, myrrh, and incense. The legal ceremonies were performed around His crib: Jesus Christ submitted to the expiatory rite of circumcision. Mary, virgin before, during, and after the birth, accomplished the rites of her purification in the manner of other Jewish women. God, the Redeemer, presented in the temple which He was to replace by the temple of His everlasting Church, was redeemed from the hands of the High-Priest at the price of two doves. Meanwhile, the Son of God could not descend upon earth without bringing disquietude to the powers of the world. Herod, king of Judea, tributary to Rome, considered his throne endangered by the advent of the King of Heaven. He ordered a general massacre of the children of Bethlehem and its environs, “from two years old and under.” Mary and Joseph had conveyed the infant to Egypt, from whence God recalled Him, after the death of Herod. The Gospel is silent upon the earliest years of Jesus. At the age of twelve He appeared at Jerusalem, in the temple, in the midst of the doctors, who were astonished at His wisdom. He then returned into obscurity, “growing in age, in grace, and in wisdom,” and, according to tradition, aiding His adopted father in his trade of carpenter. In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, the banks of the Jordan witnessed the appearance from the desert of a man clothed in camel’s hair, who neither ate nor drank with other men, whose life was austere and mortified, who preached penance, and who called himself the voice of the Lord, to announce the coming of the Lamb of God. It was John, son of Elizabeth and Zachary, whose birth had been foretold by an angel, and who had leaped in his mother’s womb on the visit of the Virgin Mary. The people, in multitudes, followed John, asking of him the baptism of penance. But he showed them that his ministry was of a transitory character, and sent the Jews “to Him, the latchets of whose shoes he was not worthy to loose.” And he practised what he avowed, with a sublime humility. Jesus came to demand of His precursor baptism in the waters of the Jordan. A voice was heard from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The Holy Spirit descending upon Him in the form of a dove, completed the manifestation of the Trinity, by the voice of the Father, the corporeal presence of the Son of God made man, and the mysterious figure of the Dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. Henceforth, said John, of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” The precursor made himself as nothing before his Master. He won the glory of martyrdom, and died a victim to the revenge of an immodest woman, for having reproached the tetrarch Herod, because of his impure life. 4. Here begins the public life of Jesus Christ, and His mission in the world, which, to a certain extent, the baptism of John had inaugurated. Like Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus withdrew during forty days into the desert, and there maintained a victorious combat with the prince of darkness, that, being in all things like His brethren, the apostle could say, “He had passed through all our temptations.” To establish distinctly the difference between His spiritual royalty and the sovereignty of this world, Jesus Christ in the first place manifested His power by miracles: the wedding of Cana, which He honored by His presence, as if to sanctify humanity in marriage, which is its source, beheld the change of water into wine. From this moment, His steps were marked by prodigies. All infirmities, all disorders, every class of suffering, yielded to His word. The daughter of Jairus was restored to life at the voice of God, who is the author of life; sight was restored to the blind; the possessed were delivered from the power of the demon. A paralytic of thirty years was publicly cured on the Sabbath day. Jesus healed also a leper, the servant of a centurion. On a highway He met the widow of Naim, who followed the funeral of her son. He approached the bier, recalled the dead to life, and restored him to his mother. The elements obeyed Him; the winds and tempests became still on His command. He walks on the water, and enables Peter also to walk upon it at His side, a living image of the Catholic Church, of which St. Peter was to be the first pontiff, and which the waves were never to submerge. A simple touching of the clothes of the Saviour cured a woman of an issue of blood. A secret and divine virtue went forth from Him and wrought wonders. The faith of the Canaanite was recompensed by the cure of her daughter. The deaf and dumb, by His power, were restored to hearing and speech. The multitudes who followed Him into the desert having forgotten to provide food for the journey, Jesus Christ multiplied seven loaves and five fishes, until they were sufficient to satiate more than five thousand persons. In the presence of Peter, James, and John, His disciples, He was transfigured, and appeared in all His glory on Mount Tabor. Descending again among the Jews, He went about doing good, and working miracles. A man born blind opens his eyes to the light; a woman who had been ill eighteen years, recovers her health by His word; one sick of dropsy is cured in the same manner. Finally, He closes this series of marvellous works, which were public and well attested, which, in fact, during three years, all Judea had witnessed, by the resurrection of Lazarus, after he had lain three days enclosed in his tomb, and his body had already become a prey to the corruption of death. 5. We have begun by enumerating, in a summary way, the principal miracles of Jesus Christ, because, in the eyes of the multitude, they were the most substantial proofs of His divinity. His doctrine was not less marvellous, and it was to produce in the religious and moral world the same transformation which the power of the Son of God wrought upon the material world. His mode of teaching resembled in nothing the methods of the philosophers and sages. He made no showy display of words, no oratorical pretensions. He was simple and familiar in His discourse, presenting His sublime ideas under the forms of parables or images. It was on the heart He wished to engrave His law of charity, and it was to the heart that He addressed himself. Especially He sought to teach the unity of God, the Father of all men. He established this fundamental principle, not by arguments nor disputations, but with the simple, natural, candid tone of a son who speaks of his father. The idea which predominated in the ancient world was that of a God angry and terrible, whom none could look upon and live, and who must be appeased by the blood of victims and of hecatombs. In the doctrine of the Saviour, God appeared only as the father of the prodigal son; as the fountain of living waters for the thirsty soul, such as he was to the Samaritan at Jacob’s well; or like the good shepherd who bears on his shoulders the wandering sheep which he leads back to the fold: finally, as the God of mercy and forgiveness. This is the true and attractive characteristic of the New Testament, which, for this reason, is called the law of mercy. The grace of God thus descending upon earth, Jesus Christ established the channels through which it was to be communicated to men. These are the sacraments, the visible signs of the mysterious and invisible operation of grace upon the soul, viz.: Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, and Matrimony. It must be distinctly remembered that nothing in the past bore any resemblance to such institutions, or doctrines, or works, as these. “How the teachings of Jesus Christ stand out in bold relief, detached by their divine character from all the errors which surround them, in the midst of hypocritical doctors, of captious scribes, of proud Pharisees! How the Man-God detects their cunning by His own wisdom! How He anathematizes all the vices by His sanctity! How He exhausts all the passions by His patience! By His meekness, He imparts strength to every weakness! And how ready is He to help in every affliction.”* 6. To perpetuate the benefits of the redemption which He brought to mankind, and to insure to them the purity of His doctrine and the integrity of the sacraments which He instituted, it was incumbent on Jesus Christ to found, and, in fact, He did found, a visible society, always teaching, always one, which He made the depository of His doctrines. This is the Catholic Church, whose history we now study, and whose divine institution, such as it was given by the Saviour, we now proceed to examine in detail. Two objects are here worthy of especial attention: (1.) the instruments chosen; (2.) the form given. (1.) “Jesus, walking along the shore of the sea of Galilee, and seeing the fishermen, said to them, Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men.” These fishermen, whose whole fortune was in their nets, who had no knowledge but that of their trade, were the chosen instruments, the first founders of the Church; that institution which was destined to bear throughout the earth the light of truth—to confound the wisdom of the philosophers, to seat itself in the Capitol, and to reign, without limits and without end, over the world. The names of these elect of God to conduct this grand enterprise were utterly unknown to the world of philosophers and the powerful of their time: Simon, who was called Peter, John and James, sons of Zebedee, Andrew, Peter’s brother, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alpheus, Simon of Cana, Jude, brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed his master. The weakness, the obscurity, the ignorance of these twelve Jews were well calculated to throw into strong relief the divinity of the doctrines which they were commanded to teach to mankind. Jesus Christ purposely selected the weak things of the earth to confound the strong. He instructed them, as a characteristic of the success of their mission to remain weak, humanly speaking, and not to rely upon any earthly help, or artifice, or defence. “Do not possess gold nor silver, nor money in your purses. . . . . And when they will not receive you nor hear your words, going forth out of that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. . . . . Behold I send you as lambs in the midst of wolves.” It is evident that Jesus Christ designed to reject, in the composition of His Church, all that a man of the commonest prudence would have sought for, and to incorporate with it all that the same man would infallibly have rejected. It is this which St. Paul terms the folly of the cross, and which the most unexampled, the most brilliant, and the most enduring successes have never ceased to proclaim, everywhere, to be the wisdom of God. (2.) The apostles of His Church being thus selected, Jesus Christ organized them in unity, and with authority—two correlative principles, without which no institution can subsist. The twelve apostles were as yet like separate blocks awaiting the foundation-stone, in order to form with it, and by means of it, one edifice. Simon was chosen for a special calling; henceforth he was to be called Peter; et imposuit Simoni nomen Petrus, a prophetic name, for he was to become the rock on which the Church should be built. His mission was explained to him a few days after, in a more explicit manner. “I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven.” Here, then, is already a supremacy constituted in the hierarchy of the Church; a chief placed above the other chiefs; a foundation-stone selected among the other stones of the edifice. The authority of this sovereign chief is more distinctly proclaimed by these words: “Feed my sheep; feed my lambs.” To complete our citations on this subject, let us add a passage which is too often neglected, yet which, from its connection with others, places in still greater prominence the prerogatives and functions of the Prince of the apostles. “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not, and when thou shalt be converted, confirm thy brethren.” Certainly Jesus Christ could not more plainly manifest His will to establish His Church on the unity of Peter, and to constitute it under the authority of this supreme pastor, who is to feed the sheep and the lambs,—that is to say, following the interpretation of the Fathers and doctors, the bishops and the faithful,—who holds in his hands the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and who is charged to strengthen his brethren in the faith. Peter and his successors were then invested with the authority, the primacy of the apostleship. They are the centre of the Church, and from them must radiate her history, based on the unity of one headship and one faith, with the assurance of that divine saying, “I have prayed that thy faith fail not.” This promise of infallibility is afterwards renewed by another solemn declaration: “Behold I am with you all days even to the end of the world.” And to seal the unity of this divinely constituted hierarchy, Jesus Christ thus addresses his Father: “Holy Father, keep them in Thy name whom Thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are one. And not for them only do I pray, but for them also, who through their word shall believe in me” (Christians in every place and in all time, at that moment present to the thought of the Saviour), “that they may all be one, as Thou, Father, in me and I in Thee, that they may also be one in us.” Thus this nascent Church, destined ever to increase more and more, will remain united to Jesus, its founder, by the uninterrupted tradition of Peter and his successors; and whoever would seek for salvation, must adhere to this unity, to this authority of Peter and his successors: for Jesus Christ has promised to be with them even to the consummation of ages. 7. The public mission of the Saviour, the preaching of His doctrine supported by miracles, the institution of the Church, and of the sacraments which she was to dispense, occupied only three years. The Jewish people had been witnesses of this extraordinary life, they had seen the miracles which Jesus had strewed about His path, yet in this Messiah, true son of David, whose every trait had been so clearly defined by the prophets, they failed to recognize “the Desired of all nations, the Expectation of the world, the Desire of the everlasting hills.” But this blindness had been predicted, and is the more easily understood, because Christ, in the ideas of a gross and carnal people, was to be a conqueror, a hero, surrounded with glory and magnificence. Jesus Christ, on the contrary, declared that His kingdom was not of this world; He preached a doctrine totally opposed to the maxims of the world; He taught men to detach themselves from earthly inclinations, desires, and hopes, and to conquer, by mortification and sacrifices, the kingdom of heaven, which suffers violence. The Pharisees, whom He compared to whitened sepulchres, and whose hypocrisy He unmasked; the great, whom He alarmed by accepting the title of king, the spiritual and pacific king of souls; the doctors of the law, the priests, and scribes, whom He accused of “imposing on their brethren burdens which they would not touch with the point of their finger,” united their common hatred, and resolved upon the death of one whom they regarded as only a man. Jesus Christ was acquainted with their conspiracy; without fearing, but without provoking them, He came to Jerusalem. It was a short time after the resurrection of Lazarus; the people gave Him a triumphal entry, waving palm branches around Him, and spreading their vestments for the passage of the humble animal which bore the new king of Sion; one only cry escaped from every lip: “Hosanna! Glory to the Son of David!” Five days later, these acclamations of triumph were changed into tumultuous vociferations: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him! Let His blood be upon us and our children!” What had occurred during this interval? Nothing that can explain such a change. But the hour was come when the Son of Man was to be delivered into the hands of His enemies. Jesus Christ had celebrated the Passover with His disciples, and had instituted at the last supper the Holy Eucharist, the permanent miracle of the love of a God who dwells in the midst of men, to become their food and drink. The same night, Judas Iscariot, his lips still tinged with the Eucharistic blood, had sold his Master to the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver, and betrayed the Son of Man by a kiss. The crime was no sooner committed than despair entered the traitor’s soul: he hastened to cast the money into the midst of the temple, and hung himself. The Pharisees, the council of the priests, and the people who had plotted the death of Jesus, followed Him with shouts, crying, “He is a blasphemer.” They accused Him also before the governor, Pontius Pilate, as the enemy of Cæsar. Led before him, and questioned, if He were the Christ—if He were a king—”I am,” he replied, for, from this moment, He spoke openly, and without parable. He was then given over to the insults of the populace, spit upon, beaten, stripped of His garments, fastened, naked, to a column; and Pilate, showing Him to the people, exclaimed: “Ecce Homo!” Yes, behold the man who pays the ransom of all men, by suffering Himself in their place. His disciples abandoned Him; John and the holy women alone remained faithful. A heavy cross was laid on His shoulders; He falls under its weight, but is forced on to Golgotha. His holy Mother meets Him on this path of dolors. The daughters of Jerusalem weep for Him, and He predicts to them, that soon they will weep for the fate of their country and their children. At the foot of Calvary the soldiers cast lots for his clothing; they nail Him to the cross between two malefactors, one of whom is converted, and becomes the first saint, under the new law, who enters heaven, which is now opened to man by the passion of the Son of God. At length He cries, “It is finished!” and He dies. All nature was moved—the rocks were rent—the dead arose. The curtain of the holy of holies was rent from the top to the bottom, and darkness covered the earth. Witnesses of this divine death exclaimed, “This, truly, was the Son of God!” Joseph of Arimathea solicited and obtained from Pilate permission to bury the body of Jesus. They laid it in a sepulchre cut in the rock, placing at the entrance an enormous stone. The Jews fixed their seal upon it, and set a guard there (A.D. 33).* The consummatum est—It is consummated—of Calvary announced to the world the accomplishment of all the prophecies. At the precise moment when Jesus Christ expired, the seventy weeks of years predicted by the prophet Daniel were ended. The fall of Adam was repaired by the sacrifice of a God. The mediation of the Redeemer, the reconciliation of man with God, was now an accomplished fact. *We adopt here the most simple chronology, without pretending to impose a preference. We know the opinion which places the death of our Lord Jesus Christ under the consulate of the Geminii, the 23d year of our era. It is supported by respectable authorities, and has been adopted by some learned critics. 8. Three days after His death, Jesus Christ rises victorious from the tomb—the guards are overturned, the stone of the sepulchre is moved, the disciples once more behold their Master, now become glorious, immortal. St. Thomas, still incredulous, touches the scars of His wounds, and places his hand in the wound in His side. During forty days, Jesus remains in the midst of them, renewing His instructions for the completion of His work, and performing a multitude of miracles. This fact of the resurrection, perfectly established by the four Evangelists, superabundantly demonstrated by even the incredulity of St. Thomas, “who refused, obstinately, to believe,” said St. Leo the Great, “in order that the world might be more fully assured of the fact,” is the basis of our faith, and the confirmation of the divinity of the Church. “If Jesus Christ be not risen again,” said St. Paul, “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” It was during the forty days our Saviour remained on earth after His resurrection that His disciples, having seen Him, touched Him, spoken with Him, and received His instructions, derived from Him their undaunted courage to announce the Gospel. Finally, Jesus united them around Him for the last time at Bethania; and on a mountain near this city, He addressed to them these words: “All power has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go preach the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” He then extended His hands over them and blessed them. At the same moment He was raised up towards heaven, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.
