Thanks to the discovery of the writing of Hippolytus, we have learned much of the inner life and activities of the Church in the Metropolis of the Empire circa A. D. 200-225. We possess for the same time ample testimony to the influence and work of Christianity in another part of the Empire in the teaching of a powerful Christian writer of the great province of pro-consular Africa.
At this period internal dissensions and controversies, similar to those which, as we have learned from Hippolytus, were then agitating the congregations of Rome and central Italy, were also disturbing the peace of the Carthaginian and North African communities.
There were evidently in the teeming, busy Christian life of the early years of the third century two parties fiercely contending for their own special views of government, of organization, and of discipline—Rome and Carthage, those great centers of population, being no doubt representative Churches. What was going on in these capitals of Italy and North Africa, on a smaller scale was going on in Lyons and Ephesus, in Antioch and Alexandria. We will here speak in some detail of Tertullian's evidence, not only ample and varied, but provided by a great scholar and a conspicuously earnest and able man. When we have summarized some of his testimony we will endeavor to show how it came about that these grave disputes on Christian discipline and organization arose at this particular juncture.
Tertullian has been accurately described as the contemporary of Hippolytus. Born somewhere about the middle of the second century in North Africa, in his early years he was trained as a Pagan, and for some time appears to have been active and even conspicuous as a jurist at Rome. The date of his conversion to Christianity is uncertain. But it seems probable that the turning point in his career can be dated between A. D. 190 and 195. In A. D. 197 we find him settled at Carthage, where he became a presbyter of the Church. His literary activity as a Christian writer and teacher lay mainly between A. D. 197 and A. D. 230 or thereabouts. In A. D. 202-3 he became persuaded that the Montanistic preaching in Phrygia was the work of God, and from this date more or less his teaching and writings were colored with some of the Montanistic errors. His strong bias in favor of an extreme asceticism to be observed by earnest Christians no doubt largely influenced his subsequent advocacy of those Montanistic doctrines whose austerity was their central feature.
He was a writer of rare originality and genius, a keen observer, a vivid word-painter, but often passionate and exaggerated in his exhortations and rebukes. He ranks among Christian scholars as a profound scholar and thinker, an indefatigable and laborious student, gifted with splendid eloquence and intense earnestness. It may well be conceived that, in spite of his grave errors and mistakes, his influence upon the Church life of his day and time was enormous. His style has been picturesquely described, and with some justice, as "Dark and resplendent as ebony," and "in some respects," it is added, "his life and work had something in common with that of the Apostle Paul."
Evidently the same feeling was working in Tertullian at Carthage as actuated Hippolytus in Rome; a persuasion that the Church in the persons of its responsible leaders had left its first love, and was sanctioning a more lax and easy way of living than had been set forth as the pattern life by the Apostles and the teachers of the first hundred years of the existence of Christianity as a religion and a life.
Many of the very same innovations in discipline and conduct which Hippolytus tells us had been introduced in the course of the pontificate of Zephyrinus at Rome under the influence of his adviser Callistus, we find more or less dwelt upon, only with increased elaboration of detail, by the Carthaginian teacher.
But it is the hard and austere way of life which Tertullian and his school prescribed as the only way which a Christian ought to tread which especially calls for mention here. The aspect of Christian society was very different when Tertullian and Hippolytus taught to what it had been a hundred years before when Ignatius lived and suffered, when a Polycarp ruled the Church in Smyrna, and an Irenaeus as a young man listened to his words.
The Christian communities in important cities were no longer largely made up of the poor or small traders, of freed-men and of slaves, with a sprinkling of the nobility, and with perhaps here and there a wealthy patrician and a senator. Such humble folk could well busy themselves in their modest avocations, could live as it were in retirement, could separate themselves from public rejoicings in which idolatrous ceremonies were largely mixed up, could keep aloof from municipal and public affairs. But as the second century wore on the communities began to include in their roll of members all sorts and conditions of men, from the lowest to the highest. Tertullian's own memorable statement, already quoted, was no mere piece of rhetoric, but told a plain fact. "We (Christians) fill the cities, the houses, the fortresses, the Senate and the Forum, the palace of the Prince, we are found among the municipalities, among the civil servants of the State, in the very camps of the armies."
New ideals must surely be set forth, new rules for the Christian life, a different code of restrictions must be laid down, for such a wide-spread society as that Avhich Tertullian so vividly portrayed. What were all these Christians to do amidst such environments? How were they to conduct themselves in the Senate, in the palace of the Caesars, in the Forum where laws were administered, in the municipal councils where the affairs of the City were discussed and arranged?
It was especially in all public and municipal business, so largely and generally shared in by the Romans of the Empire in the provincial cities as well as in the metropolis, that these difficult questions came painfully to the front. It was in all the acts of official life that the Christian was so sorely tried. The old Roman religion was apparently inextricably mixed up with public business, and Roman religion of course meant idolatry. The magistrates were perpetually bound to offer sacrifices, to invoke the aid of the invisible gods, to be present at ceremonies in which the worship of the genius of the Emperor and one or other of the national deities formed a regular and necessary part of the ceremonial. And the revival of Paganism under the Empire, dating from the days of the great Augustus, accentuated this idol-worship, this perpetual association of religious ceremonies with all state and official proceedings. In the second century Christians largely stood aloof for these reasons from all public duties and all public services.
We have seen already how conspicuously loyal to the Emperor and the Government were the followers of Jesus. By word and act they were the most obedient, the most submissive of subjects. They prayed constantly for the Caesar, in the closet as in their assemblies for divine worship; they obeyed without murmur the regulations and ordinances of his government. They were never numbered among the frequent turbulent disturbers of the established rule; indeed they regarded the majesty of the Empire as the surest earthly guarantee of public peace and security. In the frequent revolts in the provinces no Christian ever took part. Among the followers of the various pretenders to Imperial rank who from time to time arose in different parts of the Empire no Christian was ever found. In the authentic proces verhaux of the trials of accused Christians, in the Acts and Passions of the Martyrs which are accepted as genuine and undoubted pieces, very rarely if ever is a disloyal word reported to have been uttered by the Christian sufferers in the course of the harsh and often cruel interrogatory. Only one charge which seemed to touch the fringe of disloyalty to the State could not be answered. There is no doubt but that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth for a considerable period shrank from any sharing in public duties, Imperial and municipal. This abstention was a well-known accusation often thrown in the teeth of the Christian Romans, and one that could not be easily refuted. They were reproached with being a useless folk, taking no part nor share in any public business. How could they—as such a sharing involved idolatry in a hundred forms! It was a common term used for them, "the useless folk," an ingenious play upon their name of Christian (Achrestoi) or the Useless Ones.
And as time went on the grave difficulty increased with their numbers, and the higher social position of the converts. As the third century dawned a climax was reached, and the chiefs of the Christian sect had to face and to solve a formidable problem.
Two parties seemed to have been formed, each adopting a different policy, the one endeavoring to make it easier for the follower of Jesus to bear his part in the ordinary life of a citizen, the other uncompromising, stern, harsh, refusing to make any allowances, rigidly rejecting any idea of compromise. Men like Zephyrinus, the Bishop of Rome, A. D. 202-219, and Callistus, his minister and subsequently his successor, A. D. 219-223, seem to have represented the party of moderation and compromise. Hippolytus of Rome and Tertullian of Carthage are types of the more stern and unbending teachers, who pressed upon Christians the duty of a complete and total separation from the ways and pursuits of ordinary public and civic life.
We have spoken of Hippolytus. From Tertullian, however, we can gather still more of the teaching of these uncompromising and in many respects unpractical Christians. He deals with well-nigh all classes of citizens and their occupations, dwelling with some detail upon arts and crafts. Especially in his treatise on "Idolatry," he naturally inveighs against the artists who fashioned the idols. But in his invective he travels beyond the mere fabrication of the images directly designed for worship in the temples and shrines, and condemns all the ornaments and adornments intended for the houses of the rich, if in any way they were connected with the stories and legends of the gods. The artists and architects, the very workmen in their service, are all included in his sweeping condemnation. No true Christian could be included in their numerous class, for fear lest any of their handiwork should be connected with subjects bearing upon the popular idolatrous mythology of the Empire. But the stem purist, not content with his charge to avoid the popular arts and crafts, condemns all commerce, all trading, based as he conceived it to be upon greed and covetousness. He goes further still in his rigorous catalogue of unlawful ways of life. The office of a teacher in a public school is one that no Christian ought to hold. Such a teacher in the course of his instruction will be compelled to expound to the young the fables of the gods of Rome, the attributes of the deities, their genealogies, and their supposed powers. Curiously enough in another writing he suffers the young to frequent these public schools, though he forbids the Christian to take any part in the instruction supplied there.
On the question of amusements he is most severe. The passion of the Roman of the Empire for games is well known. The theatre, the circus, the gladiatorial games, entered into the life of all classes and orders. No follower of Jesus must be seen at any such exhibition. All are alike forbidden. In the tract Be Spectaculis he tells with great force the story of an exorcist commanding an unclean spirit to quit the body of a believer, and asking the demon how he dared enter into the body of a servant of God. The evil spirit replied, "I found the servant of God in my own home," i.e. in the theatre.
A yet graver point was decided by this representative teacher of the purist Christian school of the early years of the third century. He discusses whether it were possible for a Christian man to undertake any public function or office connected with the State, and replies: "Yes, it would be possible to accept a magistrate if this could be done without offering sacrifices, or having anything to do with the temples of the gods; such a position might be accepted if it did not besides involve condemning accused citizens to prison and to torture." On the whole Tertullian emphatically decided against the possibility of a true Christian assuming the responsibilities of a public functionary."
Among the stem precepts put out by the extreme school, of which we are speaking, among these forbidden ways of life so eloquently denounced by the great master Tertullian, it will be especially interesting to see what he says of the soldier's career. Could a Christian serve in the army of which Rome was so proud, whose splendid successes had won her the sovereignty of the largest part of the then known world, whose discipline and courage continued to expand and protect her enormous frontiers? Here, again, Tertullian's warning words addressed to that influential section of the Church of which he was the most distinguished teacher, incidentally tell us how widespread was the Christian sect at the beginning of the third century. The Roman army, circa A. D. 200, was full of Christians, "We are of yesterday, and we have filled your camps." "Along with you we fight" (Apol. 37, 42). The opening section of the famous treatise De Corona incidentally implies how very numerous were the Christian soldiers serving in the third or Augustan Legion.
Were all these Christian soldiers of Rome in the wrong? Was military duty incompatible with the Christian profession? Tertullian decides that such a way of life was wrong for a Christian; but his words here are less violent than the expressions he uses when he inveighs against other pursuits which he considered were unlawful for the followers of Jesus. "Shall it," he says, "be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaimed that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law?"
But here again the opinion of the Catholic Church was against the rigorous school whose opinions Tertullian voiced. As a whole the Church of the third century leaned upon the temperate words of John the Baptist, speaking to the soldiers of Rome (Luke iii. 14). It referred to the favorable judgment passed upon the centurions of the great army (Luke vii. 1, 10, and Acts, Chapter x.), and it remembered the general kindly mentions of soldiers in the Gospels and Acts, and so never discouraged Christian men from following the standards of the Empire.
In times of persecution Tertullian expresses very strongly what in the eyes of his school was the duty of Christians—anything like evasion, concealment or flight he considered argued culpable weakness. But, on the other hand, the policy of the Church largely discouraged everything which could bo construed as bravado, or useless exposure on the part of believers. Indeed, in certain cases money was given by individuals to the police authorities with a view of staying persecutions. Such acts were most strongly deprecated and condemned by Tertullian's school, to whom, indeed, martyrdom was rather to be courted than shunned.
Thus complete separation on the part of the Christian communities was urgently pressed by the extreme school of Christian thought. To carry into effect their rigorous precepts everything must be given up; if necessary, poverty must be accepted, rank and position forfeited. Even the customary public courtesies must be abandoned; when, for instance, a frontier victory of the Emperor and the army, in one of the perpetual wars which were being waged by the Empire, was announced in Rome or in a provincial city, it was the custom to illuminate and to adorn the houses with flowers. No Christian must share in this seemingly innocent courtesy to the Sovereign and his legionnaires, for such simple rejoicings would seem to imply a homage to the gods of Rome. Thus the gulf between the Christian subject of Rome and the ordinary citizen would be constantly widened, and the ill-feeling with which the votaries of the religion of Jesus were generally regarded among the populace would be constantly deepened.
Counsels of moderation, such as Paul gave in such writings as 1 Cor. viii., were explained away. Examples such as Daniel and Joseph in the Old Testament history, who lived without giving offense in a court where idol-rites formed part of the State ceremonies, were set aside. The separation must be complete.
In the family life, in public life, in trade and commerce, no modus vivendi was possible in the eyes of this stern and rigorous school, which asserted itself so powerfully in the early years of the third century. "Fast," wrote the great rhetorician in his fiery zeal, "because fasting will train your body for martyrdom, your skin will be strengthened to bear the iron nails; when your blood is well-nigh exhausted you will bleed the less beneath the scourge." "Dread," so he apostrophized the Christian women, "marriage and maternity; how will children profit you, since you must leave them as you go to the executioner, since their longing and your prayer must be that God should take them soon to Himself?" And again, "Accustom your limbs rather to fetters than to bracelets of gold: on that neck of yours now encircled with chains of pearls and emeralds, leave a spot where the sword of the lictor can fall. The age for Christians is no golden age. The robes which the angels are bringing you, remember, are the robes of martyrdom." Life, in the eyes of these grave ascetic teachers, was colored by the thought of a bitter persecution ever close at hand. And persecution to these zealots seemed always to be desired rather than to be dreaded.
But wiser and more temperate counsels on the whole prevailed in the Church. At Rome the policy of the community, guided by such bishops and teachers as Zephyrinus and Callistus, tended to bridge over the chasm which yawned between the Christians and the Empire; and the circumstances of the time which we shall presently consider, aided them in their endeavors. The policy of the rigorous school of such earnest and devoted though fanatical men as Hippolytus and Tertullian found no place in the teaching of the Catholic Church. A little later, but before the middle of the century (the third), we find such a great and revered bishop as Cyprian of Carthage even withdrawing himself for a season from the scene of danger; although when he judged that the time was come when an example of fearless courage was needed, he returned to his post of danger and duty, in the full consciousness that such a return in his case involved certain death.
And it will be seen on careful examination that the circumstances of the time were peculiarly favorable for the development of the policy of the moderate Christian leaders who in good earnest sought for a possible modus vivendi for Christians in the Empire; for the party of common sense who longed for an opportunity of doing their duty to the State as well as to God. These teachers wished to see their flock good patriots as well as good Christians. No fundamental principle, of course, must be given up, no real concession to idolatry must be made; but, on the other hand, no rash protests must be advanced, no impossible exclusiveness must be claimed. Where it was possible, the common life of ordinary citizens must be shared in, and the common duties of citizenship must be discharged by the followers of the Crucified.
For the first and second centuries such a rule of life was impossible. During this period a well-nigh ceaseless persecution of Christians was maintained by the Government. Up to the time of Nero the Church grew up in silence and in profound obscurity. From A. D. 64, the date of the cruel Neronic persecution, for well-nigh one hundred and thirty years, the attitude of the Government towards the Christian was one of persistent hostility. During these years there was never any real cessation of persecution. In some part or other of the Empire it was ever raging; over the votaries of the proscribed religion the sword was ever hanging suspended. The first considerable interval of general stillness was enjoyed by Christians from the middle of the reign of Commodus to the middle of the reign of Severus, roughly from A. D. 186 to A. D. 202, some sixteen years. Then in A. D. 202 bitter persecution began again, raging for some nine years, more or less in all parts of the Empire. When Severus died in A. D. 211, a long time of stillness set in, and for some twenty-four years the Christians enjoyed general immunity from all harrying; indeed, they were treated even with favor. Then the Emperor Maximinus reigned between two and three years, which were again a period of unrest and persecution. Then after another twelve years of stillness a terrible reaction set in—the reaction which Christian annalists paint in lurid characters under the well-known name of the Decian persecution. Decius was Emperor from A. D. 249 to A. D. 251. This resume of the periods alternating between persecution and stillness brings us to the middle of the third century.
Thus it will be seen between A. D. 186 and A. D. 249 the Christians lived for well-nigh fifty-two out of those sixty-three years comparatively unmolested; often, indeed, as we have said looked upon with some favor. In the earlier years of the first Severus (A. D. 193-211) there were Christians not only in the Imperial palace, but also in the Senate; and during the reign of Alexander Severus (A. D. 222-235) the Imperial household was largely composed of Christians. The instructions of the great Alexandrian teacher Origen were welcomed by persons of the highest importance in Rome as in the provinces. The Emperor Philip (A. D. 244-249) was even said to have been baptized into the Faith, and in these quiet years many public functionaries were openly Christians.
Encouraged by these periods of quiet, periods which now and again showed signs of even something more than toleration, the responsible leaders of the Catholic Church, seeing in this changed aspect of public feeling towards Christianity "the finger of God" sought how they could in lawful matters promote the growth of this kindlier disposition towards them displayed by the State.
Severus (A. D. 193-211), some time before the close of the second century, published a law enabling the Jews to hold the office of decurion without taking part in any of those sacred functions which belonged to the ceremonial department of the municipal office in question if such sacred functions were repugnant to the principles of their Faith. Now there is no certain proof, it is true, of the promulgation of a law setting forth such a formal exemption in the case of the Christians, but it is clear that such an exemption practically did tacitly exist, and that in the third century, in such periods of marked stillness as characterized the reigns of Alexander Severus and of Philip, and the earlier years of the Emperor Valerian, the Christian believers might hold offices connected with the Imperial court, or occupy magistrates and appointments belonging to municipalities, without being compelled to share in any public function of an idolatrous character. It must be remembered, moreover, that these periods of stillness for the Christian population of the Empire occupied considerably more than half of the third century. Origen's testimony is very decisive here when he speaks of Christians not avoiding or shirking the common public duties of life. Tertullian's words recently quoted, although rhetorical, are to the same effect.
But the third century was no golden age for Christians, although they enjoyed long periods of comparative immunity from harassing persecution. We have already computed that during at least twenty-five years bitter persecution raged. This was continued, though not throughout the whole Empire, during some ten or eleven years of the fourth century, while the final period of the war of Paganism against its victorious adversary, which lasted some fourteen or fifteen years, and is generally known as the Diocletian persecution, claimed perhaps more victims than had any of the previous onslaughts. It was the final attack, but it was at the same time the most determined and terrible.
It seems strange that these fierce persecutions should have arisen in an age which had witnessed long periods of stillness, showing that there was a possibility of the Pagan Empire and Christianity existing, so to speak, alongside one another, so long as a spirit of mutual forbearance existed, so long as a wise toleration was displayed by the Imperial government of a religion whose professors again and again had shown themselves the most loyal and peaceful of subjects and citizens.
But the truth was. Paganism was stronger as a creed than later generations have believed. Superstition wide-spread and deeply rooted lived on in quarters where it is difficult to credit its existence. In the age of the Antonines we have seen that the best and wisest among the Romans seem firmly to have believed in dreams, in oracles, in soothsayers, in diviners, in all the strange and curious mechanism, so to speak, of the Pagan system. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the wisest and best of the Pagan sovereigns, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, was a firm believer in these strange mysteries of an old and dying religion, and was superstitious to an extreme degree. And if Marcus was an earnest believer in these things, it is surely not difficult to understand that men far inferior to him in ability and learning were in their day slaves to the same curious and deep-rooted superstitions. We have to remember that it was an adept in the occult sciences who persuaded the Emperor Valerian in the middle of the third century to proscribe once more the worshippers of Christ, while the awful persecution of Diocletian in the first years of the fourth century was the result of the pleading of the men who inspected the sacred victims offered at the shrines of the ancient deities of Rome.
With this spirit of superstition still living in the Empire, ready ever to break out into open action, it is not difficult to account for the sudden outbreaks of a fierce persecution, which we shall meet with now and again in the last hundred and thirteen years of our thrilling story.
In close connection with these troubles in the inner life of the Church of Rome, and in some measure of the Church of Carthage also, troubles which were doubtless not peculiar to these two most important centers, was a heresy which threatened to divide the Church into two opposing camps at a most critical period of her history—viz. circa A. D. 177 —A. D. 220—when struggling Christianity was carrying on a life and death contest with Paganism. This heresy was named Montanism, after its founder, the Phrygian Montanus.
The troubles which, as we have seen, so gravely disturbed the Church of Rome were very real; they arrayed profound scholars and theologians of blameless life and of the highest reputation, such as Hippolytus and Tertullian, against experienced prelates like Zephyrinus and Callistus of Rome, who were supported by all the organization and power, and, if we may use the later expression, by the public opinion of the Catholic Church.
These troubles arose from the changed conditions, notably from the numbers and social position of the Christians, who were now largely recruited from those classes which would naturally participate freely in public life. Hence the problem: Were Christians to "come out from the world," to aim at the formation of a little society of exclusive religious devotees, or were they to go on to a world-wide mission by more or less adapting themselves to Roman society, its ways, its laws, its customs?
Now the Church, face to face with this new and changed position, chose the second alternative: to use the graphic language of a modern scholar, "She marched through the open door into the Roman State, and settled down there for a long career of activity, determining to Christianize the State along all its thoroughfares by imparting to it the word of the Gospel, but at the same time leaving it everything except its gods." But to do this the Church in some way had to abandon its old discipline and primitive severity, its ancient apostolic simplicity. And although the Christian community and its responsible rulers adopted this altered policy there were in its midst not a few "holy men of heart," devout scholars and deep theologians, who resented bitterly the change of policy, and with all their power opposed it and set themselves against it. This we have seen in Rome when Hippolytus preached and wrote against the movement, which he, and men who thought like him, deemed secular, retrograde, or, to use a modern term, opportunist; and in Carthage we have sketched the working of a similar movement, where Tertullian, with yet greater vehemence and ability, protested against this laxer teaching and practice. The contest between the men who mourned over the decadence of primitive Christianity, and the men of the new school, was being carried on fiercely at Rome and Carthage as the second century was expiring, and was continued in the first decades of the third.
A good many years before these dates there had arisen in the western districts of pro-consular Asia, in the province of Phrygia, a sect of Christians urging a more exacting standard of moral obligations than was beginning to be observed in the Catholic Church, especially with regard to marriage, fasting, and martyrdom; and at the same time, in the person of its founder, Montanus, advancing strange claims to the possession of a special prophetic inspiration, in the sense in which prophecy was understood in apostolic days. The headquarters of the sect were the small and little known Phrygian towns of Pepuza and Tymion. Besides Montanus himself, only two women named Prisca and Maximilla seem ever to have asserted that they were endowed with prophetic gifts. They professed to utter the direct commands of the Holy Spirit, and the principal burden of their revelation was the necessity of a more strict and holy life. Montanus appeared on the scene about the year 156, when Antoninus Pius was reigning; but for some twenty years his movement was confined to Phrygia and the neighboring districts.
After A. D. 177 Montanism, as it was called from its founder, began to spread over a much wider area, and attention became gradually attracted to its claims and to its teaching'. There is no doubt that the urgency with which the Montanists preached the imperative duty of a severer life won to their ranks in different countries many earnest souls who were utterly dissatisfied with the laxer discipline of the Catholic Church, and disapproved of the new policy which was gradually being adopted by the Church of Rome and other great communities. It was the ascetic preaching of the Montanists which at first won them adherents rather than their peculiar belief in a new and special outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
On the other hand the strange and novel doctrine concerning a special and fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon Montanus and his two female friends no doubt seriously weakened the cause of the rigorists—the party which set itself to oppose what they deemed the secularization of the Church—by causing their views to be associated with the Montanist heresy. There was, in fact, no necessary connection. Hippolytus, for instance, one of the most earnest of those who set themselves to denounce the new departure in Church policy, in his famous work "On Heresies," speaks with profound contempt of Prisca and Maximilla, the Montanistic prophetesses, whom, as he said, the Montanists magnified as above the Apostles; and he terms the majority of their books as foolish, and their arguments as worthy of no consideration ("Refutation," Book VIII. 12, and X. 21). Tertullian, indeed, adopted the full teaching of Montanism far on in his career as a teacher, but only when he found that the chasm was broadening every day between the old Christianity to which his soul clung, with its primitive severity, its resolute refusal to share in anything connected with the life so inextricably mixed up with the Pagan associations around, and the new Christianity which more or less accommodated itself to the life of the Empire.
The Catholic Church, however, as a Church, unswervingly opposed Montanism. Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis, an eminent theologian and a voluminous writer of Asia Minor in the last quarter of the second century, wrote strongly condemning their errors. Indeed, the universal acceptance by the Catholic Church of the canon of the New Testament before the close of the second century, an acceptance which rigorously excluded all other writings from the inspired volume, was sufficient to brand as a deadly heresy any teaching respecting a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit, no hint of which appears in the inspired pages.
But, as we have remarked, Montanism for a comparatively brief period was a power chiefly in consequence of its protest against what may be regarded as secularism in the Church, a departure from the old paths of primitive Christianity. Besides its influence in Asia Minor and Africa, in Gaul, too, it evidently had made a lodgment. This much we learn from the sympathetic letter addressed to Eleutherus (Bishop of Rome, A. D. 176 to A. D. 192) by the Gallican confessors, who, without expressing a definite opinion as to the truth of the Montanistic claims, yet considered that communion should be maintained with the Asian zealots.
In Rome, at one time late in the second century, according to Tertullian, there was clearly a disposition in the official Church, if not to recognize the claims of Montanism, at least to consider them favorably. Praxeas, however, who is charged with introducing from Asia the Sabellian heresy respecting the doctrine of the Trinity, succeeded in inducing the Roman bishop to withhold his letters of conciliation to the churches of Asia and Phrygia on the question. The expressions of the great African master here are interesting. "For after the Bishop of Rome" (either Eleutherus or Victor) "had acknowledged the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, and in consequence of the acknowledgment had bestowed his peace on the churches of Asia and Phrygia, he (Praxeas), by importunately urging false accusations against the prophets themselves and their churches, and insisting on the authority of the bishop's predecessors in the see, compelled him to recall the pacific letter which he had issued."
There is no question but that Montanism was the most dangerous heresy as regards the peace of the Church which had arisen in the first century and a half of its existence. The various Gnostic heresies, it is true, were more far-reaching and probably affected greater numbers in the great centers of population. But the Gnostic heresies, as far as we are acquainted with them, were not Christian—were altogether outside the pale of the Catholic Church. Montanism, on the other hand, arose in the heart of Christian communities, and in its burning advocacy of the old strictness and austerity of primitive Christianity, awoke deep sympathy in the hearts of many of the most earnest followers of Jesus, in spite of its strange delusion respecting the message of the new prophecy.
With the exception of this grave delusion it does not appear that on great doctrinal questions there was any real difference between the Catholics and the Montanists, although Hippolytus ("Refutation," x. 22) charges them with holding Patripassian opinions. It would be difficult, however, with our present knowledge, to brand them on this account with holding any definite error, for the language at this period on the subject of the Trinity was often loose and unguarded.
But the views of Montanists on the new prophecy were amply sufficient to warrant the stem rejection which the sect met with at the hands of Catholic teachers. Montanism, after an existence of some fifty years, was gradually stamped out. It produced no more inspired prophets or prophetesses when Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla had passed away; and after the first decades of the third century very little is heard of it. Only in Phrygia and its neighborhood, the land of its nativity, did it hold its ground. In these districts Montanistic communities are heard of as late as the fourth century. With the exception of Tertullian no considerable writer or theologian appears in its ranks, and the adhesion of Tertullian in his later life was gained no doubt largely owing to the uncompromising stand of the Montanistic teaching against the new and laxer policy of the Church.