The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

city. As London is the market of England, to which the

best of all things find their way, so Rome was the market of

the Mediterranean world; but there was this difference between

the two, that in Rome the articles were not paid for. Money,

indeed, might be given, but it was money which had not been

earned, and which therefore would come to its end at last.

 

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.

Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no

industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts

and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices

of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas,

the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing

out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London

turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt. And how, it

may be asked, was the money spent? The answer is not difficult

to give. Rome kept open house. It gave a dinner party every

day; the emperor and his favourites dined upon nightingales and

flamingo tongues, on oysters from Britain, and on fishes from

the Black Sea; the guards received their rations; and bacon,

wine, oil, and loaves were served out gratis to the people.

Sometimes entertainments were given in which a collection of

animals as costly as that in Regent’s Park was killed for the

amusement of the people. Constantine transferred the capital to

Constantinople; and now two dinners were given every day. Egypt

found the bread for one, and Africa found it for the other. The

governors became satraps, the peasantry became serfs, the

merchants and land owners were robbed and ruined, the empire

stopped payment, the legions of the frontier marched on the

metropolis, the dikes were deserted, and then came the deluge.

 

The empire had been already divided. There was an empire of the

West, or the Latin world; there was an empire of the East, or

the Greek world. The first was overrun by the Germans, the

second by the Arabs. But Constantinople remained unconquered

throughout the Dark Ages; and Rome, though taken and sacked,

was never occupied by the barbarians. In these two great cities

the languages and laws of the classical times were preserved;

and from Rome religion was diffused throughout Europe; to Rome

a spiritual empire was restored.

 

The condition of the Roman world at one time bore a curious

resemblance to that of China. In each of these great empires,

separated by a continent, the principal feature was that of

peace. Vast populations dwelt harmoniously together, and were

governed by admirable laws. The frontiers of each were

threatened by barbarians. The Chinese built a wall along the

outskirts of the steppes; the Romans built a wall along the

Danube and the Rhine. In China, a man dressed in yellow

received divine honours; in Rome, a man dressed in purple

received divine honours; in each country the religion was the

religion of the state, and the emperor was the representative

of God. In each country, also, a religious revolution occurred.

A young Indian prince, named Sakya Muni, afflicted by the

miseries of human life which he beheld, cast aside his wealth

and his royal destiny, became a recluse, and devoted his life

to the study of religion. After long years of reading and

reflection he took the name of Buddha, or “the Awakened.” He

declared that the soul after death migrates into another form,

according to its deeds and according to its thoughts. This was

the philosophy of the Brahmins. But he also proclaimed that all

existence is passion, misery, and pain, and that by subduing

the evil emotions of the heart the soul will hereafter finally

obtain the calm of non-existence, the peaceful Nirvana, the

unalloyed, the unclouded Not to Be.

 

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have

succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of

metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its

beautiful morality. The men who laboured in the fields had

always been taught that the Brahmins were the aristocracy of

heaven, and would be as high above them in a future state as

they were upon the earth. The holy books which God had revealed

were not for them, the poor dark-skinned labourers, to read;

burning oil poured into their ears was the punishment by law

for so impious an act. And now came a man who told them that

those books had not been revealed at all, and that God was no

respecter of persons; that the happiness of men in a future

state depended, not upon their birth, but upon their actions

and their thoughts. Buddhism triumphed for a time in Hindustan,

but its success was greatest among the stranger natives in the

north-west provinces, the Indo-Scythians and the Greeks. Then

came a period of patriotic feeling; the Brahmins preached a war

of independence; the new religion was associated with the

foreigners, and both were driven out together. But Buddhism

became the religion of Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam, and finally

entered the Chinese Empire. It suffered and survived bloody

persecutions. It became a licensed religion, and spread into

the steppes of Tartary among those barbarians by whom China was

destined to be conquered. The religion of the Buddhists was

transformed; its founder was worshipped as a god; there was a

doctrine of the incarnation; they had their own holy books,

which they declared to have been revealed; they established

convents and nunneries, splendid temples, adorned with images,

and served by priests with shaven heads, who repeated prayers

upon rosaries, and who taught that happiness in a future state

could best be obtained by long prayers and by liberal presents

to the Church.

 

At the period of the importation of Buddhism into China, a

similar event occurred in the Roman world. It was

the pagan theory that each country was governed by its own

gods. The proper religion for each man, said an oracle of

Delphi, is the religion of his fatherland. Yet these gods were

cosmopolitan; they punished or rewarded foreigners. Imilkon,

having offended the Greek gods in the Sicilian wars, made

atonement to them when he returned to Carthage: he offered

sacrifices in the Phoenician temples, but according to the

milder ceremonies of the Greeks. The Philistines sent back the

ark with a propitiatory present to Jehovah. Alexander, in Asia

Minor, offered sacrifices to the gods of the enemy. The Romans,

when they besieged a town, called upon its tutelary god by

name, and offered him bribes to give up the town. Rome waged

war against the world, but not against the gods; she did not

dethrone them in their own countries; she offered them the

freedom of the city. Men of all races came to live in Rome;

they were allowed to worship their own gods; the religions of

the empire were regularly licensed; Egyptian temples and Syrian

chapels sprang up in all directions. But though the Romans

considered it right that Egyptians should worship Isis, and

that Alexandrines should worship Serapis, they justly

considered it a kind of treason for Romans to desert their

tutelary gods. For this reason, foreign religions were

sometimes proscribed. It was also required from the subjects of

the empire that they should offer homage to the gods of Rome,

and to the genius or spirit of the emperor; not to the man, but

to the soul that dwelled within. The Jews alone were exempt

from these regulations. It was believed that they were a

peculiar people, or rather that they had a peculiar god. While

the other potentates of the celestial world lived in harmony

together, Jehovah was a sullen and solitary being, who

separated his people from the rest of mankind, forbade them to

eat or drink with those who were not of their own race, and

threatened to punish them if they worshipped any gods but him.

On this account the Roman government, partly to preserve the

lives of their subjects, and partly out of fear for themselves,

believing that Jehovah like the other gods, had always an

epidemic at his command, treated the Jews with exceptional

indulgence.

 

These people were scattered over all the world; they had

their Ghetto or Petticoat Lane in every great city of

the empire; their religion, so superior to that of the pagans,

had attracted much attention from the Gentiles. Ovid, in his

“Art of Love,” counsels the dandy who seeks a mistress to

frequent the theatre, or Temple of Isis, or the synagogue on

the Sabbath day. But the Jews in Rome, like the Jews in London,

did not attempt to make proselytes, and received them with

reluctance and distrust. Their sublime faith, divested of its

Asiatic customs, was offered to the Romans some Jewish heretics

called Christians or Nazarenes.

 

A young man named Joshua or Jesus, a carpenter by trade,

believed that the world belonged to the devil, and that God

would shortly take it from him, and that he the Christ or

Anointed would be appointed by God to judge the souls of men,

and to reign over them on earth. In politics he was a leveller

and communist, in morals he was a monk; he believed that only

the poor and the despised would inherit the kingdom of God. All

men who had riches or reputations would follow their dethroned

master into everlasting pain. He attacked the church-going,

sabbatarian ever-praying Pharisees; he declared that piety was

worthless if it were praised on earth. It was his belief that

earthly happiness was a gift from Satan, and should therefore

be refused. If a man was poor in this world, that was good; he

would be rich in the world to come. If he were miserable and

despised, he had reason to rejoice; he was out of favour with

the ruler of this world, namely Satan, and therefore he would

be favoured by the new dynasty. On the other hand, if a man

were happy, rich, esteemed, and applauded, he was for ever

lost. He might have acquired his riches by industry; he might

have acquired his reputation by benevolence, honesty, and

devotion; but that did not matter; he had received his reward.

So Christ taught that men should sell all that they had and

give to the poor; that they should renounce all family ties;

that they should let to-morrow take care of itself; that they

should not trouble about clothes: did, not God adorn the

flowers of the fields? He would take care of them also if they

would fold their hands together and have faith, and abstain

from the impiety of providing for the future. The principles of

Jesus were not conducive to the welfare of society; he was put

to death by the authorities; his disciples established a

commune; Greek Jews were converted by them, and carried the new

doctrines over all the world. The Christians in Rome were at

first a class of men resembling the Quakers. They called one

another brother and sister; they adopted a peculiar garb, and

peculiar forms of speech; the Church was at first composed of

women, slaves, and illiterate artisans but it soon became the

religion of the people in the towns. All were converted

excepting the rustics (pagani) and the intellectual freethinkers, who formed the aristocracy. Christianity was at first

a republican religion; it proclaimed the equality of souls; the

bishops were the representatives of God, and the bishops were

chosen by the people. But when the emperor adopted Christianity

and made it a religion of the state, it became a part of

imperial government, and the parable of Dives was forgotten.

The religion of the Christians was transformed; its founder was

worshipped as a god; there was a doctrine of the incarnation;

they