and earth his footstool; in whom is all place and he beyond; who is the uttermost bound of the universe-that he, the Most High, walked in Paradise at eventide, seeking for Adam; and shut the ark when Noah was gone in, and rested under the oak with Abraham, and called out of the bush to Moses, and was seen the fourth in the furnace of the King of Babylon, though he is called the Son of Man-except this was all in an image and a mirror and a mystery? Surely that even of the Son of God these things should not be believed except they were written, and perchance not believed though written of the Father, whom they [the school of Praxeas] bring down into the womb of Mary, and shut up again in the monument of Joseph."

CHAPTER III.

ST. CYPRIAN.

ST. CYPRIAN'S literary activity was limited to about a dozen years. He suffered martyrdom in 258, and his earliest work is dated A.D. 246. He is a clear and forcible writer, but not as original as Tertullian, to whom he is much indebted. It is an old legend that his habitual way of asking for his copy of Tertullian was, Cedo magistrum-"The master, please." He follows all Tertullian's ideas-his pessimism, his austerity, his horror of heresy, his enthusiasm for death; he adds nothing of his own except sanity and moderation and consistency. Even in consistency the author is scarcely perfect. We are told when the writer is advocating the works of mercy, that the alms-deeds of Dorcas earned her recall to life; when he is consoling the Christians who were not exempt from the chronic pestilence which raged for many years in Africa,' he insists that death is a good to the true believer, and waxes sarcastic at the fact that believers shrank from death. It seems there was a bishop dying of the plague, and he prayed for time to prepare himself, and in his sleep had a vision of a glorious and terrible young man, who stood over him and said, "If you fear to suffer and are not willing to depart, what is it I shall do for you?" As the bishop died soon after, St. Cyprian feels that the rebuke was intended for survivors. It is characteristic of the difference between him and Tertullian, that while Tertullian thinks it a disgrace, or something like it, for a Christian to die by a slow, easy fever, St. Cyprian rebukes the impatience of those who would rebel against a foul and horrible pestilence, because it interfered with the chance Because sewers had not kept pace with amphitheatres or even aqueducts?

of martyrdom. In the writer's view there was no reason to be shocked at these horrors, since the world was irretrievably bad. There is much less parade of loyalty than in Tertullian, who lived nearer the days when the empire had unmistakably deserved it, and might still expect that the empire would come to deserve it again.

The contrast goes deeper. St. Cyprian, on his conversion, attained perfect inward peace and self-complacency. He tells us himself that he had a great many excesses to repent, and this is supported to some slight extent by the tradition which makes him a magician anxious to bewitch a consecrated virgin upon any terms.1

However this may be, he had resolution enough to turn over a new leaf completely and at once. His deacon and biographer, Pontius, assures us that he embraced continence even before he was baptized, and on his baptism, in which he enjoyed a sensible illumination, edified and astonished the faithful by a complete renunciation of his property, which he sold for the benefit of the community he joined. It seems that the sacrifice was less complete than he intended, as the purchasers restored him the usufruct.

His conversion was the expression of the pessimism of a man who wishes for a more regular life, and has to change his theory of the universe to attain it. His first work was a letter to one Donatus, a fellow-convert, to whom he confides his indictment against the world. He begins with a philippic against the growth of vulgar crimes and vices; then he dilates on the miseries and turpitudes of what passes for being respectable and glorious. The advocate will sell his client, and the judge will sell his sentence. The official ruins him

self by splendid shows, and the rich always know that they may be ruined by calumny. No one is secure in any station, and the emperor who is most feared has most to fear. Nothing but a belief in the inalienable favor of the Highest can give real peace. Throughout the author hardly argues; he makes assertions which he leaves to be tested by an appeal

There is no evidence that the legend of Cyprian of Antioch either distinguished or confounded him with Cyprian of Carthage.

to experience. He has not the keen sense of the objections to his system which we find in Minucius Felix and even in Tertullian. In his reply to Demetrius or Demetrianus (we do not know whether he was a proconsul or a pamphleteer) he takes for granted that the world is going from bad to worse, as Demetrius alleges; but he denies that it is the Christians' fault.'

"You are puffed with pride, or greedy with avarice, or cruel with wrath, or wasteful with gaming, or staggering with wine, or envious with blue malice, or polluted by lust, or violent with cruelty, and you marvel that God's anger grows into punishments upon the race of man when what is matter for punishment is growing day by day. You complain that foes arise, as though, if there were no enemy, there were room for peace among togas of our own; as though, even if warfare and perils from barbarians without be put down, there were no weapons of home-bred assault raging more fiercely and grievously from within by reason of calumnies and injuries of powerful citizens. You complain of barrenness and famine, as if drought caused more famine than greed; as though forestalling the rise in corn and the growth of prices did not make the furnace of distress grow hotter. You complain that rain is shut up in heaven when granaries are thus shut up on earth. You complain that earth bears less, as though what she bears were not denied to those who lack. You make a crime of pestilence and plague, whereas plague and pestilence serve to reveal or increase the crimes of individuals, who neither show mercy to the sick, nor refrain from letting rapine and avarice loose upon the dead, whose succession is at the mercy of sycophants. All such are cowards in the obedience of piety, rash in covetousness of impiety, fleeing from the burials of men dying, turning upon the spoils of men dead, to make it plain that haply the poor souls were forsaken in their sickness to this end that they should not be able to escape by fitting care, for he was minded that the sick should perish who enters upon the heritage of the perishing."

The conclusion of the matter is, that St. Cyprian warns his

"Ad. Dem." 10.

1

readers: "Take heed, therefore, while time serves, to true and everlasting salvation; forasmuch as the end of the world. is now at hand, turn your mind to God in the fear of God, and take no pleasure in this life, in that wanton and vain lordship over the righteous and meek, since we see in the field that tares and wild oats lord it over well-tilled and fertile wheat. Do not say that evils befall because your gods have no worship from us; but know that this is the judgment of God upon you, that since you discern him not by his benefits, you may discern him by his wrath. Seek God, however late, since he exhorts you long ago by his prophets, saying, Seek God and your soul shall live. . .

"What shall be the glory of faith and the doom of faithlessness when the day of judgment shall come? What gladness of believers, what sorrow of the faithless, who have refused to believe this in time, and are unable to come back to belief! For the ever-burning Gehenna will consume its prey, and the ravenous torment will feed upon the guilty with undying flames and there will be no place where the torments shall have rest or end."

:

He insists throughout his treatise on the Plague that the visitation is not a sign of wrath upon the Christians, though they are not exempt, and that it is a sign of wrath upon the heathen; and naturally the argument is not free from confusion. It may be said that he has not Tertullian's energetic sense of the worth of temporal order: he does not think that the great obstacle to the conversion of the emperors is that the world could not exist without the empire. His temper is much more cheerful and equable than his master's, and his pessimism was much more thoroughgoing, inasmuch as he lived in the unhappy age of Decius and Valerian instead of the prosperous though stormy age of Severus. He even exceeds the severity of his master in dealing with the dress of consecrated virgins. Tertullian insists on a veil as a badge of modesty appropriate to all grown-up women, while St. Cyprian is engaged in a crusade against all forms of personal vanity, which not unfrequently developed themselves more 1 "Ad. Dem." 23.