done by the Oratorian lives. But in a literary point of view they have put us back rather than advanced us. With a few honourable exceptions, our contemporary hagiology has fallen back into the phase of translation-and of translation often very badly done indeed.

It seemed at one time not impossible that the successful example of Father Faber's ascetical works might lead to the formation of a school of writers who might imitate his method, and attempt to reproduce his style. One or two luscious allegories, full of flowers and stars and such like pageantry, fell unapplauded to the ground, and the danger was at an end. The reason was obvious. Father Faber's evident fluency and facility were not common fluency and facility; they were the fruits of long education, serious training, wide reading, prudent self-criticism, and cautious pruning. Like one or two other successful and original writers, his trick might perhaps be caught, but his secret never. If he had founded a school, it would certainly have degenerated, and might have become mischievous. His style may be compared to the oratory of a man like Lacordaire; safe in his hands, but not to be imitated without danger. A "wildish Faberian book "-to use his own expression-was welcome enough from his own pen; it might have been less acceptable from the pen of an imitator without half his knowledge or half his prudence. Thus we come, with regard to Father Faber's literary position, to a conclusion quite parallel to that which might be formed as to the man himself apart from his works. He was engaging, attractive, graceful, sweet, joyous; but this play of beautiful outward qualities came from the depths of solid piety, sound virtue, and · a life of prayer. His grace came from within, and without this his winning exterior might have pleased for a moment, but would have exercised no lasting influence. His works reflect at once the solidity of the inner man and the playful beauty of his manners and conversation. They too are graceful, attractive, fascinating; but their real power lies in the careful thought which they embody, in the learning on which they are founded, and the conscientious self-restraint which presided over their publication.

Drigen against Celsus.

I.

THE works of the early Christian apologists demand especial attention at the present day, partly from the strong attraction manifested towards the primordia of the faith, partly because we are engaged, as against the enemies of the Church, in a struggle greatly resembling that of the first ages, and they who know how to use these remarkable monuments will have anticipated objections that were met far more than a millennium ago. Among these works Origen's famous treatise against Celsus holds the first rank. It is a vast and miscellaneous store-house

of deep suggestions, or curious observations. A single passage in it seems to have given the hint for a book that has played a great part in modern, that is, in Protestant thought-Butler's Analogy. It contains, as might be expected from an author whose genius led him to very doubtful and even dangerous paths, much that startles one; yet on the other hand, Origen was one whose services claim, as far as may be, a favourable construction, and who can never be dispensed with by those who take up the task of defending the Christian Revelation against those without. I propose little more in the present inquiry than to review this ancient treatise as one might do a modern work, and to point out to the popular reader its most interesting traits, a task which, considering the limited space at my command, may require two or three papers for its completion. In this number I shall not go beyond the

first three books.

It is against his will that Origen undertakes an apologetic work on behalf of Christianity, remembering the silence of our Lord when in the presence of Pilate, which may teach us how we ought to act when put upon our defence by those who have no sincere wish to know the truth. Actions speak far more strongly than words, and a verbal defence tends to weaken that which is exhibited in deeds. Origen disdains the idea that any of the Faithful could be found so weak as to be shaken by arguments like those of Celsus, and therefore addresses him

self either to those outside of, or weak in, the faith. Whilst therefore, for the sake of such persons, he offers conscientious solutions of the several objections urged by Celsus, he depends more on the large and massive effect produced by Christianity in revolutionising the moral state of the world, reminding us again of the answer given by our Lord to the inquiring disciples of St. John.

There were of course two great classes in the ancient world whom the Christian apologist had to meet-the Jews and Pagans; and objections on behalf of both these classes were supplied by Celsus in his infidel work called annons λóyos, "True Reason," to which Origen replies in the treatise I am considering. For the present I shall confine myself to the latter or Pagan side of the question, which is practically of greater importance to us, as anticipating the mental position of many of those external to the Church in our own times.

One of the most familiar charges against Christianity in its earliest period was that of its forming a secret association. The Roman legislation was peculiarly favourable to guilds, clubs, and sodalities of various kinds, but then it required that these should be known to the laws and recognised by them. The existence of any institution which did not derive from human laws the breath of its life, was an object of suspicion and fear; and such Christianity appeared to be, with its agapa or lovefeasts, of which even now the pain bénit in foreign churches is a relic, looking like a symbol of an illegal society. It must be admitted Origen's defence against this charge is very bold. He compares the Christians living in the midst of the Pagan world to civilised people in a land of savages (he mentions Scythians), whom all could understand as forming themselves into a secret association against the unholy laws that surrounded them. Or again, he compares them to a conspiracy against one of those detestable tyrants whom Greek public feeling regarded as extraneous to the pale of humanity. Christianity was a covenant entered into against the tyranny of the devil and of falsehood. Those who remember the sharp line which Greeks drew between themselves and barbarians, and, again, their instinctive detestation of tyrants, can perceive how well Origen adapted his arguments to his readers. The former feeling must have constituted with the majority of educated minds one of the greatest difficulties of Christianity. It is perhaps no exaggeration to compare it to a religion announced, for example, by men of colour to Europeans, and claiming obedience from the

superior race, accustomed haughtily to look down upon them. It is true that Celsus admitted—and it was not a new notion—— that the barbarians had an aptitude for inventing ideas, and the Greeks for criticising, establishing, and recasting them; but this did not remove the repugnance felt by the latter to whatever came from a barbarian source, and which began by overthrowing the wall of separation so dear to the pride of their genius and refinement. Origen accepts and enlarges upon the admission which had been made by the sceptic he is answering. A man coming from Greek schools to the doctrine of Christianity, might not only judge it to be true, but work it up in such a manner as to approve it to the Greek method of demonstration--which in fact was done to a great extent by the learned Fathers; and still more when, in the scholastic era, Christian theology was set forth according to the forms of the Peripatetic dialectics. The same process indeed we have seen repeated in modern times. What is the popular Catholic apologetic literature of France, England, and Germany, but the statement of Catholic arguments in the forms which have come into fashion in Europe under influences not less remote, or more so, from Christianity than the Porch or the Academy? In the earliest centuries however, what seemed the weakness of the Christian doctrine was its real strength. A rhetorical and pedantic spirit had long since given such a character of barrenness and deadness to the Pagan schools, that the rudeness and simplicity with which the new Revelation was preached must have powerfully recommended itself to minds worn out with vain and verbal wrangling. I may quote the following passage in illustration of this from the third book of the treatise before us :

We place confidence in the purposes of the writers of the Gospels guessing as we do their honesty and good faith, shown in their writings and having nothing false and juggling and feigned and tricky. For it occurs to us that souls which never learned what is taught by Greek sophistry, abounding in persuasiveness and sharpness, and by the rhetoric which is busy in the courts of law, could never have thus forged things having a native power to produce faith, and a life corresponding to it. And this I think was why Jesus wished to make use of such teachers of His dogma, that there might be no room for a suspicion of persuasive sophisms; and that it might be clearly apparent, to those capable of understanding, that the absence of fraud in the design of the writers, being full of simplicity, was deemed worthy of a divine power, far more effective than appears to be a sounding of words and composition of phrases and a train of distinctions and Greek technicality.-Origen c. Celsum, iii., p. 135, ed. Gul. Spencer, Cantab. 1658.

Not of course that Christian dogma was incapable of form, which it received as time went on, but it had, from the first, what

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it has retained amidst all the development of the schools, an energy as addressed to the people, which Greek philosophy never knew. It certainly needed this, humanly speaking, to overcome the profound prejudice which Pagan antiquity had against the Jews, and which is shown by the almost complete silence of earlier writers about that nation, and by the contemptuous ignorance displayed by the later authors.

Perhaps the most favourite objection of modern anti-Catholic controversialists is that which attempts to refer the rites and ceremonies of the Church to Pagan sources; which objection, in England, Middleton was most prominent in urging. It is curious that we find in the earliest ages of the Church, the precise analogous difficulty urged (with a different purpose indeed) by Celsus against the Revelation of Moses. If the moderns attack, for example, the use of incense or of processions as borrowed from Paganism, Celsus accused Moses of borrowing circumcision from the Egyptians. And we have seen this very objection, of ascribing the Mosaic institutions, the arrangements of the Temple for instance, to Egyptian influences, urged by a modern popular writer, Miss Martineau, who certainly did not learn it from Celsus.

As to circumcision, Origin treats the objection very briefly. asserting the authority of Moses in ascribing it to Abraham, against that of the Egyptians to the contrary, and mentioning the curious fact that they themselves, in certain incantations, invoked the name of the God of Abraham and Isaac. This tendency to degrade the true by partly accepting it, and yet placing it on a level with the false, we see is no new phenomenon in the world and we may compare those Egyptians who mingled the highest of names among their false gods, with the Emperor Alexander Severus, who had statues of Christ and of Orpheus in his chapel, with the Saxon Redwald, who in the same temple had an altar for the Christian sacrifice, and a smaller one for his idols (Bede, Eccl. Hist. ii. 15), with the Samaritans of old, who gave the example of this sort of syncretism, and with the continual borrowing we see going on before us, on the part of sectaries, from the ceremonial of the Catholic Church.

Perhaps the victory of Christianity over the ancient Egyptian religion has not been sufficiently considered. It must have been a much greater achievement than the overthrow of Greek and Roman Paganism, which Egypt had extensively fascinated by its gorgeous ritual and mysterious temples. Its influence over the imagination of the Pagan world is shown even in a passage where