The student of church history now meets with the manifest and appalling effect of the world in the church. It is a most sorrowful sight, but it ought to be a profitable lesson to the christian reader. What then was, is now, and ever must be. The Holy Spirit, who dwells in us, is not now less sensitive to the foul and withering breath of the world than He was then.
What the enemy could not do by bloody edicts and cruel tyrants, he accomplished by the friendship of the world. This is an old stratagem of Satan. The wily serpent proved more dangerous than the roaring lion. By means of the favor of great men, and especially of emperors, he threw the clergy off their guard, led them to join hands with the world, and deceived them by his flatteries. The Christians could now erect temples as well as the heathen, and their bishops were received at the imperial court on equal terms with the idolatrous priests. This unhallowed intercourse with the world sapped the very foundations of their Christianity. This became painfully manifest when the violent storm of persecution succeeded the long calm of their worldly prosperity.
In many parts of the empire the Christians had enjoyed undisturbed peace for a period of thirty years. This had told unfavorably on the church as a whole. With many it was not now the faith of an ardent conviction, such as we had in the first and second centuries, but of truth instilled into the mind by means of christian education—just what prevails in the present day to an alarming extent. A persecution breaking out with great violence, after so many years of tranquility, could not fail to prove a sifting process for the churches. The atmosphere of Christianity had become corrupted. Cyprian in the West, and Origen in the East, speak of the secular spirit which had crept in—of the pride, the luxury, the covetousness of the clergy—of the careless and irreligious lives of the people.
"If," says Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, "the cause of the disease is understood, the cure of the affected part is already found. The Lord would prove His people; and because the divinely-prescribed regimen of life had become disturbed in the long season of peace, a divine judgment was sent to reestablish our fallen, and, I might almost say, slumbering faith. Our sins deserve more; but our gracious Lord has so ordered it that all which has occurred seems rather like a trial than a persecution. Forgetting what believers did in the times of the apostles, and what they should always be doing, Christians labored with insatiable desire to increase their earthly possessions. Many of the bishops who, by precept and example, should have guided others, neglected their divine calling, to engage in the management of worldly concerns." Such being the condition of things in many of the churches, we need not wonder at what took place.
The Emperor ordered rigorous search to be made for all suspected of refusing compliance with the national worship. Christians were required to conform to the ceremonies of the pagan religion. In case they declined, threats, and afterward tortures, were to be employed to compel submission. If they remained firm, the punishment of death was to be inflicted, especially on the bishops, whom Decius hated most bitterly. The custom was, wherever the dreadful edict was carried into execution, to appoint a day when all the Christians in the place were to present themselves before the magistrate, renounce their religion, and offer incense at the idol's altar. Many, before the dreadful day arrived, had fled into voluntary banishment. The goods of such were confiscated, and themselves forbidden to return, under penalty of death. Those who remained firm, after repeated tortures, were cast into prison, when the additional sufferings of hunger and thirst were employed to overcome their resolution. Many who were less firm and faithful were let off without sacrificing, by purchasing themselves, or allowing their friends to purchase, a certificate from the magistrate. But this unworthy practice was condemned by the church as a tacit abjuration.
Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, in describing the effect of this terrible decree, says, "that many citizens of repute complied with the edict. Some were impelled by their fears, and some were forced by their friends. Many stood pale and trembling, neither ready to submit to the idolatrous ceremony, nor prepared to resist even unto death. Others endured their tortures to a certain point, but finally gave in." Such were some of the painful and disgraceful effects of the general relaxation through tampering with this present evil world. Still it would ill become us, who live in a time of great civil and religious liberty, to say hard things of the weakness of those who lived in such sanguinary times. Rather let us feel the disgrace as our own, and pray that we may be kept from yielding to the attractions of the world in every form. But all was not defective, thank the Lord. Let us look for a moment at the bright side.