Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

258 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMthat lie set up in his private chapel images of Abraham,the father of the Jewish people, and of Christ, thefounder of the Christian Faith, as well as of Orpheus,the institutor of the Hellenic mysteries, and of Apol-lonius, as the teacher of Indian, Egyptian, and Grecianwisdom. The same emperor, we are told, in his publicgovernment, " permitted the Christians to exist," andChristian churches were in his days publicly frequentedat Rome for the first time. It is this sort of liberalfusion of creeds which the book of Philostratus represents.A favourite of the Empress Julia Domna,writing under her commission, very naturally reproducesthe policy which was followed by her son Cara-calla, as well as by her sister's grandsons, Elagabalusand Alexander Severus. These emperors would havebeen content if all the worships of the Roman Empirecould have been comprehended in a solar religion,which is exactly that of Apollonius. They werewilling to admit Christ as a god into it, if the god soadmitted would acknowledge O his brotherhood with thedeities embraced by the like comprehension. Thisperiod lasted from the death of Septimius Severus in211 to the accession of Decius in 250. But fromthe time of Decius the Roman emperors became awareof two things, the one that Christ would accept nosuch brotherhood, and the other that His religion wascontesting with them the possession of the Romanworld. And a new period ensued, which contains thegreat and what may be termed scientific persecutionsof the Church.We can now, then, sum up the results which weain from the work of Philostratus.Nothing is more afllicting to the student of historyin the first three centuries than the want of anythingfc