How the Christian in ancient Rome 'out-lived the pagan, out-died him, and out-thought him' Terrot R. Glover,
I have tried to draw the picture of the great pagan religion, with its enormous strength, its universal acceptance, its great traditions, its splendours of art and ceremony, to show how absolutely inconceivable it was that it could ever pass away.
Then comes the Christian Church — a ludicrous collection of trivial people, very ignorant and very common; fishermen and publicans, as the Gospels show us, "the baker and the fuller," as Celsus said with a sneer. Yes, and every kind of unclean and disreputable person they urged to join them, quite unlike all decent and established religions. Where is the old religion? Christ has conquered, and all the gods have gone, utterly gone — they are memories now, and nothing more.
The Christian proclaimed a war of religion in which there shall be no compromise and no peace, till Christ is lord of all; the thing shall be fought out to the bitter end. And it has been. He was resolved that the old gods should go; and they have gone. How was it done?
Here we touch what I think one of the greatest wonders that history has to show. How did the Church do it? If I may invent or adapt three words, the Christian "out-lived" the pagan, "out-died" him, and "out-thought" him.
He came into the world and lived a great deal better than the pagan; he beat him hollow in living. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians do not indicate a high standard of life at Corinth. The Corinthians were a very poor sort of Christians.
But another Epistle, written to the Corinthians a generation later, speaks of their passion for being kind to men, and of a broadened and deeper life, in spite of their weaknesses. Here and there one recognizes failure all along the line — yes, but the line advances.
Men came into the world full of this passion for Jesus Christ. They went to the slave and to the temple-woman and told them: "The Son of God loved you and gave himself for you"; and they believed it, and rose into a new life.
To be redeemed by the Son of God gave the slave a new self-respect, a new manhood. He astonished people by his truth, his honesty, his cleanness; and there was a new brightness and gaiety about him. So there was about the woman. They sang, they overflowed with good temper. It seemed as if they had been born again.
Excerpts from Terrot R. Glover, The Jesus of History (London: Student Christian Movement, 1916), Chapter 9: "The Christian Church in the Roman Empire". The author was a Baptist, a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and a university lecturer in ancient history and classical literature.
