Introductory Note.
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[ 145–220.]
our Lord repulsed the woman of Canaan
(Matt. xv. 22) with apparent harshness, he applied to her people the epithet dogs, with which the children of Israel had thought it piety to reproach them. When He accepted her faith and caused it to be recorded for our learning, He did something more: He reversed the curse of the Canaanite and showed that the Church was designed “for all people;” Catholic alike for all time and for all sorts and conditions of men.
Thus the North-African Church was loved before it
was born: the Good Shepherd was gently leading those “that were
with young.” Here was the charter of those Christians to be
a Church, who then were Canaanites in the land of their father
Ham. It is remarkable indeed that among these pilgrims and
strangers to the West the first elements of Latin Christianity come
into view. Even at the close of the Second Century the Church in Rome
is an inconsiderable, though prominent, member of the great
confederation of Christian Churches which has its chief seats in
Alexandria and Antioch, and of which the entire Literature is Greek. It
is an African presbyter who takes from Latin Christendom the reproach
of theological and literary barrenness and begins the great work in
which, upon his foundations, Cyprian and Augustine built up, with
incomparable genius, that Carthaginian School of Christian thought by
which Latin Theology was dominated for centuries. It is important to
note (1.) that providentially not one of these illustrious doctors died
in Communion with the Roman See, pure though it was and venerable at
that time; and (2.) that to the works of Augustine the Reformation in
Germany and Continental Europe was largely due; while (3.) the
specialties of the Anglican Reformation were, in like
proportion, due to the writings of Tertullian and Cyprian. The hinges
of great and controlling destinies for Western Europe and our own
America are to be found in the period we are now
approaching.
The merest school-boy knows much of the history of
Carthage, and how the North Africans became Roman citizens. How they
became Christians is not so clear. A melancholy destiny has enveloped
Carthage from the outset, and its glory and greatness as a Christian
See were transient indeed. It blazed out all at once in Tertullian, after about a century of missionary labours had been exerted upon its creation: and having given a Minucius Felix, an Arnobius and a Lactantius to adorn the earliest period of Western Ecclesiastical learning, in addition to its nobler luminaries, it rapidly declined. At the beginning of the Third Century, at a council presided over by Agrippinus, Bishop of Carthage, there were present not less than seventy bishops of the Province. A period of cruel persecutions followed, and the African Church received a baptism of blood.
Tertullian was born a heathen, and seems to have
been educated at Rome, where he probably practiced as a jurisconsult. We may, perhaps, adopt most of the ideas of Allix, as conjecturally probable, and assign his birth to 145. He became a Christian about 185, and a presbyter about 190. The period of his strict orthodoxy very nearly expires with the century. He lived to an extreme old age, and some suppose even till 240. More probably we must adopt the date preferred by recent writers, 220.
It seems to be the fashion to treat of Tertullian as a
Montanist, and only incidentally to celebrate his services to the
Catholic Orthodoxy of Western Christendom. Were I his biographer I
should reverse this course, as a mere act of justice, to say nothing of
gratitude to a man of splendid intellect, to whom the filial spirit of
Cyprian accorded the loving tribute of a disciple, and whose genius
stamped itself upon the very words of Latin theology, and prepared the
language for the labours of a Jerome. In creating the Vulgate, and so
lifting the Western Churches into a position of intellectual equality
with the East, the latter as well as St. Augustine himself were debtors
to Tertullian in a degree not to be estimated by any other than the
Providential Mind that inspired his brilliant career as a
Christian.