The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864

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His remains were removed in a golden coffin by a procession of
distinguished civilians and the whole army, from Nicomedia to
Constantinople, and deposited, with the highest Christian honors, in the
Church of the Apostles, while the Roman senate, after its ancient
custom, proudly ignoring the great religious revolution of the age,
enrolled him among the gods of the heathen Olympus. Soon after his
death, Eusebius set him above the greatest princes of all times; from
the fifth century he began to be recognized in the East as a saint; and
the Greek and Russian Church to this day celebrates his memory under the
extravagant title of _Isapostolos_, the 'Equal of the Apostles.' The
Latin Church, on the contrary, with truer tact, has never placed him
among the saints, but has been content with naming him 'the Great,' in
just and grateful remembrance of his services to the cause of
Christianity and civilization.

Constantine marks the beginning of the downfall of ancient and classical
paganism. Still it dragged out a sickly old age for about two hundred
years longer, until at last it died of incurable consumption, without
the hope of a resurrection.

The final dissolution of heathenism in the Eastern empire may be dated
from the middle of the fifth century. In the year 435, Theodosius II.
commanded the temples to be destroyed or turned into churches. There
still appear some heathens in civil office and at court so late as the
beginning of the reign of Justinian I. (527-567). But this despotic
emperor prohibited heathenism as a form of worship in the empire on pain
of death, and in 529 abolished the last intellectual seminary of it, the
philosophical school of Athens, which had stood nine hundred years. At
that time just seven philosophers were teaching in that school, the
shades of the ancient seven sages of Greece--a striking play of history,
like the name of the last West-Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, or, in
contemptuous diminutive, Augustulus, combining the names of the founder
of the city and the founder of the empire.

In the West, heathenism maintained itself until near the middle of the
sixth century, and even later, partly as a private religious conviction
among many cultivated and aristocratic families in Rome, partly even in
the full form of worship in the remote provinces and on the mountains of
Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and partly in heathen customs and popular
usages, like the gladiatorial shows still extant in Rome in 404, and the
wanton Lupercalia, a sort of heathen carnival, the feast of Lupercus,
the god of herds, still celebrated with all its excesses in February,
495. But, in general, it may be said that the Graeco-Roman heathenism, as
a system of worship, was buried under the ruins of the Western empire,
which sank under the storms of the great migration. It is remarkable
that the northern barbarians labored with the same zeal in the
destruction of idolatry as in the destruction of the empire, and really
promoted the victory of the Christian religion. The Gothic king Alaric,
on entering Rome, expressly ordered that the churches of the apostles
Peter and Paul should be spared, as inviolable sanctuaries; and he
showed a humanity, which Augustin justly attributes to the influence of
Christianity (even perverted Arian Christianity) on these barbarous
people. The Christian name, he says, which the heathens blaspheme, has
effected not the destruction, but the salvation of the city. Odoacer,
who put an end to the Western Roman empire in 476, was incited to his
expedition into Italy by St. Severin, and, though himself an Arian,
showed great regard to the catholic bishops. The same is true of his
conqueror and successor, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who was recognized by
the East-Roman emperor Anastasius as king of Italy (A.D. 500), and was
likewise an Arian. Thus between the barbarians and the Romans, as
between the Romans and the Greeks, and in a measure also the Jews, the
conquered gave laws to the conquerors. Christianity triumphed over both.

This is the end of Graeco-Roman heathenism, with its power, wisdom, and
beauty. It fell a victim to a slow but steady process of incurable
consumption. Its downfall is a sublime tragedy which, with all our
abhorrence of idolatry, we cannot witness without a certain sadness. At
the first appearance of Christianity it comprised all the wisdom,
literature, art, and political power of the civilized world, and led all
into the field against the weaponless religion of the crucified
Nazarene. After a conflict of four or five centuries it lay prostrate in
the dust without hope of resurrection. With the outward protection of
the state, it lost all power, and had not even the courage of martyrdom;
while the Christian church showed countless hosts of confessors and
blood-witnesses, and Judaism lives to-day in spite of all persecution.
The expectation that Christianity would fall about the year 398, after
an existence of three hundred and sixty-five years, turned out in the
fulfilment to relate to heathenism itself.

The last glimmer of life in the old religion was its pitiable prayer
for toleration and its lamentation over the ruin of the empire. Its best
elements took refuge in the church, and became converted, or at least
took Christian names. Now the gods were dethroned, oracles and prodigies
ceased, sibylline books were burned, temples were destroyed, or
transformed into churches, or still stand as memorials of the victory of
Christianity.

But although ancient Greece and Rome have fallen forever, the spirit of
Graeco-Roman paganism is not extinct. It still lives in the natural heart
of man, which at this day as much as ever needs regeneration by the
spirit of God. It lives also in many idolatrous and superstitious usages
of the Greek and Roman Churches, against which the pure spirit of
Christianity has instinctively protested from the beginning, and will
protest, till all remains of gross and refined idolatry shall be
outwardly as well as inwardly overcome, and baptized and sanctified not
only with water, but also with the spirit and fire of the gospel.

Finally, the better genius of ancient Greece and Rome still lives in the
immortal productions of their poets, philosophers, historians, and
orators--yet no longer an enemy, but a friend and servant of Christ.
What is truly great and noble and beautiful can never perish. The
classic literature had prepared the way for the gospel, in the sphere of
natural culture, and was to be turned thenceforth into a weapon for its
defence. It passed, like the Old Testament, as a rightful inheritance,
into the possession of the Christian church, which saved those precious
works of genius through the ravages of the migration of nations and the
darkness of the Middle Ages, and used them as material in the rearing of
the temple of modern civilization. The word of the great apostle of the
Gentiles was here fulfilled: 'All things are yours.' The ancient
classics, delivered from the daemoniacal possession of idolatry, have
come into the service of the only true and living God, once 'unknown' to
them, but now everywhere revealed, and are thus enabled to fulfil their
true mission as the preparatory tutors of youth for Christian learning
and culture. This is the noblest, the most worthy, and most complete
victory of Christianity, transforming the enemy into friend and ally.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] [Greek: Laboron], also [Greek: labouron]; derived, not from _labor_,
nor from [Greek: laphuron], i.e., _praeda_, nor from [Greek: labein], but
probably from a barbarian root, otherwise unknown, and introduced into
the Roman terminology, even before Constantine, by the Celtic or
Germanic recruits. Comp. Du Cange, Glossar., and Suicer, Thesaur. s.h.v.
The labarum, as described by Eusebius, who saw it himself (Vita Const.
i. 30), consisted of a long spear overlaid with gold, and a cross piece
of wood, from which hung a square flag of purple cloth, embroidered and
covered with precious stones. On the top of the shaft was a crown
composed of gold and precious stones, and containing the monogram of
Christ (see next note), and just under this crown was a likeness of the
emperor and his sons in gold. The emperor told Eusebius (I. ii. c. 7)
some incredible things about this labarum, _e.g._ that none of its
bearers was ever hurt by the darts of the enemy.

[B] X and P, the first two letters of the name of Christ,
so written upon one another as to make the form of the cross:
[Illustration] (_i.e._ Christos--Alpha and Omega, the beginning and
the end), and similar forms, of which Muenter (Sinnbilder der Alten
Christen, p. 36 sqq.) has collected from ancient coins, vessels, and
tombstones more than twenty. The monogram, as well as the sign of the
cross, was in use among the Christians long before Constantine, probably
as early as the Antonines and Hadrian. Yea, the standards and trophies
of victory generally had the appearance of a cross, as Minucius Felix,
Tertullian, Justin, and other apologists of the second century told the
heathens. According to Killen (Ancient Church, p. 317, note), who quotes
Aringhus (Roma Subterranea, II. p. 567) as his authority, the famous
monogram (of course in a different sense) is found even before Christ on
coins of the Ptolemies. The only thing new, therefore, was the _union_
of this symbol in its _Christian_ sense and application with the Roman
_military standard_.

[C] Cicero says, pro Raberio, c. 5: 'Nomen ipsum _crucis_ absit non modo
a corpore civium Romanorum, sed etiam a cogitatione, oculis, auribus.'
With other ancient heathens, however, the Egyptians, the Buddhists, and
even the aborigines of Mexico, the cross seems to have been in use as a
religious symbol. Socrates relates (H.E. v. 17) that at the destruction
of the temple of Serapis, among the hieroglyphic inscriptions, forms of
crosses were found which pagans and Christians alike referred to their
respective religions. Some of the heathen converts, conversant with
hieroglyphic characters, interpreted the form of the cross to mean _the
Life to come_. According to Prescott (Conquest of Mexico, iii. 338-340)
the Spaniards found the cross among the objects of worship in the idol
temples of Anahnac.

CAUSES OF THE MINNESOTA MASSACRE.

If great public phenomena do not come by chance, then there were causes
for the Minnesota massacres, by the Sioux, in 1862-'3, quite apart from
the aboriginal cruelty and ferocity of the Indian nature. We all know
that the carnal Indian man is a bad enough fellow at the best, and
capable of dreadful crimes and misdemeanors, if only to gratify his whim
or the caprice of the moment. And when he is bent upon satiating his
revenge for some real or imaginary wrong, I would back him in the
horrible ingenuity of his devices for torture, in the unrelenting malice
of his vengeance, against any--the most fierce and diabolical--of all
the potentates in the kingdoms of eternal and immutable evil!

But the white man has always had the advantage of the red man. He was
his superior in knowledge, power, and intellect; and came, for the most
part, of that lordly race, the issue of whose loins already occupy all
the chief countries within the zones of civilization. He knew,
therefore, when he first began to deal with the Indian, what manner of
man he was, what his enlightenment was, and how far it reached out into
the darkness where all is night! He knew that this wild, savage,
untamable redskin could not be approached, reconciled, traded with, or
stolen, from, by adopting, in his case, the usages and courtesies of
civil life, as we understand them, but that his own peculiar laws,
customs, and manners must be studied and conformed to, if any headway
were to be made in his regard and confidence.

At no time, from the beginning to the present day and hour, has any
white man been so fuddled in his wits as to suppose that the Indian
could either act or talk like a clergyman of any recognized Christian
denomination. It was too much, therefore, to expect from him that he
should exhibit any of the fine charities and warm affections which
distinguish the Christian character. He was a redskin, implacable in his
hate, not altogether trustworthy even in his friendships, and jealous of
his reputation and the traditions of his race. Nor was he without
manhood either. A brave, bloody, mocking and defiant manhood! capable of
the endurances of the martyr, exhibiting sometimes the sublimest
self-sacrifice and courage.

Whether out of these wild and savage materials there lay anywhere, at
any time, the human or divine power to mould a civilized community, does
not appear upon the record. It is certain, however, that after all the
far-too-late attempts to transfigure these savages into the likeness of
a down-East Yankee, or, better still, into the similitude of a Western
farmer, no permanent good results are likely to ensue.

The red man and the white are separated indeed by the prodigious
distances (ethnologically speaking) not only of race and language, but
of noble tradition and glorious history. They could never amalgamate in
blood, or in the so-called natural sympathies of man. They seem to be
born enemies! as their feelings and their instincts apparently reach
them when they come into contact with each other. They cannot exist side
by side. A mightier than they holds the destinies of both in His hands.
He has tried the redskins. He has given them a good chance upon the
earth, and they have failed to do anything but kill buffalo and breed
like rats--often burrowing like rats--refusing to dig and plant the
teeming, beneficent earth which had been committed to their charge; and
preferring, generally, the life of a vagabond loafer to that of a
thrifty, careful husbandman.

I do not blame them. They are as God made them, and man left them; for,
I suppose, their forebears--somewhere afar off in Asia, perhaps, in the
dim, immemorial ages--had all passed through the various phases of the
civilization of their time, and that they did not grow out of the tail
of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible
reason there could be for the perpetuation--let alone the creation--of
such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for
unknown centuries--before the white man ever saw their faces--many
thousands of them still squatting there, cleaving, like bereaved
Autochthons, to the bosom of the dear old mother who had whelped and so
long nurtured them; and trying to make themselves believe that they are
still masters of the continent.

What they were made for at all, I do not pretend to divine. The
Divine Maker of all knows best, and what He does is its own
justification--satisfying the wellnigh insatiable cry of the universe
for universal justice. They are the saurians of humanity; and it is
remarkable that the idea of 'progressive development'--if I may be
pardoned for making use of a term in modern philosophy about which there
has been so much assumption and canting--it is remarkable that this
idea, which the name of _saurian_ suggests, should run through all
nature, and be embodied in her finest forms and intelligences. There is
a considerable distance between the saurian and good Master Adam, the
gardener of Eden; but it seems to me, after all, that this brutal, foul,
obscene monster of the prime, was only Adam in the making. He came after
him, a long way, at all events; and if geology had been fashionable in
his time, and he a _savant_, he might have chalked out for himself a
very fine pedigree.

For this strange, eccentric Nature, who meant _man_ from the beginning,
and failed to realize her ideal because of those horrible nightmare
dreams of which these saurians, mastodons, mammoths were the visible
representatives, did, nevertheless, make, in every succeeding world (for
every crust of this planet is the crust of a dead world), higher and
higher organizations--until, at last, she gave to man his _inscrutable_
birth!

That was, no doubt, a great triumph of power and genius! Man is a noble
animal, the finest of all living fellows! _et cetera! et cetera!_ But
what sort of a fellow was he when he came, in his spindles and
shacklebones, from the womb of the All-mother? Was he a Caucasian, or a
Mongolian, a Negro, a Malay, or a Bosjesman?--this last being an effigy
of man so abominable that no race that I have heard of will include him
even as a lodger in the parish settlements!

Mark! what a sameness, and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all
the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us _men_ out of
our mothers, but babes--helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless
_babes_!--ignorant; who must _grow_ into the perfect stature and the
mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way?
Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which
separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law of nature is
progress. It is often, nay, always, a very slow thing--but how sure! how
inevitable! how beneficent in its results! She never makes worse after
bad--and those weird opium monsters of the foreworlds were unspeakably
bad!--but always she makes of bad better; and of better she has made her
best, at present. In the light of this law, _were any one mad enough to
grope_, he might come to the conclusion that the first man (or race of
men) was anything but a grandee in mind, person, or estate; and that our
seemingly puzzled but at last most wonder-working mother, ycleped
Nature, made some very ugly attempts at man before she reached the
climax of her imagination and her power as it obtains in the man
Caucasian!

I regard all the colored races--and with no malice or evil of any sort
in my heart toward them--as first experiments in the gamut of human
creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my
consciousness--let alone my active intellect--the belief that these were
the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that
the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless
person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of
the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown modern Indian!
It is an _old_ face, as if the accumulated wrinkles of, not 'forty,' but
a hundred 'centuries' had ploughed their marks there. They seem to
belong to the dawn of time; while our Caucasian man is ever young and
beautiful, the born master of all things.

We must deal with races according to their faculty, and credit them
according to their faculty. If we fail, we fail in wisdom--and in
prudence, which is a valuable attribute of wisdom. Expect not grapes
from thistles! Expect no virtue--unless it relates to his own
selfishness or his own tribe--from an Indian, or from very many other
men!

It must not be forgotten, however, that Indians are people who, to say
the least of them, are fashioned in the likeness of men. Here, as
elsewhere, Nature sticks to her old plan, and will not budge an inch. In
the chart of the Indian's nature are mapped out the same feelings,
instincts, passions, the same organs and dimensions as belong to the
highest race, or the highest race of the mixed races. She will have no
nonsense about her red children, nor about her black. There they are, as
she (for purposes of her own, not particularly clear) intended them to
be--men, alive, oh!--not descendants of Monboddo's ape, nor of Du
Chaillu's gorilla, but men proper and absolute! with their duties,
responsibilities, and destinies.

Seeing, therefore, that the Indian (our American Indian, with whom we
have now to do) has all the faculties--however defaced and blurred by
long centuries of bloody crimes, which they regard _not_ as crimes, but
as virtues--seeing that these red, thriftless, bloody-minded Indians
have all the human faculties intact--although, it may be, not so bright
as those of some of our own people who call themselves Americans--is it
not possible that by fair and manly dealing with them, by a just trade,
and conscientious regard for the sanctity of treaty rights and
obligations--that you, whom it may more particularly concern, might so
win their good will as to make them friends instead of enemies? The
devil that lies at the bottom of all savage natures is easily roused,
not at all so easily laid again, and as easily kept in his own place.
Indians are not incapable of friendship, nor of good faith, although the
best require a great deal of looking after--and close looking, too! But
what I want to urge is this: that if you always appeal to the worst
passions of the redskin, rob him of his rights and property, cheat him
by false promises, deceive him at all hands, and then mock him when he
knocks at your door for credit or charity, that he and his may live, you
cannot much wonder if, obeying his traditions, his religion, and the
dictates of his savage nature--now maddened into fury and reckless of
consequences--he indulges in the frightful havoc, the relentless murders
and burnings, which have so lately marked his trail in Minnesota.

Let no one suppose for a moment, from what I have now said, that I
design to offer any apology, any excuse for the nameless and
unpunishable crimes which these miscreants have perpetrated. I have no
pity and no compassion for them, and surely no word either which I
desire should be construed, in this respect, to their favor. I go with
the old Scotch judge--a rigid Antinomian! who, having tried and
convicted a Calvinist as rigid as himself, asked him what he had to say
why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced against him.

'My lord,' said the prisoner, 'it's a bad job; but I was predestined to
do it!'

Whereupon his lordship replied: 'Ay! ay! my cannie laddie! an' I was
predestined to hang ye for't.'

So while I set forth the necessary, evil nature of the Indian, and the
consequent necessity of his bloody deeds, I also insist upon the
necessity of hanging him for it.

I plead not for the Indian of Minnesota, after these most shocking, most
appalling butcheries. I love my own race; and not a man, woman, or
child, who was sacrificed by these monsters, but their wounds were my
wounds, and their agonies tore my heart to the very core. Henceforth I
shall never see an Indian but I shall feel the 'goose flesh' of loathing
and horror steal over my Adam's buff! But you, my beloved friends of
Minnesota! you who have suffered so much in your families and homes
during the massacre, are you sure that you did all you could do as
citizens and rulers in this land to see even-handed justice dealt out
between the corrupt Government agencies and storekeepers, and the
helpless Indians? Had these last no just and reasonable ground of
complaint? complaint of the General Government, complaint of the delays
in their payment, complaint of the swindling of the storekeepers and
traders?

They had sold their lands, and gone away to their reservations. But the
money for their lands--promised so faithfully at such a time--where was
that money? _Non est!_ The Indians depended on it, trusted to the
certainty of its coming as the saint trusts in the promises. They came
for it--often, in their history, in the depth of winter, for hundred of
miles, through an inhospitable forest; their wives, children, and braves
starving--many of them left behind in the wilderness to die; their only
weapon made of coarse nails, lashed with wire, and this they called a
gun barrel, and with this they killed what game was killed by the way.

This did not happen in Minnesota, it is true; but events as horrible and
sickening as this did happen, and brought with them consequences more
horrible still, which will never be forgotten while the State exists or
the language lasts. Scenes were enacted at that 'Lower Agency' which
were disgraceful to human nature, and the victims were invariably the
redskins. Once when Red Iron came there, at the summons, or rather after
the repeated summons of Governor Ramsay, it turned out that nearly four
hundred thousand dollars of the cash payment due to the Sioux, under the
treaties of 1851-'2, were paid to the traders on old indebtedness! How
much of this enormous sum was really due to the traders it is bootless
now to inquire; although it is pretty certain, from what we know of
similar transactions, that not a twentieth part of it was due to them.
Mr. Isaac V. D. Heard, who has written a 'History of the Sioux War and
Massacres of 1862 and 1863,' who is an old resident of Minnesota of
twelve years' standing, acted with General Sibley in his expedition
against the savages in 1862, and was recorder of the military commission
which tried some four hundred of the participants in the outbreak--has
not been deterred by the just hatred which the Minnesota people nurture
against the Indians, and which they will keep hot until their rifles
have exterminated the whole brood of them, from saying a brave word
respecting the iniquities perpetrated by rascal peddlers and official
prigs against the Indians which were the immediate causes of the
massacre and the subsequent wars.

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