SALVIAN'S TESTIMONY by I. E. Kimball

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 20, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 41.

SALVIAN'S TESTIMONY.

By I. E. Kimball

BY ELDER I. E. KIMBALL.

(Concluded.)

SALVIAN continues: "With so general a consent, do we all follow our sins as if we sinned from a deep and well-considered conspiracy so to do. The demons are ferocious and tremble; thou art like them, ferocious but tremblest not." "Some, indeed a very few there be, who may be excepted from the general crimination."

"Why do the slaves lie about in terror of the torture they are liable to? While perchance they wish to release themselves from torture they lie." "That a few may become illustrious the whole world is overturned; the honor of a single one is the destruction of the world."

He arraigns persons in power as devastations of the country, relentless extortioners. A poor man could not remain unhurt near to a rich man. "Murder, which is rare among slaves, restrained by the fear of punishment, is frequent among the rich who confide in impunity. But perhaps I am wrong in speaking of murder in the rich as sin, inasmuch as when they slaughter their slaves, they reckon it an exercise of right, not of crime. And a like privilege they claim in behalf of their impurities." Never was sketched a more revolting condition of a community, calling themselves Christian, no, never by human hand.

The profane custom of swearing "by Christ" (per Christum) which was in use even among the monks a hundred years before, is now almost universal. "Finally, many swear by the name of Christ that they will do a certain thing, not only those that are passionless, but also wicked deeds, because I mortally strike this one by Christ, because I slay this one by Christ. Can pagans do more than this? With how much less sin had those sworn by the demons than by Christ." "Such men seem to think that when they have sworn by Christ, their crimes are in some way sanctioned by religion. They can in conscience do no less, having already pledged their faith to Christ that they would do as much." "Behold, such are they who love Christ."

"The rude natives around us cannot be reproached with any such inconsistencies as attach to us. Neither the Huns, the Saxons, the Moors, the Scythians. They attach no disgrace to the life of a brigand, but rather glory in it." Thus Thucydides' notes of the proudest heroes of ancient Greece: "The poor are plundered, widows groan, orphans are trampled upon, and many are driven to take refuge among the barbarians, seeking indeed among the barbarians for Roman humanity, because among the Romans they cannot endure the barbarous inhumanity." "Multitudes," he says, "thus purchased liberty under the pretense of captivity."

The barbarian and Saracenic devastations which soon followed were remedies rather than calamities. They themselves conceived the awful truth that they were sent to punish the idolatrous and sweep away insufferable filth. "We compel an unwilling God to avenge the enormity of our crimes." A shameless wickedness "beset the whole mass." "We now lament over the whole as guilty." He names every quarter of Christendom before he concludes.

He now inveighs against the horrors of the theater, and the spectacles exhibited to thousands of Christian eyes. "For such are the things done there that one not only is not able to speak of them without pollution, but not even able to write of them." "Innumerable thousands of Christians daily" witnessed them. "The heathen celebrated these games fully believing them to be acceptable to their gods [they were]; we celebrate the same well knowing them to be abominable to our God. But this is not the worst, therefore to Christ—O monstrous madness!—we consecrate the spectacles and the actors." Think of it!

He mentions the innumerable and terrible calamities visiting every part of the Roman world, yet they were in no way reformed. Sardinia, Sicily, and Africa too had fallen, but the gravity of morals was not changed. Hardened as Pharaoh of "old, they would not be reformed." What was it that happened at Carthage? "Even while the noise of war was ringing around the walls, the church of Carthage maddened in the circus and luxuriated in the theater. . . . Being slaughtered without, practicing lewdness within." And he depicts the same of Gaul, whose devastations he witnesses. He shows family relations to have been almost wholly broken up, and challenges contradiction from all the world. "Who did not plunge into the abyss of foulest impurities, who returned to the confidence of his wife? Nay, as far as pertains to the promiscuousness of lust, who did not reduce his wife to the rank of his servant or slave?" He says, "The barbarians were offended at their lewdness."

"In Africa, if any are fierce, they are fiercer; if any are drunken, they are sottish; if any false, they are the most false; if any fraudulent, they the most fraudulent; if any are rapacious, they the most; if any perfidious, they the most treacherous, and in all they bear the palm." But as to impurity, all that could be said of Sodom, Babylon, Tyre, he says of Carthage. "A religious man," a monk, hardly dare show himself in the city. Yet they were all accredited members of the holy orthodox church, and partakers of the sacraments.

I must stop adducing this evidence. "Carthage, a Christian city, an ecclesiastical city," was only a type and example of all. "The judges saw and acquiesced" in all their foul indecencies. The monks had now become a graceless horde of vagabonds, full of impurities, eyes full of adultery; they could not cease from sin, as our "Jeremiah of his age" tells us. It was the last stage of all debauchery which Salvian compared to the cesspool of a large ship. Neither is he ironical, neither acrimonious, nor yet is he vindicating any other point than the justice of God in the great visitations of wrath then being visited upon the Roman world.

Everywhere they were stained with marks of mortal crime. Law was altogether slackened; judgment no way asserted itself. It was easier to find a man guilty of the greater crimes than the less, of all crimes than of none—the nobles and the rich every one of them charged with either murder or adultery,—mortal crimes,—slaughtering slaves without any compunction, swearing and executing most execrable villainies "by Christ," consecrating the vile debauching theaters to Christ, the wealthy robbing the poor, many finding protection, shelter, and home among the barbarians, conjugal affection and family relations in all confusion, the monks and the "religiosi" a band of villains and hypocrites. Now was not this people that professed the holy orthodox faith, and said they were the church, abandoned to delusion? And was not this a bad time to draw out "church principles" for the after ages?