The Apology of Tertullian (Classic Reprint)

Christianity. The one is the great Apology of the most eloquent of the early Fathers of the Church the father of Latin Christianity, as Dean Milman calls him; the other is the ethical treatise of the puresouled Stoic Emperor, the first great general persecutor of the Christian Church. A few prefatory words are needed upon each, but the reader is referred to the previous volume of this series Bishop Kaye saccount of Tertullian for fuller details about him. The life of Tertullian is only known to us through his writings. He was born at Carthage about A.D. 160, and died about 240; but the precise dates are uncertain. He was trained as a lawyer, but vxas converted to Christianity in 192, and became a priest. He vas married, but childless. It was probably about ten years after his conversion that he became a Montanist, moved, as Bishop Kaye believes, by the laxity of the clergy that he saw around him, and the longing to find a stricter life. The same learned writer shows that his Montanist writings are among the most valuable, simply because, in his unsparing attacks on what he held to be faulty in the practices and discipline of the Church, he unconsciously preserves for our information what these were. The work before us is the greatest of Tertullian swritings. The deeply religious heathen Emperor, M. A urelius, died in 180, and was succeeded by his unworthy son, Commodus. He was followed by Septimius Severus, the first of the Barrack Emperors, in other words, of those military adventurers who held the Roman Empire down to the days of Dioclesian, following one another rapidly, and, with hardly a single exception, dying violent deaths. The golden age of the Empire was gone, it was the iron age now.
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