CHAPTER XXI AMONG THE CHRISTIANS

Αὐτίκα οἱ εἰς Χριστὸν πεπιστευκότες χρηστοί τέ εἰσι καὶ λέγονται.—Clem. Alex. Strom. ii. 4.

Aulus Plautius, without any pretence to be a philosopher or a republican, prided himself on retaining the antique fashion of Roman simplicity. His house was in every way a contrast to that of Otho. It excited the laughter of the dandies of the new school, with its old rude statuary, its hard couches, its plain tables, its floor of simple black and white marble, the limited number of faithful and sober slaves, among whom but few were Greeks, and not one resembled the pampered pages who were the pride of more modern establishments. The whole service of the house was modest and yet stately; and the conqueror of Britain, so far from blushing at the moderate fortune and Roman surroundings which showed that he at least had not plundered the provinces which he had governed, was, on the contrary, pleased that men should see this example of honesty and justice.

Pudens was in command of the escort of the Empress; and it was on his return from the Palace to his own house that the rencontre with Nero occurred which has been already narrated. Caractacus, too, and Claudia were present, though the guests were few; and young Flavius Clemens had been invited to meet the children of Claudius. After the modest supper was over, the Empress and her brother enjoyed a conversation with their noble hostess, and learnt from her that in one of the outer offices of the house of Plautius the Christian assembly was that night to be held. It would have been too dangerous for Octavia to be present, but Pomponia had many Christian slaves and some freedmen who shared her secret, and were men and women of unquestioned fidelity. Britannicus had now heard from her a great deal about the elementary doctrines of the new faith. There seemed to be no reason why she should any longer refuse his desire to be an eye-witness of Christian worship. She had spoken on the subject to Linus, the bishop of the Gentile community; and, without revealing any name, had told him that a young stranger, for whom she could vouch as one who would not be guilty of any treachery, would be entrusted with the watchword, and would be present at the evening prayers. Flavius Clemens was also to be present as a companion to Britannicus. Pomponia’s own son, a bright boy, named Aulus Plautius after his father, had not yet been taught any of the truths of Christianity. His mother had trained him in all high and noble things; but the general, who knew that she had ‘taken up unusual religious views,’ had laid on her his injunctions not to teach them without his permission to their son.

So retired had been the life of the young prince, and so intentional the seclusion in which he had been brought up, that few knew him by sight. But to prevent the danger of his being recognised by any chance informer, Pomponia so altered his appearance that even Octavia might have failed to recognise him. The Flavian boy was at that time a person of little or no importance, and it was not necessary that he should be disguised. Pomponius, who stayed with the Empress, entrusted Britannicus to the charge of Pudens, who, though not yet baptised, was now a recognised catechumen. He had been at Christian gatherings before, and was all the more glad to go this evening, because Claudia also was to be present, in whom the soul of the centurion was more and more bound up. But to avoid all possibility of suspicion he placed his faithful Nereus in charge of the young stranger, while he himself stood a little apart, and watched.

The heart of the noble boy beat fast as he entered that unwonted scene. The room in which the Christians met was a large granary in which Plautius stored the corn which came from his Sicilian estates. It was as well lighted as circumstances admitted, but chiefly by the torches and lanterns of those who had come from all parts of the city to be present at this winter evening assembly.

Britannicus was astonished at their numbers. He was quite unaware that a religion so strange—a religion of yesterday, whose founder had perished in Palestine little more than twenty years before—already numbered such a multitude of adherents in the imperial city. Clemens whispered to him that this was but one congregation, and represented only a fraction of the entire number of believers in Rome, who formed a multitude which no single room could have accommodated. He told him, further, that though the Jewish and the Roman—or, as they call them, the Gentile—converts formed a common brotherhood, only separated from each other by a few national observances, they usually worshipped at Rome in separate communities.

If Britannicus was surprised by the numbers of the Christians, he was still more surprised by their countenances. The majority were slaves, whose native home was Greece or Asia. Their faces bore the stamp which had been fixed on them by years of toil and hardship; but even on the worn features of the aged there was something of the splendour and surprise of the divine secret. The young prince saw that they were in possession of something more divine than the world could understand. For the first time he beheld not one or two only, but a blessed company of faithful people who had felt the peace of God which passeth all understanding.

The children also filled him with admiration. He had seen lovely slaves in multitudes; there were throngs of them in the Palace and in the houses of men like Otho and Petronius. But their beauty was the beauty of the flesh alone. How little did it resemble the sweet and sacred innocence which brightened the eyes of these boys and girls who had been brought up in the shelter of Christian homes!

But he was struck most of all with the youths. How many Roman youths had he seen who had been trained in wealthy households, in whom had been fostered from childhood every evil impulse of pride and passion! He daily saw the young men who were the special favourites of his brother Nero. Many of them had inherited the haughty beauty of patrician generations; but luxury and wine had left their marks upon them, and if they had been set side by side with these, whose features glowed with health and purity and self-control, how would the pallid faces of those dandies have looked like a fulfilment of the forebodings which even Horace had expressed!

Nothing could have been more simple than the order of worship. The Christians had ended the Agape, the common meal of brotherly love, consisting of bread and fish and wine. They had exchanged the kiss of peace. The tables had now been removed by the young and smiling acolytes, and the seats arranged in front of the low wooden desk at which Linus and the elders and deacons stood. They had no distinctive dress, but wore the ordinary tunic or cloak of daily life, though evidently the best and neatest that they could procure. In such a community, so poor, so despised, there could be no pomp of ritual, but the lack of it was more than compensated by the reverent demeanour which made each Christian feel that, for the time being, this poor granary was the house of God and the gate of heaven. They knelt or stood in prayer as though the mud floor were sacred as the rocks of Sinai, and every look and gesture was happy as of those who felt that not only angels and archangels were among them, but the invisible presence of their Lord Himself.

First they prayed;—and Britannicus had never before heard real prayers. But here were men and women, the young and the old, to whom prayer evidently meant direct communion with the Infinite and the Unseen; to whom the solitude of private supplication, and the community of worship, were alike admissions into the audience-chamber of the Divine. Never had he heard such outpourings of the soul, in all the rapture of trust, to a Heavenly Father. How different seemed such intercourse with the Eternal from the vague conventional aspirations of the Stoics towards an incomprehensible Soul of the Universe, which had no heart for pity and no arm to save!

But a new and yet more powerful sensation was kindled in his mind, when at the close of the prayers they sang a hymn. It was a hymn to Christ, beginning—

‘Faithful the saying,

Great the mystery—Christ!

Manifested in the flesh,

Justified in the spirit;

Seen of angels;

Preached among the nations;

Believed on in the world;

Received up in glory!’

Britannicus listened entranced to the mingled voices as they rose and fell in exquisite cadence. He had heard in theatres all the most famous singers of Rome; he had heard the chosen youths and the maidens chanting in the temple processions; he had heard the wailing over the dead, and the Thalassio-chorus of the bridal song. But he had heard nothing which distantly resembled this melody and harmony of voices wedded to holy thoughts; and, although there were no instruments, the ‘angelical soft trembling voices’ seemed to him like echoes from some new and purer region of existence. He rejoiced, therefore, when they began yet another hymn, of which the first verse was—

‘Awake thee, O thou sleeper,

And from the dead arise,

And Christ shall dawn upon thee,

To light thy slumbering eyes.’52

When the hymn was over they sat down, and Linus rose to speak to them a few words of exhortation. He reminded them that they had been called from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. He told them that they had fled to the rock of Christ amid a weltering sea of human wickedness, and though the darkness was around them he bade them to walk in the light, since they were the children of light. Many of them had lived of old in the vices and sins of heathendom, but they were washed, they were justified, they were sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit of their God. Were not their bodies temples of the Holy Ghost which dwelt in them, except they were reprobates? Since, then, they were in the Spirit, let them bring forth the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, goodness, charity—against which there was no law. The world was passing away and the fashion of it; their own lives were but as the withering grass and the fading flower; and was not the day of the Lord at hand? Would He not speedily return to judge His people? Would not that day come as a thief in the night, and how should they stand its probatory fire unless they were safe in the love of their Redeeming Lord?

So far had he proceeded when a mighty answering ‘Maranatha’ of the deeply-moved assembly smote the air, and immediately afterwards Britannicus stood transfixed and thrilled to the very depths of his whole being.

For now a voice such as he had never heard—a sound unearthly and unaccountable—seemed not only to strike his ears but to grasp his very heart. It was awful in its range, its tone, its modulations, its startling, penetrating, appalling power; and although he was unable to understand its utterance, it seemed to convey the loftiest eloquence of religious transport, thrilling with rapture and conviction. And, in a moment or two, other voices joined it. The words they spoke were exalted, intense, impassioned, full of mystic significance. They did not speak in their ordinary familiar tongue, but in what seemed to be as it were the essence and idea of all languages, though none could tell whether it was Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or Persian. It resembled now one and now the other, as some overpowering and unconscious impulse of the moment might direct. The burden of the thoughts of the speakers seemed to be the ejaculation of ecstasy, of amazement, of thanksgiving, of supplication, of passionate dithyramb or psalm. They spoke not to each other, or to the congregation, but seemed to be addressing their inspired soliloquy to God. And among these strange sounds of many voices, all raised in sweet accord of entranced devotion, there were some which no one could rightly interpret. The other voices seemed to interpret themselves. They needed no translation into significant language, but spontaneously awoke in the hearts of the hearers the echo of the impulse from which they sprang. There were others which rang on the air more sharply, more tumultuously, like the clang of a cymbal or the booming of hollow brass, and they conveyed no meaning to any but the speakers, who, in producing these barbarous tones, felt carried out of themselves. But there was no disorderly tumult in the various voices. They were reverberations of one and the same supernatural ecstasy—echoes awakened in different consciousnesses by one and the same intense emotion.

Britannicus had heard the Glossolalia—the gift of the tongue. He had been a witness of the Pentecostal marvel, a phenomenon which heathendom had never known.

Nor had he only heard it, or witnessed it. For as the voices began to grow fainter, as the whole assembly sat listening in the hush of awful expectation, the young prince himself felt as if a spirit passed before him, and the hair of his flesh stood up; he felt as if a Power and a Presence stronger than his own dominated his being; annihilated his inmost self; dealt with him as a player does who sweeps the strings of an instrument into concord or discord at his will. He felt ashamed of the impulse; he felt terrified by it; but it breathed all over and around and through him, like the mighty wind; it filled his soul as with ethereal fire; it seemed to inspire, to uplift, to dilate his very soul; and finally it swept him onward as with numberless rushings of congregated wings. The passion within him was burning into irresistible utterance, and, in another moment, through that humble throng of Christians would have rung in impassioned music the young voice of the last of the Claudii pouring forth things unutterable, had not the struggle ended by his uttering one cry, and then sinking into a faint. Before that unwonted cry from the voice of a boy the assembly sank into silence, and after two or three moments the impulse left him. Panting, unconscious, not knowing where he was, or whether he had spoken or not, or how to explain or account for the heart-shaking inspiration which had seemed to carry him out of himself beyond all mountain barriers and over unfathomable seas, the boy sank back into the arms of Pudens, who, alarmed and amazed and half ashamed, had sprung forward to catch him as he fell.

As he seemed to be in a swoon, one of the young acolytes came to him, and gently bathed his face with cold water. And meanwhile as the hour was late, and they all had to get home in safety through the dark streets and lanes through which they had come—some of them from considerable distances—Linus rose, and with uplifted hand dismissed the congregation with the words of blessing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Pudens and Nereus carried back the still half-unconscious boy into the house of Pomponia, where his sister awaited him. Octavia was alarmed at the wildness of his look, but the fresh air had already revived him. ‘I am quite well,’ he said, as the Empress bent anxiously over him, ‘but I am tired, and should like to be silent. Let us go home, Octavia.’

‘The escort is waiting,’ said Pudens.

So they bade farewell to Pomponia, and the soldiers saw them safely to the Palace.

When they had started, Claudia said: ‘Oh, Pomponia, while he was at the gathering the Power came upon him; he seemed scarcely able to resist it; but for his fainting I believe that he would have spoken with the tongue!’

Pomponia clasped her hands, and bowed her head in silent prayer.