CHAPTER LXIV AT THE THREE FOUNTAINS

‘For out of prison he cometh to reign.’—Eccl. iv. 14.

‘Lieblich wie der Iris Farbenfeuer

Auf der Donnerwolke duft’gem Thau

Schlimmert durch der Wehmuth düstern Schleier

Hier der Ruhe heitres Blau.’—Schiller.

After his first defence, the Apostle Paul had lived on in his narrow prison, indomitably cheerful though death stood almost visibly beside him. Himself undaunted, he strove to kindle the same faith and courage in those whom he loved. He had heard that Timothy was sad and despondent, and had not got over the grief of being separated from him. The Apostle had a deep human yearning to see once again the dear companion of his earlier conflicts. He wrote to him the beautiful, pathetic letter which contains for us his last words. He exhorted him to strenuous cheerfulness, and urged him to face the shame of the Gospel at Rome, and to come and share his sufferings. ‘Come, my child’—such was the burden of his message—‘come before winter; come quickly; come, or it will be too late.’ And when he comes let him send to Carpus at Troas for the large cloak which Paul had left at his house in the hurry and tumult of his arrest, and the books, especially the parchments. It is often cold in his prison, and that old ‘dreadnought,’ which he had woven with his own hands out of the black goat’s-hair of his native province, old as it was, and often whitened with the dust of the long Roman roads, and drenched in the water-torrents of the Taurus, and stained with the brine of Adria, would yet be a comfort to him as he sat on the rocky floor. And the papyrus books and the parchments—few and worn as they were—would help to while away the monotonous hours, and were very dear to him. With some of them he had been familiar ever since he was a happy boy in the dear old Tarsian home. So when Timothy comes to shed the last rays of life’s sunshine on Paul’s prison, let him bring the old cloak and the books—poor inventory of a saint’s possessions after unequalled labours for mankind! And let him, if possible, bring Mark the Evangelist with him; for Peter, with whom Mark had travelled, had now sealed his testimony by martyrdom, and Mark’s knowledge of Latin might be serviceable, and his personal tendence would be very dear. The immediate danger of arrest would not be great, for the rage of the informers had now been glutted to repletion, and the State and the Emperor had more than enough to occupy their thoughts. Pudens and Claudia had written to him with all affection from their British home, and had sent to minister to his necessities. He gives to Timothy the greetings which they had sent supposing him to be at Rome. Linus had also sent greetings, in a letter dictated from his bed of death. As for himself, he was more than ready to die. He had finished his course; he had kept the faith; henceforth there was laid up for him the crown of righteousness. Thinking, perhaps, how Pætus Thrasea and Seneca had sprinkled their blood as a libation to Jupiter the Liberator, he wrote the striking words, ‘I am being already poured out in libation, and the time of my setting sail is close at hand.’ Was he heavy at the thought? Not so. He quotes a fragment of a fine early Christian hymn which had consoled many a martyrdom:—

‘If we died, we shall also live with Him;

If we endure, we shall also reign with Him;

If we deny Him, He will deny us.

If we are faithless, He abideth faithful.

He is not able to deny Himself.’

And thus the old man’s soul was joyful in the Lord.

Did Mark, did Timothy come to him

‘Before the white sail of his soul had rounded

The misty cape, the promontory Death’?

Mark was at Alexandria, and Timothy did not see him. The Lycaonian hastened to Rome the moment he had received Paul’s letter, but he came too late—came to be himself imprisoned, though happily only for a time. The Apostle was not mistaken in saying that his death was imminent. During Nero’s absence in Greece he had been summoned before the two wretched freedmen, Helius and Polycletus, on the second ground of his indictment—that he was a Christian, and therefore the preacher of a forbidden religion. That cause needed no trial. The accused not only confessed, but gloried in the accusation. Defence, therefore, was superfluous, since no apology for Christianity could alter the now established law that its practice was prohibited on pain of death. He would have been put to death at once, but Nero in a letter from Greece had expressed some wish to see him, and to ask him some further questions about the Christians before he attached his sign manual to the order of execution.

The truth was that Nero was half mad with anxiety, and as all magic incantations had failed to give him the least inkling of the future, he desired to learn something from the Christians. Among the slaves in the Palace who had been denounced as Christians by the informers, Herodion only had been spared, not only because of his age and blameless fidelity, but also because, in a household where the buzz of incessant gossip made it impossible to keep anything secret, it had been generally rumoured that he possessed the gift of prophecy. Nero therefore summoned Herodion into his presence. But Herodion refused to speak, and Nero, in a transport of fury, unsheathed his dagger, and held it over the poor old slave with his uplifted hand. But Herodion’s countenance did not blench, and he said with perfect calmness—

‘O Cæsar, thou canst not kill me if thou wilt.’

‘How? canst not?’ said the Emperor, stooping to pick up the dagger, which had dropped from his astonished grasp. ‘Canst not? One step, one thrust, and thou art a dead man.’

‘Canst not,’ said Herodion, with unmoved serenity. ‘I shall die, indeed, but it is not thus, nor by thy hand, that I shall die.’

‘Lead him off to death,’ said Nero. ‘These fanatics are inexplicable.’

But his yearning to divine the future was only intensified, and Simon Magus persuaded him that he might learn it from the imprisoned Apostle, whom he represented as a powerful sorcerer.

Once more, therefore, the Apostle stood face to face with the Emperor, on one of the troubled tumultuous days which followed his hasty return from Naples, after he had received the news of the revolt of Vindex. It was an interview, not a judicial audience. The Emperor saw him in private, with no one about him except a few trusted freedmen, and one favourite slave, named Patroclus. Several amulets lay scattered round him to avert magic and the evil eye. For form’s sake he first asked the Apostle about the crimes with which Christians were charged, and heard once more the proofs of their righteousness, loyalty, and holiness. Then he offered Paul his freedom and pardon if he would reveal to him the future. Onesimus, who had been allowed to attend the Apostle, and who stood at the far end of the apartment among a group of slaves, used to say afterwards that if the Apostle would only have spoken a word of hope, or even some ambiguous promise which might be interpreted in almost any way, the chains would have been struck off his hands. But he answered that the secrets of the future were in the hands of God alone, and that he had no commission to reveal them. Nero was scanning his features with intense anxiety, and as the Apostle fixed on him his earnest, undaunted, pitying gaze, the Emperor—more than ever convinced that he could prophesy the unknown—told all the slaves except Phaon and Patroclus to withdraw. But Paul, weak with long imprisonment, and scarcely able to stand, begged that he might support his weary frame on the shoulder of Onesimus. Otherwise they were alone. The Emperor, who had no dignity at that hour of calamity, appealed to his prisoner. ‘They tell me,’ he said, ‘that thy God, or thy Chrestus, does enable thee to foretell events to come. I am in danger. The legions are revolting against me on all sides. The astrologers have promised me that I shall be King of Jerusalem. All is uncertain. See, I appeal to thee. I, the Emperor, ask thee, the doomed and wretched Jew, to tell me what will happen. Will Vindex conquer? Will Galba conquer? Will the guards be faithful? Shall I be murdered? Answer me these questions, and I will spare thy life, and send thee away with rich rewards.’

‘I answer,’ said the Apostle, ‘as a Prophet of the East answered a king before. If Nero should give me his house full of silver and gold, yet cannot I go beyond the word of the Lord; and the Lord has not bidden me to speak to thee. And what were wealth, and what were all the Empire to me? Thinkest thou, O Emperor, that I fear death? To us Christians to die is to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better; and Christ hath conquered death.’

‘Wilt thou not even tell me whether I shall be killed? I adjure thee by thy Christ, or thy Iao, or whatever thou holdest most sacred, tell me!’

The Emperor was trembling and weeping.

Another might have scorned his unmanliness, or rejoiced with malignant triumph over the disgrace of the enemy of all the good. But Paul knew too much of human weakness to indulge in scorn. He felt for him a sincere, a trembling, a yearning pity. He uplifted his eyes to heaven, paused for a moment, during which the Emperor’s eager and almost imploring gaze was fixed upon his face, and then solemnly replied—

‘Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live.’

‘Tell me more,’ said Nero passionately.

‘I may not tell thee more. Only,’ he continued, raising his chained hand, ‘I say to thee, repent! Repent of thy life of crime and infamy! Repent of thy many murders—the murder of thy brother, the murder of thy mother, of—’

‘Accursed Jew, darest thou revile me?’ said Nero, leaping up from his gilded chair, his face burning with fury.

The Apostle remained unmoved. Onesimus told afterwards that he had not felt the tremor of a single muscle as the storm of the Emperor’s rage burst over him. Nero stood amazed—his wrath stilled before so majestic an indifference.

‘Tell me more,’ he said again, in a voice of entreaty.

‘Think, rather,’ said the Apostle, ‘that thy hour of judgment is nigh at hand—yea, it standeth at the door. The blood of the innocent, slain by thee, cries against thee from the ground. I pity thee—Paul the prisoner, Paul the aged, pities thee, and he will pray for thee if haply the thoughts of thy heart, and the shames of thy wickedness, may be forgiven.’

‘Dismiss this man,’ whispered Phaon to the Emperor, impatiently. ‘He is a Jew, evidently half insane with dreamings in prison. Were it otherwise, I would here and now chastise his insolence.’

‘Nay,’ said the boy Patroclus, in a voice of deep emotion. ‘Rather listen to him. O Nero, I will confess to thee that I have talked to Acte; I have talked to Christian slaves—once my fellow-slaves—in thy Palace and the household of Narcissus, and I know that the gods—or that God, if (as they say) there be but one God—is with them. Dismiss Paulus, I entreat thee; set him free. He tells the truth.’ And with these words the young cupbearer flung himself on his knees with a gesture of appeal.120

Nero had been startled—almost moved—by the solemn tones and inspired aspect of the Apostle; but the appeal of Patroclus and his mention of Acte produced a different effect from what the youth had intended. The Emperor was jealous that such potent influences should have been at work in his own Palace; that in spite of his persecution of the Saints, in spite of his having made Christianity an illegal religion, those who had been so near to his own person as Acte and Patroclus should reject his divinity, and own Jesus as their king.

‘Thou art bewitched,’ he said to Patroclus, rudely pushing the boy aside.

And, unhappily, at that moment Gaditanian strains, accompanied by the words of a gay song, reached his ear from an adjoining room in which some of his light companions and favourites were sitting. The sound awoke all his heartless and incurable frivolity. Bursting into a forced laugh, he said, ‘I see there is no more to be got out of this Jew. Take him hence,’ he said to the Prætorian in attendance, ‘and see that he be led to death as soon as the day shall dawn.’

‘He is a Roman citizen,’ said the centurion.

‘Yes,’ said the Emperor. ‘He has been tried and condemned. I will here countersign the condemnation which orders him to be beheaded.’

The Apostle spent that last night on earth in sleep as sweet as that of an innocent child. He rose in the morning smiling and refreshed, and Onesimus was early at the prison to help him in all his last arrangements and preparations. As the soldiers would allow Onesimus, and no one else, to accompany him, he bade an affecting farewell to Luke, who had been for so long a time his beloved physician, and started on his way.

His doom was secret and sudden. At that early morning hour the centurion and soldiers were not likely to be troubled with many spectators. One or two humble Christians from the poorest haunts of the Trastevere would fain have followed, but the soldiers, who were in savage humour from the perilous uncertainty of the times, suffered none of them to attach themselves to the little procession. Hence the death of the Apostle was so lonely and obscure that scarcely a breath of tradition survived to commemorate it to posterity. An ordinary faith might have been overwhelmed by the apparent utterness of failure which had crowned that life of unparalleled exertions for the cause of Christ and for the good of man. Deserted, abandoned, a pauper, a prisoner—the founder, indeed, of Churches, but of Churches some of which were already the prey of Judaisers and of alien heretics, and were cold to him—in the capital of the world, where he seemed to be but an insignificant atom, and where Jew and Pagan were united in irreconcilable hostility to the faith which he had preached—deserted by all them of Asia—no one with him but the poor emancipated slave—yet he was in no sense disillusioned, nor did his faith fail. It did not trouble him that the curtain was about to fall in darkness on one of the noblest and greatest of all human lives. That life seemed to him but as the life of a great sinner whom God had forgiven, whom Christ had saved. The winter of his trials was past, the eternal spring of the resurrection was breathing through the air its heavenly perfume.

Along the Appian road they passed, through the gate of Rome which still—nigh upon two thousand years afterwards—is called by his name. They passed the pyramid of Gaius Cestius, with all its statues. Only one incident occurred on his journey. Just as they were passing the pyramid of Cestius, a lady, young and deeply veiled, met the mournful procession, and stopped the centurion in command of the soldiers. ‘I am Plautilla,’ she said, ‘the daughter of Flavius Sabinus, the Præfect of the City, the relative of Aulus Plautius and Pomponia Græcina. Suffer me for a moment to speak to your prisoner.’

Impressed by the great names which she had mentioned, the centurion bade the soldiers stand aside for a moment, and Plautilla, kneeling on the grass, asked with tears for the Apostle’s blessing. He laid his chained hand on her head and blessed her, and she gave him from her kinswoman Pomponia a handkerchief with which to bind his eyes as he knelt for the blow of the executioner. He gratefully accepted it, and said, ‘I know the name of Pomponia. It is ever pronounced with the blessings of the saints of God.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘O Apostle, and my brother, the nephew of Vespasian, who is in command in Judæa—he too is a Christian.’

The Apostle upraised in thankfulness his fettered hands. ‘The night,’ he said, ‘is far spent. The day is at hand.’

The centurion beckoned to the soldiers to proceed, and Plautilla stood gazing after them under the shadow of the pyramid.

About three miles from the walls of Rome, on a green and level space amid low, undulating hills, was the spot then known as Aquæ Salviæ, and now as Tre Fontane. To this spot they marched in the early morning—the chained prisoner with the soldiers round him, and the centurion walking at their head. Onesimus followed close behind. The martyr scarcely spoke. His face was lit with an inward rapture; his lips moved incessantly in silent prayer. He had no fear. Lovely to him as the colours of the rainbow on the thundercloud gleamed the azure of his home. They reached the green level under the trees. The prisoner was bidden to kneel down. Onesimus helped him to take off his upper garment, received his last few words of prayer and encouragement and blessing, and the gentle pressure of his hand in farewell. He bound over the Apostle’s eyes Plautilla’s handkerchief, and then turned away, hiding his face in his hands, weeping as if his heart would break. Then he heard the word of command given. For one instant he looked up—in that instant the sword flashed, and the life of the greatest of the Apostles was shorn away.

The work of the soldiers was over. They had no further concern in the matter, except that the centurion had to certify to Nero that the execution had been carried out. They left the mortal body of the martyr on the green turf. When they were gone, the Christians, whom they had repelled but who had followed them afar off, came to weep over it and to bury it. Onesimus took his part in digging the nameless grave. But the site of it was kept in loving remembrance until in due time there rose over that spot the ‘trophy’ which existed, as we are told by Gaius the presbyter, as far back as the second century, where now stands in all the splendour of its many-coloured marbles the great church of San Paolo fuori le Mura.

And, as they sorrowfully left the scene of martyrdom, the grey light which had touched the eastern clouds began to flush into the rosy dawn, and the sun rose on the world’s new day.