CHAPTER LXVI L’ENVOI

‘Many kings have sat down upon the ground, and one that was never thought of hath worn the crown.’—Ecclus. xi. 5.

‘All is best, though we oft doubt

What the unsearchable dispose

Of highest wisdom brings about,

And ever best found in the close.’

Samson Agonistes.

But little remains to be said; for, unless the writer has entirely failed of his purpose, the history of the preceding pages has told, and the fiction has illustrated, the truths which it was his object to set forth. We have seen something of what Paganism had become in the days of the Empire, and of what Christianity was in its life, and motives, and purposes. The contrast between the two gives us the secret why Christianity was destined to grow from that tiny grain of mustard-seed to a great tree, under whose shadow the nations of the world should rest.

But the reader may perhaps care to learn what was the future of those who played their little hour on the stage of life and have appeared in these pages. It is characteristic of that age of trouble and rebuke and blasphemy, in which the sun and the moon were darkened and the stars of heaven shaken, that many of the great and mighty and rich hardly looked for any other death than the steep declivities of murder and suicide. Heathendom had grown to a monster which, like the decrepit Saturn, devoured its own offspring. Those whom we ushered into the reader’s presence at the beginning of this book had nearly all been swept away by violent deaths before the period at which it closes. We have seen the murders of Claudius, of Agrippina, of Britannicus, of Octavia, in that Palace thronged with the ghosts of crime. We have stood by the dreary deathbed of the honest and manly Burrus, and by Corbulo when he fell on his own sword, and by Poppæa when she passed away in agony, her husband’s victim. We have seen the shameful end of Lucan and of Mela; the terrible disillusionment and suicides of Gallio and of Seneca. We know how Pætus Thrasea died, and how the great nobles—the Silani, and Sulla, and Rubellius Plautus, and Antistius Vetus, and Ostorius Scapula, and Piso, and that host of conspirators—met their doom. Vice, and the favour of the Emperor, proved no protection to such gay courtiers as Tullius Senecio and Cæcina Tuscus; nor genius and refined Epicureanism to Petronius Arbiter; nor beauty and talent to poor handsome Paris. The vicious as well as the virtuous were often mingled in indiscriminate ruin. Of the guests whom we saw assembled at the Villa Castor, and to whose conversation we have listened as they gathered round the citron tables of Nero and Otho, the majority met with a miserable doom. With the exception of the family of Seneca, the literary men escaped fairly well. Persius died young, and by a natural death. The elder Pliny, who was a successor of Anicetus in the office of Admiral at Misenum, perished of the scientific curiosity which led him to watch too closely from the Liburnian galleys of his fleet the great eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii in A.D. 79. Martial grew up to disgrace himself by shameful epigrams, to practise the arts of a fawning parasite to ‘his lord and his god,’ the vile Domitian, and at last to marry a rich wife, and retire to Spain with the memories of talents wasted, for the most part, over things vain and vile.

The philosophers were scattered and banished. Musonius Rufus, whom Demetrius the Cynic saw at work as a common labourer on the Isthmus of Corinth, was recalled by Galba, and honoured by Vespasian. He had the satisfaction of bringing to justice the infamous Publius Egnatius Celer, who had caused the murder of Barea Soranus and his daughter. Cornutus, who carried to the grave his sorrow for his bright young pupil, Persius, was banished in the last year of Nero’s reign, and we hear of him no more. Demetrius the Cynic was banished by Vespasian. The Emperor passed him after his condemnation, and Demetrius, deigning neither to rise nor salute him, broke into open abuse; but Vespasian was not cruel, and took no further revenge than to utter the one word ‘Dog!’

The freedmen, too, were swept away one after another, Narcissus was poisoned by the order of Agrippina; Pallas and Doryphorus by the order of Nero. Epaphroditus was put to death by Domitian for having helped Nero to drive into his own throat the fatal dagger-thrust. Sporus—miserable victim of an evil age—had urged Nero to show one touch of manliness, and dare to die. Not long afterwards he, too, died by his own hands, rather than submit to that degradation of appearing on the stage which Nero had so often done and so eagerly desired to do. Helius, Polycletus, Patrobius, and others, were condemned and put to death by Galba, after having been led through the streets in chains. Spicillus, the favourite gladiator of Nero, was tied to one of his statues and crushed to death by it; Locusta died a death of infamy amid intense and universal rejoicing.

The informers met, for the most part, the fate that they deserved. Under previous emperors they had been—it is the comparison used by Seneca—like dogs whom their patrons fed with human flesh.122 They cut men’s throats with a whisper. A joke, a sarcasm, the babble of a drunkard, the confidential remark of private intercourse, the most casual and unpremeditated reflection—nay, even a careless gesture before the dumb image of the Emperor—might become, in their hands, an engine of destruction. They could earn one-fourth of the spoils by accusing a man either for something which he did, or for something which he did not do. Upon this evil gang of scoundrels, the worst curse of that day, Titus laid his heavy hand. He ordered the vilest of them to be beaten with rods in the Forum, to be dragged round the Amphitheatre, to be sold as slaves, to be deported to the rockiest and most desolate islands.

Epictetus, who had been sold as an infant from his cradle in Hierapolis, and whom we have heard talking to Titus and Britannicus in the days when he was the little slave of Epaphroditus, lived to bequeath to the world the legacy of thoughts purer and sweeter than any which we have received from classical antiquity, with the exception of those uttered by Marcus Aurelius, that ‘bright consummate flower’ of pagan morality. Those thoughts seem to absorb and to reflect the auroral glow of ChristianityT19 and could never have been attained by a Pagan if Christianity had not been in the air. Epictetus was so poor that his sole possession was a small lamp—and even that was stolen from him! His virtue and political insignificance, his plain living and high thinking, did not save him from banishment. He retired to Nicopolis (where the Apostle Paul had spent his last winter), and there

‘taught Arrian, when Vespasian’s brutal son

Cleared Rome of what most shamed him.’

And when he ended his peaceful life of obscurity and self-denial in extreme old age, he deserved the epitaph, ‘I, Epictetus, was a slave, and lame, and a pauper, and dear to the Immortals.’

And did vengeance suffer such wretches as Nymphidius Sabinus and Tigellinus to escape? After crimes so many and so heinous, did they come to a good end? The traitor Nymphidius, after a futile and impudent attempt to secure the Empire for himself, was murdered by his own Prætorians. He dragged down with him to destruction the fierce Cingonius Varro, who had written an oration which Nymphidius was to pronounce to the soldiers. Tigellinus, indeed, was strangely protected by Nero’s old and miserly successor when the clamour of the people demanded his life as an expiation for his crimes. He escaped by giving enormous bribes to Titus Vinius, Galba’s legate, and priceless gems to his daughter Crispina. But to him also as to all, ‘punishment was but another name for guilt, taken a little lower down the stream,’ and vengeance in due time fell upon him, and suffered him not to live. After a vain attempt to bribe his executioners, he committed suicide at Sinuessa amid a coarse and brutal orgy, which reads like a parody upon the death of Petronius Arbiter. It was a death exceptionally squalid, vile, and agonising—fit end for a traitor, a coward, a villain of the deepest dye.

As for the succeeding Emperors, the spasm of their brief elevation was marked by universal horrors—wars, and rumours of wars, and massacres, and civil conflicts; nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, plagues and famines and earthquakes in divers places. There was, as Christ had warned His disciples, great tribulation, such as had not been since the beginning of the earth, no nor shall be. These things were the beginning of troubles. The epoch is so described on the sacred page, and the best comment on those Christian prophesies is furnished by the dreary summary of the greatest of pagan historians.

And amid all these calamities and this unbelief, as the lightning cometh from the east and shineth even to the west, the sign was seen in heaven of the Son of Man coming in power and great glory. Against the old dispensation and the old world the doom visibly went forth. The abomination of desolation—the desolating wing of Rome’s abominable eagle—was seen in the Holy Place. The marble floors of the Temple of Jerusalem swam in blood. Zealots laid their gory and brutal hands on the holiest things. Priests, gaunt with famine, were seen leaping madly into the flames kindled upon the altars. The gold which overlaid the cedarwork ran molten through the hissing stream of the carnage of its defenders, and the Holiest Place sank into heaps of ghastly ruin to have its site defiled with swinish offerings and pagan shrines. The Temple was doomed to annihilation, because it was the centre and type of an inferior and abrogated worship. And the same year which saw this visible abrogation of Judaism and all its pompous ineffectuality of ceremonies and sacrifices, saw also the great temple of the Capitoline Jupiter reduced to ashes in the fierce faction-fight between Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian, and the partisans of Vitellius. Thus, within a few months, the chief shrines of the Jew and the Pagan were polluted with massacre, and flung high into the air their flaming signals of the new faith which was to dominate the world. Their destruction was a beacon-light of the coming fulfilment of the old and awful prophecy, ‘I will overturn, overturn, overturn, saith the Lord, till He come whose right it is.’

The three shadowy Emperors who followed Nero passed away within a few months, like phantoms, in defeat and shame. Galba—old, prosaic, unattractive, niggardly, with his feet so gouty that he could not wear a shoe, and his hands so gouty that he could not hold up a book—had disgusted Rome before six months were over, and was butchered in the streets. His body was left lying where it fell till a common soldier, returning from harvesting, flung down his corn, cut off Galba’s head, and, since there was no hair to hold it by, first hid it in his bosom, and then brought it to Otho with horrible indignities. Otho, hurried to imperial dignity by his freedman and a score of soldiers, was Emperor for ninety-five days, and then was totally defeated by the German legions of Vitellius at the bloody battle of Bedriacum. It happened that one of the legionaries had brought evil tidings, and, being treated partly as a liar and partly as a coward who had fled from battleT20 drew his sword, and, stabbing himself, fell dead at Otho’s feet. Otho shuddered and recoiled at the sight. ‘Men so brave, men so well-deserving,’ he exclaimed, ‘shall not be further imperilled on my account.’ He might still have held out; he might still have been victorious; but at the age of thirty-seven he had seen enough of life. He had drained to the dregs the cup of its unsatisfying pleasures; he had discounted its hopes and fears. He wrote some kindly letters; divided among his servants what he had at hand; pardoned some deserters; saw any one who wished to see him; and then, hiding a dagger under his pillow, closed the doors and fell fast asleep. He awoke at dawn, and with one blow drove the dagger into his heart. He felt his own total unfitness for Empire. Τί γάρ μοι καὶ μακροῖς αὐλοῖς; ‘What have I to do with long flutes?’ he was often heard to murmur to himself. Voluptuous, unheroic, this ‘sweet and impudent creature’ had, at one time, been more at home in the rites of the Bona Dea than among the banners of the legions. He was half inclined to fancy that he was one of those who are raised to power by a jest of fortune;—but he had been sobered a little by responsibility, and there was a touch of grace in the courage of his end.

His successor, Vitellius, the yet more infamous son of an infamous father, after a reign of seven months, chiefly noticeable for its drunkenness and voracity, was murdered in the streets with every expression of contumely. His body, pierced with multitudes of slight wounds, was first flung down the Gemonian steps, and then dragged through the streets by a hook, and flung into the Tiber.

The good plebeian, Vespasian, inaugurated a respite of simpler manners and better days, in which Rome and its society returned to decency and good sense. A man of robust commonplace and kindly instincts, he won the Romans by his honesty and rough wit. When the Consular Menstrius Florus corrected his pronunciation (as Kemble did that of George III.) and told him that he ought not to say plostra (wagons) but plaustra, he only resented the impertinence when he met him the next day by addressing him, not as Florus, but as Flaurus (φλαῦρος phlauros), or ‘not worth much.’ When a youth came, reeking with perfume, to thank him for an appointment to the Prætorship, Vespasian, with a frown of disgust, said, ‘I would have preferred that you smelt of garlic,’ and cancelled the dandy’s office. Tolerant and fearless, he resented no injuries, and ruled for ten years without making an enemy. Too sensible, and with a conscience too much at ease, for superstitious fears, when a comet was pointed out to him as portentous, he said—alluding to the Roman expression ‘a hairy star’—that, ‘it could not refer to a bald person like himself, but to the King of the Parthians, who had long hair!’ When he felt the first touch of mortal illness, he observed, with a jest at the folly of senatorial apotheosis, ‘I think I am becoming a god.’ He was charged, indeed, with avarice, and the story was told that, when informed of a colossal statue which was to be reared to him at the public expense, he held out the hollow of his hand as though for the money, and said, ‘The pedestal is ready.’ But, if he was parsimonious, it was for the public good, and he returned from the proconsulate of Africa so poor that he had to mortgage all his possessions to his brother Sabinus. A thorough man of business, he was indifferent to parade and pomp. Napoleon I. was probably but half sincere when, on his return from the magnificences of his coronation, he flung his gorgeous robes into the corner, and said that ‘he had never spent so tedious a day in his life;’ but Vespasian was quite in earnest when, on the day of his great Judæan triumph, he found the procession so tardy and tedious that he called himself ‘an old fool who had been deservedly punished for his silly vanity.’

And what shall we say of Titus, who has played a considerable part in our earlier pages? A Marcus Aurelius he was not; nor did he knock at the door of truth so earnestly or sit at the feet of virtue so humbly as did that saintly heathen. Yet there was an infinite charm about him. He was a man of fine presence, of dignified yet winning demeanour, endowed with great personal strength and tenacious memory, eloquent, poetic, accomplished, a splendid rider, a fine swordsman, a patient and skilful general, a soldier of unflinching personal bravery. Josephus is constantly telling us of his firmness, his pity, his stern discipline, his splendid bravery. Again and again he exposed his person as freely as the commonest soldier in his ranks. Again and again he extricated himself from personal peril, and his legions from imminent defeat, with a strength which was unequalled, and a prowess which was contagious. At the siege of Jerusalem he constantly rode near the walls, and on one occasion shot down twelve of its defenders with twelve consecutive arrows. Amid all his heroic labours and anxious responsibilities he lost none of the fascination of his youth. When he left the Province to visit his father, the soldiers, who had already saluted him Emperor, demanded with supplications, and almost with threats, that he would either stay or take them with him. Unjustly suspected of a disloyal intention to found for himself an Eastern kingdom, he hurried to Rhegium, and thence to Puteoli with the utmost possible speed; and when he reached Rome, bursting into his father’s presence, as though to confute the calumny, he embraced him with the touching cry, ‘I have come, my father, I have come!’ He did not escape the sins and temptations of his youth, and his passionate love for Berenice, which she as passionately returned, involved him in discredit. But while he was still the support of his father’s throne, he gave proofs of his faithfulness and self-control, and if he had been guilty of the faults which scandal charges upon him, the change which came over him when he was summoned to the purple was greater than the traditional change of our own hero-king, Henry V. As an Emperor, no vice was visible in him, but many supreme virtues. Deeply as he was attached to Berenice, he dismissed her from the city because Rome condemned an amour which would have been held venial and almost innocent in a Nero or a Domitian. He became chaste and self-controlled, full of munificence, entirely free from avarice. Gracious and generous to all, he acted on the rule ‘that no one should leave the Emperor’s presence with a gloomy brow.’ His famous saying, ‘Friends, I have lost a day,’ was spoken when, at supper-time, he was unable to recall a favour conferred on any one since morning. He courted the goodwill of the people, but without base concessions. Desirous as Pontifex Maximus to keep his hands unstained by the blood of the innocent, he declared ‘that he would rather perish than destroy.’ Nothing was more touching than the forgiving lenity with which he tolerated the plots and hatred of his execrable brother, Domitian. Aware of his wicked designs, he only took him aside secretly, and begged him with tears to act as a brother should. A deep misgiving oppressed his soul. At the end of the games which he had displayed to the people, he wept abundantly, and, oppressed by evil omens, started for his Sabine farm, full of grief. Stricken down with fever before he reached his home, he drew back the curtains of his litter, and looking heavenwards, he murmured, ‘I do not deserve that my life should be thus cut short, nor have I done any deed to be repented of, except one.’ What that one sin was he did not reveal, and no one could conjecture. He died in the same homely villa as his father, and, though he had only reigned two years and three months, in that brief time he had earned an affection which expressed itself in a genuine outburst of eulogy and regret, and which won for him the title of ‘the darling of the human race.’ But how vain a thing is glory! On the Arch of Titus the hero is represented being borne heavenward by an eagle with outspread wings. Vain triumphs! Vain and profane apotheosis! Little did it avail him to have won the passionate affection of his subjects! There is something infinitely sad in his shortened days and his brief tenure of power. It is only too probable that he fell a victim to the machinations of his brother, and died by poison secretly administered. And Destiny—let us say rather the will of God, of which he was the instrument—forced him, against his own wish, to be the exterminator of the city and—had extermination been possible—of the nationality of the chosen people. To them the darling of the human race is Titus ha-Rashang, ‘Titus the Wicked.’ They fable how, when he boasted that he had escaped vengeance, after escaping from a storm at sea, God sent a tiny gnat, which crept up his nostril into his brain. On his brain it fed, and caused him, day and night excruciating agonies. Finding once that it ceased to gnaw for an instant on hearing the banging of an anvil, he had an anvil constantly banged with a huge hammer at his side. But the creature soon became accustomed to the sound! When Titus died, it was taken out of his brain, and found to be of the size of a bird, and to be furnished with a beak and claws of iron. Such is the torment which hatred devised for the best of the Twelve Cæsars, and the best but one or two of all the Emperors for three hundred years. But the sad truth is that, apart from such frenetic imaginations, the last years of the life of Titus were full of anxiety and disquietude, for which he did not find in a sounding philosophy the alleviation which he would have found abundantly in a humble faith.

With Domitian we have happily been less concerned. How such a mixture of depravity and savageness, of falsity and ingratitude can have sprung from the virtuous union which also produced a Titus, is a mystery of atavism. But at last the dagger of Stephanus struck him down, and a better phase of the Empire was renewed. Rome gauged his character right when she nicknamed him ‘the bald Nero.’

Of the Jews whom we have introduced, Ishmael Ben Phabi vanishes into obscurity. He lives, however, in the energetic curse which the Talmud pronounces upon family after family of the priests of that epoch. He occurs in the line which denounces the violence of himself and his sons: ‘Woe to the family of Ishmael Ben Phabi! woe to their fists!... Their servants strike the people with their rods!’

Josephus became the devoted creature of the Flavian dynasty. By timely prophecies he managed to secure the favour of Vespasian and Titus, as he had won their admiration by his genius and courage. He played his difficult part with consummate astuteness, and secured his safety in spite of the execration of the Jews and the suspicion of the Romans. But what shall we say of a man who, in spite of his boasted patriotism, could, after being an eyewitness of the long, slow agony of his country’s dissolution, be a guest of the Romans during the games in which hundreds of his miserable fellow-countrymen perished in the amphitheatre?—of a man who could commemorate without a pang the unequalled splendour of the triumph at Rome, when Vespasian and Titus, robed in purple and silk and crowned with laurel, sat in their chariots amid rivers of splendid spoils, and Domitian rode a gallant war-horse by their side, and Simon Bar-Gioras, after cruel insults, was led aside at the foot of the Capitol to be strangled in the Tullian Vault? Judæa Captiva wept under her palm-tree, desolate, broken-hearted, with her hair about her ears, and the famous Arch of Triumph was built which still shows the golden candlestick, and table of shewbread, and vessels of incense—beneath which it is said that no Jew will walk, because even in a strange land they remember thee, O Zion! But the sleek priest and warrior who had been selected as one of the defenders of his country, accepted an assignment of land from devastated territories of his native country; inhabited a suite of rooms in Vespasian’s own house; and continued to live in the sunlight of court favour, not only under Titus, but also under Domitian. And then, not by martyrdom, not as a patriot, but as the pensioned favourite of those who had massacred his countrymen and destroyed the tombs and city of his fathers, he died, and went to his own place, leaving behind him, even in the light of his own falsified records, an ignoble and dishonoured name.

King Agrippa II., after a considerable portion of his domains had been reduced to a desert, lived also in Rome, as a titular king, and died, at the age of seventy, in the reign of Trajan—the last prince of the House of Herod. Happy had it been for him if St. Paul had, not almost, but altogether persuaded him to be a Christian. He languished on, wealthy and despised, with Josephus as his bosom friend. It might have been said of him, in the language of the Prophet: ‘All the kings of the nations, all of them, sleep in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast away from thy sepulchre, like an abominable branch.... Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, thou hast slain thy people.’

Berenice, the widow of two kings, was no longer young when she won Vespasian by her splendid presents, and Titus by her Eastern beauty and fascination. But he listened to the voice of duty when he dismissed her from Rome, and when she returned he avoided seeing her. She, too, vanished into the darkness, and died we know not when.

Aliturus, no longer the apostate Jew, but the humble Christian, found it, of course, impossible to play any longer the part of the favourite pantomime of the Roman stage. He loathed the thought of ever again wearing his motley before the grinning and degraded populace. He would fain have aided the struggling Church of Rome, but there was nothing that he could do; and the presence of one whose person was so well known would only imperil the gatherings of that handful of slaves and artisans in the catacombs. The Christians themselves advised him to leave the city, which he could not dissociate from his dead past. He sold his house in Rome, and his villa in the suburbs, and, leaving a large sum in the hands of Cletus to help his flock, he sailed for Palestine, receiving before he started the blessing of Paul the prisoner, and carrying with him letters of commendation from the Beloved Disciple to Simeon and others of the Desposyni, or ‘relations of the Lord.’ These letters neither revealed his real name, which he had changed to Amandus, nor his past history, which might have created an invincible prejudice; but certified that he had been converted to the faith, and was now a brother, faithful and beloved. He freely gave of his wealth to the destitute, and was of great service to a church pre-eminently poor.

And, remaining in Jerusalem, he was an eye-witness of all that horrid siege, in which a nation overwhelmed with unutterable calamities, intensified by their own unutterable guilt, sighed in vain to see one of the days of the Son of Man. Joining the moderate party, he did his little best to counteract the overweening tyranny of John of Giscala. He witnessed the slaughter committed by the Idumeans, when they had been invited into the city. He saw the insults heaped on the corpse of the murdered High Priest Hanan; and the martyrdom of Zechariah, the son of Baruch, in the middle of the Temple; and the High Priest Matthias murdered by Simon Bar-Gioras, after his three sons had been slain before his eyes. He heard the roar of internecine conflict, when three sections of fanatics fought furiously against each other. Day by day he was agonised by the inconceivable miseries of the starving and maddened people. He saw the granaries madly burnt in civil discords; the marble floor of the sanctuary wet with footsteps dipped in blood; the gore of worshippers slain by the hurtling engines of zealots, mingling with the blood of the sacrifices; the deserters sent back with their hands cut off, or ripped open to search for the gold which they had swallowed, or crucified outside the city-walls, till wood failed for the crosses, and crosses for the bodies; the streets and houses full only of the corpses of those whom famine had slain; the horrible disorders of rampant licentiousness, which were the expression of blasphemous despair. He saw Martha, the daughter of the wealthy Gamaliel, trying to pick grains for food from the ordure of the streets; he saw the miserable mother who, in the pangs of hunger, roasted and devoured her own child. He heard the incessant thunder of the battering-rams upon the walls, and the whizz of the dazzling stones hurled from the catapults, and the monotonous cry of the poor scourged maniac wandering about day and night with the wail: ‘A voice from the East, a voice from the West, a voice from the four winds! Woe, woe to Jerusalem, and to the people, and to the Holy House!’ He heard Josephus and Titus pleading with the frantic people, and the false prophets deluding them. He heard the crash of the falling cloister which buried six thousand men, women, and children under its ruins, and the roaring of the flames, and the groans of the wounded, and the shout of the victors, and the despairing yell of the defeated. He saw the priests tearing the gilded spikes from the Temple roof, and hurling them down upon the Romans. In spite of the strong efforts of Titus—under the urgent entreaties of Agrippa and Josephus—to spare the Temple, he saw a Roman soldier, as though inspired by some divine fury, snatch up a burning brand, and spring upon the back of a comrade, and hurl his torch through the golden window of one of the chambers which surrounded the Holiest Place; and then, when the flames burst out on every side, he saw the whole Temple hill assume the aspect of a great bellowing volcano stored with fire, while amid the upheaped corpses the blood, streaming in rivers from fresh wounds, hissed and bubbled as though it would almost have quenched the flames. He saw something of that awfully desperate struggle of madness and fury,

‘When through the cedarn courts, and gates of gold,

The trampled ranks in miry carnage rolled.

To save their Temple every hand essayed,

And with cold fingers clutched the feeble blade;

Through their torn veins reviving fury ran,

And life’s last anger warmed the dying man.’

And how his life was preserved—famine-stricken, wounded, horrified, daily imperilled as he was in that circle of fire in which the scorpions of religious faction madly stung each other to death—he never knew. From April 10, A.D. 70, when Titus pitched his camp near Jerusalem, till July 17, when, for the first time, the perpetual sacrifice ceased, for lack of priests to offer it—and on till August 10, when the Holiest sank in flames, and the Roman soldiers adored their idolatrous ensigns in its blackened area—and onwards till September 8, when all resistance ended, Aliturus had scarcely known one day which was not full of terror and misery. In the final indiscriminate slaughter of the captured city he was selected as one of the seven hundred youths, conspicuous for size and beauty, who were destined to grace the triumph of Vespasian and Titus. But he sought an interview with Josephus and the astonished Titus, and when he revealed to them his identityT21 and convinced them that his one desire had been to win the Jews to counsels of moderation, and to do good works among the miserable, he was set free, and large presents were given to him, and he was suffered to go whither he would.

He could not return to Jerusalem, for Jerusalem was no more, and on the Jews had fallen their own awful imprecation—‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ He went to Pella, whither the Church of Jerusalem had, so to speak, fled into the wilderness. With the Christians there he abode for some time, and then he visited St. John at Ephesus, and Onesimus at Hierapolis. The memories of his own country had been too striking and oppressive, and the brilliant favourite of the Roman populace died at Hierapolis, a beloved but obscure presbyter of its happy church.

The persecutions of the Christians continued intermittently for three centuries, and the rhythmic cry—the double antispastus, Chrīstĭānōs ād lĕōnēs—rang through the amphitheatre of many a pagan city. But the church grew and flourished and shone in the world like that Vision of the Apocalypse—a woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars upon her head. The Church of Rome rose from her ashes, and in many a seven-times-heated flame of affliction there stood beside her One like unto the Son of Man.

When Linus died, Cletus succeeded him as the third ‘Pope’ of Rome—although that title was not given to the humble presbyter-bishops of the struggling community for more than two centuries, and not formally adopted by them till about A.D. 400. Cletus was succeeded by Clement. Of the first thirty Popes it is said by Christian tradition that all but two were martyrs. The blood of those martyrs was the seed of the Church. That Church had been consumed to ashes, and, rising from her ashes, soared heavenwards, first waveringly, then steadily, at last with supreme dominion, ‘reflecting the sunlight from every glancing plume.’

Hermas, having been made a freedman by Octavia, set up in trade, and married. But he was unfortunate. In one of the later persecutions under Domitian he was betrayed to the informers by his own sons. He escaped with his life; and in the reign of Nerva he, with other victims of the cruel Flavian Emperor, received lands in lieu of the goods of which he had been despoiled. He cultivated his little farm in peace, and lived to write the celebrated ‘Shepherd,’ which some have described as ‘a fusionless screed of dry morality,’ and some as a dull novel, but which may be called ‘the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of the Early Church.’ Simple as it is, it was so well suited to the days in which it was written that it was read in the churches, and almost attained the dignity of Scripture.

Pudens and Claudia made their permanent home in Britain. They found it a more congenial residence for Christians than bloodstained Rome, and by the beauty of their lives, as well as by their teaching, they escaped the hostility of the Druids, and founded a Church in their house, and in the city of Noviomagus, where they chiefly lived. They acquired a deep affection for ‘the isle of blossoming woodlands, isle of silvery parapets,’ which they adopted as their own, in spite of the courteous invitation of Titus, who urged them to return to Rome. And sometimes Pudens thought that there must be a prescience in the British prophecy which their friend Laureatus, the Latin poet of Vectis, had turned into galliambics from the wild songs which fired the patriotism of the host of Boadicea, and which said—

‘Though the Roman eagle shadow thee, though the gathering enemy harrow thee,

Thou shalt wax and he shall dwindle, thou shalt be the mighty one yet;

Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be celebrated;

Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimitable,

Thine the lands of lasting summer, many-blossoming Paradises,

Thine the North, and thine the South, and thine the battle-thunder of God.’

The old king Caradoc lived with them for a time in the charming villa which they had built. He had fancied at first that, after the disgrace of defeat and betrayal, he would never be able to show his face among the warlike Silures whom he had led to victory. But Christianity softened his soul. He received a warm welcome from many of his friends and former subjects, and it was no little due to his conversion and his teaching that Christianity secured a footing among the Cymry long before its truths had been accepted in other portions of the British Isles.

Pomponia crowned a life of love and gracious kindness with a death of perfect peace. She recovered from the virulent fever which she had caught in the prisons, and consoled the drooping years of her husband, Aulus Plautius. He died in the reign of Titus, and she did not long survive him. She was happily spared the spectacle of the reign of Domitian and the martyrdom of Flavius Clemens. All who were in sorrow sought her for consolation. Even the imperial Titus came gladly to her when his dark hour was upon him, and his heart was broken by the cruel ingratitude of his brother. She heard often from Pudens and Claudia, and from all whom she had loved. She fostered by every means in her power the struggling community of the catacombs, and when she lay upon her deathbed St. Clement, the fourth Bishop of Rome, administered to her the last sacrament. Her example had been of high benefit even to the Pagans of Roman society. It was her influence which told in the improved manners of the reign of Vespasian, and no vestal was more honoured for her official sanctity than Pomponia Græcina for her Christian holiness. When the ear heard her it blessed her, and when the eye saw her it gave witness to her. The blessings of those that were ready to perish came upon her, and she caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.

The close of the life of Onesimus was as peaceful as its youthful years had been full of trouble and storm. After the martyrdom of the Apostle Paul, and the all-but-extinction of the Church in Rome, he proposed that Nereus, and Junia, who was now united to him in holy wedlock, should leave Aricia, and, with the means which they possessed, should establish a new home in his native Thyatira, or in Hierapolis, or in Ephesus. Nereus gladly consented, for the gloom and loneliness of Aricia weighed upon his spirits, and he was haunted by the thoughts of the agonies which he had witnessed in the imprisonment and death of his brethren at Rome. Before they started, Onesimus sought a secret interview with his cousin and foster-sister Acte. He found her still living in the Golden House, but profoundly uncertain about the future. She had bathed the mangled corpse of Nero with her tears; she had adorned his grave with flowers; she had ventured even to pray for his soul. To her he was not the monster into which he developed, but still the youth who had loved her, and whom she had loved. But now, amid the terrible scenes which Rome was witnessing, and seemed likely long to witness in the fierce struggles of rival generals for power, her life was anxious. Apart from the obvious perils which might befall her in the hands of such wretches as Nymphidius and Tigellinus, she had long desired to escape from that city of Circean splendour. Eagerly she offered Onesimus to accompany him, and told him that now she, like himself, was a baptised Christian. She resumed her old name of Eunice, which she had borne as a child before the evil days of Rome, and she had wealth sufficient to maintain them all.

Her preparations were made secretly, with the aid of the Christian slaves in Cæsar’s household. She sold her jewels, and, taking much of her property with her, sailed with Onesimus and his wife and Nereus to Ephesus. They fixed their home at Hierapolis, where they could enjoy the teaching of the Deacon Philip, and where Acte, gladly serving as a deaconess of the little Church, gave all her goods to the poor, and lived in happy friendship with the virgin daughters of the Evangelist. The children of Onesimus and Junia owed much to her kindly nurture and teaching. In due time Onesimus himself was ordained to the ministry, and became in later years a bishop of the Church of Ephesus. There, when he was quite an old man, in the year A.D. 107, he met the martyr Ignatius of Antioch, when he was being conducted to his martyrdom in the Colosseum by the decuria of soldiers whom he calls ‘his ten leopards.’ He showed the greatest kindness to the holy martyr, who, in his letter to the Ephesians, gratefully commemorates the ‘inexpressible love’ which Onesimus had manifested towards him. Some say that he, too, suffered martyrdom at Ephesus, after a long life and many happy years.

And now that Judaism had been utterly crushed, Paganism again and again wrestled with Christianity, and put forth all its force. It strove to rival the new faith by ritual splendour and orgiastic rites, and ‘the extreme sensuality of superstition.T22 It strove to put forth Pythagoras, or Socrates, or Apollonius of Tyana as parallels to Christ; and Stoicism and Neo-Platonism as substitutes for the truths of the Gospel. It kindled its expiring lamps with ‘sparks from the incorruptible fountain of wisdom,’ and turned its back on the Sun of Righteousness, from which they were derived. It tried all that sneers and banter could do in the writings of the Pseudo-Lucian, and all the power and passion of argument in the books of Porphyry, Hierocles, and Celsus. Waging deadly war against all who called themselves Christians, it tried to burn them at its stakes, to crucify them on its countless gibbets, to devour them by its herds of wild beasts, at least to daunt them by its horrible tortures. On every field Christians met and conquered them with the two sacred and invincible weapons of martyrdom and innocence. The Church escaped from and soared out of their reach on ‘the two great wings of pureness and kindness,’ and so ‘by the unresistable might of weakness shook the world.’ The Christians refuted the arguments urged against them; they turned the edge of the jeers; they exposed the feebleness of the philosophers who wrote to denounce them. Meekly enduring the tortures devised against them ‘they stood safe’ (as said their martyr Cyprian); ‘stronger than their conquerors, the beaten and lacerated members conquered the beating and lacerating hooks.’ These obscure Sectaries—barbarians, Orientals, Jews, slaves, artisans—fought against the indignant world, and won. And when they had won, and in proportion as they won, they ennobled and purified the world. Wrestling with the pagan curse of corruption they made pure the homes, and the conversation, and the amusements, and the literature, and the inmost hearts of all who faithfully accepted the truths they preached. Wrestling with the curse of cruelty they suppressed infanticide, they sanctified compassion, they put down the cruel and ghastly scenes of human slaughter in the amphitheatre, they made the wretched and the sick and the outcast their special care, ‘they encircled the brow of sorrow with the aureole of sanctity.’ Wrestling with the curses of slavery and selfish exclusiveness they taught the inalienable rights of humanity, they confronted tyranny, they inspired nations with the spirit of liberty, they flung over the oppressed a shield of adamant, they taught that all men are the children of God. Intellectually, socially, politically, in national life and in individual life, in art and in literature, Christianity has inspired all that the world has seen of best and noblest, and still offers to the soul of every man the purest hope, the divinest comfort, the loftiest aspirations. To talk of ‘the crimes of Christianity’ is a preposterous paradox. There is not one evil thought that can be thought, not one evil deed that can be done, which is not utterly alien from its true spirit. Crimes, indeed, without number have been committed in its name. Kings, and priests, and peoples have misinterpreted its documents, forged its commissions, falsified the image and superscription of its current coins, while ‘swarms of vile creatures have made it an inexhaustible prey.’ But ‘it has lived through all, and has suffered that which would have been tenfold death to aught less than Divine.’ And even yet, after nearly nineteen centuries have sped since its Dawn began, and its Sun of Righteousness arose with healing in His wings, this faith alone sets before mankind the Divine Example of a Perfect and a Sinless Man, and alone offers the sure promises of pardon and of peace. All the best wisdom of the world lies in the brief Book of its New Covenant, and all the hopes of the world lie centred in the faithful acceptance of its Law and of its Life.