CHAPTER XLVIII ENSLAVED AND FREE

‘These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base

As was my former servitude, ignoble

Unmanly, ignominious, infamous,

True slavery.’

Samson Agonistes.

Pomponia Græcina was only one of many to whom Paul of Tarsus from his prison-lodging brought joy and consolation. There was a twofold element in the happiness which seems to rise to exultation in the letter which he wrote from Rome to his Philippians. On the one hand he felt that from his bonds there streamed illumination, so that the grace of Christ became manifest even in Cæsar’s household, and among his chosen soldiers; and, on the other, he was enabled to hear the groanings of them who were in a captivity far sorer than his own—to undo many a heavy burden, and let the oppressed go free.

Shortly after the visit he had received from Pomponia, he was told that a young man was waiting outside who desired to speak with him. His sympathy with the young in their trials and temptations was always deep, and he asked Luke to admit the visitor. With hesitating step and downcast mien he entered, and the Apostle bade him come and sit by his side.

‘Dost thou recognise me?’ asked the visitor, in a low voice.

‘I have met many youths in many cities,’ answered the Apostle, ‘and I have seen thy face before, but where I cannot remember. Art thou Eutychus of Troas?’

‘No,’ he answered, glancing at the Prætorian; ‘but,’ he added in a whisper, ‘I am, or rather I was, a Christian.’

‘Speak without fear,’ said Celsus; ‘I, too, am one of the brethren.’

‘Thou wilt soon remember me,’ said the youth to Paul, removing the disguise which covered his dark locks and greatly altered his appearance. ‘I saw thee in the school of Tyrannus at Ephesus, when I came there with my master, Philemon of Colossæ.’

‘Onesimus!’ said the Apostle. ‘Welcome, my son—though I have heard sad things of thee from many.’

‘It is true, it is all true, that thou hast heard of me, O my father!’ said Onesimus, as he knelt before the Apostle, and kissed the hand on which his tears were falling fast. ‘Yes; I stole money from Philemon, my beloved master. I ran away from him; I am a worthless fugitive, a thievish Phrygian slave, whom most masters would crucify. And worse—I have denied the faith; I have done all things vile. Can there be forgiveness, can there be hope, for such as I am?’

‘My son,’ said the Apostle, ‘there is forgiveness, there is hope, for all who seek it.’

‘But oh, thou knowest not, my father, to what depths I have sunk. I have stolen a second time. I have been drunken with the drunken, slothful with the slothful, unclean with the unclean. I have been false to my trust. I have been in the slaves’ prison, and the gladiators’ school. I have fought in the amphitheatre. I have served the shameful wandering priests of the Syrian goddess. Twice over have I been all but a murderer. Can all this be forgiven?’

‘My son,’ said Paul, deeply touched, ‘thou hast sinned deeply; but so have many, who now are washed, cleansed, justified, sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God.’

‘Ah, but,’ cried the youth, ‘they have never been renegades.’

‘Onesimus,’ answered Paul, ‘hast thou not heard how the Lord Jesus told us to forgive our brethren, not only seven times, but seventy times seven? Will He be less merciful than He has bidden us to be? I bid thee hope in His infinite forgiveness. The blind and the leper, the publican and the harlot, the impotent man, and she out of whom he cast seven devils, went to Him, and were forgiven. Go thou, if thou canst not otherwise, as a leper, as a demoniac, as a paralytic, and He will abundantly pardon. Hast thou, indeed, sought Him?’

‘Nay, father, I could not,’ said Onesimus. ‘Ever since that theft from Philemon, ever since that flight, I have prayed but faintly; I felt as if I could not pray, as if no prayer of mine could be heard. A cloud of despair has hidden God’s face from me. Oh!’ he cried, wringing his hands, ‘I am an outcast—I am a castaway. I have no part in Him. My lot is now with this world, of which I have seen the infamies and loathe the crimes. It was but two weeks ago that any gleam of hope came back to me.’

‘What gave thee hope?’

‘Lucas of Antioch, whom I see with thee, gave some parts of his records of Jesus to one of Octavia’s slaves. I, too, went with the unhappy Empress to Pandataria, and there I read the Master’s parable of the Prodigal Son, and I tried to say, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say—”’

But here Onesimus stopped, and though he made an effort, he was unable to proceed.

With all his heart the great Apostle pitied him; indeed he pitied him so much that he found no words to speak. He could only lay his hand gently on the suppliant’s head, and uplift his eyes to heaven in prayer.

So Luke spoke and said, ‘I can tell thee, Onesimus, of other words of the Master. He cried: “Come unto me, all that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will refresh you;” and “him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.”’

‘Did He say that? Did He say that?’ asked Onesimus, eagerly.

‘He did,’ said Luke, ‘and no word of His can pass away.’

The Prætorian Celsus had heard the conversation, and he too was touched. ‘Those words,’ he said, ‘called me from Satan to God. I was as deep a sinner as any man in the cohort, and no man can be much worse than that. I used to shrink from no cruelty, and to abstain from no sin. I was one of the soldiers employed in the massacre of the innocent slaves of Pedanius Secundus. So deep was my misery that one night I went in full armour to the Sublician Bridge, meaning to end a life so shamed and empty. But as I climbed the parapet, I was seized by the strong arm of a man in a slave’s dress. I drew my dagger and asked him, with a savage oath, if he held his life cheap, since he, a slave, thus dared to interfere with me, a Prætorian soldier. He fixed his steady eyes on me, and said, “I am unarmed; you can slay me if you will; but I will try to prevent you from self-murder.” “My life is my own,” I answered sullenly. “It is not your own,” he answered. “It is God’s, who gave it. He set you here, and you have no right to desert your post.” The man was Nereus, now the freedman of Pudens. He drew me away from the bridge, and I talked long with him. He was the first to give me the hope that I might live for better things. He taught me about Christ, and Christ’s promise that He would cast out none who came to Him. That saved me. When I was a Pagan I knew shame and guilt, but never knew that it could be washed away.’

‘Thanks be to God for His great goodness,’ said the Apostle. ‘And thou, my son, Onesimus, hear what Celsus has said. Thou hast had no fruit in the things of which thou art now ashamed, for the end of those things is death. But now, if thou wilt return to Christ, thy fruit shall be to holiness, and the end shall be eternal life.’

That interview completed the change in the heart of the Phrygian youth. He had returned from Pandataria a freedman, for on the night before her murder Octavia had freed her Christian slaves. He had also received gifts from his generous mistress which placed him above present need. He had therefore hired himself a lodging, and now, being readmitted, at Paul’s intercession, into the Christian assemblies, he recovered life and happiness. He waited on the Apostle with ceaseless assiduity, and anticipated all his wants. If ever Paul needed one to serve him—which was often the case, for Timotheus had been sent on a message to Ephesus—the Phrygian was at hand, and the Apostle found in his society and cheerful vivacity a great alleviation of a captive’s weariness. It was not long before he confided to the Apostle his whole story, concealing nothing, and he asked for his advice as to his future course.

That advice fell like a death-blow on all his hopes. With the impetuosity of youth he had entirely lost sight of the fact that he was still Philemon’s slave, and that the manumission conferred on him by Octavia, in her ignorance that he was the personal chattel of another, was legally invalid. He was, therefore, stricken with amazement when the Apostle told him that he was not a freedman, but still a slave. At those words the fabric of his life seemed once more to be smitten into ruins. He had exulted with passionate joy at the thought that he was no longer at the beck and call of a master, no longer liable to the horrors of the cross and the branding-iron, of the scourge or the furca. To be told that he was still a Phrygian slave, that duty required him to go back to the familia of Philemon, to restore what he had stolen, to face any punishment which the law of Colossæ might inflict on him, to place his future life unreservedly in the hands of his owner, and to face the humiliation of returning to the company of his old companions as a thief and a runaway—this was like a sentence of hopeless condemnation. And there was yet another circumstance which made the pang more deadly. He still cherished for the gentle daughter of Nereus a love which might not have seemed hopeless. If he stayed at Rome, if as a freedman he could strike out for himself an honourable career—which his Greek education rendered possible—he felt sure that he could yet win the hand of the Christian girl. But to return to Colossæ as a slave, and a guilty slave, and to be perhaps compelled to grow old in servitude on the banks of the Lycus—it seemed too terrible a sacrifice!

Yet his sincerity stood the test. After a great struggle with himself he bowed his head, and answered: ‘If it is my duty, my father, I will do it.’

‘It is thy duty, my son Onesimus, and doubt not that the path of thy duty will also be the path of thy happiness. Thou wilt gain by losing. I know and I love Philemon, and his wife Apphia, and their son Archippus; and I will write to Philemon for thee, and I do not doubt that now he will set thee free—for indeed I need thee. Thou art as a son to me; I have begotten thee in my bonds, and thou art true to thy name in all thy help to me. But even if Philemon does not set thee free, he is now thy fellow-Christian, and therefore thy brother beloved, and no slavery can make thee other than the Lord’s freedman.’

The letter to Philemon was written—the Magna Charta of ultimate emancipation—and Onesimus was sent with it to his former master. He was accompanied by Tychicus of Ephesus, who was charged with the circular letter to that and other cities, as well as with the letter to the Colossians. They had an affecting parting with the Apostle, for though he was full of hope, yet the issue of his approaching trial was uncertain, and they knew not whether they should ever see his face again. He shed tears as he embraced Onesimus, to whom he had grown deeply attached, but they left him in the kind care of Aristarchus, and of the two Evangelists Mark and Luke. Above all, Timotheus had again come from Ephesus to stay with him, and Timotheus was to him as the son of his old age.

His case excited little attention. When it was heard in Nero’s presence the Emperor was amusing himself with composing a loose satire, paragraphs of which he handed from time to time to some delighted favourite. He polished his wicked verses again and again, till his note-book was almost illegible with erasures, and he paid little heed to the Apostle’s accusers. The evidence, scanty as it was, broke down completely, and testimony in favour of the innocence and the services of the prisoner was given gladly by gentile witnesses.

The impeachment might have been more formidable but for the shipwreck of the vessel which, as Julius had told Vespasian, was conveying to Rome a commission of his accusers among whom were two persons no less important than Josephus, the young and learned Rabbi of Jerusalem, and Ishmael ben Phabi,92 the High Priest. But their ship foundered in a terrible storm. Its entire cargo was lost, including the documents on which the Sadducean hierarchs of Jerusalem had relied to procure the Apostle’s condemnation. Of the two hundred souls on board only eighty had been picked up, by a ship of Cyrene, after they had swum or floated all night in the tempestuous waves. Ishmael and Josephus had indeed been saved, but several of their witnesses had perished. On the other hand, when men so different as Felix the brother of Pallas, and the honourable Festus, and the centurion Julius, and Publius the Protos of Melite, and Lysias the chief captain at Jerusalem, all wrote in Paul’s favour, and when the good-natured King Agrippa II. and Berenice had taken the trouble to subscribe to this favourable testimony with their own hands, there could be no reason for detaining him. Not even Tigellinus had any object in keeping his clutch upon a prisoner who was too poor for purposes of extortion. The Apostle was acquitted. Accompanied by rejoicing friends, he went to Ostia, and thence set sail for Ephesus. After a brief sojourn in the city of Artemis, he paid his promised visit to Philemon at Colossæ. The first to greet him with happy smiles in the house of the Colossian gentleman was Onesimus, and as the Apostle pressed him to his heart, he learnt that all his hopes had been fulfilled. Philemon, on receiving Paul’s letter, had summoned the fugitive to his presence, and frankly forgiven him. Orders were given to all the slaves of the household that no reference was to be made to the past. Apphia and Archippus treated the runaway with marked kindness, and he himself restored the full sum which he had stolen and strove in every way to repair the old wrong. Philemon had not thought it advisable, under the circumstances, at once to set Onesimus free, but now in honour of Paul’s visit he manumitted him and others of his Christian slaves, and allowed him henceforth to devote his grateful services to the comfort of the Apostle, with whom he set forth for Crete.