THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE MISSION OF THE BARBARIANS.

“Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the horologe of time peals through the universe when there is a change from era to era.”[33] So writes Mr. Carlyle in one of his powerful essays; and he is correct. As gradually and as silently as childhood passes into youth, and youth into manhood, and manhood again into old age, so does a nation and the world itself pass from one era into another. But if the signal of such a change is not heard sounding through the world, the moment of the transition is foreknown and has been preordained by God, under whose eye all agents throughout the universe are ever acting out their parts. Men are sometimes taken by surprise, but God never. Men are often mistaken in their calculations of the action of natural forces, but it cannot be so with God. A revolution brews like an angry storm, all in silence; and bursts; and a nation is shivered into fragments. Men are amazed; they have made a false reckoning; but the storm has brewed under the eye of God, and gathered its hidden forces, and burst at the very moment that God allowed it, and the havoc has been done up to the time which he has marked out. This is the expression of a great Catholic principle of history which it is well, especially in this age of godless theories, to keep constantly before our minds. We are about to endeavor to show how powerfully the truth of this great historical principle is brought out in that part of history to which our subject refers, for it is well said by Cesare Cantu in his Storia Universale,[34] “If ever history was manifested as a visible order of Providence, it was in these times.”

As we pass from the fourth into the fifth century, we come into a new era of the history of the church. The fourth age was one of mental strife; it was an age of great minds. The enemy of the church in the time of the persecutions had been brute force; now it was power of intellect. But God always has his champions ready. In the persecutions, they were the martyrs; in the fourth age, they were the Athanasiuses and the Ambroses. But in the fifth age the men of God’s choice are of another type. They are men out of the darkness, savages of the forest, wild dwellers amid the ice-mountains and the swamps. They have known no civilizing influences; they are nature’s children, and hardy as the rock and granite. They have reason, it is true; but it does not guide them on their strange, savage mission. They are all driven on by an instinct that is irresistible.

The words of Alaric are the expression of the feelings of all those wild warriors. As the Gothic leader is marching towards Rome at the head of his army, a solitary goes out from his grotto to arrest him in his course. “No,” replies Alaric, “a mysterious voice within me says: March on, go and sack Rome.” So we are told by Socrates[35] and Sozomen[36] in their histories. Thus, then, they go to their stupendous work of destruction. That work is characterized by blood, and smoke, and the crash of falling cities. The age is one of chaos. Never before since the world began were there such wild ruin and devastation; never such terrible levelling to the ground of human grandeur; never such savage smashing up of the monuments of luxury and worldly greatness. It would, indeed, be difficult to describe adequately what is so confused and so chaotic. When the storm-clouds have gathered and overshadowed us with darkness, when the lightning-fires flame through the sky and scathe the forest-trees, and the blinding raindrops drive in fury through the air, can we see any order in it all? Can we draw lines and mark out clearly the different elements of the storm? No. It is only when the storm is spent and the air becomes clear again that the eye can discern what havoc has been done. The giant oak has been cleft by the storm-spirit’s fiery sword; the lofty tower has been hurled down from its stately height; the rocks have been split, and the earth’s surface torn up, as by the bursting of some mighty engine of war. So it would be difficult to describe, with anything like clearness of method, the mighty storm which burst upon the Roman Empire in the fifth century. However long we pore over the pages of Paul Orosius or Salvian, we still rise from our study with bewildered brain. God lets loose his wild messengers of wrath, and they do their savage work in their own savage way. We can see no order in it—to our eye there is none. We hear the wailing cries of despair, and the frenzied howls of the conquering barbarians, and the loud re-echoing crashes of the falling empire. But it is only when the smoke has cleared off and the dust has subsided that we can form any idea of the ruin and devastation which have been accomplished. If our task, then, were mainly to draw an accurate and true picture, we should fail. But it is rather to give a view of a period of history from a Catholic philosophical standpoint: it is to show, as far as we can, the action of God on human affairs. It will be necessary, then, first to point out what the mission of the Roman Empire was—a mission to build up: and then the causes which prepared the way for the mission of the barbarians—a mission of sweeping destruction.

At the time when the Son of God came down upon earth, the Roman Empire was at the height of its splendor and power. Never in the history of the world had there been an empire in every way so wonderful. Never before had there been a power so mighty and all-embracing in its dominion. All that had been great and brilliant in the civilization of the empires of old had come down to Rome, and had undergone a boundless development there. This truth is powerfully put forth in the words of the first professor of the philosophy of history at the Catholic University of Ireland. We will quote his words: “The Empire of Augustus,” he says, “inherited the whole civilization of the ancient world. Whatever political and social knowledge, whatever moral or intellectual truth, whatever useful or elegant arts the enterprising race of Japheth had acquired, preserved, and accumulated in the long course of centuries since the beginning of history, had descended without a break to Rome, with the dominion of all the countries washed by the Mediterranean. For her the wisdom of Egypt and all the East had been stored up; for her Pythagoras and Thales, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and all the schools besides of Grecian philosophy suggested by these names, had thought; for her Zoroaster, as well as Solon and Lycurgus, legislated; for her Alexander conquered, the races which he subdued forming but a portion of her empire. Every city in the ears of whose youth the Poems of Homer were familiar as household words, owned her sway. Her magistrates, from the Northern Sea to the confines of Arabia, issued their decrees in the language of empire—the Latin tongue; while, as men of letters, they spoke and wrote in Greek. For her Carthage had risen, founded colonies, discovered distant coasts, set up a world-wide trade, and then fallen, leaving her the empire of Africa and the West, with the lessons of a long experience. Not only so, but likewise Spain, Gaul, and all the frontier provinces from the Alps to the mouth of the Danube, spent in her service their strength and skill; supplied her armies with their bravest youths; gave to her senate and her knights their choicest minds. The vigor of new, and the culture of long-polished, races were alike employed in the vast fabric of her power. In fact, every science and art, all human thought, experience, and discovery had poured their treasure in one stream into the bosom of that society which, after forty-four years of undisputed rule, Augustus had consolidated into a new system of government, and bequeathed to the charge of Tiberius.”[37]

This passage from Mr. Allies is like a brilliant flash of light thrown on Rome’s greatness; but yet it only gives us a glimpse. It would take us long to form to ourselves an adequate idea of this greatest of empires. We should have to make long journeys through her extensive provinces, measure her vast cities, march along her grand roads, and, after we had journeyed over all the civilized world of those days, we should still be within the circuit of the mighty empire. Her sway extended over the three then known continents: “Gaul and Spain, Britain and North Africa, Switzerland and the greater part of Austria, Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, formed but single limbs of her mighty body.”[38]

It is wonderful, again, to think of what Pliny calls the “immensa Romanæ pacis majestas.” The inconceivable majesty of Rome in the time of peace was, perhaps, more overpowering than anything else about her. Having a boundlessness of empire such as we have described, containing within her circuit a population, according to Gibbon, of 120,000,000, looking round from her throne of supreme authority, and claiming all as her own that was visible to the eye of civilization, she could stretch forth her sceptre over all this immeasurable area and over these countless peoples, and hold all in submission and peace. We cannot, then, be surprised that Rome ruled over the nations as a goddess; that divine power and majesty were believed to belong to her. Her sway was felt from the Rhine and the Danube to the deserts of Africa, from utmost Spain to the Euphrates, like an ubiquitous presence. Her eye of authority reached from one extremity of the world to the other, and she had her 340,000 men stationed on the frontiers, looking with watchful ken into the vast unknown solitudes beyond, and ever ready to hurl back the savage hordes of external foes, if perchance they stepped forward for a moment from their native darkness. Very few forces were needed to preserve internal order. That same Gaul which in 1860 required 626,000 armed men to preserve internal order and for external security in time of peace, had a garrison of only 1,200 men in the days of old Rome.[39] Well then may Pliny and the old Roman authors speak with such admiration of the “immensa Romanæ pacis majestas.” Nothing had ever been seen on the earth so imposing and so grand. No empire had ever existed with such a boundless sway, such wonderful internal organization, such a union of strength, such compactness of power, and such an awe-inspiring name. And at the time of Augustus there was no sign of decay or deterioration. Rome was, on the contrary, rising higher and higher in cultivation and refinement. We may here quote the words of Tertullian in his treatise De Anima; they give us a vivid and beautiful picture of the Roman Empire of his day. “The world itself,” he says, “is opened up, and becomes from day to day more civilized, and increases the sum of human enjoyment. Every place is reached, is become known, is full of business. Solitudes, famous of old, have changed their aspects under the richest cultivation. The plough has levelled forests, and the beasts that prey on man have given place to those that serve him. Corn waves on the sea-shore, rocks are opened out into roads; marshes are drained, cities are more numerous now than villages in former times. The island has lost its savageness, and the cliff its desolation. Houses spring up everywhere, and men to dwell in them. On all sides are government and life.” And so we might go on indefinitely, describing Rome’s power, and riches, and civilization, and never succeed in giving an idea equal to the great reality. Then, as we think of all this, we are led to ask ourselves, How is this mighty empire ever to fall? Other empires, we know, rose and fell, but at their highest point of greatness they could not be compared to the Empire of Rome. All that they had of might and majesty and durability Rome has, and immeasurably more. Men have not known how to qualify her power, nor how to designate her except by calling her “Eternal Rome.” Where, then, can another power come from that shall be able to cope with her? She looked as durable as the very firmament which God had set on immovable pillars, more lasting than the rock-built earth on which she had grown and developed for nearly a thousand years. Her existence was inconceivable before she began to be; her ceasing to exist was as inconceivable afterwards. It seemed as if to destroy her would be to split the earth itself on which she was based, or to shiver the universe, which she seemed to embrace in her mighty arms. Of her capital itself a great living writer says: “Look at the Palatine Hill, penetrated, traversed, cased with brick-work, till it appears a work of man, not of nature; run your eye along the cliffs from Ostia to Terracina, covered with the débris of masonry; gaze around the bay of Baiæ, whose rocks have been made to serve as the foundations and the walls of palaces; and in those mere remains, lasting to this day, you will have a type of the moral and political strength of the establishments of Rome. Think of the aqueducts making for the imperial city for miles across the plain; think of the straight roads stretching off again from that one centre to the ends of the earth; consider that vast territory round about it, strewn to this day with countless ruins; follow in your mind its suburbs, extending along its roads for as much, at least in some directions, as forty miles; and number up its continuous mass of population, amounting, as grave authors say, to almost six million; and answer the question, How was Rome ever to be got rid of? Why was it not to progress? Why was it not to progress for ever? Where was that ancient civilization to end?”[40] After looking at Rome with a human eye, this is the way we should speak; these are questions we should ask. To the human eye, Rome was based on everlasting foundations, and was to be immortal. There was no power—there could be no power sufficiently mighty to move her from her seat. But looking at her from the standpoint of the great Catholic principles of history, we shall use language very different. We shall say that Rome, however mighty and well based, will last no longer than serves the wise designs of God’s providence. He raised her up, as he has raised other empires, for a mission; when that mission is fulfilled, he will say to her, “Perish,” and she will wither away and gradually die, or, if so be his pleasure, she will be swept, as by the fury of a storm, from the face of the earth. It was the latter judgment that actually fell upon her, and we have to see in the course of this essay with what terrible reality it was carried out.

Mighty as Rome was, so was she intended for a mighty mission. She had subdued the world, and the world was at her feet. Her great highways cut through her immense empire in every direction. By these broad roads the riches of the provinces were carried to her bosom, and by these roads went forth her legions to guard the distant frontier. She had given her own language to the various races which she had bent under her sway, so that her word of command was understood and obeyed in every part of her wide empire. At this point, then, in the course of her history, God had determined to appear, in visible form, on the scene of human events. When the world was thus at peace, and under the sway of this mightiest of empires, the Prince of Peace came on earth. Circumstances never could have been more favorable for the establishment of his kingdom. It strikes us, then, here at once, that the evident mission of the Roman Empire was to prepare the way for Christianity. In spite of the opposition of pagan gods; in spite of sensual passions and human pride, the Crucified will have Rome, as has been long ago preordained, for the seat of his own wonderful empire. Thence his missionaries will go forth, like Rome’s own conquering legions, but unto still more glorious conquests than they. The broad Roman roads will rejoice more under the footsteps of these new conquerors than ever they did in days before under the tramp of warlike battalions returning booty-laden to the great capital. Everything is ready for the prosecution of these new conquests. The provinces are at peace and ready to receive these Heaven-sent messengers. Men seem to be waiting for some voice that shall be heard sounding through the world telling them to lay down their swords for ever, to forget their strifes, and that they are all brothers. Such a voice is now to be heard. The language of Rome has made itself universal in order that it may be the organ of a universal religion. When the first revelation was made, the language of the human race was one; so was it necessary that, when a new revelation was about to be given to men, they should be brought back again to unity of language, in order that revelation might be universally received, and be transmitted to future ages. The great Roman conquerors had no thought, whilst they went forth to conquest with their countless warriors, full of ideas of human glory and lust of booty, that they were the simple instruments of him who was ruling in the heavens, and whom they knew not. But so it was. And we see how God’s designs were carried out. We see, in course of time, the aged fisherman, from the Galilean Lake, wending his way toward the great Roman capital. As he walks along the Via Appia with his scrip and staff, he is the symbol of simplicity and human weakness. But mark you well that old way-worn form. There walks the first of the great race of Popes. He represents no contemptible power, that weak-looking wayfarer. He bears with him a secret source of strength which will give him courage against all obstacles. Though he looks so mean in his Jewish garb, yet he is a conqueror such as the world has not yet seen. He has no legends at his back, no surroundings of earthly might to make the world tremble before him. But he bears with him something mightier than Roman armies, and far more irresistible: it is the Cross of Jesus Christ. March on, old man, to the great city that is called the mistress of nations and omnipotent. Fear not; thou shalt subdue her with thy poor wooden cross, and plant in her midst thy everlasting throne. Yea, of a truth, the throne which that old man shall establish there shall be the first immovable throne which the world has ever seen. The throne of Cambyses has passed away; the throne of Alexander has crumbled to dust; and the throne of the Roman Cæsars will soon be buried in the wreck of barbarian invasion. But the throne of the fisherman will stand firm where he planted it, whilst everything around perishes and crumbles away. Nations and kings will mistake it for a human thing, and they will, in their blind rage, rush against it to overturn it; but they will dash themselves to pieces in the collision, and they will be seen lying around in scattered fragments, whilst that throne itself still remains immovable. So, then, the fisherman, conscious of his great mission, enters into the mighty city which God had been preparing for him those long ages. That was a solemn moment for the world, though the world knew it not. Other conquerors enter into the capitals of kingdoms with great pomp and a mighty array of armed men; and perhaps their hold upon the subdued cities is of short duration. The tide of human affairs quickly changes, and perhaps the conquerors themselves are in their turn the conquered and the captive. But this meek old man has no armed force to awe men into submission. He is the centre of no pageant. He walks on his way in silence. He has nothing but his staff and his scrip and his little wooden cross, which in reality is his sceptre. But he enters Rome to take a lasting possession of it. Not all the world in arms will ever again be able to make a permanent conquest of that city. A mystery will henceforth hang about it for ever. It will always look like a city of the past, and yet it will hold within it the life of all peoples and nations to come. By degrees, other kings shall leave it altogether to Peter and his successors, as if scared away by the mysterious presence of Christ’s vicar. And if, in the course of ages, men dream like Rienzi of the great days of ancient Rome, and long to see the old pagan prestige of the city brought back, and then come with their mailed hands and strike the mysterious power that God has established there, their mailed hands shall wither, and they will fall back stricken by Heaven in their turn, as Oza was in past days for his irreverence.

When, then, Peter had taken possession of his city, the rapid spread of Christianity began. Here was the throne of the head of the church established in the very centre of civilization and of the Western World. We cannot think that Romulus and his wild robber-followers had any profound design in fixing the site of their city on those seven hills. No; but God had. It is remarkable that Rome seems built to be even naturally and physically the centre of the world. “Nothing,” says Father Lacordaire, “is isolated in things; the body, the soul, divine grace, everything is united; all is harmonious. The body of man is not that of the irrational animal; the configuration of a country intended for one destiny is not the same as that of a country appointed to another destiny, and the general form of our globe is as full of reason as of mystery.”[41] The ancients seem to have had a traditional knowledge of this; hence it was that, when they built their cities, they made a deep and religious study of the spot which was chosen as the site. Looking, then, first at Italy, we see that God formed it for a great purpose. It is curious to remark how Asia, Africa, and Europe are united, as it were, together by the basin of the Mediterranean Sea, which also opens toward the West to allow the vessels of all nations to sail to the American continent. Into this central Mediterranean Sea, Italy shoots out its long length. On its northern side it is strongly guarded by ridges of mountains, and seems thus designed to be defended from Europe, whilst it is its heart. Almost in the centre of this Italian peninsula, more to the south than the north, and more westward than eastward, Rome is seated. She is built on seven hills, and by the borders of the Tiber, whose yellow waters roll sluggishly along between banks bare and uninteresting, and destitute of that green verdure which gives such a charm to the rivers of our own country. At a distance of six leagues eastward rises the dark line of the Apennines; looking westward, you may catch a view from some elevated spot of the bright-glancing waters of the Mediterranean; northward rises the isolated Soracte, towering up like a mighty giant, and seeming to stand as guardian of the plain. Directing your gaze southward, your eye falls on the pleasant hamlets of Castel-Gandolfo, Marino, Frascati, and Colonna.[42] In this centre of the world, then, made such by God when he formed the globe; in this centre, so wonderfully adapted for easy communication with the rest of the world, God has his central city built, and when the hour comes which he preordained in his wise Providence, he conducts the Fisherman-Pope there, and bids him there abide till the end of time. It is not likely, then, that any other city of the world, either Jerusalem or Constantinople, or any great capital yet to be built, can supplant Rome in the honor of being the city of the Popes, or that any other country will be in as true a sense the chosen country of God as Italy is. Italy was chosen, as we have seen, to be the heart of the world. Then God chose to have this great central capital from which the light of Christianity was to radiate to the four quarters of the globe. It would be easy to show what a glorious and conspicuous part she has acted in all ages through the church’s history. It is Italy which has given to the church almost the whole long line of Pontiffs who have filled the chair of St. Peter. From Italy have gone forth almost all the greatest missionaries of the world. St. Innocent says, in his Epistle to Decentius, that all the great founders of Christian churches in Gaul, Sicily, Spain, and Africa came from this favored county. To her also is Germany indebted for her first apostles; and, unless we credit the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, we must own that Christianity was first brought over into Britain by missionaries from Rome. And we are not surprised that Italy is so prolific in apostles and preachers. Nearest to the heart does the life-blood flow most quickly. Under the eye of Christ’s Vicar, and under the shadow of his presence, has the Christian life always been best realized. We cannot, then, wonder that the history of Christian Italy should furnish the highest and the most glorious pages of the history of the church. She is glorious in her countless martyrs, in her learned doctors, in her great founders of religious orders. With all this before us, we can understand the soul-stirring words of Luigi Tosti to the Italian clergy. “State sa,” he cries out, “Leviti dell’ Italiano chericato, abitatori della terra in cui la chiesa impresse sempre la prima orma dei suoi passi, quando procede all’ assunzione di una forma novella. Scalza, perseguitata, cruenta di martirio in Pietro: ricca, guistiziera, fulminatrice in Ildebrando; bella, copulatrice di due civiltà nel decimo Leone; e sempre in Italia.” We lose much of the fire and vigor of the original by translating these words into our own language, but yet we may, perhaps, venture to render them thus: “Arise, Levites of the Italian clergy, dwellers in that land on which the church always imprints her first foot-mark whenever she is about to take up a new form. Barefooted, persecuted, red with the blood of martyrdom in Peter; rich, rigid, hurling anathemas in Hildebrand; beautiful, uniting the two civilizations in the tenth Leo; and always in Italy.”[43]

Returning, then, to what we have already said regarding the Roman Empire, and seeing how wonderfully God has arranged all things for the establishment of his holy religion, we may form to ourselves an idea how rapidly the truths of Christianity would spread throughout the world. Now we see a nobler and higher use for those grand Roman roads than ever entered into the minds of those who designed and constructed them; now we perceive the advantage of that one noble Latin language being the established language of the empire; now we take in more perfectly the great design of God in laying so many nations at the feet of Rome, and inspiring them with such veneration for her very name. Thus favored on all sides, Christianity soon made its way into the cities and towns of the wide-spreading empire. We have been amazed as we have observed God working out in detail this grand scheme for the propagation of his religion. We have seen and wondered at the mighty power of that Word which was confided by Jesus Christ to the apostles and their successors. We have seen it captivating the rich and the poor alike, and baffling and finally humbling at its feet the proud philosophers themselves. We know how in a few years the Christians could be counted by thousands in Rome itself, and how they were found wherever the Roman legions had penetrated. From Rome, as from a great central sun, the light of truth shone far out in all directions, and Christian churches seemed to rise as by an invisible power, in all cities and towns near and far distant, and then shoot forth their beautiful brightness into the surrounding darkness. In Africa, as Alzog and Döllinger relate, the Christians soon outnumbered the pagans. And we know well, for there is no one who has not read them, the famous words of Tertullian, in his Apologetica: “We are but of yesterday, and already we fill your towns, your villages, your fortresses, your islands, your assemblies and your camps, the senate and the imperial court; we leave you nothing but the temples.” In studying the first ages of the church’s history, what glorious things do we witness, and how strongly is the conviction forced upon us that God is there ruling events and using men for his own great purposes! We see the Roman legions transforming themselves, as did the Thundering Legion, into so many phalanxes of conquering Christians, who rushed to victory under the impulse of the grand idea that they were thus subduing new countries to the rule of Christ.[44] We see those victorious legions carrying with them their laws, their customs, and their schools to the banks of the Rhine and the Danube, and there planting civilization and the faith of Christ. We wonder less at this when we think what noble Christian hearts were burning in the breasts of those brave men, and how oftentimes they laid down their lives as martyrs for Christ’s name. We can never forget the noble Theban legions dying at the foot of the Alps, thus giving by their heroic martyrdom the first lessons of Christian teaching to the people of Switzerland. In the camps of Rhætia, Noricum, and Vindelicia, again, we see Christian soldiers sowing the seeds of their holy religion on every side of them. How beautiful a thing did it appear to the devoted Ozanam to follow the footsteps of these early missionaries, to represent to himself the hymns of redemption rising heavenwards amidst the silence of the pagan forests, and to see in imagination the barbarians receiving the waters of baptism at the same fountains which their fathers adored![45] The more closely, then, we study the manner in which Christianity was propagated in the first ages, the more clearly does the mission of the Roman Empire stand out before our eyes. It becomes more and more evident, the longer we look at facts, that Rome’s conquering legions, her great far-reaching roads, her laws, and her one universal language were all made use of by God in a wonderful way, not only to prepare the way for, but also for the establishment of his great spiritual kingdom upon earth.

Thus far we have considered the Roman Empire as working for God, as aiding in a remarkable manner the propagation of Christianity. Thus viewed, the Roman Empire was on God’s side. But from another point of view we know how bitterly she opposed God’s work. Never was there such dire war made against God as during the three hundred years of the persecutions. We have now to glance at these years of blood and hatred, since they are a part of the explanation why in later times there came, by God’s sending, such a whirlwind of wrath on the mighty empire that it was shaken to its very foundations, and fell with a crash which made the whole universe tremble. We do not intend to dwell on the more minute details of these strange, sad years, but only to refer in a general way to the cruelty of the persecutors and the heroic conduct of the children of the cross in the presence of death.

Towards the end of the first seventy years of the Christian church, we see the imperial garden at Rome the scene of a strange festivity. The Roman people are there assembled on a dark night for an entertainment. The Emperor Nero is seen passing to and fro in his imperial carriage, followed by the senators in their costly equipages amidst the shouts and plaudits of the people. It is the opening of the first persecution. The long, shady avenues are lighted up by living torches—human beings covered over with burning pitch are serving as festal lamps. In the open squares of this garden we see women and children, belonging to some of the noblest families of Rome, clothed with the skins of wild beasts, and cast to hungry dogs, which devour them alive. Meanwhile Nero laughs with savage glee at the success of his new invention, and his myrmidons congratulate him on the ingenuity he has displayed in it. This is only a glimpse—but we need no more.

Later on we see that other monster Domitian, shut up in a dark chamber of his palace, holding with fiendish satisfaction the end of the chain which binds the limbs of those who are brought before him for trial. We see him oftentimes presiding in person and gloating with a wild beast’s gusto over the tortures inflicted on innocent Christians. In his reign, virtue became a crime, and the followers of Christ were put to death throughout the whole extent of the empire as being the declared enemies of the state. We do not wonder that Domitian acquired for himself the odious name of “the tyrant whom the universe detested,” as Suetonius tells us in his Life of this emperor. Neither can we wonder that the Roman people endeavored to blot out even his very name from their memory. Lactantius tells us, in his De Morte Persecutorum, that his statues were broken to pieces, and his inscriptions effaced from the proud monuments which his hands had raised.

As we pass on to Trajan and Adrian, we find no reason to be partial to their memories. Though no new edicts of persecution were published during their reign, yet Christians were put to death in great numbers throughout the empire. When we think of Trajan’s persecution, a grand, saintly figure always rises before our minds—it is St. Ignatius of Antioch, as he himself has sketched in striking outlines, in his famous Epistle to the Romans, the sublime ideal of the Christian martyr, and he realized with wonderful exactitude that ideal in his own person.

The student of church history well remembers the bold independence of the holy man as he stood before the emperor at Antioch; and the courageous joy with which he went to the amphitheatre to be the victim of wild beasts and a spectacle to the bloodthirsty Romans, is one of those glorious things which the church points to as characteristic of her great martyr-bishops.

Again, when we think of Adrian, we recall that symbol of his cruelty, the brazen bull, into which, when heated to red-heat, the faithful veteran Eustachius with his wife and family was cast. His name, too, brings back to our memory the brave widow Symphorosa and her seven sons. The cruel scene of torment is again enacted before our minds. We think how the poor mother was suspended aloft by the hair, all bruised and mangled as she was by hard lashes, whilst the bodies of her children were opened before her eyes with knives and iron hooks. Such facts as these are certainly not calculated to persuade us that Adrian’s character was one of mildness and clemency, as profane historians would have us believe. To this emperor belongs, as Tillemont tells us, the odious distinction of having profaned in the vilest manner those holy places which are so dear to Christian hearts. He defiled the holy Mount of Calvary by erecting thereon the sensual figure of Venus; he desecrated the sacred Cave at Bethlehem by setting up the statue of Adonis; and he placed, as though in jeering triumph, the image of Jupiter over the tomb of our blessed Saviour. Under the influence of Adrian’s zeal, paganism experienced a temporary revival; idolatry seemed to regain new life and vigor, and made a great effort to substitute the trophies of the devil for those of Jesus Christ. Adrian went so far as to erect temples in his own honor, which, as Döllinger says, have been falsely supposed by some to have been places of Christian worship. Adrian died at last a wretched prey to his crimes. As he writhed in agony and rotted away under the violence of a loathsome disease, he called a thousand times upon death to come to his deliverance. But death came slowly to the cruel torturer of Symphorosa and her sons.

As we pass rapidly on down these years of blood, our eye is again arrested, in the time of Marcus Aurelius, by the grand figure of glorious Polycarp, who rises then distinct and clear to our view, as he stands up bravely on his funeral pile above the heads of the Roman rabble, overspanned by his triumphal arch of fire. As the venerable martyr went to his trial, a voice from heaven spoke to him these words: “Courage, Polycarp, quit thyself like a brave man.” And so he did. No one can read without emotion the beautiful, calm answer which the old man gave to the proconsul who ordered him to “blaspheme against Christ.” “It is now eighty-six years,” the aged martyr replied, “that I have served him. How then can I blaspheme against my Lord and Saviour?” His noble words and his heroic death inspired courage in thousands of Christians who afterwards gave their lives for Christ. We learn, also, that during this persecution Christians who had been for some time detained in the prisons were massacred en masse, and that the Rhone flowed all red and ghastly with the blood which countless martyrs had shed on its banks. But the emperor-philosopher felt his impotence to destroy the ever-dying yet ever-multiplying race of Christians. “Vary their torments,” he writes, in his despair, to the governors of the provinces; and then we see the victims of his hatred crucified, burned, or cast to the wild beasts. Modern men of science may rank Marcus Aurelius with philosophers, but we are inclined to believe, with M. Leroy, that it was his infamous cruelty towards the Christians rather than true wisdom which has made them pass over in silence his shameless turpitudes and grant him this proud distinction.

During the raging persecution which Septimius Severus had enkindled against the Christians, we see St. Perpetua going boldly to death, bearing in her arms her new-born child. Her aged pagan father, kneeling in tears at her feet and begging her to sacrifice to the gods, could not deter her from advancing, with firm step and calm look, to meet the wild beasts of the circus. We see Felicitas, Saturninus, Revocatus, and others accompanying her through the savage crowd to the same fate. What a grand procession of heroes—something to look at till our tears flow and our hearts are set on fire! As they advance proudly along, the voice of Satur, one of their number, is heard giving forth those scathing words to the wild crowd that surrounded them: “Look well at us, that you may know us again at the judgment-day.”

Turning our eyes to Alexandria, we find that city a great centre of persecution at this time. There it was that the most intrepid defenders of religion, and the stern, penitential men of the Thebaid, were summoned to crown their noble lives by the heroism of martyrdom. And again is the blood of martyrs flowing like water in the streets of Lyons. St. Irenæus and twenty thousand Christians are immolated in honor of Christ’s name. The work of extermination is continued with unrelenting vigor under the gigantic son of the Thracian peasant. Maximin deals out his blows of death with the power and fury of a Cyclops. But the brave Christian hearts, braced up to noble deeds by the secret indwelling presence of their Lord, do not quail before his terrors. And in the midst of the bloody fray, we hear the soul-inspiring voice of great Origen, calling aloud to his brethren in these words: “Behold, generous athletes, your portion—a tribulation above all tribulations, but yet a hope above all hopes; for the Lord knows how to glorify, by his rewards, those who have thought little of this poor earthen vessel, which death so easily breaks to pieces. I should like to see you, when the combat is at hand, bounding with joy as did the apostles in their day, who rejoiced that they were found worthy to suffer outrages for the name of Jesus. Remember ye the words of Isaiah, ‘Fear not the reproach which comes from men, and let not yourselves be cast down by their contempt.’ Men laugh to-day, and to-morrow they are no more; already the eternal pit swallows them up for ever. When you shall be on the arena of combat, think with Paul that you are a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. If you triumph, Christians will applaud your courage; the heavenly spirits will rejoice at your victory. But if you yield, the powers of hell will shout for joy, and will come forth in myriads from their fiery abyss to meet you. Fight, then, valiantly, and, in imitation of Eleazar, leave behind you, as a remembrance of your death, a noble example of constancy and virtue.”[46] These noble words are worthy of the generous soul and the marvellously gifted mind of the great doctor of Alexandria. They sound forth with a soul-stirring, awakening power, like a trumpet-blast from heaven. And, no doubt, many a trembling heart was nerved into courageous daring by them; many a glorious victory was won under their influence which would otherwise have been lost. And it was in the next persecution under Decius that such powerful, encouraging words were needed. Never yet since the empire began to make bloody war against Christ’s followers had the Christians more need of strength and help; never had they more need than now to picture to themselves the depths of the fiery abyss, and the bright glories of God’s kingdom. Decius came to his bloody work with a resolution to succeed at any cost. His orders went abroad over the empire to all governors and public functionaries, that every conceivable torture was to be used in order to force the Christians to renounce their faith. It was not, then, prompt, quick death that was now the order of the day, but slow, cruel torture. We have a picture of the horrors of this persecution in the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa. “The magistrates,” he says, “suspended all cases, private or public, to apply themselves to the great, the important affair—the arrest and punishment of the faithful. The heated iron chains, the steel claws, the pyre, the sword, the beasts, all the instruments invented by the cruelty of man, lacerated, by night and by day, the bodies of martyrs; and each tormentor seemed to fear that he might not be as barbarous as his fellows. Neighbors, relatives, friends, heartlessly betrayed each other, and denounced Christians before the magistrates. The provinces were in consternation; families were decimated; cities became deserts; and the deserts were peopled. Soon the prisons were insufficient for the multitudes arrested for their faith, and most of the public edifices were converted into prisons.”[47] We find, also, St. Denis of Alexandria speaking in moving language of the persecution which he witnessed in his own city. He tells us that the numbers of the martyrs were past counting. No regard was paid to sex, age, or rank; men, women, children, and old men were tormented with equal cruelty. Every species of torture was employed, and every imaginable cruelty used to increase the horrors of death.[48] Again, at Smyrna, Antioch, Lampsacus, Toulouse, Nîmes, and Marseilles, martyrs died in thousands. In fact, wherever we turn our gaze, we see throughout the length and breadth of the empire the blood of Christians flowing.

During the reign of Valerian the monotonous work of death goes on, but, perhaps, as we advance, the destruction of Christians becomes more wholesale. At Utica the heads of one hundred and fifty followers of Christ fell at once, and at Cirta in Numidia we see an atrocious butchery taking place which lasts the greater part of a day. The martyrs are led into a valley with ranges of hills rising to a great height on both sides, as if to favor the spectacle. They are ranged in line, their eyes bandaged, along the river-side; and the executioner passes on from one to another, striking off their heads.[49] It was, perhaps, a glad sight for the savage idolaters who thronged the high hill-sides to witness the bloody slaughter, but it was a sublime spectacle, too, for the angels of heaven, as they looked down upon those brave soldiers of Christ, and saw them standing in calm, joyful silence by that African river-bank and receiving their bright martyrs’ crowns.

The ages of blood came to an end with the Diocletian persecution. It would be difficult to imagine that anything new in the way of torture could be invented at this date. Ingenuity and malice had already done their worst in the matter of inventions; but Diocletian and his associates brought with them a qualification in which they were surpassed by none of their predecessors, and that was an intense hatred for the Christian religion. Never had the rage and fury of persecutors been greater than was displayed by these “three ferocious wild beasts,” as Lactantius calls them; and never, consequently, did the blood of Christians flow more copiously. Hell was making its last great effort. Though we are accustomed, in traversing these centuries of terrible bloodshed, to read of cruelties which are almost beyond belief, yet we are startled into new horror when we find in this tenth persecution an entire town with its twelve or fifteen thousand inhabitants consumed by fire because it is a town of Christians. Each province has its peculiar species of torture. In Mesopotamia, it is fire; in Pontus, the wheel; in Syria, the gridiron; in Arabia, the hatchet; in Cappadocia, iron bars for breaking limbs; in Africa, hanging; the wooden horse in Gaul, and wild beasts at Rome.[50] Where, we ask, as we gaze over the wide-stretching empire, is not the blood of Christians flowing? Its voice rises heavenwards from the cliffs of Tangiers; it saturates the plains of Mauritania; it springs from wounded combatants on the shores of Tyr; but nowhere over the wide earth is it poured out for God’s glory without his taking count of it. The blood of martyrs will not cry to heaven in vain; God’s day of reckoning with the empire will surely come.

But we can dwell no longer on these ages of heroic sacrifice. Pascal has truly said that “the history of the rest of the Romans pales beside the history of the martyrs.” Whoever wishes to see the full force of this remark, let him read the Acts of the Martyrs, in the history of Eusebius, or the charming pages of Ruinart, or in the ponderous tomes of the Bollandists. Nowhere in Christian literature is there anything so simply and touchingly eloquent. The Acts of the Martyrs constitute a drama whose character is most sublime, and the interest of which is more than ravishing. In order to express our idea more perfectly, we will borrow the words of Mgr. Freppel. “If there be a drama,” he says, “each of whose acts bears a special character, whilst at the same time perfect unity is preserved, it is the Acts of the Martyrs. Here we have a bishop who puts to confusion a proconsul by the calm constancy of his faith; there we have a virgin who mingles with her answers that enthusiasm of love with which her heart is on fire. In another place, we have the Christian mother surrounded by her sons, who confess one after another the simple faith of their infancy, and pass from mouth to mouth the testimony of truth. Again, we have the Christian soldier, who reveres in Cæsar the majesty of power, but who places above all imperial honors the worship of the King of kings. In this magnificent epopee of martyrdom, to which each persecution adds a new song, the scene varies according to time and place; it is the fidelity of love and the grandeur of sacrifice which constitute its unity.”[51] It is there that we have put before us the most beautiful and the most noble characters that have ever done honor to the human race. We find nothing sordid, nothing selfish, nothing haughty in these heroes. They are meek and humble, yet brave and high-souled, and strikingly grand in the face of death. Profane history may ransack its annals, but it will never be able to show us characters so noble and so admirable. Their equals are not to be found in the Lives of Plutarch, nor in the pages of Eutropius. How true is it that the Catholic Church alone is the Mother of Heroes! The heroism of the martyrs was of that kind for which all ordinary theories fail to account. It gave strength to the tottering frames of venerable old men; it made timid virgins courageous in the presence of hideous racks; it spoke by the lisping tongues of frail infants. Let the profane historian point to any scene that can equal in simple grandeur the trial and death of the gentle, sweet St. Agnes, or in heroic endurance the painful, slow martyrdom of the beautiful Agatha, the glory of Sicilian virgins. Let him tell us of anything, either in profane fact or fable, which can equal in purity and strange boldness the beautiful history of Eulalia, the child-saint of twelve summers, whose name is celebrated in touching harmonies by Prudentius as the glory of Merida, the sweet Lusitanian city which stands on the flowery banks of the rapid Guadiana. Let him tell us of anything, even in the fancied facts of strangest romance, that is half as marvellous as the history of St. Cyr, the child-confessor and martyr of three years old, who, when he was taken up into the governor’s embrace to be coaxed into apostasy, lisped out his brave confession, “Christianus sum,” and was dashed to pieces on the steps of the tribunal. Will the profane historian speak of wonderful endurance? We invite him to look at the child Barallah, in his seventh year, who was suspended in the air and scourged before his mother’s eyes, and who, as his blood sprang out on all sides, and his little bones were stripped of their flesh, could be brave and unflinching whilst the rough executioners themselves shed tears of pity. As the blood flowed from his body, the little martyr cried out in the burning heat of his torments, “I am thirsty; give me a little water.” His brave mother reproved him, saying, “Soon, my son, thou wilt be at the source of living waters”; and she carried her child in her arms to the spot where he was to be beheaded, and as his head was severed from his body she received it into her veil. Tell us, profane historian, of great mothers like this. Tell us if your greatest heroes could be so invincible in the midst of suffering as the child-martyrs of the Catholic Church.

The three ages of martyrdom in the church’s history are emphatically the ages of great heroes. No brave man that ever went to death for any other cause went so boldly or was so calm and dignified as the Christian martyr in the presence of the executioner. Never before in the annals of the human race were men known to go to death rejoicing; never before were they seen to smile and be glad when brought in sight of the rack and the gibbet. This perfection of courage and sublime self-possession were seen every day among the martyrs of the church. This it was that amazed the frantic rabble which witnessed their sufferings; it was this that oftentimes enraged the Roman governors so far as to drive them to order the death-blow to be inflicted before the torturers had done their appointed work. The joy with which the martyrs gave their blood for Christ’s holy name is one of the problems which unchristian philosophers have never been able to solve. These so-called thinkers have never been able to comprehend the long, mysterious blood-shedding of those three hundred years. The Christian philosopher alone, with his great Catholic principles of history, can understand that blood-shedding is the mysterious law which characterizes in such a striking manner the great work of the Incarnation. As he gazes into the past, he sees the sacrificial blood flowing in every nation’s worship. Far back in the ages of the patriarchs, he can discern the red stream glistening; and as his eye still gazes, he sees it flowing ever onward, with typical significance, through the centuries, until it meets the God-man’s sacred blood pouring down from the Cross of Calvary. There the typical was merged in the real. He can see, again, how congruous it seems that, after the great sacrifice of the cross had been typified through the proceding ages by an ever-flowing stream of blood, and after Christ had poured out all his own blood on the hill of Calvary, and it had flowed down so copiously on the sinful world, his first followers and disciples should in their turn shed their blood for him. This abundant blood-shedding, this wondrous heroic self-sacrifice, was a testimony which honest men could not withstand, for, as Pascal says, “men believe witnesses who shed their blood.” To die willingly and joyfully for another was something of which the world had not yet heard. Jesus Christ, then, wished to show the mighty power of his doctrine. He would let the world see what wonders his cross could work in the souls of men. He wished to make it manifest to all men’s eyes what courage it could give in the presence of the most terrible racks; how it could so influence the weak and timid as to make them joyful when they were taken to die; how it could be a consolation and an ineffable sweetness in the midst of torments the most painful. All this he did manifest to the world in the most striking light. His martyrs were such characters as the world had not seen before; what was terrible to others was not so to them; when others would shriek with agony, they would smile with joy; when others would languish and faint under the lash and the knife, they could calmly remark with St. Eulalia as she looked at her wounds: “They write your name all over my body, sweet Jesus.” Truly, the cross planted amidst a very sea of blood, generously shed for the love of the Crucified, is the grand central point of all history, which men may look back at, and gaze upon with admiration and ravishment to the end of time.

But, returning to our former point of view, and looking upon these centuries of terrible blood-shedding as the fierce, furious war which the Roman Empire waged against God and his religion, we naturally ask ourselves a question, Where is the great God of the Christians whilst his children are being immolated to pagan savagery throughout the whole earth? Does he from his high heaven take note of what is done? Oh! he who sees the sparrow fall does not lose sight of his children, nor does his eye fail to see the sufferings which they endure for him. The voice of his martyrs rose heavenwards with a mighty cry during those three hundred years. It rose from the saturated floor of the Roman amphitheatre; it spoke with pleading eloquence from the depths of the mines of Numidia; it echoed incessantly in the ear of God from amid the solitudes of Pannonia. God was not at any time deaf to that cry. He was slow in his anger, but, then, on that account he was the more terrible. Whilst Nero was shedding the first Christian blood at Rome, God was silently gathering together his avenging armies in the forests of the north. It took him more than three hundred years to marshal his overwhelming warrior-hosts; but, O heavens! what a direful shaking of the universe when they did come!