From the Dublin Review.

ORIGEN AT CAESAREA.

Origenis Libri contra Celsum (inter Opera omnia). Ed. Migne.1857.

In concluding our survey of the character and work of Origen, it will

be useful to recall the leading dates in the chronology of his life to

the date of his exodus from Alexandria. Born in or about 186, he

became the head of the Catechetical school at the age of eighteen:

About 211 he visited Rome. From that year till 231, he labored at

Alexandria, with no other interruptions than short journeys into

Arabia, to Caesarea, and into Greece. In 231 he left Alexandria never

to return, and thenceforward the chief place of his residence was

Caesarea of Palestine. In the fourth or fifth year of his sojourn

there (235), Maximin's persecution compelled him to flee to Caesarea

of Cappadocia. Returning to the other Caesarea in 238, he remained

there for about eleven years, that is, until the commencement of the

Decian persecution. During these years, however, he made another

journey into Greece, and two more into Arabia. After the cessation of

the persecution he lived a short time in Jerusalem, and thence removed

to Tyre, where he died in 253, or 254, in the sixty-ninth year of his

age. The chief divisions of his life after attaining manhood are

therefore the following:

1. The twenty years (211-231) of his Alexandrian teaching.

2. The twenty years (231-251) of his life at Caesarea.

3. The three or four years from the end of the Decian persecution

(251) till his death (254.)

In our present essay we shall be concerned chiefly with the second of

these periods. It was the time of Origen's most active and dignified

labor. He was now not so much the teacher of disciples as the teacher

of teachers and the doctor of the whole East. The church was, on the

whole, at peace, her numbers were increasing, her organization

developing, and her doctrines becoming daily more and more a subject

of inquiry to intellects, friendly and hostile. We have before taken

notice (Dublin Review, April, 1866, p. 401) how Caesarea was an

important centre, political, literary, and religious; and here Origen

spent the twenty years of which we now speak, in intercourse with such

bishops as S. Alexander, S. Theoctistus, and Firmilian, in training

such pupils as Gregory Thaumaturgus, in preaching such homilies as

those on Isaiah, Ezechiel, and the Canticles, in writing such

apologies as the Contra Celsum, and in carrying through such an

enterprise as the Hexapla. It is to this period that we must refer the

emphatic testimony of S. Vincent of Lerins. "It is impossible," says

he, "to tell how Origen was loved, esteemed, and admired by every one.

All that made any profession of piety hastened to him from the ends of

the world. There was no Christian who did not respect him as a

prophet, no philosopher who did not honor him as a master." The word

piety ([Greek text]) is worth noticing, because something much more

wide and broad was meant by it then than now; indeed, the original

word would be better translated religion or religiousness. The term,

prophet, is also worthy of being remarked; a prophet means one who is

at once teacher of the most exalted class and an ascetic who has

perfectly trampled this world under his feet. Finally, the

philosophers looked to him as their {773} master, though he professed

to teach no philosophy but Christianity, and quoted the Hebrew

scriptures instead of Plato and Aristotle when men came to him with

difficulties about the soul, the logos, and the creator.

In the present article, therefore, we shall be concerned with his

Caesarean life; and as it is impossible to compress within moderate

limits all that might be said of the literary productions of this

exceedingly rich period of his labors, we shall confine ourselves

chiefly to the consideration of the great work Contra Celsum. First,

however, let us take a glance at the events of the twenty years, for

they are not void of events which give us a notion of the man.

Since his principal charge at Caesarea was to preach the Word of God

to the people, perhaps the largest part of his extant writings has

come to consist of the homilies that he delivered in the discharge of

this honorable duty. It was the bishop himself who, as a rule,

preached in the church, and no priest was substituted whose learning

and piety were not beyond all question. We have before quoted the

strong words in which Eusebius has handed down the opinion of Origen

held by S. Theoctistus, bishop of Caesarea. On the Sunday, therefore,

as we learn from himself, on festivals, and sometimes, it would seem,

on Fridays or other week-days, he stood forth from among the clergy

with all the weight of his bishop's mandate and of his own character,

to interpret and comment on the Holy Scriptures. It would be

interesting to be able to picture to ourselves that church at Caesarea

in which the great light of the east spoke, Sunday after Sunday, to

the mingled Greek and barbarian Christians of the capital of

Palestine. It would probably be a building designed and founded for

the purpose. Yet it cannot have been grand or sumptuous, or in any way

resembling. a heathen temple, for Origen himself allows that the

Christians had no "temples." 'What it was inside we can better guess.

We know from Origen's own hints that there existed in it the usual

distinctions of position for the various ranks of faithful and of

clergy that are so well known from writers of a century later. We may

therefore conclude that the chancel or altar part was clearly

separated from the rest of the interior, and perhaps elevated above

it; that the altar itself stood at some distance from the eastern

wall, and that round the apsis behind it ran the [Greek text] or

presbyters' bench. Here, in the centre, stood the chair of the bishop,

and here he sat during the sacred liturgy in the midst of his priests,

all in a semicircle of lofty seats. The deacons and inferior clergy

occupied the rest of the sanctuary, which was separated by a railing

from the nave. In the nave, immediately outside the rails, stood the

_ambo_ or reading-desk, sometimes called the choir, for here clustered

the singers and readers whose place it was to intone the less solemn

parts of the liturgy. Hangings, more or less magnificent, according to

circumstances, suspended above the rails, were closed during the canon

of the mass; and shut out the holies from the sight of the people.

Over the altar was the canopy, on four pillars, and upon the altar a

linen cloth; and the chair of the bishop was usually covered with

suitable drapery. When the bishop preached, he stood or sat forward,

probably in front of the altar, but within the chancel-rails; it was a

very unusual thing to preach from the _ambo_, though S. John

Chrysostom is recorded to have done so in Sancta Sophia, in order to

be better heard by the people. Origen, therefore, would preach from

the sanctuary on the Lord's-day; bishop, priests, clergy, and people,

in their places to hear him; the pontiff in his flat mitre with the

_infulae_ of the high priesthood; the priests in the linen chasubles

that came down and covered them on every side; the deacons and others

in their various tunics and albs; the singers and readers with the

diptychs and books of chant laid {774} ready open on the desk of the

_ambo_; the faithful in the nave, men on one side and women on the

other; the virgins and the widows in their seats apart; the various

orders of penitents in the nave or in the narthex, and the band of

listening catechumens in front of the "royal gates" (of the nave) that

they hoped soon to be allowed to enter. His hearers would be of all

degrees of fervor, and of many different ranks; they might include

Greek philosophers and poor _vernae_ or house slaves, patricians of

Roman burghs, and Syrian porters; doubtless the bulk of them were the

poor and the lowly of Caesarea. He had to say a word to all, and he

found means to say it, in the word of Holy Scripture. He had, by this

time, dispensed himself from previously writing his discourses; and

hence many of those that have come down to us are the shorthand

reports that were taken down as he spoke, and afterward corrected by

himself. The text or subject of the discourse was that portion of

Scripture which had just been recited by the reader, or part of it;

though sometimes we find that he had a text given him by the bishop or

by the presbytery, and that occasionally he selected a particular

subject at the desire of "some of the brethren." He held his own copy

of the Scripture in his hand; for we find him comparing it with the

version just used by the reader. His discourses were not set pieces of

eloquence; they were true homilies, that is, familiar and easy

addresses, almost seeming to have developed themselves out of an

earlier style of dialogue between priest and people. They have all the

abruptness, all the questionings and answerings, all the explanations

of terms and sentences, and all the appreciation of difficulties that

suggest rather the catechist with his class than the preacher with his

auditory. We miss the poetry and fine fancy of Clement, but we gain in

orderly and connected development. One is certainly tempted to think

that more artistic and ornamental treatment might have been expected

from the son of Leonides and the teacher of rhetoric. But Origen tells

us more than once that he studiously avoids worldly and profane

eloquence. His reason seems not far to seek. Rhetoric was the main

profession of the pagan teachers that abounded in every town of the

empire; and S. Augustin's expression, that rhetoric meant the art of

telling lies, was not exaggerated. Rhetoric in those days did not mean

the sound and immortal precepts of Aristotle, but the vain heaping

together of empty words. It was the necessity of protesting against

this that has undoubtedly given much of their ruggedness to the

homilies of Origen. His watchword was, edification; his rule and law,

as he expressly says, was, not completeness of exposition, not parade

of words, but the benefit of those who listened. Because he was a

speaker, he rejected tedious and minute disquisitions, which were more

suitable for "the leisure of a writer." Because he was a speaker of

the truth, he avoided, even to austerity, the imitation of profane and

perverted art. He was rich in matter, and poured forth a stream of

doctrine, of exhortation, of reproof. His name and character did the

rest. A word from Origen had more weight than a treatise from an

unknown mouth. We have no record of how his audience took his

discourses, save what is implied in the general testimony to his

prodigious reputation. But, on the other hand, he presents us with a

few facts about his audience. We learn that some were readier to look

after the adorning of the church than the beautifying of their own

souls. It appears that it was difficult to get an audience together on

common week-days, and that they were somewhat remiss in assembling

even on festivals, though he speaks of a few as "constant attendants"

on the preaching. Those who did come to church, too often came not so

much to hear God's word, as because it was a festival, and because it

was pleasant to have a holiday. And {775} some escaped the sermon

altogether by going out immediately after the reading: "Why do you

complain of not knowing this and not knowing that," he says, "when you

never wait for the conference, and never interrogate your priests?"

Moreover, many who were present at the discourse in body, were far

away in spirit, for "they sat apart in the corners of the Lord's house

and occupied themselves with profane confabulation." He did not preach

to an immaculate audience: there were many who were Christians in

name, Pagans in life; many who turned the house of prayer into a den

of thieves; many who preferred the agora, the law courts, the farm,

before the church; and many who could provide pedagogues, masters,

books, money, and time, that their children might learn the liberal

arts, but who failed to see that something of the same diligence and

sacrifice was necessary on their own parts if they wished to become

true disciples of the word of God. But from all this it would be wrong

to infer that Origen's hearers were worse than others in their

circumstances. Doubtless they listened with reverence both to his

teaching and to his rebukes. Perhaps even they applauded him by

acclamation; such a thing was not unknown a century or so later. It

would be little to Origen's taste to have his audience waving their

garments and rocking their bodies in ecstasy or calling out

"orthodox!" as they did to S. Cyril, of Alexandria, or "Thou art the

thirteenth apostle!" as the excitable Constantinopolitans did to S.

Chrysostom; like S. Jerome, he preferred "to excite the grief of the

people rather than their applause, and his commendation was their

tears." S. Vincent, of Lerins, two centuries after Origen's preaching

at Caesarea, speaks of the way in which his "eloquence" affected

himself. If his audience were as well satisfied, they must have

listened to him with great pleasure and profit. "His discourse," says

S. Vincent, in the Commonitorium, "was pleasant to the fancy, sweet as

milk, to the taste; it seems to me that there issued from his mouth

honey rather than words. Nothing so hard to believe, but his powers of

controversy made it plain; nothing so difficult to practise, but his

persuasiveness rendered it easy. Tell me not that he did nothing but

argue, There has never been a teacher who has used so many examples

out of the Holy Writ." The homilies of Origen did not pass away with

the voice that delivered them. Till he was sixty years old he had

generally written them out beforehand. After that time the shorthand

writers beside him caught every word as it fell, and so the discourses

became a treasury for ever. Fortune and time have indeed destroyed far

the greater part of the "thousand and more tractates" which S. Jerome

says he delivered in the church, and of what remain some only exist in

abbreviated Latin translations. But though their letter is diminished,

their spirit pervades the whole field of patristic exposition, and

many of the greatest of the Greek and Latin fathers have not hesitated

over and over again to use at length the exact words of Origen. And so

the sentences first uttered in the church of Caesarea have become the

public property of the church universal, and while Caesarea is a ruin

and its library scattered to dust, the living word and spirit of him

who spoke there, speaks still in cities far greater, and to auditories

far more wide; for every pulpit utters his thoughts, and Christian

people, though they may not know it, are everywhere "edified" by that

which was first the offspring of' his intellect.

Origen had been laboring at Caesarea for barely four years when one of

those interruptions occurred that he had already become familiar with

at Alexandria. The Emperor Maximin (235), a barbarian giant, whose

unchecked propensities for cruelty and blood seem to have driven him

absolutely mad before the end of his three years' reign, followed up

the murder of his {776} benefactor Alexander Severus by a series of

horrors, in which were involved both pagans and Christians alike. Any

man of name, character, or wealth, in any part of the world that could

be reached by a Roman cohort, was liable to confiscation, torture, and

death in order to appease his frantic suspicions. Caesarea was an

important Roman post, and as no one in Caesarea was better known than

the head of the Christian school, we soon find that Origen is marked

out for a victim. He escaped, however, by a prompt flight, and reached

the other Caesarea, of Cappadocia, the see of his friend Firmilian. He

had no sooner arrived there than the capricious persecution fell upon

the city of his refuge, under the auspices of Serenianus the governor,

"a dire and bitter persecutor," as he is called by Firmilian. In these

straits he managed to lie hid for two years in the house of a lady

called Juliana--a house, indeed, to which he was attracted by other

considerations beside that of safety; for this lady was the heiress of

the whole library of Symmachus the Ebionite, one of those learned

translators of the Hebrew Scriptures whom Origen incorporated in the

Hexapla. He himself mentions with great satisfaction the advantages

which his biblical labors derived from the opportunities he enjoyed in

his Cappadocian retirement. We are also indebted to this period for

two, not the least interesting, of his works. Maximin's informers seem

to have contrived to implicate the good Christian Ambrose in some

trouble. That Ambrose was a man of wealth we have seen, and he was

undoubtedly, also, in some considerable charge or employment which

necessitated his journeying frequently from one Roman city to another.

Whether this persecution caught him at Alexandria or Caesarea, or

elsewhere, is uncertain; but he had received notice of his danger and

was preparing to place himself in security when the insurrection of

the Gordians broke out in Syria and Asia, and in the confusion and

trouble that ensued he became the prisoner of Maximin's troops, and

was immediately sent, or destined to be sent, to Germany, where the

emperor had just concluded a triumphant campaign. The news of the

danger of his zealous friend and patron drew from Origen the letter

that we know now as the Exhortatio ad Martyrium. It was accompanied by

another, the De Oratione, which he had perhaps already composed. These

two works, into an examination of which we cannot enter, show more of

the interior spirit of their writer than anything else that has

reached us. When a history of the early methods of prayer comes to be

written, the treatise on prayer will have to be thoroughly examined.

The Exhortation to Martyrdom is full of the true Adamantine vehemence

and piety. Though addressed to Ambrose, it is really, and would be

accepted as a general call to the Church of Palestine to stand fast

and do manfully in the dangerous times on which they had fallen. The

name of Protectetus, a priest of Caesarea, which is associated with

that of Ambrose in the dedication, as he was also in danger of death,

felicitously localizes it, and we may look upon it as a homily,

delivered in writing and from a distance, and on a new and stirring

subject, to that church which he had been accustomed to edify with his

words during the three or four years preceding. We unwillingly omit to

enter upon it at large. At Maximin's death (238) he returned to his

own Caesarea. After this, his literary enterprises, completed and

undertaken, come thick and frequent. Among other works we meet with

the commentaries on Ezechiel and Isaiah, on S. Matthew and S. Luke, on

Daniel and the twelve minor prophets, and on several of the epistles

of S. Paul. It is to this time also that belongs the celebrated

exposition of the Canticle of Canticles, of which S. Jerome has said,

that whereas in his other works he surpassed all other men, so in this

he surpassed himself. But little of the original has come down to us,

and the translation {777} of Rufinus is too free and abridged to

enable us to understand how this high praise was deserved.

About the same period he made a second journey into Greece. What

occasion brought him to Athens we are not informed. We find, however,

that he thought very highly of the Athenian Church. In his reply to

Celsus, speaking of the influence and weight that Christians were

everywhere acquiring, he instances the Church at Athens, and boasts

that the assembly of the Athenian people was only a tumultuous mob in

comparison with the congregation of the Athenian Christians. Since

Athens was even then the central light of the whole world, we may

perhaps conclude that Origen's journey thither was caused by some

phase of the conflict between Philosophy and the Gospel with which he

had been all his life so familiar. On his return to Caesarea he wrote

the answer to Celsus, with which we shall concern ourselves presently.

It was written during the reign of Philip the Arabian. We are told by

Eusebius that Origen wrote a letter to this emperor. What this letter

can have been about is somewhat of a puzzle in history. Eusebius, to

be sure, a couple of chapters before he mentions the letter, relates a

story, rather coldly, about Philip's coming to the church (at Antioch)

one Easter time as a Christian, and his seating himself among the

penitents when the bishop (S. Babylas) refused to admit him on any

other terms. S. Babylas might well reject him and place him among the

penitents, for his career, which commenced, as that of most of the

Roman emperors, with the murder of his predecessor, the young Gordian,

had been anything but innocent. Certain it is, however, that the story

was current of Philip's being a Christian. Even if he were not, which

seems the more probable, there is no improbability that he may have

questioned such a man as Origen about Christianity. It must be

recollected, moreover, that this Emperor Philip was by birth an

Arabian, being a native of Bostra. He was the son of a robber-chief,

and we are first introduced to him as taking an important part in the

campaign of Gordian in which the Persians were driven out of

Mesopotamia. The important Roman city of Bostra, though not within the

boundaries of Arabia, was sufficiently near them to be considered the

metropolis of the upper part of Arabia, as Petra was of the middle.

Philip, therefore, was evidently nothing more than a powerful Bedouin

Sheik, such as may be seen at this very day in the countries of which

he was a native, and had succeeded his father in the possession of

wide influence over the predatory tribes that ranged over all

Palestine, Syria, and Arabia, except the actual spots occupied by a

Roman military force. His character is significantly illustrated by

the incident that raised him to the purple. When Gordian's army was in

Mesopotamia, his dangerous captain of Free Lances took care to have

the whole of the commissariat supplies intercepted, and thus caused

the mutiny which, terminated in Gordian's death. Such a feat was easy

and natural to a chief whose wild horsemen commanded every part of the

great Syrian desert that lay between Mesopotamia and the Roman

stations off the Mediterranean coast. But what is more to our purpose

is, that Origen was frequently at Bostra, and was there at the very

time of Gordian's campaign and Philip's accession. Bearing in mind the

extent to which the name of Origen was known among the pagan men of

letters, as well as among the Christian churches, it seems impossible

but that Philip must have heard him mentioned. Only let us grant that

the emperor had a leaning to Christianity, even though in no better

spirit than that of an eclectic, and the occasion of Origen's letter

becomes clear. The mention of the Syrian desert reminds us of another

celebrated name. Palmyra, or Tadmor of the Wilderness, was, at the

time of which we write, almost in the zenith of her beauty, though it

was not till {778} twenty years afterward that her splendor culminated

and collapsed under Zenobia and Longinus. Origen knew the great

philosopher, who had been his auditor at Alexandria, and whom he had

most probably met again at Athens. It is quite possible that Longinus

may have become the guest of Zenobia before Origen left Caesarea for

the last time, and, therefore, during the time he was so familiar with

the Arabian Church. We know that he had more than a mere acquaintance

with the author of the Treatise on the Sublime, and, perhaps, there

were no two minds of the age more fitted to grapple with each other.

Of their mutual influence we have no certain traces, but it may be

noted that amongst the lost works of Longinus there is a treatise,

[Greek text]. Can it have had any relation to that of Origen under the

same name?

It was at Caesarea, between the years 243 and the breaking out of the

Decian persecution in 249, that was written the famous Contra Celsum.

It is justly considered the masterpiece of its author. Ostensibly an

answer to the gainsayings of a heathen philosopher, it really takes

up, with the calmest scientific precision, the position that

Christianity is so true and hangs together with such completeness of

moral beauty, that the barkings of Gentile learning cannot confute it,

nor the violence of Gentile hatred stop its inevitable march. With no

rhetorical passion, with profound learning, with a knowledge of Holy

Scripture truly worthy of Adamantins, with frequent passages of noble

and profound eloquence, the Christian doctor builds up the monument of

the faith he loved and taught; and the work that has come down to us

through all those ages since it was written, has been recognized for

fifteen hundred years as one of those great, complete, finished

productions that are only given to the world by the pen of a genius.

Eusebius, his biographer, speaks of it as containing the refutation of

all that has been asserted, and, "by pre-occupation," of all that

could ever be asserted on certain vital matters of controversy. S.

Basil and S. Gregory Nazianzen strung together a series of favorite

passages mainly from it and called their work Philocalia, "love for

the beautiful." S. Jerome, whose praise cannot be suspected of

partiality, puts him by the side of two other great apologists his

successors, and exclaims that to read them makes him think himself the

merest tyro, and shrivels up all his learning to a sort of a dreamy

remembrance of what he was taught as a boy. Bishop Bull takes the

Contra Celsum as the touchstone of Origen's dogmatic teaching; "he

meant it for the public," he says, "he wrote it thoughtfully and of

set purpose, and he wrote it when he was more than sixty years of age,

full of knowledge and experience."

It must have been about the time when Marcus Aurelius was engaged in

persecuting the church (160-180) that a certain eclectic Platonist

philosopher called Celsus, in order to contribute his share to the

good work, wrote an uncompromising attack on Christianity, and called

it by the title of The True Word; or, The Word of Truth. We have

called him an eclectic Platonist; but, in fact, it is very much

disputed among the learned what sect of philosophers he honored with

his allegiance. Some call him a Stoic, others an Epicurean, and this

latter opinion is the common traditional one; and what would seem to

settle the question, Epicurean is the epithet given to him by Origen

himself. That Origen, when he took up The Word of' Truth to refute it,

thought he was going to refute an Epicurean, is quite evident; but it

is no less evident that he had not read many sentences of the work

itself before he began to doubt and more than doubt whether the name

of Epicurean was a true description of its author. In one place he is

amazed to hear "an Epicurean say such things," in another he charges

him with artfully concealing his Epicurism for a purpose, and in a

third he {779} supposes that if he ever was an Epicurean he has

renounced its tenets and betaken himself to something more sound and

sensible. What made Origen hesitate to state plainly that he was no

follower of Epicurus seems to have been the broad tradition that had

attached the epithet to the name of Celsus, thereby identifying the

writer of The Word of Truth with the writer of a certain work against

magic, well known to literary men, which was beyond all doubt from the

pen of an Epicurean Celsus. This latter was also probably the same as

the Celsus to whom the scoffer Lucian dedicated his Alexander, in

which he shows up that impostor's tricks and sham magic; and Lucian,

in his dedication, alludes to the works against magic, just as Origen

does. As Lucian died some years before Origen was born, the works

against magic must have been very widely known, and their author must

have been accepted as _the_ Celsus, and as he was certainly an

Epicurean, that designation fastened itself also upon the other

Celsus, the author of The Word of Truth, who had not had the advantage

of an admiring Lucian to fix his proper title in the memory of the

literary world. But an Epicurean he certainly was not. One proof is

quite sufficient. The subject of magic was a decisive test of a true

Epicurean. Not believing in Providence and professing, in fact, a sort

of philosophic atheism, he considered that gods and demons never

interfered in the concerns of the earth and the human race. Human and

mundane atoms, as they got created by a species of accident and came

together fortuitously, so they continued to blunder against each other

in various ways, and thus caused what men foolishly called the cosmos,

or order of the universe; whilst the divine nature of the immortals,

serene on Olympus

Semotá a nostris rebus, sejunctaque longè,

Jam privata dolore omni, privata periclis,

Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri,

Nec benè pro meritis capitur nec tangitur irâ.

Lucretius, de Rerum Naturtâ, I. 50.

The Epicurian, therefore, laughed alike at the notion of benevolent

god and malignant demon, at providence and at magic, and crowned

himself with flowers and drank and sinned, if his means allowed it,

under the soothing persuasion that "to-morrow" he was "to die." When,

therefore, we find that the author of The Word of Truth not only

attributes miracles to AEsculapius, Aristeas, and others, and magic to

Christ, but also considers that this world and its various parts are

committed to the custody of demons, whom it is, therefore, proper to

propitate by worship and sacrifice, we need no other evidence that he

was no follower of Epicurus.

On the other hand, a prominent belief in the agencies of unseen powers

was a mark of the Platonist of the day. Whatever Plato may have

thought of the inferior gods and demons (and on some occasions, as in

the Timaeus, he speaks of them with considerable levity), the

followers, who revived his doctrine in the first centuries after

Christ, gave them a very large share of their attention. A creator or

first father of all things was a Platonic dogma, and man and matter

must have in some way come from him; but in order to bridge over the

interval between two such extremes as God and matter, recourse was had

to an immense army of intermediate beings, of which the highest was so

dignified as to be little more than an abstraction, and the lowest

shaded off into a species of superior animal. It is this, multitude of

good and bad demons that makes its appearance in modified shape and

number in Platonist and Gnostic cosmogonies, and which is so puzzling

to follow through all its fantastic intermarriages and combinations.

When Celsus must have been writing, that is, about the time S. Clement

of Alexandria began to teach, the spirit of Plato was abroad, not only

at Alexandria but at Athens and in Rome. Theurgy was openly professed

by the most reputable teachers; their enemies called it sorcery; but

whatever it was, it meant some intimate communion with {780} the

invisible world. A writer; therefore, who puts the moon and stars

under the guardianship of heavenly powers, who pathetically defends

the case of the demons and deprecates their being deprived of the

gratification they derive from the "smell" of a sacrifice, and who

attributes supernatural powers to friends and enemies--calling them in

the one ease miracles, in the latter, magic--is evidently closer to

Saceas and Porphyry than to Epicurus and Democritus. Celsus, however,

though he says all this, cannot be called a real Platonist or

Neo-Platonist. He came in the early days of a revival, and his

philosophic pallium hung rather loosely about him; he was not above

following a new leader on an occasion, provided he saw his way to a

new stroke against the Christians. It must be admitted that he shows a

fair share or learning, some acuteness, and some acquaintance with a

variety of different peoples and customs. On the other hand, he is

occasionally guilty of the most absurd and transparent sophisms, his

conceit is unbounded, and his tone generally sneering and often very

offensive.

It was this philosopher then, Eclectic, Platonist, and man of the

world, whose Word of Truth seemed to the pious and indefatigable

Ambrose to be so dangerous and damaging that no time ought to be lost

in answering it. With this view, he attacked Origen on the subject,

and by dint of prayers and representations made him take in hand its

refutation. Origen was by no means eager to undertake the work; and we

can partly enter into his objections. The book of Celsus was not a new

one: it had been in the hands of the reading world and in the centres

of learning, such as Athens, Antioch, Caesarea, and Alexandria, for at

least sixty years, and it is to be supposed that answers to its most

important objections were common enough in the Christian schools,

though, perhaps it was itself ignored. Then, it was not the sort of

book that could do the faithful any harm, for they could not read it,

or, if they did, they distrusted it even where they could not refute

it. It was too late in the day for an open-mouthed pagan to have any

chance against the gospel of Christ. The dangerous people were those

who, like the heretics, came with the elements of this world disguised

under the sheep's clothing of Christianity; but an honest wolf only

lost his trouble; and so Origen, whilst promising to comply with the

wishes of his friend, plainly says that what he has undertaken to

overthrow, he cannot conceive as having the least effect in shaking

the orthodoxy of a single faithful man. "That man," he says, "would be

little to my taste, whose faith would be in danger of shipwreck from

the words of this Celsus, who has not now even the advantage of being

alive; and I do not know what I should think of one who required a

book to be written before he could meet his accusations. And, yet,

because there might possibly be some professing believers who find

Celsus's writings a stumbling-block, and would be proportionally

comforted by anything in the shape of a writing that undertook to

crush him, I have resolved to take in hand the refutation of the work

you have sent me." The expressions, "a book to be written,"

"writings," and "hand-writing," are noticeable, for they show clearly

enough, what has not been much observed, that Origen's chief objection

to answering Celsus was that Celsus was already answered in the oral

teachings of the church. In this also we have the explanation of the

contempt in which he seems to hold his antagonist--a temper which is

seldom advisable either in war or polemics. But Celsus had been, and

was daily being answered, and the only question was, whether it was

worth while to put formally on paper what every Christian catechist

had by heart. Was it not better to imitate the majestic silence of

Jesus Christ, who spoke no word, but let his life speak for him? "I

dare affirm," he says, "that the defence you ask me to write will be

swamped and disappear before that other defence of {781} facts and the

power of Jesus, which none but the blind can fail to see." And he

adds, that it is not for the faithful he writes, but for those who

have not tasted the faith of Christ, or for those weak believers who,

in the apostle's phrase, must be kindly taken up.

And yet Ambrose seems to have been quite right in insisting that

Origen should answer the book of Celsus. Its arguments might be stale,

and its influence small, but there it was, a formal written record of

some of the ugliest things that could be said against Christianity and

its founder. What seemed more becoming, than that the foremost

Christian doctor of his day should take in hand, at a time when

external peace and internal growth seemed to warrant it, to give a

formal, written answer to an attack that was a standing piece of

impertinence, even if it did no harm? Besides, some harm it must have

done, at least in the shape of keeping well-meaning pagans from the

truth; and though Origen is always more fond of working for the

spiritual welfare of his own household than of direct proselytizing,

yet Ambrose, as a convert, knew what prejudice was, and what was the

importance of a work from the pen of a Christian doctor who had the

ear of the Gentile world. And Ambrose, moreover, was perfectly aware,

as was everyone except the Adamantine himself, that even if the

refutation embraced only the common topics that were handled daily in

the Christian instructions, yet the result would be as far above the

ordinary catechetical lesson as the master was above the ordinary

catechist. Perhaps he hardly knew, as we know, that his instances

would produce a master-piece of polemical writing, from which all ages

have borrowed, and in which the immense knowledge of Scripture, the

beautiful and tender piety, and the sustained eloquence of expression

were unrivalled until, perhaps, Bossuet wrote his Histoire

Universelle.

It is by no means our intention to give a detailed analysis of this

wonderful work: it is described at great length in easily accessible

authors. But it will be interesting to seize on some of its most

salient characters, and thus to throw what light may be possible upon

the subject of our discussion. And the first remark that occurs seems

to be a contradiction of Origen's own statement. The Contra Celsum was

written more for the faithful than for the philosophers, and was less

aimed at the dead and gone Celsus than at the living children of the

church. It may be true that it was not meant precisely to confirm

tottering faith or to prop up consciences that the objections of

Celsus had shaken; but its effect would naturally be to encourage the

devout Christian by showing him how much could be said for his

profession, and exposing to scorn with irresistible logic the best

that could be said by his gainsayers. If Origen had not had in view

the same audience as that to which he preached on Sundays and Fridays,

he would hardly have dealt so abundantly in the citations from Holy

Scripture which are such a marked. feature of the work, and he would

not have cared to expand as he does the bare polemical branch into the

flowers and fruit of homiletic exhortation. But the faithful were

always his first thought, and the ground-color of all he has written

is warm and outspoken piety. He knew much about pagan philosophy and

worldly science, but when Porphyry (quoted by Eusebius) says that

Plato was never out of his hands, we can only say that Plato is never

mentioned in his writings save where an adversary or an error-compels

him. A far truer picture of himself is given in his own words to his

favorite pupil, Gregory Thaumaturgus. "You have talents," he says,

"that might make you a perfect Roman lawyer, or a leader of any of the

fashionable sects of Greek philosophy; but the wish of my heart is,

dear lord and my most honored son Gregory, that you make Christianity

your last end" ([Greek text]--alluding to the _summum bonum_ of the

stoics), "and that you {782} use Greek philosophy and all its

attendant sciences as handmaids to the Holy Scriptures, and as the

means ([Greek text],) toward Christianity." This was written, of

course, long after Gregory had become a Christian, and, indeed, about

the very time that the Contra Celsum would be in progress. Not a

little, therefore, in the work which would seem to beg the question,

as against an enemy, becomes an eloquent development, as toward those

who already believed. And this remark will be found not unimportant in

explaining more passages than one.

The attack of Celsus is that of a clever, well-informed, travelled

man. It is to be feared that we cannot call him a well-meaning one.

The extra-ordinary impudence of one or two of the leading sophisms and

a general tone of rancor and rabidness, very different from the

politeness of Numenius and Porphyry, seem to force the conclusion that

we are dealing with a man who ought to have known better but whose

heart had been hardened by the world and the flesh. He goes over a

large variety of topics, is not at all remarkable for order (as his

opponent complains), and repeats himself more than once. Several

German writers have published accurate accounts of his philosophic

tenets, as far as they can be ascertained. For the present, in order

to arrive at some definite knowledge of the sort of people who opposed

Christianity from the time of S. Clement to the Decian persecution, we

shall present Celsus in a few of the chief characters that he assumes

in his onslaught on Christianity. For he is very many-sided in his

anxiety to get at all the vulnerable points of his enemy, and perhaps

it might be said that his memory is not so good as a polemic's memory

ought to be, and that he contradicts himself once or twice. At any

rate he acts with some success more parts than one.

The Scoffer was a character in which Celsus had the advantage of a few

recent traditions. Perhaps the thorough pagan scoffer, who really

laughed at Christianity because he believed it deserved to be laughed

at, was rather out of date. But Lucian (and he may have known Lucian)

could have let him see how a man of genius may scoff impartially at

religion in all its shapes. Celsus was not a scoffer of this latter

sort. Either he was really too conscientious, or else he instinctively

hated Christ more than Zeus, and therefore tried to ridicule and crush

the former, while he waived hostilities against the latter. The

scoffer, as impersonated by him, is a decent, lawfearing citizen, who

is quietly engaged in doing his duty to society and making what he can

out of the queer problem called Life, when suddenly a man that calls

himself a Christian bursts in upon his calm existence with the

intelligence that he must believe in a person called Christ, or expect

to burn everlastingly. Of course, the first thing the amazed Gentile

does is to think the man mad. His second, and more charitable idea,

which is the result of some little inquiry and of a comparison of

notes with other amazed acquaintances at the bath and the theatre, is,

that the obtrusive person is an adherent of a new and peculiar sect of

philosophers. He, therefore, resolves to examine the tenets of these

philosophers with the serene impartiality of one who sets small store

by any tenets of philosophy. He finds that their doctrines are not

new, but most of them quite old--the immortality of the soul and a

future life, a rather strait-laced verbal morality, and so on; ideas

which many respectable philosophers have held, and do hold. But is

there any reason in the world for making such a parade, and noise,

merely because another philosopher, called Christ, has chosen to teach

them also? How impertinent, absurd, and unpleasant it is for these

people, instead of keeping their doctrines to the schools, to force

them with threats upon practical men! Of course, practical men and

good citizens do not regard them. If the gods do interfere in the

concerns of the earth {783} (a doctrine which Celsus, in his character

of scoffer, is inclined to waive rather than to admit), why all this

indispensable dogmatism about a Son of God? Let it be enough that we

do admit that there is a God, who in some way is supreme; as sensible

people you can demand nothing more. We call him Zeus; you call him the

Most High, Sabaoth, Adonai, or what else you please, just as the

Egyptians call him Ammon, and the Scythians, Pappaeus. Doubtless you

talk of miracles; so do all these new-fangled sects, but they mean in

reality Egyptian magic. You appeal, moreover, to your intellectual

teaching; we know about that also: no sect is good for much in these

days which does not hang on to the skirts of Plato. Besides, what is

this we hear about disputes among yourselves? This makes the absurdity

of the thing better still! The Jews say the Messiah is to come; the

Christians declare he has come. Pray, which are we to believe? On what

side are we solemnly to arrange ourselves in this momentous dispute

about a donkey's shadow? Why, here we have a squadron of bats--or an

army of ants swarming from their nest--or a congress of frogs in

solemn session on the banks of their ditch--or a knot of worms

assembled in full ecclesia in a corner of their native mud, in hot

controversy which of the lot are the wickedest. We are the ones, they

keep saying, to whom God has foreshown and announced all things; he

has left the whole universe, the broad heavens, and the earth, to look

after themselves, and makes his laws for us alone; to us alone he

sends his heralds, and us he will never cease to prompt and to provide

for, that we may be united with him for ever. He is God; and we are

next to him, as being his sons and like him in all things. We are

lords of all things, earth, water, air, and stars; on our account is

everything, and all is ordained to minister to us. If some of us sin,

God will come, or he will send the Son, to burn up the wicked, that

the rest may live with him eternally. One could listen to worms and

frogs going on in this fashion with more composure than to you Jews

and Christians.

It is not Origen's object to prove directly the importance of

Christianity. He says that it was no barbarous system of doctrine, and

challenges any philosopher, fresh from the teachings and the schools

of Greece, to come and examine it. "He will not only pronounce it

true," he says, "but he will work it up into a logical system, and

will be able to supply it with a complete demonstration, even to a

Greek. But I must also add this: our doctrine has a certain method of

demonstration peculiar to itself, and far more divine than any that

the Greeks have in their schools. It is that which the apostle calls

the demonstration of spirit and of power; of spirit, that is, by

prophecies, which abundantly prove our whole system, especially those

parts of it which concern Christ; of power, by the miracles which can

be shown to have taken place among us, and traces of which still

remain among those who live according to the will of the Word." And as

Christianity was now well known to the whole world, to scoff at it

either for its insignificance or its absurdity seemed very foolish: it

was a standing fact, and challenged examination. This is partly taken

for granted partly incidentally expressed throughout the reply. But

the impudent scurrility of the passage about the bats, frogs, and

worms, rouses Origen's indignation. "The Jews and the Christians," he

says, "because they hold dogmas which Celsus does not approve, and

which he does not seem to be very well acquainted with, are worms and

ants, are they? The peculiar opinions in which the Jews and Christians

differ from other men, are not unknown to the world. If a man,

therefore, feels inclined to call a part of his fellow-men worms and

ants, I will show him whom to call so. The men who have lost the true

knowledge of God, whose religion is all a sham--the worshipping {784}

brute beasts and graven stocks, and lifeless matter--creatures whose

beauty should have led them to glorify and adore their Creator--these

are the worms and ants. But those who, led on by reason, have risen

above stocks and stones, above silver and gold, and everything

material; who have risen above this whole created universe unto him

that made all things; who have confided themselves wholly to him; who

recognize him almighty over every creature, seeing every thought and

hearing every prayer; who send up their prayers to him only, doing all

that they do as though he saw it, and speaking all their words that

none may be displeasing to him who heareth them all--these, surely,

are _men_; nay, if it were possible, more than men. They may have,

been worms once, but shall not such religion ([Greek text]) as this,

that no trials can shake, no danger, not even death itself, destroy,

no persuasiveness of words overcome, be their shelter against such

jibes for the future? What! shall they who restrain the appetites that

make men soft and yielding as wax--and restrain them because they know

that by continence alone they can obtain familiarity with God

[Footnote 208]--shall they be called the brothers of worms and the

kindred of ants and the near neighbors of frogs? Forbid it Justice!

glorious Justice, that gives social rights to fellow-men, that guards

the equitable, the humane, and the kind--forbid that such men as these

should be likened to birds of night! Call those worms of the slime,

who wallow in lust--the common herd of men, who do evil and call it

right--but surely not those who have been taught that their bodies,

inhabited by the light of reason and the grace of the omnipotent Lord,

are the temples of the God whom they adore.'" It is a subject that

warms him, and he pursues it at some length. He does not imitate the

scurrility and abusiveness of his adversary, though he must have been

sorely tempted sometimes, to say some plain things about paganism.

Celsus shows all the liveliness of language of a man who carries on a

personal quarrel. He is not above calling his enemies "drunken" and

"blear-eyed;" he hardly takes the trouble to mention that they are

irrational fools; and for a specimen of his more fanciful bad language

the passage quoted above will suffice. Origen sometimes complains of

this, as well he may. He says that Celsus "scolds like an old woman,"

that he shouts calumny like the lowest of a street-mob, and, as a sort

of climax, that he reminds him of a couple of "women slanging each

other in the street." But the scoffer and the reviler is after all not

our philosopher's favorite _rôle_. Perhaps he will show better as the

man of intellect.

[Footnote 208: The expression of the contemporary Platonists.]

The man of intellect has a face of severely classic mould, whereon

sits normally a thoughtful frown, as though he were ever asking

himself the reason of things, varied by a pitying smile when he finds

it necessary to recognize the existence of a non-intellectual being.

His hands are very white, his pallium neat, his hair scented, and his

whole appearance bespeaks him to be on the most distant terms with the

profane multitude. When Christianity first had the bad taste to talk

to him of penance and hell-fire, he did not deign to speak, but only

scowled disgust; but in a century or two he began to see he must say

something for his own credit. He therefore began to utter lofty

sentences and to employ his smile of pity, though the early look of

disgust was so very deeply printed on his countenance that it never

afterward left him. This is the sum of his case:--"This foolish system

called Christianity makes some little noise, it is true. But a

philosopher has only to glance at it, to despise it. I have read and

examined the books and writings of the sect; I have conversed with its

learned men, and I find that it is essentially low, grovelling, and

vulgar. It repudiates wisdom altogether; it formally forbids the

educated, the learned, and the wise to be numbered among its {785}

members. On the other hand, it energetically recruits its ranks from

among the uneducated, the weak-headed, and the imbecile. These are the

sort of men the Christian teachers declare to be most acceptable to

their God, thus showing clearly that they have neither the ability nor

the wish to make converts of any but the feeble-minded, common people,

and country boors, slaves, women, and children. They are wary; they

are like the quacks and cheap-jacks of the agora, who take care not to

obtrude themselves upon those who could find them out, but show off

before the children in the streets and the loitering house-slaves and

an admiring mob of any fools they can collect. They are mean and

underhand. You shall see, in a private house, your slave, your weaver,

your sandal-maker, or your cloth-carder--a fellow wholly without

education or manners, and silent enough before his master and his

betters--the moment he finds himself alone with the children and the

women, beginning to hold forth in marvellous style. Parents and

preceptors are no longer to be obeyed, but he is to be believed

implicitly; they are mad and doting, immersed in fatuous trifles, and

incapable of seeing or doing what is really good, he alone can impart

the secret of virtue; let the children believe him, and they will be

happy themselves and bring a blessing on the house. Meanwhile, let

father or tutor make his appearance, he mostly gets frightened and

stops; but if he be a determined one, he just whispers in parting,

that children of spirit should not submit to parental tyranny; that he

has much to explain which the presence of others will not allow him to

utter; that he cannot bear the sight of the folly and ignorance of

such corrupted and lost men, who moreover are seeking every pretext

for punishing him; finally, that if the dear children want to hear

more, they must come, with the women and as many of their companions

as they know of, into the women's apartment, or into the carding-room

or the leather-shop--and so he contrives to get hold of them."

Perhaps there was nothing in Christianity that disgusted the

philosophers so much as the fact that it went out after the poor, the

lowly, and the sinful, and offered them a share in all that it could

teach or promise. That the common herd had no need and no right to

philosophy was an accepted tenet with the new Platonists. The passage

just quoted is interesting; through its transparent misrepresentation

we can see the poor man and the slave, in the second century, in the

actual process not only of having the gospel preached to them, but

also actively preaching it as well as they could to others. The

sophism of Celsus, that Christians prefer fools and sinners for

converts, therefore they must be all a foolish and wicked set, must

have been stale, we may hope, by the time Origen undertook to answer

it. He enters into the whole accusation, however, and refutes, almost

word for word, the whole of what we have just given and more to the

same purpose.

But the intellectual objector has something positive to say, as well

as something negative. He announces, therefore, with almost ridiculous

solemnity, that he will have pity on these poor Christians, and tell

them how they are to obtain union with God, what masters they are to

follow, and what heroes they are to imitate; in short, he will provide

them with a theology, a gospel, and an assemblage of saints. For the

saints, they are our grand Grecian heroes--Hercules, Orpheus,

AEsculapius, and the rest, from Anaxarchus, who encouraged the tyrant

who was having him bruised in a mortar to "pound away on the mortal

coil of Anaxarchus," to Epictetus, who made a cheerful remark when his

master broke his leg. For the gospel, it is the most powerful teaching

of the divine and immortal Plato; and for the theology, it is the

following sentence from the Timaeus: "To discover the maker and the

father of the universe is a hard {786} thing; to make them known to

others, when discovered, is impossible." This last doctrine he is

afraid the wretched Christians will not be able to take in. They are

such a poor frightened set that the sublimity of Platonic dictum

scares them into their holes; they are such a body-loving race that

they must have a God with a body, and be able to see him with the eyes

of their flesh, which all philosophers pronounce to be impossible.

Origen, in his reply, first of all disposes of these two sneers: "The

Christians a timid set! when, rather than renounce a syllable of their

Christianity, they are prepared to suffer torture and death in its

worst shapes! The Christians a body-loving race! when they are readier

to lay down their bodies for piety's sake than a philosopher is to put

off his pallium! and when the injunction to be dead to sense and

living to soul lies upon the very surface of their teaching! But let

it pass. We must speak to Plato's theology." Here is the answer, as

terse as an epigram, as luminous as the sunlight. "Plato, when he said

God was hard to find, impossible to impart, said a sublime and a

wonderful thing; but our Scriptures give a message from God to man

that changes all the facts, and it is this: God the Word was with God

in the beginning, and the _Word was made flesh_. It is not only hard

for man to find God; it is impossible for him to seek him at all, or

to find him in an elevated order ([Greek text]) unless he whom he

seeks assist him. The knowledge of God is indeed far above man's

nature; but God, out of his kindness and _philanthropy_" (Origen's

usual expression when speaking of the incarnation), "through his

wonderful and godlike grace, has willed that his knowledge appear unto

those whom he foresees will live worthily of it, and whose piety will

be firm even against death itself, though they who know not what piety

is may jeer and ridicule. God, I think, seeing the arrogance and the

insolence of those who, with all their boasted philosophical knowledge

of the divine nature, are idol-ridden and temple-ridden and

mystery-ridden as much as the most ignorant of the mob, has chosen the

foolish things of this world, the poor, simple Christians, whose life

is purer than the lives of most philosophers, to put to the blush

those wise men who can unblushingly treat a lifeless thing as a god or

the likeness of a god. Surely the man of sense must laugh to see the

philosopher, after all his sublime talk about God and things divine,

go and ogle his idol and pray to it, or think there is some being

behind it that requires prayer to be offered up with such a ritual as

that. But the Christian knows that God is everywhere; no image limits

his vision, no temple bounds his power, for the whole world is his

temple; and his servant, therefore, shutting the eyes of his body,

raising on high the eyes of his soul--transcending all this world,

piercing the concave of heaven itself, out of the world and above the

heavens--makes his prayer to God: no sordid or grovelling prayer, for

he has learnt from Jesus to ask for nothing little or sensible, but he

prays only for what is great and really divine--for such things as

lead to that blessedness which is in him, through his son, the Word,

who is God." He has no wish to disparage Plato; Plato has spoken very

beautifully, but the Christian Scriptures have not only beauty; but

they have, what is much more important, plain morality and the divine

virtue of changing the heart. The "ambassadors of the truth" propose

to themselves to convert the whole world, the clever and the dull, the

Greek and the barbarian; not a rustic, not a poor unlettered simpleton

will they consent to abandon. Of what use is Plato in such a work as

this? His brilliant and polished periods may possibly be of use to the

few literary men that can understand them; but in the art of

attracting the attention of the rude populace he is outdone even by

Epictetus. But the Scripture has something in it that not even

Epictetus can show. Its doctrines may possibly in certain cases seem

to repeat the teachings of Grecian philosophy; but {787} it has the

power of making men act on those doctrines, which never a Greek

philosopher yet could boast of. And now as to the heroes and

philosophers, the fathers and saints of paganism. "Let us see what

leaders Celsus wishes us to follow, to the end that we may not be

without ancient and reverend models of heroism. He sends us to

God-imbued poets, as he calls them, the sages, and the philosophers,

whom he indicates in a general way, without naming particular names.

He sends us, also, to Hercules, AEsculapius, and the rest, to learn

heroism from their brave contempt of death, not unfittingly rewarded

by the myth that has deified them. Where he does not mention names it

is hard to refute him. Had he named his divine poet or sage, I should

have tried to show him to be a blind guide; but since he has not done

so, I must content myself with appealing to what everyone knows of the

divine poets as a body, and asking whether they can be compared for a

moment to Moses, for instance; to the prophets of the creator of all

things; above all, to him who has shone forth on all the race of man,

and announced to all the true way in which God would be served; who,

as far as lay in him, has willed that none should be ignorant of his

secret teachings, but, in his super-abounding philanthropy, has both

given to the learned a _theology_ that can raise their souls above all

things here below, and yet at the same time condescends to the weak

intellect of the untaught man, of the simple woman, and the household

slave--himself assisting them to lead a better life, each in his

degree, according to the teachings about God that _every one of them_

has been enabled to share. He mentions Hercules. Has he forgotten the

ugly story about that hero's base servitude to Omphale. It would take

some persuading to make us pay divine honors to the ruffian that

seized the poor farmer's ox by main force, and devoured it before his

eyes, whilst the owner cursed him, and he seemed to enjoy the curses

as much as the meal itself; whence is derived the edifying custom of

accompanying his sacrifices by a rite of powerful execrations. He

mentions AEsculapius. I have already dealt with AEsculapius: he was a

clever doctor, but he did nothing very extraordinary. He puts up

Orpheus. Of course, Celsus is aware that Orpheus wrote about the gods

far more impiously and fabulously than Homer ever did. Now, he

considers, with Plato, that Homer's poems are unfit to be permitted in

the model republic; so that it is perfectly evident that he introduces

Orpheus here for the sole purpose of defaming us and disparaging

Jesus. Poor Anaxarchus in his mortar undoubtedly affords a great

example of fortitude; but as this happens to be the solitary fact that

is known about Anaxarchus, it would be difficult to make him a model

hero and absurd to make him a god. Then, as to Epictetus: there is no

need of depreciating him; it is enough to say, that his words and

deeds are not worthy of the most distant comparison with the words and

deeds of one whom Celsus despises; for the sayings of Jesus _convert_

the wise and the simple. Celsus asks: 'What did your God say in his

sufferings, like to this?' I answer that his patience and his bravery

in his scourgings and his thousand ignominies were better shown by his

_silence_ than by any word ever uttered by suffering Greek. But he did

speak." And then he touches on some of the words of Jesus in his

agony. It is to us like a new revelation of the gospel, like a new

Epiphany, to read the comparison of the life of Jesus with the lives

of the best and noblest of antiquity. It brings vividly to our

imagination the brilliancy of the dawn of that day of Christ Jesus

(into whose light we are baptized, and in which we live with little

appreciation), when we can call back again the shades of paganism, and

watch the gross darkness as it lifts and moves slowly off before the

sun of justice. We can realize something of the feelings of earnest

hearts as they came within the reach of that light, and share a little

in the {788} excitement of a conflict wherein the victor overcame,

not, like Perseus, by displaying the horrors of a Gorgon's head, but

by unveiling, philosophically, artistically, enthusiastically, the

charms of a "theology" upon whose beauty and truth there were no

drawbacks, and in whose abysses of gladdening hope there were resting

places for every want and wish of a human heart. Origen lets the light

in upon the poor heroes and purblind sages of a Cimmerian night, and

he forgets the scoffings of wretched philosophy, as he expiates on the

love, the kindness, the philanthropy, the condescending grace of the

Word, who is God. We cannot follow him far. The intellectual objector

has much to say about the unreasonableness of faith; and the Christian

doctor vindicates scientific theology, whilst he shows how the crowd

of men must simply believe or be without any teaching whatever. He

says deep and pregnant things about faith, science, and wisdom, that

would bear fruit if reproduced in an age like ours. Then he enters at

great length into the critical objections of the man of intellect

against the life and actions of Jesus, more especially against the

great corner-stone of faith, the resurrection. And throughout the

whole of his demonstrations on intellectual grounds, he is fond of

calling attention to two grand arguments of fact, that no amount of

subtlety can explain away, and that the dullest wit cannot help

seeing: first; that Christianity has changed and reformed men's morals

in a way totally unexampled; second, that such a system of dogma and

morality can never by any possibility have been the product of human

thought, especially seeing what sort of men have propagated and

professed it, "not many wise, not many noble;" therefore its origin is

divine, and its author is the great creator of whom Plato spoke in

stammering words, and whom all philosophy has sought.

Celsus, after having laughed at Christianity, and argued against it,

and having sometimes laughed argumentatively, and at other times

argued by a laugh, appears toward the end of his book in the entirely

new character of the citizen, or patriotic opponent of impious

innovations. He defends the old faith in the gods and the myths, the

old sacrifices, in a word, the old civilization, from the awful

radicalism of a sect that were upsetting the very foundations of

social order, and endangering what little religion the common people

could be got to practise. "All this private association and

sectarianism is clearly against the law of the empire. They repudiate

temples, they despise statutes, they mock at the offerings of incense

and the sacrifices of living things; and they tell decent temple-goers

and frequenters of the sanctuaries that they are doing an abomination

and worshipping devils. Now, the proper, sensible, and right thing is,

that each nation preserve its own customs and laws. One people has

found the advantage of one set of institutions, another of another;

let each keep what is once established by due and competent authority.

The Jews are perfectly right in being tenacious of their particular

laws." (This is cool, in one who had just been abusing the Jews with

all his powers of ridicule and logic--but then he is now speaking in a

different character.) "Besides, there is another and a deeper reason

for this. It is probable that in the beginning of things the diverse

parts of the earth were committed to diverse powers and dominations to

be presided over and governed according to their pleasure; it must

therefore be wrong to attack those institutions which they have

established from the beginning in their several prefectures. It seems,

indeed, perfectly certain that there is nothing in the world that is

not given in charge to some demon. Man himself, the moment he enters

the prison of his body, passes under the power of the keepers of this

prison-house. Nay, the Egyptians, who are unexceptionable {789}

authorities here, tell us that to look after the various parts of a

man's body, there are told off no less than six-and-thirty demons or

aerial powers (some say more); and they even mention their names, as

Chnoumen, Chnachoumen, Cnat, Sieat, and others, by invoking whom you

obtain health in your various limbs. Certainly, therefore, if a man

prefer health to sickness, and happiness to misery, there is no reason

why he should not deliver himself from evil by propitiating these

beings who have him in charge. One or two things, therefore; either

the Christians must live in this world and worship those who rule this

world, or they must abjure marriage, never have children, take no part

in the affairs of men, in fact depart from the earth altogether, and

leave no seed behind them. If they are to share in the goods, and to

be protected from the evils of this world, then it is both

unreasonable and ungrateful not to render tribute to the guardians of

what they enjoy and the powers from whom they have so much to fear."

The proud and fastidious philosopher has fallen low. What an interval

between the grand sentences of Plato and the humiliating confessions

of the apologist of idol-worship! And yet both extremes must be duly

considered, before we can realize the Paganism of the Neo-Platonic

revival. The demonology of Zoroaster, which was the practical religion

of the whole East, had encountered the Platonic philosophy and

engrafted itself upon it; and the sages of such Greek cities as

Caesarea found themselves seriously defending the devil-worship of the

wandering Arabs that roved over the plains of Syria and Asia, ignoring

the centres of civilization that Alexander's conquest had erected in

their midst."

The first part of the objectors patriotic appeal on behalf of

established "institutions" is easily disposed of. The argument,

carried to its lawful lengths, becomes ridiculous. "The Scythian law

kills all the old men; the Persian law sanctions incest; the Crimeans

sacrifice strangers to Diana; in one part of Africa they immolate

their children to Saturn. One national law makes hanging a virtue,

another commends death by fire. Some nations reckon it pious to

worship crocodiles, others pay divine honors to cows, others again

make gods of goats, and one people adores what another eats. This is

making religion, not a truth, but a whim and a fancy. This is making

piety, holiness, and righteousness, affairs of opinion, and not

ascertainable, fixed realities. Suppose some one were to get up and

say the same of temperance, prudence, justice, or fortitude, would he

not be considered an imbecile? The truth is, there are two sorts of

laws; the unwritten law of Nature, of which the author is God, and the

written law of the state. If the state-law is not at variance with

God's law, it ought to be kept and to be preferred before the laws of

strangers; but if it oppose the law of God, it must be trampled upon,

even though danger, ignominy, and death be the consequence." Thus much

for the sentiment of nationality, and the common and obvious reasons,

as Origen calls them, that will make plain men repudiate it. But the

demon-theory and the alleged distribution of things to the aerial

powers, leads to a deeper and more serious question. Knowing,

therefore, that his book will fall into the hands of some who will be

inclined to examine such questions to the bottom, he undertakes to

speak more at length on the matter. This gives him an opportunity of

showing, by the history of the dispersion of Babel, how it is that we

find such diversity of peoples in different parts of the earth. Their

dispersion was a punishment; the ministers of this punishment are the

wicked spirits, acting as the instruments of God. One nation alone

remained in God's favor, and even it had to be punished through the

"princes" or spirits of other nations. Of God's mysterious dealings

with this nation, and of the redemption that was to come {790} through

it to all the other nations, he says he cannot speak out, an account

of the _disciplina arcani_, which forbade the Christian teacher to

enter into explicit details about the evil spirits, and this far the

sake of not affording encouragement to idolatry.

The time had now come when all the nations were called to the one

saviour, the one lawgiver Jesus Christ, who "issuing a master and a

teacher from the midst of the Jews, feeds with the word of his

teaching the universal world." For punishment, therefore, were the

peoples of the earth delivered to demons; for salvation they must all

return to the law of God, through Jesus. Then, as usual, the Christian

doctor lays down the grand principle that withers with its first

breath all this base and futile service of devils. "The Lord our God

do we adore, and him only do we serve." If demons punish men, or if

angels rule this lower world, it is by his supreme will that they act.

"God, therefore, the one Supreme Lord of all--him we must conciliate

and make propitious, by religion and all virtue. Is not this simple?

Is it not reasonable? Bethink you for one moment. There are two men,

of whom one devotes himself entirely to the Almighty God, the other

busies himself in searching out the names of the demons, their powers

and their deeds, the rhymes that raise them, the plants that please

them, the magic gems and the wizard characters that will elicit their

answers; which of these two, think you, will be most pleasing to the

Lord of All? But little wisdom is required to see that the former, in

his simplicity and trust, will be accepted of the Almighty God and his

familiars; whilst he who for the sake of his health and his comfort

and his base and mean wants, deals, in demon-worship and magic, will

be rejected as evil and impious, and be left to the tender mercies of

the devils he invokes, to the confusion and despair of diabolical

suggestions, and to infinite evils. For Celsus himself owns that these

demons are wicked, that they are covetous of blood, of the savour and

smoke of a sacrifice and of the singing that evokes them; let their

worshipper, then, beware lest they prove slippery in their faith to

him, and lest the adorer of yesterday be abandoned or ruined in favor

of the more ample offerings of blood and of burnt odors that are

brought by the adorer of today. And let not Celsus accuse us of

ingratitude. We know perfectly well what true gratitude is, and to

whom we ought to be grateful for all that we possess; and we fear not

to be ungrateful to the demons, our adversaries and our enemies; but

we fear to be ungrateful to him with whose benefits we are laden,

whose workmanship we are, whose Providence has placed us in our varied

lots in life, and at whose hands we look for life eternal when this

life shall be ended. And we have a symbol of this our thankfulness; it

is the bread that we call the Bread of thanksgiving--the Eucharistic

Bread." This last sentence would read commonplace to the infidel or

the catechumen that might fall upon this answer of Origen to Celsus.

They could not know what the faithful Christian knew, and what the

writer himself knew and must have felt to his innermost heart, that

these passing words were a veil that covered nothing less than the

Tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament. The great central mystery, for

well-known reasons, does not meet the eye in the pages of Origen, save

in suggestive passages like this; but we Christians of today can

pierce the mystery because we have its key, and can respond with our

Catholic sympathies to a Catholic voice that speaks to us in veiled

accents across the expanse of sixteen centuries. "For our

citizenship," he concludes, "we are no rebels or traitors. You say,

quoting the words of an ancient--

'King there is but one,

whom Saturn's son hath established,'

We say with you, King there is but one; but in the place of Saturn's

son' {791} we put him who 'raiseth up kings and deposeth them,' and

'who provideth a wise ruler in his season upon the earth.' The kingly

power is from God, and by God's will we obey it; would that all

believed this as we do! You exhort us to enter the imperial armies and

fight for the state. But no men serve their country as the Christians

do. They are taught to use heavenly arms in behalf of their rulers,

and to pray to heaven for 'kings and all those who are in high

places;' and their prayers, their mortifications, and their

self-restraint are of more avail than many soldiers set in array of

battle. And beyond all this, they teach their countrymen the worship

of the Lord of All, and there is no earthly city so little and mean

but they can promise its citizens a heavenly city with God. You exhort

us to enter the magistracy and protect our country's laws and

religion. We have in every city an organization that is to us a second

_patria_, created by the word of God, governed by those who are

powerful in word and sound in work; excuse us if we concern ourselves

mainly with the magistracy of the church. The ambitious we reject;

those whose modesty makes them refuse the solicitude of the church of

God, these we compel to accept it. The presidents of God's state are

called by God's will to rule, and they must not defile their hands

with the ministry of human laws. Not that a Christian refuses his

share of public burdens; but he prefers to reserve himself for burdens

and for a service of a diviner and more necessary sort, wherein is

concerned the salvation of men. The Christian magistrate has a charge

over all men; of those that are within, that they live better every

day; of those that are without, that they may be numbered among those

who act and speak the things of God-service. Serving God in very

truth, instructing whom he may, he lives full of the divine word and

law, and so he is able to lead to the Lord of All every one that is

converted and wishes to live in his holy law, through the divine Son

of God that is in him, his word, his wisdom, his truth, and his

righteousness."

With this description of the Christian bishop, we conclude our remarks

on Origen. It will doubtless have occurred to most of our readers that

we have too completely ignored the charges of heterodoxy that have so

often been made against the name of Origen. But we do not admit that

Origen was unsound in faith, much less that he was formerly heretical.

Although not unprepared to justify this conviction, we cannot do more

at present than invoke the authority of a new and important

contribution to the Origen controversy, which was notified in our last

number. [Footnote 209] Professor Vincenzi, it is confessed by

competent and impartial critics, has totally dissipated the notion

that Origen denied the eternity of punishment. As to the other

accusations, he goes through them one by one and confutes them,

without admitting anything whatever in the genuine works of Origen to

be theologically unsound, "excepting a few points on which the fathers

of his age were as doubtful and uncertain as himself, since the Church

had not then defined them." [Footnote 210] Thirdly, he undertakes to

prove that S. Jerome was completely mistaken, through no fault of his,

with regard to the merits of a controversy in which he played so

memorable a part; and, lastly, he maintains that Origen was never

condemned by Pope or council, discussing especially the alleged

condemnation by the fifth general council. Under shelter, then, of the

authority of a work that comes to us with the approval of the Roman

censorship, and which on two separate occasions has been warmly

praised in the Civiltà, we cannot be wrong in waiving, at least, all

discussion, in articles like the present, on the alleged errors of

Origen. What has been said, though it has left the greater {792} part

of his work unconsidered, may perhaps have served to draw attention to

one who is in some respects the greatest of the Greek fathers. He did

not live long after the completion of the Contra Celsum. As he had

been the faith's champion from his orphaned boyhood to his old age, so

he merited at least to suffer as a martyr for the Truth he had served

so long. His tortures in the Decian persecution did not immediately

cause his death, but they hastened it. He died at Tyre in 253 or 254.

The cities where he taught are now mere names. Alexandria is a modern

Turkish town, Caesarea is a heap of broken columns and ruined piers,

Athens is the capital of a pitiful nation of mongrel Hellenes, Bostra

and Petra are tombs in the deserts of Arabia. But two things are not

likely to grow less in their greatness or to lose the vividness of

their importance, the faith of Christ and what Origen has done for it.

In another region of the world, and in cities with names that are

different, yet with histories as grand as belonged to the cities of

the East, unbelief seems to be bringing back a condition of mind, to

encounter which the Catholic writer will have to put himself into the

circumstances of those ancient giants who met and overthrew scientific

paganism in the second and third centuries. Faith, and what is faith,

and why men must believe, occupied Clement and Origen. The same

questions are occupying the thought of our own day; and many a hint

may be gathered and many a suggestive argument started, by those who

will take the Alexandrian stand-point and look at faith as it is

looked at in the polemical works of the great Alexandrian school.

[Footnote 209: In S. Gregorii Nysseni et Origenis scripta et

doctrinam nova recension, per Aloysium Vincenzi. 4 vols. Romae

1865.]

[Footnote 210: "Dummodo tamen nonnulla exceperis, quae pariter apud

Patres coaevos adhuc dubia manebant et incerta; quippe nondum ab

Ecclesiá definita."--_Vincenzi_, ii. 524.]

------

ORIGINAL.

THE TALE OF A TOMBSTONE.

BY D. O'C. TOWNLEY.

It is quite true to say, that the American makes a mistake who, in his

European tour, leaves Ireland out in the cold unvisited. He at least

fails to make an acquaintance which could not prove otherwise than

interesting, and possibly to find a burying-place where, if he had

them, he might dispose of his superfluous prejudices bearing upon that

island and its people--prejudices for the most part begotten of

ill-directed reading or formed with the hasty conclusions of a very

limited experience.

If a politician, he cannot fail to learn, ere he travels many miles,

whether in Connaught or in Ulster, what he ought _not_ to do with a

people having a desire to see them prosperous and contented. If a

historian, he may find food for a chapter unwritten by Hume and

Smollet, or even by the more impartial Macaulay; a chapter which may

throw some light upon the cause, ever obscurely and often untruthfully

given, whose effect is that spirit of retrogression which hovers over

the unhappy island and lays its blighting hand upon every acre from

Cork to the Giant's Causeway. If he be a painter, a poet, or a

novelist, he may find in Ireland and her people an Eldorado with mines

as inexhaustible as the ore is rich. If a tourist merely, even such a

one as does London in a fortnight, Paris in a week, and the Rhine on

the fastest steamer upon that ancient river--that brilliant soul who

takes his sleep o' moonlit nights, and on the days which follow, sits

yawning over dinner till the shadows fall, and the storied head· {793}

lands have been passed unseen--even such as he, stupid or _blasé_, as

the case may be, may find in Ireland something to awake to momentary

energy, at least, his sleeping thought and action.

Approaching the fall of 18--, having done the continental celebrities

the year before, and having been in England since early in the month

of May, I concluded, before returning to New York, that I should pay a

flying visit to the emerald cradle of that prolific race, which is, in

the language of the stump, when it suits the orators to say so, the

bone and sinew of these States; the great level which uproots our

forests; the great spade which hollows our canals; the huge pick and

shovel and barrow, that lay our iron roads over mountain and morass;

and the mighty polling power which develops the peculiarities of

legislators, contributes most generously to the revenue of the excise,

and to the sustenance of the many good and bad people whose business

of life it is to get this truly erratic people into all manner of

trouble, including jails, and out of it.

With no prejudices against the Irish people, and some

clear-sightedness as to the causes of their proverbial discontent,

unthriftiness, and frequent turbulence, I went quite ready to sorrow

or be glad, just as either mood was suggested by my surroundings;

neither to sneer at their emotional enthusiasm nor to turn disgusted

from their hilarious mirth.

Crossing from Holyhead to Dublin, I remained in that city for a few

days, then visited the south and west, leaving the industrious north

to finish off with. But as the purpose of this sketch is not to retail

either impressions of the country or its people, or all the personal

experiences of my journey, I must proceed to the narration of the

single incident, the object of this writing, referring the reader, if

his appetite lean in the direction, to the pencillings of Mr. Willis

or the much more truthful story-telling of Mrs. Hall. My immediate

purpose is gained if I have in a slight degree awakened the reader's

interest for that which follows, and if he understands that I had now

almost reached that period which I had set down for the close of my

tour and my return home.

Of the month I had set apart for Ireland--the _bonne bouche_, or, if

you like the Celtic better, the "_doch an durhas_" of my feast--I had

but one week left when I found myself at Warrenpoint, a pleasant

watering place on the margin of the bay of Carlingford, going

northward to Belfast. Here I had been two days, rather longer than I

had proposed to remain, but the season and the place at this time of

the year are especially attractive. So near Ireland's' highest

mountain as I then was, it occurred to me how discreditable the

confession would be that I had not seen it save in the purple

distance, and I concluded to do myself the honor of a near

acquaintance--sit upon its topmost ridge, and rifle a sprig of heather

from its venerable crown as a relic of the nearest spot to heaven on

the Isle of Saints.

"No," said mine host, "your honor must never say good-by to Ireland

until you see her only living monarch who has not emigrated or been

transported to a penal colony!"

Slieve Donard, the king in question, was but twelve miles distant, or

rather the village nestling at its foot. The road to Newcastle, the

name this village bears, was one of peculiar beauty all the way, and I

chose, to me, the most enjoyable of all ways of reaching it--I

determined to walk there. So, about eight o'clock on a beautiful

autumn morning, the dew still upon the grass and glistening upon the

rustling leaves of the beeches in a grove of which my rustic hotel lay

shadowed, armed with a stout blackthorn, a book in either pocket, and

a light breakfast in its appropriate department, I set out upon my

journey; accomplished it most enjoyably, arriving with but a {794}

faint remembrance that I had eaten any breakfast whatever, and just in

time for the _table d'hôte_ at Brady's.

The hotel was full with the motley occupants peculiar, there as

elsewhere, to hotels by the seaside in the bathing season. Among the

guests were reverend gentlemen assorted in the nicest manner, lean

kine and fat; the good-natured parish priest and the more

sanctimonious and exclusive curate of the orthodox persuasion; surly

country squires who had rushed down to please their wives and the

girls--"what did they want with salt water?" the city shopkeeper and

his prim property, exulting in evidence of _ton_ in every word and

movement. Even the eye-glassed, red, and wiry-whiskered Cockney could

be seen and heard, possibly attracted there by the reputation of the

"Hirish girls for fine hiyes and hintellects," or probably from a

peculiar horror, for private reasons, of other watering places nearer

home, where landlords were less generous and accommodating, being more

experienced. These, and such as these, with a few who came to see

rather than to be seen, made up the guests at Brady's.

After dinner I joined a party of the class last mentioned who purposed

devoting the rest of the afternoon to an excursion upon the mountain,

ascending as high at least as would enable them to enjoy a scene

pronounced by travellers to be one of the finest in a land praised

alike in song and story for its scenic beauty. The unmingled enjoyment

of that ascent--for the labor of the journey was a pleasure too--is

one of the most pleasant of the many happy memories which I owe to the

"Isle of Tears." The landscape which unrolled itself like a scroll as

we ascended was of remarkable beauty. Rich with all the gorgeous

coloring of the season was spread out as far as the eye could reach

the unshorn wealth of corn-field and of meadow. Here and there a clump

of beech or chestnut sheltered, half hidden among the foliage, the

snow-white walls of a farm house. Liliputian figures crept stealthily

along through lane and over pasture, more like the tiny figures in a

Flemish painting than men and cattle at their labor. The rock-bound

bay was alive with its freight of toy-like fishing-boats, whose white

sails borrowed the golden hues of evening as the sun stole down toward

the heathery forehead of Slieve Donard. The whole scene, embraced from

an altitude of fourteen hundred feet, is again before me, and I revel

for a moment, whilst the illusion lasts, in the unspeakable emotion

which was born of it.

But as I set out to tell a story whose theatre is not the mountain but

the valley underneath, I must e'en come down again to supper and to

prose, leaving, however reluctantly, Slieve Donard and its poetry

behind me.

Leaving Newcastle with that regret which all must feel who leave it at

such a season, I started next morning after breakfast for

Castlewellan, where I intended taking the coach for Newry, having

ordered my luggage to be forwarded there from my hotel at the Point.

Castlewellan is but four miles distant, and the journey thither was

said to be one of the most enjoyable walks in this romantic region.

The road, for the entire distance, is one uninterrupted ascent toward

the summit of one of the lesser hills on which the village stands,

affording from every point--unless when now and then a jutting

mountain crag overhangs the path, and for a moment, intercepts the

vision--a view of the broad expanse of sea, the valley widening as you

rise--each footstep of the ascent adding some new beauty of form and

color, light and shadow to the scene.

Half way upon my journey I sat down to rest for a minute or two by the

road side and lighted a cigar. Under its soothing influence and that

of the scene beneath me, I dropped into one of those blissful reveries

in which we sometimes forget our earthliness for a while, our souls

absorbed in ecstatic {795} contemplation of the wondrous beauty, yet

still more wondrous mystery, of the Creator's handiwork.

I had been thus but a short time indeed when the sound of approaching

footsteps broke in upon my thought, followed by the customary

salutation, "God save you, sir, 'tis a heavenly morning that we have."

Replying in the country phraseology, "God save you kindly," I raised

my eyes to see the passing figure of a stooped old man, with a spade

upon his shoulder, moving slowly onward 'neath his weight of years and

in my direction. Always fond of a companion, when wandering in this

way, being usually fortunate enough to meet with those to whom the

scenes around me were familiar, and from whom I often learned much

indeed that was new and interesting, I arose to resume my walk.

Strongly impressed by the venerable form of the old peasant, as I

deemed him, and thus attracted, I joined him, making some casual

remarks about the appearance of the country, which easily opened the

way to conversation. Enough of years have passed since that autumn

morning to have worn out the then feeble thread of the old man's life,

but palpable to my memory as the recollections of my wedding day is

every lineament of that expressive face. I hear again, as I write, the

gentle music of his voice, his white hairs float before me stirred by

the morning mountain breeze, and I greet again his expressive

salutation, felt again if again unspoken, "God save you kindly."

To all my inquiries touching the country round about, and the harvest,

then all but gathered from the fields, he replied in that simple yet

lucid manner common to the most uneducated Irish peasant, when he

speaks of things familiar to him, chastened in his every remark by

expressions of his gratitude to God for bounties received, and of his

reliance upon his wisdom and goodness in affliction.

His calling, he told me, was a sad one. He, too, was a laborer in the

field, but the harvest he gathered was moist with the tears of many.

Death himself was the reaper. He was the village sexton.

I had often before met men of his melancholy occupation, but the

hearts of these seemed to have been hardened by the very nature of

their handicraft, as they became familiarized with that sorrow,

bitterest to human nature--the parting for ever in this world with the

truest and best beloved; but in the good old man beside me the keenest

sympathy for his suffering fellow mortals seemed to have found a meet

and fitting resting-place.

I learned from him that a few rods further on my way stood the chapel

and burying-ground of Drumbhan, where, for some fifty years back, he

had made the last dwelling-places of his friends and neighbors. Five

minutes' walking brought us to the open gate and to the pathway

leading to the modest village church, within whose sacred walls a

number of the villagers had already gathered to early mass.

Guided by my new acquaintance, I also entered, joining in the sacred

ceremony, which began soon afterward.

How is it, I ask you who have accompanied me thus far, reader, how is

it--and the feeling is common to almost all of us--that in such a

simple edifice as that I knelt in, paintless and unpictured, unadorned

by the bright conceptions of genius or the cunning fingers of art;

with naked floor and whitewashed wall; window untinted with Scripture

story, itself suggestive of devotion; no ornament save the simple

embellishments of the altar; no music save the solemn voice of the

priest, distinctly audible in the respectful stillness of the place;

how is it, I ask you, that in such a sanctuary our souls seem to reach

nearer to their God in silent adoration, than when we kneel on velvet

cushions in the temples of the city, with their graven oak and marble

pillars, their lofty domes of painted glass, their frescoes and their

statuary, their mighty organs and their hundred choristers?

{796}

On leaving the church, at the conclusion f the mass, I rejoined the

sexton, who had stopped a moment at the porch for his spade, where he

had left it in an angle as we entered. I followed him across the yard

and through the wicket which separated us from the burying-ground.

Calling my attention to some of the more imposing monuments of the

place, he passed forward along the narrow pathway to perform the

melancholy task which he had told me was his first duty of this

morning--to make a grave for the last, the very last, of the

companions of his boyhood; one, he said, whose death, like his life,

was all peace, and that was part of the reward of the gentleness of

his nature, the fulness of which was hereafter.

Passing from stone to stone, to linger for a moment at this which told

its tale of the early call of the young and innocent, or at that which

spoke of many years and mayhap of many sorrows, I stopped near to one

which, from the quaintness of the inscription and chaste simplicity of

its form had a peculiar attraction for me. It was a cross in granite

with a wreath not unskilfully chiselled crowning the upper limb,

whilst along the extended arms was a single line, "The 'Widow and her

Son."

Leaning on a more aspiring tombstone near, I read again and again

these simple words, all the while imagination doing its work of making

a history for the mother and her child, when from this my second

reverie of the morning, I was again aroused by the voice of my aged

friend.

"I see you have been reading that inscription, sir," he said. "I

have," I, replied, "and it has stirred my curiosity rather strangely.

It seems to me that there is much which the tombstone does not tell."

"Very much indeed, sir," returned the sexton; "look around me as I may

at these familiar forms, there is not one amongst them tells as sad a

tale as this one."

"Your reply does not lessen my curiosity," I said; "and even if it be

the saddest of your sad experiences, and that I did not fear to

trespass too much upon your feelings or your time, I should ask you to

tell me the story of those whose resting-place is thus beautifully,

yet strangely marked."

"No trespass, sir, no trespass," the old man replied. "If the story be

one to recall a scene which will make my old eyes weep, it will just

be such a one as suits my heart this morning. So having yet an hour to

spare before the remains of my old friend can reach the ground, we

shall sit down upon this grave here whilst I tell you the story of

Mary Donovan and her boy."

Glancing around to see that no unexpected duty called him, he seated

himself on the mound proposed. I sat down beside him, an eager

listener to that which follows, given to you in words as near his own

as may be, but wanting in that richness of accent and figurative

expression peculiar to his class and to his country.

Had business or pleasure called you to Castlewellan some six years

ago, began the sexton, you could hardly have failed to meet a

good-natured innocent, [Footnote 211] some seventeen or eighteen

years old, ever to be seen the first at Blaney's when a traveller

pulled up his horse for refreshments or coach or car, to set down or

to receive a passenger. Ere the rattle of hoof or wheel had ceased in

the courtyard before the inn, the voice of poor Ned Donovan was sure

to fall upon the stranger's ear in a greeting, wild, yet musical, and

with that peculiarity of expression which told the story plainly, that

he was one of those to whom, for his own wise purpose doubtless, God

had been but sparing in the gift of mind. And yet there was a childish

joyousness in his every look and tone that compensated in some measure

for his misfortune, evidence as it was that he was saved from the

cares and anxieties common even to those of his early years.

[Footnote 211: Synonymous with "Idiot" among the Irish peasantry

when used in this way; they rarely use the word idiot unless in

derision.]

{797}

Ned loved the horses and the cars, and knew every professional driver

that came that way to fair or market for miles and miles around. He

reserved, however, especial affection for the regular roadsters, man

and beast; these I mean that drove daily to Blaney's from Newry,

Rathfriland, or Dromore. The men, well acquainted with his ways, never

spoke a hasty or unkind word to him, although he was occasionally

self·willed in the matter of the horse-feed and the watering. The

horses naturally returned the affection of one whose attendance upon

them was untiring. He talked to them incessantly in public or in

private; their comfort occupied the first place in his thought. He

curried, whisked them down, patted and praised their best points with

all the enthusiasm of a connoisseur, or, when the like happened,

mourned over a broken knee or a windgall as over some serious domestic

trouble, as indeed to him it was. All this and more of the kind was

done without fee or reward, save the privilege at all hours of the

kitchen fireside and the stables, with an occasional ride down to the

river, "wid the creatures for a drink," as he would say or "to wash

the mud from their legs, and bad scran to it."

Few days passed, however, failing to bring him a chance horse to hold

for a fine gentleman "wid boots and spurs bedad," or when he had not

an errand to run or to lend a helping hand with the luggage of some

generous traveller; and with these opportunities came sixpences,

sometimes even shillings, for his trouble, but oftener still just

because he was Ned Donovan. Many to whom his story was unknown often

wondered at the glistening eager eye with which he counted his

earnings over, and at the happiness an additional sixpence seemed to

give him; all this was so unlike the hourly evidences of his most

unselfish nature. Strangers, less charitable in mind than in pocket,

led astray by this seeming love of money, not unfrequently thought

that much of the boy's idiocy was put on, and they said so; but they

did not know him, nor happily he the meaning of their sneer. It was

amusing to follow him at the lucky moment when he got a shilling or so

in this way, when be invariably made straight for the bar of the inn

to deposit it with the utmost gravity of manner in the safe keeping of

good Mrs. Blaney. He had learnt from bitter experience how unsafe it

was to be his own banker, as he had frequently lost his earnings in

the hay loft or the stable, before the happy thought had struck him to

find a better keeper for them. You would have heard there, too, how he

invariably came at night to withdraw his funds, and how he always had

money given him, more or less. For there were unlucky days for Ned,

when travellers were few or forgetful; but his memory was far from

faithful in this regard, and good Mrs. Blaney was more than kind.

The reason for this seeming selfishness of Ned is easily told. He had

a mother whom he loved with all his strange impassioned nature, a

widowed mother. To receive her grateful smile in return for the wages

of his industry each evening when he reached his home was the crowning

happiness of the day.

God was kindly with him--he was not alone, poor boy! He had a mother,

and all that mother's love. Had you travelled that way you must have

noticed their little cottage at the turning going up the hill to St.

Mary's. You may see it even now as you pass, but the roses Mary

trained there are dead and gone, the little latticed window broken,

the garden weedy and desolate, telling its tale of sorrow like the

tombstone.

Mary Donovan had lived there for many years--since her boy was quite a

child. She came one morning, so the gossips said, a passenger by the

coach, somewhere from the North. Her child was then but four years

old, and then, as ever after, an object for the sympathy of the kind

of heart. She took humble lodgings and applied to the {798}

shopkeepers and the neighboring gentry for employment at her needle,

with which she was wonderfully skilled, they said. The prejudices

which met her at the first, from all save the kind landlady of the

"Stag," soon gave way before her patient, unbending uprightness of

character and the unfathomable sorrow that weighed her down, for

sorrow is a sacred thing; even the voice of scandal hushes in its

presence. Her past history was her secret. Whether it was one of shame

or of suffering virtue no tongue could tell. Silent as the grave to

all impertinent inquiry, meek and humble before her God, and gentle as

gentleness itself with every living thing, her mystery became

respected, and she and her boy beloved.

From that evening, when wet and weary from her journey, she first

awoke the kindly sympathies of the hostess of the "Stag"--the same

good-natured Mrs. Blaney--for twelve long years the widow pursued her

peaceful way, earning for herself and for her child not merely a

livelihood, but many of the comforts of dress and food, which were

looked upon as luxuries by those around her; and never did mother

receive more fulness of reward in the passionate love of offspring

than she in that of her all but mindless boy.

When he was yet a child often have I watched him sitting at her feet,

as she sat at the cottage door or window plying her ever busy needle,

listening to the strange stories of the fairies and the leprechauns of

the olden times she could tell so well. Of Heaven and its glories,

too, she would sometimes speak, to be interrupted by some strange

remark, suggestive of more than human wisdom. Then the startled mother

would fix her eyes upon his face so earnestly, as if in hope that God

at last would shed light upon the shadowed mind of her bereaved one,

to meet ever and always the glance of childish adoration, but with it,

alas! the vacant smile that spoke forgetfulness already of the

transitory ray of reason that a moment rested there.

Often have I stopped, as I passed that way, to listen to some quaint

old ballad full of the melancholy music of her voice, and make my

friendly inquiries for herself and child, sure to find him in his

usual resting-place. My welcome was a warm one always, and my grey

hairs--for they were grey even then, sir--often mingled with the

yellow curls of the boy as he clambered up my knee to kiss me. We were

warm friends, sir, Mary and I, for I and I only, of all living beings,

knew her secret and the story of her sorrow--and this was the way I

learned it:

One day, soon after her arrival in the town, I had just risen from

early mass in the chapel and turned in here upon my morning round,

when the voice of some one weeping bitterly, and the sad wail of a

child accompanying, drew my attention to a corner of the yard and to

the kneeling figure of a woman and that of a little boy, seated among

the long grass of the grave beside her. Mourners were no unfamiliar

sights to me, even at such an early hour, but the woman's dress

bespoke the stranger and awoke my curiosity. I neared the grave and

recognized it as that of a good old man, once the village

school-master, who had died two years before. I knew him well; for

many years he had dwelt amongst us, respected for himself as for his

calling. He had been happy in the affections of an only child--a

daughter, the very picture of her mother, he used to say, whom he had

buried amongst strangers. In her was centred his every earthly hope.

She was his pride, and her pleasure all the reward he sought in a life

laden with all the petty vexatious of the teacher. She forsook him and

her happy home, and fled to England with one whom she had known for a

few weeks only, who had met her at Rostrevor, where her father's fond

indulgence had sent her for the season; forsook all for a

husband--scandal said, a lover--who, whilst enamored of her beauty,

scorned her father's poverty. The old man never raised his head again

in the village. Two years of sorrow, and the grave closed over him.

{799} I made it. The savings of his industrious life still lay in the

hands of the village pastor in safe-keeping for the lost one should

she ever return to claim it; but Mary never claimed it.

I drew nearer, for my heart told me who the mourner was. I, too, had

loved the girl, as who indeed had not? I, too, had shared the sorrow

of her honest father, and many a time had yearned to know the fate of

the fair-haired daughter of his affection.

I drew still nearer; my step was noiseless upon the grass. I leaned

upon a headstone near me. I spoke the words that pressed for

utterance, "Mary, Mary," I said, "You come too late, too late!"

She started from the grave; an exclamation of terror and surprise

broke from her. She looked me wildly in the face as if the spirit of

her injured father stood in shape before her, and recognizing the sad

features of that father's friend, she sank, sobbing convulsively, upon

the grave again, hiding her pale face in the long grass which covered

it.

I raised her kindly in my arms, and sitting down beside her, her

wondering yet gentle boy between my knees, I heard her sad tale of

passion and remorse. No other ever heard that story; she asked my

silence and I spoke not.

From that time forward, year after year, the penitent paid frequent

visits to her lather's grave; her gentle manner asked for no inquiry,

and none was made, and there was nothing left of the once joyous

daughter of the school-master to challenge recognition. The boy, too,

seemed to love the place, and oftentimes accompanied her. For her sake

it was he loved it, seeming to comprehend that here there was

something sharing with him her affection, some link which bound them

both to the place for ever.

Well, years passed on; and, as I have said, the voice of scandal had

long been hushed; the child had almost reached to manhood, and the

silver threads of time and sorrow had stolen in among the once golden

locks of the mother. Childlike ever, and uniformly good and cheerful,

Ned rose each morning, and as it had been for some years, the daylight

was not more certain to enter the pleasant bar-room of the "Stag" than

was the shadow of the innocent to fall across its threshold, its

earliest visitor. Evening brought him home with his caresses, his

childish chat; and his petty earnings to his mother, who, happy at the

pleasure his employment gave him, was profuse in the praises that he

loved to hear.

And so matters had gone on for years, just as if they might have done

so for ever, when God in his wisdom brought that sore affliction upon

us all--the famine and the sickness of '47. Who that has lived

through that year of misery and horror, but shudders at the

remembrances its very name recalls? Who but wails some beloved one

snatched away with scarce a moment's warning?--the child from its

mother's arms; the mother from the child's caresses; the youth

standing, full of hope on the threshold of his manhood, when the warm

blood froze suddenly in his veins, the glad visions of his future

faded before him as the relentless hand of death seized him with a

grasp of iron, leaving him upon the earth but one hour of agony, and

the breath to say farewell; the aged flung into the grave upon whose

brink they had, trembling, stood for years clinging to life with more

than the tenacity of the young;--all, all stricken with that horror of

dissolution; bowed down as if a curse had fallen upon us for our sins

as once came the plague upon the Egyptians.

First amongst the victims was the long-tried, patient Mary. With

sufficient warning only to bring the good priest to her side, to

receive the last rites of her faith, to press in her enfeebled arms

her terror-stricken son, and upon his lips one agonizing kiss--and her

soul was with its God.

The agony of the boy when once he realized the great grief that had

fallen upon him was, they told me, so fearful and so wild as, to wring

with horror the {800} hearts of all who heard him. After a time he was

somewhat pacified by the gentle persuasion of the priest and the kind

soothing of some good-natured neighbors, who, disregarding the danger

of the infection, had gathered in, out of love and pity. They strove

to lead him from the death-bed; but no! the first paroxysm of despair

once over, he sat him down, silent yet stern, by the bed side. He

spoke not, he wept not. Apparently unconscious of the presence of

others as of his own existence, the icy fingers of one hand clasped in

his, he thus sat gazing, motionless as stone, upon the dead face of

his mother.

On through the long hours of that autumn night sat the stricken

mourner, and though daylight came, aye, even the sunlight that he

loved stole in and crept up upon the bed till it fell upon the placid

features of the dead illumining them as with the glory of immortality,

still he moved not. Dead as the dead he seemed, in all but the

strange, weird evidence of being in his eyes. Stolid he remained to

all remonstrances; silent as motionless to all words of comfort. The

hour came at last for preparation toward the removal of the body--for

the cholera did not spare the poor body after death, decay set in so

rapidly--when, contrary to the expectation of all, the innocent

voluntarily arose and even assisted at the necessary duties, duties

which must have conveyed to him the knowledge of his approaching

parting with her to whom he still clung as lovingly in death as he had

done in life.

It was the afternoon of the day following that of Mary's death when a

few neighbors gathered to see her home, poor girl! I should not, say a

few either, for they were many at such a time, when the dead cart

rattled hourly past the door, and sorrowing and desolation was in

every home.

They bore her from the cottage and along the way leading to the

burying ground of Castlewellan, the parish she had lived and died in.

The wailing orphan walked stealthily behind, his head low bent,

unearthly pallor on his face, his fingers interlaced before him every

motion and expression speaking of the sorrow unto death, of the mortal

agony of desolation.

Mournfully the procession passed along till it reached the cross road

leading to this village here; but continuing their journey, those

forming it were suddenly interrupted by a wild unearthly cry from the

lips of the idiot.

"Where are yez goin', men, where are yez goin', men, I say? You must

take her to Drumbhan, you must take her to Drumbhan! She said she

would lie there some day beside her father; do you hear that, men? So

bring her to Drumbhan, I say!"

His agony was fearful, his shriek inhuman in the fierceness of its

passion. The bearers stopped, the mourners gathered around the boy,

but vain was every effort to appease him, and still his cry rose far

above their words of comfort: "Bring her to Drumbhan, oh! bring her to

Drumbhan!"

None there knew, as I have said, the mother's story, and all believed

this but a wild unreasonable fancy of poor Ned's; but had it been

otherwise, what could they do? The grave was already made, and the

good priest waiting to give the last religious rite to the body of

this patient and enduring Christian.

Seeing that they again moved on, Ned suddenly ceased his cry, as if he

had formed some strange resolution which pacified him, and relapsed

into the sudden gloom that had preceded the outcry of his anguish.

They buried her; he came away quietly with them. They sought, some of

them, to bring him to their houses, thinking to save him the agony of

returning home just then to miss her presence; but all efforts to lead

him any way but that toward his desolate home were fruitless He

returned to the cottage. He sat down by the vacant bed and rocked

himself to and fro, singing with mournful pathos snatches from an old

ballad, a favorite of his mother's.

{801}

An old neighbor promising to remain with him that night and care for

the cottage till next day, when arrangements were to be made for the

disposal of its contents and for the future of poor Ned, the others

went to their homes.

The shadows of the night came down. In and near the cottage all was

silent. The old woman crept toward the boy to rouse him from his

lethargy, and to urge him to take some food which she had prepared for

him. He was asleep. Thanking God for this, his greatest gift to the

sorrowing heart, the old woman sat down, and, covering her shoulders

with her clock, dozed away an hour or two, then awoke and watched,

then slept again, again awoke to find the idiot still asleep, then

slept again.

About an hour after sunrise she started from her seat, alarmed by an

outcry at the door, her name being loudly called, "In God's name,

what's the matter? who's dead now? is it the priest, alanna?"

"Oh! may the Lord be betune us an harum," said a voice from amongst a

crowd of excited people at the door, "if they haven't raised poor

Mary's body in the night! Here's Brian an' myself saw the empty grave

as we passed by the chapel yard just now. Sure never was such a thing

as that ever heard of before in Castlewellan anyhow."

"Whisht, whisht, for the love av God," said the old woman, "or Ned

will hear yez," and turning toward the bedside, hoping that he still

slept quietly, she saw but his vacant seat--the boy was gone.

"I know it all, I know it all," she cried. "As sure as God's in heaven

this day, he's gone and raised her up himself. I heard him in his

sleep, the crature, but thought nothing of his demented talk. Go after

him, men! Go after him, I say! He has gone wid her to Drumbhan."

They hurried off with many others who now heard this extraordinary

story. They ran eagerly down the hill toward the village here. You

know the distance, maybe? Two long miles at least. Well, when they had

reached within half a mile of this spot, sure enough, God knows, they

overtook the crazy boy, wheeling before him on a barrow the coffin

containing the dead body of his mother.

Never did human eye see sight like this before. He heard their hurried

footsteps coming on behind him, and setting down the barrow gently on

the road, he turned suddenly upon them with all the frenzy of the

fiercest madness in his face, and raising up the spade that lay beside

the coffin, and brandishing it above his head, he cried, "Back, back,

I tell you all; touch her one of you, and I'll cleave him! Didn't I

tell you to bring her to Drumbhan? Didn't I tell you she wanted to

sleep down here beside her father? You thought that you were good, did

you, and Father Connor, too, to put her up in the hill beside the big

church there? But what did you know? what did you know? Did she tell

any of you last night that she couldn't rest there; did she do that, I

say? No, no, she came to me who loved her, to her own poor Ned--she

came and asked me to bring her to Drumbhan; and so I will--so I will,

I say, in spite of you all! in spite of you all!"

So saying, he raised the barrow once again and passed onward with his

burden. They spoke not. They made no effort to turn him from his

purpose. Many there were who would gladly have eased the exhausted

creature of his burden, but, awe-stricken, they feared to approach

him, and silently fell behind a second time in sad procession at the

widow's funeral.

At last he reached the gate there. I was standing at it when he came.

He wheeled his burden along that path behind us, and to the grave,

here. I followed with the rest, as powerless to interfere as they. He

laid down the barrow gently again, and taking up the spade he had

carried with him, began to dig the grave. I joined him. He looked at

me at first inquiringly; then recognizing me, muttered something to

himself as if approvingly. Other hands besides ours were soon at work,

and a {802} few minutes more found Mary resting by her father's side

and the last sod carefully replaced--when, failing only when his task

was done, the worn-out boy sank senseless upon the grave.

They carried him away gently, and when consciousness returned, they

soothed him with kind words. The women blessed him and praised his

mother, and his love for her, till recollection returned, and tears

for his loss stole silently down the idiot's cheeks. All traces of

passion had disappeared, and in its place there seemed the evidence of

a new-born intelligence in the mute yet expressive sorrow of that pale

face.

He went with them without a murmur; several times turned hastily

whilst in sight of the graveyard to look back, then disappeared.

All that day the picture of that poor creature and the scene in which

he played so strange a part, haunted me at every step. Still I saw him

coming as he did that morning down the hill; the barrow, the coffin,

the crowd walking solemnly after. Still I saw it through that long,

long day, and leave my fancy it would not. That night I could not

rest. True, I had loved poor Mary and I had loved her boy; still I had

laid away in their narrow beds many, very many that were dear to me,

linked to my affection by the closest ties of kindred, but I had never

sorrowed, old man as I was, as I had done that day; never felt such

awe at the untold mystery of our nature and the wonderful ways of my

God.

In the morning I arose early, early for me, and although no duty

called me here till after early prayer's, I took my spade upon my

shoulder and came upon my way, feeling drawn toward the place, I knew

not why.

The morning was as beautiful as this one, and, as I think I have said

before, the season of the year the same. Already here and there I

noticed, as I came along, familiar faces in the fields, and some, too,

of my neighbors I met upon the road; but contrary to my usual custom l

avoided the familiar chat so frequently indulged in when we met each

other at such an early hour, passing on with a "good morrow" only,

eager to reach Drumbhan.

Some twenty minutes brought me to the chapel, for I lived then as I do

now, a short mile below there. I went in to say a prayer, conscious of

my weakness, in the hope to shake the weight from off my shoulders

that pressed me down so heavily. Thence passing into the graveyard

here, I turned my eyes in this direction to behold, prostrate upon the

grave of his. mother, the loving, harmless boy.

My knees trembled as with palsy. How came he here? I said, and when?

Why, I asked not; I knew too well of this love that was more than

earthly. Tottering, I drew near; I called him by his name. He answered

not. I called again. No voice replied; nor sound, nor motion was there

save the echo of my voice and my hurried footfall as I neared the

spot. I stooped, I raised him in my arms, I parted from his brow the

long hair damp with the dew of morning. I gazed upon that pale, pale

face, which, in the holy peace that rested there, spoke of the

goodness and the mercy of our Heavenly Father, into whose holy keeping

the spotless soul had passed. He was dead.

The sexton's tale was told.

----------

{803}

ORIGINAL.

LIGHT.

Gaudium lucis AEternae.

When the twilight veil is closing

Gently o'er each darkening scene,

Love we not the shades reposing

Underneath its misty screen?

When, like ruins dim and hoary,

Forms are outlined on the sky,

See we not surpassing glory

In the day-god's closing eye?

Yes! But from the LIGHT is given

All the grace of coming night;

And the change from day to even

Is a change of varied light!

Silent midnight reigneth over

Scenes so lately bright and fair,

Shades like gliding spectres hover.

Round each faint-traced image there;

And the darkness' onward stealing

Shrouds the earth with dusky pall,

But from LIGHT, the dim revealing

Even of midnight's glories fall.

And the purer spirit-vision

Is a world all fair and bright;

Ever in the dream elysian

Joy is of "eternal light."

Marie.

--------

{804}

From The Dublin University Magazine.

MEDIAEVAL BOOKS AND HYMNS. [Footnote 212]

[Footnote 212: The reader will bear in mind that the author of the

following paper is a Protestant minister.-ED. CATH. WORLD.]

The fall of Rome was the annihilation of a great dominant power, a

power which had been supreme; and when the barbarians marched into her

streets and devastated her homes, the world sunk back into a tenebrous

night of social, intellectual, and moral darkness. Her mighty empire,

held together like one country by her genius, was broken up and

divided amongst the different tribes who had poured down from the

north and overrun Europe, divided just as the fortune of war or the

caprice of choice indicated. It was the approach of a moral chaos; but

the hand whose guidance is to be felt in the life of individuals, and

may be traced in the history of nations, did not abandon the world to

the utter confusion of its own impulses. As the imperial power of Rome

fell away and died out like an effete thing, wasted by its own'

corruption, a new power was springing up in vigorous youth by the side

of that which was declining. Christianity was advancing toward the

west with rapid strides, victorious through the persecution of tyranny

and the jealousy of philosophy; it was then taking its stand in the

world as an influence; but if at this moment amid the vast changes and

subversion of things which took place after the fall of Rome,

Christianity had been merely a reformed philosophy, and had been left

to the mercy of pagan barbarians, it would have been extinguished in

its infancy. That was avoided by a remarkable concatenation of

circumstances. For centuries there had been an apprehension in the

Roman empire of an advance of the barbarous nations in the north of

Europe, symptoms of which had manifested themselves in the earliest

period of the Christian era. Toward the latter end of the second

century the most powerful of these tribes, the Goths, impelled by some

influx of other barbarians, advanced from their position near the

mouth of the Vistula, invaded the Roman frontier, and took Dacia,

where they were found by the Emperor Caracalla at the opening of the

third century, in the middle of which they were allowed by Aurelian to

settle along the banks of the Euxine, when they were divided into two

parts--the "Ostro" or Eastern, and the "Visi" or Western Goths. In the

next century a terrible alarm was raised amongst them, which even

penetrated into the Roman empire, and up to its capital, where it was

related that an awful race of beings--savage, ugly, inhuman, begotten

of the devil--were pouring in thousands out of the deserts and plains

of Asia into Europe. Such were the Huns. Already they had reached the

territory of the Ostrogoths, whom they compelled to supply them with

guides to lead them on toward the Visigoths. These latter at their

approach fled in the extremity of terror toward the Danube, and

implored the protection of Valens the emperor, who allowed them to

settle in Moesia, upon the condition that they should defend the

imperial frontier. In less than forty years afterward from defending

the Roman frontier they sacked Rome. But during this interval an

incident took place which had a great influence upon the destinies of

Christianity. After the settlement with Valens, an intercourse of a

somewhat friendly character sprung up between the Romans and {805}

these barbarian defenders of the frontier. The church was suffering

from her great Arian apostasy--a form of scepticism exactly parallel

to that new light of modern times called Rationalism. Valens was an

Arian, and, wishing to convert these pagan barbarians, sent a

missionary amongst them in the person of the renowned Ulphilas, whom

he made bishop of the Moeso-Goths. This great bishop labored

assiduously for the conversion of the barbarians, invented an

alphabet, and translated the Scriptures with his own hand into their

strange idiom. His labors were blessed with success; the Goths

embraced Christianity, though in the Arian form; and fifty years

afterward, when Alaric led them into Rome, amid the tumult of the

unfettered license of the soldiers, an order was issued to respect the

churches of the apostles and the sacred places. In the midst of the

devastation of the city and through the very thick of the riot, a band

of priests and devotees were seen marching under the protection of

Gothic soldiery, carrying on their heads the sacred vessels of St.

Peter, and mingling with the shoutings of the ravagers the chant of

solemn psalms. Under Gothic protection, and by the express order of

the Gothic king, the sacred vessels were deposited in safety at the

Vatican; numbers of Christians joined the procession and received

shelter, whilst many who were not Christians also availed themselves

of the opportunity to join the band of believers and escape in the

general confusion. [Footnote 213]

[Footnote 213: Oroslus Hist., lib. vii. c. 39.]