DIVINE SERVICE.
“Wisdom hath builded herself a house: she hath mingled her wine: she
hath also prepared for herself a table.”
The more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present instances of
the summing up of an entire world of complex associations under some
single form, like the Zeus of Olympia, or the series of frescoes which
commemorate The Acts of Saint Francis, at Assisi, or like the play of
Hamlet or Faust. It was not in an image, or series of images, yet still
in a sort of dramatic action, and with the unity of a single appeal to
eye and ear, that Marius about this time found all his new impressions
set forth, regarding what he had already recognised, intellectually, as
for him at least the most beautiful thing in the world.
To understand the influence upon him of what follows the reader must
remember that it was an experience which came amid a deep sense of
vacuity in life. The fairest products of the earth seemed to be
dropping to pieces, as if in men’s very hands, around him. How real was
their sorrow, and his! “His observation of life” had come to be like
the constant telling of a sorrowful rosary, day after day; till, as if
taking infection from the cloudy sorrow of the mind, the eye also, the
very senses, were grown faint and sick. And now it happened as with the
actual morning on which he found himself a spectator of this new thing.
The long winter had been a season of unvarying sullenness. At last, on
this day he awoke with a sharp flash of lightning in the earliest
twilight: in a little while the heavy rain had filtered the air: the
clear light was abroad; and, as though the spring had set in with a
sudden leap in the heart of things, the whole scene around him lay like
some untarnished picture beneath a sky of delicate blue. Under the
spell of his late depression, Marius had suddenly determined to leave
Rome for a while. But desiring first to advertise Cornelius of his
movements, and failing to find him in his lodgings, he had ventured,
still early in the day, to seek him in the Cecilian villa. Passing
through its silent and empty court-yard he loitered for a moment, to
admire. Under the clear but immature light of winter morning after a
storm, all the details of form and colour in the old marbles were
distinctly visible, and with a kind of severity or sadness—so it struck
him—amid their beauty: in them, and in all other details of the
scene—the cypresses, the bunches of pale daffodils in the grass, the
curves of the purple hills of Tusculum, with the drifts of virgin snow
still lying in their hollows.
The little open door, through which he passed from the court-yard,
admitted him into what was plainly the vast Lararium, or domestic
sanctuary, of the Cecilian family, transformed in many particulars, but
still richly decorated, and retaining much of its ancient furniture in
metal-work and costly stone. The peculiar half-light of dawn seemed to
be lingering beyond its hour upon the solemn marble walls; and here,
though at that moment in absolute silence, a great company of people
was assembled. In that brief period of peace, during which the church
emerged for awhile from her jealously-guarded subterranean life, the
rigour of an earlier rule of exclusion had been relaxed. And so it came
to pass that, on this morning Marius saw for the first time the
wonderful spectacle—wonderful, especially, in its evidential power over
himself, over his own thoughts—of those who believe.
There were noticeable, among those present, great varieties of rank, of
age, of personal type. The Roman ingenuus, with the white toga and gold
ring, stood side by side with his slave; and the air of the whole
company was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection. Coming
thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united, in a
silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for a
moment as if he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy. Yet
that could scarcely be, for the people here collected might have
figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a new world, from the
very face of which discontent had passed away. Corresponding to the
variety of human type there present, was the various expression of
every form of human sorrow assuaged. What desire, what fulfilment of
desire, had wrought so pathetically on the features of these ranks of
aged men and women of humble condition? Those young men, bent down so
discreetly on the details of their sacred service, had faced life and
were glad, by some science, or light of knowledge they had, to which
there had certainly been no parallel in the older world. Was some
credible message from beyond “the flaming rampart of the world”—a
message of hope, regarding the place of men’s souls and their interest
in the sum of things—already moulding anew their very bodies, and
looks, and voices, now and here? At least, there was a cleansing and
kindling flame at work in them, which seemed to make everything else
Marius had ever known look comparatively vulgar and mean. There were
the children, above all—troops of children—reminding him of those
pathetic children’s graves, like cradles or garden- beds, he had
noticed in his first visit to these places; and they more than
satisfied the odd curiosity he had then conceived about them, wondering
in what quaintly expressive forms they might come forth into the
daylight, if awakened from sleep. Children of the Catacombs, some but
“a span long,” with features not so much beautiful as heroic (that
world of new, refining sentiment having set its seal even on
childhood), they retained certainly no stain or trace of anything
subterranean this morning, in the alacrity of their worship—as ready as
if they had been at play—stretching forth their hands, crying, chanting
in a resonant voice, and with boldly upturned faces, Christe Eleison!
For the silence—silence, amid those lights of early morning to which
Marius had always been constitutionally impressible, as having in them
a certain reproachful austerity—was broken suddenly by resounding cries
of Kyrie Eleison! Christe Eleison! repeated alternately, again and
again, until the bishop, rising from his chair, made sign that this
prayer should cease. But the voices burst out once more presently, in
richer and more varied melody, though still of an antiphonal character;
the men, the women and children, the deacons, the people, answering one
another, somewhat after the manner of a Greek chorus. But again with
what a novelty of poetic accent; what a genuine expansion of heart;
what profound intimations for the intellect, as the meaning of the
words grew upon him! Cum grandi affectu et compunctione dicatur—says an
ancient eucharistic order; and certainly, the mystic tone of this
praying and singing was one with the expression of deliverance, of
grateful assurance and sincerity, upon the faces of those assembled. As
if some searching correction, a regeneration of the body by the spirit,
had begun, and was already gone a great way, the countenances of men,
women, and children alike had a brightness on them which he could fancy
reflected upon himself—an amenity, a mystic amiability and unction,
which found its way most readily of all to the hearts of children
themselves. The religious poetry of those Hebrew psalms—Benedixisti
Domine terram tuam: Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meis—was
certainly in marvellous accord with the lyrical instinct of his own
character. Those august hymns, he thought, must thereafter ever remain
by him as among the well-tested powers in things to soothe and fortify
the soul. One could never grow tired of them!
In the old pagan worship there had been little to call the
understanding into play. Here, on the other hand, the utterance, the
eloquence, the music of worship conveyed, as Marius readily understood,
a fact or series of facts, for intellectual reception. That became
evident, more especially, in those lessons, or sacred readings, which,
like the singing, in broken vernacular Latin, occurred at certain
intervals, amid the silence of the assembly. There were readings, again
with bursts of chanted invocation between for fuller light on a
difficult path, in which many a vagrant voice of human philosophy,
haunting men’s minds from of old, recurred with clearer accent than had
ever belonged to it before, as if lifted, above its first intention,
into the harmonies of some supreme system of knowledge or doctrine, at
length complete. And last of all came a narrative which, with a
thousand tender memories, every one appeared to know by heart,
displaying, in all the vividness of a picture for the eye, the mournful
figure of him towards whom this whole act of worship still consistently
turned—a figure which seemed to have absorbed, like some rich tincture
in his garment, all that was deep-felt and impassioned in the
experiences of the past.
It was the anniversary of his birth as a little child they celebrated
to-day. Astiterunt reges terrae: so the Gradual, the “Song of Degrees,”
proceeded, the young men on the steps of the altar responding in deep,
clear, antiphon or chorus—
Astiterunt reges terrae—
Adversus sanctum puerum tuum, Jesum:
Nunc, Domine, da servis tuis loqui verbum tuum—
Et signa fieri, per nomen sancti pueri Jesu.
And the proper action of the rite itself, like a half-opened book to be
read by the duly initiated mind took up those suggestions, and carried
them forward into the present, as having reference to a power still
efficacious, still after some mystic sense even now in action among the
people there assembled. The entire office, indeed, with its interchange
of lessons, hymns, prayer, silence, was itself like a single piece of
highly composite, dramatic music; a “song of degrees,” rising steadily
to a climax. Notwithstanding the absence of any central image visible
to the eye, the entire ceremonial process, like the place in which it
was enacted, was weighty with symbolic significance, seemed to express
a single leading motive. The mystery, if such in fact it was, centered
indeed in the actions of one visible person, distinguished among the
assistants, who stood ranged in semicircle around him, by the extreme
fineness of his white vestments, and the pointed cap with the golden
ornaments upon his head.
Nor had Marius ever seen the pontifical character, as he conceived
it—sicut unguentum in capite, descendens in oram vestimenti—so fully
realised, as in the expression, the manner and voice, of this novel
pontiff, as he took his seat on the white chair placed for him by the
young men, and received his long staff into his hand, or moved his
hands—hands which seemed endowed in very deed with some mysterious
power—at the Lavabo, or at the various benedictions, or to bless
certain objects on the table before him, chanting in cadence of a grave
sweetness the leading parts of the rite. What profound unction and
mysticity! The solemn character of the singing was at its height when
he opened his lips. Like some new sort of rhapsôdos, it was for the
moment as if he alone possessed the words of the office, and they
flowed anew from some permanent source of inspiration within him. The
table or altar at which he presided, below a canopy on delicate spiral
columns, was in fact the tomb of a youthful “witness,” of the family of
the Cecilii, who had shed his blood not many years before, and whose
relics were still in this place. It was for his sake the bishop put his
lips so often to the surface before him; the regretful memory of that
death entwining itself, though not without certain notes of triumph, as
a matter of special inward significance, throughout a service, which
was, before all else, from first to last, a commemoration of the dead.
A sacrifice also,—a sacrifice, it might seem, like the most primitive,
the most natural and enduringly significant of old pagan sacrifices, of
the simplest fruits of the earth. And in connexion with this
circumstance again, as in the actual stones of the building so in the
rite itself, what Marius observed was not so much new matter as a new
spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many observances not
witnessed for the first time to-day. Men and women came to the altar
successively, in perfect order, and deposited below the lattice-work of
pierced white marble, their baskets of wheat and grapes, incense, oil
for the sanctuary lamps; bread and wine especially—pure wheaten bread,
the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards. There was here a
veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the earth’s gifts, of
old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way redeemed at last, of
all that we can touch or see, in the midst of a jaded world that had
lost the true sense of such things, and in strong contrast to the wise
emperor’s renunciant and impassive attitude towards them. Certain
portions of that bread and wine were taken into the bishop’s hands; and
thereafter, with an increasing mysticity and effusion the rite
proceeded. Still in a strain of inspired supplication, the antiphonal
singing developed, from this point, into a kind of dialogue between the
chief minister and the whole assisting company—
SURSUM CORDA!
HABEMUS AD DOMINUM.
GRATIAS AGAMUS DOMINO DEO NOSTRO!—
It might have been thought the business, the duty or service of young
men more particularly, as they stood there in long ranks, and in severe
and simple vesture of the purest white—a service in which they would
seem to be flying for refuge, as with their precious, their treacherous
and critical youth in their hands, to one—Yes! one like themselves, who
yet claimed their worship, a worship, above all, in the way of
Aurelius, in the way of imitation. Adoramus te Christe, quia per crucem
tuam redemisti mundum!—they cry together. So deep is the emotion that
at moments it seems to Marius as if some there present apprehend that
prayer prevails, that the very object of this pathetic crying himself
draws near. From the first there had been the sense, an increasing
assurance, of one coming:—actually with them now, according to the
oft-repeated affirmation or petition, Dominus vobiscum! Some at least
were quite sure of it; and the confidence of this remnant fired the
hearts, and gave meaning to the bold, ecstatic worship, of all the rest
about them.
Prompted especially by the suggestions of that mysterious old Jewish
psalmody, so new to him—lesson and hymn—and catching therewith a
portion of the enthusiasm of those beside him, Marius could discern
dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now followed, at once a
narrative and a prayer, the most touching image truly that had ever
come within the scope of his mental or physical gaze. It was the image
of a young man giving up voluntarily, one by one, for the greatest of
ends, the greatest gifts; actually parting with himself, above all,
with the serenity, the divine serenity, of his own soul; yet from the
midst of his desolation crying out upon the greatness of his success,
as if foreseeing this very worship.* As centre of the supposed facts
which for these people were become so constraining a motive of
hopefulness, of activity, that image seemed to display itself with an
overwhelming claim on human gratitude. What Saint Lewis of France
discerned, and found so irresistibly touching, across the dimness of
many centuries, as a painful thing done for love of him by one he had
never seen, was to them almost as a thing of yesterday; and their
hearts were whole with it. It had the force, among their interests, of
an almost recent event in the career of one whom their fathers’ fathers
might have known. From memories so sublime, yet so close at hand, had
the narrative descended in which these acts of worship centered; though
again the names of some more recently dead were mingled in it. And it
seemed as if the very dead were aware; to be stirring beneath the slabs
of the sepulchres which lay so near, that they might associate
themselves to this enthusiasm—to this exalted worship of Jesus.
* Psalm xxii. 22-31.
One by one, at last, the faithful approach to receive from the chief
minister morsels of the great, white, wheaten cake, he had taken into
his hands—Perducat vos ad vitam aeternam! he prays, half-silently, as
they depart again, after discreet embraces. The Eucharist of those
early days was, even more entirely than at any later or happier time,
an act of thanksgiving; and while the remnants of the feast are borne
away for the reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the rite
reaches its highest point in the singing of a hymn: a hymn like the
spontaneous product of two opposed militant companies, contending
accordantly together, heightening, accumulating, their witness,
provoking one another’s worship, in a kind of sacred rivalry.
Ite! Missa est!—cried the young deacons: and Marius departed from that
strange scene along with the rest. What was it?—Was it this made the
way of Cornelius so pleasant through the world? As for Marius
himself,—the natural soul of worship in him had at last been satisfied
as never before. He felt, as he left that place, that he must hereafter
experience often a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for all this, over
again. And it seemed moreover to define what he must require of the
powers, whatsoever they might be, that had brought him into the world
at all, to make him not unhappy in it.