ROME AND HER SAINT.
While Ethne was thus becoming at home in the Aventine palace, a true
daughter of the heart to Damaris, Baithene had become a stay and
companion to Fabricius, such as he had scarcely known before. Baithene
came to them from a simpler world than theirs, which seemed to bring back
to the old Roman the nobleness and simplicity of old Rome. These children
came to them both unperplexed by the confused voices of the later
civilization, so feeble and so corrupt; and, moreover, without weighing
on them with the responsibility which they felt anxiously with regard to
their own children. And therefore they could fill up gaps and voids in
their own life and thought as none brought up under the same influences
could have done. The simpler world of the Sabine farm was also home-like
to Baithene.
Of the great empire, so tangled, so chaotic, with the germs of a new
world no one could then foresee struggling into life through the decay
of the old world crumbling to corruption, he could understand little.
The miles of pasture and forest, the lakes and torrents among those
Sabine hills, were to him like the hills and valleys of his own land.
Every day there were trees to be felled, or fields to be tilled; and
there was also the chase, of the beasts of prey, wolves and bears, with
Bran in his element as an _aide-de-camp_. There were also men and women
to be governed and employed. But here came in a dreary difference.
Instead of men and women bound to him and his with the loyalty to
chieftainship and the affection of kinship, those who had to be governed
here were all slaves, of many races, linked to each other and their owner
by no organic tie, but merely as mechanical atoms welded together by
frost and fire. The worst evils of slavery were indeed mitigated there.
Fabricius and Damaris were Christians; the estate was not too large for
the servants of the household to be attached personally to them, and many
of the labourers had wives and families held together, as in olden days
no slaves could be, by the sanctity of Christian marriage.
The evils of the Latifundia, the enormous farms, with the Ergastula,
the workhouses inhabited by great gangs of celibate slaves under a
slave-driver, were greatly modified on Fabricius’ land. But nevertheless
the relations between employer and employed were those of slavery; and
whether worked out mercifully or not, it was from Roman households that
forty thousand Gothic slaves had fled forty years before to Alaric, at
the first chance of liberation.
Baithene felt, in a dim way, that however rude and undeveloped might be
the social life in his own land, it was living and organic, and therefore
capable of growth; whereas this was a mere mechanical conglomeration,
always inwardly crumbling away, and ready at any blow from without to
be shattered in a moment into ruin. Yet, not being responsible for it
himself, and being in his small way royal, the largeness of heart and the
habit of caring for others remained with him, so that he contrived to
diffuse a good deal of life and interest and even gaiety around him, and
thus greatly to relieve Fabricius.
When in a few months it was deemed safe for Baithene to return to the
Aventine with the dog and Fabricius, the company of slaves who came with
them had become eager to render him willing service, knowing that he
would demand nothing but what was right, and that he would give all that
was possible; they had also become responsive to his gay words and smile,
knowing that he had not only that light-heartedness which took troubles
lightly, but also the faculty of flashing into lightnings of indignation
against injustice and wrong. He found his sister also, in her place, the
depositary of the joys and sorrows of the household, old and young; both
of them having conquered the hearts around them by their old princely
way of considering what every one needed and liked, and by their new
Christian way of ruling, not by dividing but by uniting, of reigning by
serving.
The return of Fabricius and Baithene brought Ethne and the whole family
more into the outer world. The life of Damaris, loving and natural as it
was, had become essentially a life of religion; her pleasures were in her
works of mercy, visiting the sick, helping the destitute, lifting up the
fallen—services in which Ethne delighted to share.
“The world,” in the Rome of those days, was for the most part so
undeniably wicked and unlovely, its amusements so ugly, its vices so
putrefying, that to come out of it seemed not merely the only safe, but
the only cheerful and tolerable road to take. And to Lucia and Ethne,
the mere gaiety of their youth, the beauty of flowers, the mere joy of
living, singing like birds, dancing like young fawns, especially now that
they danced and sang and lived together, were quite pleasure enough.
But when Fabricius came there had to be entertainments, visits,
attentions to and from the great houses connected with them; and this
necessarily made the position of the Irish captives more complicated and
difficult.
It was a great joy to the brother and sister to be together again; and
the rapture of Bran (the dog) at finding his young mistress again as
he crouched at her feet, and bounded round her, and gravely placed his
great paws on her shoulder, expressing his feelings with every possible
movement of tail and ears, and every possible variety of bark, and cry,
and whine, quite raised him out of the category of dumb beasts.
Baithene and Ethne had much to compare. All kinds of new questions,
social and ecclesiastical, had arisen before them; the world divided
itself so differently here from the old classifications of their
childhood. “City” and “country” were in themselves new words to them,
never having before their capture beheld any collection of houses
worthy to be called a town. The terms “master” and “slave” were not so
altogether new, since in Ireland also captives were held in bondage,
and their own Patrick had been once a slave. But that the whole class
of owners and employers should be slave-owners, and the whole class of
labourers and servants slaves, with no natural human links between them
of clan or race, was indeed new. As to the Church, there was less to
perplex them, since from the beginning they had been brought face to face
with the great perplexity of all times, that so many Christians were
not in the least Christ-like. Heretics indeed they heard of, of various
degrees and names—Arian, semi-Arian, Pelagian, semi-Pelagian, Nestorian,
Eutychian, Manichean; but these seemed to them mostly of foreign growth:
the Arians chiefly Gothic; the Eutychians (whatever that might mean)
chiefly from the East; the Manicheans chiefly from Africa; the Pelagians
from their own West, from the Britanniæ, the land of the pirates who
had captured them. Rome had seldom originated the great heretics or the
great theologians. And, moreover, of all these confusions the brother and
sister had chiefly heard through a voice ringing clear, simple, sonorous
above all the tumult like the voice of their own Patrick; and that was
the voice of Leo, Bishop Leo, Pope Leo, Leo the Great of Rome. Lupus they
knew was called Pope at Troyes, and Anianus at Orleans; but this Leo it
seemed was pope and father of a wider world. Rome herself, many years
before, they were told, the restless, divided city, had waited in peace
for forty days, during his absence after his election, united in the
unanimous choice of him as her shepherd and guide. And ever since in all
perplexities she had always turned to him, never absent, as her defender
and real lord; rock of strength amidst all the tossings of the waves and
all the crumblings of the strongholds. Ethne said to Baithene—
“It seems as though God had sent Leo to Rome, as He sent Patrick to
Ireland. If ever thou, beloved, were to take Holy Orders in this strange
land, surely it would be Leo’s hands that would consecrate thee.”
“Leo’s hands would never consecrate me!” he replied, with a slight touch
of bitterness unusual with him. “Have I not been, and am I not still,
a slave? And Leo does not admit slaves to the priesthood. They told me
amid the Sabine hills that he wrote to the bishops of Campania, that ‘a
servile meanness made some slaves seek the honour of the priesthood,
seeking that they who found no approval from man might find approval
from God; but the sacred ministry,’ he said, ‘would be polluted by the
meanness of such association. None who are bound to the service of
others’ (_qui originali aut alicui conditione obligati sunt_), he wrote,
‘or in any way not free by birth or station, was fit to serve in the camp
of God.’”[2]
“But Patrick was a slave!” she exclaimed.
“Patrick was born free,” he replied.
“But thou also wert born free!” she said, her face brightening. “Leo
could never mean to exclude such as thee!”
“I know not, little sister,” he replied. “Many indeed of the slaves of
the Romans are captives born free, but the Roman law gives the purchaser
indelible rights over the purchased.”
Ethne’s eyes filled with tears.
“Does Christianity itself, even the Heavenly City, which is free, and
the mother of us all, turn against us? Is there no refuge at all in this
world for the wronged?”
“As thou sayest,” he replied, “the heavenly Jerusalem is free; we shall
all be free there. And here we can always be free in soul! Moreover,” he
added, “slavery does often indeed degrade the slave, and make him through
all his being slavish and unfit for any high office. And on me, beloved,
this does not weigh heavily after all. God helping us, we have another
calling, the old reigning and serving for our own people.”
“At all events,” said Ethne, “we may add Leo’s prayer to Patrick’s
hymn—‘Grant us the spirit to think and do always such things as be
rightful, that we who cannot do anything that is good without Thee,
may by Thee be enabled to live according to Thy will.’ It is the great
Bishop’s prayer for us, and for himself,” she added; “let us say it
together for him as well as for ourselves.”
The entertainments, banquets, and visits of state occasioned by the
return of Fabricius to Rome, necessarily made the position of the Irish
captives more difficult. Although their being members of the Aventine
household was their best protection, Fabricius and Damaris could not bear
to have them regarded as in bondage; and yet as guests the world could
not receive them.
Christmas was drawing near, with many of the old pagan festivities, as
well as those of the Christian Church, gathered around the season. But
to the Irish captives it brought no festive home gatherings—this their
first Christian Christmas, their first homeless New Year. To them,
therefore, all that was festive in the season was concentrated entirely
in the great Festival of the Nativity. Their home was in the home of the
Holy Childhood of the Child Jesus and the Mother Mary. The great stately
basilicas were as a family hearth to these fatherless and motherless
exiles, and the words of Bishop Leo on the Incarnation were as a father’s
welcome to them.
“You know well, dilectissimi,” Leo said, “and have frequently heard the
things which belong to the sacred observance of this day’s solemnity. But
as this visible light affords pleasure to uninjured eyes, so do sound
hearts receive perpetual joy from the Nativity of the Saviour. Wherefore
we must never be silent, though we cannot set it forth as it deserves.”[3]
Then he spoke of “the general Confession common to all, whereby the whole
body of the faithful say they believe in God the Father Almighty, and in
Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord, Who was born of the Holy Ghost and of
the Virgin Mary; by which three clauses,” he said, “the engines of attack
of all the heretics are shattered.”[4]
And Ethne and Baithene, who knew the Confession well, although they
knew little of the heretics, felt warm and safe as birds in their own
nest within the sacred walls, which kept them safe from all these
battering-rams.
Again Leo said—
“Lowliness was taken up by Majesty, weakness by Power, mortality by
Eternity; and in order to pay the debt of our corruption, the inviolable
nature was united to that which could suffer.
“In the entire and perfect nature of very man was born the very God;
whole, in what was His; whole, in what was ours. By _ours_ we mean what
the Creator formed in us at the beginning, and what He assumed in order
to restore. For of that which the demon brought, which man, by him
deceived, admitted, there was not a trace in the Saviour; and the fact
that He took on Himself our infirmities did not make Him partaker of
our transgressions. He took on Him the form of a servant, of a slave”
(at these words Ethne gently touched her brother’s arm), “without the
defilement of sin, enlarging the human and not diminishing the Divine;
for that emptying of Himself whereby the Invisible made Himself visible,
and the Creator of all things willed to be one among mortals, was the
stooping of compassion, not the failure of power.
“The infancy of the Babe is exhibited by the swaddling clothes; the
greatness of the Highest is declared by the voices of angels. To hunger,
to thirst, to be weary, is evidently human; but to supply five thousand
men with five loaves, and to give to the Samaritan woman that living
water of which to drink is never to thirst again,—to walk on the back
of the sea with feet that sink not, and to allay the liftings up of the
waves tossed by the storm, is unquestionably Divine. To weep over a dead
friend is human; by a voice of command to raise him to life again is
Divine. It belongs to our nature to hang on the wood of the Cross; and to
another to make all the elements tremble when day had been darkened into
night. It belongs to humanity to be transfixed with nails; it belongs to
Deity to open the gates of Paradise to the faith of the robber.[5]
“Our Lord, the true Shepherd, Who laid down His life for the sheep, and
Who came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them, wills us to imitate
His own loving-kindness.”
Such words as these made that season indeed a festival to the captives,
rich with the joy the world could not give nor take away, a joy in which
they and Damaris and Lucia, and every slave among the hundreds in that
great patrician household, could rejoice alike.
Then came the great Festival of the Epiphany, which these children from
the Isles of the Gentiles felt to be especially their own. And again the
clear, strong words of Leo rang through the crowded basilica.
“The last holy day which we celebrated was that on which a pure Virgin
brought forth the Saviour of mankind. And now, beloved, the venerable
Festival of the Epiphany gives us a continuation of joys.
“For the salvation of all men is interested in the fact, that the infancy
of the Mediator between God and man was clearly manifested to the whole
world whilst it was still detained in an insignificant little town.
“For although He had chosen out the Israelitish nation, and one family of
that nation, from which to take on Him the nature of universal humanity,
yet it was not His will that the beginnings of His life should be
concealed within the narrow limits of his mother’s abode; but as He was
pleased to be born for all, He willed to be speedily recognized by all,
and accordingly the star appeared to the Magi.
“Lift up, dearly beloved, your faithful minds to the faithful grace of
the everlasting light. Follow after that humility, clothe yourself with
the strength of patience, that in it you may be able to make your souls
your own; for He Who is the redemption of all is Himself the courage of
all.”
“Brother,” said Ethne that evening, as they sat alone together, while
Fabricius held a great banquet for his kinsmen, “I think I understand
about Leo and the slaves. It is only because he has never had the _gift_
of being himself a slave. Thank God, our Patrick had been a captive,
and so learnt the heart of a captive and a slave. And you see even the
All-Merciful had to become one of us, that He might be touched with the
feeling of our infirmities.”
Baithene was silent a few minutes, and then he said in a low, deep voice,
taking his sister’s hands in his own—
“If ever we are lifted back to our place among the _few_, little sister,
God grant we may never lose the lessons learnt by living down among the
_many_!”
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