ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS.
History is a great perpetrator of anachronisms. She is
“débordante, frénétique,
Inconvenante; ici le nain, là le géant,
Tout à la fois.”
But
“Il faut bien tolérer quelques excès de verve
Chez un si grand poète.”[8]
All ages in one; all types tossed together _pêle-mêle_; repetitions,
contradictions, violent contrasts, inexplicable inconsistencies no
novelist would have dared to invent.
Even in our little group among the Sabine hills, how many races,
periods, types were thrown together! In Fabricius, not a lifeless
fossil, but a living survival of the grand old Rome of law and order and
self-sacrificing patriotism, the traces of which had made it possible
for the corrupt new Rome to linger on so long. In Damaris, not the
painted artificial Hellenism of her present surroundings, but a genuine
afterglow of the noble, simple beauty of early Greece, beauty as natural
and inevitable as the beauty of the lines and curves of flowers and
waves. In Miriam, the fervent, adoring, exulting, thirsting love for the
God of the fathers of the old Hebrew Psalmists; the boundless, helpful
pity for men of the old Hebrew prophets. In Eleazar, the old exclusive,
passionate patriotism of his people, which in the isolation of exile had
so long only seemed to survive in that passion for possession which the
old prophets had so continually detected and so unsparingly denounced;
and now that this icy spell was broken, the old passion of patriotism
had revived in the passionate love of the family, always recognized by
the Law and the Prophets as the sacred core of national life, the sacred
shrine of what was most heart-stirring in the national Ritual. In the
Greek hermit of the cave, a survival of the early Greek Church of the
Roman catacombs; and also an outpost of the great army of monks and
solitaries, which was to conquer the wildernesses, material and moral,
of Western Christendom. In Marius, sunset melting into dawn through his
Ethne; his weariness of the faded classicism of an imitative culture, and
the unreality of subtle debates about a faith which had no bearing on
practice, vanishing in the freshness of her new heavenly life; all that
was true and beautiful in the fading old world living anew for him in the
morning dew of her new day.
Soon after the Vandals had sailed off for Africa, Fabricius and Marius
went again to Rome to look after the desolated palace on the Aventine.
The walls were still there, but little else.
The Vandals, said to be the greatest experts at plunder among the
barbarians, had done their work effectually. Traces of barbaric feasts
were strewn about the deserted rooms; fragments of familiar household
treasures, cherished from childhood, were scattered over the broken
mosaic pavements as mere refuse of useless and abandoned plunder; the
frescoed walls were stained and scarred. In the gardens the thickets
of roses were trampled and crushed, the trellised vines torn down and
broken. There was a sense of outrage and desecration over all, which for
the time made the dear familiar things and places terrible and weird and
ghastly. They had to say to themselves again and again—“These trampled
flowers, and prostrate vines, and despoiled halls and chambers do not
_feel_ their dishonour. And ere long for us also the vulgar associations
scrawled over them will be obliterated, and the earlier characters will
reappear.”
And Marius said—
“Ethne would see through it all at once. Being a creature of the light,
naturally she always looks through to the light, and therefore can always
read all the palimpsests, and see through to all the original sacred
texts, in Attila, in old Eleazar, or in our Rome.”
Fabricius made some worldly lamentations over the destruction of property
for his children.
“I thought to have endowed thee and thy children richly,” he said, “as
becomes our ancient house. But between the Vandals and the Huns, and our
own tax-gatherers, the beggary of the citizens, and the robberies of the
slaves, there will, I fear, be little left for thee and thine to inherit.”
“We inherit _you_,” Marius said; “thee and all thou art, our mother and
all she is. And what inheritance can be worth that to us? What do rich
men often leave to their heirs, but the inheritance not of their gold but
of their avarice, the inheritance of a paralyzed hand unable to use or to
give, but only to close on what it has; the curse of an insatiable hunger
for more; the spell of a heap of gold which they have to toil to heap up
higher, enchanted into beasts of burden or mere blind earthworms?”
“And yet,” said Fabricius, “they say the earthworms help to build and
shape the world. But, however that may be, it is a good thing to see the
spell reversed, as in Eleazar the Jew, transformed back from an earthworm
into a man; the gold gone, the enchantment broken, and the man himself
again. God keep us from all such enchantments.”
“It seems,” said Marius, “that in these days of sieges and sacks there is
a good chance of the spells being broken. Perhaps if days of prosperity
and peace ever come again, they may bring back baser idols and more
unconquerable spells.”
When they returned to the Sabine hills they found all in full festival:
the corridors of the villa festooned and garlanded with flowers and
fruits, the labourers on the estate and the children of the mountain
farm gathered for the joy of harvest; Eleazar, like one of the patriarchs
of his race, with the “heritage and gift” of Rachel and her children
clustered round him, Miriam with the last babe on her knee, Damaris
guiding the first baby-steps of little Paul, Rachel in her stately
Oriental beauty, Ethne fair and radiant as morning serving every one.
While the children pelted or garlanded each other with the lavish
wealth of roses, and filled the place with the music of their laughter,
Fabricius drew near Eleazar, and the old men sat down together.
“The world is sad enough,” Fabricius said, “for thy people and for mine;
but the children are glad!”
And a soft voice near murmured—
“Their angels always behold the face of God.”
“The God of our fathers gave us homes before He gave us a Temple and a
priesthood,” Eleazar said meditatively. “Perhaps He is leading us back to
these earliest temples, where the father is the priest and the children
are the singers.”
“I have just heard a story which reads like a parable,” Fabricius
replied. “The ancient treasures of your Jerusalem and of our Rome have
fallen alike into the hands of the Vandals; but their fate has been quite
opposite. Yours have been borne safely to another shore; but ours lie
lost for ever in the depths of the sea.”
Ethne was standing near, and she knelt down and laid her gentle touch on
the hand of Fabricius.
“Father,” she said, “shall _anything_ really good perish and be lost for
ever in the depths of any sea? Does not your old Rome live on in her
great laws, and in our own Leo? Are not all the real treasures carried
on and translated into their true use and meaning in the Kingdom of our
Christ?”
And Damaris, with little Paul in her arms, added—
“Surely all the true treasures of all the temples shall be saved, to be
understood and used better by the babes who shall succeed us _here_;
and,” she concluded in a lower voice, “to be carried safely across the
sea to the other shore, whither we are going, to the land of the living,
to the City which hath the foundations.”
The families of the Anician villa and the freehold farm on the mountains,
the ancient inheritance of its possessors, dating back with a pedigree
beyond the beginnings of Rome, were much linked together.
Through Miriam and Eleazar, Rachel and her children, the first Testament
of God came to Ethne and her children, as a great national literature and
history. Abraham in his tents with his flocks and herds; David, shepherd,
hero, and king; Job, the great chieftain, who saw the dark side of the
world and ventured to bewail it to God, and was not rejected by Him, but
accepted and honoured; Moses, loving his rebellious people more than
himself, and leading them through sea and desert; Daniel in the lions’
den; the Three Children who chose the fire rather than falsehood, and
walked through the fire unharmed beside One like the Son of God;—all
these were living persons of a living story to Ethne’s children. Dear,
moreover, to Ethne with an intimate affection, besides these earthly
friends, were the heavenly friends of the toiling and the suffering—the
angel who came to the forsaken slave-woman, and called her by name, and
led her back to her dying child, that God might open her eyes to see the
“well,” and the child might live; the angel who came to the despairing
prophet, and brought him the little cake, when less sympathetic mortals
might have inflicted on him a sermon on despondency. To her the voices
of the old Hebrew prophets also, with the magnificent daring of their
denunciations of oppression and wrong, came as fresh and inspiring as
if she had heard them in the palaces on the Palatine but yesterday, or
anywhere in the streets of Orleans and Troyes.
It was much thus to learn those unrivalled old human stories, those
unique old Divine messages, not packed up in a lesson-book, nor crumbled
down into texts, nor beaten thin into allegories, but real and fresh
as the stories of Patrick or of Leo,—whilst always shining through and
through with the Divine light, which those who most frankly recognize the
human medium feel most vividly.
Delightful also it was to her beyond words, to see the light of the
fulfilment of the New Testament of God, of the Christ, slowly penetrating
into the soul of Eleazar, as it had into the heart of Miriam long before.
The New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, epistolary
treatises, familiar letters, came to Ethne’s children from the lips of
Damaris in the language of Paul and John, in living speech as familiar to
Damaris as the words of Shakespeare and the great Elizabethans to us.
“Thy Jerome’s Vulgate is as good and grand as our Claudian aqueduct,”
Ethne would say to Damaris; “but thy Greek is as the Fons Ceruleus, the
Aqua Claudia, the fountains bursting fresh from the depths of these
hills.”
It was the last lingering sound of living Greek (the first language of
the early Church) in the Western world. For centuries afterwards the
living waters flowed to Western Christendom through Jerome’s aqueduct.
The great Leo did not write or speak Greek.
Many a time also Ethne found the old Greek hermit in his cave, near Monte
Cassino, and laid her little Paul in his arms for his blessing. Once she
told him of her dream after the birth of the child—of the church crowning
the mountains in place of the temple of the old gods; of the company of
mountain-folk, instead of leading the lambs garlanded for sacrifice,
bringing their children for baptism; of the white-robed band pouring
forth thence hither and thither throughout the mountains, throughout
the world, like streams making the land fair and green wherever their
footsteps came, like angels bringing to men the glad tidings of great
joy. And the old man as he embraced the child said—
“And may this thy babe, lady, be one of those thy white-robed angels and
messengers of peace.”
One bright Sunday it happened that, as long before Lucia had discovered
Ethne diving deep into the old Hebrew poem of Job, Marius found her
greatly absorbed in a fresh manuscript. She was in ecstasies of delight.
“You never told me of this,” she said. “This is a book of the Prophets
of the New Testament of God. I shall never need to dream any more, for
here is a Divine dream, a Vision of God! The disciple beloved of the Lord
was in the Spirit on this His Lord’s Day; saw Him; saw the riddle of
this earth and its solution; saw heaven open from within; saw also the
earth _as it is_, and was no more satisfied with it than the chieftain
of old; saw how it is a battle-field to the end. But he also saw what
the old chieftain could not see—that the victory is _sure_, has been won
for ever, is being won day by day. Through all the din and wailing and
tumult he heard the Hallelujahs of those in heaven who see the meaning
and the end; felt the soft flow of the living fountains through all the
blood and fire and smoke. On earth he saw the multitudes struggling,
toiling, enslaved, oppressed, hungering and thirsting, and sick as of
old in Galilee. In heaven he saw another great multitude innumerable,
white-robed, with palms in their hands, yet longing and interceding for
those who battle and suffer below. On earth, storm and battle to the end;
but heaven shining through the rifts in the clouds all through to the
end. And at last not only a ‘multitude,’ but the City, the City which
hath the foundations coming down out of heaven from God. Earth also right
at last!—not only the hunger and thirst, but the sins, the wrongs, and
the curse and death itself gone for ever; His servants serving Him for
ever, His name shining in their foreheads,—_His name_, which that beloved
disciple always tells us is _love_, the Lamb slain for love, the King
conquering through love. You see there is no need to dream any more! All
we could dream of, beautiful, and good, and holy, is unveiled here, and
infinitely more than we could dream. The beloved disciple saw it—saw it
for us all.”
Before long another little son was given to Marius and Ethne, and she
said—
“His name must be called John, after that beloved one who _saw_. I need
no dream for him. We have the Divine dream and its interpretation, the
riddle and the solution, the Book of the unveiling. We will go into the
thick of the battle, thou and I and our children. We must not grudge them
their share of the glorious wounds, or the hard victories. We must go
back to the poor, plundered, wrecked city, to our Rome, for victory is
sure if we endure to the end.”
At Whitsuntide the family returned to the plundered palace on the
Aventine. The pain at the despoiling of the palace was swallowed up in
the threefold joy that Whitsuntide brought. In Constantine’s baptistery,
by the Church of St. John Lateran, in the porphyry font filled from the
fountains on the Sabine hills, Ethne’s second son was baptized by the
name of the beloved disciple, the great Apostle of love, the Divine of
the battles and the fountains.
And with this little John were received into the Church of Christ an aged
man and woman of the race of which He was born—Miriam and Eleazar.
As in this great Whitsuntide baptism the large company of the
newly-baptized were gathered together in their white baptismal robes,
with the chrism on their foreheads, the voice of Leo rang through the
silence in the vast spaces of the great basilica, and penetrated every
heart, as he proclaimed—
“This day’s solemnity, beloved, is to be accounted among our foremost
festivals. For as to the Hebrew people of old, fifty days after the
immolation of the paschal lamb, the law was given from Mount Sinai; so
after the Passion of Christ, whereby the true Lamb of God was slain, on
the fiftieth day after His Resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended on
the Apostles, and on the people of the faithful, so that the diligent
Christian may recognize how the preparation (_initia_) of the Old
Testament ministered to the beginnings (_principiis_) of the New, and the
second was founded by the same Spirit who instituted the first.”
As the great Bishop spake these words, Ethne’s heart turned
sympathetically to her Hebrew friends. And then came a bit especially for
her own Ireland.
“Oh, how swift,” Leo said, “is the speech of wisdom! And when God is
the Teacher, how quickly what is taught is learned! The Spirit of Truth
bloweth where He listeth. The peculiar (_propriæ_) voices of every
nation are made one common tongue in the mouth of the Church. From this
day the trumpet of evangelic preaching has pealed forth. From this day
showers of gifts and rivers of blessing have watered every desert. The
Spirit of God has been on the waters, renewing the face of the earth;
and on the departing darkness flashes the new dawn, sparkling in the
many colours of the various tongues, indwelling in each heart as a fiery
force to consume sin, to create intelligent perception, to illumine every
faculty. Let us with one heart incite one another to the veneration of
this Holy Spirit, by Whom the whole Catholic Church is sanctified, by
Whom every soul is imbued with reason, Who is the Inspirer of faith, the
Teacher of science, the Fount of love, the Seal of chastity, the cause of
all virtue. From Him is the calling on the Father, from Him are the tears
of penitents, from Him the groans of suppliants; and ‘none can call Jesus
Lord except by Him.’ For the Spirit of Truth Himself makes the house of
His glory shine with the splendour of His own light, and in His temple He
will suffer nothing dark nor anything lukewarm.”
It was always Ethne’s delight to bring Eleazar and Miriam to everything
that linked the old with the new. She rejoiced therefore when, at the
Festival of the Seven Maccabæan martyrs, Leo did honour to that noble
mother of their race, the mother of the seven Maccabæan martyr brothers.
“Blessed mother! blessed progeny!” he said. “The palms of these seven
martyrs are multiplied sevenfold—the first suffering without the help of
an example; the last tortured in all the tortures of the others; whilst
each conquers in all, all have won the sevenfold crown of each.”
And then—“The battle indeed,” he said, “never ceases for the Christian.
Thou who dreamest that the days of persecution are past, that for thee
there is no combat with the enemy, search into the recesses of thine own
heart, and see if no tyrant seeks to rule in the citadel there. Make thou
no truce with avarice; despise thou the increase of unjust gain; refuse
thou any compact with pride; chase away enervating luxury; repel thou
injustice; contend with falsehood. And when thou findest thy combats
multiplied, do thou also, a follower of these martyrs, seek with them a
multiplied victory. We die to sin when sins die in us; and men become
dead to the world, not by the perishing of the senses, but by the death
of vices. Let each of you be mindful that the Temple of God is founded in
Himself.”
Thus day by day and year by year Ethne and Marius, and all that little
company of the Aventine, sought to keep their post in the great battle,
contending in Rome against her tyrannies and miseries and sins, and
making the plundered palace rich and beautiful again by gathering thither
the orphans, the cripples, and the aged left destitute and forsaken
by the sack of the Vandals; whilst among the Sabine hills they sought
to bring freedom of soul to the slave, and the light of Christ to the
lingering paganism of the peasants.
And all the time they were upheld by the holy example, and inspired
by the trumpet-calls of Leo, rebuking the careless, encouraging the
desponding, reviving the faint, enkindling the foremost to press on
further.
Old Rome lived on, they felt, in Leo. His far-seeing eye reached from end
to end of Christendom. His strong hand held the dissolving world and the
distracted Church together.
His great life-battle was indeed drawing to a close. Underneath the vague
Pantheisms from the East, brought into the West, into Rome and Spain,
through Manicheans and Priscillians, he had detected the corruption of
moral life, the relaxing of all the ties of duty and loyalty, and had
fought against them to the death, not indeed gently either in word or
deed.
Through the subtle speculations of Greek thought he had felt the
entangling embrace of a parasite, eating out the life of Christianity,
and had kept and unfolded for the Church the great primitive faith in the
Divine and human Christ. Around him was a broken, bewildered Christendom;
on the shores of Africa, a Church with magnificent traditions of martyrs
and fathers, Perpetua, Felicitas, Cyprian, Augustine, long torn to pieces
by schisms, now lying helpless under the tyranny of the Arian Vandals,
ready to become the prey of the Moslem invasion so soon to come and
crush both Catholic and Arian under one weight of death. In the East,
heresies innumerable, originating in the subtle thinkers of Alexandria
and Antioch, fought out by the fierce monks of the desert; Syria, Greece,
Egypt, Carthage biting and devouring one another until the common enemy
came and destroyed them all. Spain was in the hands of Arians; Gaul
torn between contending races and beliefs; Britain had relapsed into
heathenism. The one thing needful at the moment seemed to be _Unity_, and
for this unity Leo sacrificed, strove, and toiled. And his own soul being
a city at unity within itself, with primitive simplicity of character,
Roman strength of will, Christian singleness of heart, this unity he
succeeded in preserving through that distracted age. But always with him
unity was a means and not an end, the essential condition of life, valued
for the sake of the life it guarded; and always he worked with the sense
that he, a mortal man, was working under an Immortal King for an immortal
kingdom; always with the sense that he, “the successor of Peter,” could
do nothing but by standing on the rock of Peter’s confession, always
translating the old Roman order and law, the old simple apostolic
confession of Christ, into the languages of the new world.
So the great Bishop battled on, until at last, six years after he had
saved the city for the second time by his mediation with the Vandals, the
faithful voice was silenced on earth for ever.
It was in the corridor of the villa on the Sabine hills that Marius
brought home the news of the death of Leo. He had just gained one more
victory for the faith, over the subtle heresies of the East. “The glory
of the day is everywhere arisen,” he wrote, “the Divine Mystery, the
Incarnation, is restored to the age. It is the world’s second Festival
since the Advent of the Lord.”
The battle for him was over. The great commander could say at last his
“Nunc Dimittis,” “Let me depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy
salvation.”
And he had been “liberated in peace.”
“No more shall we hear his clear strong words of hope and love,” Marius
said. “No more in any new peril that may come on her will Rome have Leo
to save her by throwing himself into the chasm.”
A hush of awe and tender gratitude fell on them all. Fabricius said—
“The last of the great Romans has departed.”
And Damaris—
“The latest of the great saints has entered into life.”
As always, death completed life. And they first saw the noble life in its
true meanings and proportions in the silent sculpture of death. They felt
he was indeed Leo the Great; and only at the altar, as Monica had said
to Augustine, could be his highest commemoration: “With the angels and
archangels and all the company of heaven” rendering thanks for all he had
done, and been, and become.
When they returned to the Aventine from the solemn obsequies of the
Shepherd and Father of Rome, Marius said to Ethne—
“Thou hast never been perplexed by anything that seemed doubtful in the
great Bishop’s life; not about his contest with Hilary of Arles, nor even
about his forbidding the ordination of slaves.”
“Why should I?” she said; “Leo never claimed to be anything in himself.
Has he not taught us all to say day by day in our prayers, that ‘we can
do nothing good without God’? Has he not taught us never to be satisfied
with ourselves, but always to pray on and on continually for ‘the
_increase_ of faith and hope and charity’? Has he not taught us that the
‘world is ordered by the governance,’ not of emperors or generals, or the
greatest in the world, or the holiest in the Church, but ‘by God’? Has he
not taught us that the destiny and mission of the Catholic Church, from
the lowest to the highest, is not to rule, but to ‘serve Him in all godly
quietness’?”
“Many think he is building up a new tyranny,” Marius said, “in the
kingdom of God.”
And Ethne replied, with her far-away look as of second sight—
“As far as what Leo builds is only Rome, will it not perish like the
other Rome? As far as it is chiefly Peter’s, did not the blessed Peter
himself sink beneath the waves, only to be saved by the outstretched hand
of Peter’s Lord? But as far as it is Christ’s kingdom and Peter’s rock,
which is Christ, it cannot fail to stand. We make aqueducts; God only
opens the fountains. We build our little houses of clay, which if the
life dies out of them become prisons or tombs; the living God creates
living worlds. We make empires; God gives us a little child, His Eternal
Son, the manger and the cross. Did not Leo tell us that ‘_Peter is saying
still every day throughout the Catholic Church, “Thou art the Christ, the
Son of the living God”_’? And is not our Leo also saying that for ever
now, here below, and above?”
“To thee and such as thee indeed he is!” Marius said.
“And you know we have always our twin fountains,” she added, “our Aqua
Claudia and our Fons Ceruleus, ‘the Testaments of God.’ We have our one
Book, our two literatures, never dead, always spoken to us by the living
voice; ‘breathed into us,’ as Leo told us, ‘by the living Spirit.’”
And so the days and years passed on. And the children grew into youth,
and the aged passed into the new youth above.
The first to pass away from them was Fabricius. The dishonour and
humiliation of Rome had lowered the already ebbing tide of life. His gaze
had always been one of wistful yearning towards the past; but towards the
close he learned to see that the past lives on in the heavenly future.
After his death the palace on the Aventine became simply a group of
homes for the suffering and the destitute. And so by a natural Divine
classification, not of like with like, but with unlike, Damaris gathered
around her all kinds of suffering and need, the various needs supplying
and helping each other: the aged watching the tottering steps of the
young; the little ones gladdening the sick and aged; each learning
to feel that they had some gift to spare as well as some need to be
supplied. And thus with Damaris old age was not a fading, but a ripening
into the fuller life. One day she said to Ethne, when some fresh sign of
weakness had grieved the daughter’s heart, as with a foresight of the
close—
“Thou who lovest to dwell among thy fountains surely wilt not grudge me
to the land of the fountains of living waters! For what are thy fountains
after all, thy ‘fountain of heavenly blue’ and thy Aqua Claudia, but
aqueducts, though indeed aqueducts chiselled by Divine hands? Whence do
they come, the ever-flowing, exhaustless springs of thy hills?”
And Ethne said, with the far-off look in her eyes—
“Truly the clouds, mother, are ever feeding the springs, and the clouds
drink of the seas; the smallest spring which is perennial must indeed
have its source in the infinite and the eternal.”
Damaris took her hands and laid them on her own heart.
“Higher than our highest hills,” she said, “we must go for our fountains.”
“But,” said Ethne, “does not the Christ, did not our Leo, speak of a well
of living water springing up _within_ us, here and now?”
“Surely He does,” Damaris replied. “And if He leads me by His fountains
above, I shall know that He, the Source of all the fountains, is with
thee here. I am leaving thee in no parched desert land. How else could
there be ‘no hunger nor thirst’ for _me_, there?”
“But the City of God,” Ethne resumed, with tearful pleading, “is building
also on earth; thou wilt not leave us too soon for the one above? Hast
thou not said that our Rome is a city not only of the _fountains_, but of
the _steps_? Stay with us! stay with us yet a little while, and help our
feebler feet to climb.”
And Damaris _did_ stay yet a little while. But at last the last step for
her was reached, the step over the invisible threshold—and she entered
into light; but she did not leave them in darkness, for as she entered,
the light shone through on them.
“Death,” she had been wont to say, “does not close the door of the unseen
for us. Death is always keeping it open, both for those he takes and for
those he leaves behind.” And when she died they found it true.
As the years went on, glad tidings came from Ireland of more ground
conquered, more souls won for Christ.
A beautiful story came of another captive and slave, the maiden Brigit,
set free to liberate the hearts of thousands; and from Brigit’s large
Irish heart came another hymn, to take its place on Ethne’s heart with
Patrick’s breastplate—
“I would a lake of hydromel for the King of kings;
I would that all the people of heaven should drink of it for ever;
I would the viands of faith and piety, and also instruments of
penitence in my house;
I would great cups of charity to distribute;
I would cellars full of graces for my companions;
I would that joy should be given at the banquet;
I would that Jesus—Jesus Himself—should reign over it;
I would that the three Maries of illustrious memory,
And that all the spirits should be gathered from all parts;
I would be the steward of the Lord,
And at the cost of a thousand sufferings receive His blessing;
I would a lake of hydromel for the King of kings.”
“The fountain indeed rises and rises in thy Ireland,” Marius would say;
“it is becoming a lake, a sea, the source of how many fountains who can
say?”
And Ethne—“How can we ever foresee where the new fountains will spring
up?”
“No more,” he replied, “than I could foresee _thee_.”
They did not indeed live to see how high the fountains would rise, or how
far they would flow. They did not live to hear the great proclamation of
freedom go forth from the lips of the great Leo’s successor, the great
Gregory, at the manumission of his own slaves, basing the freedom of all
men on the creation of man in the image of God, and the Incarnation of
the Son in the form of man. They did not indeed live to see the living
waters from the two fountains flow forth throughout Western Christendom
till they met in our English land, from the great missions of the
Benedictines and of the monks of Iona; the era of the great monks and
abbots succeeding the era of the great bishops. But they saw their Paul
enter the white-robed company of their young kinsman Benedict on Monte
Cassino; and they gave their John to join the first-born of Baithene in
the great Irish monastery, which nurtured and sent forth Columba. And
day by day they and their children pressed onward, in the city, in the
solitude, in the home, armed with the breastplate of Patrick’s hymn—
“Christ before us,
Christ behind us;
Christ around us,
Christ within us,”
and strong in the strength of Leo’s faith. “_Although He has committed
His sheep to the care of many shepherds, Christ Himself has never left
the guardianship of His beloved flock._”
For
“God fulfils Himself in many ways.”
“IPSE TAMEN DILECTI GREGIS CUSTODIAM NON RELIQUIT.”
THE END.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Bagaudæ, the name given to the peasants who revolted against Roman
oppression in Gaul, said to be a Celtic word meaning crowd or mob.
[2] _Vide_ St. Leo, Epistola 4, ad Episcopos per Campaniam Tusciam, &c.,
Acta Sanctorum, S. Leonis, Opera 1, p. 611.
[3] S. Leo, Sermon XXIII. These quotations are taken from sermons of S.
Leo on the Nativity and the Epiphany, in the Acta Sanctorum.
[4] Epistles of S. Leo. The Tome, 28, Epistle to Flavian, Bishop of
Constantinople.
[5] The Tome, 28, Epistle.
[6] St. Benedict was of the Anician house, and the first habit of the
Benedictines was of white, or undyed, wool.
[7] St. Columba.
[8] Victor Hugo on Creation and Providence, _Encore Dieu, L’art d’être
grandpère_.
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