_THE GREAT COMBAT._
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Behold me then at the age of twenty-five, innocent of crime, sentenced to
the life and labors of a convict! My associates were the lowest ruffians
imaginable. My fare was coarse and sometimes revolting. I was locked up
alone at night in a dark cell. I slept on a pallet of straw. From sunrise
to sunset I was compelled to labor on the public works, chained by the leg
to another creature as miserable as myself.
Young as I was, I had already met with strange adventures and made
hairbreadth escapes. I was long buoyant and hopeful, and was constantly
expecting some lucky turn of the wheel of fortune. There was, indeed, very
little rational ground of hope. My uncle Beltrezzor was dead. My sisters
had escaped to the other end of the world, and were not likely to return.
Not one of the few Christians of the city knew anything about my being
there, for I had seen no one but Beltrezzor. Demetrius alone knew my
whereabouts, and by command of Simon he had entered a false name for me on
the books of the prison. So I was lost and buried from the social world in
which I had moved.
I did not believe that my imprisonment would be of long duration. Young,
educated, wealthy, I thought I was needed by the infant Church. The
subject of the greatest miracle of Christ, my very presence was an
argument in favor of Christianity. Then my experiences in the spiritual
world had given me knowledge superior to that of all the disciples;
knowledge necessary to the organization of the faith upon truly rational
principles. To suspect even that one so valuable to the holy cause could
be imprisoned for life, without a future, without a mission, was to doubt
the wisdom of Providence and the verity of my death and resurrection.
It was thus that the secret pride of my selfhood buoyed me up in the
direst adversity, and that my own self-righteousness became the fountain
of hope!
Notwithstanding all this, I remained a captive at hard labor for forty
years of my manhood! As long as the children of Israel were in the
wilderness, so long was I in the convict prison of Antioch! Terrible
thought!
When I emerged from my prison-grave into the world and the Church again, I
was old and feeble and bronzed and broken, forgotten by all men, a cipher
in the sphere of thought and life in which I had expected to occupy so
commanding a position.
The wicked and detestable emperors, those monsters of nature, Tiberius,
Caligula, Claudius and Nero, had successively governed and cursed the
Roman state. The Christian religion had spread into all countries; into
Syria and Parthia and Arabia, into Egypt and Abyssinia, into Spain and
Gaul and Britain, by the zealous labors and fiery devotion of Paul and
Peter and Barnabas and Philip and James and hundreds of lesser lights of
the new faith.
All this and thousands of other strange events had occurred without my
knowledge, without my participation. The great world moved on without me.
I knew as little of it in my prison as a child knows of the sea, who
bathes his little feet in the surf that breaks upon the beach at his
father’s door.
This great lapse of time, an entire manhood, so devoid of incident, so
uninteresting to the general reader, was my real life. All that had
happened previously was my childhood. It was in this fearful school of
captivity and sorrow and labor and solitude and darkness, that I became a
man and a Christian. Looking backward, I am filled with gratitude for the
wisdom and goodness of God, which infused such health and blessing into
the cup of bitterness which I was compelled to drink.
I passed through three great spiritual eras during my captivity. Life does
not consist in external events, but in the revelation of spiritual states.
This alone is the true biography.
The first era was one of intense resistance to my fate. My disagreeable
surroundings annoyed and irritated me. The unaccustomed labor in the
burning sun was almost too great for my strength. I loathed my companions
and my keepers. I loathed my tasks. Still greater suffering was occasioned
by my losses; the loss of friends and relatives; of books and study; of
the delightful society of woman; of all the thousand little things which
constitute the comfort and charm of civilized life.
Hope lingered long, and died a slow but painful death in my heart. I made
many efforts to escape—all of which failed, and brought upon me terrible
punishments. I was starved and scourged repeatedly, and finally branded
for an attack made upon one of my keepers, in which I nearly succeeded in
killing him. These things called out and developed all the evil qualities
of my nature. Let the smoothest-faced, sweetest-tongued and gayest-hearted
man in the world undergo what I have undergone, and he will discover how
many unrecognized devils have been dormant in the serene and undisturbed
depths of his being.
Wounded and bleeding in my self-love and self-respect, my sufferings,
physical and mental, seemed to have a destructive effect upon my spiritual
nature. Destruction of the old precedes a new order of things. Along with
hope, faith also sickened and died. For a long time I consoled myself by
recalling my wonderful experiences in the spiritual world. I prayed, and
recited to myself the sweet promises of Scripture to those in affliction.
But as months and years rolled away, despair overpowered me. I began to
doubt the truth of religion, the reliability of my own memory, and even
the very existence of God.
So little depth of earth had the good seed found in my heart! I, who
thought I loved and believed in Christ; who had seen him in both worlds;
who conceived myself ready and able to preach his true doctrine to
mankind; thus tried in the fiery furnace of temptation, found myself all
dross, thoroughly skeptical and wicked, worse than the ignorant convicts
and keepers around me.
What mortal can comprehend the meaning of those mysterious words of the
Divine Man on the cross: “My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?”
I felt also that God had forsaken me. When the little religious light I
had, faded away in my soul, I was taken possession of by demons, male and
female. I verily believe that I was, for a while, what the world calls
insane. I became proud, and supercilious, and scoffing. I was ambitious as
Simon, cruel as Magistus, sensual and abandoned as Helena. Escaped from
those wretches in the body, my spirit became the sport and prey of
infernal spirits similar to them. I envied the power, the glory, the magic
of Simon. At night I dreamed only of bacchanalian orgies in a Grecian
heaven, and awoke parched and feverish and excited and maddened, as if
some syren-like Helena had kissed me in my sleep.
This wretched state lasted about ten years. It culminated in a great
illness; for relief or death had become the alternative. The illness of a
convict in prison! Cast upon my pallet of straw, without friends, without
nurses, without proper diet or medicine, frequently without water; what
days and nights of suffering and anguish did I experience!
It was a long, long sickness. The stage of excitement was accompanied with
wild delirium, and my imagination was haunted by fiery figures of infernal
spirits.
Then exhaustion came, and forgetfulness. Nature slowly rallied; after
that, thought returned, strength and feeling came back. My sisters and
Beltrezzor and Jesus loomed up away off, as pleasant pictures or beautiful
dreams. Many sweet little scenes of my happy childhood revisited me in
charming memories. I lay for hours in peaceful trances. I had consoling
visions. The poor convict’s cell was illumined with a glory not its own.
One night I saw the house that was building for me in the heavens. It was
rising in stately grandeur. Oh it was beautiful! but still unfinished.
Mary Magdalen was toiling away with earnest brow and face more angelic
than ever. Many shining spirits were about her. I was lying some distance
off, asleep in the shadow of a great rock. She said to her companions with
a sweet smile:
“He will awake presently and help me build.”
One day I heard the voice of my father saying to John the Baptist,
“The crisis is over; he will be saved; we must teach him the power of the
Lord’s Prayer.”
I know not whether this was a dream or a genuine vision. But I repeated
the Lord’s Prayer feebly and with folded hands. The effect was wonderful.
A great light shone around me. The air was full of little cherub forms.
Heavenly music was heard in the distance. The deepest chords of my being
were touched. The flood-gates of contrition were reopened. Faith returned.
I wept. I was happy—oh, so happy!
This also may have been a dream, but it was a potent medicine; for after
that, my recovery was amazingly rapid. I then entered into a second and
very different phase of my spiritual life. The devil, after casting me
repeatedly into the water and the fire, and rending me sorely, had
departed. But I knew full well that he only departs for a season—that his
return is as sure as the rising of the tides. I knew that the only way to
keep him out, was to refurnish my house on the heavenly model.
Now my knowledge of spiritual things came to be of immense advantage. Not
an abstract, theoretical knowledge of them, but a knowledge derived from
sight and hearing. I had seen, felt and studied the angelic sphere of
life. I knew what it was. I had discovered three great elements in that
sphere, and determined to put them all into action in my own life, so as
to bring my spirit into interior communion with angels and the Lord.
The first element was profound humility and reverence. God only enters the
soul which is thoroughly emptied of self. A proud Christian is a devil in
disguise. The angels are so thoroughly divested of the selfhood, that they
live and labor only for others’ good; and that is living and laboring for
God.
Prayer is the means by which humility and reverence are cultivated. It
does not change the Unchangeable; it only brings the soul into that state
in which it is receptive of the divine love and wisdom. I determined,
therefore, to pray—for I had long neglected prayer—and to pray regularly,
systematically, earnestly, and especially in the form or after the manner
that the Lord himself had appointed.
The second element of angelic life was cheerfulness. The cheerfulness of
angels flows from the peace and joy in which they live. They cannot be
present in a sphere of gloom and darkness. The silent, tearful, mourning,
austere, ascetic Christian, cuts himself off from angelic consolations,
and renders his regeneration doubly painful and difficult. Tears and
fastings and scourgings and solitude and fantastic self-denials do not
lead to heaven. They block up the way thither with needless difficulties.
I determined, therefore, to be cheerful; to accept my lot with graceful
resignation; to have a genial word and pleasant smile for every one; to
avoid reveries and broodings which kept the past continually in painful
contrast with the present; to make a final surrender of all my grand
ambitions and glorious expectations; and to take a heartfelt pleasure in
the trifles of life, such as may be found even within the walls of a
prison.
The third element of the angelic life was useful activity. An idle angel
is an impossibility. They are all busy as bees; and like those little
preachers to mankind, each labors intently, not for his own special
benefit, but for the good of all the rest. Their cheerfulness and
usefulness run in equal and parallel streams, and they are both
proportioned to their reverence and humility.
I determined therefore to work willingly; to accept my hard tasks as those
appointed of God; to be no longer an eye-servant but an earnest, faithful,
intelligent co-operator in building, repairing and improving the
magnificent temples, baths, aqueducts, walls, quays and fortifications of
Antioch; to treat my fellow-laborers as brethren, not by descending to
their gross level, but by striving to lift them as well as myself up to
the height of a noble and unselfish manhood.
All this was facile and beautiful in theory, difficult and painful in
practice. The struggle was intense; and many, many dark and miserable days
alternated with my bright ones. It was the great warfare of my life, less
imposing than my struggles with Magistus and Helena, but far more
productive of results. It was a process by which good was substituted for
evil; but as fast only as the evil was thoroughly repented of and put
away. It was a process of growth by which the germ of the heavenly life,
penetrating through the dead shell of the old nature, passed upward into a
serener light and larger liberty. It was a death and a resurrection. How
small an affair was my first resurrection in comparison with this!
Twenty years or more were spent in the great combat between my old natural
man and the new spiritual man which was being conceived, born, nourished,
instructed and vitalized within me. I am still engaged in the same
conflict. But after twenty years, I felt that the good had attained a
permanent ascendency—that duty had become pleasure—that self was so far
subdued that I expected nothing, desired nothing for myself alone, and
experienced a serene delight in promoting the happiness of others.
The reader need not think that a convict’s prison afforded no
opportunities for the great work of regeneration, and for the development
of Christian character. The rainbow that shines in the cloud, and glitters
in the dew-drop, is the same. The divine influx is identical in the
greatest things and in the least. The patience, the meekness, the kindness
to others, the obedience to law, the truthfulness, the industry, the
honesty which can be exhibited in the lowliest sphere of human life, have
no sweeter odor, no greater worth in the sight of heaven when they are
displayed on the throne of the Cæsars.
I worked faithfully at all my tasks until my overseers respected me so
much that they did not watch me at all. I was always ready to assist every
one with word and deed, until my power over my fellow-prisoners was such
that my voice of intercession could suspend a quarrel or even suppress a
riot. I delighted to instruct these poor degraded fellows in the truths of
religion; and when they turned a deaf ear to these, I could still please
them with scraps of poetry or history or science. It was a special
pleasure to nurse the sick; and in the course of twenty or thirty years,
hundreds and even thousands felt the benefit and the blessing of my
presence.
This steady growth of a good and useful character in spite of the sneers
and rebuffs of the ill-disposed, and in the face of mighty difficulties,
brought substantial comforts to myself also. I was released from strict
confinement; I was made overseer of a considerable party; I was allowed
liberties I had not known before; and I was fed with abundance from the
officers’ table. Thus, with advancing years, I became contented and happy,
and my means of being useful to others were greatly increased.
I was permitted to plant flowers and vines in the interior courtyard of
our prison. After long and patient labor I adorned and beautified the spot
so greatly that it attracted the attention of every visitor.
The mission of flowers is like that of poetry, to enchant, to elevate, and
to purify. Therefore the Spring comes annually to shower her myriads of
fragrant little lyrics upon the world!
It seemed a shame to constrain these sweet and free children of the air
and sunlight to illumine the interior of a dungeon and to live with
criminals; but I remembered that the angels whom they represent, delight
to visit the humblest spot and to assist the most forlorn and helpless
creatures of God.
I had been in prison about fifteen years without seeing a book, when a
singular old Greek character was confined with us for some nameless crime.
He was taciturn and stately, and evidently a man of education. He had a
copy of the Tragedies of Eschylus which the guard had not taken from him,
although parchments so well executed as that, were of considerable value.
He seemed to know Eschylus by heart, and he loaned the book to me. With
what delight I devoured it!
It was to me a whole flower-garden of sweets and beauties. The sad fate of
Orestes, haunted by the Furies, struck the tenderest chords in my heart;
and I contemplated with the joy of kinship and sympathy the grandeur of
Prometheus chained to the rock, for holding in his possession secret
knowledge which no tortures could compel him to reveal.
I, too, was to learn the sanctity of silence!
One day the old Greek, when working on a pier, suddenly plunged twenty
feet into the rapid Orontes. He struck out boldly down the river for the
sea, and the boat sent after him did not overtake the desperate swimmer.
He left Eschylus behind him.
I had been in prison about twenty-five years, when I came into possession
of another and far greater book. A young Jew was condemned to hard labor
for striking a Roman officer who had insulted his sister. He fell sick
almost immediately, and was carried off by grief and a rapid consumption.
I nursed him closely, and he seemed much attached to me until he
discovered that I was a Christian. He became at once stern and cold and
uncommunicative, and ended by requesting the keeper to provide him with
another nurse or none at all.
He died not long after, and I was surprised at receiving a message from
his deathbed. He thanked me for my kindness to him, and begged me to
accept from him a beautiful little copy of the Psalms of David.
What a treasure I found it! It was a mirror of my own struggles; of my
hopes and fears; of my deep humiliations and my ecstatic triumphs. It let
me into the presence of angels. It was like the voice of God calling to
little Samuel in the dead of night.
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[Illustration: Ornament]