“See how these Christians love one another.”
TERTULLIAN.
The manumission of Adonijah preceded his baptism. His dark clustering
locks were closely shaven, and the cap of liberty was placed upon his
head with the usual ceremonies. He was no longer a slave, but he was a
freeman without a country. No civic privileges were connected with, or
conferred by the gift of liberty. The manumitted slave could not serve
in the Roman army, nor hold any office in the state, unless the emperor
chose to exercise his despotic authority in his favour. He might enrol
his name on the list of Ærarians and become a member of a guild, and
follow a trade, or he might remain in the household of his patron; but
he could not become a citizen of Rome without influence or gold: both
were exerted in his favour.
The conversion of Julius and Adonijah were interesting events to the
Roman Christians, and the sponsari of the catechumeni were selected from
the most distinguished members of the Church by its pious bishop. In the
primitive times the sponsors answered for the good faith of those
persons who desired to be instructed in the Christian religion. It is
from this custom that the sponsors in our own Church are derived; for
when infant baptism became general, the sponsari answered for Christian
babes as they formerly had done for the adult heathen whom they
presented as catechumeni[20] or candidates for that sacrament.
The sponsari of Julius Claudius and his Hebrew freedman were not men of
rank, but experienced Christians. Indeed, one was an aged slave; but the
Church numbered many such among her brightest jewels. Her internal
order, though marked by distinctive and fixed degrees of rank, did not
rest upon those external ones upon which worldly societies depend; the
beautiful and harmonious bond of love alone united all the members of
the universal or Catholic Church together in the first ages of
Christianity.
The admission of Julius Claudius and Adonijah was followed by the
marriage of Lucia and her lover. If the existence of the nobly descended
Roman lady had been known beyond the pale of the Church, some impediment
might yet have divided her from Adonijah. Nor would it have been safe
for the vestal who had broken her vow to have re-appeared in the heathen
metropolis. So she was married to Adonijah in the privacy of the
Sotterrania,[21] and Julius finally, through the purchased influence of
Cenis, the mistress of the emperor Vespasian, got the name of Adonijah
enrolled in one of the civic tribes.
The new-made citizen of Rome did not intend to remain in the metropolis
of the world. He wished to revisit his native land, for to him the
desolation of Judea was dearer than the magnificence of imperial Rome.
The Church of Jerusalem, with its bishop Simeon, had returned to Judea.
No molestation was offered by the Gentile conquerors to those Jews who
had never taken up arms against them, and the converted Israelites, of
which the Church then holding the supremacy over every other was
composed, had an apostle for their head of the lineage of David, being
the kinsman of the Lord,[22] as well as his disciple. By this Church
Adonijah and Lucia were received with affectionate greeting and
hospitality. The travellers had indeed found a welcome from the brethren
in every place, for the tenets of Christianity were widely promulgated
throughout Asia; for the dispersion of Israel had caused many Gentiles
to enter the Church, nor, as we have seen, did all the Jews remain in
the blindness of error; for ecclesiastical records assure us that
numbers about this time repented and received the faith they had
blasphemed and persecuted, being convinced by the ruin of their city and
destruction of their temple that the crucified Jesus was their promised
Saviour.
In passing through his native land Adonijah soften paused to weep and
pray. He lamented the woes of his country, while he acknowledged the
justice of the sentence that had gone forth against her. He visited the
ruins of Nazareth and Bethlehem, he wept at Mount Calvary, he mourned
over the destruction of the temple; but he saw the traces made in the
living rock by the earthquake, and the sepulchre that could not hold in
its keeping the risen Son of God, and was comforted. One was by his side
who shared his sorrows and his joys, who wept with him for the sins of
his people, and rejoiced in that atonement by which they might yet be
forgiven and restored to their own land.[23] It was natural that a
converted Jew, long exiled from his native land, should seek the
memorable spots rendered holy by the birth, ministry, crucifixion,
resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and that his Gentile wife should
share his feelings, and accompany him in his pilgrimage; yet pilgrimages
were not common in the first ages of the Church. No allusion to such
visits can be found in any part of the New Testament, to afford either
example or encouragement to a practice that afterwards became so
general. The faith of the early Christians needed not such excitement;
they felt the presence of their Lord in heaven, and did not seek to
trace his footsteps upon earth.
Lucia Claudia had not quitted Rome without regret; she was a member of
that glorious Church to which the noblest of St. Paul’s Epistles had
been addressed while he was yet personally unknown to his Roman
brethren. She was the pastoral daughter of Linus, the friend of Pomponia
Græcina and of the fair British convert Claudia, celebrated by Martial
for her beautiful complexion, but whom the Church numbered among its
precious jewels; Clement, too, and many other persons whose names were
written in the Book of Life, regarded Lucia Claudia as a sister. No
human society was ever so closely united in friendship as the primitive
Christians, who obeyed from the heart the new commandment enjoined by
their Lord, “Love one another.”
Lucia Claudia, however, found the same tender affection, the same
perfect union, existing among the Christians of Palestine as at Rome.
Some were then living who had seen the Lord, and had listened to those
divine precepts which had made the Gentile officers sent to apprehend
him return to their dissatisfied employers with the remarkable reply,
“Never man spake like this man,” and she no longer regretted Rome. To
Adonijah, the Hebrew Christian Church planted by the High Priest of the
order of Melchisedec, so long-promised to Israel and rejected when He
came, was a lively representation of heaven upon earth. He recognised
the Lord’s Prayer as a Jewish one,[24] to which one petition alone had
been added by the great Head of the Christian Church, who then gave it
the perfection “which came down from the Fountain of Goodness and Father
of Light.” The Psalms of David, too, sung in his own dear loved land,
were full of that light which was spreading then over the whole earth to
enlighten the dark and idolatrous Gentiles Jerusalem and the cities of
Judea might lie in the dust of desolation for ages, but Christ had been
the glory of the land; and the heart of the Jew clave to his ruined
country, as if no curse lay upon its hills and valleys, for the Sun of
Righteousness had risen there with healing on his wings, and Adonijah
acknowledged the Son of David as his Lord and his God, and he loved best
to worship where the steps of his Saviour had been.
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[20] Infant baptism was general in the second Century—a fact proved by
the works of Cyprian, and there is reason to believe that the infant
children of Christian parents were usually baptized, though the practice
fell into disuse in the third and fourth centuries.
[21] Whether the early Christians used the present ritual we are not
able to determine. The ring placed upon the finger of the bride was an
ancient heathen custom, nor can we find a different origin for the
bride-cake, which in the middle ages was decorated with ribbons and
placed upon the altar. It is probable that the Church retained such
rites as were not inconsistent with a Christian profession.
[22] Simeon, the brother of Jude, the son or grandson of Cleopas, is
supposed by some to have been the nephew of Joseph, by others the
offspring of the Virgin’s sister, who was also named Mary. It is
possible that both these statements may be correct. He succeeded St.
James the Less in the Bishopric of Jerusalem, and was crucified in the
reign of Trajan, in his 120th year.
[23] See Appendix, Note XII.
[24] The Lord’s Prayer is from the Mishna of the Jews; to this beautiful
compilation our Saviour added a characteristic petition, “Forgive us our
trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us,” for he
approved the beautiful formula then in use, and gave it all it wanted.