The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

there would be a grand

performance in the circus and that all would be done in the best style. A

blue awning, with white stars in imitation of the sky, would shade them

from the sun; trees would be transplanted, and a forest would appear upon

the stage; giraffes, zebras, elephants, lions, ostriches, stags, and wild

boars would be hunted down and killed; armies of gladiators would

contend; and by way of after-piece the arena would be filled with water,

and a naval battle would be performed—ships, soldiers, wounds, agony,

and death being admirably real.

 

So passed the Roman street-life day, and with the first hours of darkness

the noise and the turmoil did not cease; for then the travelling carriages

rattled towards the gates, and carts filled with dung—the only export of

the city. The music of serenades rose softly in the air, and sounds of

laughter from the tavern. The night watch made their rounds, their

armour rattling as they passed. Lights were extinguished, householders

put up their shutters, to which bells were fastened—for burglaries

frequently occurred. And then for a time the city would be almost still.

Dogs, hated by the Romans, prowled about sniffing for their food. Men

or prey from the Pontine Marshes crept stealthily along the black side of

the street signalling to one another with sharp whistles or hissing sounds.

Sometimes torches would flash against the walls as a knot of young

gallants reeled home from a debauch, breaking the noses of the street

statues on their way. And at such an hour there were men and women

who stole forth from their various houses, and with mantles covering their

faces hastened to a lonely spot in the suburbs, and entered the mouth of a

dark cave. They passed through long galleries, moist with damp and

odorous of death—for coffins were ranged on either side in tiers one

above the other. But soon sweet music sounded from the depths of the

abyss; an open chamber came to view, and a tomb covered with flowers,

laid out with a repast, encircled by men and women who were apparelled

in white robes, and who sang a psalm of joy. It was in the catacombs of

Rome, where the dead had been buried in the ancient times, that the

Christians met to discourse on the progress of the faith; to recount the

trials which they suffered in their homes; to confess to one another their

sins and doubts, their carnal presumption, or their lack of faith; and also

to relate their sweet visions of the night, the answers to their earnest

prayers. They listened to the exhortations of their elders, and perhaps to a

letter from one of the apostles. They then supped together as Jesus had

supped with his disciples, and kissed one another when the love feast was

concluded. At these meetings there was no distinction of rank; the high-born lady embraced the slave whom she had once scarcely regarded as a

man. Humility and submission were the cardinal virtues of the early

Christians; slavery had not been forbidden by the apostles because it was

the doctrine of Jesus that those who were lowest in this world would be

highest in the next, his theory of heaven being earth turned upside down.

Slavery therefore was esteemed a state of grace, and some Christians

appear to have rejected the freeman´s cap on religious grounds, for Paul

exhorts such persons to become free if they can—advice which slaves do

not usually require.

 

As time passed on, the belief of the first Christians that the end of the

world was near at hand became fainter and gradually died away. It was

then declared that God had favoured the earth with a respite of one

thousand years. In the meantime the gospel or good tidings which the

Christians announced was this. There was one God, the Creator of the

world. He had long been angry with men because they were what he had

made them. But he sent his only begotten son into a corner of Syria, and

because his son had been murdered his wrath had been partly appeased.

He would not torture to eternity all the souls that he had made; he would

spare at least one in every million that were born. Peace unto earth and

goodwill unto men if they would act in a certain manner; if not, fire and

brimstone and the noisome pit. He was the emperor of heaven, the tyrant

of the skies; the pagan gods were rebels, with whom he was at war,

although he was all-powerful, and whom he allowed to seduce the souls

of men although he was all-merciful. Those who joined the army of the

cross might entertain some hopes of being saved; those who followed the

faith of their fathers would follow their fathers to hell-fire. This creed

with the early Christians was not a matter of half-belief and metaphysical

debate, as it is at the present day, when Catholics and Protestants discuss

hell-fire with courtesy and comfort over filberts and port wine. To those

credulous and imaginative minds God was a live king, hell a place in

which real bodies were burnt with real flames, which was filled with the

sickening stench of roasted flesh, which resounded with agonising

shrieks. They saw their fathers and mothers, their sisters and their dearest

friends, hurrying onward to that fearful pit unconscious of danger,

laughing and singing, lured on by the fiends whom they called the gods.

They felt as we should feel were we to see a blind man walking towards a

river bank. Who would have the heart to turn aside and say it was the

business of the police to interfere? But what was death, a mere

momentary pain, compared with tortures that would have no end? Who

that could hope to save a soul by tears and supplications would remain

quiescent as men do now, shrugging their shoulders and saying that it is

not good taste to argue on religion, and that conversion is the office of the

clergy? The Christians of that period felt more and did more than those

of the present day, not because they were better men but because they

believed more; and they believed more because they knew less. Doubt is

the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.

 

In that age the Christians believed much, and their lives were rendered

beautiful by sympathy and love. The dark, deep river did not exist—it

was only a fancy of the brain: yet the impulse was not less real. The

heart-throb, the imploring cry, the swift leap, the trembling hand out-reached to save; the transport of delight, the ecstasy of tears, the sweet,

calm joy that a man had been wrested from the jaws of death—are these

less beautiful, are these less real, because it afterwards appeared that the

man had been in no danger after all?

 

In that age every Christian was a missionary. The soldiers sought to win

recruits for the heavenly host; the prisoner of war discoursed to his

Persian jailer; the slave girl whispered the gospel in the ears of her

mistress as she built up the mass of towered hair; there stood men in

cloak and beard at street corners who, when the people, according to the

manners of the day, invited them to speak, preached not the doctrines of

the Painted Porch but the words of a new and strange philosophy; the

young wife threw her arms round her husband´s neck and made him agree

to be baptised, that their souls might not be parted after death. How awful

were the threats of the heavenly despot; how sweet were the promises of

a life beyond the grave! The man who strove to obey the law which was

written on his heart, yet often fell for want of support, was now promised

a rich reward if he would persevere. The disconsolate woman whose age

of beauty and triumph had passed away was taught that if she became a

Christian her body in all the splendour of its youth would rise again. The

poor slave who sickened from weariness of a life in which there was for

him no hope, received the assurance of another life in which he would

find luxury and pleasure when death released him from his woe.

 

Ah, sweet fallacious hopes of a barbarous and poetic age! Illusion still

cherished, for mankind is yet in its romantic youth! How easy it would

be to endure without repining the toils and troubles of this miserable life

if indeed we could believe that when its brief period was past we should

be united to those whom we have loved, to those whom death has

snatched away; or whom fate has parted from us by barriers cold and

deep and hopeless as the grave. If we could believe this the shortness of

life would comfort us—how quickly the time flies by!—and we should

welcome death. But we do not believe it, and so we cling to our tortured

lives, dreading the dark nothingness, dreading the dispersal of our

elements into cold, unconscious space. As drops in the ocean of water, as

atoms in the ocean of air, as sparks in the ocean of fire within the earth,

our minds do their appointed work and serve to build up the strength and

beauty of the one great human mind which grows from century to century

and from age to age, and is perhaps itself a mere molecule within some

higher mind.

 

Soon it was whispered that there was in Rome a secret society which

worshipped an unknown god. Its members wore no garlands on their

brows; they never entered the temples; they were governed by laws which

strange and fearful oaths bound them ever to obey; their speech was not

as the speech of ordinary men; they buried instead of burning the bodies

of the dead; they married, they educated their children after a manner of

their own. The politicians who regarded the established Church as

essential to the safety of the state became alarmed. Secret societies were

forbidden by law, and here was a society in which the tutelary gods of

Rome were denounced as rebels and usurpers. The Christians, it is true,

preached passive obedience and the divine right of kings, but they

proclaimed that all men were equal before God—a dangerous doctrine in

a community where more than half the men were slaves. The idle and

superstitious lazzaroni did not love the gods, but they believed in them,

and they feared lest the “atheists,” as they called the Christians, would

provoke the vengeance of the whole divine federation against the city,

and that all would be involved in the common ruin. Soon there came a

time when every public calamity—an epidemic, a fire, a famine, or a

flood—was ascribed to the anger of the offended gods. And then arose

imperial edicts, popular commotions, and the terrible street-cry of

Christiani ad leones!

 

But the persecutions thus provoked were fitful and brief, and served only

to fan the flame. For to those who believed in heaven—not as men now

believe, with a slight tincture of perhaps unconscious doubt, but as men

believe in things which they see and hear and feel and know—death was

merely a surgical operation with the absolute certainty of consequent

release from pain and of entrance into unutterable bliss. The Christians

therefore encountered it with joy, and the sight of their cheerful

countenances as they were being led to execution induced many to

inquire what this belief might be which could thus rob death of its

dreadfulness and its despair.

 

But the great moralists and thinkers of the empire looked coldly down

upon this new religion. In their pure and noble writings they either allude

to Christianity with scorn or do not allude to it at all. This circumstance

has occasioned much