Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

of the Roman Empire had come to Cilicia to stamp out the Christian faith. Julius heard of the measures taken against the Christians, and though he supposed that it concerned the Christian community in which Pamphilius lived, he did not think of him. But one day as he was walking along the square in the place where his official duties called him, he was accosted by a poorly dressed, elderly man, whom he did not recognize at first. It was Pamphilius. He came up to Julius, leading a child by the hand.

“How are you, friend?” said Pamphilius. “I have a great favor to ask of you, but I don’t know as you will be willing to recognize me as your friend, now that we Christians are being persecuted; you might be in danger of losing your place if you had any relations with me.”

“I am not in the least afraid of it,” replied Julius, “and as a proof of it I will ask you to come home with me. I will even postpone my business in the market so as to talk with you and be of service to you. Let us go home together. Whose child is this?”

“It is my son.”

“Really, I need not have asked. I recognize your features in him. I recognize also those blue eyes, and I should not have to ask who your wife is: she is the beautiful woman whom I saw with you some years ago.”

“You have surmised correctly,” replied Pamphilius. “Shortly after we met, she became my wife.”

The friends went to Julius’ home. Julius summoned his wife and gave the boy to her, and brought Pamphilius to his luxurious private room.

“Here you can say anything; no one will hear us,” said Julius.

“I am not afraid of being heard,” replied Pamphilius; “since my request is not that the Christians, who have been arrested, may not be sentenced and executed, but only that they may be permitted publicly to confess their faith.”

And Pamphilius told how the Christians arrested by the authorities had sent word to the community from the dungeons where they were confined. The elder Cyril, knowing of Pamphilius’ relations with Julius, commissioned him to go and plead for the Christians. The Christians did not ask for mercy. They considered it their mission to bear witness to the truth of Christ’s teaching. They could bear witness to this in the course of a long life of eighty years, and they could bear witness to the same by enduring tortures. Either way was immaterial to them; and physical death, unavoidable as it was, for them was alike free from terror and full of joy, whether it came immediately or at the end of half a century: but they wished their lives to be useful to men, and therefore they had sent Pamphilius to labor in their behalf, that their trial and punishment might be public.

Julius was dumbfounded at Pamphilius’ request, but he promised to do all in his power.

“I have promised you my intercession,” said Julius, “but I have promised it to you on account of my friendship for you, and on account of the peculiarly pleasant feeling of tenderness which you have always awakened in me; but I must confess that I consider your doctrine most senseless and harmful. I can judge in regard to this, because not very long ago, in a moment of disappointment and illness, in a state of depression of spirits, I once more shared your views, and once more almost abandoned everything and went to you. I understand on what your error is based, for I have been through it; it is based on selfishness, on weakness of spirit, and the feebleness caused by ill health; it is a creed for women, but not for men.”

“Why so?”

“Because, out of pride, instead of taking part by your labors in the affairs of the empire, and in proportion to your services rising higher and higher in the estimation of men,268 you forthwith, by your pride, I say, regard all men equal, so that you consider no one higher than yourselves, and consider yourselves equal to Caesar.

“You yourself think so, and teach others to think so. And for the weak and the lazy this is a great temptation. Instead of laboring, every slave immediately counts himself equal to Caesar. If men listened to you, society would be dissolved, and we should return to primitive savagery. You in the empire preach the dissolution of empire. But your very existence is dependent on the empire. If it was not for that, you would not be. You would all be slaves of the Scythians or the barbarians, the first who knew of your condition. You are like a tumor destroying the body, but able to make a show, and to feed on the body and nothing else. And the living body struggles with it and suppresses it! Thus do we act in regard to you, and we cannot do otherwise. And notwithstanding my promise to help you, and to comply with your request, I look on your doctrine as most harmful and low: low, because dishonorably and unjustly you devour the breast that nourishes you: take advantage of the blessings of the imperial order without sharing in its support, and yet trying to destroy it!”

“What you say would be just,” said Pamphilius, “if we really lived as you think. But you do not know about our life, and you have formed a false conception of it. For you, with your habitual luxury, it is hard to imagine how little a man requires when he exists without superfluities. A man is so constituted that, when he is well, he can produce with his hands far more than he needs for the support of his life. Living in a community as we do, we are able by our labor to support without effort our children, and the aged and the sick and the feeble. You assert that we Christians arouse in the slave