Part 22

In another moment Ethopus hurled him upon his back, and seating himself upon his body, took a knife from his pocket and cut off half his tongue. He then deliberately passed a stout pin through the stump and tied a strong thread behind the pin. He thus stopped the blood which was pouring out of the wretch’s mouth and gurgling in his throat. He was now dumb like Ethopus. He could not betray him. He could not escape him.

This was one of the most horrible scenes I ever witnessed. It had evidently been deliberately planned. I was chained against the wall and could not stir. I called out to Ethopus to stop, not to cut out his tongue, not to roll him up in the cloth, but to leave him bound and gagged until we escaped. He paid no more attention to my entreaties, to my excitement, than if I was not present. He seemed deaf, dumb, blind, insensible to everything except to the one master resolution of his soul.

He wound the body carefully up in the bituminous cloth and secured it with leather thongs. It was a shocking sight. He then removed my bolts and chains and set me free. He led me sternly and forcibly to the door, and we passed out, leaving Magistus to his terrible fate. He had fallen into the very pit that he had dug for me.

There was no one in the hall as we came out. Ethopus took the opposite way from that by which he and Magistus came. We soon met officers and guards. I showed the signet-ring; no questions were asked; and we shortly found ourselves in the street and free. What a release!

I did not know which way to go. Ethopus drew me toward the public square. It was crowded with people. Swinging lamps of all colors were suspended from the trees. There were bands of music and fireworks, and dancing-girls and flower-girls, and men with trained monkeys, and all the strange sights and sounds which make a great city in high carnival so brilliant and attractive. Heralds had announced in the afternoon that twelve favorite disciples of the Jewish impostor would be burned, in the shape of candles, that night. The interest was intense.

We came very near to Simon’s palace. It was brilliantly illuminated. I recognized the figures of Helena and Lelius and Simon and Demetrius promenading with others on the grand portico. The carts or wagons came along with the unhappy victims. There was a great bustle in the crowd. The figures were set up on a green knoll which elevated them above the heads of the people.

One of the Christians sang, with a clear, sweet voice:

“Glory to God in the highest! Peace on earth and good-will toward men!”

The mob hooted and yelled and applauded, each in an uproarious manner.

“Ready,” cried an officer.

The torches were applied; and twelve bright pillars of flame rose in the air. There was wild cheering from the crowd; but I heard a wilder cry from the spectators on the portico of Simon. The cry was:

“Magistus! Magistus!”

His own friends recognized his face and witnessed his death-struggles!

Such was the origin of the Christian candles, a mode of fatal torture afterward adopted on a grand scale by the emperor Nero in his persecution of the disciples at Rome.

Poor children of Christ! They faced death in every shape. They were crucified; they were flayed alive; they were thrown to wild beasts; they were cast into pits full of serpents; they were stoned; they were starved; they were frozen; they were burned; but there was no form of death which excelled in atrocity this invention of Magistus and Helena.

Helena! Beautiful, enchanting, detestable woman! From this point our currents of life diverged never again to meet. When I look back, I can scarcely comprehend the causes of the wonderful control she exercised over my spirit. I was young, enthusiastic, and impressible; and the senses, educated first, prolonged their sway over the rational faculties. I have been so long delivered from the bondage of the sensuous life, that I am astonished that I ever found any beauty unallied to goodness, or any fascination in aught but a pure and virtuous love.

Women who are given to luxury and pleasure; who aspire to captivate men by the charms of the senses; who live upon the flattering incense of lovers and admirers; who are cunning, proud, vain, ambitious and contemptuous toward others, are Helenas at heart. Circumstances beyond their control may curb their wills and prevent the outward development of their characters. But the revealing light of the spiritual world will show them to be selfish, sensual and cruel to a dreadful degree; and they become the syrens of hell.

These characters are so fearfully wicked, that some may think them gross exaggerations. Exceptional they may be, even in these evil times; but they are the genuine offspring of our natural lusts unsubdued and uncontrolled by the sacred laws and life of heaven. They are the common, every-day characters of the spheres of the unhappy in the spiritual world, and they exist in potency, if not in act, in every human being whose heart is alienated from God, or whose ruling love is the love of self.

I had no time to philosophize in this manner, when I knew that the friends of Magistus had recognized his face before it was concealed by the fatal flames. A keen and rapid pursuit would immediately follow in every direction. To get out of the city was our first thought, our only safety. If we took the roads to the interior of the country, we could certainly be overtaken. If we struck out eastwardly for the sea-beach, we might pick up some fisherman’s boat and escape to sea. We took the latter course.

We walked rapidly, and were many miles up the coast before midnight. I was fresh and under high excitement, and Ethopus seemed capable of all endurance. I occupied the time in telling him the whole history of his brother Anthony, and in thanking him over and over again for my extraordinary deliverance. The poor, dumb man could only manifest his delight by shaking my hand and patting me on the shoulder, which he repeatedly did.

Several hours more and I was thoroughly fatigued. Just before dawn we lay down under a great tree on the banks of a little stream which was perpetually tripping from the mountains toward the sea, bearing its crystal tokens from the spirit of liberty in the one to the kindred soul in the other.

When I awoke, the sun was high in the heavens. Ethopus was bathing his feet in the little river. He could not bear to disturb me, as I appeared so exhausted and so sound asleep. He pointed smilingly to a little boat, which we had not discovered in the darkness of the night. There was one ark of hope and safety. I felt reassured. We had nothing to eat but some apples, which we had plucked by the way. We made this frugal meal, and if we had put to sea immediately, the whole story of my life, from this point, might have been different.

The morning was bright and balmy. A little silver mist rose softly from the woods, the leaves of which were twinkling with dew. The sea’s surf, which at times is so white and boisterous, rippled gently against the yellow beach. The singing of birds was heard here and there in the branches, and now and then a great shining fish flapped up out of the water. The air was sweet and serene, the sky soft and pure. “This heavenly peace and repose of nature,” said I to myself, “is neither silence nor solitude!”

One of the most beautiful things in the world to me is a little stream of clear water, afar off in the country among the green hills, breaking into sounds and colors over the stones and pebbles in its path. I could sit by the hour on the banks of such a lovely rivulet, looking into its face and listening to its music. It is there, if ever, that the breathings of the spirit world upon the heart endeavor to break forth from the lips in poesy and song.

Touched that morning with this delightful and child-like love of nature, I could not rest satisfied until I had bathed my weary limbs and body in the cooling stream. I dallied a long time among the ripples and in the shadow of the overhanging trees, forgetful of the painful past and the uncertain future.

A sharp cry from Ethopus, who was getting the boat ready, suddenly aroused me from my dream. He pointed down the beach. Before I had put on my robe, I heard the tramp of horses, and in a few moments we were surrounded by a troop of cavalry and taken prisoners. Bound tightly and mounted behind two of the soldiers, we were hurried back to Antioch and cast into separate dungeons.

I lay there for several weeks neglected and alone. I had at least no fear of a visit from Magistus. A visitor, however, at last appeared. It was Demetrius.

“Lazarus,” said he, “I reproach myself for the part I took in decoying you into the house of Simon and betraying you into the hands of Magistus. It was not well done toward a fellow-student of the Platonic philosophy. I have labored to make you amends. I have saved your life, but it was a hard struggle. Ethopus was thrown to the lion. Helena pouted and fumed because you did not share his fate. Lelius was for a long time inflexible. I have gained something for you, although not much. You are condemned for life to the chain-gang of criminals who are compelled to labor on the public works. It is a sad fate, but you are young. Time, the revolutionist, sometimes releases the bound.”

“Life is sweet,” said I, “and I thank you. I forgive your wrong to me. I forgive Helena and Simon. I will pray for them and you. And, oh, Demetrius, let a man, henceforth dead to the world you live in, beseech you to extricate yourself from this terrible network of evil that surrounds you. Aspire to be free, just, true and good, and you will be happy.”

“Where did you get this religious philosophy?”

“From a greater than Plato—from Christ.”

He turned away.

XXX.

_THE GREAT COMBAT._

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.