Catharine Furze

by William Hale White

“Did he Believe?

“Charmides was born in Greece, but about the year 300 A.D. was living in Rome. He had come there, like many of his countrymen, to pursue his calling as sculptor in the imperial city, and he cherished a great love for his art. He knew too well that it was not the art of the earlier days of Athens, and that he could never catch the spirit of that golden time, but he loved it none the less. He was also a philosopher in his way. He had read not only the literature of Greece, but that of his adopted land, and he was especially familiar with Lucretius and his pupil Virgil. His intellectual existence, however, was not particularly happy. Rome was a pleasant city; his occupation was one in which he delighted; the thrill of a newly noticed Lucretian idea or of a tender touch in Virgil were better to him than any sensual pleasure, but his dealings with his favourite authors ended in his own personal emotion, and it was sad to think that the Hermes on which he had spent himself to such a degree should become a mere decoration to a Roman nobleman’s villa, valued only because it cost so much, and that nobody who looked at it would ever really care for it. Once, however, he was rewarded. He had finished a Pallas Athene just as the sun went down. He was excited, and after a light sleep he rose very early and went into the studio with the dawn. There stood the statue, severe, grand in the morning twilight, and if there was one thing in the world clear to him, it was that what he saw was no inanimate mineral mass, but something more. It was no mere mineral mass with an outline added. Part of the mind which formed the world was in it, actually in it, and it came to Charmides that intellect, thought, had their own rights, that they were as much a fact as the stone, and that what he had done was simply to realise a Divine idea which was immortal, no matter what might become of its embodiment. The weight of the material world lifted, an avenue of escape seemed to open itself to him from so much that oppressed and deadened him, and he felt like a man in an amphitheatre of overhanging mountains, who should espy in a far-off corner some scarcely perceptible track, and on nearer inspection a break in the walled precipices, a promise, or at least a hint, of a passage from imprisonment to the open plain. It was nothing more than he had learned in his Plato, but the truth was made real to him, and he clung to it.

“Rome at the end of the third century was one of the most licentious of cities. It was invaded by all the vices of Greece, and the counterpoise of the Greek virtues was absent. The reasoning powers assisted rather than prevented the degradation of morals, for they dissected and represented as nothing all the motives which had hitherto kept men upright. The healthy and uncorrupted instinct left to itself would have been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, What is there in it?—and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast. Charmides was unmarried, and it is not to be denied that though his life as a whole was pure, he had yielded to temptation, not without loathing himself afterwards. He did not feel conscious of any transgression of a moral law, for no such law was recognised, but he detested himself because he had been drawn into close contact with a miserable wretch simply in order to satisfy a passion, and in the touch of mercenary obscenity there was something horrible to him. It was bitter to him to reflect that, notwithstanding his aversion from it, notwithstanding his philosophy and art, he had been equally powerless with the uttermost fool of a young aristocrat to resist the attraction of the commonest of snares. What were his books and fine pretensions worth if they could not protect him in such ordinary danger? Thus it came to pass that after a fall, when he went back to his work, it was so unreal to him, such a mockery, that days often elapsed before he could do anything. It was a mere toy, a dilettante dissipation, the embroidery of corruption. Oh, for a lawgiver, for a time of restraint, for the time of Regulus and the republic! Then, said Charmides to himself, my work would have some value, for heroic obedience would he behind it. He was right, for the love of the beautiful cannot long exist where there is moral pollution. The love of the beautiful itself is moral—that is to say, what we love in it is virtue. A perfect form or a delicate colour are the expression of something which is destroyed in us by subjugation to the baser desires or meanness, and he who has been unjust to man or woman misses the true interpretation of a cloud or falling wave.

“One night Charmides was walking through the lowest part of the city, and he heard from a mere hovel the sound of a hymn. He knew what it was—that it was the secret celebration of a religious rite by the despised sect of the Jews and their wretched proselytes. The Jews were especially hateful to him and to all cultured people in Rome. They were typical of all the qualities which culture abhorred. No Jew had ever produced anything lovely in any department whatever—no picture, statue, melody, nor poem. Their literature was also barbaric: there was no consecutiveness in it, no reasoning, no recognition in fact of the reason. It was a mere mass of legends without the exquisite charm and spiritual intention of those of Greece, of bloody stories and obscure disconnected prophecies by shepherds and peasants. Their god was a horror, a boor upon a mountain, wielding thunder and lightning. Aphrodite was perhaps not all that could be wished, but she was divine compared with the savage Jehovah. It was true that a recent Jewish sect professed better things and recognised as their teacher a young malefactor who was executed when Tiberius was emperor. So far, however, as could be made out he was a poor crack-brained demagogue, who dreamed of restoring a native kingdom in Palestine. What made the Jews especially contemptible to culture was that they were retrograde. They strove to put back the clock. There is only one path, so culture affirmed, and that is the path opened by Aristotle, the path of rational logical progress from what we already know to something not now known, but which can be known. If our present state is imperfect, it is because we do not know enough. Every other road, excepting this, the king’s highway, heads into a bog. These Jews actually believed in miracles; they had no science, and thought they could regenerate the world by hocus-pocus. They ought to be suppressed by law, and, if necessary, put to death, for they bred discontent.

“Nevertheless, Charmides decided to enter the hovel. He was in idle mood, and he was curious to see for himself what the Jews were like. He pushed open the door, and when he went in he found himself in a low, mean room very dimly lighted and crowded with an odd medley of Greeks, Romans, tolerably well-dressed persons, and slaves. The poor and the shaves were by far the most numerous. The atmosphere was stifling, and Charmides sat as near the door as possible. Next to him was a slave-girl, not beautiful, but with a peculiar expression on her face very rare in Rome at that time. The Roman women were, many of them, lovely, but their loveliness was cold—the loveliness of indifference. The somewhat common features of this slave, on the contrary, were lighted up with eagerness: to her there was evidently something in life of consequence—nay, of immense importance. There were few of her betters in Rome to whom anything was of importance. A hymn at that moment was being sung, the words of which Charmides could not catch, and when it was finished an elderly man rose and read what seemed the strangest jargon about justification and sin. The very terms used were in fact unintelligible. The extracts were from a letter addressed to the sect in Rome by one Paul, a disciple of that Jesus who was crucified. After the reading was over came an address, very wild in tone and gesture, and equally unintelligible, and then a prayer or invocation, partly to their god, but also, as it seemed, to this Jesus, who evidently ranked as a dæmon, or perhaps as Divine, Charmides was quite unaffected. The whole thing appeared perfect nonsense, not worth investigation, but he could not help wondering what there was in it which could so excite that girl, whom he could hardly conclude to be a fool, and whose earnestness was a surprise to him. He thought no more about the affair until some days afterwards when he happened to visit a friend. Just as he was departing he met this very slave in the porch. He involuntarily stopped, and she whispered to him.

“‘You will not betray us?’

“‘I? Certainly not.’

“‘I will lend you this. Read it and return it to me.’ So saying, she vanished.

“Charmides, when he reached home, took out the manuscript. He recognised it as a copy of the letter which he had partly heard at the meeting. He was somewhat astonished to find that it was written by a man of learning, who was evidently familiar with classic authors, but surely never was scholarship pressed into such a service! The confusion of metaphor, the suddenness of transition, the illogical muddles were bad enough, but the chief obstacle to comprehension was that the author’s whole scope and purpose, the whole circle of his ideas, were outside Charmides altogether. He was not attracted any more than he was at the meeting, but he was a little piqued because Paul had certainly been well educated, and he determined to attend the meeting again. This time he was late, and did not arrive till it was nearly at an end. His friend was there, and again he sat down next to her. When they went out it was dark, and he walked by her side.

“‘Have you read the letter?’

“‘Yes, but I do not understand it, and I have brought it back.’

“‘May Christ the Lord open your eyes!’

“‘Who is this Christ whom you worship?’

“‘The Son of God, He who was crucified; the man Jesus; He who took upon Himself flesh to redeem us from our sins; in whom by faith we are justified and have eternal life.’

“It was all pure Hebrew to him, save the phrase ‘Son of God,’ which sounded intelligible.

“‘You are Greek,’ he said, for he recognised her accent although she spoke Latin.

“‘Yes, from Corinth: my name is Demariste;’ and she explained to him that, although she was a slave, she was partly employed in teaching Greek to the children of her mistress.

“‘If you are Greek and well brought up, you must know that I cannot comprehend a word of what you have spoken. It is Judaism.’

“‘To me, too,’ she replied, speaking Greek to him, ‘it was incomprehensible, but God by the light which lighteth every man hath brought me into His marvellous light, and now this that I have told you is exceedingly clear—nay, clearer than anything which men say they see.’

“‘Tell me how it happened.’

“‘When I first came to Rome I had a master who desired to make me his concubine, and I hated him; but what strength had I?—and I was tempted to yield. My parents were dead; I had no friends who cared for me—what did it matter! I had read in my books of the dignity of the soul, but that was a poor weapon with which to fight, and, moreover, sin was not exceeding sinful to me. By God’s grace I was brought amongst these Christians, and I was convinced of sin. I saw that it was not only transgression against myself, but against the eternal decrees of the Most High, against those decrees which, as one of our own poets still dear to me has said—

“‘Ου yαρ τι νυν yε καχθες, αλλ' αει ποτε
ζη ταυτα, κουδεις οιδεν εξ οτου φανη.’ [{1}]

“‘I saw that all art, all learning, everything which men value, were as straw compared with God’s commandments, and that it would be well to destroy all our temples, and statues, and all that we have which is beautiful, if we could thereby establish the kingdom of God within us, and so become heirs of the life everlasting. Oh, my friend, my friend in Christ, I hope, believe me, Rome will perish, and we shall all perish, not because we are ignorant, but because we have not obeyed His word. But how was I to obey it? Then I heard told the life of Christ the Lord: how God the Father in His infinite pity sent His Son into the world; how He lived amongst his and died a shameful death upon the cross that we might not die: and all His strength passed into me and became mine through faith, and I was saved; saved for this life; saved eternally; justified through Him; worthy to wait for Him and meet Him at His coming, for He shall come, and I shall be for ever with the Lord.’

“Demariste stood straight upright as she spoke, and the light in her transfigured her countenance as the sun penetrating a grey mass of vapour informs it with such an intensity of brightness that the eye can scarcely endure it. It was a totally new experience to Charmides, an entire novelty in Rome. He did not venture to look in her face directly, for he felt that there was nothing in him equal to its sublime, solemn pleading.

“‘I do not know anything of your Jesus,’ he said at last, timidly; ‘upon what do you rest His claims?’

“‘Read His life. I will lend it to you; you will want no other evidence for Him. And was He not raised from the dead to reign for ever at His Father’s right hand? No, keep the letter for a little while, and perhaps you will understand it better when you know upon what it is based.’

“A day or two afterwards the manuscript was sent to him secretly with many precautions. He was not smitten suddenly by it. The Palestinian tale, although he confessed it was much more to his mind than Paul, was still rude. It was once more the rudeness which was repellent, and which almost outweighed the pathos of many of the episodes and the undeniable grandeur of the trial and death. Moreover, it was full of superstition and supernaturalism, which he could not abide. He was in his studio after his first perusal, and he turned to an Apollo which he was carving. The god looked at him with such overpowering, balanced sanity, such a contrast to Christian incoherence and the rhapsodies of the letter to the Romans, that he was half ashamed of himself for meddling with it. He opened his Lucretius. Here was order and sequence; he knew where he was; he was at home. Was all this nought, were the accumulated labour and thought of centuries to be set aside and trampled on by the crude, frantic inspiration of clowns? The girl’s face, however, recurred to him; he could not get rid of it, and he opened the biography again. He stumbled upon what now stand as our twenty-third and twenty-fourth chapters of Matthew, containing the denunciation of the Pharisees, and the prophecy of the coming of the Son of Man. He was amazed at the new turn which was given to life, at the reasons assigned for the curses which were dealt to these Jewish doctors. They were damned for their lack of mercy, judgment, faith, for their extortion, excess, and because they were full of hypocrisy and iniquity. They were fools and blind, but not through defects which would have condemned them in Greece and Rome at that day, but through failings of which Greece and Rome took small account. Charmides pondered and pondered, and saw that this Jew had given a new centre, a new pivot to society. This, then, was the meaning of the world as nearly as it could be said to have a single meaning. Read by the light of the twenty-third chapter, the twenty-fourth chapter was magnificent. ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.’ Was it not intelligible that He to whom right and wrong were so diverse, to whom their diversity was the one fact for man, should believe that Heaven would proclaim and enforce it? He read more and more, until at last the key was given to him to unlock even that strange mystery, that being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Still it was idle for him to suppose that he could ever call himself a Christian in the sense in which those poor creatures whom he had seen were Christians. Their fantastic delusions, their expectation that any day the sky might open and their Saviour appear in the body, were impossible to him; nor could he share their confidence that once for all their religion alone was capable of regenerating the world. He could not, it is true, avoid the reflection that the point was not whether the Christians were absurd, nor was it even the point whether Christianity was not partly absurd. The real point was whether there was not more certainty in it than was to be found in anything at that time current in the world. Here, in what Paul called faith, was a new spring of action, a new reason for the blessed life, and, what was of more consequence, a new force by which men might be enabled to persist in it. He could not, we say, avoid this reflection; he could not help feeling that he was bound not to wait for that which was in complete conformity with an ideal, but to enlist under the flag which was carried by those who in the main fought for the right, and that it was treason to cavil and stand aloof because the great issue was not presented in perfect purity. Nevertheless, he was not decided, and could not quite decide. If he could have connected Christianity with his own philosophy; if it had been the outcome, the fulfilment of Plato, his duty would have been so much simpler; it was the complete rupture—so it seemed to him—which was the difficulty. His heart at times leaped up to join this band of determined, unhesitating soldiers; to be one in an army; to have a cause; to have a banner waving over his head; to have done with isolation, aloofness, speculation ending in nothing, and dreams which profited nobody: but even in those moments when he was nearest to a confession of discipleship he was restrained by faintness and doubt. If he were to enrol himself as a convert his conversion would be due not to an irresistible impulse, but to a theory, to a calculation, one might almost say, that such and such was the proper course to take.

“He went again to the meeting, and he went again and again. One night, as he came home, he walked as he had walked before, with Demariste. She was going as far as his door for the manuscript which he had now copied for his own use. As they went along a man met them who raised a lantern, and directed it full in their faces.

“‘The light of death,’ said Demariste.

“‘Who is he?’

“‘I know him well; he is a spy. I have often seen him at the door of our assembly.’

“‘Do you fear death?’

“‘I? Has not Christ died?’

“Charmides hath fallen in love with this slave, but it was love so different from any love which he had felt before for a woman, that it ought to have had some other name. It was a love of the soul, of that which was immortal, of God in her; it was a love too, of no mere temporary phenomenon, but of reality outlasting death into eternity. There was thus a significance, there was a grandeur in it wanting to any earthly love. It was the new love with which men were henceforth to love women—the love of Dante for Beatrice.

“She waited at the door while he went inside to fetch in the parchment. He brought it out and gave it to her, and as he stood opposite to her he looked in her face, and her eyes were not averted. He caught her hand, but she drew back.

“‘’Tis but for a day or two,’ she said; ‘a week will see the end.’

“‘A week!’ he cried! ‘Oh, my Demariste, rather a week with thee than an age with anything less than thee!’

“‘You will have to die too. Dare you die? The spirit may be willing, but the flesh may be weak.’

“‘Death? Yes, death, if only I am yours!’

“‘Nay, nay, my beloved, not for me, but for the Lord Jesus!’

“He bent nearer to her; his head was on her neck, and his arms were round her body. Oh, son and daughter of Time! oh, son and daughter of Eternity!

“He had hardly returned to his house, when he was interrupted by his friend Callippus, just a little the worse for wine.

“‘What new thing is this?’ said Callippus. ‘I hear you have consorted with the Jews, and have been seen at their assembly.’

“‘True, my friend.’

“True! By Jupiter! what is the meaning of it? You do not mean to say that you are bitten by the mad dog?’

“‘I believe.’

“‘Oh, by God, that it should have come to this! Are you not ashamed to look him in the face?’ pointing to the Apollo statue. ‘Ah! the old prophecy is once more verified!—

“‘Tutemet a nobis iam quovis tempore vatum
terriloquis victus dictis desciscere quæres.’ [{2}]

But I must be prudent. I saw somebody watching your house on the other side of the street. If I am caught they will think I belong to the accursed sect too. Farewell.”

“The morning came, and about an hour after Charmides had risen two soldiers presented themselves. He was hurried away, brought before the judges, and examined. Some little pity was felt for him by two or three members of the court, as he was well known in Rome, and one of them condescended to argue with him and to ask him how he could become ensnared by a brutal superstition which affirmed, so it was said, the existence of devil-possessed pigs, and offered sacrifices to them.

“‘You,’ said he, ‘an artist and philosopher—if it be true that you are a pervert, you deserve a heavier punishment than the scum whom we have hitherto convicted.’

“‘For Christ and His Cross!’ cried Charmides.

“‘Take him away!’

“The next day Charmides and Demariste met outside the prison gates. They were chained together in mockery, the seducer, Demariste, and the seduced, Charmides. They were marched through the streets of Rome, the crowd jeering them and thronging after them to enjoy the sport of their torments and death. Charmides saw the eyes of Demariste raised heavenward and her lips moving in prayer.

“‘He has heard me,’ she said, ‘and you will endure.’

“He pressed her hand, and replied, with unshaken voice, ‘Fear not.’

“They came to the place of execution, but before the final stroke they were cruelly tortured. Charmides bore his sufferings in silence, but in her extremest agony the face of Demariste was lighted with rapture.

“‘Look, look, my beloved, there, there!’ trying to lift her mangled arm, ‘Christ the Lord! One moment more and we are for ever with Him.’

“Charmides could just raise his head, and saw nothing but Demariste. He was able to turn himself towards her and move her hand to his lips, the second, only the second and the last kiss.

“So they died. Charmides was never considered a martyr by the Church. The circumstances were doubtful, and it was not altogether clear that he deserved the celestial crown.”