Thus, this, their festival day, brings the two great champions of the Cross—and it is for Christ and the Cross that every son of England is fighting to-day—before our minds with a singular vividness and nearness: Peter, type of the natural man, untutored; sure of himself and of his own good impulses, of the honest purpose of his guileless heart; impetuous, loving, weak, with all purely human weakness, even to betrayal; and—divinely strengthened—Peter the rock, Peter the fisherman who conquered the world! Paul, the Patrician, the apostle born out of due time, whose ardour is all of the intellect, keen as a blade and burning as a flame; the little man of Tarsus upon whose spirit the teaching of all Christianity reposes as firmly to-day as does the Church upon the stone of Peter; Paul, whom the Captain, Christ Himself, enlisted by the miraculous condescension of a personal appeal. Has not every Christian, whatever his creed, vowed them reverence throughout all the ages? To-day, may not the eyes of the believer look up to them with a new confidence?
The Signora, lying through a wakeful night and thinking of these things, went with a rush of memory back to Rome, to scenes and experiences and thoughts dominated by the memories of the two chief apostles.
There is nothing more characteristic of their lives than the different manners of their death. Peter is Peter to the end; first yielding to the natural impulse, then, by virtue of the grace of God, returning upon himself and leaping to the highest altitude of superhuman sacrifice. In the whole tradition of the Church there is no legend more touching than that which tells us how Peter, flying out of Rome, met the Christ carrying the Cross. It is the original Peter in all his guilelessness who, unstartled by the vision, with the perfect simplicity of his faith, asks: “Domine quo vadis?” And it is the sublime founder of the Church of God who, unquestioning, accepts the Master’s rebuke, and retraces his steps to face his Lord’s torment with the added agony his own holy humility demands.
Every pilgrim to Rome has knelt or stood, prayed or pondered at the tomb of Peter in the golden twilight of the great Basilica, by the vastness of which, as Marion Crawford says, “mind and judgment are dazed and staggered.” Who has not leant on the marble balustrade of the confession and looked down upon the ninety-five gilded lamps that burn there day and night, upon the kneeling white figure of the Seventh Pius?—a vision in which the whole linked grandeur and piety of the Church of Rome seems epitomized. In St. Peter’s, Simon, the poor fisherman, is little thought of; it is Peter, saint and pontiff, who is paramount; he who has miraculously fed the lambs and fed the sheep from that hour on the sea of Galilee to this day. And very few remember the old man, too weak and aged to bear his cross, who had climbed half-way to the Janiculum, when his executioners, seeing that he could not advance any further, planted his gibbet in the deep yellow sand and crucified him then and there—head downwards, as he begged them. This is the ancient tradition, and it further tells us that he was followed by but few of the faithful, who stood apart, weeping.
Impressive as are these hallowed spots, these glorious memorials of the Eternal City; however full, to the believer, of the atmosphere of the days of faith—oases in the great desert of life, where the palms of the martyrs are still green and throw a grateful shade—there is nothing, to our minds, in all the grandeur of Rome, even under the dome of Peter, comparable to the effect produced upon the mind by a visit to Tre Fontane.
As Peter was led to die the death of the lowest criminal—the death of his Master—Paul was brought forth to the death of the sword, reserved for the Patrician.
To go to Tre Fontane and visit the spot of his martyrdom is to return to the primitive ages of the Church. The fisherman lies in a tomb such as no king or emperor, no hero or conqueror or best beloved of the world’s potentates ever had. And Paul sleeps in that great pillared church fuori le mura, in a severity and dignity of magnificence very well befitting the stern fire of the apostle’s zeal. But the memory of his martyrdom is consecrated in a curious isolation of poverty, one might almost say, aloofness; an earnest purity that reminds one, as we have said, of early Christian times. You have all the splendours; the golden glory, the marble, the mosaic, the sculpture and the jewels; the movement, the colour and the crowd of Rome behind, and you come out into the sweeping solitudes of the Campagna. For those who know and love those strange, arid, melancholy spaces, there is no more potent spell than the hold they lay upon the spirit. The gem-like distances of the mountains, the radiant arch of the Italian sky, the movement of light and shadow over the immense waste, the romance of each of the historic ways, the mystery of the secrets they hold—better pens than ours have striven to embody the charm and failed! Why should we try? It is like a strain of music the meaning of which is lost to us. We hear; we cannot understand. It is too full of messages. It is sad and beautiful and haunting, and withal intensely human. Here you have nature at her wildest and most untrammelled; and yet, never was city so peopled, so thick with memories of all races and all histories; endless streams of pilgrims have traversed the long roads; the centuries have come and gone upon them; the blood, the tears, the strivings and hopes of all humanity are here.
One looks forward towards wave upon wave of low-lying ground, bordered by the mountain barriers; and each time one looks back, the dome of Peter hangs pearl-like against the sky.
Speaking of the memory of our drive to Tre Fontane, the Signorina is reminded that she has jotted down her impressions in an old diary.