The New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, epistolary treatises, familiar letters, came to Ethne’s children from the lips of Damaris in the language of Paul and John, in living speech as familiar to Damaris as the words of Shakespeare and the great Elizabethans to us.
“Thy Jerome’s Vulgate is as good and grand as our Claudian aqueduct,” Ethne would say to Damaris; “but thy Greek is as the Fons Ceruleus, the Aqua Claudia, the fountains bursting fresh from the depths of these hills.”
It was the last lingering sound of living Greek (the first language of the early Church) in the Western world. For centuries afterwards the living waters flowed to Western Christendom through Jerome’s aqueduct. The great Leo did not write or speak Greek.
Many a time also Ethne found the old Greek hermit in his cave, near Monte Cassino, and laid her little Paul in his arms for his blessing. Once she told him of her dream after the birth of the child—of the church crowning the mountains in place of the temple of the old gods; of the company of mountain-folk, instead of leading the lambs garlanded for sacrifice, bringing their children for baptism; of the white-robed band pouring forth thence hither and thither throughout the mountains, throughout the world, like streams making the land fair and green wherever their footsteps came, like angels bringing to men the glad tidings of great joy. And the old man as he embraced the child said—
“And may this thy babe, lady, be one of those thy white-robed angels and messengers of peace.”
One bright Sunday it happened that, as long before Lucia had discovered Ethne diving deep into the old Hebrew poem of Job, Marius found her greatly absorbed in a fresh manuscript. She was in ecstasies of delight.
“You never told me of this,” she said. “This is a book of the Prophets of the New Testament of God. I shall never need to dream any more, for here is a Divine dream, a Vision of God! The disciple beloved of the Lord was in the Spirit on this His Lord’s Day; saw Him; saw the riddle of this earth and its solution; saw heaven open from within; saw also the earth as it is, and was no more satisfied with it than the chieftain of old; saw how it is a battle-field to the end. But he also saw what the old chieftain could not see—that the victory is sure, has been won for ever, is being won day by day. Through all the din and wailing and tumult he heard the Hallelujahs of those in heaven who see the meaning and the end; felt the soft flow of the living fountains through all the blood and fire and smoke. On earth he saw the multitudes struggling, toiling, enslaved, oppressed, hungering and thirsting, and sick as of old in Galilee. In heaven he saw another great multitude innumerable, white-robed, with palms in their hands, yet longing and interceding for those who battle and suffer below. On earth, storm and battle to the end; but heaven shining through the rifts in the clouds all through to the end. And at last not only a ‘multitude,’ but the City, the City which hath the foundations coming down out of heaven from God. Earth also right at last!—not only the hunger and thirst, but the sins, the wrongs, and the curse and death itself gone for ever; His servants serving Him for ever, His name shining in their foreheads,—His name, which that beloved disciple always tells us is love, the Lamb slain for love, the King conquering through love. You see there is no need to dream any more! All we could dream of, beautiful, and good, and holy, is unveiled here, and infinitely more than we could dream. The beloved disciple saw it—saw it for us all.”
Before long another little son was given to Marius and Ethne, and she said—
“His name must be called John, after that beloved one who saw. I need no dream for him. We have the Divine dream and its interpretation, the riddle and the solution, the Book of the unveiling. We will go into the thick of the battle, thou and I and our children. We must not grudge them their share of the glorious wounds, or the hard victories. We must go back to the poor, plundered, wrecked city, to our Rome, for victory is sure if we endure to the end.”