Attila and His Conquerors: A Story of the Days of St. Patrick and St. Leo the Great

by Elizabeth Rundle Charles

At Whitsuntide the family returned to the plundered palace on the Aventine. The pain at the despoiling of the palace was swallowed up in the threefold joy that Whitsuntide brought. In Constantine’s baptistery, by the Church of St. John Lateran, in the porphyry font filled from the fountains on the Sabine hills, Ethne’s second son was baptized by the name of the beloved disciple, the great Apostle of love, the Divine of the battles and the fountains.

And with this little John were received into the Church of Christ an aged man and woman of the race of which He was born—Miriam and Eleazar.

As in this great Whitsuntide baptism the large company of the newly-baptized were gathered together in their white baptismal robes, with the chrism on their foreheads, the voice of Leo rang through the silence in the vast spaces of the great basilica, and penetrated every heart, as he proclaimed—

“This day’s solemnity, beloved, is to be accounted among our foremost festivals. For as to the Hebrew people of old, fifty days after the immolation of the paschal lamb, the law was given from Mount Sinai; so after the Passion of Christ, whereby the true Lamb of God was slain, on the fiftieth day after His Resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, and on the people of the faithful, so that the diligent Christian may recognize how the preparation (initia) of the Old Testament ministered to the beginnings (principiis) of the New, and the second was founded by the same Spirit who instituted the first.”

As the great Bishop spake these words, Ethne’s heart turned sympathetically to her Hebrew friends. And then came a bit especially for her own Ireland.

“Oh, how swift,” Leo said, “is the speech of wisdom! And when God is the Teacher, how quickly what is taught is learned! The Spirit of Truth bloweth where He listeth. The peculiar (propriæ) voices of every nation are made one common tongue in the mouth of the Church. From this day the trumpet of evangelic preaching has pealed forth. From this day showers of gifts and rivers of blessing have watered every desert. The Spirit of God has been on the waters, renewing the face of the earth; and on the departing darkness flashes the new dawn, sparkling in the many colours of the various tongues, indwelling in each heart as a fiery force to consume sin, to create intelligent perception, to illumine every faculty. Let us with one heart incite one another to the veneration of this Holy Spirit, by Whom the whole Catholic Church is sanctified, by Whom every soul is imbued with reason, Who is the Inspirer of faith, the Teacher of science, the Fount of love, the Seal of chastity, the cause of all virtue. From Him is the calling on the Father, from Him are the tears of penitents, from Him the groans of suppliants; and ‘none can call Jesus Lord except by Him.’ For the Spirit of Truth Himself makes the house of His glory shine with the splendour of His own light, and in His temple He will suffer nothing dark nor anything lukewarm.”

It was always Ethne’s delight to bring Eleazar and Miriam to everything that linked the old with the new. She rejoiced therefore when, at the Festival of the Seven Maccabæan martyrs, Leo did honour to that noble mother of their race, the mother of the seven Maccabæan martyr brothers.

“Blessed mother! blessed progeny!” he said. “The palms of these seven martyrs are multiplied sevenfold—the first suffering without the help of an example; the last tortured in all the tortures of the others; whilst each conquers in all, all have won the sevenfold crown of each.”

And then—“The battle indeed,” he said, “never ceases for the Christian. Thou who dreamest that the days of persecution are past, that for thee there is no combat with the enemy, search into the recesses of thine own heart, and see if no tyrant seeks to rule in the citadel there. Make thou no truce with avarice; despise thou the increase of unjust gain; refuse thou any compact with pride; chase away enervating luxury; repel thou injustice; contend with falsehood. And when thou findest thy combats multiplied, do thou also, a follower of these martyrs, seek with them a multiplied victory. We die to sin when sins die in us; and men become dead to the world, not by the perishing of the senses, but by the death of vices. Let each of you be mindful that the Temple of God is founded in Himself.”

Thus day by day and year by year Ethne and Marius, and all that little company of the Aventine, sought to keep their post in the great battle, contending in Rome against her tyrannies and miseries and sins, and making the plundered palace rich and beautiful again by gathering thither the orphans, the cripples, and the aged left destitute and forsaken by the sack of the Vandals; whilst among the Sabine hills they sought to bring freedom of soul to the slave, and the light of Christ to the lingering paganism of the peasants.