But for the poor Christians of Rome, though the days were so evil, life had neither tumult nor terror. They had found that which more than compensated them for the trials of the world. Their life was a spiritual life. To them, to live was Christ. They possessed the strange secret of joy in sorrow, the boast of which upon the lips of the Stoics was an idle vaunt. That secret lay in a spiritual conviction, an indomitable faith, above all, in an In-dwelling Presence which breathed into their souls a peace which the world could neither give nor take away. The life which was to most of their contemporaries a tragedy without dignity, or a comedy without humour, was to them a gift sweet and sacred, a race to be bravely run under that lucent cloud which shone with the faces of angel witnesses,—a mystery indeed, yet a mystery luminous with a ray which streamed to them out of God’s Eternity from the Glory of their Risen Lord.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE MATRICIDE
‘It was not in the battle,
No tempest gave the shock;
She sprang no fatal leak,
She ran upon no rock’——
Cowper.
‘Hæc monstra Neroni
Nec jussæ quondam præstiteratis aquæ.’
Mart. iv. 63.