A rush took place, and the crowd fled promiscuously in every direction. The soldiers could not resist the contagion. They leapt down and fled, and the decurio followed, shouting to them in vain. The executioners joined the soldiers in their flight. For a moment the Apostle and Aliturus stood alone on the scaffold, and then hurried down the steps. Scarcely had they reached the ground when the lightning struck the metal caldron and tore it from its chains. It fell with a mighty crash, and the oil streaming over the flame burst up in a fierce blaze which would very rapidly have reduced the whole scaffold to ashes had not the deluging rain begun to fall in cataracts, quenching the fire, but leaving a charred and shapeless ruin.
The news was brought to Nero and Tigellinus that evening by multitudes of witnesses when the storm had cleared and the heavens had resumed their azure sleep. They shared the superstition of the mob, and thought that, by magic powers unusually terrible, the Apostle had brought down the wrath of Heaven. At the same time this could have nothing to do with the Christians in general, for had not the execution of the other Apostle been carried out with perfect ease? They were officially informed that the Apostle, of his own free will, had thought it right to return to the door of the Tullianum and surrender himself as a prisoner. Such strange security deepened the impression that he could wield supernatural powers.Afraid to detain him in Rome, Nero ordered him to banishment in the rocky Ægean island of Patmos.[104]
Thither the Apostle was conveyed, and there, gazing on the sea that burned like glass in the sunlight, he wrote his Apocalypse. In that strange book we can still read the echo of the horror kindled in the heart of an eyewitness by an Emperor who had degenerated into a portent of iniquity, fighting with empoisoned breath and dragon-like fury against the saints of God. The Apocalypse is the ‘thundering reverberation’ of the Apostle’s mighty spirit, smitten into wrathful dissonance amid its heavenly music by the plectrum of the Neronian persecution. All the horrors of that frightful age of storms, and eruptions, and earthquakes, and falling meteors, and famine, and pestilence, and threatenings of Parthian invasion and imminent massacres of civil war, threw gigantic and blood-red shadows across the Apostle’s page. The air was being shattered by the trumpet-blasts of doom which would bury in flame and ruin alike the Harlot City on the seven hills which had made herself so drunken with the blood of the saints, and the Holy City which had become a den of murderers—which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt—where the Lord was crucified. When he wrote his vision, three or four years later, the souls of those who had been slain in the great Neronian tribulation for the Word of God and the testimony which they held were still under the altar, and cried, ‘How long, O Lord, how long dost thou not avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?’ But white robes were given them, and they were bidden to rest yet a little while till the number of their brethren was fulfilled. And afterwards one of the four-and-twenty elders who sat around the throne asked him, ‘Who are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?’ And he said unto him, ‘Sir, thou knowest.’ And the Elder answered, ‘These are they which came out of THE GREAT TRIBULATION, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’
CHAPTER LVI
LIVING TORCHES
Ὁ νειδισμοῖς τε καὶ θλίψεσι θεατριζόμενοι.—Hebr. x. 33.
‘Sec. Br. O night and shades!
How are ye joined with hell in triple knot.
Is this the confidence
You gave me, brother?