And with cold fingers clutched the feeble blade;
Through their torn veins reviving fury ran,
And life’s last anger warmed the dying man.’
And how his life was preserved—famine-stricken, wounded, horrified, daily imperilled as he was in that circle of fire in which the scorpions of religious faction madly stung each other to death—he never knew. From April 10, A.D. 70, when Titus pitched his camp near Jerusalem, till July 17, when, for the first time, the perpetual sacrifice ceased, for lack of priests to offer it—and on till August 10, when the Holiest sank in flames, and the Roman soldiers adored their idolatrous ensigns in its blackened area—and onwards till September 8, when all resistance ended, Aliturus had scarcely known one day which was not full of terror and misery. In the final indiscriminate slaughter of the captured city he was selected as one of the seven hundred youths, conspicuous for size and beauty, who were destined to grace the triumph of Vespasian and Titus.But he sought an interview with Josephus and the astonished Titus, and when he revealed to them his identity[T21] and convinced them that his one desire had been to win the Jews to counsels of moderation, and to do good works among the miserable, he was set free, and large presents were given to him, and he was suffered to go whither he would.
He could not return to Jerusalem, for Jerusalem was no more, and on the Jews had fallen their own awful imprecation—‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ He went to Pella, whither the Church of Jerusalem had, so to speak, fled into the wilderness. With the Christians there he abode for some time, and then he visited St. John at Ephesus, and Onesimus at Hierapolis. The memories of his own country had been too striking and oppressive, and the brilliant favourite of the Roman populace died at Hierapolis, a beloved but obscure presbyter of its happy church.
The persecutions of the Christians continued intermittently for three centuries, and the rhythmic cry—the double antispastus, Chrīstĭānōs ād lĕōnēs—rang through the amphitheatre of many a pagan city. But the church grew and flourished and shone in the world like that Vision of the Apocalypse—a woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars upon her head. The Church of Rome rose from her ashes, and in many a seven-times-heated flame of affliction there stood beside her One like unto the Son of Man.
When Linus died, Cletus succeeded him as the third ‘Pope’ of Rome—although that title was not given to the humble presbyter-bishops of the struggling community for more than two centuries, and not formally adopted by them till about A.D. 400. Cletus was succeeded by Clement. Of the first thirty Popes it is said by Christian tradition that all but two were martyrs. The blood of those martyrs was the seed of the Church. That Church had been consumed to ashes, and, rising from her ashes, soared heavenwards, first waveringly, then steadily, at last with supreme dominion, ‘reflecting the sunlight from every glancing plume.’
Hermas, having been made a freedman by Octavia, set up in trade, and married. But he was unfortunate. In one of the later persecutions under Domitian he was betrayed to the informers by his own sons. He escaped with his life; and in the reign of Nerva he, with other victims of the cruel Flavian Emperor, received lands in lieu of the goods of which he had been despoiled. He cultivated his little farm in peace, and lived to write the celebrated ‘Shepherd,’ which some have described as ‘a fusionless screed of dry morality,’ and some as a dull novel, but which may be called ‘the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of the Early Church.’ Simple as it is, it was so well suited to the days in which it was written that it was read in the churches, and almost attained the dignity of Scripture.
Pudens and Claudia made their permanent home in Britain. They found it a more congenial residence for Christians than bloodstained Rome, and by the beauty of their lives, as well as by their teaching, they escaped the hostility of the Druids, and founded a Church in their house, and in the city of Noviomagus, where they chiefly lived. They acquired a deep affection for ‘the isle of blossoming woodlands, isle of silvery parapets,’ which they adopted as their own, in spite of the courteous invitation of Titus, who urged them to return to Rome. And sometimes Pudens thought that there must be a prescience in the British prophecy which their friend Laureatus, the Latin poet of Vectis, had turned into galliambics from the wild songs which fired the patriotism of the host of Boadicea, and which said—
‘Though the Roman eagle shadow thee, though the gathering enemy harrow thee,