THE DOINGS OF HEROD THE GREAT.
About sixty years B.C., Herod, misnamed the Great, had partly by bribery prevailed on Antony and Augustus to make him king of the Jews, and Josephus describes his visit to Rome on that appointment. Herod has always been a monster of cruelty. He married a beautiful woman named Mariamne, whom he put to death after being the mother of several of his children. Then he had a fit of remorse, and frantically called her by name, and ordered his servants to do so. Then he next slew the grandfather and brother of Mariamne, the latter being ordered to be suffocated while his servants were engaged in a bathing frolic. In his old age he was seized with a sudden suspicion against two sons, whom he accused of a plot against him, and after some wavering caused them to be strangled, and some three hundred who sympathised with them to be stoned to death. After these symptoms of madness, a year before his death, being alarmed by the reports of the visits of the Magi, and the prophecies of the birth of Christ, he ordered the massacre of the innocents. He died a year after, at the age of seventy-one, of a disgusting disease, accompanied with horrible tortures, having reigned thirty-five years. In order that he should not die without being lamented, he had ordered a large number of the chief inhabitants of Jerusalem, as soon as he was dead, to be slain by his soldiers. He died enormously rich, and even Horace refers to his vast palm groves. There was a lengthened litigation and appeal to Rome about the division of his estates and governments. The son who succeeded him so misconducted himself that after nine years he was banished by Augustus and his wealth confiscated.
MARY MAGDALENE.
There were three Marys—Mary of Bethania, Mary the sister of Lazarus, and Mary Magdalene; and some think they were all one person. Most of the early writers say that she and Lazarus and Martha left Galilee and settled at Bethany, and there Christ often visited them. The penitent woman and she are by some treated as the same person; but it is at best only a conjecture. It is a popular tradition that Mary and Lazarus, and Martha or Mary their sister, were expelled after the Ascension, and put to sea, and reached Marseilles, and founded a Church there, of which Lazarus was the first bishop. The relics of these saints were alleged to be discovered in Provence in the thirteenth century, and Mary Magdalene’s were at St. Maximius, near Marseilles, where a convent now stands. Her festival is kept July 22nd, and once was a holiday in England.
MARY MAGDALENE PREACHING.
A Provençal legend states that after the Ascension Lazarus, with his two sisters Martha and Mary, Maximius and seventy-two disciples, also Cedon the blind man whom our Saviour restored to sight, and Marcella the handmaiden were put by the heathen in a vessel and set adrift; but, guided by Providence, it landed at Marseilles in France. The people were then Pagans, and refused to give the pilgrims food or shelter, so that they were fain to take refuge under the porch of a temple. And Mary Magdalene preached to the people, reproaching them for their senseless worship of dumb idols. And though at first they refused to listen, yet they were after a time convinced by her eloquence, and by the miracles she and her sister performed; and they were all converted and baptised. These things being accomplished, Mary Magdalene retired to a desert near the city, where there were only rocks and caves, and she devoted herself to solitary penance for thirty years, weeping and bewailing for the past. She fasted rigorously, and must have perished, but the angels came down from heaven every day and carried her up in their arms into regions where her ears were ravished with the sounds of heavenly melody, and where she beheld the glory and the joy prepared for the penitent sinner. One day, a hermit, having wandered near the spot, beheld this wondrous vision of the angels carrying the Magdalene up to heaven in their arms, and singing songs of triumph; and after recovering from his amazement, he returned to the city of Marseilles and reported what he had seen. Fra Angelico has a most interesting picture of the Magdalene preaching from the steps of a building to an audience composed mostly of nuns, who are in rapt attention.
ACCOUNT OF ST. MARTHA.
St. Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary, was a favourite member of that family whom Christ often visited, staying a night on His visits. On the first visit, Martha attended to the practical details of hospitality, while Mary was intensely absorbed in the spiritual charm of the conversation, and did nothing but listen, and yet was commended for this, as if each was entitled to follow her own way of displaying her affection. The message sent at a later date to Christ by the two sisters was simply this—“He whom Thou lovest is sick”: they knew it was enough to say that one word. On the last visit of Christ, Mary poured costly ointment on Christ’s feet, which Judas Iscariot said was a shocking extravagance. St. Martha seems to have been present at the Crucifixion. After Christ’s ascension, she, as stated under the head of Mary Magdalene, went to Marseilles, and her body is deposited in a vault under the church at Tarascon. King Louis XI. gave a rich bust of gold, in which the saint’s head is kept.
ST. VERONICA AND HER HANDKERCHIEF.