CHAPTER XXIV.
“Yet dread me from my living tomb,
Ye bigot slaves of haughty Rome.”
Scott.
Adonijah and Lucia Claudia remained in the environs of Jerusalem with the Church and its apostolic bishop, Simeon, for many years. They were the parents of a lovely family, who were growing up in the nurture and fear of the Lord, when the Roman brethren, being desirous of sending gifts to the Hebrew Christians, wished Adonijah to come to Rome to receive their bounty for those impoverished children of Abraham who had received the faith of Jesus. The fulfilment of the prophecies respecting the dispersion of the Jews had probably occasioned that conversion among the Israelites spoken of by Hegesippus, the earliest historian of the Church. There is reason to believe that these persons retained their ancient customs as far as a people could retain them who were under the Gentile yoke of bondage, though they received Christ as their High Priest, Redeemer, and Divine Ruler. Attachment to the customs of their forefathers, and the example of Christ, “a minister of the circumcision,” made the Hebrew Christians still cling to their ancestral ritual. This adherence would in time have created a bar between them and their Gentile brethren, if it had been suffered to continue; but the revolts of the unbelieving Jews in the reigns of Trajan and Adrian caused this separation to cease. No Israelite after those wars was suffered to remain in Palestine, so that when Jerusalem was rebuilt under the heathen name of Ælia, the Christian Church established there was no longer composed of converted Jews. After a time the dispersed and scattered tribes of Israel might purchase from the Roman soldiers once a year the mournful privilege of weeping over the solitary foundation-stone of the temple, but poverty and slavery left few to avail themselves of the opportunity in that age. The custom has never ceased; it has been transmitted from generation to generation, and the nineteenth century still witnesses the affecting commemorative visit of the Jew to the desecrated shrine where his forefathers once worshipped Jehovah. He still looks forward to the promises, and fondly hopes to see the temple crown once more the holy mount; and he will not be deceived, for the builders will have then received the chief Corner-stone they rejected, and will bear his seal on their foreheads, his name on their hearts.
Nearly two thousand years of woe and degradation then lay in dark and direful perspective between the children of the dispersion and the dawn of those better things—those political privileges which the Christian legislature of our own land has accorded to them. Selfish hearts would churlishly deny to the Jew his newly granted civic rights, but they might as well shut out the light of heaven, or forbid the wind to blow, as withhold the blessings God has promised to his long-suffering people, whose restoration and final conversion is clearly decreed, and foretold by Isaiah and all the Jewish prophets.
The converted Hebrews, always working with their hands, possessed none of the commercial privileges of their unconverted brethren. These poor saints when thrust out of the synagogues were subjected to much persecution in every place, and the collection made for their relief in the metropolis of the world would provide them the means of paying the heavy tribute imposed upon them by the Roman governors. The Church of Jerusalem was too poor to aid them; the descendants of some of the apostles were tillers of the soil, who literally earned their bread in the sweat of their brows.
Many years had elapsed since Adonijah and his wife had quitted imperial Rome. The magnificent Coliseum, planned by a Christian architect martyred by Vespasian, and built by captive Jews destined to die at its dedication, shone brilliantly in the mid-day sun in its youthful magnificence; not, as now, hoary with centuries of age, save where the mantling ivy covers its ruined grandeur with a veil of beauty. A solitary subterranean epitaph records that Gaudentius, whose genius raised this mightiest monument of heathen power and heathen cruelty, died Christ’s soldier and servant, but leaves his history untold, the question how a Christian became the architect of such a structure undecided. Perhaps he was condemned like the Jewish masons to build his own arena of death and martyrdom—the first, not the last, Christian who suffered on that spot, in the mystic Babylon, for the witness of Jesus.[[25]] Adonijah regarded with mournful interest on the beautiful arch of Titus, and the emblems of the conqueror’s devastating victory and the desolation of Judea and Jerusalem. Nearly nineteen centuries have passed since the erection of a monument, beneath which no Jew’s foot has ever been known to tread, but which stands fair, glistening, and fresh in our own age as it did then, when his eyes first looked upon it. He saw in the Temple of Peace the seven-branched candlestick, the golden vine, and the splendid vessels formerly used in the temple service, and sighed over the degradation of the fallen Jewish Church. He looked upwards, nevertheless, and through the dim and shadowy future beheld the mystic dawning of that day when the dispersed of Israel would look upon Him with sorrow and contrition whom they pierced, and should be restored again to their own glorious land. He turned to Lucia Claudia as he quitted the temple, and said, “Why should I mourn, my wife, for these things, since the types and shadows of the Mosaic dispensation have been accomplished and fulfilled in Christ, and like Symeon, having seen his salvation, I am ready to depart in peace?”
The meeting between Julius the Presbyter and his sister was extremely moving. He had indeed become a vigilant and faithful minister of Christ to whom the Greek name of Theodatus had been given by the brethren as a mark of their general estimation of his piety. From him Lucia heard with painful interest of the arraignment of the Vestal College, and the danger that impended over Cornelia Cossi, the Maxima, or chief vestal priestess. No one knew why Domitian in his quality of Pontifex Maximus (head priest of Jupiter) chose to institute a prosecution which darkened the fame and endangered the lives of these unfortunate priestesses. This year he had opened his public career of crime by condemning the Consul Glabrio to combat with a lion in the arena; that valiant magistrate had however redeemed his life by slaying his brute assailant, and was banished; but Cornelia Maxima and her sister vestals found in Domitian a more incensed and formidable foe than Glabrio. Lucia obtained permission to visit the Chief Priestess in the prison to which the injustice of a heathen tyrant had condemned a pure and lofty-minded Roman lady. Time had not deprived Cornelia Maxima of her majesty of form and stature; what she had lost in youthful charms she had gained in dignity, and when she rose from her recumbent posture on the hard pavement of the Tullianum, and cast an indignant glance upon her uninvited visitor, Lucia Claudia beheld in the condemned prisoner the very Cornelia of Nero’s reign who had urged her sovereign to arraign and punish the lapsed vestal, the wife of his guilty favourite. She remembered this, but not with anger, as she approached the unhappy Cornelia, and throwing her arms about her neck assured her that Lucia Claudia still loved her, and believed her innocent. Cornelia attempted to disengage herself from the embrace, but she yielded at last to the sweet influence of those womanly tears and caresses, and wept long and passionately on Lucia’s friendly bosom. She had never shed a tear during the course of the prosecution, and when once she became calm she wept no more; no, not when she descended into her living grave in the sight of the awe-struck Roman people.