Clement, with rare restraint, forbade that even the veil which covered the virgin’s body should be lifted, but he permitted Sfondrato to remove the linen cloths rolled up at her feet, to be distributed to such as were worthy to possess these sacred souvenirs. The Cardinal gave away all but one piece, a little rag that he had reserved for himself; another Cardinal, a great historian, was present at the scenes I have described and tells us that Sfondrato was rewarded for all his love and charity by finding, adhering to this fragment, a tiny particle of bone, which must have detached itself under the hand which was tenderly attempting to staunch one of the wounds inflicted by the Lictor’s axe. This is the only relic of the saint which was ever separated from her body, and no greater treasure could she have bestowed on her faithful servant. He bequeathed it to her Church, where his own body finally found a resting-place, like that of Clement, at her feet. He also cut off a tiny piece of her dress, and, as he did so, felt beneath it the knots of the hair shirt which she continually wore to mortify her innocent flesh.
The bodies of Valerianus, Tiburtius, and Maximus were found in the second sarcophagus, everything about them testifying to the truth of the records of their martyrdom. The two brothers were exactly alike, as tradition recorded, in form and size, while Maximus was a much larger, heavier man. The manner of his martyrdom was also attested, the leaden plummets of the whips having fractured his skull in several places, so that the thick brown hair, which was perfectly preserved, was all matted with blood and particles of bone. Urban and Lucius were found buried directly below Cecilia’s resting-place. To this her body was returned a month later, when on her feast, the 22d of November, the Pope, with all the Cardinals and a great concourse of bishops and prelates, came to celebrate the Holy Mysteries and, for the third time since her death, consign the dear maid’s body to the keeping of earth. Clement enclosed the little cypress-wood coffin in one of silver, superbly ornamented with gold—enclosed this in a newer and larger marble sarcophagus (the old one being too small for the double treasure), inscribed on a silver tablet the record of all that had taken place, sealed the whole with his Pontifical seal, and had the vault built over once more, not to be opened again, God willing, till the Last Day.[21]
Before closing the saint’s coffin, Clement sent for the eminent sculptor, Maderno, and commissioned him to model a statue as like as possible to the fair body that lay there, but forbade him to remove the veil. Maderno hastened to obey, and the statue now in the Church and known by thousands of reproductions all through the artistic world, is an exact portrait of Cecilia, with every detail of pose and garments, as then shown, faithfully represented. Baronius and Bosio, to whom he related them, have minutely chronicled all the circumstances connected with the second finding of her body.
CHAPTER XI THE CHURCH UNDER CONSTANTINE
Constantine’s Edict—St. Sylvester, the Friend of Constantine—Refuge at Soracte—The Emperor’s Vision—“In Hoc Vinces”—Constantine’s Baptism—The Church Has Peace—Helena’s Basilica—The Blessing of the Golden Rose—Origin of St. Peter’s—The Obelisk from Heliopolis—Testimony of the Dust of the Martyrs—The Place of the Shock of Horses—The Beauty of St. Peter’s—Pilgrims from Britain—Charlemagne, the Blessed.
“And the Church had peace!” Those few words are all that are used to describe the overwhelming relief of the world when Constantine caused his great edict to be proclaimed throughout the Empire. “Let none henceforth dare to molest the Christians in the exercise of their religion or in the building of Temples to God.”
The frightful persecution under Diocletian, more cruel and bloody than all that had preceded it, had been continued by his successor Galerius,[22] and was still active, still a living menace to the faithful; and, as they had done so often during the past three hundred years, they had to fly to their underground refuges or out into the desert to call upon the rocks and mountains to cover them. St. Melchiades, whom St. Augustine calls “the true son of the Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” became Pope in 311 and suffered such great tribulations for the faith in the beginning of his pontificate that the Church reckons him among the martyrs, although he lived to see her triumph, dying only in 313. To him succeeded Sylvester, the great ruler, the friend of Constantine, whose name is so intimately connected with the foundation of the two chief basilicas of Christendom, that of St. John Lateran and that of St. Peter’s.
Before being called to the Papacy, St. Sylvester had been a zealous and holy priest for many years, but during a part of that time he had been obliged to live in hiding on Mount Soracte, the strange rock which raises itself from the Campagna, some twenty-five miles to the northeast of Rome, to culminate in a precipitous cliff two thousand two hundred and seventy feet high—as if arrested by the sight of the distant city. I think it was Byron who compared it to a wave about to break, and no other simile describes it half so well. I spent a heavenly day there in my youth and came away regretfully, not only because of the superb view of the Apennine panorama at which I had been gazing, but because of the ideal aloofness and sweetness of the atmosphere round the ruined convent on the summit, where, though I was then in the first flush of youth, I would gladly have remained for years. Soracte, under its present name, was well known to the Romans; Horace had sung of the mantle of the snow that lay on its rough sides in the winter; Virgil spoke of it reverently as one of the homes of Apollo, who had a temple there; so its name is not a contraction of St. Oreste, as some used to think, though a Church and monastery were dedicated to that saint on Soracte very early in our era. The monk who acted as our guide could not tell me much about him, but spoke of St. Sylvester’s sojourn on the mountain as if he had left it but the day before. The lonely peak was not always lonely, the geologists say. Long ages previous to the foundation of Rome the Apennines flung out their chain thus far; then came great heavings in earth’s fiery heart; she opened and the hills sank back whence they had come, and “the mountains were made plain”; they disappeared, leaving this solitary vanguard rock to mark their vanished limit and their actual sepulchre.
How gladly must Sylvester have sped back to Rome over the long Milvian Way, as soon as he could resume his sacred duties in the city! He must have been there when Constantine, with his great host, paused at the “Saxa rubra” (the red rocks over which I have often wandered, seeking for wild flowers), near the Milvian Bridge, depressed and anxious, and very fearful that the army he led was not strong enough to overcome the usurper, Maxentius, who had fortified himself behind its walls. In this month of May, 1913, Catholics from all over the world are thronging to Rome to take part in the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of that day. For Constantine, hesitating to attack, was standing without his camp, gazing at the western sky, towards which the sun was sinking, as the chroniclers tell us, thinking of what lay before him, thinking, too, of what lay behind—of the long years during which he had half believed in Christianity without being made a Christian; thinking of what would happen to his soul should he, still unbaptised, be slain in the now inevitable conflict; thinking, we may be sure, of his good mother, Helena, over there in Constantinople, storming Heaven with prayers for his safety. It was all enough to make even an Emperor thoughtful, and Constantine was a man who took both this life and the next very seriously.
Then, as officers and men watched their leader’s face grow darker and more gloomy, and the reflection of his melancholy began to gain them all, “airy and excellent” the vision came. Resting on the setting sun as on a pedestal, and paling that glory by its own more dazzling splendour, a gigantic cross flamed out across the cloudless sky, and as all gazed, terror-stricken and breathless, these words wrote themselves in fire against the blue: “In hoc vinces”[23]—“In this thou shalt conquer!” The portent hung for many minutes, some say for an hour, and then slowly withdrew into the empyrean, and the empty sky and the empty Campagna, the gleaming host and the proud rebel city, alone remained.