"How is that?" said Hatasa, with breathless interest. "Thou sayest a living Christian may be baptized for the dead?"
"Assuredly," answered Ammonius. "The apostles so taught, and the Church hath always so practiced. If any Christian hath a relative that died without knowledge of Jesus, and such Christian doth believe that the deceased was a just and righteous person according to the measure of light given unto him, and was such that he would have followed our Lord if he had known sufficiently of him, such Christian may receive baptism for the deceased, and the dead shall reap benefit of this vicarious faith and obedience, how and to what extent hath never been clearly revealed unto us."
"There is hope in that!" cried Hatasa. "There is consolation in that. Thy Lord must have been full of human love and pity to make provision not only for his friends, but for those good and just men, also, who have ignorantly been his enemies."
"Yea, verily," answered Ammonius. "He loveth all men; his mercy endureth forever; his loving-kindness is stronger than height, or depth, or life, or death, or any other creature, as thou mayest assuredly know for thyself if thou wilt believe on him."
Then Am-nem-hat said: "There is much in this religion that taketh fast hold upon both the heart and the mind; for it verily seemeth that Jesus seeketh not to impose a system upon man that is in any respect external to man, but rather that he seeketh to show unto man such spiritual food as is most divinely suitable to satisfy that hunger of the soul wherefrom the whole world suffereth already; and he seemeth to propose nothing as matter of faith which was not already a conscious want and need of nature: so that his teachings ought to be accepted as at least the highest utterance of philosophy if even not as divinely true."
"Thy profound criticism of the spirit of our religion striketh very nearly to the heart of the whole matter," said Ammonius. "For the world yearned after God whom it knew not, and Jesus plainly declareth that unknown God whom men ignorantly worship. The world groaned and sorrowed under the blind conviction of sin, and, wherever men acquired a local habitation and a name on earth, there they had their holy places also; and in some way--often in a crude and ignorant way, often in a gross and sensual way, often in a heathenish and cruel way--they sought, by sacred rites of penitence and sacrifice, to atone for their wrong deeds done; but the wrongs continually repeated themselves, and the unavailing religions left the world's heart like a troubled sea that can not rest. But Jesus saith the sin for which ye suffer is not a wrong thing done at all; these wicked deeds of yours are not sin, but are the outcroppings of the sin that lieth back of all your deeds. Can a bitter fountain send forth sweet waters? Doth an evil tree bear good fruits? Do ye gather figs from thistles? Cease now your world-old and unavailing efforts to regenerate the heart by the vain expiation of your wicked deeds. Purify the fountain, that the waters thereof may be sweet. Make the tree good, and its fruits shall be good also. For sin is non-conformity to the will of God, and your evil deeds are only the evidences of your enmity against him. So, when the blind yearnings of the world's heart after peace had made sacrifices, not only of every beast and creeping thing upon the earth, but of men also, he saith: 'All these things ye do in vain, for your righteousness must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, or ye shall likewise perish. I am the Light, the Truth, the Way--the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world--a perfect righteousness and sacrifice once for all offered for the sin of men. Believe in me, and ye shall be saved; all other sacrifices are in vain.' So every yearning want of the heart is met and satisfied in Christ. All other religions under heaven condemn actions which they suppose to be wicked, and prescribe certain forms of expiation for such as they suppose to be expiable; but Jesus proposes to pardon, not so much the sinful act as the sinner, the sinful nature out of which the act ariseth, and to regenerate this nature so that it will hate what it believes to be wicked, and love what it believes to be holy. For Christ atoneth for all sin, and the act of faith is to personally appropriate the benefit thereof to each one for himself."
"True," said Am-nem-hat, "and I undertake to assert that no other religion in the world hath so represented sin to be want of conformity to the will of God, rather than an evil deed; and in this whole matter of sin and the forgiveness thereof, thy religion differeth from paganism more radically than even in the doctrine of one God it differeth from polytheism."
And in this and such like conversation the evening wore away until bed-time came, and they separated for the night. The family at Baucalis did not speak or think of these matters as of mere abstract theories of truth, or of philosophy, but as actual, living verities. The Christians felt their religion to be the only real life. They regarded all earthly pursuits, passions, and pleasures, as mere incidents of existence, and religion as the one controlling and all-important thing. Their pleasant home was to them a merely temporary station on the highway whereby they were journeying to a better land; the flesh was only a tabernacle which the spirit must soon forsake; all that pertained to it was for a brief season only; the real life was only begun during their occupancy of this earthly tenement; Christian faith was to them the one thing real and permanent, and earthly existence was of little consequence except as it might stand related to eternal interests. Hence there was a freshness, a vigor, a sense of reality and earnestness, in their way of thinking and speaking of such things, that demonstrated their religion to be no beautiful, speculative philosophy, but a hard, experimental, and all-controlling fact. And so every night during that week the dwellers at Baucalis assembled in Hatasa's room, and passed long hours in the discussion of all the salient points of Christianity in a friendly, careful way, as if, indeed, they had a mutual interest in ascertaining the truth, especially concerning all those ideas upon which the antagonism between Christianity and paganism most plainly appeared. To set down all the various conversations in which they engaged would indeed be to write a treatise upon primitive Christianity, a work in which, perhaps, no interest would be felt in an age in which that system no longer exists upon earth, and is utterly unknown to all except a few self-poised, fearless, unpopular antiquarians, who have been eccentric and independent enough to exhume that ancient religion from out the accumulated débris of fifteen centuries of ecclesiastical "progress" which flourisheth over its ruins even as the vine ripens and the roses bloom over the wreck of buried Pompeii. Yet we can not resist the inclination that moveth us to write out our notes of one other evening's conversation that happened between this Christian family and their pagan guests.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE NET RESULT OF LAW.