Let not the reader fear that we are going to lead him forward into a long history. This will belong to some one better qualified, for the task of unfolding the grandeur and charms of free and unfettered Christianity. We have only to show the land of promise from above, spread like an inviting paradise before our feet; we are not the Josue that must lead others in. The little that we have to add in this brief third part of our humble book, is barely what is necessary for its completion.
We will then suppose ourselves arrived at the year 318, fifteen years after our last scene of death. Time and permanent laws have given security to the Christian religion, and the Church is likewise more fully establishing her organization.
A Marriage in the Early Ages of the Church.
Many who on the return of peace had hung down their heads, having by some act of weak condescension escaped death, had by this time expiated their fall by penance; and now and then an aged stranger would be saluted reverently by the passers-by, when they saw that his right eye had been burned out, or his hand mutilated; or when his halting gait showed that the tendons of the knee had been severed, in the late persecution, for Christ’s sake.[235]
If at this period our friendly reader will follow us out of the Nomentan gate, to the valley with which he is already acquainted, he will find sad havoc among the beautiful trees and flower-beds of Fabiola’s villa. Scaffold-poles are standing up in place of the first; bricks, marbles, and columns lie upon the latter. Constantia, the daughter of Constantine, had prayed at St. Agnes’s tomb, when not yet a Christian, to beg the cure of a virulent ulcer, had been refreshed by a vision, and completely cured. Being now baptized, she was repaying her debt of gratitude, by building over her tomb her beautiful basilica. Still the faithful had access to the crypt in which she was buried; and great was the concourse of pilgrims, that came from all parts of the world.
One afternoon, when Fabiola returned from the city to her villa, after spending the day in attending to the sick, in an hospital established in her own house, the fossor, who had charge of the cemetery, met her with an air of great interest, and no small excitement, and said:
“Madam, I sincerely believe that the stranger from the East, whom you have so long expected, is arrived.”