From this time we find no further mention whatever of these fragments; but it is curious that toward the end of the second century several writers speak of a colossal statue at Rhodes as still existing. It is possible that one was again constructed, but of smaller dimensions. Indeed, Leo Allazzi tells us that the Colossus of Rhodes was reconstructed and completed under the Emperor Vespasian; but later Greek authors give us nothing in support of this opinion.
A long time after the fall of the Roman empire the island of Rhodes was conquered by the general-in-chief of the Caliph Othman, in the seventh century of the Christian era; and then mention is once more made of a colossus in metal. "This last memorial of a glorious past was not respected by the conqueror," says the Byzantine history. "The general took down the colossus which stood erect on the island, and transported the metal into Syria, and sold it to a Jew, who loaded 980 camels with the materials of his purchase."
We should refer any who may be curious for further details on the Colossus of Rhodes to a remarkable work on the subject by Carl Ferdinand Lüders, in which the fiction of the gigantic outstretched limbs is completely disposed of; but with such an array of learned accessories, more germanico, that few will perhaps read it throughout.
From The Month.
PUBLIC LIFE OF ST. CATHARINE OF SIENA.
No one can expect to find the history of the Church free from vicissitude; as it has its bright and glorious periods, so also it has its times of gloom and darkness, when a superficial observer might almost interpret the disastrous character of the more salient facts that meet his eye, as the evidence of a suspension of the vital activity and healthy vigor of the whole body. But the life of the Church is essentially internal, and depends on the free action of divine grace, penetrating and animating the whole community—an action that is perpetually kept up by the most common and unobtrusive ministrations of sacramental strength, which are going on in full frequency and efficacy, while the political fortunes of the hierarchy, or of the supreme power, are crushed by oppression or persecution; or even while scandals are seen in high places—when bishops become courtiers, when cardinals are truckling to kings and emperors, and popes are in captivity or exile. And it often happens that these dark times are most prolific of the noblest fruits of the interior life; and that at such seasons the choicest treasures of the Church—the souls on whom great and special graces have been bestowed—are providentially brought out into unusual prominence, so as to exercise great influence and give a character to the period, or a direction to some of its most important transactions. Even if it be not so, at all events we have only to go a little below the surface in order to find plentiful indications of the rich veins that are contained in no soil but one. Thus, in Italy, at the time in which this paper treats, there were a number of saintly souls, whose names have since taken rank in the calendar of the Church. The secular historian sees little more than a set of quarrelsome states, restless in their mutual discord and aggressive ambition, and distracted, ever and anon, by the most furious domestic strife, which would slake itself with nothing but blood. St. Andrew Corsini once showed his audience, as he was preaching in the Piazza of Fiesole, looking down on Florence, an immense flight of hawks, kites, and other ravenous birds, battling with one another over the city. They represented, he told them, the number of evil spirits that were engaged in stirring up the inhabitants to intestine discord. Florence was not worse, but rather better, and more thoroughly Catholic, than its neighbors; yet when we take up such a life, for instance, as that of St. Giovanni Colombini, of Siena, the founder of the Gesuati, we find ourselves at once in an atmosphere of calm and fresh simplicity, of happy peace, fervent devotion, and loving faith; and it is only by the chance mention of public calamities—the sufferings of the peasants, whose fruit-trees had been cut down by the German "company"' of marauders, and the like—that we are reminded of the Italy of the day, with its endless disturbances and hopeless insecurity. We have not merely the beautiful picture of Giovanni himself, and his immediate followers and friends; of his good wife, for instance, who begged him to read her pious book while she kept him waiting a few minutes for his dinner, and who, though he had at first thrown it on the floor in a fit of impatient anger, could not persuade him to leave it, when all was ready, till he had read to the end the story of St. Mary of [{548}] Egypt. She had prayed that he might be more given to almsgiving than he was, and then had to complain that she had prayed for a shower, not for a deluge, when he began to give away everything in the house; and she had to yield at last to his saintly fervor, and release him altogether from the obligations of the married life. It is not only Francesco Vincenti, the other rich and noble gentleman of Siena, who caught up the example of Giovanni, began to give great alms, dress shabbily, and serve the poor, and at last joined him in giving up the world altogether, and placing himself under religious obedience; or Giovanni's cousin Catarina, the first of the nuns whom he established, whom he could not persuade to embrace the state of poverty, though she had given up the idea of marriage, till he called her to a little window in the wall between their two houses, one night, as she was going up to bed with her lamp lit, and talked to her in so heavenly a strain that her heart was perfectly changed; and when she turned to go away at last, she found that she had been listening all night, and the morning rays were streaming through the shutters, though, as he bade her observe, the little stock of oil in her lamp was unconsumed. These might be accidents of piety and simple faith in particular families; but we cannot so account for the great number of followers that enlisted themselves under Giovanni—so many, that the worthy magistrates of Siena thought fit for a time to banish him and his companions from the city, lest every one should join them; nor for the ready and enthusiastic welcome that he met with wherever he went throughout Tuscany, the joy with which his preaching was received, and the rapid fruit that it produced. The beautiful account of him and his early followers, written in the century after his death by Feo Belcari, is full of details and anecdotes that seem to prove the powerful hold that faith and religion retained upon the mass of the population in those seemingly black and miserable days. The mere number of his followers, as we have said, is an evidence of this, the proofs to which the novices were put were very severe indeed; yet when Urban V. came from France to Italy, Giovanni went to meet him at Corneto with a company of seventy, all of whom had joined him within two years. The same conclusion is forced upon us when we take up the life or the letters of the still more famous child of the same fair city, St. Catharine of Siena, of whose public influence we hope to give presently some short account. The family of religious disciples whom she collected around her in the course of her short life, from all ranks and classes, could never have been furnished save by a population thoroughly penetrated with religious feeling, and familiar with the loftiest principles of faith. Her own home, too, is a charming picture. There is the good pious father, "a man simple and without guile," as Father Raymond tells us, "fearing God, and keeping free from vice;" a man so moderate in speech, that for no occasion whatever, of disturbance or trouble that was given him, did unbecoming words escape his lips; rather, when others of his family felt bitterly, and he heard them break out into angry words, he set himself at once, with a joyous countenance, to comfort them, saying, "Ah, God give you good luck! don't fret yourself, or say things like that, which don't befit us." He let himself be injured and brought to the brink of ruin by a false charge, and yet would never allow any one in his presence to speak against his accuser, leaving his cause entirely to God; and in due time all was wonderfully set right. His large family of children were brought up with so much modesty, and with so great a hatred of anything licentious, though only in word, that one of the daughters, whom he had given in marriage to a young man who had lost his parents when a child, and learnt bad language from the chance companions he had picked up, made herself ill with [{549}] grieving over her husband's bad habit in this respect, and could never be well or happy till he had given it up. We hear less of the rest of the family. Catharine was one of twenty-five children; but though they opposed for a while her resolution not to marry, and tried to make her give up her excessive penances, they seem to have been good, fervent Christians; and her mother, with her natural love for her child, struggling against the sacrifice of giving her up entirely to the service of God, is delightful in her simplicity, and her character gives a charming air of truthfulness and reality to the whole picture. But there is no reason for supposing that the family of the good Jacomo and Lapa were far above the level of their neighbors in virtue and piety, except in the instance of the one chosen soul whose wonderful graces and history have alone saved them from being altogether forgotten, like the mass of their daily companions in the streets and the churches of Siena. What we are told of them reveals that which escapes the notice of the superficial historian—the daily life of a Catholic people, however politically unsettled, and subject to violent outbreaks natural to its hot temperament and passionate disposition—though the character of the Siennese was said to be comparatively gentle and sweet—still thoroughly leavened and penetrated by the faith that had been handed down through an unbroken succession of generations, since the city's first martyr consecrated its soil by his blood. Such, in general, was the population of Italy, and, of course, of great parts of Europe, at that time; and such a population constitutes a resource, as it were, for the Church, that it must take, it would seem, many generations thoroughly to corrupt or to destroy. From the depths of such a people springs ordinarily the ever-fresh crop of eminent saints, who form the chief glories and supports of the Church in their successive generations; and the wide extent to which the principles of Christian faith and practice influence the mass from which they themselves rise, makes it possible for them to gather followers around them, to touch the springs of public action and thought, and to exercise the wonderful influence upon the men of their day which is so strange an enigma to the uncatholic historian. [Footnote 81]
[Footnote 81: Thus Dr. Milman ("Latin Christianity," t. v., p. 891-2) is fairly upset by what he calls a "most extraordinary letter" of St Catharine. It is that in which she relates her assistance of Nicola Tuldo, when under sentence of death and on the scaffold. He adds at the end of his note: "St. Catharine had the stigmata. And this woman interposed between popes, princes, and republics." We may see, perhaps, whether she "interposed," or was entreated to do so; whether her influence was sought by herself, or forced on her by others. ]
The singularly beautiful life of St. Catharine of Siena, written by her friend and confessor, Raymond of Capua, gives us as perfect an account as we could wish to have of the personal and, as it were, private history of the saint, and sets her character before us in the freshest colors, like a picture of Fra Angelico. But it is deficient in that very part of her life to which it is our purpose more particularly to attend. The public influence exercised by St. Catharine was fresh in the recollection of those for whom Fr. Raymond wrote: they wished to be told the antecedents, as it were, of a person whom they had seen brought forward by Providence in so remarkable a manner to support the papacy in an hour of severe trial. A complete life of St. Catharine would have to include a great many points which have been omitted by Raymond; and much that he has mentioned or alluded to would have to be fixed more accurately as to time and place. Nor could any one hope to draw up such a work with success without the fullest acquaintance with the ample collection of her letters. It is from these last that many most important features of her public life would have to be drawn. [Footnote 82] We owe them, probably, to [{550}] the care with which her disciples or secretaries copied them before they were sent, for it is hardly likely that they could have been otherwise recovered from the persons to whom they were addressed.
[Footnote 82: One of the best sketches of St Catharine's action on public matters with which we are acquainted is contained in the introduction to M. Caltier's recent translation of her letters into French. The "Histoire de Ste. Catharine," published many years ago by M. Chavin de Malan, contains a great deal of extraneous matter, and does not scene to as to use the letters as they might have been used. M. Christophe, in his "Histoire de la Papauté pendant le XlVe Siècle," falls entirely in giving sufficient importance to the saint. There is a good Italian "Storia di Sta. Catarina da Siena," by Fr. Capecelatro, an Oratorian, published a few years ago, in which much use is made of the admirable notes of Fr. Buramacchi to Gilgli's edition of the letters.]