of the catacomb are all guarded by the government on this day of St. Cecilia’s, so that no one may stray from the one chapel where service is going on. Close to the entrance is the small recess where the saint was laid in her first sleep. It is low and reaches far back into the damp earth-wall; myrtle and bay-leaves are strewn over its floor, and flowers and little oil-lamps are spread about like stars. As each person leaves the chapel, he takes away a leaf or flower as a holy remembrance. Two altars are erected, one close to the martyr’s grave, just beneath a Byzantine fresco head of our divine Lord, the other on the opposite side of the chapel. The space, small enough for a modern congregation, though large for a catacomb chapel, is so crowded that it is difficult for the priests to pass in and out from the altars to the temporary sacristy, and the worshippers almost lean upon them when they stand to say the “Judica me, Deus.” No noise is heard, save the murmured words of the Mass and the tinkling of the elevation-bell. Foreigners are there with fair-haired boys serving the Mass of some favorite friend and accompanying chaplain; Romans are there with their intense, if not deep, southern devotion; rich and poor, prince and beggar, student and peasant, are alike crowding the virgin-martyr’s shrine. A few hundred years ago, this was the church’s cradle, and patrician and slave came to be baptized together and wear for one day the white robes that to-morrow twilight would see red with blood on the deserted sand of the gladiator’s amphitheatre. The priest who said Mass in those days hardly knew, when he came to the consecration, whether the hand of the pagan soldiery might not be upon him before
the communion; the mother who knelt in tears, half of natural sorrow, half of heavenly joy, and thought of the fair young boy she had but yesterday given back to God on the scaffold, did not know whether tomorrow’s dawn might not find her herself prostrate and headless on the same place of execution. Partings then were seldom for long, and, even when the Christians parted with our Lord on the hidden altars, they knew they would meet him soon again at the right hand of his Father. Not unfrequently, the Blessed Sacrament was kept in a silver vessel made in the shape of a dove, and one cannot help thinking how sweet a union must have existed between this custom and the idea of the protection and the teaching the Holy Spirit was to afford to his spouse, the church. “When the Spirit of truth cometh,” Jesus had said, “he shall teach you all things.” And so the Dove of heaven taught the church the hidden beauties of the ineffable sacrament, and protected this greatest treasure of the Bride in its integrity of doctrine and its continuity of love. May we not so interpret, lovingly and reverentially, the olden custom of the dove-shaped tabernacle?
Beautiful as the day was, it was a sore trial to leave the darksome, silent chapel, where generations of older and braver Christians than ourselves had spent their triumphant vigils and been brought back to sleep their peaceful hero-slumbers—it was a trial, I say, to return to the carelessly beautiful earth, the unheeding theatre of such wondrous mysteries. To leave the catacombs in Cecilia’s times was to go forth to almost certain death; to leave prayer and solitude, the catacombs of the heart in our day, is to encounter certain sorrow and possible sin. It is hard to leave God’s temple and mingle with
the chattering throng; it is hard to lift the curtain of silence and mix with the wrangling world. Yet it is our duty. Few are privileged to be hermits, and those few not until the privilege is turned into a trial, and the apparent retreat is no other than a hard-won stronghold. In the battle, we must fight, and fight manfully, in the foremost rank; it is only the generals and the chiefs among us that watch from afar, and feel, like wearied Moses, the weight of victory or defeat hanging on the issue of their prayers. Our part seems the harder, but it is only because our nature is so little that dissatisfaction with our present lot is the very air we breathe. After all, if we could look around us, we should see many beautiful things; if we are bound in fetters of duty, they are golden fetters, with the word of God carved all over their sunlike sheen; if we are led in one way and forced to wear the harness of unalterable circumstances, the reins are broidered with fair work that tells the story of how the angel led the ass of Balaam, and how palms were strewn on the path of Jesus; the way is emblazoned with rarest flowers and sweetest fruits, the heraldry of grace; if we bear a yoke and a burden, they are but spices and ointments, wine and oil, and milk and honey, all fair and gracious merchandise from the great mart of heaven, to be borne over the world, as the clouds bear the rain, in fertilizing charity and fruit-bearing meekness. So let us leave the dear catacomb, where even Music hushed her sighs, and come forth across the Roman Campagna, with the mist-veils rolled off it, and the noonday sun, with its reminiscences of summer, gilding its fringe of distant mountains, and its strange rifts of sudden, unsuspected valleys. Here and there, an aqueduct or a
proud stone pyre, a mound of stones, each of which bears an imperial inscription, a rude shepherd’s fence, or irregular stone wall, that is all you see. Not far from here, in a cornfield whose waves of brown and gold a few months ago kissed the foot of an ilex-crowned hillock, is the fountain of Egeria, a grotto, fern-clothed, with a broken goddess of mouldering stone. The water and the “maiden-hair” fern are there still, as beautiful as when the king of Rome is said to have wandered here in search of wisdom; the sage himself and the problematic nymph of tradition are dead and gone, forgotten by the owner of the corn-field, ignored by the peasant who drinks at the fountain, unknown to the brown, barefooted child who gathers the feathery fern.
Of what use is it to say any more? Facts are more cruel commentaries on the past than any words.
Yet we have just seen children and peasants, women from northern lands, men from eastern climes, bearing away as a relic a leaf of bay or a starry flower from the once filled recess where Cecilia lay in peace-sealed slumber.
Where is the difference, and why?
A little child can tell, but the philosopher will not listen.
The feast of St. Cecilia, though to the writer of these pages it ended on the threshold of the catacomb, is not completed here.