"Though the symbol was always probably in private use among the early Christians," struck in the truth-seeker, "I believe its first public appearance would not date further back than its triumphant one upon the Roman eagles. In the Catacombs, I'm told, the Virgin and Child appear in the oldest work, or symbolism—the Cross never save as executed by late hands."
"May there not be subjective reasons for that?" asked my porcelain widow. "I mean for the modern adoration of the Cross? Do you not think we are much softer hearted, much more keenly susceptible of all the finer emotions than were those old Greek, Roman, and Jewish converts? One feels the same thing, it seems to me, in mystic reading. The old visions were triumphant, simple, or, so to say, material—the very A B C of mysticism; while the visions of later mystics are complicated, involved, like the soul-life of this time, often agonizing beyond natural power of endurance. And the stigmatized saints are of these later times."
"And then," said the art-student, "I think they didn't realize in those early days how long time was going to be, and how tough and many-headed, evil. The faith was but young then. Perhaps they couldn't have borne to know the length and fluctuations of the fight—and they felt so sure of speedy victory, that our Lord's resurrection and ascension appealed to them more keenly than His passion."
"All reasonable theories," replied my neighbor. "But, apropos of some of the legends concerning the Tragedy of the Cross, the weeping willow, the trembling aspen, the robin redbreast, the red crossbill, the passion flower, and so many more, I hardly know a more naïve example of the way in which our forefathers pressed the exterior world into testimony for their belief than occurs in an old picture in an Augustinian monastery in Sussex.
"It is a fresco on the wall of a chamber—subject, the Nativity—and the animals therein are made to publish the event in words supposed to resemble their characteristic sounds and cries. A cock, crowing, is perched at the top, and a label from out his mouth has the words, 'Christus natus est!' 'Quando, quando?' quacks the duck. Hoarsely the raven, 'In hæ nocte.' 'Ubi? ubi?' inquires the cow. And, 'Bethlehem,' bleats out the lamb."
"Oh, Mrs. Stainton, I beg your pardon," suddenly called out the ex-Anglican parson from the foot of the table, and despatching a servant with a plate to the little widow. "I quite forgot your predilection."
"But somebody else may like the inner consciousness too," returned she, transferring to her own plate the fowl's gizzard sent. "You make me feel like a terrible old French aunt of mine—a gourmande who spent two or three hours every day in consultation with her cook, a man, concerning her for the most part solitary dinner, and who was at the last found dead with her cook-book lying open on her knee! My oldest brother, when a little fellow, dined with her one day. In his helping of fowl was included the inner consciousness. Childlike, he put this tid-bit carefully aside as a delicious last morsel. But the old lady eyed his plate with great discontent, growing every moment more grim. Finally she could bear it no longer, and, poising her fork, she dexterously harpooned the bonne-bouche, and triumphantly transferred it to her own plate, remarking to the dreadfully disappointed child, 'I see, my nephew, that you don't love this little portion. Now I do, so it is best I should have it.' We none of us could tolerate this aunt, but my brother's feeling toward her ever after was really venomous in its spitefulness."
"That reminds me," said the Scotchman, "that I saw a photograph of Dixblanc to-day, and was astonished to find her not at all an evil-looking person. I quite believe now that she murdered her mistress in a fit of passion, as she says, and not at all for robbery. And there must have been awful provocation. Fancy living with a disreputable, avaricious, nagging old Frenchwoman!"
"But how worse than with an old Englishwoman of like characteristics?" asked somebody.
"Oh, because the Française is more fine, exasperating, and utterly unrestrained by terrors of Mrs. Grundy and the decent," replied the ex-Anglican, ex-things-in-general truth-seeker.