VIII
Either the learned physician’s simples or his advice had their effect on Julius: he very speedily recovered his spirits, and his notions concerning the Christian life seemed to him idle vaporings.
The physician, after a visit of a few days, took his departure. Soon after, Julius got up, and, profiting by his advice, began a new life. He engaged tutors for his children, and he himself superintended their instruction. His time was wholly spent in public duties, and very soon he acquired great consideration in the city.
Thus Julius lived a year, and during this year not once did he remember the Christians. But during this time a tribunal was appointed to try the Christians in their city. An emissary of the Roman Empire had come to Cilicia to stamp out the Christian faith. Julius heard of the measures taken against the Christians, and though he supposed that it concerned the Christian community in which Pamphilius lived, he did not think of him. But one day as he was walking along the square in the place where his official duties called him, he was accosted by a poorly dressed, elderly man, whom he did not recognize at first. It was Pamphilius. He came up to Julius, leading a child by the hand.
“How are you, friend?” said Pamphilius. “I have a great favor to ask of you, but I don’t know as you will be willing to recognize me as your friend, now that we Christians are being persecuted; you might be in danger of losing your place if you had any relations with me.”
“I am not in the least afraid of it,” replied Julius, “and as a proof of it I will ask you to come home with me. I will even postpone my business in the market so as to talk with you and be of service to you. Let us go home together. Whose child is this?”
“It is my son.”
“Really, I need not have asked. I recognize your features in him. I recognize also those blue eyes, and I should not have to ask who your wife is: she is the beautiful woman whom I saw with you some years ago.”
“You have surmised correctly,” replied Pamphilius. “Shortly after we met, she became my wife.”
The friends went to Julius’ home. Julius summoned his wife and gave the boy to her, and brought Pamphilius to his luxurious private room.
“Here you can say anything; no one will hear us,” said Julius.
“I am not afraid of being heard,” replied Pamphilius; “since my request is not that the Christians, who have been arrested, may not be sentenced and executed, but only that they may be permitted publicly to confess their faith.”
And Pamphilius told how the Christians arrested by the authorities had sent word to the community from the dungeons where they were confined. The elder Cyril, knowing of Pamphilius’ relations with Julius, commissioned him to go and plead for the Christians. The Christians did not ask for mercy. They considered it their mission to bear witness to the truth of Christ’s teaching. They could bear witness to this in the course of a long life of eighty years, and they could bear witness to the same by enduring tortures. Either way was immaterial to them; and physical death, unavoidable as it was, for them was alike free from terror and full of joy, whether it came immediately or at the end of half a century: but they wished their lives to be useful to men, and therefore they had sent Pamphilius to labor in their behalf, that their trial and punishment might be public.
Julius was dumbfounded at Pamphilius’ request, but he promised to do all in his power.
“I have promised you my intercession,” said Julius, “but I have promised it to you on account of my friendship for you, and on account of the peculiarly pleasant feeling of tenderness which you have always awakened in me; but I must confess that I consider your doctrine most senseless and harmful. I can judge in regard to this, because not very long ago, in a moment of disappointment and illness, in a state of depression of spirits, I once more shared your views, and once more almost abandoned everything and went to you. I understand on what your error is based, for I have been through it; it is based on selfishness, on weakness of spirit, and the feebleness caused by ill health; it is a creed for women, but not for men.”
“Why so?”
“Because, out of pride, instead of taking part by your labors in the affairs of the empire, and in proportion to your services rising higher and higher in the estimation of men, you forthwith, by your pride, I say, regard all men equal, so that you consider no one higher than yourselves, and consider yourselves equal to Caesar.
“You yourself think so, and teach others to think so. And for the weak and the lazy this is a great temptation. Instead of laboring, every slave immediately counts himself equal to Caesar. If men listened to you, society would be dissolved, and we should return to primitive savagery. You in the empire preach the dissolution of empire. But your very existence is dependent on the empire. If it was not for that, you would not be. You would all be slaves of the Scythians or the barbarians, the first who knew of your condition. You are like a tumor destroying the body, but able to make a show, and to feed on the body and nothing else. And the living body struggles with it and suppresses it! Thus do we act in regard to you, and we cannot do otherwise. And notwithstanding my promise to help you, and to comply with your request, I look on your doctrine as most harmful and low: low, because dishonorably and unjustly you devour the breast that nourishes you: take advantage of the blessings of the imperial order without sharing in its support, and yet trying to destroy it!”
“What you say would be just,” said Pamphilius, “if we really lived as you think. But you do not know about our life, and you have formed a false conception of it. For you, with your habitual luxury, it is hard to imagine how little a man requires when he exists without superfluities. A man is so constituted that, when he is well, he can produce with his hands far more than he needs for the support of his life. Living in a community as we do, we are able by our labor to support without effort our children, and the aged and the sick and the feeble. You assert that we Christians arouse in the slave the desire to be the Caesar; on the contrary, both by word and deed we fulfil one thing: patient submissiveness and work, the most humble work of all—the work of the workingman. We know nothing and we care nothing about affairs of state. We know one thing, but we know it beyond question—that our well-being is only when the well-being of others is found, and we strive after this well-being; the well-being of all men is in their union.”
“But tell me, Pamphilius, why men hold aloof from you in hostility, persecute you, hunt you down, kill you? How does your doctrine of love give rise to such discord?”
“The source of this is not in us, but outside of us. We regard as higher than anything the law of God, which controls by our conscience and by reason. We can obey only such laws of the State as are not contrary to God’s: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.’ And that is why men persecute us. We have not the power of stopping this hostility, which does not have its source in us, because we cannot cease to realize that truth which we have accepted, because we cannot live contrary to our conscience and reason. In regard to this very hostility which our faith should arouse in others against us, our Teacher said, ‘Think not that I am come to send peace into the world; I came not to send peace, but a sword.’
“Christ experienced this hostility in His own lifetime and more than once he warned us, His disciples, in regard to it. ‘Me,’ He said, ‘the world hateth because its deeds are evil. If ye were of the world the world would love you, but since ye are not of this world therefore the world hateth you, and the time will come when he who killeth you will think he is serving God.’ But we, like Christ, ‘fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul. And this is their condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.’
“In this there is nothing to worry over, because the truth will prevail. The sheep hear the shepherd’s voice, and follow him because they know his voice. And Christ’s flock will not perish but will increase, attracting to it new sheep from all the lands of the earth, for ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. …’ ”
“Yes,” Julius said, interrupting him, “but are there many sincere ones among you? You are often blamed for only pretending to be martyrs and glad to lay down your lives for the truth, but the truth is not on your side. You are proud madmen, destroying the foundations of social life.”
Pamphilius made no reply, and looked at Julius with melancholy.