Part 12 (1/2)

From that audience-hall those three men retire. The boy, grown old in l.u.s.t, goes thence to be an hour alone, to ponder for an hour on this G.o.d, this resurrection, and this truth, of which the Jew, in such uncourtly phrase, has harangued him. To be alone, until the spectre of a dying mother rises again to haunt him, to persecute him and drive him forth to his followers and feasters, where he will try to forget Paul and the Saviour and G.o.d, where he would be glad to banish them forever.

He does not banish them forever! Henceforward, whenever that spectre of a mother comes before him, it must re-echo the words of G.o.d and eternity which Paul has spoken. Whenever the chained and bleeding captive of the arena bends suppliant before him, there must return the memory of the only captive who was never suppliant before him, and his words of st.u.r.dy power!

And Seneca? Seneca goes home with the mortified feelings of a great man who has detected his own meanness.

We all know the feeling; for all G.o.d's children might be great, and it is with miserable mortification that we detect ourselves in one or another pettiness. Seneca goes home to say: ”This wild _Easterner_ has rebuked the Emperor as I have so often wanted to rebuke him. He stood there, as I have wanted to stand, a man before a brute.

”He said what I have thought, and have been afraid to say. Downright, straightforward, he told the Emperor truths as to Rome, as to man, and as to his vices, which I have longed to tell him. He has done what I am afraid to do. He has dared this, which I have dallied with, and left undone. _What is the mystery of his power?_”

Seneca did not know. Nero did not know. The ”Eastern mystery” was in presence before them, and they knew it not!

What was the mystery of Paul's power?

Paul leaves them with the triumph of a man who has accomplished the hope of long years. Those solemn words of his, ”After that, I _must_ also see Rome,” expressed the longing of years, whose object now, in part, at least, is gratified. He must see Rome!

It is G.o.d's mission to him that he see Rome and its Emperor. Paul has seen with the spirit's eye what we have seen since in history,--that he is to be the living link by which the electric fire of life should pa.s.s first from religious Asia to quicken this dead, brutish Europe. He knows that he is G.o.d's messenger to bear this mystery of life eternal from the one land to the other, and to unfold it there. And to-day has made real, in fact, this his inward confidence. To-day has put the seal of fact on that vision of his, years since, when he first left his Asiatic home. A prisoner in chains, still he has to-day seen the accomplishment of the vows, hopes, and resolutions of that field of Troy, most truly famous from the night he spent there. There was another of these hours when G.o.d brings into one spot the acts which shall be the _argument_ of centuries of history. Paul had come down there in his long Asiatic journeys,--Eastern in his lineage, Eastern in his temperament, Eastern in his outward life, and Eastern in his faith,--to that narrow h.e.l.lespont, which for long ages has separated East from West, tore madly up the chains which would unite them, overwhelmed even love when it sought to intermarry them, and left their cliffs frowning eternal hate from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. Paul stood upon the Asian sh.o.r.e and looked across upon the Western. There were Macedonia and the hills of Greece, here Troas and the ruins of Ilium. The names speak war. The blue h.e.l.lespont has no voice but separation, except to Paul. But to Paul, sleeping, it might be, on the tomb of Achilles, that night the ”man of Macedonia”

appears, and bids him come over to avenge Asia, to pay back the debt of Troy.

”Come over _and help us_.” Give us life, for we gave you death. Give us help for we gave you ruin. Paul was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. The Christian Alexander, he crosses to Macedon with the words of peace instead of war,--the Christian shepherd of the people, he carries to Greece, from Troy, the tidings of salvation instead of carnage, of charity instead of license. And he knows that to Europe it is the beginning of her new civilization, it is the dawn of her new warfare, of her new poetry, of her reign of heroes who are immortal.

That _faith_ of his, now years old, has this day received its crowning victory. This day, when he has faced Nero and Seneca together, may well stand in his mind as undoing centuries of bloodshed and of license.

And in this effort, and in that spiritual strength which had nerved him in planning it and carrying it through, was the ”Asian mystery.” Ask what was the secret of Paul's power as he bearded the baby Emperor, and abashed the baby Philosopher? What did he give the praise to, as he left that scene? What was the principle in action there, but faith in the new life, faith in the G.o.d who gave it!

We do not wonder, as Seneca wondered, that such a man as Paul dared say anything to such a boy as Nero! The absolute courage of the new faith was the motive-power which forced it upon the world. Here were the sternest of morals driven forward with the most ultra bravery.

Perfect faith gave perfect courage to the first witnesses. And there was the ”mystery” of their victories.

And so, in this case, when after a while Seneca again reminded Nero of his captive, poor Nero did not dare but meet him again. Yet, when he met him again in that same judgment-hall, he did not dare hear him long; and we may be sure that there were but few words before, with such affectation of dignity as he could summon, he bade them set the prisoner free.

Paul free! The old had faced the new. Each had named its champion. And the new conquers!

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Anno Christi, 60.

[10] Tacit. Annal., xiv. 9.

[11] Anno Christi, 60. See Neander, P. & T., B. iii. ch. x.

[12] This correspondence, as preserved in the collections of fragments, has too much the aspect of a school-boy exercise to claim much credit, though high authorities support it as genuine. But the probability that there was such a correspondence, though now lost, is very strong.

THE DOT AND LINE ALPHABET.

[This sketch was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1858, just at the time that the first Atlantic Cable, whose first prattle had been welcomed by the acclamations of a continent, gasped its last under the manipulations of De Sauty. It has since been copied by Mr. Prescott in his valuable hand-book of the electric telegraph.

The war, which has taught us all so much, has given a brilliant ill.u.s.tration of the dot and line alphabet, wholly apart from the electric use of it, which will undoubtedly be often repeated. In the movements of our troops under General Foster in North Carolina, Dr. J. B. Upham of Boston, the distinguished medical director in that department, equally distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty in the same campaign, made a similar arrangement with long and short flashes of light.]

Just in the triumph week of that Great Telegraph which takes its name from the Atlantic Monthly, I read in the September number of that journal the revelations of an observer who was surprised to find that he had the power of reading, as they run, the revelations of the wire. I had the hope that he was about to explain to the public the more general use of this instrument,--which, with a stupid fatuity, the public has as yet failed to grasp. Because its signals have been first applied by means of electro-magnetism, and afterwards by means of the chemical power of electricity, the many-headed people refuses to avail itself, as it might do very easily, of the same signals for the simpler transmission of intelligence, whatever the power employed.