CHAPTER XIII

TWO ARCHBISHOPS

On September 27, 397, Nectarius, Patriarch of Constantinople, lay dead in his stately palace.

On the Good Friday of that year (April 4) had died a very different prelate, the great St. Ambrose. He had died immediately after receiving the Sacrament, after lying many hours with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. His friends, the chief citizens of Milan, who adored him, had entreated him to pray that for the sake of the Church his days might be prolonged, for he was but fifty-seven years old. But he answered, ‘I have not so lived among you that I am ashamed to live; and yet—for the Lord is merciful—I do not fear to die.’ ‘It is a death-blow for all Italy,’ exclaimed the brave Vandal, Stilico, when he heard it. And he was right.

No human being would have dreamed of making any such remark about Nectarius. He was commonplace of the commonplace; he was of the world, worldly; he was a luxurious worldling, profoundly ignorant of theology. When appointed archbishop he was a layman; he had never even been baptised.

He was, indeed, a strange successor to the humble, holy, fervid St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the greatest theologian and one of the greatest orators of his day. But Gregory had shown himself too mild, too noble, and too good for the magnificent office of which he may be said to have created the possibility. When Gregory was carried by force from his humble bishopric at Nazianzus to preside over the little handful of the orthodox at Constantinople, the city, besides being execrably corrupt, was predominantly Arian.

Gregory lived in a lodging, and preached in a single room, which was large enough to receive the shrunken congregation. It was through his earnestness and fame that the room had gradually grown into a chapel, and the chapel into ‘The Church of the Resurrection.’ He was no imposing orator, but short of stature, and though only fifty years old, was pale, meagre, sickly, and prematurely aged, with bald head and beard already sable-silvered. He wore an aspect of continual melancholy; his careworn countenance was often bathed in tears. And so far from valuing the worldly eminence of his rank, his dress was more like that of a mendicant than of the bishop of the queen of cities, the capital of the Eastern world.

It was, of course, impossible that so good a man as Gregory should escape a storm of odium. That is the compliment which vice pays to virtue. He had as many stones flung at him as bad men have roses; his only criticism of them was they were so ill-aimed. His life was often in danger. On one occasion a furious swarm of Arians, headed by ‘beggars who had forfeited their claim to pity, monks who looked like goats or satyrs, and women more frightful than Jezebels,’ armed with sticks, stones, and firebrands, wrecked his church, assaulted his congregation, mingled with blood the wine of the chalice, and nearly murdered him. He escaped, but because one man had been killed in the tumult he was summoned before the magistrates for a breach of the peace. Then he was nearly ousted by the intrigue of one of the basest class of clerical adventurers in whom that age abounded. Gregory hated the place; he hated the work; he hated the prevalent hypocrisy; he hated the universal talk about religion, without a semblance of its reality, which left him hardly anyone whom he could trust.

Utterly against his will he was compelled to accept the archbishopric, which involved the care of the Church of the Apostles. He had not the least desire to be a bishop. He had never cared to hang about the doors of the great. With singular independence, he declared that he had never wished to clasp the bloodstained hands of rulers, ‘under whose hands the whole world is ruled by a little diadem and a small rag of purple.’

He found the presidency of the Second Œcumenical Council the most distasteful of his duties. He describes it as a scene of faction, disorder, jealousies, and disgraceful violence. He found that the assembled ecclesiastics were chiefly interested in personal questions. They appeared as antagonists in a battle, bandying bitter accusations, and leaping from their seats in transports of mutual animosity, until Gregory was thoroughly ashamed of them. He describes them as chattering like cranes and showing their teeth like wild boars, and no sooner had he ended a wise and conciliatory speech intended to raise them to a higher level, than the younger clergy buzzed about him like wasps. It is curious that the two best saints of the fourth century, St. Gregory and St. Martin of Tours, had a rooted dislike of ecclesiastical gatherings. Gregory breathed an earnest prayer that he might have nothing more to do with them, and Martin said that he had never known anything come of them but mischief. The great Bossuet agreed with them. ‘You know’—so he wrote to a friend—’what kind of things these assemblies usually are.’

Warning the congregated bishops that they were become a byword of strife and partisanship, and finding that they were intriguing to get rid of him, he offered to resign. With disgraceful alacrity the assembled Fathers took him at his word. He left his episcopate to be sought for by the restless ambitions of time-servers and hypocrites, ’angry lions to the small and fawning spaniels to the great,’ and, sick at heart, retired ‘to gaze on the bright countenance of truth in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies.’

Nectarius owed his election to the Patriarchate to the most casual incident. He was a Prætor, and as he was going to Tarsus he called on Chrysostom’s old teacher, Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, to ask if he could take any letters for him to that city. Struck with his venerable appearance and his placid temper, Diodore mentioned him to Flavian as a possible candidate for the vacant archbishopric. Flavian laughed at the notion, but out of compliment to Diodore put down the Prætor’s name at the bottom of the list of selected candidates, which was handed to the Emperor. Theodosius passed his finger down the list, paused at the name of Nectarius, read the list through a second time, and then declared that he chose Nectarius.

‘Nectarius! Who in the world is Nectarius?’ asked everyone in astonishment, and it turned out that he had not even been baptised! But Theodosius had very little opinion of any ecclesiastics except Ambrose, and Ambrose was a layman when the voice of the people had called him to the Archbishopric of Milan. So Nectarius stepped from the baptismal font to the most influential patriarchate of the world, and to the presidency of the Second Œcumenical Council!

But Theodosius was grievously mistaken if he supposed that Nectarius was going to be a second Ambrose.

On the contrary, he was just one of those purpureal, imposing, nugatory personages who, because of his easygoing nullity, his commonplace, worldly shrewdness, and his total absence of zeal and genius, suited the corrupt luke-warmness of a semi-Christian city.

Nectarius rose to the full height of the pomposity which had been impossible to Gregory. He could, indeed, give no help to the Emperor in the intense perplexities caused by theological disputes. The bishops heard a terrifying rumour that Theodosius even meant to consult the heretic Eunomius, who openly argued the Son was unlike the Father. The world, as after the Council of Rimini, might wake with a groan to find itself Arian! As no help was to be obtained from the ignorant Archbishop, Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium, threw himself into the breach, and determined to give Theodosius a picture-lesson. He went with other bishops to a Court gathering. Theodosius was seated on his throne in all his splendour, and by him sat his little son Arcadius, only eight years old, whom he had recently invested with the diadem, and whom the courtiers were surrounding with flattering homage. Amphilochius saluted the Emperor, and did not take the smallest notice of Arcadius. ‘What!’ said the Emperor, angrily, ‘do you not see my son?’ ‘Oh, said the Bishop, carelessly, ‘I forgot. Good morning, my child!’ and he actually had the audacity to pat the august infant on the cheek and tickle him with his finger! ’Turn that man out!’ roared Theodosius, in a flame of anger. Then Amphilochius, facing him, said, ‘You see, Emperor, you cannot tolerate an indignity to your son. Doubt not, then, that God shares the same feelings, and learn your duty.’ The Emperor was deeply impressed, and the world was saved from the heresy of Eunomius!

Under the courtly archiepiscopate of Nectarius the clergy of Constantinople became utterly corrupt and utterly worldly; but then, Nectarius was such a good manager—he kept everything so quiet, and he gave such good dinners! And under his sway the Church, to use Kingsley’s phrase, ‘swaggered on, arm in arm with the flesh and the devil.’

CHAPTER XIV

ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP

Paul did not say, Let everyone desire the episcopate. It is a work, not a relaxation; a solicitude, not a luxury; a responsible ministration, not an irresponsible dominion; a fatherly supervision, not a tyrannical autocracy.—Isidore of Pelusium, Ep. iii. 216.

Nectarius, then, on September 27, 397, lay dead in his splendid palace; and the breath was hardly out of the Archbishop’s body when there were a dozen ‘austere intriguers’ in the field, and the subterranean plots and whisperings began, and the wirepullers were incessantly at work. The floodgates of ecclesiastical ambition were opened, and poured their muddy sluices over the capital of the East.

All Constantinople buzzed and clacked with the counter-solicitations of eager interests, and every nameless pretender to the episcopal throne put into play every secret method in his power to win the coveted prize. For did not the Archbishop rank among the noblest in the whole land? Had he not the precedence over the most illustrious civilians at Court and in the houses of the great? Was not the Patriarch of Constantinople practically higher in position than even the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome?

The electorate with whom the choice rested was a little ill-defined. The provincial bishops were supposed to have weight in the matter, and as a synod of them happened at the time to be assembled in the city, under the presidency of Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, their influence was regarded as highly important. But then the illustres and honorati—all who had high civil offices, had also to be consulted. The people, too, had an undeniable voice in the nomination of their prelate; and the supreme court had necessarily to be reckoned with.

So, for four weary, dreary, and shameful months Constantinople became a turmoil of cabals. There was the cabal of bishops, each trying to further the promotion of his own favourite, or of himself. There was the cabal of the clergy of Constantinople, some striving with all the reckless passion of self-interest to procure their own preferment; others, who had no possible chance, trying to curry favour with anyone who, if elected, might advance their future interests; there was the cabal of influential personages who felt intensely interested in the result, because they had pitted their importance against each other, and the failure of their candidate would be a diminution of their prestige. And each separate faction strove to calumniate and undermine all the candidates of the rest.

Incomparably the most odious of these cliques were those of the clergy, who seemed to hesitate at no moral humiliation which would further their ambitious plans. There was no flattery, no complaisance to which they would not stoop, if they could only capture popularity among the lowest of the people. They trumpeted their own merits in every direction, and got them still more effectually trumpeted by the dictated eulogiums of their partisans. On the other hand, no amount of subterranean calumny was too gross if it served to dim the hopes or dash the prospects of a possible rival. As for the civil functionaries and Court officials, they were constantly receiving the visits of the clergy, who bowed before them with the most abject abasement. Money was spent with profusion in the furtherance of their intrigues. From dawn to dusk the baths, the colonnades, the church porches, the markets, had but one theme of common interest—who was to be the new Archbishop?

‘I know,’ some bourgeois would say mysteriously as he stood in a group of gossip-mongers.

‘You know?’ another would answer, with disdainful curiosity. ‘Who is it, then?’

‘Ah! that’s telling. But I don’t mind giving you a hint. It’s one of the priests of the Church of the Anastasia.’

CHAPTER XV

THE CAPTURE OF CHRYSOSTOM

Fortune? There is no fortune! All is trial, or punishment, or recompense, or foresight.—Voltaire.

It was a morning in February. Chrysostom was arranging with the faithful and indefatigable Philip the duties of the day after they had shared the morning meal of bread and dates. Suddenly they heard a summons at the door, and old Phlegon came in to say that there stood outside a slave in the gorgeous livery of the governor of the city, who had brought a letter.

‘What can he want at this early hour?’ said Philip as he cut the silken band; broke the Government seal, and handed the letter to the Presbyter. Chrysostom read with some surprise, ’Asterius, Count of the East, requests the Presbyter John to give him the honour of his company an hour hence at the Roman Gate, that he may have the advantage of visiting in his company the Martyry of St. Lucianus.’

He handed it to Philip with a smile.

‘Well, that upsets all our plans,’ said Philip. ‘But how odd! An interest in martyries was the last thing of which I should have suspected his Excellency. But it will be a delightful little excursion along the banks of the Orontes. You will let me walk with you as far as the Roman Gate? We must start almost immediately to get there in time.’

A few minutes later they set forth from the house in Singon Street, in which Chrysostom had been born, in which he had lived nearly all his life, and in which his father Secundus, his mother Anthusa, and his only sister had died. It was a burning morning of the Syrian spring, and as they passed in happy spirits through the streets—gazing now at the great Charonium, now at the statue of the Fortune of Antioch, now at the house which had been Philip’s former home, and now at the glancing river, seen in glimpses here and there, and at the long colonnades, and the palaces, and the distant hills gleaming in the sunshine—the last thought which could occur to their minds would have been that thenceforth, to one of them for long years, and to the other for ever, those bright scenes would from that moment vanish from their lives, that they would never again tread, side by side, those old, familiar streets. Chrysostom could not have left the home of his parents, of his childhood, and of so many happy and fruitful years, without many a sob had he distantly suspected that when he walked from his paternal door so unconsciously he would never again set foot upon its threshold. Philip’s heart would have been torn with reminiscences of his father’s execution, his mother’s sad death, his cruel punishment, the horrible fate of his boyish friends, if he could have dreamed how long it was before he could look on Antioch again.

A little before they reached the Roman Gate Asterius met them, all smiles and complaisance. Several of his bodyguard and slaves had escorted him, and fell back as Chrysostom and Philip approached. They were a little at a loss to know why he smiled so much, and was so very deferential; but they were soon to learn that

A man may smile, and smile, and be…

—well, no, not exactly a villain, but the accomplice in a little plot.

The Martyry was not far beyond the city walls, and lay in an umbrageous grove of oaks and laurels. Asterius was walking with Chrysostom, and Philip followed them, a little in front of the escort. But no sooner had they turned into the path which led to the chapel than Asterius took Chrysostom by the arm, and requested him to step into a chariot which was there waiting.

‘I am sorry, Count,’ said Chrysostom, ‘but I have my duties at Antioch, and directly we have paid our devotions at the shrine of the martyr I must return.’

CHAPTER XVI

TALES BY THE WAY

Apart from the fatigues of travel and the necessary uncertainty and anxiety, the journey of eight hundred miles towards Constantinople was as pleasant for Chrysostom as his captors could make it. The modern love for beautiful scenery was in those days but little developed; but John was one of the few who keenly enjoyed the beauties of Nature, and he could not be indifferent to the glorious scenes through which the journey lay. When they did not arrive at their station till after dusk he would often sit silent, gazing on the stars—’those eternal flowers of heaven,’ as St. Basil calls them—and musing on his own unknown future, and on the little lives of men. He was also deeply interested in seeing the home of St. Paul’s boyhood as they passed through Tarsus, and looked on the silver Cydnus, up which Cleopatra had rowed in her gilded barge.

Had the circumstances been less mysterious Philip would have been wild with delight as he galloped among the soldiery of the escort. He felt the exhilaration of change and exercise, and new glimpses of the great world; and he was naturally a favourite with the soldiers, who delighted in his witty Antiochene jokes and in his buoyant freshness of spirits, while they were struck with the genuine innocence and sweetness of his character. He did not share their rough quarters, but took his meals with Chrysostom and the two great officials, and slept at his master’s feet, or in an anteroom.

They reached Pessinus, the capital of Galatia, after several days of almost unbroken travel. There Chrysostom and Philip looked with interest on the legend-haunted heights of Mount Dindymus, and saw the ancient temple of the mother of the gods, in which the Emperor Julian had recently paid his devotions.

Amantius and Aurelian had become more and more attached to their captive and his young companion; they no longer made any secret of the fact that they were conveying him to Constantinople. They pretended that it would be as much as their lives were worth to say why he was wanted; and he could not himself even form a guess, for he dismissed as preposterous the only conjecture which flitted across his mind. That he could have been elevated to the Patriarchate of Constantinople seemed to him an absurdity; and he would have shuddered at the prospect instead of being elated by it.

The sight of the Temple of Cybele, from which the heaven-fallen image had been carried to Rome six centuries earlier, naturally turned their thoughts to heathen idolatry, and as they rested in the evening Aurelian said:

‘Idolatry is, I suppose, nearly as ancient as mankind itself; but such is the epoch in which we live that I have myself seen it receive its deathblows.’

‘Do you refer to the edicts of Theodosius?’ asked Chrysostom, ‘or to Ambrose’s crushing answer to Symmachus, when he pleaded with Gratian to restore the altar of victory in the Senate-house of Rome?’

‘No. I refer to the destruction of the Temple of Serapis and the battle of Frigidus. I was present at both.’

‘Do tell us about the destruction of the Serapeum.’

‘It was an event of deep interest,’ said Aurelian, ‘but I wish I could regard it with unmixed approval. The Christians, especially the monks, after Theodosius had forbidden sacrifices in 386, had headed many furious assaults on temples. Heathens like Libanius say that they found their account in doing so. They did not always escape unpunished. Rustic populations were passionately devoted to ancient shrines, like this one as Pessinus, which were mixed up with all their memories and traditions. You have, no doubt, heard how Marcellus, the lame Bishop of Apamea, was killed in his attack on the great Temple of Jupiter. But no temple was so famous as that of Serapis. It had been founded by the first Ptolemy, and Alexandria itself was called “The City of Serapis.” The temple stood on a mound which was ascended by a hundred marble steps. It was of enormous size, had a great library, and was full of exquisite statues and precious works of art. The very walls were covered with plates of silver and gold. The rising of the Nile, and therefore the prosperity and almost the existence of Egypt, was, by the mass of the population, believed to depend on the favour of Serapis. Libanius had unwisely taunted Theodosius with leaving untouched the great temples at Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria, while he allowed the smaller temples to be assaulted, destroyed, and, alas! plundered by the monks. Theophilus of Alexandria, saving his reverence a bold, bad man, at once sanguinary and avaricious——’

‘Hush!’ said Chrysostom, who never hesitated to rebuke even the greatest if he thought it a duty.

‘Well,’ said Aurelian, ‘he really is all I say, and worse; and the blessed Paul told the High Priest that he was a whited wall.’

‘Yes,’ answered Chrysostom, ‘but directly he knew that he was the High Priest he apologised, and said, “It is written, Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people.”’

‘I stand corrected, John,’ answered Aurelian with a smile, for he was a soldier, and admired straightforward courage. ‘But to continue. Theophilus had already profaned and dismantled a temple of Osiris, and the worshippers of Serapis, fearing the next step, garrisoned the Serapeum. The Christians assembled to attack it, and there would have been bloodshed, but the magistrates secured a truce till the Emperor could be consulted. Theodosius decided for the demolition of the temple, in revenge for the Christian prisoners whom the Pagans had tortured and killed. It was at once despoiled and demolished. But when the multitude entered the shrine where the huge gilded idol sat enthroned, with the basket on his head and the three-headed monster in his right hand, they paused in superstitious dread. Heaven and earth would collapse, it was believed, if the majesty of the god were violated. But one of my rude soldiers had no such fear. He put a ladder against the statue, and ascended it, amid the breathless silence of the multitude, with a huge battle-axe in his hand. Then the audacious legionary dashed his axe on the face of the image with all his force, and smote off its cheek. The mob expected to see him struck dead or blind; but no lightning flashed, no cloud darkened the blue of heaven. He smote again and again, while the hall rang with the echo of his blows. In a minute or two the hollow head of the image rolled with a clang on the marble floor, and out sprang an immemorial colony of rats, whose home had been thus rudely invaded. No sooner did the mob see the black, voracious creatures leaping and scurrying off in every direction than superstition was changed into angry contempt. The protector of heaven and earth had not been even able to protect his own rats! The people broke into shouts of laughter, swarmed up the pedestal, tore down the image, tripudiated on its shattered fragments as they dragged them through the mire of the streets, and ultimately flung them into a huge bonfire. There was a little delay in the rising of the Nile, and when it did rise it threatened a deluge. “Serapis,” they murmured, “will avenge himself.” But no; the waters sank to the due fertilising height, and even in Alexandria Serapis will never be worshipped more!’

Chrysostom listened, and mused.

‘But, sir,’ said Philip, modestly, to Aurelian, ‘you said you had also witnessed the other deathblow to Paganism.’

‘Ah! I see,’ said Aurelian, ‘your youthful blood is all on fire to hear about battles. I have been in many. Believe me they are frightful things, even when we are victors. I remember only too well the massacre of Adrianople. I was near the person of the Emperor Valens on that awful August 9, 378. It was only by a moment’s delay that I was shut out of the cottage in which he was burnt to death with his followers, while the barbarians were massacring two-thirds of the Roman army, of which, but for the darkness, none would have escaped. Alas! it was the Nemesis of our crimes! If Valens admitted the Goths over the Danube to the hospitality of Roman territory, he should not have suffered them to be insulted and starved. Yet, even after the retribution of Adrianople we were guilty, that very year, of the horrid butchery of all the deceived and unarmed Gothic youth, which I for one regard as the most frightful of all evil omens and hateful crimes.’

‘I would not ask you about those shocking scenes,’ said Philip; ‘but how did the battle of the Frigidus put an end to Paganism?’

‘I must answer you briefly,’ said Aurelian. ‘It was September 6, 394; Eugenius, the puppet-emperor of Arbogast the Gaul, had pretended to espouse the cause of the Pagans. In the mountainous passes he had placed statues of Jupiter, with his right hand uplifted as though to strike, and armed with golden thunderbolts. The battle was very risky, for Arbogast had posted his forces with great skill. The first day the enemy got the best of it. The Goths of Arbogast routed those under Gaïnas and slew 10,000 of them. Theodosius, pressed by many of his generals, would have retreated to a safer encampment, if he had not thought that this would look like a defeat of Christianity. “Our Labarum, which bears the cross on it,” he cried, “shall never retreat before the image of Heracles.”

‘There was among the allies one superb young Goth, named Alaric, who, if I am not much mistaken, will be heard of again; he, almost alone, urged the Emperor to renew the battle. The enemy spent the night in songs and revelries; Theodosius spent it in prayer. When he slept he saw two terrible figures on white horses, who told him that they were St. John and St. Philip come to fight for him. Next morning he dared not narrate the dream to his troops, lest they should think it a fiction, until a soldier said he had dreamt the very same thing. Then Theodosius told his vision. His robe was wet with tears, and when he took it off to don his cuirass he hung the wet purple garment on a tree, as though in silent appeal to Heaven. Our men were filled with wild enthusiasm; but even then I doubt whether we should have won if suddenly—may I say supernaturally?—the bora, the blinding, driving, sleet-laden whirlwind of these mountains, had not burst in the very faces of Arbogast’s troops. We rushed upon them in the track of the storm, and utterly routed them. Theodosius charged into the thick of the fray, shouting, “Where is the Lord God of Theodosius?” Eugenius was not fighting, as Theodosius did, in the forefront of the battle, but his tent was pitched on a knoll at a safe distance, and he sat in the tent-door in his purple and his diadem. He was seized by soldiers who, he fancied, had come to drag Theodosius a captive into his presence. They tore off his purple and dragged him to the feet of his conqueror, where he prostrated himself, trembling. Theodosius upbraided him with the murder of the young Valentinian. While he was pleading for life one of the soldiers swept off his head with a sword, and put it on a pike. Then our men flung down the statues of Jupiter, and, seizing the golden thunderbolts, took them to Theodosius. “Keep them for yourselves,” said the Emperor, who was in one of his gayest moods. “Thank you, Emperor!” said the soldiers; “may we often be smitten by such thunderbolts!” Theodosius rolled in his saddle with laughter at their rough wit. They took up the laugh—and so Paganism perished, at Alexandria and at the Frigidus, in two shouts of mirth!’

‘How sad that Theodosius should have died so soon after his great victory!’ said Chrysostom. ‘But John, the Egyptian hermit, prophesied that it would be so.’

‘Yes! he exchanged the laurelled car for the coffin, and passed from triumph to the funeral. He has died just when he was most needed. You are hardly likely to have read the verses of a new and splendid Roman poet named Claudian, the eulogist of Stilico, but he makes the dying Theodosius say, and quite truly—you understand Latin?—

Res incompositas, fateor, tumidasque reliqui.’Claudian, De Bell. Gild., vi. 293.

‘Were you with him when he died?’

‘I was. I was on guard, and a wonderfully pretty and touching scene took place in his sick-room. Knowing that his last hour was near, he sent for his younger son, Honorius, then little more than a child. The Emperor was so weak that he could not preside all day at the games of the circus given in honour of his victory; so in the afternoon the little boy Honorius took his place. To secure the allegiance of Stilico he married the boy to Maria, the daughter of Stilico and Serena, his niece, who had always had a great influence over him. The two lovely children knelt by his bedside—Honorius with his placid, regular features, and Maria with her rosy cheeks and long golden locks. Stilico was there, his white head nobly conspicuous as he towered over the rest of the courtiers. The beautiful Serena bent over her little daughter. She wore the superb necklace of pearls which she took, perhaps wrongly, from the neck of the statue of Rhea, the mother of the gods.’

‘Did not the old Vestal Virgin prophesy that one day she would be strangled with that very necklace?’ asked Amantius.

‘Ay,’ said Aurelian, ‘but I don’t think it likely that the prophecy will be fulfilled. I could tell you many more incidents. I witnessed, for instance, the murder of that bright youth, the Emperor Gratian. But we must now go to sleep, for we have a long ride before us to-morrow.’

At Nicæa, on the eastern shore of Lake Ascanius, Chrysostom visited with deep interest the church in which, seventy-two years earlier, the first Christian emperor had been present at the first great Œcumenical Council. From thence a day’s journey brought them to Nicomedia, the capital of Bithynia, the favourite residence of Diocletian before his

and he retired to find greater happiness in the cultivation of cabbages at Salona. As they passed the village of Ancyron the chariots were stayed for half an hour that Chrysostom might visit the house and the room in which the great Constantine had ended the splendid and troubled dream of his strange life.

He suggested that evening that Amantius should enliven their journey with some of his reminiscences.

‘I have been, naturally,’ said Amantius, with a sigh, ‘a man of peace; yet I have seen one or two scenes which interested me in the East, as Aurelian has in the West. He has said something about the great Ambrose. I could tell you something about the great Basil and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus; something, too, about the Emperor Julian and his ways.’

‘Tell us something about Basil of Cæsarea,’ said Chrysostom.

‘The only time I saw him,’ said Amantius, ‘was in the great cathedral of his metropolis. The Emperor Valens was not only an Arian, but a persecutor. He entered the densely thronged cathedral with his spear-bearers—it is nearly twenty years ago—to overawe Basil into communicating with the Arians. The people were pressing on each other like the waves of the sea, and were thundering forth the Psalms of the day. Behind the Holy Table, facing the people, stood the Archbishop, his crosier in his hand, the episcopal ring on his finger, the white pallium, embroidered with its four crosses, over his shoulder. He stood there tall, stately, immovable as a statue. His beard was long and white, his features thin but noble; his ardent gaze was fixed on the Holy Table; the presbyters stood round him, and the fervour of devotion and beauty of holiness which reigned through the church so struck the timid and conscientious, though cruel, Emperor, that when he came to present his offering he tottered, and would have fallen heavily to the ground if a presbyter had not caught him in his arms. But Valens inspired no respect. The mob of Constantinople openly jeered at him when he went to meet his fate, and from the walls of Chalcedon the people insulted him with shouts of ”Sabaiarius,” or “small-beer drinker.” If they had behaved in that way to his brother, Valentinian I., he would have flung them wholesale to his two bears, Golden-Flake and Innocence, which he kept in a den near his bedroom, and fed on human flesh.’

‘The brute!’ said Philip, sotto voce.

‘Basil was as great in the East as Ambrose in the West,’ said Chrysostom; ‘but Philip whispers to me that he is dying to know whether you witnessed the murder of Rufinus.’

‘Yes; and a grim sight it was. Rufinus did not feel a doubt that on that very day Arcadius would nominate him Augustus. His purple, his diadem, his Court, his largesses, his banquets, his unequalled palace of “The Oak,” at Chalcedon, were all prepared; the oration of thanks was hovering on his lips. He had been baptised by Gregory of Nyssa. The holy Ammonius, one of the four “Tall Brothers” of Egypt, had stood sponsor for him. He was murdered in the Hebdomon, seven miles from Constantinople, just after the golden coffin of Theodosius had laid in state in the Church of the Apostles, with the livid face exposed. Rufinus was so eagerly impatient for the consummation of his ambition, which should turn the provincial cobbler’s son into an emperor, that he had the audacity to pull Arcadius by his purple robe to hurry him on. Then the chief Gaïnas and his Goths closed round him in threatening circle, and a soldier suddenly plunged his sword into his heart. The Emperor’s robe was stained in the blood of his Minister, and he fled in terror. They struck off the head of Rufinus and put it on a pole, fulfilling the prophecy he had received in the morning, “that he should came back that day with his head higher than all.” Then they hacked his body to pieces. One soldier had hewed off his hand, and managed to make the fingers open and shut by the severed tendons. He reaped quite a harvest of money in the streets by carrying round this hand, and crying, “Give an obol to the insatiable!” What a lesson it was of sudden Nemesis in the moment of overweening hopes!’

‘But have you no reminiscences to tell us, John?’ asked Aurelian.

‘Nay,’ answered Chrysostom; ‘what should a humble presbyter like me have to tell? You know all about the affair of the statues at Antioch, and you would hardly care for my trivial experiences in a lonely mountain cave. Yet—let me see—I can tell you one little anecdote. You know that Valens, who was intensely superstitious, was at one time in a paroxysm of alarm about magic.’

‘Why was that?’ asked Philip.

‘Because a group of foolish persons at Antioch had tried by Pagan sorcery to discover the name of his successor. They wrote the letters of the alphabet in a circle, and held a ring by a hair in the middle of the circle after elaborate incantations. The ring vibrated till it had touched in succession the letters THEOD. But, besides this, it was afterwards declared that the letters magically chosen were in four heroic verses, which said that the successor of Valens would be a great prince; that they would be put to death for their curiosity, but that vengeance would fall on their murderers, who would perish by fire on the Plains of Mimas. No one knew what was meant by “the Plains of Mimas” till after Valens was burnt alive in the peasant’s cottage near Adrianople, when they found there an old tomb inscribed with the words, “Here lies Mimas, a Macedonian Captain.”

‘The result of the divination was whispered abroad. Filled with fury and jealousy, Valens began to take vengeance. Woe to the man whose name began with Theod! Many Theodoruses and Theodotuses were put to death, and many changed their names; but, after all, his real successor, Theodosius, escaped, for he was then living as a private gentleman on his Spanish farm. But the horrors of that day will not soon be forgotten. Spies and informers sprang up, and flourished like a crop of mushrooms on rotten wood. The punishments were frightful. I myself’—he said, with a shudder—’saw the philosopher Simonides burnt alive in the Forum of Antioch. He died laughing, saying “He fled from life as from a mad mistress.” One youth was executed for possessing a magic book, another for using a love-spell. An old woman perished for curing the daughter of a proconsul of fever by a crooning song, a boy for getting rid of a stomach-ache by muttering the vowels of the alphabet. The world went mad with silly superstition. Whole libraries were destroyed by the owners, lest they should be condemned to torture or death for being the unconscious possessors of a single book of sorcery. Many valuable works have thus perished for ever. Well, in those days of grotesque and horrible panic, when one was almost afraid to speak above a whisper, I was walking to the martyry of St. Babylas with my friend Theodore, now Bishop of Mopsuestia. He was in great danger, humble as he was, because of the fatal Theod in his name. We were walking under the flowering groves on the banks of the Orontes, when we saw something white floating on the river. It looked like the leaves of a book, and, moved by curiosity, we fished it out of the water with our staves. What was our horror when a glance showed us that the papyrus was written all over with magic formulæ. A soldier was close at hand. We suspected that he was an informer, and had laid a trap for us. We wrapped a stone in the leaves and flung them into the middle of the river. For days afterwards we were in an agony of apprehension; but by the mercy of God nothing came of it. If the soldier had seen us we should have been lost. To this day I count it as my greatest deliverance from imminent peril.’

‘He was a poor creature—that Valens,’ said Aurelian.

The next evening they reached Chalcedon, and the waters of the sea shone before them like a sheet of gold. Across the narrow strait of the Bosporus they saw the gleaming walls and towers and palaces of Constantinople, the new Rome.

CHAPTER XVII

CONSTANTINOPLE

A spacious barge, gay with streamers, was moored for them beside the quay at Chalcedon, with a gilded dragon at its prow and a gorgeous canopy of purple silk. It was manned by five rowers in the imperial livery, who speedily conveyed them across the sparkling waters. To the bewilderment of Chrysostom, whose unworldly simplicity had not even yet divined the secret, a vast multitude lined the opposite shore, and received them with acclamations and shouts of joy, in which he repeatedly heard his own name. The tall chariot of the Prætorian Præfect, who stood highest among ‘the illustrious,’ awaited them, and in this they were driven at a rapid pace to the Patriarcheion, or house of the archbishop. The streets were cleared before them by a band of liveried runners. The Presbyter looked in mute inquiry to his friendly captors. They only informed him, with renewed smiles, that for the present he would find rooms prepared for him in the Palace of Nectarius, and that, after he had refreshed himself by a bath and a morning meal, some of the palace officials would be waiting to conduct him to an interview, first with the Grand Chamberlain, and then with the Emperor himself.

Resigning himself to circumstances, and suppressing to the utmost of his power every impulse of curiosity, though he was conscious that some great crisis of his life was at hand, Chrysostom gave himself up to silent prayer. But Philip, in the young enthusiasm of his life, was in the highest spirits, and was all eyes. His journey had been full of exhilaration to him, and he delighted to catch a glimpse of a great unknown. Who could fail to look with interest on the famous city which was the rival of Rome? In that rapid drive he could only get confused glimpses of cupolas, and baths, and pillars, and statues, and churches, and ancient temples scattered over the seven hills of Byzantium, until they entered the second of the fourteen regions of the city. It covered the hill on which Constantine had pitched his tent, and he chose it as the site of his principal forum. The chariot drove under a triumphal arch, and on all sides were porticoes filled with the choicest works of ancient Greek statuary. Beside the arch, in a shrine, was the old statue of Cybele, which the Argonauts were said to have brought from Mount Dindymus. It had been turned into a statue of the genius of the city by removing the lions at the feet of the goddess, and altering the arms from a gesture of command to one of supplication. In the centre of the Forum stood a pillar of marble and porphyry 120 feet high. On its summit Constantine had placed a statue of himself, which, with that half-and-halfness which characterised his religious attitude, might be regarded as wearing the attributes either of Christ or of Apollo. Round its head were some of the nails said to have been brought by his mother, St. Helena, from Jerusalem as the nails of the Cross; but Pagans might, if they chose, regard them as the radiated crown of the old sun-god. This statue had, however, been replaced by one of Julian, and Julian’s by that of Theodosius, which now surmounted the column. In this open space stood the Church of Santa Sophia, or the Holy Wisdom, once a Temple of Peace. South of it was a second forum, a long rectangle, bounded on one side by the wall of the Hippodrome, and on the other by the wall of the Augusteum, or Imperial Palace, now the Seraglio. In this stood the famous Milion, from which all the roads of the East were measured. It was a domed building, surrounded by an arcade of seven pillars, embellished with statues, and containing those of Constantine and St. Helena. On the east side of this second forum ran a long portico, called ’The Passage of Achilles.’ The adjacent baths of Zeuxippus were enriched with the Athene of Lindus, the Muses of Helicon, the Amphitrite of Rhodes, the Pan consecrated by the Greeks after the defeat of Xerxes, and others of the loveliest works of the greatest Greek sculptors. North of the famous Baths stood the Senate-house built by Julian, and no sooner had the chariot passed this building than it drew up at a stately palace next to it. This was the Patriarcheion, the residence of Nectarius, and of the Archbishop of Constantinople. How unlike the humble lodging which had sufficed for the great St. Gregory of Nazianzus!

Here Chrysostom and Philip alighted after a courteous farewell to Aurelian and Amantius, whom they thanked heartily for their many acts of kindness and courtesy.

‘We shall often meet again,’ said Amantius. ‘Indeed, we shall see you at the palace in an hour’s time.’

A sumptuous breakfast was already laid out, and attendants were in waiting; but Chrysostom told them that he required but little food, and that Philip would wait on him. Philip opened the bag which he had hastily packed at Antioch, and provided the Presbyter with new garments instead of his travel-stained suit. He took the same opportunity to array himself in his best Antiochene costume, and, though he was not vain, a glance at one of the great polished silver mirrors told him that he looked well. When they were a little rested and refreshed Chrysostom, with Philip following him, was conducted in state to have an interview with Eutropius, the all-powerful Minister.

Passing through the great hall of the Patriarch’s house—known as the Thomaites—they passed by the little Church of ‘Our Lady the Theotokos,’ which stood in the quarter of the Jewish bronzesmiths, the Chalkoprateia. In the palace-wall was a gate, called the Gate of Meletius, in honour of the saintly Bishop of Antioch, through which the Emperor used to walk to the private wooden staircase—the Skepaste Skala—which spanned the space between the Church of Our Lady and that of St. Sophia.

Through this entrance they were conducted to the suite of rooms occupied by Eutropius—the Præfectus sacri cubiculi, or Grand Chamberlain.

The outer hall was full of attendants, and here Philip had to stop; but Chrysostom was ushered to the inner room.

The officers who were conducting him knocked with their golden wands on the folding doors, which were flung back, and Chrysostom saw the Chamberlain seated at a table inlaid with precious marbles, on which lay a large golden inkstand, and a large pen-case, also of solid gold. On one side of him stood the Count of the Sacred Wardrobe, the Count of the Palace, and the Groom of the Bedchamber; on the other stood Amantius, as almoner of the Empress Eudoxia, and Aurelian, as captain of those palace bodyguards who were known as Silentiarii and Palatini. On either side of the doors stood four of these armed soldiers.

With these great palace officials stood the two prime favourites and most trusted agents of the Grand Chamberlain, men whom he had lifted out of the mire to set among princes. One was the Spaniard Osius, once a cook, and always a scoundrel, whom Eutropius had elevated to the post, first of Count of the Sacred Largesses, and then of Master of the Officers. The other was Leo, once a weaver, now a fat, cheery, bibulous general. He was nicknamed Ajax because, unlike Tydides

his greatness was wholly corporeal. Claudian describes him as

Eutropius instantly rose, and made a profound bow to the embarrassed Presbyter. Chrysostom saw before him the practical lord of the Eastern Empire, who shaped every whisper of the throne.

He was a little bald old man, with a fringe of grey hair round his baldness. His face might once have been beautiful in its features and pleasant in its expression, but now it was withered with premature old age, and there were deep wrinkles on the forehead. Years of degraded humiliation, years of anxious misery, years of triumph, avarice and guilt, years of cunning diplomacy, during which he held in his effeminate hands the threads of empire, had left their manifold, and therefore not easily decipherable, traces on his countenance; and if something of that which was, or might have been, good in him still sometimes shone in his glance or twinkled about his well-shaped mouth, the expression of his face more predominantly expressed astuteness, ill-dissembled arrogance, and flashes of the bitter hatred and contempt which he felt for the majority of mankind. Like Sir Robert Walpole, Eutropius held that nearly every man has his price; and he had repeatedly enjoyed the sinister satisfaction of seeing men who stood very high in the civil and religious world ready and even eager to kotow to him, to kiss his feet, to sell their souls to him for a mess of pottage. It had been the curse of his life to be driven to radical disbelief in human nature. He despised almost every human being whom he knew; he trusted scarcely anyone, unless, indeed, their personal interests were, like those of Osius and Leo, indissolubly connected with his own.

But if there was one man in the world whom Eutropius did respect, and in whose moral superiority he firmly believed, it was the Syrian presbyter who had now been ushered into his presence. He had heard the thunders of his impassioned rhetoric waking the echoes of the great dome of the church of Antioch. In that fulminant eloquence he had recognised the cry which comes from a true human heart. Never before had he heard the unmistakable accent of intense and fervent sincerity. It had pierced like lightning through the thick crust of revenge, bitterness, and Oriental craft, under which, like a dying spark, beneath vast accumulations of embers, lay the true nature of Eutropius as God had meant it to be. Yes, this was indeed rhetoric—the ornate, if too Asiatic, rhetoric of a pupil of Libanius; but under the rhetoric burned the flame of conviction and of truth. Eutropius had heard and turned pale; and at the moment, trembling and terrified at accents so unlike those which breathed softly through the borrowed platitudes of Nectarius and the silken euphuisms of the corrupt and intriguing priests of Constantinople, his conscience had started up with pointed finger and outstretched arm. At those ‘grave rebukes invincible,’ though they were not addressed to him, and though Chrysostom had been wholly unaware of the presence of the then obscure and miserable eunuch, Eutropius had stood abashed,

The impression had never been quite obliterated: he felt it now. But it gratified him to think that he had in consequence tried to do at least one purely good deed in his life, by elevating the preacher to an office which, in the hands of a great man, might practically be regarded as the highest in the world.

Chrysostom did not lose his self-possession, though he could not but be a little agitated to feel that now the well-kept secret, which any mind less absolutely unworldly than his would long ago have divined, must at last be revealed. He returned with dignity the low bows of Eutropius, of Osius, of Leo, and smiled faintly back to the smiles of his friends Aurelian and Amantius. But Eutropius, hardly knowing what excuse to offer for the way in which he had trepanned his visitor, stood there, still bowing, and a little uneasily, washing his hands in air.

‘I must,’ he said, with yet another bow, ‘apologise to your Beatitude——’

‘My Beatitude!’ exclaimed Chrysostom in amazement. ’Babai!’ (which we may render ‘Good Heavens!’) ‘I am but a humble Syrian presbyter of Antioch, and we are not addressed by such titles there.’

The officials, even Eutropius, could not help a little laugh at this; but the Chamberlain continued:

‘Pardon me, sir, you are no longer the humble presbyter of Flavian at Antioch; you are Archbishop of Constantinople and Patriarch of the East.’

Here, then, was the secret! It had, indeed, once flitted across the thoughts of Chrysostom in his journey, because the quick and curious Philip had suggested it to him as a possibility. But he had instantly rejected it as too wildly improbable to be even contemplated.

He stood there troubled and almost thunderstruck.

‘Oh, spare me!’ he cried at last, with one of those quick gestures of repudiation which come so spontaneously to an Oriental. ‘I do not wish for this honour. I do not love this burden. I foresee that it will only end in trouble and misery. You yourself will repent of it, and regret it. I have never been consulted. I was wiled away from my home against my will. Oh, Amantius! oh, Aurelian! you have been cruel friends.’

‘Nay,’ said Eutropius, ‘the Presbyter John must forgive us all. We doubted whether he would consent; and we knew that the Antiochenes love him too well to part with him readily. That was the sole object of our little ruse, and we trust that in all other respects your wishes and comforts have been attended to.’

‘Oh! all that is nothing,’ said Chrysostom, wringing his hands. ‘But I must refuse. I cannot, I cannot be Patriarch of Constantinople. I am not ambitious. I am no courtier. Better by far the damp cave on Mount Silpius, in which I so nearly died. Would it had been God’s will that I had died there rather than that this should befall me.’

Eutropius was a little taken aback. He had meant to confer an immense favour; he had been foolish enough to expect an effusive gratitude. Why, he knew no other bishop or priest in Constantinople who would not have kissed his feet in transport for so magnificent a boon. And now he was finding it necessary to apologise and to plead.

‘I bear you witness,’ he said, ‘you have not sought this responsibility; but we must not shun responsibility when it comes. His Eternity the Emperor——’

‘His Eternity!’ exclaimed Chrysostom, on whom, unaccustomed to the fulsomeness of Byzantine Courts, the title jarred like a blasphemy.

‘Oh!’ said Eutropius, ‘it is only a title;’ while Leo and Osius were so struck by this strange specimen of independence that it was with difficulty they refrained from laughing outright.

It is surely a most unbecoming title,’ said Chrysostom gravely. ‘I thought it had been laughed out of fashion by Athanasius, even in the days of the Emperor Constantius. What higher title could you give to Christ Himself? But to give it to a man! All flesh is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth. “His Eternity!”—oh! let me return to my humble home in Antioch. I cannot breathe this perfumed atmosphere.’

‘By Bacchus!’ whispered Leo, whose expletives were not very carefully chosen, ‘you have caught a Hun!’

Eutropius was fairly disconcerted. Here he was conferring on this man one of the most supreme of sacred distinctions, and, so far from thanking him for the favour, he had already rebuked him twice! But the very rebukes made him feel more keenly the royal independence and sincerity of the Presbyter. Almost for the first time in his life he was met by a Christian and a disinterested man!

‘Well, well, my dear Presbyter,’ he said, ‘we will waive these little forms of speech; but I was going to say that we must all obey the wishes of the Emperor. He is now expecting you in the Purple Chamber. Are you ready to see him?’

‘I am ready,’ murmured Chrysostom. ‘Would it had been otherwise. But God’s will be done!’

CHAPTER XVIII

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS

The great official personages rose in a body and preceded Chrysostom, by whose side walked Eutropius.

The Purple Chamber, into which they were ushered by a crowd of slaves, was so called partly from its pavement and walls inlaid with porphyry, and partly from its rich purple hangings embroidered with gold. The luxury of modern days would almost seem like childish simplicity before the lavish pomp of Byzantine splendour. The floor along the centre was sprinkled with gold dust, brought from distant lands in ships and chariots at enormous cost, that the sacred feet of the Emperor might not be desecrated by treading on anything less profoundly precious. The walls of alabaster and other lustrous marbles were inlaid with agate and cornelian, and the eastern sunlight glowed hotly on pillars of the Numidian marble, rose-coloured or golden. Chrysostom was almost blinded by the sudden blaze of splendour, to which he was wholly unaccustomed. Two lines of the palatine soldiers stood at intervals down the centre of the hall. They wore Sidonian war-cloaks so richly dight that there were pearls on their girdles and emeralds in their helmets.Claud., de Laud. Stil., ii. 88. Between and behind them were massed a number of courtiers in all the ranks of Byzantine officialism—perfectissimi, egregii, illustres, and spectabiles. Round the apse at the end stood a guard of tall and fully armed Gothic soldiers in their collars of gold, and nearest the Emperor stood the four Prætorian Præfects, conspicuous, like him, in the purple robe, or man-dye, which they, however, wore only to the knees.

In the centre, on a throne supported by four huge golden lions, lolled Arcadius on silken cushions fringed with pearls. His robe of purple was woven in gold with dragons, which were his imperial insignia. His person was a blaze of jewels. Huge rubies and emeralds were pendent from his ears. Necklaces of large orient pearls gleamed round his neck, and over his breast hung chains of precious stones chosen for their size and lustre. The passion for gems, which Constantine had fostered, had lingered among later emperors. Round the dark hair of Arcadius was the diadem, a band of purple silk woven with pearls and the choicest rubies and emeralds.

Arcadius was but a youth of nineteen, but it seemed as if all the fire of his blood, all the manliness and fervency of youthful life, had either never existed in his ill-shaped body, or had long ago been drained out of him by the hollow and dreary magnificence in which his days were passed. His intellect was of the feeblest; his character was flabby and invertebrate. Chrysostom took him in at a glance. He was a youth of short stature, of feeble health, of thin person, and of sallow complexion. His thick eyelids drooped over his eyes, and gave him the aspect of being always half-asleep; and, except in the very rare cases in which he was for a moment aroused out of his listlessness, his speech was apt to dribble out in low, lazy, and half-finished sentences. He was steeped to the lips in indolent and sensuous luxury, and though he was too languid to be actively vicious, this lord of the world was the born slave of everyone who had sufficient astuteness and opportunity to turn him into a helpless tool.

The look of Arcadius—who had been an emperor since he was eight years old, and who had been married at seventeen—betrayed nothing but infinite boredom. He had not even his younger brother’s resource of keeping pet hens. He scarcely had as much activity as used to make Louis XV. take a courtier by the buttonhole and say, ’Ennuyons-nous ensemble!’

Chrysostom could not help wondering how it happened that such a poor creature—and his equally poor brother, Honorius—could be sons of the able, stalwart, and handsome Theodosius; and why the destinies of the word should be committed to hands so unequal to the burden.

And, if there was ever a man to be pitied, it was this hapless potentate. There was no bliss in his youthfulness. He cared for no one, and believed in no one. He regarded even the Ministers who domineered over him with a dull jealousy and suspicion, and would soon have got rid of them if he could only have summoned up the energy to do without them. Eutropius only suited him because he saved all trouble, relieved him of the intolerable burdens of empire, transacted the minute details and functions of necessary business; and arranged for him the amusements which served to dissipate his deadly dulness and to

But meanwhile the wretched little human deity felt an inexorable weariness of everything:

And so he sat in his vast hall and in his ‘sacred’ chambers

The Chamberlain and officials advanced with genuflexions and prostrations, and with hands which shaded their eyes, as though they were blinded with the divine and sunlike radiance of the Emperor. Chrysostom bowed low, and then advanced in the simple dignity of his manhood. Eutropius took him by the hand and presented him to Arcadius.

‘This, sire,’ he said, ‘is John, the Presbyter of Antioch, whom your sacred Majesty has been pleased to appoint to the vacant Archbishopric.’

CHAPTER XIX

GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET

Sumptuous gluttonies and gorgeous feasts.—Milton.

The Patriarch had a few days of respite before his consecration would plunge him into the incessant, onerous, and intensely responsible duties of his new office. They were only broken by the banquet at the Palace.

‘What am I to wear among hundreds of bejewelled popinjays?’ he asked Philip in amazement. ‘I have no conception in what sort of costume Nectarius would have appeared. Fortunately, I shall henceforth imitate the great Nazianzen, and refuse all invitations.’

Philip was equal to the occasion.

‘You have,’ he said, ‘the white robe which Anthusa embroidered for you in gold with calliculæ and gammadias that you might wear it at Count Lucian’s. That will do splendidly.’

So he was conducted by some of the palace eunuchs to the banquet, looking more dignified by far in his simplicity than the glittering courtiers whom Arcadius and Eudoxia had invited.

What a scene it was, and how distasteful to the simple Presbyter!

He was led up stairs carpeted with crimson cloths of which the borders were stiff golden broideries, and between tall lamps in which fragrant flames were burning, and of which the pedestals were covered with wreaths and garlands. The tables were of thyine and other precious woods, and were laden with crystal and myrrhine vases which had once been carried in Roman triumphs, and were now crowned with the choicest Chian, Lesbian, and Thasian wines. Between them were large golden salvers heaped with the most delicious fruits, and there was no dainty of the earth, the air, or the sea which the thousand cooks of the Palace did not procure for the Emperor’s table. As for the richly dressed attendants, it seemed impossible to count the number of eunuchs and pages, of which the younger, specially chosen for their beauty, wore their hair in long, essenced curls. The whole spectacle was to Chrysostom inexpressibly distasteful. This materialism of luxury wearied and repelled him. The only thing which made it seem even excusable to his conscience was his reminiscence of Solomon feasting the Queen of Sheba in his halls of Lebanonian cedar, amid the dazzling display of gold and Tyrian purple, and slaves, and souls of men.

He was led to a seat at the sigma, or crescent-shaped table of rich mosaic rimmed with silver, which was pre-eminently the seat of honour. The Emperor sat at the centre, on a dais, in a chair of gold, with the Empress at his right. Next to her sat Theophilus of Alexandria. Chrysostom was placed at the left of Arcadius, and next to him sat Eutropius. The only others admitted to the royal sigma were the four Prætorian Præfects, who were highest of all in official rank.

Chrysostom barely touched either the dainties or the wines. Considerations of health, as well as his own tastes and wishes, made him habitually and to the highest degree abstemious; and, indeed, the chronic indigestion caused by the excess of his youthful austerities usually compelled him to take his meals alone. But all, or nearly all, of these assembled clarissimi and illustres were to be under his spiritual care, and he was interested in gazing round upon them.

Arcadius had the misfortune, for a ruler, of being intensely shy. He was overpowered with self-consciousness. After one or two half-attempts at commonplaces, uttered with blinking eyes, he gave up the fatiguing effort to converse. But the liveliness of Eutropius, who was in great good-humour, helped to while away the time. He pointed out to Chrysostom the three famous widows—Marsa, Castricia, and Epigraphia—in their upper robes of gauze, woven in gold with scenes from the Gospels, their necklaces, their earrings, their hands hidden with rings, and their shimmer of numberless jewels. Chrysostom gazed at them with a look of disapproval, but in his own mind contrasted them most unfavourably with three others of the noblest ladies present, who were conspicuous for the severe and almost nun-like simplicity of their adornment. One of these was Olympias, once the betrothed of the Emperor Constans; another was the Princess Salvina; the third was the good Nicarete, who was—what was rare in ancient days—an old maid, and who found her sole delight—so Eutropius bore her witness—in deeds of kindness to the poor.

Chrysostom looked longer at the male guests. He did not know Theophilus by sight, and asked the Chamberlain who that stately and richly clad ecclesiastic was.

‘That,’ said Eutropius, in a meaning tone, ‘is the Patriarch of Alexandria.’

‘Why does he scowl so heavily at me when he looks this way?’

‘Because of jealousy, defeated intrigue, envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.’

‘Impossible, surely!’ said Chrysostom. ‘I have never seen him before. How can I possibly have wronged him?’

‘I cannot tell you the whole story; but he wanted his presbyter, Isidore, elected instead of you. The man has a sinister and evil eye. May Christ protect you from it!’

‘Amen,’ muttered Chrysostom. ‘I will speak to him after the banquet in all friendliness. But will the Emperor like us to talk in this way, and neglect him?’

‘Oh!’ said Eutropius, laughing, ‘His Eter—— I beg your pardon, his Sublimity, is more than half-asleep already, and will be fast asleep soon. He will not notice.’

‘Well, then,’ said Chysostom, ‘tell me the names of those two Gothic warriors sitting near the top of the tables below us.’

‘The elder is Fravitta,’ said Eutropius. ‘Though he is a Pagan, as his fathers were, he is most friendly to the Empire, and can be absolutely trusted. Have you never heard how he saved the life of the Emperor Theodosius?’

‘No.’

‘When you have been here a little longer, and begin to understand the intricate wheelwork of our intrigues, you will learn that there are two factions of Goths. One is thoroughly loyal to the Empire. It is scanty in number, and would be almost impotent if it were not headed by that noble Fravitta, a man who rises above the faithlessness of many of his fellows. One day Theodosius, who was always kind to the Goths, invited some of them to a banquet, unaware that Eriulph, the head of the hostile Gothic faction, was plotting to overthrow the Empire. When Fravitta and Eriulph grew warm with wine they fiercely quarrelled, and Theodosius had to break up the banquet. Fravitta, fearing that Eriulph directly he left the palace would stir up a civil war, impetuously drew his sword, and, taunting him with treachery, stabbed him to the heart. A fierce tumult arose, and Fravitta would have been torn to pieces by Eriulph’s followers if he had not been saved by the Imperial Guards. It is more than lucky for us that the Goths are not at one.’

‘Do you foment their disagreements?’

‘On that subject,’ said Eutropius, smiling, ‘as Æschylus says, “A great ox hath passed upon my tongue.”’

‘This man,’ he thought to himself, ‘has no idea of diplomatic secrets. He divines everything by sheer force of honesty.’

The Chamberlain was quite right, for Chrysostom replied:

‘I see you have not forgotten the old Roman secret of “Divide and rule.” But who is the other Goth?’

‘An entirely different kind of person. He is an Arian; and all the Goths are so devoted to the memory of their missionary, Wulfila, that I doubt their ever being converted to orthodoxy. You must have heard his name often, for he has played a great part in recent events. It was he who brought down God’s vengeance on the guilty head of Rufinus. It is Gaïnas.’

Chrysostom did not like the bitter tone in which the words were spoken; but as he was silent Eutropius continued:

‘Do you not mark his discontented look? He is a conspirator, and will, I fear, create trouble from his influence over the army. Near him is his countryman, the barbarous Tribigild, and, if I am not much mistaken, they are at this moment hatching perilous plots.’

‘I see a group of bishops seated at yonder table.’

‘Yes, they are assembled under the presidency of Theophilus to settle some small ecclesiastical matter. Some of them have been here for weeks. Constantinople is constantly full of bishops. One cannot walk down the Chalkoprateia without stumbling across them. I see them very frequently at my humble abode,’ he added—his eyes and features all a-twinkle, as they always were when some mischievous fancy reminded him of men’s weaknesses.

‘I wish they would remain in their own dioceses,’ thought Chrysostom, with a sigh; but he only said; ‘It would be kind if you would tell me the names of one or two of them, that I may address them afterwards.’

‘Well, if I may lay aside formality in talking to your Beati—— Oh! I beg your pardon. Well, in talking about bishops, I will describe the one or two of them whom I know best. You see that ponderous—I had almost said elephantine—specimen of humanity? That is Maruthas, Bishop of Mesopotamia. The little, slim, highly venomous-looking personage——’

Chrysostom looked reproof, and Eutropius, more and more convinced that his Patriarch was quite a new phenomenon at Constantinople, said:

‘Oh ! I mean nothing; but for freedom’s sake let me talk in my own way. After all, my dear Archbishop, I am simply telling you the bald truth about the man, and setting down nought in malice. You will be able, later on, to judge for yourself. Well, the small man is Cyrinus, Bishop of Chalcedon. That portly, handsome, florid ecclesiastic, who looks as if one of our thousand palace-barbers had arranged his curls as well as those of the pages, is Severian, Bishop of Gabala, who would be exceedingly glad—if he could—to be bishop of something else. I could tell you a good deal about him, but I do not wish to shock your charity. Lastly, not to weary you, the old gentleman who is so heartily enjoying his dinner is Acacius, Bishop of Berœa.’

‘I wish, Chamberlain, you would speak more respectfully of the bishops.’

CHAPTER XX

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

And yet bubbles o’er like a city with gossip, scandal, and spite. Tennyson.

On February 26, 398, the humble Presbyter of Antioch attained the dignity for which so many had longed, intrigued, and bribed, and which myriads of ecclesiastics would have regarded as uplifting them into the seventh heaven of gratified ambition and satisfied desires.

The imposing ceremony took place in the cathedral of Constantinople, the great Church of St. Sophia. Its magnificence illustrated the altered fortunes of Christianity since Constantine had first placed the jewelled cross on the purple silk of his labarum. Its great doors were of shining bronze enriched with bas-reliefs; the windows were formed of thin slices of alabaster and other transparent marbles. The pillars and their capitals, carved with foliage, were all of porphyry or of Numidian giallo-antico. The floors were of lustrous and many-coloured marbles, with which also the walls were tessellated; the domes and architraves were inlaid with mosaic on a gold ground, and picked out with polychromes of blue and vermilion.The Church of St. Sophia is described by Paul the Silentiary and others. The descriptions apply to the Church of Justinian, but are generally true of the other church also. The Holy Table, which even then had begun by a false analogy to receive the unscriptural and unprimitive designation of ‘altar,’ stood in front of the apse, not against the wall, but in the middle of the chancel space. It was of gold decorated with precious stones, and between the columns which supported it hung curtains of silk, embroidered in gold with figures of our Lord, St. John the Baptist, and St. Paul. The iconostasis was of silver, with a frieze of medallions representing Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Apostles. In the apse was the Throne of the Patriarch and the synthronus, or stalls of the presbyters, which were canopied and were of silver-gilt. The choir extended nearly as far as the ambo, or reader’s pulpit, which was of precious marbles with mosaics of lambs, doves, fishes, and peacocks, inlaid with gems. It was ascended by two flights of steps, one on the west side, one on the east, and the canopy above it rested on eight columns. The space below it, enclosed by railings, was occupied by the choir and the readers. The soleas, or division which marked off the seats of the clergy, was made of onyx. The tapestries which usually shrouded the sanctuary were drawn back for the service. The seats for the Emperor and Empress were on the south side; and not only were they present, but they came in their utmost pomp, attended with crowds of perfectissimi and illustres arrayed in their most brilliant robes.

Chrysostom was consecrated Archbishop by the darkly scowling Theophilus, and was the reverse of happy. The rasping voice of the wicked and black-browed Patriarch of Alexandria was hoarse with antagonism. It almost made him shudder, by the same subtle instinct which makes the nobler animals tremble at the hiss of the serpent. He felt the man’s magnetic hatred, jealousy, and burning spirit of revenge in his very touch. But, besides this, he could not but mourn that God had called him to a work which he felt would be painful and stormy. He sighed for the love which had surrounded him in Antioch, and even more for the peaceful days of his monastery and mountain-cave. What were these rich carpets and gleaming floors to the grass that groweth on the mountains, and the lilies in the valleys of Mount Amanus? What were these crimson and gold-embroidered tapestries to the shadows of the blossoming trees on the banks of his loved Orontes? How could he ever acquire over this luxurious, turbulent, money-loving, pleasure-hunting, worldly throng of curious strangers, of whom so many were already inclined to hate him, the gentle influence which he had wielded over his former flock?

With a heavy heart and a mind over which flitted many a sombre cloud of misgiving he uttered his enthronisation discourse. In it he touched on the various spheres of duty which he regarded as belonging to his place as Archbishop of this metropolitan see. As yet, of course, he could only speak generally. ‘There are still Pagans,’ he said, ‘in Constantinople: I will try to win them by setting a Christian example, and endeavouring to promote the true ideal of the Christian life. There are many Arians and other heretics: I will use no other weapon against them than the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. I will be a bishop, not a gladiator. I hate as unchristian the bitter spirit of unfairness in theological controversy. I repudiate as execrable the use of violence in ecclesiastical propaganda. Rather than exacerbate differences, I will willingly incur the ignorant calumny aimed at the great Basil of Cæsarea, that his teaching was like a river avoiding rocks to hide itself in sands. Theological battles and ecclesiastical cabals are an incomparably poorer proof of orthodoxy than simple faithfulness. “The bees,” said Basil, “fly in swarms, and do not begrudge each other the flowers. It is not so with us. We are not at unity. More eager about his own wrath than his own salvation, each aims his sting against his neighbour.” And, because of this, Basil was called a heretic! But his only answer was: “I have determined to neglect no labour, to shun no humble word or deed, to excuse myself going no journey, to decline no burden, if I may obtain the reward of the peacemaker.”’ ’As for myself,’ said Chrysostom, ‘I will, God helping me, boldly rebuke vice; I will make no agreements with death, no covenant with hell. In marshalling the hosts of righteousness to the Armageddon battle against sin, the trumpet in my hands shall give no uncertain sound. To wickedness and vice I must, by the very call of God, be an uncompromising enemy; but to the offenders themselves I would ever act in the spirit of compassion, and, as far as in me lies, will live peaceably with all men. But, beloved, man is nothing. God is all-in-all. Oh! help me by your sympathy! Oh! support me by your prayers!’

The sermon was not one of Chrysostom’s greatest. There was but little of the cadenced rhetoric, little of the Asiatic luxuriance, nothing of the volcanic passion. Yet there was enough to show to the good that he was a good man, that he would not be one of those who mistake pride for dignity, or require people to speak to him out of the dust. But most of the fashionables in the audience were disappointed by what they regarded as the tameness of the discourse, and they said so to one another with little circumlocution.

It is a merciful provision that preachers do not hear the remarks and criticisms of their dispersing congregations. At every door such remarks hover in the air, like flocks of ravens, to peck away any good seed which may chance to lie on the trodden road of men’s hearts.

But Philip, who was not known by sight, did hear many of the remarks that were made, as he stood by the great bronze door, waiting for Chrysostom to come out, that he might conduct him home.

A group of ladies passed by. ‘How very poor! How very tame! No dazzling metaphor; no flights of rhetoric!’

‘Ah!’ thought Philip, ‘it won’t be long before you, my fine ladies, will have eloquence enough for you. I hope it won’t singe your gay feathers too severely.’

‘I thought the fellow could speak,’ said an exquisite, who had intrigued and bribed in vain for Isaac the Monk. ’Why, he was as heavy as lead and as dull as ditch-water!’

A group of bishops passed by, escorting Theophilus of Alexandria. They were talking in tones which showed that they did not in the least object to be heard.

‘I feel sure he is secretly unsound,’ said Cyrinus of Chalcedon, venomously. ‘Look how leniently he spoke of heretics.’

‘Yes,’ said Severian of Gabala, ‘he will be like Theramenes, whom the Greeks called ”Cothurnus,” because that buskin fits on either foot; or rather, as the proverb says, “more slippery than a slipper.”’

‘A regular trimmer, I fear,’ murmured Antiochus of Ptolemais;—and an alarmed titter, instantly suppressed, ran through the group, for everyone knew that ’Amphallax,’ or ’Trimmer,’ was a recognised nickname of Theophilus, and the black look which the Alexandrian turned on the speaker seemed as though he took an accidental slip for an intentional insult.

CHAPTER XXI

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES

Insomnes longo veniunt examine Curæ.

Chrysostom’s first care after his enthronisation was to arrange his household, and then to master the manifold duties—diocesan, social, and patriarchal—of his high station.

His faithful servants had come from Antioch, and had brought with them the simple furniture of his paternal home. Old Phlegon was installed as porter at the Patriarcheion; and when he was vexed with the throngs of visitors and the incessant summonses which brought him out of his porter’s cell, he sighed for Singon Street as much as his master. Social duties lay on Chrysostom with a heavier weight than the work of his archiepiscopate. Nectarius had given frequent and superb entertainments, not only to the bishops who visited Constantinople from every quarter of the world and to the leading clergy, but also to the prætorian præfects, the great senators, and all the high Court officials. The Emperor himself had sometimes been his guest. It would have been profoundly distasteful to Chrysostom to undertake anything of the kind. Valuing all the intercourse of private life which might be used for high and noble ends, he shrank from the pleasures and unprofitable frivolities of society as from a dreary and barren Sahara. He was impatient of ‘the quotidian ague of frigid impertinences.’ This was soon discovered by the worldly, the dissipated, and the idle, the illustrious dandies, and the fine ladies. The very aspect of the Archbishop’s Palace became so severely simple that it kept them off.

CHAPTER XXII

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES

Truth is cruel.—Père Hyacinthe.

Every day brought upon Chrysostom the burden of new and incessant duties. The care of Constantinople and its diocese would have been enough to exhaust the energies of any man; but the affairs of many other dioceses, over which custom gave him a patriarchal jurisdiction, came before him; and besides his schemes of reformation and beneficence at home, he felt an intense eagerness to further the cause of the Gospel by missions among the Persians, the Phœnicians, and other nations. Meanwhile he was getting an insight into the general corruption and worldliness into which the Church had fallen, and was preparing to put in force every possible remedy. He saw on all sides of him a Christianity which was a Christianity in name alone; a Christianity passionately eager about theological shibboleths; a Christianity which plunged into all the vices and follies of the world, while it busied itself with all the functions and formulæ of the Church; a Christianity which relied for salvation on orthodoxies and amulets, while it neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and truth. What shocked him most was to find these false forms of a Christianity which had become hollow and nominal chiefly rife among the clergy. Their condition illustrated ’the eternal Pharisaism of the human heart.’ They said, and did not. No word was more common on their lips than the word ‘scandal.’ Every petty divergence from their own conventionality, every recognition that the river of the grace of God might be deeper and broader than their straight-dug ditches, every cordial sign of union with brethren whose opinions or organisation differed slightly from their own, was always a ‘scandal’. But the scandal of their own pettiness, narrowness, subterranean meanness, and total want of charity, was to them a source not of penitence, but of pride. The rottenness of dying superstitions and a feeble pretence at perverted intellectualism had half strangled Christianity with ever-new watchwords and ever-new creeds. Eyes blinded by immoral partisanship were incapable of recognising pure goodness. The thin dust on the balances of orthodoxy, and small ecclesiastical scrupulosities, had become more to them than the solid gold of righteousness and love. Strong in their opiniated self-satisfaction, they often yielded without a struggle to the coarsest temptations. Their hypocrisy became so ingenious that it even deceived themselves, and they voided the most envenomed virulence on those who repudiated their pretensions and loathed their habitual manœuvres.

All this had been seen and had been bewailed already by some of the greatest and holiest of the saints of God. Chrysostom had read the views of St. Hilary, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Basil, St. Jerome, St. Isidore of Pelusium, and St. Nilus, the many letters to lapsed virgins and fallen monks, and the many stories of much-admired clerical adventurers; but he was slow to admit the reality of the sad condition of things which more and more was forcing itself upon his conviction. He would not act on impulse or in a hurry; he would wait, and watch, and pray, and discriminate, and use his private influence to the uttermost before he gave vent to any public utterance or struck any open blow.

It was the Emperor’s custom to leave Constantinople in the summer, and retire to the voluptuous privacy of Ancyra. The plan had been devised by Eutropius, whose one object was so completely to absorb Arcadius in luxurious self-indulgence that he might leave all serious business in the hands of his Chamberlain. At Constantinople he kept him engaged day after day in the Hippodrome and the Circus, where he might see the runners, and the chariot-races, and the wrestlers, and the fighters, and excite himself, as far as his languor permitted, with the factions of the Blue and Green. Lolling and sleeping on soft silken cushions in the Kathisma, or Emperor’s box, Arcadius could occasionally diversify his satiated boredom by looking on while funambulists walked upwards and downwards on tight ropes, or gymnasts, to the stupefaction of the mob, balanced a pole on their foreheads, on the top of which a little boy would go through all sorts of antics. Sometimes a thrill of delicious sensation would pass through the audience when the funambulist missed his footing and was dashed dead on the orchestra, or the boy tumbled from his balanced pole and broke a leg. If such an accident tended to cause too much emotion, the jesters called moriones, or cordaces, were at hand, who acted the part of clowns, and soon set the audience in a roar of laughter.

But lest monotony should jade the Imperial mind, especially during the burning heats of summer, Eutropius had provided the palace at Ancyra. The day of the journey was announced, and then the Chamberlain gratified the mob of the city with a gorgeous spectacle. On that occasion the Emperor always wore a crown of gold set with the most precious gems. His robes were of purple silk woven with golden dragons. He wore the most splendid of his earrings, and strings of orient pearls hung one below another over his breast. The attendant guards were decked with golden chains and armlets, and the heads of their lances were gilded, with silken streamers of purple pendent from them. The Palatini also carried dazzling shields with bosses of gold, round which were painted golden eyes. The chariot of the Emperor was a blaze of gold, and was covered with thin laminæ of flexile gold, which moved and glittered as it advanced. The white mules which drew it were shod with gold, their housings were blazoned with golden broidery, and the reins glittered with gems. Crowds of bedizened courtiers, and hundreds of attendant pages, and eunuchs of every age and of every race, walked in sumptuous procession before and behind, through streets thronged with thousands of sightseers, many of whom had been patiently waiting since the morning to see the palace gates flung open and the pomp issue forth. Yet, as one penetrates into the depths of a pyramid, to find at last only the ashes of a monkey or a cat, so the centre of universal interest was with the occupants of the chariot, and they were only a sallow, sleepy youth and a wrinkled, kotowing eunuch. Nevertheless

The procession wended its way to the harbour, where lay crowds of gilded barges to convey the Emperor and his Court to the other side of the Bosporus, whence they went by land to the soft climate of Phrygia. At Ancyra Eutropius amused and enervated the Emperor with banquets, and spectacles of dancing-girls, and with every costly diversion which the ingenious luxury of idleness could devise.

Philip and his young friends had watched the Emperor’s departure with the curiosity and not ungenial cynicism of youth. As for Philip, he was an observer of human nature, and never missed the chance of seeing anything. Full of fun, he accused David of envying all the glory.

‘Why should I envy the bloom on the wings of butterflies?’ said David.

‘Oh yes, you are a philosopher, David. But you,’ he said to Eutyches, ’I confess that, in spite of your protesting look, you would give your eyes to be one of those processional gentlemen, and strut in gold amidst the cheers of the mob. I feel sure that you are saying to yourself, “Oh that I could be Eutropius for but one hour!”’

Eutyches turned to him his laughing face. ’You know better,’ he said. ‘I greatly prefer to be a clerk at the Patriarch’s. As for Eutropius, if I had an enemy, and if I wanted to curse him——’

‘Two impossible suppositions for you, Eutyches,’ said David.

‘Well, if I had, and if I could, I should say, change lots with Eutropius!’

‘Curses wait round him open-eyed,’ said Philip, ‘but you would like to be Aurelian, now?’

‘What, with Typhos, that wicked brother of his, dogging his heels and secretly trying to devour him?’

‘All very fine, Eutyches; but you know you asked the Patriarch to come and see the show.’

‘And do you know what he called it?’

CHAPTER XXIII

FACE TO FACE WITH SHAMS

The errors of Chrysostom were errors of judgment only. He might have been equally inflexible without producing so deadly an exacerbation. Ambrose had been no less masterful than he, and no less fearless; but the training of Ambrose in civil offices had taught him the art of dealing with men. Even in his most bold proceedings he displayed a certain tact. We are apt to despise tact as a petty accomplishment; but just as a trivial oversight may ruin the smooth working of complicated machinery, so trivial faults of tone and manner, or a little lack of conciliatoriness, which is something wholly different from unfaithful concession, may throw out of gear the movement of great societies.

Certainly there had been little in the past experience of Chrysostom to bring this quality prominently forward. He had as little of it as Savonarola, whom he resembled more closely than any other historic parallel.

His long years of ascetic, monastic, and eremitic solitude, while they revealed to him many abysses of the deceitful human heart, and burned into his conviction the indefeasible supremacy of the moral law, had but little fitted him to bear the infirmities of the weak. He was out of touch with his surroundings.

Men are sometimes called upon to cleanse Augean stables without the Herculean strength by which alone the task can be accomplished. Men of unflinching honesty and flaming zeal are sometimes placed in the midst of societies hopelessly corrupt, and their heroic efforts only seem to precipitate their own destruction. Such a man was Gregory of Nazianzus, and Chrysostom, and Hus, and Luther, and Whitefield. Such men are forced, as it were, to dash themselves against barriers of adamant.

And his experiences in the mountain-cave had done Chrysostom another disservice. By hopelessly ruining his health they had caused also a sort of irritability—not so much of feeling as of tone and manner—which was more a physical accident than a moral defect, but which made what he said seem less easy to bear than otherwise it might have been. To this we must add the fact that his inexhaustible vocabulary and impassioned style made his words smite their hearers like a storm of hail. He was himself unaware of the effect produced by his own utterances. It was often more tremendous than he had intended. Even a platitude, wrapped round in the lightning of his fervent rhetoric, sounded like a paradox and a defiance. Sometimes, when he had preached a sermon in which he only seemed to himself to have enunciated the most obvious moral certainties, he found to his astonishment that he had thrown all Constantinople into a ferment of agitation. If, for instance, oppressed by social problems and the glaring contrast between plethoric wealth and starving populations, he simply enunciated the plainest truths inculcated by Christianity and the Apostles, he found himself on the one hand besieged by applications from gross impostors who cursed him as a hypocrite if he refused their claims, while at the same time the upper classes were denouncing him as a dangerous Socialist and a reckless demagogue.

‘How is it, my son,’ he once said to Philip, ‘that over and over again I only utter truths which hundreds have said before me, yet when I say them they seem to rouse men to fury, and when others say the very same thing they are set down as commonplaces?’

‘There are ways of saying things, father,’ said Philip, smiling; ‘the gnats buzz, and the thunder roars, and the ultimate elements of sound are much the same, but they produce different effects.’

CHAPTER XXIV

THE CONSULSHIP OF EUTROPIUS

’I have a piece of news for you,’ said Eutyches to his two young friends; ‘quite a first-rate piece of news. And I crow over Philip, who always fancies that he has the monopoly of news.’

‘Out with it,’ said Philip, ‘before you burst!’

‘Who do you think is to be the Consul for next year?’

‘Who? I don’t believe you know; it is mere gossip.’

‘But I do; and the news is certain.’

‘Well, who?’ said Philip.

‘No, no!’ said Eutyches, ‘I am not going to gratify your burning curiosity so cheaply.’

‘I’ll guess it in three guesses.’

‘No you won’t. I’ll give you fellows ten guesses between you. If Philip guesses right I’ll give him a picture of the Archbishop in gold on a blue ground, to stick up on his bedroom-wall; if David guesses right I’ll give him an earthenware vase full of roses from the flower-market; and if neither of you guess in ten guesses, what will you give me?’

‘Sly fellow!’ said Philip. ‘It’s a sort of bet. But if we don’t guess, I’ll go to the brass-market and get you a little bronze——’

‘Who’s the sly fellow now?’ said Eutyches. ’One word for me, and ever so many for yourself. We all know why Philip buys all his presents at the brass-market. We all know why the Archbishop’s bills at a certain shop are so extravagant——’

CHAPTER XXV

THE GOTHS

Rem Romanam alius circumsteterat metus totius Gothiæ.

As Chrysostom began to understand the general condition of society and politics at Constantinople he found that there were three predominant and fiercely antagonistic parties. He was more or less concerned with the affairs of them all. In each of the three parties he had some friends; with each he had some points of sympathy. The result was that every trouble and agitation in Constantinople became more or less a trouble or agitation for him, and he had to suffer from

First, there was the old Conservative Roman party, at the head of which stood his friend Aurelian, who, in spite of the desperate intrigues of his wicked brother, only known to history by the nickname of Typhos, was now in the high position of Prætorian Præfect. The literary exponent of this party was his friend Synesius. Although Constantinople was regarded as the capital of the East, it was called New Rome, and all of the old stock disdained to regard themselves in any other light than that of genuine Romans. They therefore looked with horror on the constant increase of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, and Vandals, who now not only crowded the ranks of the Roman army, but constituted at least half of its numerical strength. They saw a fatal menace for the future in the fact that the three commanders-in-chief of the Roman forces—Stilico, Alaric, and Gaïnas—the three generals who were thought to monopolise the military genius of the day, were all barbarians. The object of the great oration of Synesius before Arcadius had been to arouse him to a sense of the immediate dangers and of the certain peril to the ultimate fortunes of the Empire involved in this state of things.

Opposed to this Roman party was the Gothic party, headed at Constantinople by Gaïnas, formidable in arms, in numbers, in physical strength, in native manhood, and in military experience.The name Gaïnas is an abbreviation of Gaisananths, ‘spear-bold.’ Zosimus writes it Γαΐνης, Socrates Γαινᾶς. Even if they could have found none but barbarians to help their cause, it would have been difficult to resist them; but they were aided by the incessant intrigues of Romans like Typhos, who cared for nothing but their own pelf and advancement; and also by the intricate feminine intrigues of evil-living ladies like the wife of Typhos. If Gaïnas had even been such a man as Stilico, or, still more, such a man as Fravitta, who, though he still continued to be a Pagan, had married a Roman wife, and felt himself bound by laws of honour and loyalty, the Ostrogoths, who were the nominal defenders of Constantinople, would have constituted a less threatening factor in the problems of the day. But Gaïnas was a man of fierce, restless, unstable character. He was actuated by the passions of ambition and revenge which were common to him with most of his countrymen. He was discontented. He had helped Theodosius both against the usurper Maximus and the usurper Eugenius, and deemed himself inadequately rewarded, though he had received honours and donatives of which his fathers had never dreamed. Unhappily, too, the party of Gaïnas was not only the Gothic party, but the Arian party. The Arians, as we have seen, were still numerous. In the days of Nectarius they had even risen and burnt down the Patriarcheion. Fanatically devoted to their heresy, they were willing to make common cause with the Gothic chieftain, who fancied that even the diadem itself might not be beyond his reach. Arbogast, indeed, had thought that a barbarian could not venture to assume the purple, but things had advanced since the days of Arbogast. Arians had been emperors, and Goths had made emperors; why could not a Goth and an Arian elevate the glory of Wulfila even to the throne of Constantine?

The third party was that of Eutropius: the party of civil officialism and palace favourites, the party of eunuchs and wirepullers. It derived its sole strength from the subservient ineptitude of the reigning emperor, but wielded an immense prestige from the fact that it could invariably command the influence of the Throne.

Typhos, indignant at his brother’s elevation to the Præfecture, on which he had set his heart, began to intrigue secretly with Gaïnas, and the unscrupulous wife of Typhos with the wife of Gaïnas. The Goth, full of cunning and suspicion, was willing to utilise them both, but he was much too cautious to betray to them his own private plans.

Those plans were now nearly ripe for action. A kinsman of the Goth—Tribigild, a military tribune and chieftain of the Gruthongs—had come to Constantinople partly to compliment Eutropius on his elevation to the Consulship, but in reality to plead for higher office for himself and larger subsidies for his warlike nation.

Eutropius simply dallied with and fooled the Gruthongian chieftain. He despised his tribe as a distant section of the Ostrogoths too numerically feeble to be formidable. After manifold delays he snubbed Tribigild altogether, and sent him back without added pay, without presents, without even the cheap reward of empty titles. It was a fatal impolicy, due too the vertigo of his unwonted exaltation. No doubt such requests as those of Tribigild were an incessant worry to the Court; but Eutropius might have had sufficient foresight to see that a relation of Gaïnas, and a chief of high pretensions, could not be duped and insulted with impunity.

What passed between Gaïnas and Tribigild is not known, but there seems to be little doubt that they concocted between them a disastrous conspiracy.

Angry and dejected, his Scythian breast, as Claudian calls it, inflamed with want, his pride humiliated, his hand empty of gifts, the Gruthongian chieftain made his way home. His wife saw him approaching from a distance, and flew to meet him. She was one of those strong, and lofty-statured Teutonic women, by whose side the enervated Roman ladies looked so puny and slight-natured. She was clad in robes of fine linen, fastened at the breast with a jewelled brooch, and her long, fair tresses were confined by a band clasped with golden serpents. Joyously meeting him, and flinging her white arms round his neck, she asked what titles he had won, what presents he had brought for himself and her, what largesses for his tribe. Doubtless he had some necklace of orient pearls or emeralds for her, and some shield with its golden boss set round with gems to hang upon the wall of his banquet-chamber, and testify the admiration of Arcadius for a loyal chief?

‘Ask me not!’ he answered with sullen anger; ‘I bring nothing. My requests have all been refused. No larger subsidies are conceded. They have not given me the title of Count. I have been insulted—and by a eunuch.’

Then, in all the old passion of a barbarian woman, his wife tore her cheeks with her nails and poured out her fierce taunts.

‘Back, then, to your plough,’ she said, ‘husbandman, unfit to be a warrior! Fling away the sword, and take to the harrow. Let your Gruthongs sink to the level of an earth-grubbing peasantry. Oh! why did fortune link me with a poltroon? There are other Gothic women whose husbands have not been content to sweat over spades, whose homes are adorned with the spoils of cities that their husbands have laid waste, who are waited on by fair Argive and Laconian maidens. But the chief of their clan was an Alaric, and not a Tribigild.’

‘My tribe is small,’ said Tribigild, ‘my warriors are few.’

‘Tush!’ she said; ‘war will give you allies, war will crowd your ranks. Fling off the half-Roman; be a true Goth once more. They have spurned your fidelity; let them dread your injuries.’

No Goth could resist such appeals. Tribigild roused his tribe, and flew to arms. Multitudes of slaves and barbarians joined him. The rich plains of Phrygia lay before him, and its cities were only defended by walls which had long crumbled into decay. He devastated the whole country with fire and flame, and the terrified people appealed to Constantinople for protection from massacre and ruin.

At first Eutropius affected to make light of the catastrophe which his levity had precipitated. ’It is but an incursion of brigands,’ he said to the frightened Emperor. ‘They want chains, not troops. I will send a Prætor, not a Tribune, to punish them.’ It was, as Claudian says, the policy of the ostrich, which hides its head in the sand, and thinks that its enemy will not see it. Secretly, however, he sent to negotiate with Tribigild. Experience had given him an immense belief in the omnipotence of bribes. In this instance they were vain. The Gruthong had already enriched himself with abundant spoil. He disdained to accept donatives wrung from fear. He affected to despise the honours which came from an eunuch. ‘What, then, do you want?’ said the emissaries.

‘I want neither a courtship, nor presents, nor a donative,’ he answered.

‘Will nothing content you?’

‘Yes! I want revenge. Send me the head of the eunuch and I grant you peace.’

Gaïnas made matters much worse by doing his utmost to increase the general consternation. ‘My cousin Tribigild,’ he said, ‘is a first-rate general, and those Gruthongs are splendid fighters.’

Eutropius was in despair. At last he summoned such advisers as he could trust. But he had few on whom to rely except dandy youths and loose old men, whose chief glory it was to discover new refinements of luxury for their banquets, and to have peacocks and green parrots among the entremets. The chief subject of their chatter was the description of dresses and the discussion of the rival merits of athletes. Their very rings and their silk dresses were a burden to their decrepit enervation, and their chief aim was to look effeminate and have a good supply of lewd witticisms, while they talked of the wrigglings of acrobats and the dancing of actresses. But now Eutropius told them that affairs were serious. What was he to do?

They agreed that it would be unwise to send Gaïnas to suppress the rebellion. He was a Goth, and could not be trusted to put down Goths. His allegiance was more than suspected, and Tribigild was his cousin. No; there was nothing for it but to appoint Leo general.

Even in that conclave of his creatures the suggestion of Eutropius was received with an ill-suppressed titter, in which his prime favourite, the Spanish ex-cook, Osius, joined. For Leo was a common joke. He was so fat that he could neither walk without waddling nor speak without panting. What soldiers, whether Gothic or Roman, could respect or would obey such a general? Yet he valiantly exclaimed that he would drag this upstart Tribigild and these Gruthongian deserters behind his chariot to Constantinople.

So, while owls screeched their evil omens, he was sent forth to meet his doom, and to feed the Molossian vultures with the carcases of his soldiers. Never was there such a dissipated and ill-disciplined host. No one knew how to choose encampments. No scouts brought news of the enemy; no guides led them by the shortest routes; no sentries watched the vallum at night. Like a disorderly procession, the motley host marched towards the valleys and mountain-passes of the Taurus.

Tribigild, by a pretence of alarm, lulled the Roman army into fatal demoralisation. Leo, with senseless ignorance, had chosen his camp at a spot where a vast marsh at his rear cut off all hope of retreat. His insubordinate army spent the night in revelry and drunkenness. At darkest midnight Tribigild and his Goths burst over the unguarded rampart, and massacred at their will the drowsy and drunken soldiers. There was no battle—only a slaughter and a rout. Leo mounted his horse, and fled headlong towards the marsh, in which thousands of his miserable soldiers were already floundering. The horse, covered with streaming sweat under the precipitate career and enormous corpulence of its rider, stumbled in the marsh, and flung Leo over its head. The wretched general tried in vain to crawl out on his belly through the mud and slush. Sunk down by his own weight, he died, partly of terror, and partly of suffocation. Tribigild could leave the wasted regions of Phrygia behind him, and burn and pillage at his will the rich plains of Pamphylia and Pisidia.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FALL OF EUTROPIUS

The mixture of dread, irritation, and intoxicated vanity which had come upon Eutropius as Patrician and Consul had clouded the usual keenness of his intellect and overthrown his shrewd judgment. He might have seen at some moments that, as a breath had made, so a breath could unmake him, and that the most ordinary common-sense dictated the advisability of his keeping on the best terms with the Imperial family. But of late Eudoxia had adopted towards him a tone almost of command, which he did not like. One day she spoke to him about the ravages of Tribigild, the insolence and probable treachery of Gaïnas, the certainty of a Persian war, and this intolerable menace of Stilico’s intervention. She gave him to understand that she did not think he had managed well, and blamed him for sending against the Gruthongs such a man as Leo, when he might have sent a man of proved valour like Aurelian, or a man of capacity like Count John.

‘Leave me to arrange these matters with the Emperor,’ he said curtly. ‘As for Aurelian, his appointment would have irritated Gaïnas; as for Count John—’ he shrugged his shoulders, and looked at Eudoxia.

A blush mounted her cheeks, dyed them with crimson, and rose to the roots of her fair hair; but she disdained to notice what she regarded as an insolent innuendo.

‘At any rate,’ she said, ‘you need not have sent a mere fat, incompetent glutton like Leo.’

‘Leo was my friend, madam,’ he said. ‘You are no judge of his military aptness.’

CHAPTER XXVII

IN SANCTUARY

Philip had been by accident in the Church of St. Sophia when Eutropius rushed into it down the private passage from the Palace which led into the Emperor’s gallery, and down the staircase from the gallery into the nave. Lost in astonishment, Philip saw the unhappy man speed in wild affright up the porphyry steps of the sanctuary and disappear behind the drawn curtain. Usually the new Patrician and Consul was never seen in public except when he paced to the Theatre or Circus between his lictors, or in the centre of a throng of soldiers, slaves, and sycophants, while everywhere the claque of paid adherents received hire with acclamations, as if he were a hero or a god. What could possibly be the meaning of the unwonted spectacle of the most powerful of living men, pale, terrified, dishevelled, ungreeted and ungreeting, unattended even by a single slave, running at full speed, though with his knees trembling under him, and often stumbling on the road? Something portentous must have happened, and without even guessing what it was, the youth’s shrewd and practical intellect instantly took in the importance of the occurrence. Whatever else it meant, it could only mean that Eutropius was taking sanctuary—was flying to the protection of that right of asylum of which he had endeavoured to rob the Church of Christ.

But great men do not fall, any more than great trees fall crashing over the forest which they overshadow, without serious commotion; and Philip was far from sure that Eutropius would not become the victim of his own law, which had excepted the crime of læsa majestas from the right of ecclesiastical protection. He foresaw that in half an hour’s time, or less, when the news of the favourite’s ruin had spread, the church would be transformed into a scene of the wildest commotion. It was necessary that Chrysostom should be instantly informed of what had happened.

The Patriarch’s palace stood opposite the wall of the Imperial precincts, and was but a minute’s distance from the eastern gate of St. Sophia. It faced the Milion and the line of statues which adorned the northern facade of the Hippodrome. While the few who were in the church were still lost in wonder, and were crowding up towards the presbytery to catch a glimpse of Eutropius when the curtains were drawn, Philip darted home, and passing straight into the Archbishop’s room, said:

‘Father, your presence is instantly needed in the Great Church! Eutropius has taken refuge in the sacrarium!’

‘Eutropius?’ exclaimed Chrysostom in amazement. ’He has fled to sanctuary? What has happened?’

‘I know nothing more,’ said Philip, ‘but I saw him flash by me as I stood in the nave. He looked as pale as death. Terror was stamped on every feature. His robes were in disorder; his head was defiled with dust. In a few moments there will be some terrible scene. There is not an instant to be lost!’

‘I will join you directly,’ said Chrysostom. ‘I have but to put on my pallium. Summon Bishop Palladius, Serapion, Tigrius, Cassian, Germanus, and all the clergy who may be in the Thomaites, to accompany me.’

‘Come, David and Eutyches,’ said Philip as he passed through the anteroom. ‘It is I who have strange news to-day, but it is beyond all jest. The Archbishop will join the clergy in the Hall directly. Leave your work and come to St. Sophia, where you will see a scene which will be memorable for all time.’

The youths sprang up, and almost immediately Chrysostom came out, and, attended by his clergy and secretaries, walked rapidly to the Cathedral. The throng was already very large, and was momentarily increasing. The startling news had spread as though on wings of fire. It had reached the streets, where the crowds were yelling with savage satisfaction. It had reached the soldiers, who were in tumult. It had reached the Hippodrome, and passed as in a moment, none knew how, through its assembled thousands. Then a strange event happened. Of late Eutropius had spent whole days in the Theatre and the Hippodrome, seated in state, graciously unbending to gratify the multitude, scattering smiles and largesses, flattering and flattered, omnia serviliter pro imperio, to all appearance the assured favourite of the promiscuous inhabitants of Constantinople. Yet now—such is fame, such the worth of the applause of the multitude!—the whole assembled populace rose as one man, shouting, ‘Death to the eunuch!’

Chrysostom was not a moment too soon. But for Philip’s swift resolution the hated Minister might ere now have been torn by rude hands from his place of shelter, and the sacredness of the shrine been polluted with the horror of bloodshed. Already there was tumult, and unwonted cries were heard in the holy place; but a hush fell on the people as the Patriarch came in sight in his pallium woven with crosses, and they made way before him as, in stately solemnity, he advanced towards the sacrarium with his attendant presbyters and deacons. They ascended the steps and passed through the curtain. It was there that Eutropius and Chrysostom met once more.

There was no manliness, there was no dignity in the anguish of the fallen Chamberlain: it was abject, it was womanish; it was calculated to awaken contempt rather than pity. The memory of his crimes added to the degradation of his wretchedness. It was as though the spectres of Timasius and Abundantius towered over him, and pointed him out to the avenging Furies. The idol which had so suddenly crumbled to the dust was a mean and ugly one. This was no Marius, sitting hungry and unshorn in his wretched dungeon, but still clothed in the majesty of manhood; no Pompeius, grand even in the midst of his calamities. It was a wretched, gilded insect of the harem whom Destiny, in one of her most cruel and sarcastic jokes, had first elevated from the most degraded slavedom to more than imperial power, and then suddenly, as in a moment, had flung away her plaything, with utter scorn, to grinning infamy.

The moment Eutropius saw the Archbishop he grovelled face downwards under the Holy Table, and wept and tore his hair; but at first his chattering teeth refused to frame a sound. Then he half rose, but hid his face in his robe, which was wet with tears and foul with dust.

‘Look at me!’ said Chrysostom.

For an instant the eunuch turned to him the deplorable, wrinkled face of his dishonoured age, with a look of appeal which would have been infinitely pathetic but for the ludicrous dishevelment and paltriness of the man, which made even sorrow seem too lofty an emotion for such a spectacle. Yet Eutyches and David were deeply moved, and there were tears in Philip’s eyes.

‘Destiny is pitiless,’ said Chrysostom. ‘Pray to God, pray to Christ to help thee. I fear thou mayst be beyond the help of man. But He who outstretched His arms upon the cross has a heart compassionate enough to embrace all wretchedness, and even the deepest guilt, so it be penitent.’

Eutropius could not answer. The Archbishop was thinking of the world beyond the grave; his own thoughts were all absorbed in the terror of the brief and passing present.

Meanwhile, through the opened curtains of the presbytery the crowd caught sight of the crouching figure, and amid the tumult and the menacing cries, which rose louder and louder, the tramp of soldiers and the clang of armour made itself ever more distinctly heard.

The sounds renewed the wildest alarm of the fugitive. ’Oh, save me!’ he cried, ‘save me!’ And as he spoke he snatched at the Archbishop’s robe, and kissed its hem.

‘I will save thee,’ said Chrysostom, ‘if man may at all save thee.’

‘Swear to me,’ said the wretched man.

‘Nay, a good man’s word needs no oath. Fear not. Leave the Holy Table. Serapion will take thee into the Chamber of the Holy Vessels.’

Leaving the Archdeacon to attend to the eunuch and supply his needs, Chrysostom advanced to the front of the chancel, and ordered the curtains to be drawn behind him. He looked out on a wild scene. The armed Prætorians had forced their way through the dense mob to the front, and stood there shouting and brandishing their drawn swords, with cries of ‘The eunuch! give us up the eunuch! He is in hiding here. He shall die!’

It was always in such scenes that Chrysostom rose to the fullest grandeur of his undaunted nobleness. Many a man will quail before a mad and mutinous mob who will face almost any other form of menace. But Chrysostom, as he looked on those gleaming eyes and furious faces, was as calm as if he had been talking to Philip in his own room. Not a pulse beat the quicker, and though his figure was not majestic, he seemed to dilate with the grandeur of his appointed task.

‘Silence!’ he called out in his clear, resonant voice, which was heard above the madness of the multitude; and once more, as they did not heed his command, he raised his arm in an attitude of authority and again cried,

‘Silence, ye people, and ye turbulent Prætorians! Silence!’ Astonished and overawed by the fearlessness of the man, which filled the disciplined soldiery with admiration, the crowd sank for an instant to silence.

‘What mean ye? What do ye desire?’ said the Patriarch, ’that ye fill with your lewd clamour the sacred silence of the church of Christ? Depart hence! The Hippodrome is the fitter scene for your shouts and tumults.’

‘The eunuch! he is hidden here! Death, death to the eunuch!’ they shouted.

‘He has taken sanctuary,’ said Chrysostom, with perfect calmness. ’He has flung himself on the protection of the Church. She spreads over him her mantle of mercy. Depart hence! your errand is in vain. He is inviolable here.’

‘Nay, but you are breaking the law,’ said the Tribune of the Prætorians. ‘He has been guilty of treason. By the edict of Arcadius, by the edict he himself demanded and carried, he has no right to protection. You must give him up.’

‘Never!’ said Chrysostom.

CHAPTER XXVIII

INEVITABLE NEMESIS

The next morning was Sunday, and never—not even at the most sumptuous of Easter festivities—had so vast a congregation thronged the ample spaces of St. Sophia. Nave, tribunes, galleries, porticoes, were filled, till there was no standing-room—not so much by worshippers as by multitudes eager for new and powerful emotions. Virgins had quitted their chambers, women had left the Gynæceum empty, men had deserted the Forum and the Hippodrome. The Emperor and the Empress were present in the royal pew, in the centre of groups of betitled and bejewelled officials; scarcely a præfect, patrician, or illustris was absent; and soldiers in their glittering armour were mingled with the crowd.

After the service Chrysostom advanced to the ambo, and seated himself for his discourse. In the dead silence he perused for a moment the sea of upturned faces. Many of them were fixed on him in bitter anger because he had snatched their enemy from destruction. On other faces gleamed and flickered the vulgar joy of the base at the fall of the great into calamity. Others showed only the idle curiosity which makes dread disasters the sources of pleasurable sensation, provided only that they fall on their neighbours, not upon themselves.

It was just such a moment as that in Notre Dame when as vast a multitude watched Massillon mount the pulpit before which lay the coffin containing the mortal remains of Louis XIV., and when, after a pause, he began his sermon and melted all to tears by the simple words, ’God alone is great.’

Chrysostom ordered the curtains of the presbytery to be thrown back, and there the assembled multitude beheld the man whom a single day had hurled from the summit of human eminence to the lowest deep of human misery. He was lying under the altar, a pitiable spectacle, pale as a corpse, clinging convulsively to one of its golden pillars. If he raised for a moment his miserable face, he saw the dense throng of soldiers who had formed part of his escort, of slaves to whom his nod was law, of citizens who had shouted applause to him for hours in public places. Higher up, in the gilded gallery, he saw the Empress whom he had elevated from insignificance, the Emperor whom he had treated like a tame animal. Then the voice of the sacred orator fell upon his ears, saying

‘”Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities—all is vanity!“ True always, it never seemed more true than now. Where now is the splendour of the Consulate? Where the gleaming of lamps and torches, the acclamations, the dances, the festivities, the joyous assemblies? Where are the crowns and Tyrian tapestries? The flattering murmur of the city, the greetings of the Circus, the flatteries of thousands of spectators—where are they now? All that is past. The hurricane has swept down upon the tree, and not only scattered all its leaves, but upturned it by the roots, and whirled it to the earth. Where are the false friends, the swarms of parasites, the tables laden with viands, the goblets crowned with luscious wines and passing all day long from hand to hand, the delicacies of banquets, the soft murmurs of the slaves of power? What has become of it all? It has vanished like a dream when one awakes; it has faded like a flower of the spring under the sirocco; it has disappeared like a shadow. It is scattered like a vapour, bursten like a bubble, torn like a spider’s web. Say, then, say ever, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!” Write it on your walls, on your garments, in your Forum, in your streets, on your houses, on your windows, on your gates. Write it most of all on your consciences, that it may be ever present to your thoughts. Reiterate it at all your banquets, and in worldly assemblies let each repeat it to his neighbour: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!”

‘And thou,’ he cried, turning to Eutropius, ‘said I not to thee incessantly that riches make to themselves wings and flee away, and thou wouldst not listen? Said I not to thee that popularity was vain as the smoke and lukewarm water of mouth-friends, caring only for their own interests? Thou wouldst not believe me. And now experience hath shown thee that wealth is not only a thankless but a murderous slave. I became thine enemy because I told thee the truth; but said I not, “I am a truer friend to thee than they that flatter thee”? Warned I thee not that faithful are the wounds of a friend, deceitful the kisses of an enemy? Hadst thou borne my wounds thou hadst not been destroyed by their kisses. My wounds were health, their kisses death. Where now are the songs which welcomed thee? Where the army of slaves who cleared the way before thine omnipotence? They have deserted to thy foes, they deny thy favours. But I, whom thou couldst barely endure, have not abandoned thee, and now in thy fall it is I alone who support and solace thee. Thou foughtest against the Church, and the Church has opened her arms to receive thee; thou favouredst the theatres, and they are shrieking for thy head. When I warned thee not to tread thus gaily the road to ruin, thou, with a shrug of disdain, wouldst fly to the Circus. Lo! the Circus multitude, enriched by thy lavishness, whets the sword to slay thee; the Church, troubled by thy rage, is running hither and thither to snatch thee from thy misfortunes!’

And then the thought seemed to strike the Archbishop that he had been too severe—that he had not sufficiently tempered his words with pity for the fallen. It was from no lack of tenderness and compassion; it was from the abstract impersonal light in which he regarded the whole scene. The poor fallen wretch had been the enemy of the Church, and he was no obscure criminal, to be either punished or pardoned, and then doomed to swift oblivion. He had played his part on the world’s most brilliant stage; he was a man whom God had smitten with His thunder, on whom in all his guilt God’s messenger was now ‘pronouncing the humiliation of pardon.’ The Archbishop had often reproved Eutropius for avarice, rapacity, injustice. The Minister’s fall could not alter the mean estimate Chrysostom had formed of his character, and he almost forgot the personal feelings of the sufferer, almost ceased to regard him as one that suffered, in the strangeness of the spectacle, and in the desire to point to the frovolous multitude of nominal Christians—above all to guilty, grasping, luxurious nobles and officials, and to the wealthy classes in general—the terrible object-lesson which, from the speaker’s point of view, their Saviour Himself had brought before their eyes. No doubt a man less inflexible of character, less rigid in his unsparing righteousness—man with more knowledge of the world, and trained in the midst of political affairs rather than by monks and hermits—would have managed the occasion with finer adaptability. His enemies declared that he had been merciless to the unfortunate. It was, indeed, the last thing which he had intended, and in the simpleness of his integrity he doubtless imagined that he had sufficiently proved the sincerity of his compassion by the generous sacrifice—by the sacrifice even of life itself—which he had been ready to make to protect the Church’s suppliant. Still, as the thought crossed his mind that haply his language might have seemed harsh, he paused, and said:

‘Nay, think not that I desire for a moment to insult a fallen man; my aim is to forewarn those who stand, and to bid them take heed lest they fall. I stand not here to fret the sores of the wounded, but to preserve the health of those who have no wounds; not to roll the billows over the head of the shipwrecked, but to point out the hidden reefs to those whose sails are swelled by the favouring wind as their prow cleaves the gleaming sea. Who was ever so great as this man? What living man in all the world could rival him in wealth? Consul, Patrician, Præfect of the Sacred Chamber—what honour was lacking to his Eminence? He was the envy of all men, and now he is as naked as the slave, indigent as the beggar. Drawn swords, and pits, and tortures, and the path that leads to execution, are ever before his eyes. These are the things, not the pleasures which he has exhausted, which crowd his vision. Why paint the picture which is before your very eyes? Behold him!

‘I say again I desire not to insult his misery, but to touch your hearts, to warn your consciences, to make of his misfortunes angels to speak trumpet-tongued to your carelessness. I know that there are some of you who reproach me for having sheltered him. Wherein am I to blame? He used, you say, to attack the Church. Yes! but now he has taken refuge there. Should we not thank God that the enemy of the Church has recognised her mercy and her power? Her power—for she has won the victory; her pity—for she has pardoned him, and folded over him the wings of her protection. Should not Jews and Pagans blush to see, in his presence here, the trophy of her greatness? He denied her privileges; he strove to deconsecrate her sanctuary. He has himself fled to that sanctuary, and, tenderly as a mother, she hides him under her inviolable veil from the resentment of the Emperor and the fury of the mob! Look at yonder Holy Table! It is adorned with gold and precious stones; but its richest ornament is the fugitive who crouches there.

‘An ornament? you cry. This man, so greedy, so rapacious, so unjust. How can this criminal adorn the altar which he strove to violate? Ah! silence! Should you not think of Him who suffered the harlot, out of whom he had cast seven devils, to wash His feet with her tears, and wipe them with the hairs of her head? Of Him Who, when brutal soldiers were nailing Him to the cross, still breathed the prayer, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Murmur not that the man who would fain have closed our asylum should avail himself of it, for by so doing he has established its sacredness. The Church is as a monarch, who is not greatest when he sits on his throne in purple, with the circle of sovereignty upon his brow, but when barbarians, their hands bound behind their backs, lie vanquished at his feet. Come, then, let us now celebrate the Holy Mysteries, and afterwards we will go in a body to the Emperor to implore for Eutropius his pity and his pardon, and to lay the golden ears of the harvest of our compassion before his feet!’

The scene was too memorably striking to be ever forgotten by those who witnessed it, and the discourse of Chrysostom was too impassioned not to leave the deepest impression. But the courage of the Patriarch and the protection of the Church were all in vain. So long as Eutropius lay hidden in the sanctuary St. Sophia continued to be almost in a state of siege, and the Forum outside was the scene of incessant tumults. The eunuch himself grew weary of his incarceration. Death itself seemed hardly less intolerable than the blank and impotent existence—dishonoured, aimless, unoccupied—to which he was now reduced. The perpetual moaning in his ears of chants and litanies; the sight of no one but presbyters, deacons, and acolytes in the small dim chambers behind the apse; the voices which insulted him; the eyes which glared fiercely upon him, if he stepped into the sacrarium; the days so deadly with unbroken ennui; the nights haunted with ghastly visions; the perpetual sense of the presence of religion without any of its consolations became altogether too much for the miserable man. His overwhelming misfortune presented a contemptible spectacle, because it was unredeemed by one touch of the dignity which it would have derived from repentance or resignation. The sole thing left him was bare life, and he clung to bare life, but not under the dreary conditions which now dazed and stunned him. On the Wednesday, as he was sitting in the sacrarium in infinite despair, he saw Typhos, the brother of Aurelian, beckoning to him. He stepped within hearing distance, and Typhos promised him that if he would give himself up without tumult or resistance his life would be spared, and he should be sent to the island of Cyprus. ’Give me,’ said Eutropius, ‘the Emperor’s oath that I shall not be slain, and I will give myself up.’

Next day he received the Emperor’s sworn assurance, and in the dusk of evening, when the church was empty, he left the sanctuary. He was hurried in the darkness to a ship which lay by the quay in the Bosporus, and it at once spread sail for Cyprus.

But the moment the news was known it became manifest that his enemies would not be content with any such deportation. Is this, they said, a sufficient punishment for his many crimes? and what guarantee have we that he may not creep back again, wind himself once more into the favour of the Emperor, and rule as he did before?

In vain did Arcadius publish a decree of unexampled severity against him, which was to be affixed to the walls in public planes in every city of the Empire. The document is too curious an illustration of the times to be omitted. It ran as follows:

’The Emperors Arcadius and Honorius to Aurelian, Prætorian Præfect.

‘We have confiscated to our Treasury all the property of Eutropius, formerly our Præfect of the Sacred Chamber, having stripped him of his splendour, and delivered the Consulate from the foul stain of his tenure, and from the recollection of his name, and the base filth thereof; so that, all his acts having been repealed, all time may be dumb concerning him; and that the blot of our age may not appear by the mention of him; and that those who by their valour and their wounds extend the Roman borders, or guard the same by equity, may not groan over the fact that the divine guerdon of the Consulship has been befouled and defiled by a filthy monster. Let him learn that he has been degraded from the Consulate and all other dignities which he stained with the obliquity of his character; that all statues, images, and pictures of him, of every material and colour, be abolished everywhere, that they may not pollute the gaze of beholders as a brand of infamy on our age. Let him be taken under escort of your faithful guards to Cyprus, where let your Sublimity know that he has been banished, so that, being there watchfully guarded, he may be unable to work confusion by his mad designs.

‘Dated January 17, at Constantinople, in the Consulship of Theodorus, a most illustrious man.’The date January 17 is obviously erroneous.

It was a strange thing that Arcadius should be blind to the fact that it was he, and he alone, who had made Eutropius Consul, and that all this talk about the filth and pollution of his mere name redounded to the utter discredit of the Emperor, who was responsible for his entire career, and had until yesterday regarded him with boundless approval. But even this sanguinary proclamation did not suffice. Gaïnas and Tribigild refused to be satisfied with anything less than the head of Eutropius. The Western Empire still openly murmured that his punishment had been wholly inadequate to his crimes. True that the Emperor had pledged his oath that the eunuch’s life should be spared, but the oath must be got rid of by any chicanery. Arcadius was persuaded to salve his conscience with the unction that he had only promised him safety as long as he was in Constantinople, and that he could be executed on new charges, though not on the old ones. A ridiculous accusation was accordingly trumped up that Eutropius had sometimes placed insignia which were purely imperial among the ornaments of his consular dignity; and, still worse, that he had caused to be yoked to his own chariot the steeds of a peculiar breed and colour, called kosmoi, which were never used by anyone except the Emperor himself. On this trumpery pretext, which was probably an invention for the occasion, and may have had no existence except in the vengeful brain of the Empress Eudoxia and her intimates, the hapless eunuch was dragged back from Cyprus to Chalcedon, seeing on every side of him his own rent pictures and dismantled statues, and there, after the most hurried mockery of a trial, his head was placed under the axe, and a career was ended which, passing in full circle from nameless abjectness, through imperial splendour, to immeasurable degradation, is one of the most dramatically strange which History has ever recorded on her varied page.

CHAPTER XXIX

EUTYCHES IS INDIGNANT

In all the later phases of his career Chrysostom had taken a noble and blameless part, unless a certain want of tact and of gracious versatility be attributed to him as a crime. Yet, as is so often the lot of the men to whose shining virtues the vicious pay the tribute of implacable hatred, Chrysostom was blamed and abused on every side. His moral brightness was, as his friend and biographer, Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis, expressed it, like a lamp flashing in sore eyes. The enemies of Eutropius denounced the Archbishop for having sheltered him; the enemies of Chrysostom himself infamously pretended that he had betrayed him to the soldiers. Eutropius had not a single friend, but many who would not have let their little finger ache to save his life stormed at the prelate, who alone had pitied him, and who, at the risk of assassination, had stood between him and the swords of his assailants. He had been too hard and cruel for their delicate sensibilities! The incarnate vices of society united to sting to death the one man whose pure virtue was an embodied reproach to their wickedness. At Constantinople he

It happened a day or two after these events that Elpidius, one of the worst of the Constantinopolitan clergy, was walking on the wooded shores of the Bosporus with the Bishop of Chalcedon. Elpidius was in his way a man of note among the clergy, because, in spite of a character entirely despicable, he was a heated and unscrupulous partisan. He identified religion with his own personal views, and, though his intellect was mean, his blind party spirit acquired for him the position of a leader among the most heated controversialists. His notions of argument were those which have been prevalent in every age among such men as he. They consisted in loud and overbearing reiteration of assertions, supported by flimsy sophisms which had been over and over again refuted; in boundless vituperation of his opponents, which among similar characters passed for reasoning; in the ignoring of the proofs which had long undermined the sandy bases of his false and unscriptural orthodoxy; and in the glaring and habitual misquotation of the words of his opponents. Such controversy, deeply dyed in vulgarity, virulence, and venom, was of a kind which no good man could deign to notice. It was mere malice, meanness, and misrepresentation, adapted only to feed the most ignorant prejudices and worst passions of his partisans. ‘The Church’—a word for ever on his lips—meant, on the lips of Elpidius, himself and those who held his ‘views.’ It was the asserted authority for every superstitious accretion, for every Pagan development, for every soul-dwarfing falsity. The teaching and example of Christ, of the Apostles, and of the Christians of the first two centuries, were regarded as unimportant. Christ’s reprobation of errors which were now thrust forward as the be-all and the end-all of orthodox religiosity went for nothing; but if any isolated phrase in the New Testament could be distorted into the false semblance of an argument, whole systems were built on it, like pyramids upon their apex. In short, Elpidius was one of those ‘Churchmen,’ so common in every age, to whom shibboleths, ceremonial, and their own self-exaltation, were of infinitely more account than judgment, righteousness, and truth. He represented the practical supersession of Christianity pure and undefiled by a dead Pharisaism and a dead Judaism, mixed up with elements of Pagan superstition and Pagan ritual. If the decrees of Councils decided in his direction, they were infallible; if they traversed his views, they were a collection of obsolete canons. If bishops supported his party they were elevated into an apotheosis of sainthood, and adored with genuflexions; if they opposed him they were a disgrace and a ‘scandal,’ to be treated with the most contumelious indifference. The controversial methods of Elpidius consisted mainly in exalting his own clique, and blackening all who differed from him with boundless depreciation. His all-absorbing churchliness and supernatural claims of sacerdotal supremacy were in nowise incompatible with violations of the most ordinary courtesies of a gentleman, or the most rudimentary virtues of a Christian.

Against Chrysostom Elpidius cherished one of those burning hatreds which, if opportunity be only favourable, stop short at no falsehood and no crime. He never spoke of the Archbishop without the hiss of the serpent being heard in every word. Nothing that Chrysostom could say was tolerable, nothing that he could do was right. Elpidius had been one of those who had been forced to wince under the Patriarch’s scathing denunciation of the worldliness which hung about the tables of the great, and of the underhand intrigues which thought all means lawful if they furthered a favourite ecclesiastical end. He was notoriously one of the auriscalpii, who abused their priestly position to lead captive silly women laden with lust; one of those who, having frightfully abused even the safeguarded office of a public confessor, which Nectarius abolished because of the iniquities to which it led, had used every influence to get the office restored. He was one of those who, sanctioned by the abuse of custom, had lived with a young and beautiful agapete, whom he called his ‘spiritual sister,’ and for whose richly dressed loveliness he always secured a prominent place in St. Sophia, until Chrysostom had threatened him with instant excommunication unless he reformed a style of living which injured the reputation of the Church. Since then he had hated Chrysostom with a hatred of which a bad layman might have envied, but certainly could not have surpassed, the unscrupulous intensity. He was animated by the one desire and object to blast, and undermine, and overthrow his thrice-detested ecclesiastical superior.

A certain freemasonry of intuition made Elpidius and others of Chrysostom’s enemies aware of the venomous dislike and jealousy entertained against him by the Bishop of Chalcedon, although Cyrinus had never manifested it to the world in general, and had, for his own reasons, concealed it entirely from the Archbishop himself. Elpidius and he had been discussing the revolt of Tribigild and the fall of Eutropius, and sat down to rest on a bank, entirely heedless of the presence of two youths who were also resting but a few feet distant from them on the shingly beach. As the youths were but plainly dressed, and evidently did not belong to the ‘classes,’ but to the ‘masses,’ such exalted personages as the Bishop and the leading presbyter did not think it worth while to notice their existence, or to talk in lower tones because they were so near. The two youths were David and Eutyches. The affair of Eutropius had thrown an immense amount of extra work upon them, and the kindly Archbishop had told them to go to the shore and breathe a little of the fresh sea air, especially as the cheek of Eutyches was not yet healed, and he had been a little shaken by the fierce buffet of the Gothic soldier. Chrysostom wanted Philip to go, too, but as business might arise at any moment, Philip would not leave him; and besides, though Olympias had now made herself responsible for his being provided with proper meals, Chrysostom was as likely as not to forget all about them, and leave them untouched while he was absorbed in his work, unless Philip were at hand to see that he took them.

‘Were you present at St. Sophia when John delivered that sermon with Eutropius under the altar?’ asked the Bishop.

‘Present, my lord?’ answered Elpidius in a tone of disgust; ‘I should think I was!’

‘I am told that it was very fine,’ said Cyrinus tentatively.

‘Fine!’ answered Elpidius, raising his voice in a gust of anger. ‘I don’t know what they call fine. Eloquence? Turgid rhetoric I call it, empty bombast, the wind of platitudes; sound and fury, signifying nothing, It was shameful, it was infamous, it was a perfect scandal! John had no business whatever to break the law by giving shelter at all to such a criminal. But if he did, he had no right to insult him grossly, and browbeat and denounce him as he lay grovelling there. And afterwards, I am told, he betrayed him. Doubtless he got a good round sum, first for his protection, and then for his treachery which will add to the treasure of which he robs the Church daily, and which will supply the secret orgies of the Patriarcheion. What can you expect of a man like that—a cheat, a miser, a hypocrite, a liar, a man with a heart hard as a nether millstone and a fist close as that of a Harpagon?’

Elpidius, as he gave place to the devil, and flung the reins on the neck of his envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, had spoken louder and louder, so that all the last part of his remarks had been poured forth upstanding, and with fierce gesticulations, in a hurricane of frenzied wrath.

It was lucky that the fiery Philip was not there. There is no knowing how fiercely he might have rebutted so deadly an outrage on the character of his adopted father and benefactor. But such a tornado of brutalities and insults roused even the gentler spirit of Eutyches to indignant revolt. Before David—who would have seen the uselessness of any intervention—knew what he was about, Eutyches had advanced to the speaker. He was a very modest boy, and it was not till then that he recognised the Bishop of Chalcedon. The episcopal dignity overawed him, but after kneeling to kiss the Bishop’s hand, as was usual, he said:

‘My Lord Bishop, I know not who that presbyter may be, but suffer me to say that he has spoken to you the most shocking calumnies. The Archbishop gave shelter to Eutropius because, in defending the Church’s right to sanctuary, he would have done so to the meanest of mankind and the worst of his own enemies. So far from being cruel, I saw him offer his own unprotected breast to the naked swords of the Goths in his defence. It was he, and he alone, who pleaded for him to the Emperor. Eutropius gave himself up against the Archbishop’s will, and in spite of his warnings and remonstrances. To say that he either protected him for a bribe, or betrayed him for a bribe, is a wicked falsehood, whoever says it! Yes,’ he added, fixing his clear and innocent gaze on the face of Elpidius, ’as wicked a falsehood as that the Archbishop is a miser or a hypocrite. On the contrary, he is profoundly indifferent to gold, and is a saint of God, if ever there was one.’

There was something in the words and bearing of Eutyches which overwhelmed Elpidius, and even Cyrinus, with confusion. His manner had been perfectly respectful, and as he stood there in all the glow of his ardent sympathy for the master to whom he was devoted, and all the bloom of his youthful innocence, Elpidius felt much as Milton makes Satan feel before the reproach of Ithuriel:

Ashamed to have been thus openly rebuked by a boy, and especially in the presence of a bishop, Elpidius tried to assume a disdainful indifference.

‘Who is this impudent baby with a raw wound on his cheek who has been eavesdropping?’ he said in his most brutal tone.

It was now David’s turn to be indignant, but he put strong control over his feelings. ‘This,’ he said very quietly, ‘is an orphan boy, one of the Patriarch’s secretaries, who will soon be ordained a reader. You can hardly wonder, my Lord, that he was deeply moved when he heard such shameless defamation of his beloved master and benefactor shouted to the four winds in a voice which might have been heard a hundred yards off. And for the wound on his cheek, it is the mark of a soldier’s blow, whom he was trying to keep from assailing the Patriarch while he was defending Eutropius at peril of his life.’

CHAPTER XXX

THE GOTHS AT CONSTANTINOPLE

Rufinus, who, under the merely nominal emperor, had wielded the sceptre of the world, had been lynched under the very eyes of Arcadius by vengeful Goths; Eutropius, who succeeded him as the arbiter of the fortunes of the nations, had been also flung by their influence from the dizzy pinnacles of greatness into headlong infamy. Gaïnas the Goth was now the most formidable personage in the Eastern world. On him the inevitable doom was next to fall. The Empress Eudoxia was the inheritress of the influence of the two murdered Ministers; but for her also this ‘dread summit of Cæsarean power’ involved nothing better than a few years of storms, remorse, and torturing anxiety, to be followed by an early, miserable, and unregretted death.

Thrown on his own helplessness by the fall of Eutropius, and feeling under the absolute necessity of being governed by someone, the fainéant Arcadius was thankful, rather than otherwise, to succumb to the more virile yoke of his haughty wife. But Eudoxia, in a State distracted by rival parties, not one of which could be neglected with impunity, felt the necessity of holding the balance between them. The Court party of slaves and officials had, for the time, been annihilated by the overthrow of the Chamberlain, and Eudoxia thought that she could herself represent the whole power of the Court if she formed against the Goths an alliance with the Roman party—the party of Aurelian, the friend of Chrysostom, and of Synesius, whose ideal object was the repression of the barbarian element which had recently sprung to such abnormal prominence, both in the East and in the West.

She had, accordingly, procured the nomination of Aurelian to the great office of Prætorian Præfect, and of her favourite, Count John, to the position of Comptroller of the Sacred Largesses, while she also brought into power and influence the soldierly ex-Consul Saturninus, the husband of her friend Castricia.

She had, however, to counterbalance the forces, not only of the Goths, but of the Arians. The majority of the Goths were Arians of the moderate school of their saintly apostle, Wulfila, to whom they owed the precious treasure of their vernacular Bible. But there were many other Arians in Constantinople, Greeks and Romans. In the days of Valens they completely outnumbered the Catholic party, and they had never acquiesced in the triumph gained by the orthodox Christians through the ability of Gregory Nazianzus and the repressive edicts of Theodosius. They were constantly plotting to regain their ascendency, which they hoped to do through the power of Gaïnas.

At the head of these Arians, but more through policy than conviction, was a dark and dangerous conspirator, whose very name, by one of the curious accidents of history, remains unknown to us, but who is usually called by the nickname of Typhos, the Egyptian Satan, given to him in a narrative of this epoch, written in an allegorical form, by Synesius. This little romance is called ‘The Egyptians,’ and, not deeming it safe to describe actual events, the Bishop threw his reminiscences into the form of a story of the struggles between the good Osiris and the evil Typhos. Typhos was the brother of Aurelian, but hated him with a deadly hatred, and watched him with devouring envy.

When Aurelian was made Prætorian Præfect and Consul-designate, Typhos, who had set his heart on the office, was sick with rage; and his no less evilly disposed wife, who had longed for the prestige of a more exalted rank, did her utmost to abet him. They represented the most abandoned class of aristocratic society, and their private entertainments were scenes of gross licentiousness. For some reason unknown to us, but connected either with contumacious blasphemy or coarse dissipation, Typhos had established the practice of snoring-matches, and highly honoured those of his base companions who excelled in producing what Synesius calls ‘the roundest snorts.’ His wife, who spent her days in the insatiable pursuit of excitement at the Theatre and in the Forum, devoted hours to the adornment of her person, and filled her assembly-rooms with women of abandoned character. The object, both of Typhos and his wife, seemed to be the enlisting of false religion, immoral pleasures, and ostentatious Philistinism into a league of contrast with, and defiance to, the literary culture, orthodox faith, and noble propriety of Aurelian and his consort. When Typhos was disappointed of his ambitious desire, he flung himself alike into reckless debauchery and deep-laid treason, for which he also was shortly to meet his doom. He and his party became the Arrabiati of Constantinople.

To console his disappointment by yet more shameless luxury, he had a lake constructed in his garden, in which were artificial islands and warm baths. Here he and his adherents of both sexes abandoned themselves to shocking orgies. Meanwhile both he and his wife were in secret communication with the unworthy wife of Gaïnas, through whose means they ceaselessly endeavoured to seduce the Gothic chieftain from all semblance of allegiance. He was already the chief general of the Eastern Empire. The Goths accepted his sway, and the army under him was largely composed of German elements. He aspired to re-establish Arianism and to be the Stilico of the East—perhaps ultimately to wear the diadem, or at least to be the Consul, and king of his tribe, as Alaric was. Gaïnas was by no means contented with the scanty results which he had obtained from the ruin of Eutropius. So far from bringing him the additional honours which he had expected, it had only issued in the promotion and strengthening of the heads of the Roman party, whose opposition to all barbarian interests had found voice in the outspoken harangue of Synesius before the Emperor. The alliance with Typhos and his party seemed to put in his grasp the fulfilment of his wildest ambition.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE DOOMED THREE

’Old man, ‘tis not so difficult to die.’ Byron, Manfred.

’Well, has John talked you over?’ asked Typhos, with a sneer, coming forward from another part of the tent when Chrysostom had left.

‘He has not,’ said Gaïnas.

‘Good!’ said Typhos. ‘Leave the little man to deal with his priests. They, I imagine, will give him enough to do ere long, and they all hate him like poison.’

‘Because he is the best among them all,’ said Gaïnas.

‘It may be so,’ said Typhos, with a shrug of his shoulders; ’but he has no right to come interfering with you.’

He proceeded to undo all the good that the Patriarch had done by appealing to every evil passion in the warrior’s nature—pride, ambition, and revenge. Gaïnas almost decided to execute his three opponents, and so to sweep them out of the way. But when Typhos had gone his two sons came in.

‘Father,’ said Thorismund, ‘don’t behead those men. They behaved nobly in giving themselves up.’

‘What cause have we to love or to spare these Romans, Thorismund?’

‘Yet spare them, father! They are voluntary hostages in your hands. Their lives may serve you better than their deaths.’

‘Is it policy or compassion, son?’

‘Perhaps a little of both, father.’

‘And what says my Walamir?’ asked Gaïnas.

‘Spare them, father,’ said Walamir, who was his father’s favourite. ‘That boy who looked as if he had never done wrong in his life asked us both to intercede with you, and we promised—and he is half a Goth.’

‘I will think of it,’ said Gaïnas.

While the fate of the three great officials yet hung in the balance, no day passed without a visit from the Archbishop to the tent of the Gothic chief. He would have carried his point almost from the first but for the countermining efforts of Typhos and of the chieftain’s wife, who had been won over by the wife of Typhos. And these, again, would have succeeded more easily but for the faithful influence of Thorismund and Walamir. So there was a struggle in the mind of the magister militum, between the impulse of the barbarian and the softening influence of his imperfect Christianity; and it was far from certain which would win the victory. Chrysostom was always accompanied by Philip, and generally by either Eutyches or David. While he was pleading with the chieftain, the Gothic youths took their friends round the camp, to repay Philip, Thorismund said, for his kindness to them at Antioch.

One day, when Chrysostom told them that he should be detained by business for some hours at Chalcedon, and bade them come for him in the evening, they seized the opportunity to take the young Goths to the Patriarcheion at Constantinople, and to show them the chief sights of the city. There sprang up between them one of those warm friendships which often arise amid complete dissimilarity.

At last the Archbishop triumphed. He received from Gaïnas the definite promise that the lives of Aurelian, Saturninus, and Count John should be spared. He begged that he might go to the tent where they still lay, fettered, under the close guard of Gothic sentries, and be the first to break to them the glad intelligence.

‘Nay,’ said Gaïnas, with a grim smile; ‘I have reasons of my own why that must not be. Farewell, Archbishop! Whatever happens in the future—and many things may happen—you at least I shall ever hold in honour, and I beg your prayers. Farewell, but leave those two youths here with my young wolf-cubs. They shall bear you news of what I do.’

CHAPTER XXXII

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE

Now there was found in that city a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no one remembered that same poor man.

Eccl. ix. 15.

After these events it really seems as if Gaïnas, to use a modern expression, had completely lost his head, or, to give the view of it taken by himself and his contemporaries, as if a demon had begun to trouble him; for his conduct became aimless and uncertain. Discontent, revenge, ambition, and evil counsels destroyed in him all capacity for wise and generous policy. Contact with the elements of a corrupting civilisation had deadened in him the savage virtues of his race, and gave nothing better to restore his moral balance.

He and Tribigild carried their armies across the Bosporus into Europe, so that Constantinople found herself overshadowed by a host of 30,000 men, of whom the vast majority were Gruthongs and other tribes of Ostrogoths. The city had nothing to oppose to them at the moment but the insignificant handful of Palace troops who were responsible for the immediate safety of the Emperor. The gates, the barracks, the walls were all in the hands of barbarians, whose allegiance was wavering, and whose ultimate objects were uncertain. The year 400 opened with the worst and darkest omens of misery and fear.

For the dominance of the Goths had rendered it necessary to fill the high office of Prætorian Præfect, from which Aurelian had been expelled, by the elevation of Typhos, his wicked and unnatural brother. And Typhos inaugurated a reign of terror more intolerable than that of Eutropius had ever been. He oppressed the provinces with frightful taxes; he sold the governorships to the highest bidder. Civil office could be purchased by the worst of reprobates, if they had enough of base skill or of ill-gotten gold to flatter or bribe the dissolute wife of the new Minister. Almost every independent voice was silenced. Synesius, with faithful friendship, did his utmost to support the cause of his friend Aurelian, and had even publicly pleaded in the presence of his brother. The only result was that Synesius himself was now kept under close surveillance, and was refused permission to return to his native Cyrene. Often in those bad days he sought the counsel of Chrysostom, and, though they were men of widely different sympathies, they had many an interesting discussion. But for the time being the Patriarch was personally powerless. The Empress, finding that she could not make him her tool, was already beginning to turn against him.

Indeed, the times were very dark. ’Everything,’ said Chrysostom in a sermon delivered at this time, ’is full of fright, danger, mistrust, trembling and despair; no one trusts another, everyone is terrified of his neighbour; no friend seems sure, no brother trustworthy. The civil war raging in the midst of our society pervades not only all open, but all secret, relations. Everywhere are countless treacheries and dark concealments. Under the sheepskins are hidden a thousand wolves, so that we almost feel more confidence in the midst of open enemies than of semblable friends. They who greeted us yesterday with profound respect, and kissed our hands, to-day have flung away the guise of their masks, and have not only assumed the guise of enemies, but of our bitterest accusers.’

So Gaïnas overshadowed the miserable city from without; and Typhos and his wife, and Eudoxia and her Court, caballed within; and the Arians, aided by barbarians and false Romans, resumed the high hopes which they once had had of winning back the East to the creed of the Council of Rimini.

As for Tribigild, we hear no more of him. He went glimmering back into the night whence he had emerged. He died about this time, suddenly, and not without suspicious circumstances.

But now Gaïnas was goaded to show his ascendancy by demanding from Arcadius the cession of one of the churches of Constantinople for the exclusive possession of the Arians. The only church at present assigned to them was outside the walls. ‘It is not reasonable,’ said Gaïnas to the Emperor, ‘it is an insult to my dignity, that I, the commander-in-chief of the forces of the East, and now the Consul-designate, should be forced to steal out of the city to worship outside the walls.’

The Emperor, as usual, drifted impotently between ‘I would’ and ‘I dare not.’ He hated to say ‘Yes,’ yet how could he venture in the presence of superior force to say ’No’? Chrysostom, hearing of the Goth’s requisition, went to the Palace, and told Arcadius that under no circumstances must he comply with the demand; at whatever cost, he must peremptorily refuse. The helpless sovereign clutched at any straw. ’This,’ said he to Gaïnas, ‘is a religious question. The Patriarch desires to discuss it with you in person. Meet him at the Palace in my presence to-morrow.’

Gaïnas was nothing loth. Strange to say, he prided himself on being an irresistible theologian. In earlier days he had maintained a lively controversy with the far-famed Egyptian eremite, St. Nilus, in which the Goth boasted, perhaps seriously imagined, that he had won the victory in argument in favour of the Arian as against the Catholic creed. He came to the Palace with some of the leading clergy of the Arian party, and Chrysostom came with some of his bishops. The interview did not, however, take the form of a theological controversy, for, in truth, Gaïnas felt himself quelled and dominated by the saintly dignity and fearlessness of the Archbishop. His genius felt rebuked in that holy presence, and he cowered before John as the birds cower and lie low when the eagle is in the air. He did not venture to cross swords with the eloquent Patriarch in questions of faith and dogmatic definition, but, taking an entirely different ground, he said:

‘I demand a church—one church only—for myself and my fellow-Arians. Is it just that I should be refused a church in the city I defend?’

‘Refused a church?’ said Chrysostom. ‘Every church alike in the city is freely open to you.’

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE MASSACRE

Your hands are full of blood.—Isaiah i. 15.

Foiled at every turn, Gaïnas began to feel that his star was no longer in the ascendant; that fortune had abandoned him; that in the game of ambition he had been finally defeated; that Nemesis was but awaiting her opportunity. Tormented more and more by indecision and disappointment, and seeing in their effects the anger of a besetting demon, he gave out that he was ill, and that he should resort to the Chapel of St. John the Baptist at the Hebdomon. It was seven miles distant from the capital, and stood on the scene of the murder of Rufinus. Gaïnas said, ‘I will pray for the recovery of my health.’ He gave secret orders to his army to join him there, not in one body, but by detachments of ten thousand at a time. They were to bring with them from Constantinople their wives, their children—all their possessions. He felt that at Constantinople, as far as he was concerned, all was over. He would throw himself back on the wild and roving life of his ancestors. Asia had long been exhausted by rapine, but he would plunder the cities of Thrace and of Europe, and, making his way to the Danube, would there reoccupy the wide regions of wasted land, and make a new home for his people away from the curse of a dying and polluted civilisation.

But now disaster after disaster befell him, and never again did he enjoy a happy day.

Two-thirds of his army had joined him at the Hebdomon, when one of those workings of God’s unseen Providence, by men nicknamed ‘chance,’ which by no means unfrequently have decided the mightiest crises of history, let loose the rush of the avalanche by which he was ultimately to be overwhelmed.

It only remained for the last division of the Gothic soldiers to shake the dust of Constantinople off their feet and join their chieftain, eager for fresh fields and pastures new. The city was full of the most painful disquietude and alarm. What did the Goths intend? Whither were they going? Was the end of the world at hand? What possible deliverance could be expected from the tyranny within or the terror without?

It was the 12th of July, 399. At the city gate of the Blachernæ suburb sat habitually an old beggar-woman. It was morning, and she had noticed that since the early dawn the Goths had been stealing by hundreds out of the city. She noticed, too, that they were all armed, though it seemed as if they were trying to conceal their arms. She was seized with misgiving. What were they going to do? Would they ere sunset assault and burn the city? Dropping her beggar’s dish, she wailed, and wrung her hands, and cried aloud to the gods. The Goths but imperfectly understood her words and her demeanour. They thought that she was cursing and insulting them, and one of the fiery barbarians lifted his sword to cleave her head. Indignant at such treatment of an old and well-known figure, a Roman struck the Goth to the ground. Then the Goths raised a wild and angry cry, and curious spectators came flocking up on every side. In the heat of the quarrel which arose both the soldiers and the multitude assumed a most threatening attitude. As the people outnumbered the soldiers in a proportion of three to one, the Goths became alarmed, and blood began to flow freely on both sides. Meanwhile the whole population of Constantinople seemed to be gathering in the streets, and there was no mistaking the significance of the fierce, indignant hum which betrayed the pent-up feelings of wrath with which the multitude regarded these alien intruders, who had so long imposed upon them an odious and insulting tyranny. At that early hour of morning twilight, before the stream of business and amusement had begun, all the citizens were free, and they naturally thronged to the scene of combat. More than this, the manhood of Constantinople showed on all occasions a more Roman, and therefore a more vigorous, manhood than was the case in the other cities of the East. The most fearless of them had not only seized whatever implements were available, but had eagerly torn the swords out of the grasp of the dead and wounded Goths, and were using them with terrible effect. Hemmed in by a threatening mass of infuriated and implacable enemies, some of the Goths hewed their path to the nearest gate and forced their way through. At the head of these was Thorismund, who had been left to accompany the last contingent; for the wife of Gaïnas was so utterly reluctant to leave the charms of security and civilisation for the roving life of incessant battlefields, that she had been one of the last to leave her home with Walamir, her younger son. She was surrounded by an escort of her countrymen, but they were far too few for so frightful and unexpected an emergency. Thorismund and the soldiers with him had fought their way safely out of the city, and, in the self-confidence of Gothic courage, felt no doubt that the whole remainder of the army would follow them. In this conviction they marched forward, and chose a place for their camp at some distance from the walls. But their conviction was mistaken. The populace had completely got the upper hand over their deeply disheartened and far-outnumbered opponents. In that street warfare, suspecting treachery at every turn, the Goths fought with far less than their usual resistless impetuosity. They made a wild effort to keep their mastery over the gate, to follow their comrades, or at the worst to give them intelligence of their frightful position, and entreat them to send reinforcements. But they were too late: the citizens had seized and manned every path of egress. When Typhos sent to them, demanding that the gates should be handed over to his guards, so deep was their distrust of him that they flatly refused to obey. Conscious of their success, they raised the pæan of victory. The Goths outside the walls, being at some distance, mistook its import, and made sure that it meant the triumph of their countrymen. One of the Goths managed at the point of the sword to make his way out of the city by one of the less guarded gates, and he undeceived them. Then Thorismund, at the head of all the most valiant warriors whom he could assemble, made his way back to the city. It was in vain. Every gate was shut against him. The walls bristled with hostile bows and spears. The young warrior could only rage in vain, while within the fatal circle the hapless barbarians got more and more entangled in the streets, and were at last hemmed inextricably into one narrow space, where, in despair almost too deep for attempted self-defence, they were being hacked, and hewn down, and stabbed by thousands of furious citizens, who were now mostly armed.

Through the burning heat of that dreadful morning the massacre went on, and a dozen Goths were struck down by stones from the windows, or pierced with arrows, or beaten to the ground with clubs and swords, for every one of their assailants whom they slew. Religious hatred, political hatred, race hatred, in their most enflamed bitterness, were incited to overwhelm for ever the detested, overbearing, and heretical barbarians.

The horrid scene still continued, and all attempt at interference would have been hopeless, for the multitude was mad with rage and the gratification of long-suppressed jealousy and revenge. The dominance of Gaïnas, in itself sufficiently detestable to the citizens, was identified in their minds with the still more execrated dominance of Typhos. Now that chance seemed to have offered them a hope of getting rid of both, they seized it with frantic avidity. Not much of the tumult was witnessed by Chrysostom, for the Silentiarii were posted at every entrance to the Forum, in order to secure the protection of the Palace. But his secretaries and some of the presbyters now and then brought him some description of the blood-bath which was deluging the streets, and as at least 7,000 Goths were still pent up in the city, the citizens, with scarcely any effectual retaliation, continued to slay and slay and slay. Distressed by the cries which reached his ears, and by his inability to prevent the massacre, Chrysostom ventured to seek an interview with Arcadius, and ask whether no energetic measure could be resorted to which might stay the fury of the sword. But the Emperor was stolidly obdurate. He regarded this dire event as a Divine intervention to rid him, in a manner wholly unexpected, alike of Gothic and of Arian tyranny. Beyond protecting his own palace he refused to give a single order or take a single step.

On the other hand, the ardent spirit of youth naturally made it impossible for Philip and his two friends to sit quietly in the protected Patriarcheion while so fierce a battle was thundering through the city streets. It was obvious that they could not join in the fighting, for Goths and Byzantines alike were under the Archbishop’s care; but if any opportunity offered itself for deeds of mercy and service, they desired to seize it. All three of them were parabolani—that is, they were members of a guild ostensibly formed for the purpose of burying the dead, a duty which was often difficult, and was sometimes shockingly neglected. But this was not their only function: they were always ready for any other deed of mercy.

By the afternoon the bodies of several hundreds of the Goths strewed the streets, and among them lay not a few of the citizens who had perished in the dreadful encounter. But seven thousand still remained, surrounded on every side by myriads of threatening faces and fiercely brandished arms. They determined to make one more desperate effort for their lives, and the word was passed among them to hew their way to the church which had been set apart for the worship of orthodox Goths. It was a church in which Chrysostom had taken deep interest. He had fancied that it might become a nucleus of proselytising influence to win back this grand nation of barbarians to the faith of the Catholics; and he had even taken pains to procure presbyters and mission-agents, familiar with the Gothic language, to set before the Arians in their beloved native tongue the fulness of the Nicene verity. Into this church, then, the Goths determined to fight a passage, feeling no doubt at all that the sacred right of asylum, which had protected the life of Eutropius, would suffice to secure their imperilled safety. It never occurred to them that they, who had so long been servants of the Empire, and had fought its battles, whatever may have been the errors into which they had of late been misled by their chiefs, would be treated with a fury too implacable to be sated by anything short of their complete extermination. So with stern faces they turned to bay, and, cleaving themselves a lane through the living barrier of their enemies, fought their way towards the Gothic church. It was outside the great Forum, though at no great distance from it. They succeeded in their effort, though with ever-diminished numbers, since the crowd harassed them at every step and cut off every straggler.

David had been occupied in various parts of the city in tending any wounded citizen whom he could help to his home, or conduct to one of the Patriarch’s hospitals. Eutyches, who was much younger and of a more timid disposition, strayed as little as possible from the side of Philip. Their dress as parabolani accounted for their presence in the streets in a peaceful capacity, and it was not long before their benevolent efforts were signally rewarded; for their eyes were attracted by a spectacle which would have moved a heart of stone.

In the centre of the stream of Goths, protected to the utmost by their shields, yet very imperfectly sheltered from the missiles hurled down on the doomed warriors from roofs and lattices, walked a tall and stately woman with her son, a boy of fifteen, a perfect type of manly Gothic beauty, by her side. She was richly dressed, and the brooch which fastened her embroidered robes was set with large emeralds, but she was now in a deplorable condition of fatigue and wretchedness. Her long, fair tresses streamed dishevelled over her shoulders: the jewelled ribbon of silk, which had confined them at the back of her head, had been torn away, and they were stained with blood from a wound in her forehead, caused by a stone, which had struck her with violence. With feelings harrowed to their depths, she watched the awful catastrophe which had befallen this mass of her fellow-countrymen; and it had long dawned on her mind that, in the crushing and crimson surge of massacre which every now and then deluged the heterogeneous conflict, and for which she herself felt partly guilty, her life could only be saved by a miracle.

It was Liuba, the wife of Gaïnas, and the boy by her side was Walamir, who had formed so romantic an affection for Eutyches in his father’s tent. Walamir had never looked so beautiful or so noble. He was dressed in the armour of his nation. The light of battle was in his eyes, and the sunlight which burned in his short, bright curls where they were uncovered by his helmet, made a sort of nimbus round his face. Boy as he was, he had fought like a hero. He carried a drawn sword in his hand, and a bow and quiver were slung over his back. Now and then, if chance offered, he would thrust the sword into its scabbard, snatch an arrow from his quiver, and aim it at some prominent assailant; but his mind was mainly absorbed in the effort to protect his mother, to whom his restless glances constantly returned. He himself had evidently been wounded. A sword-point had pierced his leg, for he limped with painful efforts, and often stumbled; and he was pale with loss of blood from a deep arrow-wound in his shoulder, which had dyed his white tunic and the wolfskin belted across his breast with deep red stains.

Eutyches was the first to catch a glimpse of him amid the serried ranks of his warriors. He caught Philip’s arms, and cried in an agitated voice: ‘Oh, Philip! let us press as near as we can, and try to save him.’

‘We will, my boy,’ cried Philip; ‘but oh! I fear the case is desperate.’

And now the Goths had reached the open space in front of the church, and by a natural movement they rushed forward to gain the entrance. The crowd pressed still more firmly on their ranks, to prevent them from reaching their asylum. Walamir and his mother were thrust on one side by the rush of the narrowing stream of soldiers, and, seizing his chance, a brutal citizen smote the wife of Gaïnas on the head with a club. She sank down without a groan, and would instantly have been trampled to death had not Philip leapt forward, and, aided by Eutyches—for the costume of the charitable brotherhood secured them from molestation—dragged her a little aside into the corner of the Galilee. Walamir had cut down the cowardly striker of a woman with a blow of his sword, and then, too faint from his wounds to make any further effort, sank with a low wail upon his mother’s corpse.

Thousands of the Goths had now pressed into the church, till it was full from end to end, and those who could not enter were slain with scarcely the shadow of resistance. While the tumult roared about the gates one rioter aimed an infamous blow at Walamir, who, lying prostrate and with outstretched arms, was now conscious of nothing but that his mother was dead and his people were perishing. The force of the blow was broken, for without a moment’s hesitation Philip felled the man with a blow on the temple from his clenched fist. But Walamir had swooned, and Philip and Eutyches, seeing that his mother was past help, gently disengaged his arms from her corpse. Philip had often been with his master to the church, and was well acquainted with its precincts. The humble residence of the presbyter, a venerable Goth, was at the back of the church, and the entrance to it lay through a shady little garden, entered by a wicket-gate which was scarcely observable amid the mass of creepers which twined about it in rank luxuriance. Through this wicket he and Eutyches carried the poor wounded lad, and the humble presbyter, thankful for the opportunity of helping one of his countrymen, laid the young Ostrogoth on his own bed, and entrusted him to the charge of his sister, who kept his house.

There for a time we must leave him, and narrate the savage and shameful tragedy which thereon ensued. For not even in the church were the hunted remnant of the Goths to find a secure refuge. They were within; they had barred the gates; they determined, if the place were assaulted by violence, to sell their lives dear. But the mob of their assailants, thwarted for the moment, had forced their way through the soldiers into the Forum, and were now yelling at the Royal Gate of the Palace, demanding that Arcadius should give them leave to violate the right of asylum and put a final end to the to terror of Gothic intimidation. It was always the impulse of Arcadius to yield. Perhaps he thought it useless to attempt resistance. Perhaps he fancied in his muddled and bewildered religionism that a holocaust of the Goths could not be but a pleasing sacrifice to God. Perhaps he fell back on his own edict that State criminals of the worst dye could not be protected by the rights of sanctuary. Be that as it may, he declined to interfere. Then the mob flew back to the church, pressed into their service every ladder which could be found, swarmed to the roofs of the sacred building, and tore them up, and broke them down with axes and hammers and battering-rams. Below was the dreadful spectacle of thousands of warriors densely wedged together in the sacred space, unable to defend themselves, unable to strike a single blow; above, on the ladders and walls and roofs, were the faces of their enemies, distorted by hatred and malignant triumph. There are scenes and occasions in which men become transformed into incarnate demons. It was so on that dreadful day with the mob of Constantinople. Pitiless as at the games of the Amphitheatre, they gloated on the final scene of slaughter, which incarnadined the sacred place with rivers of gore. Many of the Goths, seeing their desperate extremity, embraced their brethren-in-arms, and heroically fell by their own or one another’s friendly swords. Others sat down on the pavement, with their heads bowed upon their knees, awaiting whatever form of death might come. Many who were Christians joined in the lilt of some Christian chant; others who were still Pagans raised fragments of the songs of their native land. The butchery did not last long when hundreds were hurling down on them showers of stones, and masses of burning wood, and huge fragments of masonry, and most of them chose rather to die by each other’s hands. In the course of an hour not one was left alive. Portions of the church had caught fire, and there were places where the creeping streams of fire were quenched in blood. By evening, through the dismantled roofs of the wrecked edifice, the silent heavens looked down on masses of ruin, and blackened beams, and shattered rafters, and heaps of dying men and charred corpses, and broken arms.

History knows but of one scene which resembles this in its tragedy: it is the massacre of Corcyra. But in the massacre of Corcyra, B.C. 425, only 300 perished. That was on Mount Istone, not in any temple or sacred place. In this massacre at Constantinople 7,000 were helplessly and pitilessly butchered in a church which but a day or two before had rung with hymns and murmured with prayers to the White Christ, to the God of all mercy and all compassion.

CHAPTER XXXIV

GAÏNAS MEETS HIS DOOM

Such were the frightful tidings which reached the Ostrogothic chieftain in his camp at the Hebdomon. His wife had been slain; one-third of his army had been massacred; the gates of Constantinople were closed, and its walls garrisoned against him. His brave son, Thorismund, was with him, but he knew not the fate of the son of his heart, his beloved and beautiful Walamir. But there was no time to waste in anguish or in funeral obsequies—the case demanded instant action. Typhos was still left in power as Prætorian Præfect at Constantinople, and with Typhos he was in secret agreement. But this last thread of hope was speedily cut short. True that Typhos seemed almost indispensable to Arcadius for the moment, because, bad as he was, the unscrupulous thoroughness of his impartial oppression helped to replenish the exhausted treasury. But the breach between the Emperor and the Goths was now irreparable. Gaïnas was declared a public enemy. An extraordinary commission was appointed to examine into the misdeeds of Typhos. His manifold acts of treachery were exposed. He was flung into prison. For a time his execution was only averted by the intercession of Aurelian, who was now recalled from his undeserved banishment. But doomsday came to Typhos at last, as it comes in turn to all transgressors. Amid universal detestation, unaided by the vast treasures he had amassed for such brief enjoyment, he expiated his manifold malfeasance under the hands of the common executioner, and his wife died, shunned and execrated, in abject misery.

Gaïnas broke up his camp, and marched forward to ravage the lands of Thrace. But there comes to many a man who was once the spoiled favourite of fortune a time when he finds that everything has turned for him to thorns. Gaïnas and his army were utterly baulked of the rich plunder which they had hoped to win from the depopulation of Thrace. The Romans had everywhere been encouraged to contempt and defiance by the disaster of the barbarians at Constantinople. Gaïnas found the cities not undefended, like those of Asia; not with crumbling walls, but powerfully garrisoned and amply fortified. To take them by siege was impossible: time and siege-trains alike were lacking. In the place of harvests he found only wastes of stubble: the fields had been reaped already, the grain stored, the cattle driven into places of safety. It seemed as if he and all his Goths were engaged in a fruitless raid, in which at last they would be reduced to starve.

Overwhelmed with anxiety and despair, he made his way towards the Hellespont. He would once more cross to the lands of Asia, which, ravaged as they had been, still seemed to offer an inexhaustible resource. But meanwhile another event had happened.

Fravitta, a Goth by birth, a Pagan in religion, was, as we have said, by conviction a member of the Roman party. He had married a Roman wife; he accepted the duties of civilisation as the only rôle hereafter open to his fellow-countrymen. The line of Claudian was often on his lips:—

We are all one nation.
’Quod cuncti gens una sumus.’

Already, in his earlier days, he had, at peril of his own life, saved Theodosius from the dangerous conspiracy of Eriulph. His fiery youth was passed, but his courage was unquenched, his allegiance unshaken. He came forward and offered his sword and his services to Arcadius. The Emperor elevated him to the rank of Commander-in-Chief in place of Gaïnas, and he promised to make the rebellious Goths accept the yoke, or to drive them back beyond the Danube.

The safety of Thrace had been practically secured by the prudence of its own inhabitants and the bold front which they presented to the enemy. Still, Fravitta watched the movements of Gaïnas, and received early notice of his intention to fall back on the Hellespont. Fravitta arranged his forces on the Asiatic shore, and confronted the Gothic army, which was extended along the coasts of the Chersonese from Parium to opposite Abydos; he also assembled a fleet of Liburnian galleys to prevent the passage of the straits.

Gaïnas grew desperate. He and his army were suffering from the pressure of famine. Cross over to Asia he must, at whatever cost; and yet he had not a single ship, and there was a fleet to bar his passage!

The Goths did not know the art of shipbuilding, and, even had they done so, time would have failed them for the purpose. Behind them was hungry desolation; before them a determined army and the wild sea-waves. Gaïnas ordered every tree they could find in the peninsula to be cut down, and rude rafts to be constructed from the trunks lashed together. These rafts, helmless and rudderless as they were, were laden with men and horses, and launched to the chances of the sea-currents to sweep them whither they would. Gaïnas felt strangely confident of victory, and waited on the shore to watch the success of his plan. But Fravitta was more than ready for him. His galleys were at some distance from the coast, and he had armed them with iron prows. A strong west wind came to his aid. No sooner did he observe the rafts in the grasp of the isthmus-currents than he swept down on one of the largest, split it, sank it, and dashed its struggling occupants, cavalry and infantry together, into the deep sea. Those who could not swim were instantly drowned, the more easily because many of them were encumbered with the weight of their armour. Those who could swim flung away their arms; but the galleys drove amongst them, and struck them down, or they were pushed under the billows by the points of hostile spears.

CHAPTER XXXV

WALAMIR AND EUTYCHES

Weeping, ringing his hands, casting up his tear-dimmed eyes to Heaven, Reikhild, the aged presbyter of the Catholic Goths, stood in his wrecked, desecrated church. It was the morning after the battle in the streets, and the spectacle which met his eyes could hardly fail to rend the heart of a pastor. What had been his Holy Sanctuary was now a revolting slaughterhouse, and among the fallen timbers, and shattered stones, and shapeless heaps of desolation, lay in their blood the torn limbs and putrescent corpses of hundreds of murdered men, which in the fierce summer sunlight had already begun to taint the air. His church was a ghastly ruin, an evitandum bidental, of which the very site would be thenceforward shunned as a haunt of demons, which no lustration would ever purify. On such an Aceldama no church could ever be built again. In the capital of the East the era of the Goths was at an end. Henceforward the billows of barbarian invasion would ‘roll shoreward, and strike and be dissipated’ on the cities of the Western world. With the Church had disappeared the congregation also. The occupation of the presbyter was gone; the work of his life was shipwrecked; the words of Reikhild, the son of Witiges, were ended.

Shocked beyond utterance by all that he had heard and witnessed, the old man tottered back to his lonely presbytery. But the scene had been altogether too much for him. Never had his aged sister seen him so pale; she noticed on his face, for the first time, that grey hue which is the harbinger of death. Nor was she mistaken. That very evening he took to his bed, and before a fortnight was over he had passed to his eternal rest.

Walamir still lay unconscious on the couch where they had laid him, and it was impossible for her to tend him with the incessant care needed by his critical condition now that she was beset by the new anxiety of her brother’s illness. The parabolani were already hard at work in the ruined church, endeavouring to bury in one huge pit the unnumbered corpses of the dead which strewed the sacred precincts and the neighbouring streets. They laid the wife of Gaïnas in a separate grave. Philip and David had come to help them, while Eutyches went into the presbyter’s house to see his wounded friend. He found Walamir in desperate case, unable to speak a word. The barb of the arrow by which he had been wounded was still embedded in the flesh of the shoulder, and unless it were cut out nothing could prevent a fatal termination. He must obviously be removed, and that at once. Eutyches hastened to the Patriarch, and begged that the young Goth might occupy his own bed and chamber till his recovery, or death, as he could himself easily sleep in an adjoining room in the many-chambered palace. Chrysostom, ever ready to do deeds of mercy, gladly assented, and the more so because the very limited hospital accommodation was already strained to its utmost capacity by the necessary tendance of wounded citizens, who in the present exasperation of feeling might resent the invasion of their privilege by a wounded Goth, even though that Goth was a mere boy, and though the secret that he was a son of Gaïnas was closely kept.

So Eutyches flew back to Philip, and with the aid of David and others of the parabolani carried Walamir in the easiest litter they could procure to the Patriarcheion. There the lad, still entirely unconscious, was laid with all tenderness on the bed of his friend, and Asclepias, the most skilful physician in Constantinople, was summoned to attend him. He pronounced that the arrow-head must be cut out without delay, and did not conceal that in the patient’s present state of exhaustion the operation might end in death. But the boy had the magnificent physique of his father, and had been in that splendid health which is the natural result of purity and moderation. There was hope for him when there would be none for another.

He recovered consciousness during the consultation, and asked that his agony might be ended by the excision of the rankling barb. In those days anæsthetics were unknown, but Walamir begged Eutyches to hold his left hand, set his teeth hard, and bared his breast. He would not scream under the knife. He bore the agony without a groan, only when the iron was drawn but he turned white as death, and fainted away with the ensuing hæmorrhage.

Nothing more could be done for him, the physician said, but to give him perfect rest and quiet, and simple, healthful food in small quantities at frequent intervals. All that skill and tenderness could do was done. The Lady Olympias came daily to the Patriarch’s palace to see that the wants of Chrysostom were properly attended to, and she often cared for the needs of the sick boy. Nicarete also took his case in hand, and tended him with all the skill which she had learnt from daily attention to the wants of the sick and suffering in the hospitals and in their own poor houses. And in the long evenings Eutyches, ‘with look and smile a healing in themselves,’ sat by his bedside, carrying out with unwearying solicitude every direction he had received, and feeling more and more closely drawn to the now helpless lad, who had so earnestly sought his friendship. When they had first met in the tent of Gaïnas, Walamir had been like a picture of early youth in its finest promise; now he lay there worn and wasted, and recognising no one, and with fortunes utterly ruined, and very nigh to death.

But in such a frame as his Nature fought hard against the ravages of illness. The wound in his leg was relatively trivial, and soon healed. The pure, untainted blood which coursed through his veins gradually wrought the cure of the other and more serious wound, and if only he could hold out against extreme weakness he might yet recover.

Eutyches anxiously awaited the hour when he should awake to perfect consciousness and the delirium would cease, in which he murmured constantly of the scenes of recent slaughter, which seemed to shroud his memory in a mist of blood.

At last the hour came. It was evening, and the warm sunlight streaming through the lattice, with an infinitely soft air from the sea, which, came in laden with the balm of the innumerable roses in the garden, shone and breathed on the boy’s face. He woke sane, sighed, opened his eyes, and, looking round him, asked in a low voice:

‘Where am I?’

‘You are in the palace of the Patriarch John, Walamir,’ said his friend.

‘And you?’ he said, fixing his large blue eyes on the face of Eutyches—’surely you are he—whom my brother Thorismund called the boy who looks like an angel?’

‘I am Eutyches, and your friend, and Philip is here, whom Thorismund loved well.’

‘How came I here? What has happened?’

’You were badly wounded.’

‘Ah!’

The words let loose upon him an avalanche of memories. For a time he did not speak; then a sob shook his frame and silent tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Oh, hide, hide from me the horrid vision!’ he said, lifting his hand as though he would shut out the phantasmagoria of hideous recollections. ‘My father?’ he asked faintly.

‘The chief marched away with his army into Thrace.’

‘My brother?’

‘Thorismund escaped through the gates with some of his trusted warriors. He joined Gaïnas.’

‘My mother?’

Eutyches was silent.

‘Oh! you need not tell me. I remember, I remember all! And my people—what happened to all the rest that day?’

‘Do not talk more now, dear Walamir. You shall hear all in time. Try now to sleep.’

Walamir was, in truth, too exhausted to ask more. He lay back and closed his eyes, but could only sink into short and troubled slumbers. That night Olympias and Pentadia took it in turn to watch by his bedside.

Next day he seemed weaker. His mind was working incessantly, and it had nothing but tragedies on which to dwell.

The next evening he told Eutyches that he did not think that he could live. But Eutyches cheered him, holding him by the hand. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘you do not desire to live. But you are young; only think how much happiness may yet lie in store for you.’

‘I am young,’ he answered, ‘and the sunlight is warm, and the sea air sweet, and these roses are beautiful’—for Eutyches had put by his side the vase which David had given him, and it was full of roses—’but what have I to live for? My father and my brother are exiles, burning, perhaps vainly, for revenge. My mother is dead. My people are slain. I am homeless and friendless.’

‘Not friendless,’ said Eutyches. ‘We all love you. There is many a home which would receive you.’

‘Ay, as a slave,’ he said, ‘or a humble dependent. But that can never be for a son of Gaïnas and an Amaling of the Ostrogoths.’

‘Nay,’ said Eutyches, ’”sufficient for the day is its own evil.“ God will provide. Trust Him for the future. You are a Christian, though an Arian. Do you not know that Christ loves you?’

‘How can the White Christ of the Romans love me?’ he said. ‘He must have deserted us. He must be angry with us about some formula we cannot understand. How else could He have suffered us to perish? Why else could He have thus smitten me into helplessness and misery?’

‘Oh, hush! hush!’ said Eutyches. ‘I know little, I understand little. To confess to you the simple truth, I seem to care little about the hard, unintelligible words of which every idle tongue prates. But if I do not understand the doctrine, I try to do the will. I love Christ, and I know that Christ is love; and He is my Master and my Lord, and I have given my youth to Him, that He may have it under His own holy keeping, to save it from itself, and save it for Himself. Do I tire you?’

The only answer was a pressure of the hand.

‘Well then, Walamir, I seem to myself to know nothing of life, and to see nothing but its mysteries. I am but an ignorant boy, but I doubt whether even wise men—whether even he, the Patriarch, really understands what life means, or why God suffers us to be afflicted. I have not yet been much afflicted, though I, too, am an orphan, Walamir. The Patriarch gave me a home, and Philip loves me, and David, and you—and I am happy; and for the rest, doubtless the day of anguish will come to me, as it has come to you. We are born: let that come which must come. Only, may God help us for a short time to bear it, and make us faithful. I am sure that He cares for us. Try to live, Walamir; pray that you may live and serve.’

‘Tell me more of your faith,’ said Walamir.

‘I have been trained,’ said Eutyches, ‘from earliest childhood in holy homes. My father was a Catholic Goth. He died early. My mother loved God. I have been rocked in the cradle and nursed on the knees by saints of God, and that on which I built all my faith and all my love is that God is love, and that Christ is God.’

Again the mind of the Gothic boy was actively at work, and sorrows rushed in on him like a flood. He felt very tired, and as if he were at the point to die.

‘Eutyches’, he said, ‘I think that I am dying. Lean my head upon your shoulder.’

Eutyches took him in his arms and pillowed the weary head on his shoulder. His tears fell on his friend’s cheek as he stooped over him, but he spoke cheery words.

‘Walamir,’ he said, ‘something tells me you will not die, but live, and do great deeds. What you now need more than all is sleep. Nicarete takes care of you to-night. One night of good sleep, and you will recover. To-morrow morning I shall bring him to see you.’

‘Him?’ asked Walamir.

‘The Patriarch John,’ said Eutyches. ‘We call him so among ourselves.’

‘The great and holy Patriarch who blessed me in my father’s tent? He will not care to come and pray with a wretched, wounded, dying Gothic boy.’

‘He is all kindness,’ said Eutyches. ‘He will come, and you will live.’

The next morning, as Eutyches had prophesied, Walamir felt a little stronger. His wound was dressed by the good Nicarete, who was in her element in a sick-room. Then Chrysostom came and knelt by his bedside, and poured forth for him a deep, strong, short, and tender prayer. We have heard how many a life has been saved by an affusion of blood from the pulses of strong and healthy veins. Such a moral and spiritual affusion into the life of the young Ostrogoth was the prayer of Chrysostom. From that moment he visibly amended. Very soon he could be carried into the garden, and could lie under a couch in the deep shade, among the flowers. A little longer and he could walk thither, leaning on the arm of Eutyches, who had been partly set free from work to tend him in his recovery.

It was then that the very serious question arose what was to be done with him; in what way they could provide for his future?

Philip and his friends were discussing it together. ‘Of course,’ said Philip, ’he,’ pointing his finger towards the Archbishop’s study—’he would readily provide for him; but how, and where? That is the difficulty. After what has happened the people hate the very sight of a Goth. He would hardly be safe from insult in the streets. If anyone but ourselves knew that he was the son of Gaïnas, there are plenty of brutes and villains in the city who would strike him down.’

‘I wish we could keep him with us,’ said Eutyches.

‘Impossible!’ said David. ‘He is born Ostrogoth. Much as he loves you, Eutyches, his temperament is as different from yours in most things as any nature could be. The spirit and the aspirations of his wild forefathers are in him. He will be a warrior, and in these days no other career is open to him. He could not live our quiet life. The pen may be for us; the sword must be for him.’

‘Would it be possible to send him back to his father?’

‘It would be full of risk,’ said David; ‘and in the present fortunes of Gaïnas the outlook for him would be desperate.’

‘Then, what has the wise David to suggest?’ asked Philip; ‘for I am quite sure that you would not say all this if you had no plan.’

CHAPTER XXXVI

HIS MURDERED FATHER’S HEAD

So Walamir found a home, and often joined his friends in the Patriarcheion in their bathes and strolls and games in the gymnasium, having as it were grappled Eutyches to his soul with hooks of steel. He would have been even happy—for youth is less grievously haunted than age or manhood by the gnawing vultures of memory—if no further events had disturbed his life. But his happiness was constantly shaken by the dark news about his father’s reverses. There was no way of hearing from him or communicating with him, nor did the young Ostrogoth dare to speak of him openly, or to let it be known that he was his son. He was again plunged in despair when he heard the intelligence of the drowning of thousands more of his countrymen by Fravitta’s fleet during their wild attempt to cross the Hellespont on unguided rafts. After that catastrophe nothing was known for a long time, except that Gaïnas had ridden away with his remaining cavalry towards the banks of the Ister. Walamir feared that he would never again hear of his father or of his strong brother, Thorismund.

It was now January, 401. One day he was walking home with Eutyches from a rowing excursion on the Bosporus, when they saw a crowd of people assembling in the colonnade of the Forum, and were told that a deputation of Huns from Uldes, the Hunnish king, was marching to the Palace with a present to Arcadius and offers of allegiance and peace.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL

The wicked spirit, which at that time had gained possession of the affairs of men.—Zosimus.

We cannot, for some time, see Walamir again, or live among the Goths. We must remain in the stifling, corrupted city, amidst its meanness, its hatreds, its ecclesiastics, its society seething with cabals, its Court rank with intrigues, its base, manifold corruptions of the world, the devil, and the flesh.

The longer Chrysostom remained at work, the more pronounced of necessity became his antagonism to the gross worldliness of a purely nominal Christianity. Unfortunately, in his struggle with it his unflinching honesty of purpose did not save him from errors of judgment; did not enable him always to see things in their due perspective, nor to deal with them in the most effective and the least exasperating way. Already the main body of the clergy were his deadly enemies, especially the noisiest and the most domineering of them, and those who arrogated the right to speak for themselves, and for what they called ’the Church,’ by which they never meant anything but the cliques who shared their own ‘views.’ A little group of the best among the ecclesiastics was devoted to him. Men like the bright and earnest Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis; men like the venerable and original Synesius, as long as he remained in Constantinople; men like St. Cassian, who ultimately founded the great monastery of St. Victor at Marseilles; good presbyters like Germanus, the friend and relative of Cassian, and so closely linked with him in friendship that they were said to have but one soul in two bodies; sincere enthusiasts and disciplinarians like Serapion the Archdeacon and the Presbyter Tigrius—knew his saintliness, recognised his great intellect and incomparable worth. But he was feared and hated by the majority: by the great mass of loose, greedy, and fiercely dogmatic monks, led by their Archimandrite, Isaac; by the too numerous bishops who neglected their sees for their greed or ambition; by the great mass of the clergy, who would not be parted from their youthful, agapetæ, or give up their cringing to the wealthy and powerful; and by all the sham widows, and sham virgins, and sham deaconesses, who arrogated to themselves the reverence of sainthood by virtue of the distinctive dress, which served them at once as a passport to delightful freedom and as a broadened phylactery of pretentious profession. All these detested him with that bitterest kind of virulence which the world calls ‘theological,’ and recognises as not to be paralleled among secular circles.

As for the world of fashion and wealth, at first it did not make up its mind whether to crush Chrysostom or to patronise him. It soon found the latter course impossible. His warnings were so unmistakable in their plainness, so direct in their aim, so unique in their severity, that they could not be classed among the other thousand utterances of vapid pulpit rhetoric, which were generally understood to mean nothing in particular. This man was not indulging in the language of professional conventionality. It was quite clear that he meant what he said, and that he would act up to it. For he was not content with idle denunciation, or with talk which might be regarded as suitable enough for St. Sophia, but might be safely ignored in ordinary life. On the contrary, he declared in the most solemn manner that he would excommunicate the worst offenders, and that he would repel from the Holy Table those who obstinately refused to listen to his warnings and to reform their habits.

Preachers in all ages lave attacked particulars of dress. St. Jerome was so much disgusted with the innovation of Roman ladies in sprinkling their hair with gold dust that he calls it ‘reddening their locks with flames of Gehenna.’ Mediæval preachers used to attack the custom of wearing peaked boots. It is not, perhaps, wise to enter on such vain crusades. Fashions are but symptoms of passing vanity and folly, and their removal would not mean the cure of the disease. Chrysostom, however, thought it right to discourage and ridicule the silk-embroidered boots of young men, which were the marks of the most elaborate dandyism. He drew scornful pictures of these youthful dandies carefully picking their way through the streets so as not to soil their precious shoes. ’Boots,’ he said, ‘were made to be soiled. If your boots are so gorgeous, why don’t you take them off and wear them on your heads? You laugh, but I feel more inclined to weep over your follies.’

It was a more serious matter to kindle against himself the wrath of the worst part of the female world, but Chrysostom thought it his duty to attack the custom of wearing fringes. To us this might seem unworthy of his good sense; but in all such matters we cannot judge unless we are able to transfer ourselves to the habits of thought which prevail in other lands and other countries. In the East, from time immemorial, it had been regarded as worse than unbecoming for a woman to have her hair uncovered in public, and especially in sacred places. St. Paul himself shared this view. He approved of the Oriental prejudice which, in spite of the custom of Greece, forbade a woman to have her hair uncovered ’because of the angels.’ If a woman appeared with unveiled head, it was believed that the evil spirits, the Shedîm, the impure demons, immediately alighted and sat upon it. The belief continued in the days of Mahomet. Khadijah tested whether it really was Gabriel or not who appeared to the Prophet, by taking off her veil; whereupon Gabriel immediately retired, which an evil spirit would not have done. In Byzantine pictures the hair of the Virgin Mary is, as a rule, carefully concealed. The same practice continues among the Eastern Jews to this day. At Constantinople itself the abandonment of the chalebi, a hideous female headdress of the East, was held to be a sufficient reason to account for the advent of the cholera along the coasts of the Bosporus.

But, apart from this ancient conviction, the wearing of a fringe of hair on the forehead had hitherto been the recognised sign of women of bad character. It seemed to Chrysostom a shameless thing that women professing to be Christians should have the effrontery—for so he regarded it—to appear in church in a guise which seemed to defy public propriety. In public and in private he spoke of this practice with angry and disdainful sarcasm.

Superannuated coquettes who aimed at juvenility of dress and manner were Chrysostom’s pet abhorrence; and, unfortunately for him, the leaders of female fashion at Constantinople in his day were three ladies of high rank, of luxurious manners, of enormous possessions, and of a worldly morality which was in no way disturbed by ecclesiastical scrupulosities of outward observance. They excited his severest reprobation. They were Marsa, Castricia, and Epigraphia, and all three were now widows, which to Chrysostom—accustomed to the unaffected piety and genuine devotion of his mother, Anthusa—made their behaviour seem the more detestable. Marsa was the widow of the general Promotus, who had been suppressed and put to death by the jealousy of Rufinus. Theodosius had taken pity on her two children, and they had been educated with his sons Arcadius and Honorius. Besides this high title to social distinction, Marsa was, on the mother’s side, a cousin of the Empress. Thus, she was the unquestioned leader of fashion among the ladies of the capital.

Castricia had only recently been left a widow by the death of the brave Consular, Saturninus, who had probably died during the exile to which he had been doomed by the jealousy of Gaïnas. We know nothing more of her than that she closely resembled her two friends.

The worst of the three, by unanimous testimony, was Epigraphia. In exact proportion as Chrysostom honoured a widow who, like Olympias, was a widow indeed, he felt repelled by a widow who, forgetful of her loss, cared only for the pleasures of the world, and gave rise to grave scandal by her light demeanour. Epigraphia threw open her house promiscuously to all the clergy of worldly habits and dubious antecedents, and also to women whose character was known to be the reverse of estimable. Added to this, the way in which she tried to look young by the resuscitation of her faded charms was, to an ardent ascetic like Chrysostom, an intolerable folly.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

FRESH TROUBLES

The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and festering sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with oil.—Isaiah i. 5–6.

We have already seen enough to show the intense and all but universal corruption which ruined the true work of the Church in Antioch, and still more in Constantinople. It is distressing to find the same moral apostasy, the same revolting unreality, prevailing like a pestilence over the whole of Thrace, Asia Minor, and Pontus—indeed, over the whole of that region to which St. Peter and St. James had addressed their œcumenical Epistles. As far back as the beginning of the second century the Church, on Pliny’s testimony, had so far conquered the world, even in remote Bithynia, as to empty the ancient temples of the gods; but now those gods and the vices they represented—Ares and Aphrodite, Plutus and Cybele, Moloch and Ashtoreth, Mammon and Belial—were reinstated in Christian sanctuaries under the disguise of the holiest names, and that by the clergy themselves. There is abundant proof of the like intrusion of the world, the flesh, and the devil among myriads of professing Churchmen throughout Northern Africa; and if it were within the scope of our purpose to look at all closely at the Western world, we should see that Rome was as Constantinople, and Milan as Ephesus, and Ravenna as Alexandria. All the faithful might sigh, ‘The Church has triumphed—but where is holiness? The Church is splendid, dominant, orthodox, oppressive; services are numerous, ritualism elaborate; women kneel to priests and kiss their hands; the Holy Supper has become a gorgeous and magic sacrifice, ending in the creation of a material idol—but where is the Christ of Nazareth and of Calvary?’ Pagans like Eunapius, and Libanius, and Zosimus, said freely among themselves, ‘Christianity, at first so sweet and simple in its moral ideal, has degenerated into a more intolerant and no less immoral paganism; it has incorporated the old superstitions which we had flung away; it has become more material, and more abject in its corruption, than our Neo-platonism; it has worthy sons, but most of its votaries have lost our manlier virtues, and have not failed to assimilate our acknowledged vices.’ In Egypt, for instance, there was many an honest waverer who saw far more beauty and goodness in the life of the heathen Hypatia than in that of a hypocritic tyrant like the Christian Patriarch, Theophilus of Alexandria.

Christians who were Christians indeed felt their darker hours troubled by misgivings which were almost intolerable. They looked upon the abhorrent worldliness and falsity—which often seemed to them to be ‘the falling away’ of which St. Paul prophesied—as a sign of the nearness of the Antichrist. No language came more naturally to their lips than that of the Hebrew prophets. A century had not yet passed since the conversion of the first Christian Emperor and the assembling of the first Œcumenical Council; four centuries had barely passed since, on that first radiant Christmas Eve, the angels had sung, ’Peace on earth, goodwill towards men,’ and already the chief living saint and most learned writer of the day had left Rome with a curse upon his lips against her Babylonian wickedness. And if such was the condition of the Church in the so-called See of St. Peter, what was the state of things elsewhere? Egypt was in a turmoil with barbarous bishops and brutal monks. The pilgrimages to Jerusalem were, as Gregory of Nyssa had testified, scenes of vulgar debauchery. The Holy City itself was a carnival of violence and littleness. Carthage and its daughter dioceses were not only trembling under the tyranny of wicked governors, but were torn with the alternate turbulence and persecution of Donatists and Circumcellions, between whom and many of the champions of Catholicism there was but little to choose. Asia was in the deplorable condition which we shall see immediately. And here, in the New Rome of Constantinople, there was a weak Emperor with the soul of a slave; a Frankish Empress domineering and unscrupulous as a Semiramis; a Court steeped in frivolity and guile; a world of officialism cankered through and through with bribery, greed, and oppression; swarms of sham monks and clerical adventurers; intrigue and simony rampant on every side; numbers of presbyters living with their ‘spiritual sisters’ in all but open concubinage; coquettish virgins, and nominal widows, and painted haridans; the lewdness of the theatre finding scope for its wit in the scandals of the clergy, and the rage of the Blue and Green factions of the Hippodrome uncontrolled in the smallest degree by the nominal Christianity of the population. Throngs of people rushed off to the public spectacles and wild-beast shows, even on Good Friday and Easter Day. On one Easter Day they saw a young charioteer, on the eve of his marriage, horribly trampled to death under the hoofs of the chariot-steeds. Avarice and licentiousness were rampant on every side. Among the lowest classes prevailed a mendicancy seething with atrocious impostures; among the upper classes, under the soft surface of voluptuous ostentation, there was a society rent by cliques and factions, bursting with splenetic malignity, and filled with such a universal plague of uncharitableness that, if here and there a saint emerged who was vexed, like Lot, with the filthy conversation and ungodly deeds of the wicked, he must be content to focus on himself the burning rays of ‘religious,’ even more than of secular, hatred, and to live with his head in clouds of poisonous flies. What could good men say of the Church in those days, as their tears fell on the page of Holy Writ, but ’Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water; thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves?’ ’The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?’

Whether such reflexions be justifiable or no, whether the world had or had not re-intruded into the Church, whether or not the Church had gained from the infiltration of pagan superstitions and the oppressive triumph of Pharisaic externalism, the reader must judge from almost every page of the subsequent narrative, which, in the general picture presented, is a direct reflexion of the contemporary testimony of Christian saints.

For now an event happened which was the first distinct dislodgment of the loose snowdrifts, which were soon to rush down in overwhelming avalanche on the doomed head of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

It happened that a Synod of twenty-nine bishops was sitting at Constantinople, under the presidency of Chrysostom, to settle some matter of minor ecclesiastical importance. One day in September, a.d. 400, while they were in session in one of the rooms adjoining the apse of St. Sophia, a bishop who was not a member of the Synod, Eusebius of Valentinianopolis, an obscure Cilbian village in the valley of the Cayster, advanced into the assembly, holding in his hand a written document, and with an air and tone of intense indignation cried that he had come to denounce a series of intolerable scandals, which had disgraced the Churches of Asia.

Startled and horrified, the Synod asked for an explanation. Speaking with fierce anger, Eusebius said, ‘I am here to accuse and denounce a bishop of Asia of seven enormous crimes—of simony, embezzlement, luxury, theft, malversation, misprision of murder, and incontinence.

‘First, he bought his own episcopal see for an immense sum, and to recoup himself deliberately sells other episcopal sees at a regular tariff.

‘Secondly, he has alienated to his own private use an estate left to the Church by Basilina, mother of the Emperor Julian.

‘Thirdly, he has melted the silver chalices and plate of the Church to supply money to his son.

‘Fourthly, he has taken marbles from the baptistery to inlay his own private baths.

‘Fifthly, he has taken possession of marble pillars which had been prepared for the church, and has used them for the adornment of his own triclinium.

‘Sixthly, he has, in spite of his episcopal oaths, recalled his wife, with whom he openly lives; and by whom, since his consecration, he has had several children.

CHAPTER XXXIX

BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS

The priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say: Is not the Lord among us? none evil can come upon us.—Micah iii. 11.

Chrysostom would fain have taken Philip with him, for Philip grew more and more endeared and more and more useful to him. But Philip, as manager of the Archbishop’s household and an assistant in all matters of business, could not be spared for a long absence from the Patriarcheion. To take Eutyches would have been pleasant, but it seemed undesirable to expose his youth to the inevitable hardships of rough travel; and Chrysostom, who hoped for the day when he might be a presbyter or a bishop, and all that such an officer of the Church should be, was unwilling to disenchant him too painfully by those glaring contrasts between the ideal and the reality which would confront him at every turn in the now corrupt, superstitious, and simoniacal churches of St. Paul, St. Philip, and St. John. So Chrysostom took with him the graver David, whom he esteemed no less highly for his work and character, but whose grave temperament had not the buoyancy and brightness which often refreshed him in the other two. David also was considering the question whether he could face the responsibilities of the presbyterate; but he had been more familiarised than Eutyches with the existence of ecclesiastical unworthiness by his longer and more varied experience.

So Chrysostom set sail, accompanied by the Deacon Heracleides—a man of the highest worth—by some other presbyters and deacons, and by David. He had already sent before him Cyrinus of Chalcedon, Paul of Heraclea, and Palladius of Helenopolis, who were to act as his assessors. In the guileless straightforwardness of his disposition he was unaware of the fact that the first two were wholly out of sympathy with himself, even if they had not yet assumed the attitude of his open enemies. Still more generous and guileless was the arrangement which he made for a substitute to supply his place in the pulpit of St. Sophia during his absence. He appointed the worthless Severian of Gabala to fulfil this function, and Severian of Gabala was a contemptible intriguer of the most vulgar description.

Gabala was a town of Galilee, and its bishop under ordinary circumstances would have been of less account in the great world than one of our obscurest country clergymen. But Severian was ambitious, and regarded himself as an orator. He did not mean to hide himself at so dreadful a depth below the surface as Gabala, and so long as he advanced his own position he cared very little what became of his sheep in the wilderness. He separated himself from them for years, with little loss to them, but without the smallest compunction, so long as he fancied he could further his private interests. Wealth, rank, fame, Court favour—these were the dazzling lures which the devil dangled before him. This clerical opportunist would hold no views which were not popular; would express no opinion which would tend to hinder his advancement; would reject no alliance, however contemptible, which seemed likely to elevate him ever so little in the direction of the inch-high dignities which he coveted, and which a diseased ambition represented as enormous altitudes. With the whole meanness of his soul he was exclusively devoted to

He was thus in every respect the antithesis to Chrysostom, whose simple godliness, apostolic simplicity, and transparent guilelessness he despised from the whole height of his own inferiority.

CHAPTER XL

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS

Quam dissimilis est nunc a se ipso populus Christianus!

’Philip and David,’ said Chrysostom, ’Proclus has just told me’—Proclus was the young deacon who helped Serapion to arrange audiences with the Patriarch, and he ultimately became Patriarch himself—’that I am to receive a visit to-day from the well-known presbyter, Vigilantius. He has travelled in many lands, and brings me a letter of introduction from the Western poet, Paulinus, Bishop of Nola. I think you will like to hear something about the great men whom he has met; so, if Eutyches will take a little of your work, you may come in after dinner and meet the Gaulish presbyter.

‘Eutyches won’t mind, I know,’ said David, ‘for there is not much to do to-day, and he is anxious to write a letter to his friend Walamir, who, as we have just heard, is now with Alaric at Æmona.’

‘Very well,’ said Chrysostom. ’Vigilantius will be here at noon.’

‘I hope, father,’ said Philip slyly, ‘you will give him a better dinner than you gave to the Bishop of Berœa, or we shall have more trouble.’

‘I shall never hear the last of that unhappy dinner,’ said Chrysostom, smiling; ‘and you know it was all your fault, Philip. But, happily, the Lady Olympias has now taken all that out of your hands, and I have no doubt she will manage much better.’

So Vigilantius was invited. He was a Gaul, born at Convenæ, and afterwards settled at Calagurris. Jerome has deluged him with some of the—pardon the phrase, reader, which, if I dared to quote, would be more than amply justified—of the worst clerical and ecclesiastical Billingsgate. Untaught by the way in which his own heart had been lacerated by shameless calumnies, the eremite of Bethlehem was disgracefully reckless in the virulence with which he spoke of others. Jerome habitually calls him, not Vigilantius, ‘the watchful,’ but Dormitantius, ‘the snorer,’ just as, after his quarrel with the learned, saintly, and ascetic Rufinus, of whom originally he could speak in no terms of eulogy too exalted, he pursued that great man, even to his death, with the name of Grunnius, ‘the grunter.’ Even when he lay dead in Sicily, the unforgiving saint, in a commentary on Holy Scripture, has no better epitaph for the friend of his youth, whom he had once called ‘his true colleague and brother,’ than ’the Scorpion is crushed to the earth between Enceladus and Porphyrion, and the hydra of many heads has ceased to hiss against me,’—this ‘hydra’ being one of the holiest Churchmen of his day, whom Bishop Palladius describes as a man of ‘unequalled learning and unequalled humility.’

It is said that the father of Vigilantius was a vintner; hence Jerome calls him ‘a base-born tapster, a Samaritan, a Jew, a man who belches forth his impure crapulousness, whose tongue ought to be cut out by surgeons, and his insane head healed.’ But, in spite of this torrent of foul invective, Vigilantius is spoken of with respect by the voice of history. He was a man of blameless life, of bright intelligence, of fearless candour, and of a forgiving modesty, which is best illustrated by the fact that he never answered by a single syllable the rancorous and frantic vituperations to which he had been subjected by the passionate recluse. The extent to which we are forced to discount the invectives of Jerome may best he estimated by the fact that he has nothing better to say of Chrysostom, a saint whose holiness was incomparably superior to his own, than that he was ‘a mad, pestilent, contaminated, furious, and insanely tyrannical person, who had sold his soul to the devil,’ and ‘an impure demon who drags along a filth of words like a torrent.’ Jerome, it is true, only translated these words from a hideous libel written by Theophilus; but he lent them the endorsement of his Latin eloquence and his mighty name. And the other saint of his day—St. Ambrose—he described as ‘a croaking raven, who, himself entirely dingy, laughs in marvellous fashion at the colours of all other birds.’ There are some men, and even good men, who seem at once to inspire each other with mutual antipathy; there are others who are at once drawn to one another. Vigilantius and Jerome disliked each other almost from the day on which they met. Their characters and their temperaments were wholly dissimilar. But the Gallic presbyter felt at once drawn towards Chrysostom, and there was something in his frank impetuosity which attracted the Patriarch’s sympathy.

After their brief repast, which the simple Vigilantius thought excellent, though he had been warned beforehand that Chrysostom’s entertainments were profoundly despised by connoisseurs, the two youths came in.

‘Let me introduce to you,’ said Chrysostom, ‘two of my young secretaries, Philip of Antioch, and David—of Constantinople at present, but once of Nazareth.’

‘Of Nazareth?’ asked Vigilantius. ‘I know well the village where Christ was born. I visited it when I was staying with the saintly Rufinus at Jerusalem. Never can I forget its sweet, green valleys, and the prospect from its hill, on whose summit the Lord Jesus in His happy boyhood must have stood so often.’ He fixed so earnest a gaze on David’s face that the youth was not sorry when Eutyches came in, and called him to settle some point in the Patriarch’s correspondence about which he was uncertain.

‘Who is that youth from Nazareth?’ asked Vigilantius. ’I fear I stared at him too rudely, and made him blush. But my reason was that I have seen in the catacombs of St. Callistus, at Rome, a picture of Christ of which his face at once reminded me.’

‘A picture of Christ!’ said Chrysostom. ‘Are there such in existence? I thought that we had every reason to disapprove of all attempts to represent Him in His human aspect. The Council of Eliberis forbade it, and the great Eusebius of Cæsarea was almost indignant with the Empress Constantia when she asked him to procure her a picture of Christ.’

CHAPTER XLI

A FAREWELL

What a long talk you have been having!’ said Eutyches, when David and Philip came out of the study. ’Tell me all about it.’

‘Well, first you told us all about St. Felix and the Bishop of Nola.’

‘You witty fellow!’ said Eutyches.

‘Then you pulled my ears, for which you shall catch it.’

‘It was less punishment than you deserved.’

‘Then Vigilantius told us all about Jerome of Bethlehem, who, according to him, must be a singularly amiable person.’

‘You are no good,’ said Eutyches; ’David is ten times as patient as you, and is never in a hurry, as you always are. So I shall ask him all the rest.’

David gave him a sketch of what had passed, though, with characteristic sweetness, he softened down all that seemed most unfavourable to Jerome. Eutyches listened with interest, and some surprise.

‘Have you written to Walamir?’ asked Philip. ‘If you have, I hope you gave our kindliest greetings to him and Thorismund.’

‘I have,’ said Eutyches. ‘One of Aurelian’s soldiers happened to be starting for Illyricum to-morrow, and he is going to take my letter. I must give it him at once. I shall have to pass through the Chalkoprateia.’

‘To the owls with your Chalkoprateia!’ said Philip; ’you know I am too busy to come with you.’

CHAPTER XLII

THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN

A few days afterwards the Archdeacon Serapion came into the room of the Patriarch with a face flushed with indignation.

‘I come, my Lord Archbishop,’ he said, ‘to bring a complaint of the utmost gravity against the Bishop of Gabala.’

‘What has Severian been doing now?’ asked the Patriarch.

‘My Lord, I was sitting yesterday in the Thomaites with the Presbyter Tigrius, the Bishop Palladius, Proclus, young Eutyches, and others, when Severian passed into the anteroom where Philip was sitting. He asked for you; but you had gone to visit a sick presbyter, and he again passed out through the hall. Eutyches and the others rose as usual, and with them the Ladies Pentadia and Olympias, who were awaiting your return, as they had to see you on business respecting the institution of deaconesses. I did not rise. I happened to be writing, and did not observe his presence. If I had done so I should probably have risen, although I cannot tolerate the Bishop of Gabala.’

‘It were better to rise, Serapion,’ said Chrysostom. ’It is a conventional mark of honour paid to bishops, and has become usual.’

‘I will do so in future,’ said Serapion. ‘The wish of your Dignity on the subject is more than sufficient for me. I cannot, indeed, stand up when he passes with any pleasure, and do not pretend to feel any respect for Severian. To me he seems to be a traitorous hypocrite.’

‘I grieve that your feelings about him are so strong. You can, however, respect the office, even if you cannot respect the man. And should we not fight, Serapion, against these intense feelings of dislike and disdain for our fellow-men? We all have need of large forgiveness, of infinite forbearance. No man is all devil; something of the angel must be somewhere hidden in the depths of his heart. The Holy Spirit within us may be desecrated, but never wholly lost.’

‘I bow to your reproach,’ said Serapion. ‘I will follow your exhortation, although my disdain has been kindled by his treachery and baseness towards you. But what I have to report is very serious. Seeing that I had not stood up, Severian glared at me, and said in a tone of fury, in the hearing of us all, “Christ was never made man.”’

‘Surely that is inconceivable, Serapion,’ said Chrysostom; ’your ears must have deceived you.’

‘Mistake was impossible,’ said the Archdeacon.

‘But what could he have meant?’ said the Patriarch.

‘What conceivable object could he have had in uttering words of blasphemy which, if he spoke them, would at once brand him as an hypocrite?’

‘I cannot pretend to explain,’ answered Serapion, ’but will you question the others? They are here.’

Those whom Serapion had mentioned came in one by one. Olympias and Pentadia said that they had been seated at some distance from the table where Serapion sat, and the back of Bishop Severian was turned to them; but those words, uttered in fierce anger, they unquestionably heard. Proclus and Tigrius also heard them, and noticed the look and accent of fury with which they were spoken. Eutyches, who had been sitting by Serapion, and who rose as the Bishop of Gabala passed, said that the Bishop seemed first to mutter something which he could not hear, and then burst out with the blasphemous sentence.

‘What did you take to be his meaning, my boy?’ asked the Archbishop.

‘I thought,’ said Eutyches, ‘that in his uncontrollable anger he had broken into a sort of oath. May I speak further?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Well, sir, St. Paul, when he speaks about the abuse of tongues at Corinth, says, “No man speaking by the Spirit of God says ’Jesus be anathema.’“ I have heard you explain this to mean that in overpowering excitement men lost all self-control, and their tongues were then forced by evil spirits to call out blasphemies. The word which exploded from the wrath of Severian reminded me of that.’

‘My boy,’ said Chrysostom, ‘I can no longer doubt that Severian did speak those awful words, and there may be wisdom in your suggestion about them. Let the Bishop be summoned into my presence.’

Severian came, serenely unconscious of what had happened—came in with the airs and graces of the handsome, portly, well-groomed, self-satisfied ecclesiastic. Chrysostom rose to receive him, but rose with so stern a look upon his face that the Bishop of Gabala suddenly stopped short in the well-turned compliments and remarks about the weather into which he had begun to glide.

‘Your Religiosity seems to be disturbed to-day,’ he said.

‘Severian,’ said the Patriarch, ‘it is reported to me by six credible witnesses, who could not and would not lie, that you exclaimed, in their hearing, “Christ has not been made man.”’

‘How can you listen to such vain gabble?’ said Severian. ’Why, if I believed half, or a tenth part of the things which are daily said about you, I should regard you as an utter demon.’

‘What may be said about me,’ said Chrysostom, with contemptuous sternness, ‘is not the question. If any man can witness ought against me, let him speak. But,’ he said, with a wave of the hand, ‘the charge against you is perfectly definite.’

‘I never said anything of the kind,’ said Severian, with brazen front. ‘When and where did I say it?’

‘Yesterday, in the Thomaites.’

‘Who says so?’

CHAPTER XLIII

’ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS!’

’Philip,’ said Eutyches one morning as he came in to the day’s work, ‘there are four of the strangest beings you ever saw in the Thomaites.’

‘Ghosts or angels—which?’ asked Philip. ‘Are they like those you frightened the Goths with on the Palace walls?’

‘Neither, you trifler from Antioch!’ answered Eutyches, laughing; ‘but they look like spectres. They are old, but astonishingly tall, and look gaunt, wretched, and half-starved. They are dressed only in white sheepskins and sandals. Their black locks are long and matted. Their arms and legs are bare, and are covered with the marks of scars; and one of them has lost an ear.’

‘What do they want?’

‘They will only say that they have come to throw themselves on the protection of the Patriarch. Proclus has told them that he is engaged, but that they shall be admitted in a few minutes. Do go, and take a glance at them.’

Philip went into the Thomaites, and saw the four strange figures which Eutyches had described. They stood together, with downcast eyes, at the end of the hall, leaning on their staves. Their appearance as they stalked through the streets was so unusual that a crowd of soldiers and street-boys had accompanied them to the entrance of the Patriarcheion, and some of these were peeping in through the open gates. But the strangers seemed to be unconscious of the attention they excited, and stood silent, as if they were absorbed in their own thoughts. Their lips moved as in silent prayer.

‘I guessed whom they must be from your description, Eutyches,’ said Philip. ‘A glance showed me that they were hermits from the desert of Nitria. They can be no other than the four celebrated Tall Brothers. But what can they be doing here? I hope that their presence is not ominous. They belong to that—saving his Sanctity—that bad Patriarch of Alexandria, and I have heard that they have been most infamously persecuted by him.’

‘Tell me something about them.’

‘I will tell you the little I know, Eutyches. The eldest is Ammonius. He was the companion of the great St. Athanasius when he was exiled in 341, near sixty years ago, and fled to Italy. He was the first monk whom Rome had seen. He was then a youth from a desert monastery. The soft Romans were amazed at his gigantic size, his splendid figure, his sheepskins, his utter simplicity of life; for, amid their gorgeous gluttonies, he ate nothing but bread and vegetables, and drank only water. It was owing to the strange impulse of envy and admiration excited at Rome by his complete indifference to the world that monasteries have been introduced into Italy by Ambrose. When Athanasius went back Ammonius became a hermit.’

‘How did he lose his ear?’

‘He cut it off; and that is why he is called Parotes.’

‘Why? Did he think one ear enough?’ asked Eutyches, laughing.

‘No; but in those days Theophilus pretended immensely to admire these Tall Brothers, and wanted to seize him by force and make him a bishop. He hated the thought of it, and only desired to live far away from a corrupted Church and an evil world. So he fled into the depths of the Libyan desert. But even thither the agents of Theophilus pursued him. Finding that he could not escape, he cut off his ear, and, going out to meet them, said, “Go! your purpose is vain. The canons forbid any man who is mutilated to be ordained”—and he pointed to his bleeding ear.’

‘What a man!’ said Eutyches. ‘But what are those scars on their arms and legs?’

CHAPTER XLIV

EPIPHANIUS INTERVENES

One way, and one way only, was open by which the Patriarch of Alexandria might hope to ruin the Patriarch of Constantinople. Had their rôles been reversed—had the soul of Chrysostom been burning with unholy rage against Theophilus, he could have brought home to his adversary crime after crime of the deepest dye, and, by an appeal to the people, could easily have destroyed him. But Chrysostom held it better even to perish at the hands of the wicked than to use their own methods to overthrow them. ’Ye have condemned, ye have killed the just; he doth not resist you.’

Lying defamation was a weapon in the use of which Theophilus was a deadly expert. But he might as well have tried to throw dirt against heaven and stain it, as attempt to gain credence for lies which could induce people to believe that Chrysostom was a reprobate. How saintly the Patriarch’s life had been was known to all. No human being attached importance to the slanders which bad bishops and criminous clerks disseminated respecting him. But surely as a youth he could not have been so immaculate in his white innocence as now he was? Surely some old, dead scandal might be raked up against him out of the fetid embers of bygone calumnies in the vicious purlieus of Antioch where he had lived till manhood?

At any rate, it was worth trying, and Isaac the Monk was despatched on the loathly but congenial mission of attempting to pick up some rag of slander out of the long-putrescent gutters of the Syrian capital. No fitter emissary could have been chosen than this pestilent hypocrite; but his attempt failed ignominiously. He could find nothing wherewith to incriminate the Archbishop, even in the days of his unbaptised and unconverted youth. And when the Antiochenes began to suspect the object of all these inquiries of this unsavoury monk, he narrowly escaped being kicked and pelted out of the city, and had to run for his life.

But what did that matter? If defamation of character was more difficult in the case of Chrysostom than of most men, nothing was less likely than that the prolific inventiveness of ecclesiastical hatred should fail to find some other means to wreak its purposes upon him. Heresy was a charge no less fatal than crime. In the hands of an able accuser it was easily manipulated; and, of all charges, that of Origenism was the one which filled the minds of the ignorant with the greatest amount of vague alarm. Chrysostom should be branded with the stigma of Origenism.

But it would be highly convenient if the charge could be fixed on him by someone whose name would not at once, like that of Theophilus, excite incredulous scorn as to his sincerity. Theophilus—who had himself contemptuously rejected anthropomorphism until it suited his purpose to seem to favour it, and who had been in every sense as much an Origenist as Chrysostom ever was—at first thought of securing the services of Jerome. The mind of Jerome was intensely sensitive to the slightest suspicion of heresy. He had been an ardent admirer of Origen, had openly extolled his greatness, had translated and disseminated some of his books. But now, in his terror of being thought guilty of heresy, he turned completely round, and belied his own honesty and intelligence. There was a sort of basilisk power in Theophilus which paralysed opposition. He induced Jerome to translate into Latin the letter in which the Egyptian had called his rival ‘an impure demon who had sold his soul to the devil’; but the timid Recluse of Bethlehem was obviously unqualified to take part in any active crusade.

So Theophilus determined to make a catspaw of the aged and highly venerated Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, in Cyprus, whom no one would suspect of ulterior objects. Epiphanius was saintly and fairly learned, but his simple nature had two great foibles, which made him an easy tool in the hands of the astute intriguer. He had written a book which he regarded as a sufficient answer to all heresies, and having all his life long entertained that rooted belief in his own theological infallibility which is the specialty of many ecclesiastics, he had now sunk into a senile vanity which made him indignant if anyone disputed his oracular utterances. The meddling instincts of a heresy-hunter had already led him to a series of gross and illegal aggressions in the diocese of John of Jerusalem, of which he had quite needlessly, and somewhat treacherously, disturbed the peace. It required all the gentleness of John to forgive and tolerate him; but Epiphanius, revelling in the incense of adoration offered by the common people to his saintliness, was blinded by self-conceit to the disorders and improprieties of which he had been guilty. What were Church canons to him, when he was the only man who could set the Church right on all matters of religious opinion? Canons of episcopal discipline could not apply to a man who had refuted all the heresies.

The name of Origen acted like a red rag to the old man’s self-satisfied infallibility. How could any man say a word in favour of the Adamantine, when he had shown how ’dangerous’ were his views? Every competent observer, except himself, was well aware that he had never read Origen’s books; that, if he had, he was incapable of understanding them; and that intellectually, and perhaps even morally, he was scarcely worthy to tie the shoes of the holiest thinker whom the Church had produced since the days of the Apostles.

Theophilus knew his man. He sent him the decree of his precious Egyptian synod of sycophants and nobodies who had condemned Origen, and with it a humble, flattering letter, in which he intensely gratified the old bishop’s egregious vanity by saying that he himself—Theophilus—had once been entangled in Origenistic errors, from which the learned wisdom of Epiphanius had liberated him as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. Would not the saintly Bishop of Salamis once more save the world and the Church by summoning a Council to anathematise Origen and forbid all men to read his books? Would he not, especially, save Constantinople and the Eastern world from its heretical Patriarch, who, with the Tall Brothers, was perverting his diocese with the Origenistic heresies which Epiphanius had long ago refuted?

Epiphanius scented the heresy-hunt from afar, and went over to Theophilus with a bound. Egregiously duped both as to facts and opinions, and completely blinded to his own non-jurisdiction and incompetence in the matter, he summoned his suffragans, and summarily anathematised Origen and all his works.

To Epiphanius the sole norm of orthodoxy was agreement with himself. If anyone had a religious opinion which differed from his own he was ‘a’ wrang, and a’ wrang, and a’thegither a’ wrang’; and was not only a’ wrang, but also perverse, blind, ignorant, and presumably wicked. He is in this respect one of the commonest of ecclesiastical types.

Theophilus sent the decree of this ignorant synod and of his own to Chrysostom with another curt and insolent letter; but he, seeing through the plot, and profoundly uninterested in ‘the fury of the theological insects’ who were crawling over the sacred dust of Origen, put aside the whole matter as a petty dispute which did not concern him, and sent no reply.

Nettled at the unconcern which Chrysostom showed respecting his decisions—an unconcern due only to the fact that he was no more Origenistic than most of the wisest and ablest Fathers of the Church had been—Epiphanius now accepted the suggestion that, though he was eighty, he should go in person to Constantinople, and set things in order in the diocese of a superior in which he had not the least legitimate footing. He braved the dangerous winds, sailed through the Cyclades, and landed near the Church of St. John the Baptist at the Hebdomon.

From that moment his whole career at the capital was foolish and disorderly. He officiated and preached at the church, and, as he had done in the Diocese of Jerusalem, again flagrantly violated all ecclesiastical rule by ordaining a deacon. In spite of this, Chrysostom and his clergy received him with the respect due to his age and saintliness, and the Patriarch invited him to share his hospitality.

‘Not unless you swear to excommunicate the Tall Brothers and anathematise Origen,’ said Epiphanius, rudely. ’Nay,’ said Chrysostom, ‘as regards that question we must await the decision of a General Council.’ ‘Very well,’ said the Bishop; ‘then I shall go to a private lodging prepared for me by the agents of Theophilus.’

In spite of this petulant rebuff Chrysostom, in forbearance to a senility intoxicated with the sense of its own self-importance, sent Philip to the lodging of Epiphanius, the next morning, to invite him to take part in the service of St. Sophia.

‘Tell your master,’ said Epiphanius, ‘that I cannot lend the sanction of my authority to heresy.’

Philip was unwilling to carry back so crude an insult. Bowing and reddening, he asked, ‘Has your Dignity no further answer to the request of the Patriarch?’

‘None,’ said Epiphanius.

‘He may be a saint,’ said Philip, indignantly, to Eutyches, who awaited him outside, ‘but he is certainly a churl.’

But Epiphanius, as if he held in his hand the keys of all the creeds, invited every bishop who happened to be at Constantinople, denounced Origen with all his might, and induced not a few of them to subscribe to his condemnation, though they knew as little about Origen as Epiphanius himself. All, however, were not so flexible. Among them was Theotimus, Metropolitan of Scythia, whose holiness of life and loving magnanimity at Tomi, on the Euxine—famous as the scene of Ovid’s exile—had won the Goths to devout admiration, and had even softened his savage neighbours, the Huns, who, struck with the loving homage by which he was surrounded, called him, in their ignorance, ‘the God of the Romans.’ Saint and confessor, he had even acquired a reputation for working miracles, and when he rose, wearing the long locks which he had never cut, there was silence among the bishops. Educated in Greece, Theotimus had carried some of the works of Origen to his Scythian see, and there read them with profound advantage. He drew one of these manuscripts from his bosom; and read aloud page after page of teachings full of depth and beauty. ’Is this the man whom you want us to anathematise?’ he asked; ’this saint, whose holy teaching abounds in high and orthodox instruction? To condemn him thus indiscriminately is to condemn the sacred books, which he expounded as no one else has done so wisely. If you find anything wrong in his books, reject it; but do not because of it obliterate all the abounding good.’

It was, however, useless to appeal to men whose condemnation was due either to ignorant prejudice, opiniated misconception, or hateful ends; and Epiphanius himself felt that such condemnation was of very little avail. He wanted to appeal to the people, who received him with veneration, and he actually had the temerity to announce that he would preach a sermon against the errors of Chrysostom in one of his own churches—the Church of the Apostles. But even Chrysostom, with all his boundless forbearance towards the intrusive old man, now found it necessary to interfere with an act of infatuation which might well have caused a tumult dangerous to Epiphanius himself. He sent Serapion to inhibit him.

‘Bishop,’ said Serapion. ‘you have acted, and are acting, with discourtesy and irregularity. Be warned in time, or you must take the consequences.’

The firm rebuke made Epiphanius pause in his wilfulness; and he received another from the Empress herself. At this time her little son, Theodosius II., fell ill, and in her usual devotion to strange bishops she sent to ask the Bishop of Salamis to pray for him. ’Tell her,’ said the old man—whom we can hardly regard as responsible for his actions—’that the child will live if she ceases to favour heresies and heretics.’ The Empress was justly offended. ‘Tell him,’ she replied, ‘that my child’s life is in God’s hands, not in his.’ Such, however, was her superstition that she sent for one of the Tall Brothers, and asked him to speak to the aged Bishop.

All four of them went to him. He had never seen one of them before.

‘Has your Sanctity ever seen one of our disciples,’ asked Ammonius, ’or read one of our books?’

CHAPTER XLV

EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS

Theophilus sent his twenty-eight bishops by sea. Strange bishops they were! Men with the names of barbarous Egyptian gods, bishops of collections of mud huts and crocodile swamps on the banks of the Nile, bishops ignorant of everything in the choir of heaven and the furniture of earth, and so completely subservient to their wicked and terrorising Patriarch that at a crook of his finger they would have been prepared to condemn Athanasius himself. And these were the men who, at the instigation of his deadliest enemies, were in his own diocese to sit in judgment on the chief Patriarch of the East, the greatest saint, orator, and writer of his age, in the teeth of the decisions of the bishops assembled around him, more, and more honourable than they—among whom were seven metropolitans.

The Egyptians were to await their Patriarch at Chalcedon, where their dull and blind animosities might be daily exacerbated by the diatribes of Bishop Cyrinus, who never spoke of Chrysostom except as the arrogant, the ruthless, and the heretical.

Theophilus himself came more leisurely by land. He did this with an object. On the one hand, he left the evil leaven to work; on the other, he could gather conspirators in the Churches of Syria and Asia Minor, who received him with adulations because of his high rank, and to whom he sedulously announced that he was on his way to depose the Patriarch of Constantinople. His attempt, however, was not very successful. In addition to his twenty-eight Egyptian parasites he only inveigled seven others from Armenia, Persia, and Mesopotamia. It would have been well for the unhappy Bishop of Chalcedon if one of these had never come. It was Maruthas, Bishop of Mesopotamia. He was a man of slouching gait and elephantine proportions, who wore heavy boots. Cyrinus was sitting on a divan with his legs outstretched before him. Maruthas, as he came blundering in, trod with all his weight on one of the feet of Cyrinus. The Bishop uttered a shriek of pain. The points of the iron nails, with which the boots of Maruthas were shod, wounded his foot in four or five places. The result was as though all the venom in the blood of Cyrinus had flowed into those wounds, in order to wreak upon him the vengeance of God. The wounds gangrened. It became necessary to amputate his foot; and it must be remembered that in those days there were no anæsthetics. The stump gangrened again; and it was again necessary to make an amputation at the knee. The leg gangrened again. There was another amputation, and the wretched Bishop died. He took what part he could in the Synod of the Oak. He signed its childish and infamous decrees; but he was scarcely ever able to cross over to Constantinople to aid in its machinations, and men saw in his frightful and lingering death a mark of the wrath of God for the part which Cyrinus had taken in the destruction of His saint.

On Thursday, at noon, in July, 403, Theophilus, accompanied by his twenty-eight suffragans, crossed the Bosporus, and landed at a quay known as the Chalcedonian Stairs. All the Egyptian corn-ships were decked with streamers; all the Egyptian sailors received him with acclamations. He traversed the city to the Pera district, where the Empress had assigned to his use the palace named Placidiana, on the other side of the Golden Horn. In passing the Patriarcheion he disdainfully refused the hospitality offered with all courtesy to him and his bishops by Chrysostom. He would not even follow the custom of entering the church to join in Communion. ‘This,’ said Chrysostom to his friends, ‘is nothing less than a declaration of open war.’

It is to Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis, as well as to the letter of Chrysostom to Pope Innocent, that we owe our knowledge of these events. Theophilus, says the lively Palladius, had come from Egypt like a dung-beetle, except that the load which he rolled before him consisted of the loveliest and sweetest products of Egypt and Arabia, which were to be used to create the stench of hatred and envy. At the Placidiana the Alexandrian prelate lived en prince, winning courtiers and clergy alike by superb banquets and subtle flatteries, and working in concert with the monkish, clerical, and feminine cabals which sat in permanence at the house of Epigraphia. He soon got hold of tools who would admirably serve his purpose: the deacon John, excommunicated by Chrysostom for murdering his servant, and another deacon who had been condemned for adultery. He was also effectually aided by the three widows—Marsa, Castricia, and Epigraphia—and their clientéle, consisting of Severian of Gabala, Antiochus of Ptolemais, and Acacius of Berœa, together with the mass of the corrupt clergy of Constantinople and the concubines whom they called their ‘spiritual sisters.’ Theophilus felt no doubt of the result, despite the scruples of Arcadius, to whom it seemed strange that a number of unknown Egyptians, headed by a Patriarch accused of enormous delinquencies, should have come to his own capital to accuse his own Patriarch, whom, whatever might be his errors, Arcadius knew to be a saint. Moreover, at this moment the five previous emissaries of Theophilus were under sentence of death for libel, and it was only by bribery that he secured the modification of their sentence into relegation to Proconnesus. This, however, was a trifle; for Eudoxia, not Arcadius, was the real emperor. The people, it is true, were dead against the intruders and their own apostate clergy; but Theophilus secured his personal safety by getting from the Empress a guard of honour.

It was, nevertheless, obvious that no Council adverse to Chrysostom could sit at Constantinople without danger of a riot, and Severian recommended its transference to the neighbouring Chalcedon, where it could be held in the superb palace of Rufinus, possessed years afterwards by Belisarius. Here the murdered Minister of Arcadius had built a magnificent church, called the Apostolæum, in honour of St. Peter and St. Paul; and hither he had, ten years earlier, summoned Ammonius, the eldest of the Tall brothers, as the man whose reputation was the saintliest in the Empire, to perform his baptism. The palace was called ‘The Oak,’ and the synod now held there was perhaps the most contemptible and infamous known in all the annals of the Church. It proposed to take in hand three questions—the accusations against Chrysostom; the affair of the Tall Brothers; and a charge of having stolen a deacon’s clothes brought against Heracleides, whom Chrysostom had made Metropolitan of Ephesus. This ‘Synod of the Oak’ was known as the Alexandrian party; the larger synod of bishops gathered round Chrysostom in the Thomaites was called the ‘Johannites,’ and, among others, comprised among its members no less than seven metropolitans. There was scarcely an ecclesiastical offence against the Nicene canons respecting episcopal jurisdiction which this paltry and wicked synod of the Oak, relying on Court patronage, did not openly violate. Summoning before it the Constantinopolitan clergy, with outrageous impudence, it first considered the charges against Chrysostom, preserved for us by the industry of St. Proclus, who was then a young reader, but who, thirty years afterwards, became his successor in the See of Constantinople.

John, the deacon excommunicated for homicide, accused Chrysostom, among other things, of having fettered a monk as a demoniac; of having embezzled, sold, or diverted by malversation the possessions of the Church; of having published a book full of insults against the clergy; of having charged the deacons with the theft of his gallium; of having ordained as bishop a grave-robber named Antonius; of having betrayed Count John to the soldiery, of entering and leaving church without prayer; of receiving women alone; of ordaining men without witnesses; of secret ‘Cyclopean orgies’; of violences and irregularities in Asia; of having smitten Memnon in the face in the Church of the Twelve Apostles, and made him bleed; of having put on his bishop’s robes as he sat on his throne; and of having eaten a pastille before the Holy Communion.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE EARTHQUAKE

Philip had been permitted to accompany his beloved father and master when he was conveyed by the Count of the Palace across the Bosporus; and his heart was full of an anguish too deep for tears. All the long future seemed for him to be not only uncertain, but smitten with a blight. What would come of this banishment? Would Chrysostom ever be recalled? Where would be his future? He could never desert the Patriarch while his services were so indispensable; but thoughts of Miriam, and doubts whether he should ever see her again, mingled with his more unselfish grief.

He was amazed at the cheerfulness of the Patriarch. Here he was, hurled from his high estate, defeated by his enemies, an exile, horribly calumniated, not knowing what a day might bring forth, and yet he uttered no word of lamentation, and could speak to Philip with a smile.

But Philip was aware that what supported his master was ‘the strong-siding champion, conscience.’ He might have made, he had made, many errors of judgment; he had yielded to occasional impatience and irritability, caused chiefly by his severe bodily self-denial, both in the past and in the present; but of any sins such as those with which he had been charged by the foul Synod of Theophilus and its hired assassins of the truth he was wholly innocent. He felt that but for his magnanimity and self-repression nothing would have been more inevitable than a massacre in the capital, a revolution in the Empire, a schism in the Church. This had only been averted by his voluntary surrender.

CHAPTER XLVII

EUDOXIA’S STATUE

Alas! the seeming peace was but the placidi pellacia ponti; it was but

for, on the one hand, Eudoxia was still Eudoxia, and between her and the Patriarch, so antipathetic to her in character and temperament, it was impossible that there should be long-continued amity. What lasting concord could there be between a woman of insane and insatiable pride, whose Court reeked with intrigue and worldliness, and an Archbishop of dauntless courage and inflexible righteousness? And, on the other hand, Theophilus defeated all Chrysostom’s attempts to secure by a competent General Council the reversal of the judgment passed upon him by the hateful Synod of the Oak. Arcadius summoned Theophilus to come to a General Council and answer the charges brought against him. But the Egyptian had not the least intention of again imperilling his sacred Hypocrisy among a populace intoxicated by affection for their Archbishop. He wrote back that, after having been driven out of Constantinople by mobs which threatened to fling him into the sea, he could not visit the city again; and that his own people were so devotedly attached to him that his departure would cause a riot at Alexandria!

CHAPTER XLVIII

THE FORGED SERMON

No sooner had she read the first sentence than the haughty, passionate woman flamed into uncontrollable rage. She knew that Chrysostom, because his name was John, and his life was that of an ascetic, and his moral attitude inflexible, was often compared with John the Baptist. The free street-cries of Constantinople could not leave her unaware that she was often called Jezebel and Herodias. She did not suspect the deceit which the Bishop of Gabala had practised upon her credulity, and she had so few opportunities of seeing the world, except through the medium of contaminated minds, that she rarely arrived at the real truth. She accepted the report as genuine; and that such language should be used of her in St. Sophia, and by the man whom she had recalled two months earlier, and who had then lauded her piety and beneficence, was a fact which lay on her heart like a spark of fire. Severian, as he observed how hate and rage and wounded pride changed her face from red to pale and pale to red, and how her bosom heaved and her breath quivered and hissed as she turned over the leaves, felt that now at last his work was finally and effectually done, and exulted in his abominable heart.

Leaving his lie to produce its full effect, he took his leave; and she, knowing that the Emperor was alone, burst unannounced into his presence.

There was nothing which more shook the nerves and worried the immobile passivity of Arcadius than these sudden inroads from Eudoxia. Eutropius had formerly protected him from them, but now they were matters of constant occurrence. If we could imagine what would be the feelings of an automaton which found itself mated with a whirlwind we can realise what he felt.

When they were in public the Emperor and Empress never neglected the most rigid conventions of imperial etiquette. Were they not both august, and their infant already an Augustus? Were they not both ‘adored’? Did not their courtiers cover their eyes with their hands as they approached them, as though to shield themselves from the too sun-like radiance? In their public relations nothing disturbed the quotidian ague and frozen routine of gorgeous Byzantinism elaborated by Oriental servility. But when they were alone they indemnified themselves for this ponderous parade of functional ineptitude by relapsing into interchanges of spleen as frankly human as those of the meanest of their subjects. Slaves, eunuchs, pages, chamberlains, and courtiers heard from the inmost recesses of the purple chambers voices raised into tones of the shrillest vehemence, and sometimes even scraps of objurgation with which they were not unfamiliar at the Chalcedonian Stairs and other resorts of ordinary human clay.

Arcadius knew that he had to prepare for the worst whenever Eudoxia invaded his privacy unaccompanied by any of her children. At certain times of the day, above all when she entered his room with a certain flounce of her imperial robes, as she did on this occasion, he made up his mind for a bad quarter of an hour.

‘It is intolerable!’ she began, flinging herself down on a golden chair; ‘it is quite sickeningly intolerable! I would rather be a drudge in the bazaar than the Augusta if I am to submit to this.’

‘What is the matter now?’ asked Arcadius with an air of weary and irritated displeasure.

‘The matter is that you are no longer Emperor of the East,’ she said, with frigid scorn.

‘Indeed!’ replied Arcadius with studied indifference. ’Then who is Emperor?’

CHAPTER XLIX

INTRIGUE TRIUMPHANT

It soon became patent to all the world that Eudoxia was leaving no stone unturned to ruin the Patriarch, and darkest clouds of misgiving closed over the last smile of brief sunshine in the hearts of his friends. The Empress had again invoked the aid of Theophilus, and though he would not come in person, he was sending ‘three miserable Egyptians’ to act in his name. All the other bishops and ecclesiastics to whom Chrysostom’s very virtues were a reproach were speeding like vultures to a feast. Another Council was to be held, about which two things were clear—that it would not be the General Council which the Patriarch had demanded; and that, under the terrifying influence of the Court, it would be all but exclusively composed of the Patriarch’s opponents.

Those who were not in the secret could not understand the rush and blare of the new thunderstorm. Chrysostom had only shared the feeling of every sincere Christian in the city in deploring the Pagan profanities which accompanied the Sunday inauguration of Eudoxia’s statue, and surely his disapprobation could not have created an offence so deadly as to cause his destruction to be determined. Philip and Kallias alone divined the secret. Kallias knew that ere now spurious sermons, attributed to Chrysostom, had been handed about. He sorely suspected a plot between the reporter Phocas and his patron, Severian; and Philip agreed with him. Philip determined to take the bull by the horns, and walked with Eutyches to the lodging of Phocas. Philip never attempted a ruse. If he carried a point, it was always by frank forthrightness.

‘Phocas,’ he said, ‘we love the Patriarch, and have reason to fear that the present exasperation of the Court against him must be based on travesties of what he really said about the Augusta’s statue. Would you mind lending us your verbatim report?’

‘That you may compare it with that of your friend Kallias,’ said Phocas, with a touch of professional jealousy, ‘and injure my reputation as a tachygraphist, to his advantage.’

‘Nay,’ said Eutyches, with the frank smile which disarmed opposition. ’We really are not capable of such small tricks. Philip has told you that we have reasons for suspecting that he whom we regard as a father is being ruined by subterranean plots. It may help us and save him if by two reports—Kallias’s and yours together—we can prove that he said nothing wrong. No reporter in Constantinople comes near you two.’

‘That boy knows how to flatter,’ said Phocas, disarmed. ’Well, you shall see my report.’

‘They saw it, and found that while in a few expressions it had been a little coloured, it agreed in the main with that of their friend.

‘Was this the report which, as people say, Severian showed to the Empress?’ asked Philip.

‘That I don’t know,’ answered Phocas; ‘but Severian paid me for a copy.’

They thanked him, and parted good friends; but Philip determined to push his inquiries a little further.

He went to Amantius; but though Amantius was Eudoxia’s chamberlain, she never shared her secrets with him. He could give no information. Nor could Briso. He had seen a manuscript, in a handwriting which he knew to be Severian’s, lying on the table of the Empress’s room. He knew no more.

‘Could you not get me a glimpse of it?’ asked Philip.

‘Any attempt to do so, my good youth, might simply cost us our heads,’ said Briso; ‘and I doubt whether any good would result from it.’

Philip’s plans were defeated. Unless God threw His shield of protection over his beloved master he could now see no hope.

The bishops who were hurrying to Constantinople were deliberately poisoned against Chrysostom by his enemies, or won over by the bribes and threats of Eudoxia’s agents. One honest man, Theodotus of Tyana, finding that he was expected to take part, not in a trial, but in a conspiracy, turned his back on the capital and returned to his own diocese.

Christmas was now close at hand, and on Christmas Day the Emperor and Empress always attended St. Sophia in state. Now, however, Arcadius announced that he could not again communicate with Chrysostom until he had cleared himself of the heavy charges against him. Chrysostom replied that to clear himself was what he had always longed for, and that whenever the Emperor would summon a fair and free Council he would with the utmost pleasure appear before it. Even before the packed assemblage, which it was ridiculous to describe as a Council, he was ready to appear as soon as they formulated their charges and adduced their witnesses.

The boldness of his innocence alarmed his adversaries. What if he should appear in person, and by his innocence, his eloquence, his popularity, his array of overwhelming refutation, should scatter their trumpery falsehoods and trivialities to the four winds, and emerge from the storm more invincible than ever? This would not at all suit them. They wrote to Theophilus for counsel, and he advised them to rely exclusively on a canon of the Antiochene Council of 341 which forbade a bishop dispossessed by a synod to return to his see until he had been recalled by another synod. According to that canon, said Theophilus, John had no right whatever to be in Constantinople.

The answer of Chrysostom to this pretext was overwhelming. The Synod of the Oak was wholly incompetent; it broke every conceivable law of ecclesiastical discipline and of common equity; it was composed of Egyptian hangers-on of Theophilus. Its assembling in his own diocese to sit in judgment upon him was a direct violation of rules of the Council of Nice, on which nobody had insisted more strongly than Theophilus himself.

CHAPTER L

PROLONGED AGONY

The history of the Byzantine Empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, women, and eunuchs; of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual patricides.

Lecky, European Morals, ii. 14.

The year blossomed into Lent, and all things still remained in a condition of trouble and uncertainty. The state of things at Constantinople was as when two armies watch each other for months from opposite heights, and neither dares to attack the other; and there seemed no hope of peace or of any return to normal duties.

It was the party of unscrupulous episcopal malcontents, envenomed by their own jealousy and goaded forward by the furies of Eudoxia, who were most afraid. Easter was approaching. They dreaded lest the Emperor would on that great festal day go to St. Sophia, and be impressed by the passionate love and fidelity with which the multitude clung to their great pastor. This must be prevented at all hazards. They went to Arcadius, headed as usual by Severian, and begged that as Chrysostom was entirely defeated, and had been condemned by two synods, he might be expelled from the church. But had Chrysostom been so defeated, so condemned? Arcadius, in his somewhat constipated intellect, felt considerable doubts as to the truth of either assertion, and expressed them.

‘You should believe us,’ said Severian; ‘we are bishops, and a true bishop cannot lie.’

‘It depends on how you define a true bishop,’ thought Arcadius; but he was, as a rule, at the mercy of the last speaker, and usually adopted the course which cost him least trouble at the moment. He therefore so far yielded as to send a message to Chrysostom that, as he had been condemned, he must keep at a distance from his church.

CHAPTER LI

DRIVEN FORTH

’I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.’ Gregory VII.

Thus miserably did things drag on till Whitsunday, while civil oppression, animated by the burning passions of Eudoxia and the vitriolic malignity of the bishops, permitted scenes of shame and brutality to violate even the sanctuary of God. The fury of oaths, the screams of the tortured, the whistling of scourges, were heard even in churches, while the attempt was made to coerce the faithful to anathematise the holy pastor whom they loved. Men recalled the language of the Gospels—’And there shall be signs in sun, and moon, and stars; and upon earth distress of nations in perplexity for the roaring of the sea and the billows; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for expectation of the things which are coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.’ Nor was their dread unreasonable. The defeat, deposition, exile, and martyrdom—for martyrdom to all intents and purposes it was—of the saintly Patriarch of Constantinople led to age-long consequences, both in the East and in the West. In the West, the events which issued from it tended to establish the influence of the Bishop of Rome at a period when that influence was in many respects for the advantage of mankind, and before it had been distorted by forged donations and false decretals into a cruel and pernicious tyranny. In the East, it degraded the Church into an abject subservience, in which she abdicated her functions as a denouncer of luxury and oppression, and submitted to ‘the Cæsaro-papism’ of wavering despots.