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VOL. 1717.
LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST

IN ONE VOLUME.

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
By the same Author,

CHRONICLES OP THE SCHONBERG-COTTA FAMILT . 2 vols.

THE DRAYT0N8 AND THE DAVENANTS 2 VOls.

ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA 2 yds.

WINIFRED BERTRAM 1 VOl.

DIARY OF MRS. KITTY TREVYLYAN 1 vol.

THE VICTORY OF THE VANQUISHED 1 vol.

THE COTTAGE BY THE CATHEDRAL 1 vol.

AGAINST THE STREAM 2 vols.

THE BERTRAM FAMILY 2 VOls.

CONQUERING AND TO CONQUER . . . . * *. *• . 1 vol.

[ DONATED J^Y THE

] MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASS^OOTATlOv

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LAPSED,
BUT NOT LOST

A STORY OF ROMAN CARTHAGE

BY THE AUTHOR OF

"CHRONICLES OF THE SCHONBERGf-COTTA ElMIL^f," >^
COPYRIGHT EDITION,

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LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER I.

The last rays of the sun, flame to the last, were
burning on the rich and populous shores of the Bay
of Carthage, touching to a fiery point the white
temples which crowned the low heights, glowing
along the upland corn-fields, which were the granary
of Rome, capriciously distinguishing here and there
the red stem of a pine on the slopes, or the sail of
one or another of the countless merchant ships which
crowded the harbour.

The hum of the great city- — great even in this
its later Roman flood-tide, yet not reaching to the
brim of its ancient Punic glory — rose to the point
above the sea where the young maiden, Viola, was
sitting, watching, under the shadow of a group of
C)rpresses, the path among the vines and olives
which led up from the city two or three miles away.

6 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

No sound of vesper bells came to her; the
Christian Church, which was noiselessly pursuing
her path of conquest, and even venturing in some
places to greet the eye with sacred buildings of
some stateliness, did not venture to appeal to the
ear, and had not, indeed, yet found her own voice,
in the music of church bells. And the call of the
Arabian prophet to prayer was not yet to be heard
for four centuries. The level of secular sound was
pierced by no call to prayer, and the level of the
city roofs was broken by no aspiring spire or
minaret.

The cry of the sailors weighing anchor, the song
of the day labourer returning from his work, the
chant of the solitary boatman as he rounded the
point on which she sate, the far-off hum of the busy
swarms of Carthage, were all the sounds that reached
her. The hum was louder than usual, and there
was anxiety in the watching eyes. It had been a
great festival-day at Carthage and throughout the
empire.

Rome that day was keeping her thousandth
birthday — Rome, who had made the whole world so

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 7

marvellously one, unaware as yet how, in infusing
herself into the world, she had lost her own identity;
how, in enforcing this external unity, she had melted
down the very bone and sinew of the nations, and
reduced them to a gelatinous mass, which when
once the mould of her strong institutions was broken
by the new races of the north, would cease to have
any coherence, so that men would wonder blindly
what had caused this marvellous unity to seem
to be.

The secular games were that day beginning, in
every city throughout the empire, to celebrate the
foundation of the city, the city of Romulus, the city
of Brutus, of Caesar, of Cicero, the city of Scipio
the conqueror of Punic Carthage; the city whose
name ruled the world, but which nevertheless had
herself been ruled for thirty years by none of Roman
origin, but by a dissolute Syrian, who desecrated
her most sacred shrines, by another Syrian who held
all races and religions equal, by a barbarous Thra-
cian, and an Arabian.

Yet most obviously one Power, called Rome,
still reigned, made roads, and kept them safe from

8 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Bordeaux to Phrygia, imposed taxes and had them
paid, whoever was ruined and whoever was enriched
by them; and now this day celebrated its own my-
thical thousandth birthday in the Coliseum of con-
quered Carthage, in the Amphitheatres at Smyrna,
at Treves, at Eichborough — celebrated it by setting
men and beasts to tear each other to pieces in the
arena.

The maiden Viola sat and watched, anxiously
trying to disentangle and interpret the various dim
sounds that reached her, until the tones of a clear
tenor voice rang along the upland path, and the
watching face broke into a radiance of welcome as
she gathered her veil around her and hastened a
few steps down the slope to meet the brother she
was waiting for.

"Valerian, you are late," she said. "There have
been sounds as of a tumult in the city, and I know
these great festivals are said to be perilous to us,
and I was afraid something evil was happening. But
they died away half an hour since."

"There has been a great celebration in the Am-
phitheatre," he said, "and there were some famous

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. Q

athletes from Rome, and fresh Hons just brought
from Numidia. The contest was keen, they say, and
all the city went to see it."

"All the city. Valerian!" she said, veiling her
eyes with a shudder. "Surely none of us — none of
ours?"

"I cannot say none," he replied. "You see fami-
lies are mixed in these days, and a Christian wife
may have to purchase from a heathen husband her
freedom to attend our mysteries and visit our sick
by accompanying him to the theatres. It is not all
so simple as you think, Httle sister, here in our quiet
farm."

"But the Amphitheatre!" she said. "That arena
where the wild beasts have rent and torn our very
own — the disciples of our Christ — our own sweet
martyrs, Perpetua and Felicitas, whose birthdays we
celebrate to-morrow in the catacon^bs. Surely none
of us would be found there?"

"None like thee^ beloved," he said, fondly touch-
ing the long dark hair which escaped from the fillet.
"To thee Vivia Perpetua and Felicitas are like thine
own sisters, fresh in perpetual youth."

lO LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"As they are^ Valerian," she said softly.

"As they are," he replied. "But to many, even
of us, it seems as an old tale, and the half-century
which separates us from them seems a gulf which
cannot be passed. The heathen have grown gentler,
they say, since then. The faith has penetrated with
its tender light many a home which does not know
its source. It is more than thirty years since there
has been anything worthy to be called a perse-
cution."

"Still," she said, "there is the arena, and the
savage wild beasts rend men there to amuse more
savage men and women. And our grandmother said
this morning, who knows when the old rage may
burst out again?"

The young man smiled with a little gentle scorn.
"Grandmothers naturally see perils in every twilight
shadow," he said.

"But our grandmother remembers seeing Per-
petua and Felicitas and the rest martyred," she re-
plied. "It was that which made her a Christian,
and she says it is a great crime for any Christian
to visit the gladiatorial shows."

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I I

"If we had seen such horrors we might probably
dread their renewal as she does," he said, "and judge
severely those who frequent them."

"But the Church forbids. TertuUian used the
strongest denunciations, our own TertuUian, who you
say has such eloquence and zeal."

"TertuUian was a great man, but he was an
austere man," was the reply, "and he was a Moi^
tanist, and is scarcely to be followed in all things."

"Valerian! brother!" she exclaimed; "you are
not defending — most surely you would never attend
the games?"

He was leaning against the stem of a stone pine
as she spoke, his dark eyes ranging dreamily over
the city and the bay.

But at her question he seemed to arouse himself
from a dream, and looking down into her eager in-
quiring face, he said, with a quiet depth of tone
different from an)^hing in his voice before, but
scarcely as if in response to her, rather as if with-
drawn from her into a soliloquy —

"No, I shall not be present at the games. I
was but continuing a debate in my own mind. The

12 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST*

gladiatorial games are barbarous. Not Christianity
only, the human soul, the soul which TertuUian calls
naturally Christian, protests against them. Not the
Church only; beautiful wise old Athens would none
of them. But you know not, here in your soft
seclusion among the oranges, and roses, and figs,
and vines, near the sacred catacombs, how hard it
is to press on side by side with men like one's self
in every path of thought and life, and then sud-
denly to come to some barrier which to them is
a dream or an insane delusion, and to us is more
solid than an imperial decree, and to have to
separate and go the solitary way despised and mis-
understood."

"But, Valerian," she said, "it is the King's way
and a glorious way. And you might make some of
them come with you; even one would be much!"

"It all seems to you so simple," he said, "here
among your hymns and your gardens, and with
every one around you believing the same. But
there, in the city, are wise and good and learned
men who think our sacred histories as much a fable
as VirgiFs story of .^neas landing on these hills

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 3

where we stand, and stretching out longing arms to
his goddess-mother, made known to him by her
majestic tread, and vanishing when he began to re-
cognise her. And there in the city, on the other
hand, are reHgions to whose hoary antiquity ours is
but of yesterday. See ! the last gleam of the sunset
is crimsoning the Temple of Coelestis, the Astarte
worshipped here by multitudes of Carthaginians
when Rome was but an eagle's nest on one of her
seven hills."

As he spoke two strangers, a man and a woman,
passed them in plain and threadbare garments.

Both had a bowed and downcast look, as of
people who shrank from observation.

The man might be about sixty years of age; his
face was lined with rigid deep Hnes, the form was
bowed, but rather it seemed by want of will to be
erect than by the stiffness of age. His eyes were
habitually downcast — never lifted up. When the
heavy eyeUds were raised, and the glance was for-
ward, it seemed as if the eyes had ceased to be
messengers of the soul within, and were no longer

14 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

anything save sentinels to guard from danger or
surprise without. The light of human meaning and
communion had passed from them — they had be-
come mere organs of vision.

The woman was yoimger, and in her eyes there
was a depth of appeal. She always seemed looking
up, always crouching below every creature she looked
at, with a wistful deprecation Hke a beaten dog.
Not long together, however, were those longing,
deprecating, appealing eyes ever absent from her
companion; though as they rested on him the ex-
pression changed to one of tender, pained solicitude
and care; the appeal passed out of them, apparently
from the hopelessness of response, for on her his
eyes never rested.

As they passed Viola made the sign of the cross,
to which the woman responded, not, as usual, by re-
peating it, but by bowing low, and with quivering
lips for one moment gazing full into Viola's eyes,
with a look which was a prayer, and which Viola
instinctively felt to be an entreaty for help of any
kind she could give, and to which she instinctively
responded by giving her bread and a bunch of

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 5

raisins from her scrip, and by saying, "The good
Lord bless thee and thine!"

The woman received the bread and the benedic-
tion with a mute Oriental gesture of reverence,
pressing the girl's hand on her own brow, and the
two passed on, out of sight

"Who are these?" asked Valerian; "and how do
you know them?"

"I do not know them," Viola said. "I only saw
them this morning. They went towards the hill of
the catacombs. I think they have spent the day
among the martyrs' tombs. You know it is the eve
of the natalitia of Perpetua and Felicitas."

"What can they have done?" said Valerian.
"They look like creatures who have fallen below
hope of pity, or of rising. And yet she acknow-
ledged the cross."

The brother and sister went down together to
the farm in the valley, but as they went Valerian
kept recurring to the two strangers.

"Under the cross," he said, "yet without hope!
Can they have fallen under the great shadow of
TertuUian? Qeansed in baptism, and then fallen,

1 6 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

one or both of them, into some great crime, from
which there is no fresh stream to lave."

"It is better to Hsten to TertuUian first than last,
brother," said Viola.

"Surely," he said, "if at all. The sternest
guides are the most merciful while the way is yet
to tread."

"But, Valerian," she said suddenly, "this was to
be a great day with you; your oration?"

He seemed unwilling to enter on the subject.

"I am not afraid how it would be received," she
said proudly. "But tell me, I want to hear the
echo of the dear praise of thee."

"There was more than enough of that," he
said.

"But what of that? As TertuUian said, in the
spirit of all he wrote, *we do not stoop to stand at
that tribunal.' What is success to a Christian?
What is it but climbing to a pedestal, where, after
all, you have to stand bowed under a cross? What
are pedestals for us but scaffolds?"

"Something has saddened thee to-day," she
said.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 7

"Nothing but the old conflict," he replied.

"But," she said, "you spoke brut just now as if
our grandmother thought too solicitously of the con-
flict. You spoke of the heathen growing gentler."

"Yes, those of our own rank. But it is that
which makes it hard to keep to our discipline. You
can strike telling blows against ice, but when the ice
has melted into water, and the water is evaporated
into enervating moisture, enveloping, softening, re-
laxing every limb, who can fight against that?
When the heathen set the Christ on the cross and
mocked Him, it was clear what the loyalty of the
faithful meant; but when, like Philip the Arabian,
they set Him on a marble pedestal beside Socrates
and ApoUonius of Tyana, and worship them together
in the lararium, it is not so easy to refuse the
kindly acknowledgment, and to declare that we can
accept such divided homage as little as mockery;
that He is King and Lord, or nothing. To be called
a morose bigot seems harder, at least to me, than to
be called a deluded enthusiast."

"Would it be?" she said. "But ah, Valerian!
it is the other people we have to think of, is it not?

Lapsed t but not Lost, ^

1 8 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

We do not want them to tolerate us. Do we?
That matters so little. We want them to worship
Him! Think what it must be to have no Holy
Eucharist, no hymns, no prayers, no blessed Cross,
no crucified, no living Christ!"

He was silent some minutes.

"It would be a bla^k beyond all things to thee,"
he said; then in a low voice, "to thee, beloved,
surely, and also," he added, as if to himself, "to me
— yes, to me. But to the Christians who seek rich mar-
riages with the heathen, who are content that their
dearest should worship Venus Urania, or Jove, or
nothing, provided they bring as dowry ancestors, or
vineyards, or troops of slaves; who are as eager as
Jews or heathen about the price of their cargoes; to
the Christian women who as TertuUian said delight
themselves in their jewels, peacocks, monkeys, little
Maltese dogs; would the loss of Him leave such a
blank, leaving them their rich marriages, their an-
cestors, their great cargoes, or their little Maltese
dogs?"

"Ah, Valerian," she said, "do not let us be hard.
The necessity to choose would make them choose

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 9

right, would show what are the shadows and what
is the imperishable substance."

"Certainly," he said gravely, "a decree which
called us to the arena to be torn in pieces for the
amusement of our fellow-citizens would at all events
decide whether the arena was a desirable entertain-
ment for Christians or not."

They had reached a point from which Carthage
lay spread before them. Across a wilderness of un-
dulating gardens and cornfields, interspersed with
villas and farms, from which the perfume of roses
and jessamine and countless flowers came up to
them with a heavy wealth of sweetness through the
dewy evening air, temple and fortress rose before
them, white and shining in the moonlight, with the
innumerable moving lights of the city reflected in
the bay, and mingling with the lights in the merchant
fleets. The planet Venus threw a long trail of
golden light across the rippling sea, whilst in the
city the lights were streaming in another long trail
up to the Temple of Astarte.

"Venus Urania," said Valerian, "there and here!
Dea Coelestis, Queen of Heaven:

2*

20 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

' Vera incessu patuit Dea.'

See her golden footprints on the waves; and there
in the torchlight procession to her temple on the
height. Twenty years since the Emperor HeUoga-
balus had the goddess borne to Rome to be espoused
to the Sun on the Capitol, and danced in degrading
pomp at her priest before her. She saw Tyre rise
before an eaglet in the eagle's nest at Rome had
been fledged. She saw Carthage rise, and received
the adoration of Queen Dido more than two cen-
turies before the Babe lay in the manger at Bethlehem.
Helpless she saw Carthage fall under the feet of
conquering Rome. And now Rome is here at her
feet. And they are adoring her with evil worship
still, now that the pure light of the Holy One has
been more than two centuries in the world. Is it
any wonder that the heathen say, *You are of yester-
day and will be gone to-morrow'?"

"*We are of yesterday,' TertuUian said, *and we
fill your palaces,' " Viola quoted in a low voice.

"It is true," he said. "But sometimes, some-
times, I think the combat is far from being over.
And I think the attack might come from two sides:

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 2 I

the mob, who ding blindly to their old superstitions,
rooted with hidden roots far down in their dim un-
recorded lives, and are always liable to be roused
against us in pestilences and public calamities as
atheists and enemies of the gods; and the phi-
losophers, whose mild objection to our faith, as
fanaticism, could easily become mildl)* destructive to
us if our faith came as an immovable obstacle in the
way of any plan of state of their own."

"And it is all this you have been feeling to-day,"
she said. "While we in our quiet fields have been
dreaming of your oration and your triumph, you
have been in the arena, and have been pricked with
delicate shafts of ridicule, and buffeted with angry
words and looks from the heathen mob whose path
you crossed."

"Buffeted is too severe a word, little sister," he
said, rising to the gaiety as habitual to him as its
shadow of melancholy; "pricked — yes, pricked with
delicate jewelled daggerlets, matronly and maidenly
pins, and not at all enjoying my martyrdom."

22 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST

CHAPTER IL

The sound of the Christian evening h5niin
reached the brother and sister as they entered the
court.

In a moment they had quitted the welcoming
dogs and entered the atrium, reverently crossing
themselves, added their voices to the family choir.
It was the hymn at the lighting of the lamps.

" Joyful light of holy glory.
Of the Immortal Holy Father,

Holy, blessed,

Jesu Christ!
We , coming at the setting of the sun.
Beholding the evening light.
Praise Father and Son
And Holy Spirit, God..

Thee it is meet

At all hours to praise
With sacred voices , Son of God,
Thou who givest life.
Therefore the world glorifies Thee."

The household gathered for the evening prayer
— slaves, field labourers, the four brothers and sisters,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 2^

and the aged grandmother, and scattered afterwards
for the evening meal.

Crossing themselves on brow and breast, the
brothers and sisters ranged themselves on the couches
round the small table, and dipped their bread in
the same dish.

The family habits were . partly Oriental and
partly Roman, modified by the greater' freedom
which the greater purity of Christian life already
began to impart to social customs.

This little household never expanded into enter-
tainments at which the sisters and the grandmother
could not have been present, though sometimes, if
venerable men — clergymen or officers of state — hap-
pened to be there, Viola and her elder sister, Justa,
would be among those that served, bearing the cup
or the fruit to some specially honoured guest.

This evening the family generally pressed on
Valerian for. news of the reception of his oration and
of the great secular games in the city.

The eldest brother, Clement, especially had a
paternal eagerness to hear, and extracted from
Valerian, by degrees, the fact that the oration had

24 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

been enthusiastically received, and that honours
and offices of the highest had been prophesied for
him.

Clement was seven years older than Valerian,
and had early "ripened" into manhood and pro-
tectiveness by the "sudden frost" of the death of
his parents in the gi:eat invasion and slaughter by
the Numidians, when the two Emperors Gordian
were slain in one day.

That had happened ten years before, and all the
ten years had been spent by Clement in supplying
the place of the lost parents to the younger ones,
and rebuilding the ruined fortunes of the house.

Their younger brothers had been killed by the
marauders. The eldest sister, Justa, had been left
for dead, and had only by tender nursing been won
back lamed and enfeebled to a Ufe of weakness and
suffering.

Valerian and Viola, children of ten and nine,
with the grandmother, had been hidden in the
catacombs under the neighbouring hills by a Chris-
tian slave.

The intervening ten years of both the brothers

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 2^

had been spent on battle-fields, but in battles of an
entirely different kind; and the traces were visible
on the frames and faces of both.
^ Clement had been engaged in a hand-to-hand
struggle with nature and the devastations of war.
The farm had been the scene of a sharp skirmish;
and when the marauders had retreated, and the
remnant of fruits and com and wine which they
had left had been demanded by the authorities of
the city as a contribution to the fine which had
been imposed as the price of their retreat, Clement
found himself heir of a half-burned and ruined
house among trampled fields and vineyards, and fig-
trees scarred and scorched by fire, and master of
the remnant of two families of slaves which had
been left behind as useless burdens. All who could
fight or work had been slain or led away captive;
and there were no arms to help him in his toil but
those of two old men and their wives and three
grandchildren.

But Clement never lost heart. Reverently and
tenderly he gathered from the ruined home the
ashes — scarcely more than ashes — of parents and

26 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

brothers; and for once, by sad necessity, abandon-
ing the Christian mode of sepulture, returned to the
old Roman customs of his race and placed them in
urns.

Priests and deacons came from Carthage and
laid the sacred urns on three of the ledges of the
ancient Phoenician catacombs under the hills, which
the Christians had appropriated to themselves.

Sunday by Sunday he had never failed to have
some offering of bread and wine, saved from what-
ever hunger and poverty, to lay on the Christian
altar, commemorative of the blessed departed. And
resolutely uncomplaining as any of his mother's
ancient Roman house, he set himself to battle for
life for the two sisters and the young brother they
had left to his charge; an inspiriting tangible con-
test with tangible foes of nature and circumstance,
and an inspiring, visible victory.

The conflict had left its mark in his broad sinewy
frame, his strong and knotted hands, his frank,
determined, sunburnt face, and the quiet command
of his eye and voice. Day by day it had also left
its records in the clearing of some waste, the re-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. . l^j

building of some ruin; though it were only a few
inches set in order, or a few stones replaced, every
night saw something accomplished.

Every room of the homestead, every field of the
farm, was to him dear not only as an inheritance
but a conquest, a conquest for his beloved, for his
dead parents' beloved.

Work had been his delight and pride, the
glorious human work of giving law, and so giving
freedom and fruitfulness, to nature.

The fields and gardens, to which he had by the
sweat of his brow brought the waters they thirsted
for, seemed to sing and smile for him and his.

That very day they had finished roofing again
one of the old Carthaginian tanks on the hill- sides,
and after supper he went with Valerian to see the
completed work which was so soon in that fiery sun
and fertile soil to change a rocky hillside into an
Eden.

As they climbed the terraces, the chief share in
the dialogue fell, in a way very unusual between the
brothers, to the elder.

To Clement, the world of knowledge and thought,

2S LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

in which the work of his hands and the command
of his will had enabled Valerian to live, was an un-
known territory in which he believed with as simple
a reverence as in the unseen spiritual world around
and above them both. And to the histories of
ancient nations and men, the stories of the acts and
works of the heroes, the resonant battles or respon-
sive amens of the thinkers, the sages, and phi-
losophers, the creations of the poets, he listened with
unceasing delight as they poured in eloquent talk
from the lips of Valerian.

But to-night Valerian was silent, and as they
went from field to field and terrace to terrace Cle-
ment was drawn into pointing out the steps of his
slow work of restoration and repair; here, the com-
pleting of a broken terrace from the ruins of some
old Punic dwelling, there the clearing of a field of
the stones with which it was walled round; here
carefully paved channels to carry off and economise
the rains of the sudden storms, or of the continued
rainy season; until at last they stood on a corridor
within the fine old Carthaginian tank, their steps
and voices echoing in the hollow vault at the edge

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 2g

of the deep pool, which would soon be precious as
a store of gold to the dry and thirsty land; and
Clement pointed out the new repairs, made with
material and workmanship worthy of the old.

Then they sate down a few minutes on a bank
outside, looking down over olives, vines, figs, and
corn-fields melted to a dreamy grey in the moon-
light.

The external contrast between the brothers was
as great as that in their lives.

Clement, of that old Roman type, not unlike the
best English, broad-browed, broad-chested, sinewy,
muscular, with fi-ank, steady blue eyes, and a mouth
and chin the strength and determination of which
the fair beard did not hide, his tread firm and
purpose-like as that of a practised mountaineer be-
ginning a long climb, and bent on not wasting a
step; Valerian, southern in every look and Hmb,
lithe, agile, with a spring and grace in every move-
ment, which seemed to scorn the possibility of
fatigue, dark eyes alternately flashing or melancholy,
a countenance whose expression in repose you

30 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

scarcely knew, so brilliant and mobile and pene-
trated with life was it in every feature.

His listening was often more eloquent than what
he listened to, so full was the face of quick sym-
pathetic response; and his speech had the fascina-
tion of always blending the audience with the sub-
ject, and even in its most absorbed aspirations never
being content unless the listener was borne upward
along the thought which inspired the speaker.

But to-night he leant his head on his hand and
was silent.

"Something has saddened thee!" Clement said
at length. "But for the news that preceded thee,
we should have shared little in thy triumph to
day."

"The triumphs are thine, not mine," Valerian
rephed, "or at least the victories. And who that
knows what they mean cares for triumphs? You
have really repaired terribly real ravages, really
rebuilt real ruins, while I have been learning
shadows, fighting with shadows, ambitiously aiming
at shadows."

"We are no heathen," replied Clement; "ghosts

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 3 I

to US are not shades. The soul, the unseen world,
is more real than this transitory world we see. The
depression and weariness of victory are on thee.
But thou hast overcome."

" What have I overcome?" was the desponding
reply. "The whole dear ancestral farm is a series
of trophies of your victories. Where are the trophies
of mine?"

"You have conquered your place in the world.
You are ki\pwn to be a power worth having on any
side. Every career is open to you."

"To me, to us, what careers are open?" was the
reply. "We cannot be soldiers — at least men think
so, TertuUian would have thought so — because of
the sacrificing for the Emperor. We cannot be
sculptors, and that I could be," he added with a
sad consciousness of unavailing power; "our every
stroke of the 'chisel on the glorious Greek gods
would be like a treacherous blow, nailing the Sacred
One afresh to the cross. It is hard for us to be in
office without denying our highest allegiance, or
to be advocates or rhetoricians without becoming
entangled in the meshes of these evil days."

32 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"Can you not be a soldier, a sculptor, a states-
man, a rhetorician, an advocate, simply to dis-
entangle the evil meshes of the time , to untwist the
demoniacal beauty and plausibility of the false
image from the true? Can you not be a sculptor
of Divine beauty, a soldier supremely of the King
of kings, a pleader for the widow and the father-
less, and eloquent to teach the highest truth?"

"That were to be a priest, Clement; and for the
ascetic discipline of the highest life I have not
seemed to have a call, at least not anything like a
steady bent. The world is so flooded with life. I
want to live, to. live the fullest possible life; pure,
but complete, and complete because pure; but not
stunted, renouncing, self-repressed."

"We are baptized," said Clement dubiously.
"We have taken up the cross."

"What does all that mean?" was the almost
fierce reply. "What do we renounce? what cross
weighs on you here in your seclusion? What contest
are you engaged in, but the grand old human
contest of subduing nature, or rather of liberating
nature from her enemies?"

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. ^^

"My battle here does seem becoming a war of
liberation," Clement replied. "The ravages of men
are repaired at last. And now what we have to do
is to set the waters free by imprisoning them for a
while in their cool-roofed reservoirs, to do their
ministering to the fields and all the living creatures;
to set the true plants and trees free from the false
parasites and weeds, and the false luxuriance of
their own rank growth; to set the very sunbeams
free to fertilise the earth by blending them with the
waters. But is not the Church engaged in just
such a war?"

"You are right, brother; you have conquered,"
Valerian replied. "But believe me, the hardest
fights are with the shadows — the unrealities; the
shadowy Christians to whom the renounced world
still seems the substance, the shadowy philosophers
to whom all is alike unknowable, and by whom any
firm conviction is smiled at as an innocent dream
of unawakened childhood, or resented as a fanati-
cism on a par with the superstitions of the common
people. The reply among the educated men I
meet to my pleading for the Faith is not an angry

Lapsed, hut not Lost. ^i

34 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

repulse, but an easy smile, a shrug, and a con-
temptuous admission that all these things are con-
ceivable. *But what can you or we know'i Who
thinks he knows anything certainly, save those who
know nothing?'"

"Listen!" he continued. "We have both been
engaged in a campaign. But yours has been
simple: to liberate the true nature from the false,
to set her free by enabling her to be subject to her
own true inward laws. Every creature has its foes,
has it not, within or without? The vine has in-
sects, mildews, and also its own false luxuriance of
leaf instead of true fruitfulness of grapes; the corn,
which has no existence except in fruit, which is
grain or nothing, is, perhaps, the happiest. The
tares choke it; it withers, but cannot exist wild and
degenerate. It is true corn, or ceases to be. And
to all these lower creatures of our God you have
come as a liberator and a king, restoring them their
true liberty in restoring them to His laws. But
with me the battle has been inward and not simple.
My soul vibrates between the questions — Shall I
give myself to the nature which God surely made,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 35

simply expand into all wealth of thought and utter-
ance and pure human love, take all the gold and
purple, human and natural, loving it as simply in
sculpture and in palaces as in fields and gardens
and sunlit heavens — take all beauty as the heritage
of the sons of God? — or is the cross after all the
true highest law, as TertuUian thinks — he whom the
great Cyprian calls master, and reads daily? Is the
free air reached only by the rugged, upward path?
Are there joys of the Paraclete, is there a strength
of the Spirit worth all beside, only to be reached
by those who renounce, and lead the ascetic life?"

Clement passed his hand with a gesture of per-
plexity across his brow.

"How can I answer thee? I, whose life has
been so simple ! For thou knowest, whatever poetical
symbols may shine to thee (and sometimes to me)
in this old warfare against Nature, for Nature, with
Natxire, the inspiration and aim of my daily toil has
been simply to replace the lost parents and the lost
heritage to thee and thy sisters; to enable thee to
pursue thy true calling among the instructed, to
give comforts to the dear lame Justa, to make the

36 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

youth of our little Viola joyous, aaid to endow her
for marriage. I have been no Hercules conquering
dragons, only k lay deacon serving tables; and per-
haps," he added, "for the heart knows its own
temptations, sometimes in danger of getting too
fond of the tables I serve, making idol-altars of
them."

"Thy life has been simple," Valerian said, "be-
cause its inspiration has been love, free because its
law has been love. Teach me how, in my world, to
make mine like it."

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 37

CHAPTER IIL

When they reached the house the sisters were
resting at the feet of the grandmother, as she sate
erect, with crossed hands, in the old carved and
curved ivory chair.

"The grandmother is telling us once more the
story of the martyrs, the martyrs she saw suffer."

"They whose death was birth into new life for
me," said the old Roman matron.

"Tell it us, mother," Valerian said. "It is like
a deep fountain, cool and clear, in the, heart of the
hills. And these times are feverish. Let us bathe
once more in the old wells."

"You would have the old story once more from
the old lips?" she said. "God forbid that they
should refuse to bear witness to the blessed, with
whom they will soon, by the grace of Christ, be
joining, however far below them, in the praises of
the King.

38 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"I was young myself, children, younger than our
Justa, as young as the young noble matron herself,
Vivia Perpetua, and like her I was rejoicing in my
first babe, your own mother. And, moreover, I had
seen the gracious creature, and we had conversed
and compared our infants in the fashion of young
mothers; hers being a son and mine a daughter.
Her father was a pagan, and our families had known
each other; but her mother was a Christian, and she
and her brother catechumens. The intimacy had
been shunned of late by my parents. For even in
my youth it was perceived that there was a perilous
contagion in the faith.

"There was a peculiar tenderness of family love
in that family; that also, we had seen, often came
with the Christian doctrine. It shone back even on
heathen relations, and I had often observed the
pride and delight of Perpetua's father in his daughter
and her babe.

"Therefore it touched me much when, at one of
our pagan festivals, my father brought home the
tidings that the fair young matron, the Lady Per-
petua, had been rudely dragged before the tribunals.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 39

with her young brother, the young slave woman
called Felicitas, and two other young men.

"It moved my father much to see the noble
young Roman lady dragged forward to be mocked
at and insulted by the low, mixed mob of Carthage.
*Her bearing was worthy of her ancestry and of
Rome,' he said, * simple and calm.' No doubt she
bore herself as one who has nothing but truth to
say, to whom the judgment-seat she stood at, as
well as the mob who insulted her, were not her
true tribunal nor her true city; citizen of another
city, and always standing before the Invisible Judge.

"Her unhappy heathen father, to whom no higher
tribunal was known, trembled and entreated for his
child. She trembled at nothing, and was only
moved by his tears, as in his tender affection he
persevered in his efforts to *cast her down.' ^Casi
her down,' the blessed one called it, knowing her-
self to be, not as she seemed, abject under the feet
of men, but on a height and in a refuge they could
not reach.

"*My father,' she said, *this vessel, be it a
pitcher or anything else, can we call it by anything

40 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

but its right name?' * Certainly not/ he replied.
*NQr can I,' she said, *call myself by any other
name but that of Christian.' She could not, could
not, beloved, Hving in the very heart of the Truth,
say anything untrue. A fierce resentment against
her obstinacy flashed in his eyes; for her sake almost
hating her very self; and he departed.

"From that time I gleaned every fragment of
tidings I could of her. I can scarcely now dis-
tinguish what I heard from others from what I
learned from the narrative she wrote herself.

"It was this impossibility of untruth which moved
me, so easy and so harmless as it seems to dis-
semble.

"Truth was before her as a great sacred reality,
which could be Hved in, consciously known and
breathed in, and which, being breathed, made false-
hood impossible.

"No one around me so thought of truth. Religion
waa a convenient custom; the stories of the gods fair
legends from which no one could attempt to dis-
entangle the false; the opinions of the sages endless
debates, in which one logical conclusion was that

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 4 1

there was no spirit, and the other that there was no
matter; some that our bodies, some that our souls,
and many that both, were a shadow and a dream.

"Afterwards, what this truth is became the great
question to me, what it means to be a Christian?
But at first it was simply this, that truth exists,

"There was a delay of a few days before the five
Christians were placed under strict guard. The
clergy of the Church had access to them. I went
more than once to see the young mother, and ventured
for old kindness' sake to carry her fruit or flowers.
And so it happened that I was present at the baptism
of the five martyrs in the prison chambers — the first
baptism, beloved, I saw. And I think you have
scarcely seen one so moving: laved in the sacred
flood, to sit so soon at the sacred table with the
Christ himself; cleansed in precious blood for the
shedding of their own; robed in white for the mar-
riage-supper of the Lamb.

"Calm and simple as always, Perpetua said, *The
Spirit prompted me at my baptism to pray for
nothing but patience.' The light of it was on her
face. *The waters of baptism,' she said, * seemed to

42 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

give powers of endurance to my body/ And after
that I saw her no more for many days.

"They were cast into the common dungeon.
And brave as she was, the darkness and the heat
and the insults weighed the deHcately nurtured lady
down.

"Rude words and polluted, stifling air tried her,
and darkness. She, as much as you or I, had been
kept from being soiled by an insulting look, and she
shrank and trembled. And before her was the agony
and shame of the arena; yet from that she shrank
not.

"*0 miserable day!' she said, *from the dreadful
heat of the prisoners crowded together and the
insults of the soldiers. I was terrified, for I had
never seen such total darkness before. I was torn
with anxiety for my infant. Two of our deacons,
for money, obtained our removal, a few hours each
day, to a more open part of the prison. There each
of the captives pursued his usual occupation; but I
sate and suckled my infant, who was wasting away
with hunger.' Yet in the midst of her own trouble

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 43

she spoke to her mother and comforted her, and
commended the child to her brother.

"Child, woman of rank, mother, daughter, she
dreaded the horror of darkness, she shrank from a
rude word, she suffered in the sufferings of her
parents, she pined with her babe.

"And yet from confessing her Lord she never
shrank one instant.

"And his joy overflowed the terror and the suf-
fering, and even the sympathetic sorrow for the
sorrow she caused to her beloved.

"Death in her was swallowed up of life. She
recovered strength. She was relieved from her toil
and trouble for her infant. The prison became to
her as a palace. They brought the martyrs the Holy
Eucharist in the prison. *I was happier there,'
she said, *than I could have been anywhere else.'

"Lovely visions came to her at night. She saw
a ladder of gold, with a great dragon at its foot.
But, as they went up, the dragon couched like a
tame dog; and at the top was a fair, wide garden.
There sate the Good Shepherd amongst His sheep,
and He gave her food, and she took it with* folded

44 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

hands, and the Amen of the saints came to her, and
she awoke with the music in her heart and the
sweet taste of the heavenly food in her mouth.

"And when she told the dream to her brother,
they knew that hope for them in this world there
was no more.

"Once more her aged father came to her in the
prison. All the anger had gone from his poor worn
face. Wasted with grief and anxiety, he threw him-
self at her feet, fondly he kissed her hands; weeping
sore, he called her not daughter, but domina, lady,
mistress. *Have compassion,' he said, *on my grey
hairs; have compassion on thy father. If I have
brought thee up to the flower of thy age, if I have
loved thee beyond all thy brothers, do not expose
me to this disgrace. Look on thy mother, thy
brother, thy aunt, thy child — who cannot live without
thee. Do not ruin us all. For if thou doest thus,
none of us again will be able to bear ourselves as
free citizens.'

"And bitterly she grieved for him. For to his
grey hairs, him alone of all her family, her martyr-
dom brought nothing but shame and anguish, and

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 45

no compensating joy. She tried to console him by
saying, 'What will happen at the tribunal will be
what God wills. For we stand not in our own
strength, but in the power of God.'

"But he went away sorrowing.

"Once more she stood at the tribunal. Her
father sought to move her by coming with her
babe in his arms, and the heathen tried to
move her by what they thought would move her
most. They threw down her father and beat the
old man with rods. But she could not change nor
flinch, though it was harder to her than to be so
scourged herself. * Spare the grey hairs of your
father,' they cried, 'spare your babe, offer sacrifice
for the welfare of the Emperor.'

"She answered, *I will not sacrifice.'

" *Art thou a Christian?' said the judge.

"*I am a Christian,' she said.

"Then sentence was passed on them all. They
were condemned to be torn by the wild beasts in the
arena. And they went back to the prison, content.
Old memories of her childhood came back to her
there, at the threshold of her Father's house. She

4^ L.\FiED, En S^.-r LO=T.

dreamed of her Lnle brother who had died of a
sore disease al sc\"en ycais old- She diought she
saw him in a daik place, iMrsty and helpless, bf a
fountain of water he was too httle to reach. She
prayed for him. And she saw him (race again tn a
second risitMi, and the fountain welled up and
touched him, and there was a cup by it, and he
drank it all, and went away content, as children are
wont, to play. So she knew he was translated to a
happy place,

"The hearts of the gaoleis were softened, they
suffered the bretluen lo come and comfo
martjTs. ^

"With a doubtfiil mercr,;'*'-"'^^^
old father to come anAM
with his worn, wasted
grey hairs, throwing
on the grourid, pr
which must havp

"By day ani
of Him they
palaces with^
and of olf'

' ani

4

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 47

ings in that place of peace, between brethren who
had striven fiercely in controversy on earth. As, in
one of these visions, Perpetua was conversing with
some such, the blessed peace-bringing angels came
and reconciled the former combatants.

"Ah, beloved, I have often thought of that!
Will not the blessed angels so reconcile many by-
and-by?

"Good it were to live as those did, at the thres-
hold of the Home, though it were a prison, and
catch something of the reconciling hands and tones
even here.

"For in the stress and the peril, as in the per-
fect light, many a subject of fierce contention melts
away. Many who would not listen in ordinary times
to the Divine words spoken through a woman's Hps
are fain to drink them in on the steps of the arena,
on the steps of the Father's house.

"And then, beloved, the end, the terrible tumult
of their death! — the unutterable calm and love and
peace of their death! — which fifty years ago I saw,
and through which I live to-day.

"They endeavoured to clothe them in purple as

48 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

priests of Saturn, and with garlands as priestesses of
Ceres.

"But meekly submitting as they did to all per-
sonal wrong and pain, to this they would not sub-
mit. The King was concerned in this, and they
could not 3rield.

"*We have come here of our own will,' they
said, *that our freedom be not taken from us. We
have given our lives not to do this very thing.'

"And the justice God has implanted in the souls
of the heathen bore witness for them. They were
suffered to come into the arena in their every-day
dress.

"It was their last resistance.

"Perpetua and Felicitas, the lady and the slave,
were enclosed in nets and tossed by a furious cow.
When afterwards they lay wounded on the arena,
Perpetua calmly drew her rent robe over her, and
clasped up her long, loosened tresses; because it
became not a -mart)!:, bearing witness for the King
of kings, as at a festival, and going to be crowned
of Him, to suffer with dishevelled locks, as at a
funeral.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 49

"Then she crept to where her fellow -sufferer
Felicitas lay, faint, wounded, and dying, and raised
her up in her arms, the lady only privileged above
the slave in being permitted to serve to the last.

"Mightier and tenderer arms were around them
both. Felicitas had said, *In the arena, I shall not
suffer alone. Another will bear it all with me.' And
they found it so.

"ForPerpetua herself, all pain and shame seemed
lost in ecstasy. For she asked, *when she was to
be given to the wild beast,' as if that were all yet
to come; she could scarcely be made to believe it
was over.

"With her dying breath she tenderly encouraged
her young brother to be steadfast to the last. And
then she gently guided the sword of the gladiator
which finished her life — which began her life, be-
loved! And began life in we know not how many,
and, as you know, in me. Fifty years ago, and fresh
to-day as then!

"For she first revealed to me that truth exists
and can be known by us here on earth. And she

Lapsed f but not Lost. ^

50 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

first revealed to me that there is a relationship closer
than that of mother, father, or child, a love which
makes all other love unutterably deeper, and yet is
itself unutterably deeper than all."

I

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 5 I

CHAPTER IV.

The paths through the gardens and vineyards
which Valerian and Viola had trodden alone the
night before were made joyous the next morning by
the gathering of the whole Church of Carthage to
the Natal Festival of the Martyrs.

From all quarters of Carthage they came; from
the villas along the shore, and from the remoter
country. Amongst them some slaves; and not a few wo-
men of high rank, borne in rich-curtained litters, and
men high in office and rank, marked by their broad-
bordered robes. But the majority were from the
middle-classes, prosperous, industrious tradesmen,
skilled artisans, rich freedmen, shipowners, and
merchants.

Ancient ancestry, especially if Roman or Latin,

had its value. But in an empire, in which the

supreme power had so seldom descended thrice in

one family, and which lately had been subject to

4*

52 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

one barbarian after another, hereditary rank had
comparatively little weight. To be a Roman was still
something, and, among Romans, to belong to an old
patrician house was still something more, and a great
legendary Greek ancestry had its charm for educated
men; but in a provincial city like Carthage, too many
ancestries, more ancient than Rome herself, had been
crumbled down beneath the tyranny of military con-
quest for birth to take any stand in comparison with
office.

And the honour paid to office in an empire
where the imperial source of all official rank had
been often so basely won and so briefly held was of
the most lowering kind.

The enthusiasm of loyalty did not exist, the enthu-
siasm of patriotism, in the subject nations, had been
crushed out, and with Romans had been debased
into a mere jealous guarding of a privileged caste.

In the Church alone both these great inspirations
were felt; — in her loyalty to the King Immortal and
Invisible, who had created her by dying; in the
patriotism to the great Christian nation bom of one
Father, through whose veins flowed one sacred blood.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 53

which thrilled with one sympathetic Hfe, whether in
suffering or in thanksgiving, from Phrygia to Lyons,
from Egypt to Rome, from Rome to Carthage and
Spain.

So, the community at Carthage met that morn-
ing, not as an isolated colony, but as a portion of a
great state, a great kingdom.

Whether or not in a majority, as TertuUian had
asserted of Carthage, they were advancing to be the
majority throughout the empire, by the force of youth
in the midst of a world in its decrepitude.

There was no concealment in this festival. The
heathen knew why they met.

More than half a century since, before Perpetua
died, TertulHan had written his apology rather in the
tone of an assault than a defence: had summoned
the magistrates before his higher Tribunal, rather
than pleaded before theirs.

And to-day there was a freedom and a joyous-
ness about the meetings and greetings which gave
the assembly a national as well as a religious cha-
racter.

That morning, also, there was a recent convert

54 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

among them from the high places of heathenism —
Thascius Cyprian, a man of wealth and standing,
convinced late in middle life of the truth of Chris-
tianity, bringing to the service of the Church a fin-
ished eloquence and a statesman's training. A hush
of welcome greeted him as he passed along, and the
"grave joyousness" of his manner, on this his first
celebration of the mart3rrs, threw an additional light
on the feast to many.

And yet, as he passed, doubtless his eyes were
quietly taking in the pomp of dress, the jewelled
necklaces, and sky-blue robes and golden fillets, for
which he afterwards reprehended Christian women.

The thirty years of peace had, he thought, relaxed
the nerve and sinew of Christian life; and it needed
such a conversion as his, from the absolute outside
of idolatrous heathenism, to make the indelible con-
trast once more vividly perceived.

His own dress was marked by no peculiar asce-
ticism. Dearly as he honoured Tertullian, "the mas-
ter," he did not assume the philosopher's pall which
Tertullian thought the befitting dress for a Christian.
But he, coming from the unchanged world outside,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 55

felt keenly the differences which to many born with-
in the fold, and only knowing the heathen world
from outside, seemed faint and all but effaced.

It was a joyous meeting, the happy voices of
children nurtured in Christian homes, and young
maidens trooping to lay on the sacred graves the
garlands with which TertuUian had told them it was
a degradation to crown their own brows.

A tender feeling of reverence for the glorious
confessors, and of a corporate possession in their
passion and their victory blended with the natural
human joy of meeting with any sympathetic purpose.
But on none save those who had long passed the
prime of life had the terrible shadow of persecution
fallen, and scarcely one heart was saddened by a
shadow of dread that on that rugged and sanguinary
path any then present would ever be called to
tread.

The blessed Cross of Redemption itself seemed
scarcely farther off than that day of tumult and
triumph in the arena of Carthage.

The Cross was commemorated by the Eucharistic
Feast, and the martyrdom by garlands and hymns;

56 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

and both lay deep in the foundations of the Church,
and above began to rise the fair and sublime House
of God for all nations. Surely the times of fulfil-
ment were drawing near!

The four brothers and sisters came together
among the vines to the hill of the catacombs, as
bright a group as any there; the brothers first, carry-
ing a basket with the offering of bread and wine —
wine from their own grapes and bread from their
own granaries — and the sisters following with gar-
lands of richly scented flowers, bells, and cups, and
crowns of creamy white and gorgeous crimson and
purple, pouring out their perfume in the cool morn-
ing air — flowers carefully cultivated to render this
homage; and mingled with them, by a fancy of
Viola's, bunches of sweet wild blossoms, lest, she
said, "Nature's own free offerings and gifts to the
poorest — the little children of the woods and fields
— should seem to be forbidden to come to Him who
paid such honour to their lily kindred in Syria of
old."

At length they reached the entrance of the cata-
combs; and one group after another passed from the

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 57

glow of the sunshine into the twihght and coolness
of the vaulted chambers of the ancient Phoenician
dead, now appropriated to Christian burial. There
the offerings of bread and wine, taken from their
hands, were laid by the deacons on the altar, offer-
ings for the departed and the present, the Church
visible and invisible, the living here below and the
living with God. And the garlands were heaped on
tomb and floor.

The Acts of the Martyrs were read and prayers
offered; those pathetic prayers of the old Liturgies
which revealed in their detail of intercession how
rough and perilous still was the path the Church had
to tread,

"Remember, O Lord, Christians sailing and
travelling; our fathers and brethren who are in
bonds, captivity, and exile; who are in mines, and
under torture and bitter slavery. Have mercy on
all who are in prison, or in mines, or on trial, or
condenmed, or in exile, or crushed by cruel bondage or
tribute. Deliver them, O Lord, for thou art our God,
who settest the captives free; who raisest up the down-
trodden; who givest hope to the hopeless and help to

58 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

the helpless; who liftest up the fallen; who givest refuge
to the shipwrecked and vengeance to the oppressed.
Pity, relieve, and restore every Christian soul that is
afflicted or wandering. But do thou, O Lord, the
physician of our souls and bodies, the guardian of
all flesh, look down, and by Thy saving power heal
all the diseases of soul and body.

"Send down copious showers on dry and thirsty
lands. Gladden and revive the face of the earth,
that it may spring forth and rejoice in the raindrops.
Make the rivers flow in full stream.

"Have mercy on all creatures; spare the guilty;
convert the erring; restore the oppressed; on the
disquieted bestow rest; heal the weak; console the
afflicted; and perfect the alms of those who work
righteousness on account of Thy holy name.

"Sanctify also, O Lord, our souls and bodies and
spirits, and touch our understandings, search our
consciences, and cast out from us every evil imagi-
nation, every impure feeling, every base desire, every
unbecoming thought, all envy and vanity and hypo-
crisy, all lying, all deceit, all wantonness, all wran-
gling, all indifference, every motive of the flesh and

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 59

Spirit that is not in accordance with Thy holy will.
Remember, O Lord, the spirits of all flesh of whom
we have made mention, and of whom we have not
made mention, who are of the true faith, from
righteous Abel unto this day; unto them do thou
give rest, those in the land of the living, in Thy
kingdom, in the joy of Paradise, in the bosom of
Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, our holy fathers;
whence pain and grief and lamentation have fled;
there the light of Thy countenance looks upon them
and enlightens them for ever."

To the early Church, the family in earth and
heaven were truly one; the place of the departed
was not the land of the dead where all things are
forgotten, it was "the land of the living."

The sacred responsive call which has echoed
through the church for nearly two thousand years,
sounded solenmly under the ancient vaults beneath
the hills.

The solitary voice commanding —

" Lift up your hearts ; "

the whole congregation pealing back the answer —

" We lift them up to the Lord."

6o LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST*

Afterwards the whole assembly, for a time, kept
motionless silence, before the celebration of the Holy
Eucharist.

Eucharistical, joyful, the spirit of freedom and
thanksgiving seemed to pervade the whole.

The faithful footsteps of those they delighted to
honour had opened a bright path for*those that fol-
lowed; the sacred blood of sacrifice came to them
in the wine of joy and the bread of daily susten-
ance.

Yet always these elements, in the symbolism of
Christian life, are reconvertible. And on the utmost
verge of the united joyous company knelt two who
bore on every feature commemoration of the bitterest
kind.

When the service was over, and the brothers and
sisters were preparing to go home, in the shadow of
the rocky hill under which the catacombs were ex-
cavated. Valerian's eye fell on the crouching forms
of the man and woman who had crossed his and
Viola's path the evening before.

The same downcast, hopeless, stony look on the
face of the man; the same imploring, appealing, yet

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 6 I

unexpectant upward gaze in the woman, unchanged
and unillumined by any of the joy around them.

Moved by an instinct of compassion, and at-
tracted by a kind of gloomy fascination, Valerian
went up to them apart, and spoke in a low voice to
the woman.

"Can I — can the priest here do nothing for you?
He is a wise man and pitiful."

"Pity is not for us, at least not for me," she
said.

Valerian turned to the man.

As he looked, the stony features and frame grew
yet more rigid, and the sufferer sank helpless and
unconscious on the ground.

Clement and his sisters had gone out of sight,
swept on with the joyous multitude. Valerian lin-
gered to give what help he could. He would have
raised the rigid form and opened the closed lips to
pour in wine. But the woman gently laid her hand
on his, and refused all aid.

"Do not arouse him one moment before it must
be," she said. "Why should he be conscious of his
anguish one moment longer than must be? Depart

62 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

from us, we are polluted," she said; "we sacrificed
for Caesar in the persecution of Maximin. I per-
suaded him, because our love and happiness were so
great. Now he will never know forgiveness on earth,
and in heaven he can never again love or forgive
me. We are lapsed, we are Sacrificati — of the worst
and most unpardonable. He has nothing to plead
but the dead love for me. I have nothing to plead
but the devilish selfishness which I thought love for
him. We were not threatened with torture or death,
only with separation, exile, and the mines. And
now we are together — always — and never: his very
soul closed and separated from me."

Valerian shuddered and half withdrew, so deep
was the horror of treachery against Christ.

"Why do you stay with him?"

She smiled a sad wondering smile.

"Did you never love?" she said. "If my mortal
life could be poured out in one drop, which could
soothe for an hour the anguish I have caused him,
would it not be well spent?"

An impulse of unquenchable pity mastered him,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 63

and lifted him for a moment above the mists of his
time and region.

"Our Lord poured out all ^s immortal life," he
said, "my sister, for thee, for me; in Him love is
stronger than sin, than death, than all. Who knows
but that through all this anguish, though never to
be soothed in this life, He is disciplining you, mak-
ing you good, and may forgive you, after ages of
ages, perhaps, but yet at last?" For it never entered
his mind that the misery and the shame could be
atoned for or blotted out here.

He signed the cross over the ashy rigid face of
the man, as the wife had laid it on her knee, and
over the bowed head of the woman.

"It is only when he is unconscious," she mur-
mured, "that I can have the poor wasted frame rest
in any way on me. He does not know I am sustain-
ing him."

"Can it be? Can it be?" Valerian thought, "that
the Holy One himself is so sustaining you both,
although you know it not?"

But he did not say this. The horror of the dis-
loyal betrayal was too strong. He only said —

64 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"Sister! absolved or not, do not dare to look
away from the Cross."

She thanked him with an upward glance; but at
that moment a quiver passed through the rigid mo-
tionless frame, and she motioned Valerian away.

LAPSED, Birr NOT LOST. 65

CHAPTER V.

There was much simple festivity at the farm
that day, but the shadow of the two lapsed and lost
Christians lay heavy on Valerian.

In the evening, when all the guests had returned
to Carthage, he spoke of it in the family.

There was no division of opinion in the little
family as to the enormity of the crime or the neces-
sity of the severest penalty.

The grand and sombre shadow of Tertullian lay
especially dark on the North African Church.

The existence of the whole Church was based
on loyalty to an invisible King. Disloyalty to Him
by an open act of treason seemed, therefore, the one
impardonable offence. It was not denied that the
merciful One who blotted out St. Peter's threefold
denial by a threetoid commission might forgive any
who so failed Him in after ages. But for the Church
to pass by such a treachery seemed to be making

Lapsed t but not Lost. 5

6.6 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

herself a sharer in it, — seemed an act of disloyalty
in the Church herself.

"There used to be only one key to that door,"
the grandmother said. "If one of the martyrs, or of
those who had faithfully given themselves up to
martyrdom, could plead for these guilty ones, they
may, perhaps, find a place for repentance. Such
honour was wont to be paid to those who had fol-
lowed the Master closely. But there are no martyrs
in these days."

"It would be doubly worth while to suffer," said
Viola, "if by suffering one could so save. It would
make it like our Lord's own suffering."

"Thascius Cyprian thinks too much has some-
times been conceded to the pleading of the martyrs,"
Valerian said. "It is no mercy to make it less peril-
ous to fall."

"But if one had fallen!" said Qement.

"Surely we ought not to allow ourselves for an
instant to think that possible!" Valerian replied.
"To dream of having the words of denial on our lips
seems in itself a treason."

"But to dream of having the martyr's crown on

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. t^

our brow seems in itself a boast like St. Peter's,"
Qement replied, "and a summoning of the enemy
to his worst against us. And who knows what his
worst might be? What do we know, who have given
up nothing, to whom the faith has been but an aid
to do better the best things we could otherwise have
done? Who knows how we might stand torture, or,
still more, stand seeing our beloved tortured?"

"Yet it was not torture before which St. Peter
fell. It was a taunt — a taunt from a slave-woman —
and the Master within hearing. Is torture so much
more terrible than contempt," said Valerian, "that
we should dare to think it could bring us to be-
tray?"

"We may be sure the enemy would not leave
his wiles behind," said Clement, "even when he could
openly wield the sword. There is always some hid'
den temptation behind the temptation others see,
which is the temptation to us."

"The 'temptation of temptations,' it seems to
me," said Valerian, "is that makiE^ all things
shadowy; those endless suggestions that there are

68 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

two sides to everything, and that only the ignorant
beUeve in one side enough to suffer for it."

"Ah, you all talk like inexperienced children,"
said the grandmother. "Not one of you has ever
seen the amphitheatre, seen the eager faces full of
the lust of torture, waiting for the opening of the
grating. Not one of you has heard the roar of the
beasts behind it. Bare torture, tearing limb from
limb, in itself is not so easily endured when it can
he refused. Do you think life and home and love
look less tempting as the alternative to the rack?
Do you think the only place where the devil does
not suggest that there are two sides to things is in
the arena?"

"I do know a little what pain is, mother," said
the lame Justa timidly. "He who gives patience for
the little, would surely give patience for more. Yet,
indeed, if one could choose in the long nights, when
every limb makes itself felt in pain, to have it all
vanish and be in a paradise of rest, for a word, for
a few grains of incense, for a prayer which, St. Paul
says, being to 'nothing in the world' could do harm
to no one, it might be hard to choose right"

K

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 69

"Sister!" said Valerian, "a word? A lie! a
treason! a nail driven into the crucified Christ!"

"I was not thinking of ourselves, but of the poor
lost man and woman," she said, "and longing for
them to be forgiven. Might we not, at all events,
pray for them?"

"Pray that they may be forgiven?" Valerian
said. "Surely. Who doubts the pity of the Saviour?
Who doubts the power of the Master? Pray to God
as much as we will. Yet let none dare to pray the
Church to relax her laws. We are a besieged City
still, and who dares trust deserters? Who dares
weaken her walls? — the only bulwarks left in the
world against treachery and selfish ease; the only
fortress held in the world for loyalty and fidelity
and truth. The King may forgive, but never may
we stand side by side with traitors."

"Only," said Viola, "if we had suffered for them,
we might stoop down, might we not? Nay, even go,
go down to any depth of depths, if only we might
get our arms underneath the lost and lift them up?"

"You speak as if treachery and desertion were
a disease, and the Lapsed were simply like lepers

70 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

or outcasts from bodily corruption; such, of course,
we are bound to succour. But this leprosy is in the
soul, the soul itself is the leprosy in the sacred body
of the Church, and we may not tolerate it. Nothing
can save such, it seems to me, from their own con-
science, save once more to be similarly tried, and
not to lapse."

"Is the devil, then, the only friend of the lapsed?"
said Httle Viola; "the devil now, and by-and-by, we
may hope, the blessed Christ? We might almost
pray for a persecution."

"Child! child!" replied the grandmother; "you
know not what you say. Ask for persecution! We
pray 'lead us not into temptation.'"

That night, as the sisters knelt together in their
little chamber, the two fallen Christians were com-
mended in their prayers to the All-merciful, and
never afterwards were they forgotten; that some day,
in some world, the peace of God might be given to
those to whom the peace of the Church could not
be granted. And a strong spiritual link was formed
between the heart of Viola and those fallen ones.

Through them her heart first learned to know

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 7 1

the outside wilderness into which she followed
them.

"I see them," she said, "as Hagar and Ishmael,
going forth outcast and distressed into the desert.
And I think some of the holy angels will surely be
sent, that they may not perish of thirst."

72 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER VL

So simply and steadfastly had Clement taken on
him the place of the lost parents, that neither he
nor any of the family thought it anything strange
that his life should be altogether given to the family,
and the family make him no further return than to
accept his care, rely on it, and prosper on it.

That Clement should care for every one else,
and that every one else should care for Valerian,
seemed to all the normal and unquestionable order
of things. Through Clement the machinery of the
little home-state was kept steadily going, but in
Valerian the family lived, hoped, went forth into the
world and the Church, felt the vibrations of the
world and the Church thrill through the home. And
the world of that age was a world full of dull echoes
of a past whose forms it imitated while unconsciously
swayed by quite another spirit; a world where philo-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 73

sophers were trying to polish and explain the old
gods into allegories, or into a venerable and shadowy
senate, in impotent session under a distant imperial
rule. It was not so much a mocking, self-satisfied
world with which Valerian came in contact, and
sometimes in collision, as an imitative, uneasy, rest-
less, searching world; seeking rest in ancient mys-
teries and foreign rites, or daintily combining what
seemed least contrary to taste and morals in various
religions; seeking rest, and sometimes thinking it
had found rest, until some real storm came and
shattered the real external world on which it had
been really resting, and it was found that this dainty
religion was not a rock, to build on, but a plaster
decoration, flimsier than the human life on which it
was laid — an unhappy, over-taxed, insecure, luxurious,
impoverished world, which made its gods as it made
its emperors, and had as little loyalty to one as to
the other.

After his oration he was appointed to an office
under the Proconsul, which threw him into varied
society. From day to day he brought home tidings
of some companion having been severely initiated

74 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

into the rites of Mithra, or into the Egyptian mys-
teries; or of some bereaved family which had in-
voked by aid of magic the spirits of the dead, and
received some glimpse of a light or a darkness be-
yond, which at the moment seemed to many the
opening of a door, but always ended in being but
the flitting by of an irrevocable flash.

In this broken world there were still two unities:
the unity of Rome, apparently solid still, but secretly
undermined in countless directions; and the unity
of the Catholic Church, apparently threatened in
countless directions, yet destined, being the unity
of life in a living Lord, to survive Rome and the
world.

Yet the news of the Church which Valerian
brought home was more frequently of division and
internal conflict than of conquest.

The searching, uneasy spirit of the times was in
the Church as well as in the world. The "moon
above, the Church below," which look to us from
the distance so full-orbed and fair, were scarred then
as now with the ruins of many extinct volcanoes,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 75

and lit up with the false glare of many volcanoes
far from extinct.

Elements, since crystallized into solid substances
distinct from each other, were then seething and
arranging themselves in ceaseless revolution and
evolution, unnamed, undistinguished, uncompre-
hended.

And Valerian had that quahty of mind, so in-
valuable, and so perilous, which made him open to
all teaching, a reverent readiness to believe that
what interested the soul of other men must have in
it some Divine element — a generous indisposition
to condemn, a warm and generous disposition to
hear what the condemned had to say for them-
selves.

He had a companion. Prisons, in the service of
the Proconsulate to which he belonged, who had
lately taken to coming frequently to the farm, and
spoiling, Viola considered, the dialogues with her
brother which were the deHght of her life — a man
whose brisk, sharp, easy classifications of everything
in the Church and the world drove Valerian into
still more disinclination to definitions.

76 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST,

Priscus, like Valerian, had a pleasure in studying
what other people were thinking; but not at all, like
Valerian, with an intention of enlarging or modifying
his own thinking, simply as a contribution to his
museum of spiritual curiosities.

He delighted to alarm the grandmother with the
last subtleties of Gnostic speculation in Alexandria,
or the last irregularities of Montanist fervour in
Phrygia, and had not the slightest difficulty in de-
termining the spiritual position of any one, shaking
his head severely at the latitude of Origen, and con-
temptuously anathematizing that poor Phrygian
prophetess, who, when men had fled from persecu-
tion, climbed with bleeding feet across the mountain
rocks and snows to bring spiritual succour (in an
irregular way) to the forsaken Christians in the
hills.

To Priscus the various heretics were like vermin
preserved for sport; he liked to know their haunts
so . as to have them ready at any moment for a
spiritual chase.

To Valerian it was never possible to forget that
the heretics were men and women, and in some

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 77

sense Christians; and therefore he was always im-
pelled to search out the human want or even the
Divine truth, neglected perhaps elsewhere, whose
exaggeration made the heresy; and in the ante-
Nicene period uncondemned heresies, and therefore
the latitude for such sympathies, were considerable
for the most orthodox.

To Valerian and Viola these visits of Priscus
were far from congenial. But the grandmother
thought him a very well-instructed young man; he
knew everything, from the history of the Roman
house to which she had belonged to the last new
speculation of the last new Gnostic; and there was
a certain mild excitement in contrasting the wild
vagaries of these new days with the solid sacrifices
of her own youth.

With Clement also Priscus found some favour.
Valerian was too much occupied with the heart of
things and people to be a good surface newsmonger,
and the lively gossip of Priscus brought a good deal
of contemporary history to the quiet farm.

So it happened that Clement, always ready to
think others his superiors, was much impressed with

78 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

his guest's extent of information about the Roman
corn-fleets and the politics of the province, and the
menaces of the barbarians on the Persian or Dacian
frontier, and gave him credit for knowing much
about all the many things he himself did not
know.

He had also spoken to Clement on the subject
of a marriage with his sister Viola, and the prospect
of an alliance with a man in a good position in the
Church and the world, within reach of her present
home, was not a thing lightly to be rejected.

Marriages were, as a matter of course, affairs of
family arrangement, and Qement stood in the posi-
tion of the father of the family; and although he
would be sure not to disregard his sister's wishes,
there was in him a quiet persistency of puapose, and
a quiet reliance on his own convictions, which made
the resistance of his own will seem a kind of revolt
against a law of nature.

What Clement and the grandmother approved
it had hitherto seemed a rebellion to deem im*
possible.

The aspect of affairs was thus becoming menac-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 79

ing for Viola, until one evening when Priscus took a
tour over the farm with Clement. In this walk,
anxious to please the young proprietor, he hazarded
sundry rhetorical remarks about the culture of vines
and figs, which convinced Clement that, whatever
else he understood, the culture of vines and figs he
did not understand; and the discovery throwing a
shadow on his omniscience generally, Clement be-
gan to take less heed of his opinions about the
Roman empire, and to suspect hollow places else-
where.

The conclusion of the evening was not less un-
fortunate for Priscus as regarded the grandmother.
On his return to the house, having a dim perception
that he had not shone in his observations on farm-
ing, he recurred to his natural field, the gossip of the
Church of Carthage, and hazarded some sharp criti-
cism of TertuUian and the Montanists, their narrow
asceticism, combined with their daring revolt against
episcopal authority, counting on the approval of the
stately old Roman lady on the ground of rational
moderation and of authority.

But to his surprise he found himself confront-

80 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST,

ing a sacred memory on which his polished dis-
secting knife would not be tolerated for an instant.

He was in full career of a ludicrous description
of some Montanist ceremonial in which seven white-
veiled women had walked in procession through the
assembly, to the music of a wild dirge-like chant of
their own, occasionally broken by solemn words of
exhortation and promise, which were received by the
congregation as inspired prophetic utterances; and
with the want of perception of a man accustomed to
talk on the smooth, low levels, and occupied far
more with his own skill in presenting the subject
than with the subject itself, he had not perceived
the indignation gathering on the brow and in the
dark eyes of the old Roman matron, until suddenly
she waved her hand majestically and arrested his
narrative.

"I have seen such things in my time," she said;
"I have seen Christian women inspired, on the eve
of martyrdom, with an eloquence not to be gainsaid,
I have yet to learn that the holy Paraclete is limited
to sex, or age, or station. The generation which can

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. . 8 1

sit smiling by the arena whence the martyrs went to
heaven may exercise its wit on Tertullian. But I
have heard him speak, with a power to which the
smooth sermons of these days seem mere babble;
free as the Spirit whose presence is liberty, as the
Son who makes us free indeed; yet, severe as the
Spirit who smote the half-hearted Ananias, and as
the Lord who said, *If any man will follow Me let
him take up the Cross/ I have heard him appeal
from all sophisticated souls in the Church and out
of it, to the testimony in the depths of every true
soul, for God and Christianity. He believed in the
godlike capacities of men and of women : he believed
in the Spirit of God. When he apologised for Chris-
tianity, his defence became an assault on the enemy,
and they fled beyond their own defences; nay, many
of them fled to ours, convicted by their own con-
sciences. He believed in God, and in man, and in
woman; and in marriage, as few do now, or ever did.
He so believed in the immortal union of true Chris-
tian marriage as to regard second marriage as a
sacrilege. And," she concluded, "I have always thought
him right."

Lapsed^ hut not Lost, 6

82 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Priscus Started, and, colouring crimson, made a
stammering reply.

"I did not know the report of my marriage in
Rome had reached Carthage," he said. "It lasted but
six months; she was but a child, and I buried her
with all honour."

"I did not know you had been married," the
grandmother repUed. "What was that to me? I was
not thinking of you, but of Tertullian."

After that evening, to the great relief of Viola,
it was some weeks before Priscus reappeared. Cle-
ment's belief in him had been rudely shaken; and
the grandmother changed her formula about him,
from "He is as wise as many of twice his years," to
"People who are as wise at twenty as they might be
at seventy are apt to have learnt no more at seventy
than they knew at twenty."

The attack on the hero of her youth had greatly
aroused her; and now once more, out of the multitude
of small controversies and the crowd of lower men,
one great form began to detach itself from the rest in
the Church of Carthage.

Cyprian, only two years after his conversion and

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 8^

baptism, in the full vigour of his life, though al-
ready past the jHrime of his age, had been elected
bishop by the voice of the people. Some of the pres-
byters resisted his appointment, but the laity had dis-
covered the true ruler, and on their choice, with the
consent of the other bishops of the province, as in-
volving the "judgment of God" and the "aspiration
of God," he reHed.

From him Valerian brought home wise words,
fervent exhortations against the luxury of the laity
and the clergy, the degradation of the presbyters
and bishops to pursuits of trade and money-making,
the misery of the pauperised multitudes, the corrup-
tions of the theatre, which recalled to the grand-
mother the great memory of her youth.

"They are alike!" she said; "austere and ardent,
free and ascetic. I recognise the old voice once
more."

Cyprian sold his gardens to have the means of

succouring the poor, but they were purchased back

for him by some of his flock. And from those breezy

gardens near the coast, from the "bower, where the

trailing vine-branches crept in pendent mazes among

6*

84 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

the reeds that supported them, near tne thickets" of
roses and jessamines, came words of lofty Christian
enthusiasm, inspiring the hearts of the young and
reviving the old.

He spoke of the new life he had felt infused into
him. "I used to indulge my sins," he said, "as if
they were indigenous and actually parts of me; but
after that, by the help of the water of the new birth,
the stain of former years had been washed away,
and a light from above, serene and pure, had been
infused into my reconciled heart; after that, by the
agency of the Spirit breathed from heaven, a second
birth had restored me to a new man; then in a
wondrous manner doubtful things at once began to
assure themselves to me, hidden things to be re-
vealed, dark things to be enlightened, what had be-
fore been thought impossible to be capable of being
achieved.

"The Spirit flowing freely forth is restrained by
no limits, is checked by no closed barriers within
certain bounded spaces; it flows perpetually. Let
our hearts only be athirst and be ready to receive,
in the degree in which we bring to it a capacious

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 85

faith, in that measure we draw from it an overflowing
grace."

He spoke of the unspeakable corruption of the
arena, and as strongly of the despicable poverty of
the covetous rich. "Such people call that their own
money," he said, "which they shut up unused, as if
it were another's, in which their only possession is
that they keep others from possessing it^

In contrast, "Man's true elevation is a gratuitous
gift from God, and is accessible to all. As the sun
shines spontaneously, as the fountain flows, as the
showers yield moisture, so does the heavenly Spirit
infuse itself. When the soul, in its gaze into heaven,
has recognised its Author, it rises higher than the
sun, and begins to he what it believes itself to 3^."

"Do you, however," he said, "whom the celestial
warfare has enlisted in the spiritual camp, only ob-
serve a discipline uncorrupted. Be constant in
prayer as well as in reading; now speak with God,
now let Him speak with you. Whom He has made
rich none shall make poor."

"It is the old voice!" the grandmother said, the

86 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

tears filling her eyes. "Thank God I hear it again
before I die."

"Yet the Bishop is no Montanist," said Valerian;
"although every day, they say, he calls for *the
master,' and will not sleep without being strengthened
by some of the strong words of Tertullian."

"See, my children," the matron answered, "how
the blessed voices carry on the message. Our Lord
will never let the Church live on echoes. Just as
the last great voice seems dying away afar in faint
and broken echoes, from the next height rings the
new voice of this new prince with God."

"And yet, mother, the words are not altogether
the same. TertuUian was for the public ministry of
women, and had little reverence for the episcopate
if it crossed him. Cyprian would not have women
take any public office; and he says, *The bishop is
in the Church and the Church is in the bishop.'
If TertuUian had lived twenty years longer, and
these two had met, would they have borne with each
other?"

"How do I know?" she said, with a little irrita-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 87

tion. "God did not suffer them to meet. One such
voice is enough in one age."

And from that time, from the Httle treasury of
dristian manuscripts which was stored up in its
carved case in the grandmother's room, from among
the Gospels and Epistles, the brief burning words
of the Epistle to Diognetus, the martyrdom of Poly-
carp, the acts of the martyrs of Vienne and of
Carthage, the wise fervent sentences of Irenseus,
oftener than before, the aged matron desired Justa
or Viola to take out the well-worn parchments of
TertuUian; and late into the night, by the light of
the little lamp of translucent giallo, the rugged, liv-
ing words were read by the fresh young voice to
the ears that had heard the voice of "the master"
himself of old.

"Old world prayer indeed," he wrote, "used to
free men from fires and beasts and famine. But
how far more operative is Christian prayer! // does
not station the angel of dew in mid-fires nor muzzle
lions; it has no delegated grace to avert any sense
of suffering; hut it supplies the suffering with en-
durance.

88 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

^^For this community — the Church — will he un-
dying; for be assured that just in the time of its
seeming overthrow it is built up into greater power."

"Thank God for the new wine; it is of the old
vine!" she would sometimes say. '"And yet the old
is better!"

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 89

/

■ V

CHAPTER VIL

So these last months of the thirty years' peace
passed on at Carthage; Clement pursuing his quiet
way, Valerian vibrating between the attraction to all
that is beautiful in Pagan thought and art and the
attraction of that "more than commonplace holi-
ness" which said, with TertuUian, "What have we
to do with finding in this world, we whose business
in this world is to lose?'*

More and more the grave fervour of Cyprian
commanded him, that fervour which was no mere
flame of youth, but the steady red heat of a rich
nature, which, having found its Lord late, heaped
up all the accumulated stores of youth and man-
hood and ripened age in the fire of Christian sacri-
fice; the profound passion of a heart enkindled
late, and having the wealth of a lifetime to lavish
in its few last hours.

Before all things, however, Cyprian was the

go LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

bishop, the shepherd of the flock. This was what
he believed the Great Shepherd had given him to
be and to do; to find, to lead, to rule, to increase,
to restrain, to encourage the flock; to live and die
for them.

Never married, to him the Church of Carthage
was family, country, life. Its confessors were his
glory, its lapsed his anguish, its worldly languid
members his wonder and shame.

He did not so much identify them with himself
as identify himself with them.

Seeing the lukewarmness which peace had brought,
often he almost longed for some sharp lessons from
without. And, dreading or longing, he prophesied
that ere long such would come.

As yet, however, no symptom of the coming
storm was in the air; and early in the year. Valerian,
partly on family business connected with the farm
and partly on ecclesiastical business, but chiefly
swayed by his own longing to see what place the
Church really held throughout the Roman world,
and whether the divisions and perplexities of Car-
thage were reproduced elsewhere, set forth on a

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. Q I

journey of some months to Alexandria, to Smyrna,
to Lyons, and to Rome.

The days passed heavily for Viola when Valerian
had gone. Between these two there had always
been an inner kindred which had more than doubled
the world to both. The ties between the whole
family were peculiarly dose and true, but with these
two there was the intimacy of friendship. Together
everything for them rose into its highest meanings,
and many questionings of conscience came to Viola
as to the difference in her enjoyment of the sacred
services and writings without her brother.

To all it was like losing the music of the home
to lose him. His connection with the great city
and the empire was the Roman road on which their
unvaried lives travelled into the wide world. His
presence, with all the aspirations and questionings
it brought, was also a Via Sacra into the higher
world. And the loss was not lightened by the fact
that Priscus began to renew his visits.

Viola, at all events, would have preferred hear-
ing nothing of Carthage and the empire and the
Church, to having everything brought to them through

92 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

the diminishing glass of that small, self-satisfied,
busy, buzzing mind.

The world had grown small and dull enough by
the mere absence of Valerian, she thought, without
having Cyprian represented as a partisan in a small
ecclesiastical strife with the recusant presbyters, and
the whole Church pictured as an arena of petty con-
flicts and selfish aims and party factions.

Had the great Lord become incarnate and died,
had the blessed martyrs agonized and triumphed
only for this — that the world might have another
world created within it, noisy with the quarrels of
bishops and presbyters, and tainted with gossip
about the imprudences of light-minded deacons and
the enormous fortunes made in trade by covetous
bishops?

One evening, however, a gift came to the family
which changed all this.

It was a stormy autumnal evening. The vintage
was over. The grandmother and the sisters were
sitting by the charcoal brazier spinning and em-
broidering, unconsciously silenced by the tumult
outside the house. The wet branches of the trailing

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 93

vines were beating disconsolately against the walls.
The voice of the rainy winds sounded in every tone
of autumnal moan and wail through the groves of
beech and pine; and when these died away, the
ceaseless dash of the waves against the cliffs filled
up the pauses.

At length Viola grew too uneasy to remain quiet.
The sea had a terrible fascination for her since
Valerian had left, and she never knew at any mo-
ment how the storms might be endangering him.
She went, therefore, to the little flax chamber in the
roof to fetch fresh flax for the winter spinning; and
once there the temptation to mount to the flat roof
and see what was going on in the triangle of sea
visible between the rocks which closed the valley
was too strong to be resisted.

Stormy gleams of moonlight broke at intervals
through the black clouds, and in one of these she
caught sight of a vessel, apparently drifting help-
lessly on the rocks.

Assistance to the ship in her struggle with the
winds and waves they had none to render.

The life and death of the Son of Man, who

94 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

loved all men, whose love for humanity has been
reflected in so many who as yet disown Him, had
to work through many centuries yet before it created
lifeboats; and working, as ever, slowly, not by direct
precepts, but through the enkindled hearts and lives
of men, inspiring everywhere the spirit of rescue
for every form of human need and sorrow, as yet
on the shores of Carthage it had only worked so far
outwards as to set this Christian family on the
watch, whenever a wreck occurred, to see that no
wrong was done to the wrecked, in life or property.
It was a custom in the household, therefore,
whenever a ship was espied in peril, to gather all

ft

the slaves together and be ready to render succour
to any who were tossed on any point of rock or
beach within their reach, and if possible to restore
life and to guard property.

Viola lost not a moment in rushing down to find
Clement and tell him of the peril, her steps and
her heart doubtless quickened by the thought of the
possible peril elsewhere to the life dearer to her
than her own.

But the quick omnipresent eyes of the master

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 95

had been before her. Clement had already collected
two or three of the household and was on his way
to the beach, leaving Viola to arrange the woman's
part of the work in collecting clothing, and having
the braziers ready to bring back Hfe to benumbed
limbs.

It was not long before the sisters, listening at
the door to the tempest rising higher and higher,
as if with shrieks and roars of superhuman voices,
were appalled by one prolonged shrill human cry,
terribly clear above the wail of the winds or the
hoarse surging of the waves.

"God heard that, sister!" said Viola, "and He
will hear us!" and instinctively they knelt down in
the porch, their arms around each other, and prayed.
A long interval followed. The storm seemed to lull,
as if it had won its battle and done its work. And
no second appeal from human voices broke the dull
sullen beat of the tempest. The unnatural screams
and moans, as of embittered conscious beings raging
and wailing, seemed to die away.

"How strange it is!" Viola murmured; "the
winds and waves seem as if they were entrgoumtnoiy

96 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

possessed by demons, and had been exorcised, and
were crouching exhausted and moaning as the exor-
cised do before the ahar. I have a strange feehng,
sister, as if the demons had been baffled and made
to give up some prey." The words were still on
her lips, when a slave came running breathlessly to
the house.

"A rescue! a young girl saved! The master is
bringing her. He has sent to have all things ready."
And in- a few minutes Clement appeared bearing in
his arms a slight form wrapped in his own mantle.
He carried the unconscious child into the house and
laid her tenderly on the couch, beside the brazier,
among the women. '

"Let no one touch her but you," he said to his
sisters.

His tone was as if he had been speaking of
something sacred, and, slight as the burden was, his
strength seemed spent with bearing it.

Viola saw that he was very pale and his brow
was bleeding, and would have left everything to bind
up the wound; but he refused help, saying it was
nothing, and left the women alone together.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

97.

So she came to them, Eucharis, the joy and
light, the anguish and bhss of so many in the house-
hold, set for the fall and rising again of many, the
fall and rising again.

*apsed^ but not Lost,

98 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER VIlI.

A WONDERFUL delight it was to the sisters to see
the ashy pallor pass from the face, to watch the
faint flush of life dawn on the beautiful curves of
the cheek and lips and the first quiver in the heavy
blue-veined eyelids, and then at last to see the long
fringes of the dark lashes languidly rise and reveal
for a moment the dark soft eyes. For a moment, a
sacred moment, it seemed to Viola, and certainly
not less to Clement, who had ventured in to watch
for tidings.

A sacred moment, he felt; for those eyes were
windows into the unknown heart and soul, and there
must be no surprising the secret treasures hidden
there; so, reverently, he turned away.

It was but a moment; the heavy eyelids closed
again, a quiver passed through all the frame, and it
was long before they opened once more.

But when they did open, it was no more merely

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 99

the eyelids which seemed to Uft themselves automa-
tically; the human soul consciously and deliberately
raised them, and fixed a long, searching, wistful
gaze on Viola, who had been left alone with her, as
more of her own age and less Hkely to bewilder her
waking.

In a few moments the questioning gaze melted,
as if she had found an answer.

Viola lifted up her eyes to God as she knelt
beside the' couch, and half unconsciously made the
sign of the cross.

And then, suddenly, a smile, which was the
most radiant illumination Viola had ever seen glorify
a human face, lit up the lucid eyes, the mouth, the
smooth broad brow, and seemed to give colour to
the cheeks. Eucharis stretched out her arms, Viola
bent towards her, and the hearts of the Christian
maidens met in one first long kiss of peace.

That was all. Then the stranger fell asleep,

her head resting on Viola's shoulder, and Viola made

her first delicious, willing sacrifice to this new sister,

holding her hour after hour with unwearied heart in

strained and wearied arms.

7*

.•^.

1^^*

.^V

lOO LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

It was dawn before she woke again^ aad by that
time Viola had dropped into an easier posture, and
had fallen into a happy sleep of exhaustion herself;
but a slight movement of the stranger, in waking, at
once awoke her, and then for the first time she
heard the sound of the deep, clear voice. She spoke
Latin, but the accent was foreign.

"I understand it all now," she said. "Am I
alone? Are none saved but me?"

"There was one bound with you to a plank —
an aged woman — but she could not be brought back
to life."

**My faithful Rhoda!" she said, "thou art gone
to life, to Paradise, to the Christ thou hast made
me love! Thou hast left thy child, thy Eucharis, for
the first time, — for the last." And then came a burst
of healing tears.

She was an orphan, a Greek, one of those Greek
families who constituted so large a part of the early
Church of Rome.

Her mother had been dead many years, her
father some months, and the faithful old nurse was
taking her to some relations at Alexandria, as her

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. lOI

only natural kindred; but with little knowledge of
what reception they might give her.

And so it came about that, without debate or
dispute, Eucharis, this pearl from the sea, was en-
shrined as another child in the Carthagihian home,
and took her place at the distaff, in the garden, in
the readings to the grandmother, at the family
h)rmns, and the sacred services of the Church.

Quietly nestling down into the home and into
the hearts of all, as if familiar to all from infancy;
yet to each coming in quite an especial way, as just
the creature each needed to make the life complete,
and also revealing each to each in countless new and
happy lights unperceived before.

To the grandmother she brought the perfume of
old Rome, of the culture and grandeur of her early
days, and drew from her stories of old times, new
to her grandchildren. To Justa she brought all
kinds of tender helpful ways, learned from caring
for her aged nurse; a sense of one present by whom
suffering was always understood, and therefore never
dragged into light — little silent kindnesses and sooth-
ing touches, and tears understood only by the suf-

I02 IJ^SED, BUT NOT LOST.

ferer. To Viola she brought Greece, and poetry,
and music, and nature, a glorified world, a higher
heaven, a precious casket for all her treasures of
recollection of Valerian.

To Clement she brought he knew not yet what;
something that made the old labours not only light
but full of unutterable new hope and meaning, which
made him, for the first time, feel conscious he had
a life of his own — not only a foundation and stay
for other lives, which had been good and blessed,
but a whole unexplored world within of infinite pos-
sibilities.

But as yet he had not said this to himself. So
unused to ask anything for himself, his only con-
scious thought was of giving, and still giving, sacri-
ficing, succouring. But then this giving was an in-
finite receiving, a drinking in of new life with every
nerve, an expansion of every power. And Eucharis
herself? Sister, daughter, for the first time she had
sisters, a mother, a brother, perhaps two brothers,
and she wanted nothing more. Except, perhaps, to
see that second brother, of whom Viola spoke so
much.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. IO3

In him, as in Viola, there seemed something
more than merely Roman, noble and good as these
Roman Christians were — something Greek.

And his letters from Smyrna, from Corinth,
seemed to be a breath from the beautiful old world,
as well as from the holy and beautiful new Christian
world.

Soon they expected a letter from Rome.

I04 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER IX.

"One, one throughout the world!" Valerian wrote
at last from Rome: "one body, one Head, one life.
Not one as Rome is one, bound together by iron
bands from without; one by a common life from
above. And yet in this unity endless diversity; in
this fixedness a ceaseless flow.

"It is life, dilectissimiy life, which unites the
Catholic Church throughout the world; life with its
biography, its changes, its growth, its excrescences,
its diseases. By the very nature of life incapable
of being monotonously alike in all places and
periods; by the very nature of life incapable of de-
parting from its One Divine type; as certain that
no branch, no leaf, no cluster of its rich grapes will
be precisely the same in outline, in colour, in
number, or in size, as it is certain that all its leaves
and fruit and branches will be vine branches, vine
leaves, and grapes, and nothing else.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. IO5

"One King over all the kingdom, beloved; one
Father for all the family; one love through all the
children.

"And one enemy, a very subtle enemy, ready
with his appropriate weapons for every climate and
every season, his locusts to devastate, his canker-
worms silently to eat away, his mildews and his
droughts and his frosts.

"It gives a glorious sense of the reality of the
warfare, as well as of the reality and multitude of
the spiritual army, thus to traverse the world.

"Everywhere welcomes have been given me as
among kindred. Yet I must also say, in every place
where I have stayed long enough I find dififerences
and controversies, as at our Carthage, though rang-
ing round various points. At Alexandria the teach-
ing of the great layman, the Catechist Origen, master
of the great Catechetical Christian School of Alex-
andria, has left its mark; for it was as a layman he
taught at Alexandria, gathered heathen into the
Church, within the sacred boundaries of the Church
opened glimpses into worlds wider than any of the
Pagan philosophers knew.

I06 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"I would have given much to hear that eloquent
voice, but it is silenced at Alexandria for ever.
Bishop Demetrius resented his preaching as a lay-
man in the churches in Syria, although he had
taught as a layman in Alexandria, and the Syrian
bishops declared that such use of wise laymen had
been customary in their churches from time im-
memorial.

"To remove the difficulty of lay-preaching,
Origen was ordained presbyter in Syria, but this
only increased the indignation of Bishop Demetrius,
and now Origen is banished from Alexandria, and
has even been excommunicated.

"Meantime he works on, it is said, with 'adaman-
tine' unwearied force, and the tradition of his teaching
remains here.

"He has kept nobly poor all his life. But he
came of a noble race. His father was martyred.

"Origen, then a young boy, wrote him in
prison, 'See that thou change not thy mind for our
sakes.'

"His mother had hidden the child's clothes lest
he should give himself up to mart)Tdom.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I07

"The father was beheaded, and the mother left
destitute with six children.

"Quite in his youth he had learned so much
that he maintained himself by teaching rhetoric and
grammar. But he very soon resolved to devote all
his intellectual powers to Christianity; he resigned
the Grammatical chair which had been his main-
tenance, sold his books, and lived for years on four
oboli a day from the money they made.

"He has devoted himself much to the study of
the Holy Scriptures, hunting out manuscripts and
collecting and collating them. Great men and wo-
men in the empire have sought to learn of him; the
empress mother, Mammaea, sent to converse with
him, — the mother of Alexander Severus. He has
made journeys to Syria, to Arabia, to Greece, to
Rome, and now, between sixty and seventy, he is
working as hard as ever at Caesarea in Palestine.

"The Holy Scriptures he considers as an un-
fathomable mine of Divine Wisdom, in which we
must expect to find difficulties, as in the Divine
works in nature.

"But one saying reported to me perplexed me:

I08 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

* Happy are they who have advanced so far as no
longer to need the Son of God as the Physician that
heals the sick, no longer as the Shepherd, no longer
as the Redemption; but who need Him only as the
Truth, the Word, the Sanctification, or in whatever
other relation He stands to those whose perfect man-
hood enables them to comprehend what is most
glorious in Him.'

"Surely in this the true meaning and proportion
of his words have been missed. Surely the child
lives on in the man. The Shepherd leads not only
by the still waters and the ravines of death here,
but by the Hving fountains for ever: on the throne
He is the Lamb as it had been slain.

"Let me hear Thee more and more as the
glorious Word; but oh let me find Thee, never let
me lose Thee, as the Shepherd of the lambs!

"This Alexandrian school, beloved, stands at the
opposite extreme from North Africa: wide in hope
for all men, penetrating into depths we have never
dreamt of in the Sacred Writings, finding threefold
mystical interpretations where we scarcely blunder
:out one clear literal meaning. We seem but to be

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. lOQ

children beside these wise ones. And yet, and yet,
I think these wise ones need the children; the
Qiurch at all events needs and has all, for she is a
flock and a kingdom, not a mere theosophic school.

"Then in Phrygia the conflicts are of another
kind. There, in the native country of wild Bac-
chantes and pagan phrenzies^ the birthplace of our
Tertullian's Montanism, the ecstatic trances and the
prophetic inspiration of women still go on, but for
the most part now distinctly outside the Church.

"And here at Rome the combat seems to be, in
Roman fashion, chiefly for matters of government,
for the authority of the bishop, for a strong organiza-
tion, compact and forcible enough to confront the
world here in the centre of its might.

"Everywhere, indeed, I think the rule and govern-
ment are becoming stricter. Sometimes it looks to
me hke a garrison being unconsciously compacted
and organized for a siege and an assault; for, tran-
quil as the world is just now for us, I often re-
member the fears of our Bishop Cyprian. Behind
so slight a grating ever3rwhere the evil beasts who
might be set on us seem to be confined! For the

no LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

world is very unhappy, beloved, without hope, or
patriotism, or loyalty, knowing little of its rulers ex-
cept their taxes. And many hate us; the poorer
pagans frankly and fiercely, as enemies of the gods,
whenever a pestilence or a famine comes, and they
see the multitudes we have withdrawn from pro-
pitiating the gods; the philosophers mildly but de-
terminedly, as superstitious enemies of the unity and
sole dominance of the State.

"And who can say when the old rage against us
may be let loose?

"In every church there are graves of martyrs, or
the more sacred cenotaphs of the burned and de-
voured. And these, after all, are the sacred hearths
where our hearts draw most closely together.

"In Smyrna, at Alexandria, at T)n:e, at Lyons,
and Vienne, and here in Rome, I have talked with
aged men and women who, like our grandmother,
have witnessed the dying agonies of the confessors.

"And these — Greek, Alexandrian, Gaulish, Latin,
Phrygian, Jew; philosophers, advocates for the free-
dom of speech, firmest adherents to the rights of
the episcopate, — died, not for philosophy, or the

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. Ill

doctrine of the Paraclete, or for the episcopate, but
for One, for One only, the Holy One, in whom the
whole Catholic Church is one, the Christ, the Saviour,
the Son of Man, and Son of God."

In other letters he spoke of the places he saw:
the low shores of sandy Alexandria; the rich valley
of Nablous (Shechem), where Justin Mart)n: had
lived, and the woman of Samaria; the coasts of the
Mediterranean, African, Asiatic, European, fringed
everywhere with busy merchant-cities, and every city
the seat of a Christian Church and bishopric.

"Wonderful and divine it is," he said, "to find
this one heavenly language everywhere, this one
Name, scarcely known two hundred years ago, find-
ing me a home and kindred in mountain villages in
Phrygia, in old Greek cities, on island and mainland,
in new colonies on the rivers of far-off Gaul.

"Yet for the most part there are only three
languages in use among us; indeed, there are chiefly
two. It was a Greek colony which planted the
Church in Lyons; and when any of the natives
around become Christian they naturally adopt the

1 1 2 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

language of the two great civilised races, as a step
to civilisation.

"For Christians cannot remain barbarians.

"What will be done with these Goths pouring in
on all sides upon us, we know not yet. Some say
this river flows from sources which are inexhaustible,
and that the Church will have to heal these bitter
waters, which the empire cannot turn, nor stem, nor
drain away.

"Once on the outer limits of Dacia I came on
one of these Gothic camps, — a village it professed
to be; but their normal condition is warfare, and
their normal community is a camp.

"Like us, beloved, like the Church! We also, if
we cease to be a camp at war with evil, soon cease
to be a city at unity in itself.

"And sometimes I think we may be called to go
forth, camp against camp, the hosts of God against
these Gothic hosts.

"For verily they are meUf these Goths, not slaves
or womanish idlers, but men every one of them,
from the chief to the lowest.

"And where men are most men, there, I think,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 13

Christ the Son of Man might be best followed and
the future of the world best worked out.

"All things else seem old and more like oft-
repeated echoes, — the new philosophies are echoes
of the old, Latin poetry is an echo of the Greek, the
new Greek but a fainter echo still.

"But the Church is young, Christianity is a liv-
ing voice, and these Goths are young. And some-
times I think I should like best of all things to
renounce all earthly joys and fame, and go forth,
poor and unarmed, like the first seventy, among
these barbarians, to live and die for them, and win
them for the Church and the Christ."

"Valerian among the barbarians!" said Viola.
"Banished from us for ever among the wild hordes!"

But Eucharis said, "I have often thought of it.
My faithful nurse was a Gothic slave, and through
her I learned to think that we, even Christians, make
the world too small. Often and often, when I hear
of these barbarians, as it were battering against the
gates of the empire on all sides, I think, *Poor lost
children of men, outside in the darkness and the
cold! they are beating their wings like birds on

Lapsed t hut Ttct Lost. o

114 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

winter nights against our lighted homes. Let us
rise up and welcome them in, and teach them, and
make them children of God.' "

"But Valerian! that Valerian should be banished
from us for ever into that darkness!" said Viola;
"he is capable of it!" and her eyes filled with tears.
"But of course you do not know him, nor what the
world would be for us without him."

"You might go together," said Eucharis; "the
first seventy were sent out two and two."

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I 1 5

CHAPTER X.

The days glided on in happy tranquillity, in the
midst of active country work, lit up by that hope of
something beyond which, consciously or unconsciously,
is essential to the happiness of our happiest days.

For Valerian was coming home. Any day any
of the ships which came in daily from Italy might
bring him. Any evening his step might surprise
them on the threshold. All the little country festivals
of the home-life were delayed as long as possible in
the hope that he might share them. All the work
about the farm was pressed onward to completion
that he might see everything finished and ready.

This was the hope they all spoke of, but under-
neath, to Clement, another hope was slowly ripening
which he did not speak of to any one, although he
bad become aware that to him it had changed the
light of his life from a sober working daylight into
a conscious sunshine, giving vivid \igla\. an^ ^a^cs^

1 1 6 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

to every common stone or blade of grass — vivid, yet
tranquil as his own nature, as the healthy country
life they lived.

For the farm was no luxurious villa, with its
little court of fastidious patricians, or lavish wealthy
freedmen, revellers crowned and garlanded, sup-
ported on the monotonous, hopeless toil of a legion
of slaves. It was a place of wholesome, tiring, fruit-
ful work for every member of the household.

Nature was to this Christian family no slave
ministering to their luxury. She was a fellow-servant
of the one Master, whom they were daily assisting
to be liberated from their foes and hers, and to be
her highest, most beautiful and best.

No meek manageable creature, indeed, was she,
this North African Nature, only a little sluggish or a
little wayward, needing here a gentle stirring up to
activity, and there a gentle check; no quiet easy
beast of burden, as in our sober north, whose worst
danger was that she might do nothing. A powerful,
wilful, reckless, impetuous Titan, able to lift up all
the load humanity could lay upon her, Hghtly as the
sea lifts up a skiff, easily as an ^\t.^\v^xA."^Qvi^^ ^^.'^x^j

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I 1 5

CHAPTER X.

The days glided on in happy tranquillity, in the
midst of active country work, lit up by that hope of
something beyond which, consciously or unconsciously,
is essential to the happiness of our happiest days.

For Valerian was coming home. Any day any
of the ships which came in daily from Italy might
bring him. Any evening his step might surprise
them on the threshold. All the little country festivals
of the home-life were delayed as long as possible in
the hope that he might share them. All the work
about the farm was pressed onward to completion
that he might see everything finished and ready.

This was the hope they all spoke of, but under-
neath, to Clement, another hope was slowly ripening
which he did not speak of to any one, although he
had become aware that to him it had changed the
light of his life from a sober working daylight into

a conscious sunshine, giving vivid light and shadow

8*

1 1 8 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

she should spin flax. The same delicate finish, the
same capability were there.

Everything came from her fingers, orderly, and
finished, and right.

Not that he said anything of this to her or to
himself. He only loved to watch, in silence, the
deft movements, and to notice her brief fitting words,
or to distinguish the music of her low ringing laughter
from all other sounds.

In the evening it had become a custom that the
sisters went to the field or the garden where the
chief work of the day had gone on, and Clement
had found in Eucharis an interested learner and
listener whose sympathy in the daily narratives of
the daily toil made it all a poem.

She said it was as good as an old Greek legend
to hear of his labours and conquests. Every irrigat-
ing channel in the carefully watered gardens, every
cistern where the precious waters were stored, every
repaired terrace and levelled field, became as familiar
to her as to him.

When they came back, sometimes, she sang to
them Greek songs, or strange wild melodies she had

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I IQ

learned from her Gothic nurse; or sometimes the
grandmother liked to hear the sweet foreign accent
giving out the rugged powerful words of her great
TertuUian; and that, Clement thought, was like a
nymph leading a Hon, by laying her soft hand on
his mane.

And so, gradually, the gentle presence crept Hke
sunlight into every corner of his heart, and he woke
up and knew he loved her.

Still his thoughts flowed in the old habitual
channels. He did not so much question whether
she loved him, as feel sure he would shelter and
guard her. He thought of his love as of wings en-
folding her, keeping her from all cold and harm for
ever, and of her resting in it. He scarcely wanted
as yet to know her feeling; he had had no reason to
think she loved him, except as one of them all; but
he thought it would all come naturally to her, as the
love of her had come to him. It would grow silently,
tranquilly, to be a part of her being, as of his, as
his life had grown, as all natural things grow.

And he would not hurry any stage of that blessed
growth, any more than he could or would hurry

I20 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

a rosebud to unfold or a golden spike of maize to
ripen. If he had learned anything from nature, he
had learned patience, and surely in this crowning
hour of life would be its crowning triumph.

So all things went tranquilly on, until one even-
ing, after the hymn at the Hghting of the lamps,
Eucharis was singing to them with her lute a wild
dirge, which her mother, a Chian, had sung to her
as a child, which she had intertwined with a strain
of immortal hope.

SWEET IS THE LIGHT.

I.

" 'Sweet is the light I * they sang.

First Singers of our race—
' On each ^miliar thing.

On each beloved face 1
The mighty, conquering light.

Arrowy, keen, and strong 1
The dear, familiar light.

Waking the world to song 1
Light on the purple seas —

Light in the golden sky ;
SiMteet is the light V they sang;

*And therefore dire to die I*

II.

" 'To die I and leave the light.

Shadows among the glooms, ^

Groping *mid ghosts of joys
For dawn that never comes ;

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 2 I

Far from all homely things.

And all familiar wa3^ ;
Whilst o'er us, rnqm by mom.

Still shine the old glad rays.
Waking the fresh green earth

With songs to greet the sky ;
Sweet is the HghtV they sang;

*And there/ore dire to die V

IIL

" * Sweet is the light— all light,

O Fount of light 1' we sing,
* On each beloved face.

On each familiar thing I
Thy mighty, probing light.

Keen to part right from wrong I
Thy dear, familiar light.

Waking Thy worlds to song I
Light on Thy crystal sea —

Light in Thy sapphire sky ;
Sweet is the light t* we sing;

*And therefore sweet to die I '

IV.

* * To die ! and find the light ,

And never lose it more ;
Light on life's troubled waves,

Where much was dark before—
The little stormy course

Which tossed us to Thy shore ;
Light on the ceaseless storms

Wherein our race is whirled —
The blindness , battles , sins.

And chaos of the world ;
Light on Thy countless worlds.

The order through the strife.
The Life that moves the Law,

The Love that moves the Life.
Thy mighty conquering light.

Life-giving , keen , and strong I

122 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Thy kind, ^miliar light,

Proved step by step so long I
Light in the Father's House,

Holy and homelike glow —
The Home where, one by one.

Our best and dearest go.
Siveet is the light I we sing;

O Light , in Whom we see I
No darkness waiteth us —

No darkness is in Thee.
Sweet is the lights we sing.

Where Thou art known, on high I
Not darkly — Face to face :

Sweety therefore y sweet to die I* "

The rich voice gathered strength as she sang on.
They were sitting in a bower of vines close to the
house.

All the faces of the little family were turned to
her, and all were absorbed, as she was, in the
singing, when, at the last lines, Clement saw a
sudden light irradiate her eyes, and a flush passed
over her face, and then the long lashes drooped and
the rich voice dropped into tones low and soft as a
dream, until the last words seemed to come from
afar, as if from another spirit embracing and echo-
ing her own tones.

And then, when they turned to look at what
seemed to have moved the singer, they saw Valerian

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 23

Standing in an attitude of rapt listening outside in
moonlight.

There was a rush of joyous welcome.

Why did Clement feel it as a shock of cold,
rather than, like all the rest, as a flash of light?

No one loved Valerian better than he did.

Why did his eyes perpetually wander with a
soHcitous questioning to Eucharis, and never meet
her eyes?

Her eyes did not seem to rest on any one that
evening. A veil seemed to have fallen over her, a
gossamer veil, transparent as a light mist, but im-
penetrable; such a mist as that in which the god-
desses and the n)anphs in the old legends were wont
to vanish from human sight.

124 LARsiZs ELT V: T L*,>iT.

CHAPTER XL

AxD SO it was that they focnd each other, these
tiro, and an ircpeDetrible v\^ hid, indeed, fallen
betireen Euchaiis and all the wodd, bnt a vefl which
enfolded not heiself alcaie.

To ho" it was but the comir-g into lirfit of the
being Viola had taught bar to know so welL To
him it was the coming into lite of all the goodness
and loveliness he had ever dreamed- Sudden it

r

seemed to others; not to them. Only sudden; as aU
blossoming or gathering is sudden; the moment was
but the ineviuble momentaiy result of all the life
and growth that had gone before.

All the previous life they had been unconsciously
lacking only each other, had unconsciously been
making ready for each other. M3rsterious, ine\'itable
embrace of hearts which had always been related,
which could no more fail to make cme haimony

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 12$

when they met, than two voices attuned which have
been learning apart two parts of one song.

To Eucharis and Valerian this great love came
quite simply and frankly.

On every range of their being they met, in each
accidental momentary touch of the hand which, re-
presenting as it did the constant enfolding of heart
in heart, was a thrill of joy, in the mental travelling
to all the far-oflf places and races which became
near to them through their nearness to each other;
in the old Greek poetry which lived for them with
intense life through the overflow of their own.

Viola listened and wondered, and loved them
both enough to delight in their happiness.

Every season seemed to coexist for them in this
paradise of their affection. The flowers and trees,
the little dancing waves on the sandy shore, the
very shells and pebbles, were familiar and precious
to them as when they were children, in this singing,
and dancing, and blossoming of their hearts.

Childhood with its exuberant simplicity of joy
seemed theirs, and yet a sudden ripening of com-
prehension, as if they had learned the secret of the

126 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

language of all creatures, and had glimpses of fresh
meanings in the world, such as are otherwise opened
by the still air of age or death.

And Clement saw, and bowed, and renounced,
and thanked God that no one knew his anguish. He
saw the gentle, tranquil being he had loved, and
could, he felt, have shielded and cherished well,
suddenly, as it were, endued with wings, and be-
longing to another element. He saw her soar out
of that quiet world where he felt they might have
been so blessed, and rise into the sunshine and free
air. And he saw she was at home there, and though
his whole true heart went after her in one long
yearning which he felt would never be stilled, he
would not, for the world, have stretched out arms or
uttered a cry to draw her back.

The sweet, deft, homely, household ways which
had so won him were always there; she was as
helpful to him, as interested in all his work, as ever,
he felt, with a kind of pain. He had nothing to re-
proach her with; she had in no way changed to
him since Valerian came; she was even kinder,
franker, more considerate of all his plans and wishes.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. l2^

He fell back on the long habit of his life, the blessed
habit of living for others.

Only once or twice his self-control seemed to
fail him, when Valerian, in the delight of some
work or ramble together, let her be wearied and did
not seem to see it.

Clement had never suffered her to do the least
thing on his account that could be a difficulty or
pain to her. And yet he knew too well that toil for
Valerian was sweeter to her than any care to save
her toil from him.

She wrote beautiful Greek characters, dear and
firm, as many ladies did in those days; and one
evening she came down, pale and with weary eyes,
with a delicately finished manuscript in her hand.

Clement felt his indignation rise at the easy
courtesy with which Valerian received it from her.
He knew indeed that a smile between those two was
a volume of thanks. Bilt he had to struggle hard
against what seemed a revelation of selfishness in
his brother. It flashed on him how they had always
contributed to make Valerian the centre; and now,
could it be possible that he might take this priceless

128 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

creature's love as but one more jewel to enrich his
treasury?

That lurid flash seemed to dart back over the
whole past life. What had Valerian done for the
family, for others? What had he ever done except
what he liked to do? And was this the character
and the training to make him worthy to shield and
cherish that loving, tender being, whose life was so
ready to be poured out in sacrifice and service for/
all? That night the conflict with himself came to
its climax.

So easy he felt it would be for the enemy to
gain access to the very citadel by that path, that
at that point, with all the force of his will, he set
himself to make the defences stronger. Jealousy,
hatred even of his brother, cruel insight into his
worst, cruel misapprehension of his best, might
enter at that gate, and (so God help him) they
never should. For if Valerian had been self-centred,
if the* worst were true, now at all events he loved;
and love — the constant, tried love of married life —
would be the surest melting and opening of his
heart. Clement resolved that night that the sooner

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 29

the consecration of Christian marriage gathered this
love up into itself, and the every-day details of
mutual help and sacrifice, and the joys and cares
of home-life clustered around it, the sooner would
all its hallowing depths be unsealed to Valerian.

Down for ever from his visions of a bliss of his
own he came to the old life-long quiet work of
caring for all.

The next day the betrothal was arranged and
the marriage was fixed.

And every one thought it a marvellous self-
sacrifice that Clement insisted on giving up the
best part of the house he had raised from its ruins
to Valerian and his bride, and going to live apart
in a little cottage among his vineyards.

But Clement knew that the sacrifice was not
there.

ZfO-fsedf bui not Lost.

130 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XII.

They were married in the little chapel in the
catacombs, on the Natalitia of Perpetua and Feli-
citas.

The garlands and hymns, and all the festive
commemoration of the martyrs seemed to enfold
them with love and promise.

"It seems," Eucharis said to Justa and Viola, as
they were arranging her simple white bridal robe,
"as if the Church is to us as our mother, we whose
mothers and fathers have been taken to her rest
above. She gathers us to her bosom and stretches
her arms around us, and breathes her benediction
over us to-day. I feel as if soft motherly dove's
wings were all around me. *The Jerusalem, the
heavenly, which is free, which is the mother of
us all!'"

They had purposely chosen this day. They felt
it good that their joy should be blended with the
festivity of all.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I3I

Eucharis had especially gathered to her heart
those young Carthaginian martyr-mothers.

They came to her in dreams, she said, and she
often woke as if she still felt the soft touch of
Perpetua's hand on her brow, as it had rested on
the dying Felicitas in the arena, and she almost
seemed to see the radiant forms floating back into
heaven, with another, her own mother, who had left
her so long ago.

As they left the cool shade of the little chapel
together. Valerian and his bride, once more the
two crouching forms of the lapsed husband and
wife met his eyes, half hidden as before in the
shadow of the rock.

The mournful sight smote on him like an icy
touch, so that it seemed coming out from the cool-
ness of the rock-chapel, not to the glow of the
African sun, but to night, and ice, and death.

He glanced hastily at Eucharis, hoping she had

not seen, but he saw that her eyes, unconsciously

following his, were opened wide with horror, and

riveted on the worn downcast faces and the dark

penitential robes.

9*

132 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

She seemed to comprehend it all at once.
Viola had often spoken to her of those two, and
she, with the milder discipline and freer hopes of
her native Church of Rome, had often said she
would like to meet them and say some words of
love and comfort to them.

And now, seeing them for the first time, in
contrast with her own and Valerian's hfe of joy, all
other emotions gathered and flowed forth in one
strong irrepressible tide of pity.

With a gentle force which he could not resist,
she drew Valerian towards them, and, kneeling
down beside the wife, threw her arms round her,
and kissed her cheek and said —

"My sister, fear not. I know you, and grieve
for you, and I pity you, and I love you both from
my deepest heart. And the pity I feel is as the
little flicker through the shade, to the glow, the fire
of tender saving pity in the sacred heart of Jesus,
of Him you once denied, and hate yourselves that
you denied Him, of Him you love and shall love
for ever and for ever. For He loveth you. I have
seen the picture in our catacombs at Rome. I have

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 33

seen Him with the lost kid — the kid, not the
lamb — on His shoulder. The Church knows Him,
and she painted it. And I have heard Him in the
sacred Scriptures. And he says, *If any man speak
a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven
him.' And He made the angel of the resurrection
call St. Peter by name, because the last words He
had heard from Peter's lips were, *I know ffim not.'
Just because of thaty that he might know he was
not forgotten, and was forgiven, and be lifted up to
say again one day, *Thou knowest all things. Thou
knowest that I love thee.' As you will say — you
two, beloved," she said, rising, "you two, hand in
hand, together, weeping, sobbing at ffis feet, the
blessed tears His hand will wipe away."

And as she spoke, soft and low as her tones
were, they were firm and deep as one inspired.
And she looked up to heaven, and then down into
those sad faces, and the wonderful radiance of her
smile embraced them as with a sunbeam.

And for the first time Valerian saw the eyes of
the man lifted up, and gazing on the radiant in-
spired face, as if he were listening to an angel.

134 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"Are you an angel?" he said at length, with a
slow, hollow, difficult utterance, as if imprisoned
long in a solitary prison, and disused to human
speech.

Then the child came back into her face, and
she said —

"No; only a child, only a little child that has
felt the arms of our Lord about me, and know Him
a little, and am sure of His deathless pity for you,
as I am sure that He lives."

"Listen!" she said again, with her fingers on
her hps. "I seem to see and hear something be-
hind a veil, a thin little veil that will soon melt
away. I seem to see the martyrs, the holy angels,
the blessed Mary Mother, and my mother, and be-
loved ones I knew, those who can see His face, and
know what He feels. I seem to see them smiling,
a happy, wondrous innocent smile, like children
with a happy secret they must not tell. I seem to
see them smiling on you, and about you two, and
saying to each other with their heavenly looks,
* There is a surprise preparing for them! They
must not know it just yet. The Church below, per-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 35

haps, may not tell them. But we know all about
it. And in a little while they will know; in a very
Httle while."

Then her lip quivered, and she burst into tears,
and once more enfolded the woman in her arms
and kissed her.

And from the poor quivering lips the kiss was
returned.

And Eucharis suffered herself to be gently
drawn away.

**I have been waiting to see those two so long,"
she said to Valerian as they went down the wood-
land path together, " and just to tell them something
of this."

He was silent.

She looked with a little tender solicitude in his
face.

"That my dove, my pure white dove, should
touch with her white wings creatures soiled like
these!" he said at last. "I could scarcely bear it."

The large eyes opened with a long gaze of
wonder.

"Valerian!" she said, "love! What am I? And

136 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

if I were radiant and pure and fair as the sinless
angels, would it not make me whiter and purer and
fairer to the eyes of our Lord than even the angels
to bring His own down-trodden and soiled and
broken-hearted ones home once more in my arms
to Him, once more to be pure and free, and them-
selves ffis own? The angels cannot wash the poor
travel-soiled feet. Only the Master, theirs and ours,
the Master and we, Valerian, the least of us, even
we, you, beloved, and even I."

But the shadow of the sterner belief lay heavy
on him, and he said —

"What can my dove know of these things? God
forbid she should! The Church is the little band
of the King on this revolted earth. And we may
not tolerate traitors among us. The Church is the
Virgin Bride of the Son of God, and her purity must
be guarded, jealously, fiercely guarded, if needful,
for Him. You have done or said nothing wrong,
beloved," he added, as he saw her wistful eyes
downcast and a slight quiver in the parted lips.
"Thou hast done and said nothing but what is

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 37

heavenly and worthy of thee. But we are not in
heaven yet."

"No, Valerian!" she said, lifting her clear cou-
rageous shining eyes full to his. "I have said and
done nothing wrong. I am a child, and cannot
know what the Church ought to do. But I am His
child, and I do know a little what our Lord did,
and a little of how He loved. And how could I
help telling those two, if no one else would?"

And then, responding to a look of grave anxiety
in his face, she added —

"I have not grieved thee, love, to-day?"

"How could it grieve me to see into thy heart?"
he replied in a tremulous voice, "since it is mine!
If its overflow of pity is like a tide to sweep away
mountains of trouble, what is its fulness? What is
its fulness for me?"

Clement and Viola had drawn away the rest of
the bridal company, on the plea of welcoming the
bride at the Farm. And now a joyous procession
came out to meet them with songs and flowers
wreathed and strewn on the path by the children of
the estate, old servants, and friends.

138 LAPSES, BCT SOT LO;T.

CHAPTER XIIL

Climsxt was far from all unhappy in his cottage.
The blessed habits of life-long self-denial and work
brought their dail; healing; the habit of Uving in
other people's lives, bearing their burdens, really, so
that he had no strength to spend on moaning over
his own; the habit of rejoicing in other people's
happioess, really, so that it brought a positive sun-
shine into his own heart.

Indeed his life was more tranquil than that in
the home he bad created for them.

Neither happiness nor sottow permanently alter
character, or even temperament. At least it was so
with Valerian, and the existence of a deep satislying
joy in his heart could not take away those ebbings
and Aowings of the inner tides which wero at once
his strength ajj|^us weakness, c ould. n ot prevei
probler ""rid f h weighing

heavilj

>rldy

/

h wi

X^APSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 39

That his life was doubled in power and joy did
not alter the fact of its being Hved in the midst of
an oppressed and tumultuous world, or save him from
often returning from the work of the day in Carthage
with a troubled and furrowed brow.

Nevertheless, his life was, indeed, doubled in
power and joy; the child-like simplicity of the faith
of Eucharis was to him worth countless convincing
arguments against doubt.

To her all had come unquestioned: faith. Divine
love, human love, marriage. To him nothing came
unquestioned. To her religion was fresh air and life
and daylight. To him it meant conflict and storm,
icy heights, unfathomed abysses, rivers of fire.

The faith taught her in childhood, received into
the child's heart, had created a life of Christian love
around it which made it as unquestionable as her
simplest moral instincts, as her own existence.

And this faith was of the most joyous kind. The
Good Shepherd of her Roman catacombs, strong in
immortal youth, tenderly gathering the lambs, piping
to them, feeding the sheep; the Divine Lord who
was at once light and music (recoiiqaervxi^ 'Oq& OA

140 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Apollo legend), light to mind and heart, by the very
touch of the sunbeam, by the very fact of shining,
smiting all the heart to harmony with himself, and
therefore to all its highest music. The light, which
is the hfe of men, the Shepherd who is the leader
and King of men> who knows each one by name,
by character, by circumstances; thus it was that the
Christ had been revealed in the soul of Eucharis.

The Cross rose behind, not in the foreground of
her faith, revealing how all the tenderness of this
pitiful, pervading love had welled up from depths
unfathomable, and how all the gentleness was no
mere easy overflow of kindness, but the forbearance
and unutterable sympathy of love stronger than
death.

And therefore, when she met Valerian, it seemed
to her only the most natural thing in the world that
the choice divinely made for her should suit every
in and out of her whole being. Had not the Heav-
enly Father known both of them all the while, and
been leading them to each other through all the un-
seen paths?

She scarcely so much as gave thanks in conscious

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I4I

words for that supreme blessing, or for others, as
looked up instinctively and felt, "This is too good to
come from any one but Thee."

The wonder, the horror, the inexplicable mystery
was, that all the world, the thirsty, needy, suffering
world, still more all the fair and happy creatures in
it, should not spring, the instant He was revealed,
to this Fountain of Beauty, and Truth, and Life,
and Joy.

That he should have died for our redemption
added infinite gratitude to the love; but it was the
love the dying proved, it was the holy, glorious,
beautiful, loving Being who so loved, that had won
her heart.

She as really dwelt in His Presence, whatever she
did, as a lamb beside the Shepherd. Feeding, play-
ing, lying down by still waters, bathing in them,
drinking of them, the conscious sensation of joy per-
vading each separate act was that He was close, and
she was following Him.

She soothed and strengthened Valerian, not so
much by going with him into his mists and dark-
ness, though this also she could do, as by keeping

142 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

out of them in the sunhght, and shining, and being
what she was.

For he had misgivings about so many things.
Even this marriage, had it been the highest thing
God had meant for him? Had he not been sum-
moned to walk on the lonely heights? Had he not
descended into flowery paths and missed the best?

For the whole Church, girt, perhaps, for conflicts
unseen, but foreseen for her, was pervaded by the
ascetic spirit. And yet the golden words of the
ascetic TertuUian in describing a Christian marriage
were. Valerian felt, fulfilled in his.

"Where are we to find words," he wrote to his
wife, "his best-beloved fellow-servant," "to tell the
happiness of that marriage which the Church cements,
and the oblation confirms, and the benediction signs
and seals; which angels carry the news of to heaven,
which the Father ratifies?

"What kind of yoke is that of two believers, par-
takers of one hope, one desire, one discipline, one
and the same service? Both are brethren, both
fellow-servants, no difference of spirit or of flesh;
nay, they are truly two in one flesh. Where the

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 43

flesh is one^ one is the spirit too. Together they
pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform
their fasts, mutually teaching, mutually exhorting,
mutually sustaining. Equally are they both found
in the Church of God, equally at the banquet of
God, equally in straits, in persecutions, and refresh-
ments. Neither takes aught from the other, neither
shuns the other, neither is troublesome to the other.
The sick are visited, the indigent relieved with free-
dom. Alms are given without danger of ensuing
torment, sacrifices attended without scruple, daily
duties discharged without impediment. There is no
stealthy signing, no trembling greeting, no mute
benediction. Between the two echo psalms and
hymns, and they mutually challenge each other which
shall better chant to their Lord.

"Such things, when Christ sees and hears. He
joys. To these He sends His own peace.

"Where two are, there withal is He himself.
Where He is, there the Evil One is not."

For so it was that the loveliest bridal flowers
strewn by the ancient Church on marriage sprang

144 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

from the clefts of that scarred and rugged African
rock.

Happy expeditions there were when, in the cool
of the morning, Eucharis and Viola started with the
docile white ass of the farm, her panniers laden with
raisins, bread, or grapes, figs and dates, and flowers
such as the seasons brought, to take to the sick and
poor of the Church in the city, bringing all the over-
flow of the gardens and fields into sick-rooms and
hard struggling lives, with the blessed sense of bro-
therly kindness — a kindness which was the natural
due and fruit of a relationship; bringing to the
monotonous lives of the aged and the sick the shin-
ing of their own beauty and happiness.

Then there were the evenings; the gatherings
together in the cool, cloistered inner court, or in the
vine-embowered garden, or under the broad shadow
of the fig or beech-trees near the little river, or on
the breezy heights above the sea; singing and read-
ing, and delicious silences, while the waves, or the
rustling leaves, or the whispering grasses, or the
murmuring brook, spoke and sang to them.

Occasionally Valerian would give them the story

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 145

of Virgil, but when he and Eucharis were alone the
delight was to climb at once to the glorious' old
Greek world which was her heritage. No inter-
vening chains of lower ranges hid those grand
primeval mountain-tops from them. They dwelt
close underneath those fairest and, highest heights,
and to Eucharis the language was her mother
tongue; the rich harmonies were no foreign acquired
music to her; they were familiar from infancy with
the sacredness of a mother's voice.

The battle and pilgrimage of life, the unfathom-
able enigma of the world, its heights and its abysses
stretched beneath and above and around them, the
Iliad and Odyssey, the story of the Bound Titan
and of the doom of the fated dynasties, the world
as it glows and glooms, soars and sinks to the poets
who see its heights, depths, and sing them, undis-
guised, as they are! And as close to them lay the
labours of the philosophers, toiling endlessly at the
whence and why; mountains of thought launched
into the abysses, yet leaving them unfilled; endless
sounding-lines let down, yet leaving them un-
fathomed; courageous upward climbings to peaks

Lapsed t but not Lost, 10

146 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Still unsealed; one fair bridge after another launched
forth to span the chasms, yet never reaching the
other side.

All those enterprises and achievements which,
ever since, the world has wondered at and followed,
and never surpassed; so early did our race, begin-
ning with its noblest intellects, beat its wings against
the bars of the cage which no hand inside can
open!

But to them this old Greek literature was no
mere study of a fossil-world. The fauna and flora
were not extinct, but, though in feebler forms, were
perfuming and poisoning the very air they breathed.

Those ancient heights were still haunted ground.
The temples were not in ruins nor empty.

The gods were no mere fair shapes to be
handled and modelled from; they were still wor-
shipped, their help was still passionately sought; and
if powerless to save they were still mighty, through
the hands of their worshippers, to destroy.

Oftenest, however, they turned to their own
especial treasures of Christian manuscript. They

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 47

scarcely thought of them as a Hterature: rather as a
precious store of family memorials.

The voice of the Master had scarcely died out
of hearing, and the Church was ever on the watch
to hear it and to see His face again.

And meanwhile she was still a beleaguered city,
spared from assaults for years together, lately for
more than thirty years, but always hable to be
roused by alarms of war.

Naturally, her songs were war-songs, her Htera-
ture for the most part pleadings in defence or
attack.

The beauty and art in them came from the in-
evitable beauty of the minds they flowed from or of
the truths they manifested; the early Christian
writings were beautiful as the curves of a boat are
beautiful which has to stem the waves, as the curves
of a sail are beautiful which has to breast the winds;
except, perhaps, during those last thirty years, when
Origen and the Alexandrians had consciously worked
the Divine doctrine into a philosophy, and Cyprian
had begun to polish the rugged thought of Tertul-
Han into Hterary form. But Origen, as the opposite

148 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

pole of religious thought, was not well known in
that North African home.

Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Ignatius, the Martyrs of
Vienne, Irenaeus, the Shepherd of Hennas, the
Epistle to Diognetus, were household words.

Legends also from the apocryphal gospels floated
in the air of gates of Hades broken; and wild and
grotesque traditions of the infancy of our Lord, at-
tempts to fill up that silence of the Gospels which
contains in itself its own priceless lessons.

Every morning before the first meal the sacred
bread reserved from the Holy Eucharist was par-
taken, the first food of each day being in this way,
they believed, a Holy Communion with the Lord,
with the Catholic Church, and with each other.

At nine, at mid-day, and at three, such of the
family as were within reach gathered for a few.
prayers and hymns, and at the close of day all were
assembled, and the sound of the hymn rang out
through the open doors across the quiet gardens.

But dearest of all their manuscript treasures were
Greek copies of the Gospel of St. Luke and St. John
and of the Apocalypse.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 49

Dear above all, perhaps, the Apocalypse. The
glow and gloom, the thunderings and lightnings, the
sea of glass mingled with fire, the lake of fire, the
doom of the voluptuous city, throned on many
waters, like their own Carthage, attracted the fervent
African imagination, whilst Eucharis heard in it the
harpers with their harps, and saw everywhere the
one glorious face of Him they all adored.

150 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XIV.

They were sitting as usual with open doors, after
the evening meal, grouped around the grand-
mother.

And on the old matron's face was a new ex-
pression as she bent over the quaint little human
being lying swathed and swaddled like a tiny
animated mummy on her knee.

Another little creature, as precisely alike as any
two creatures of God's can be, was folded to the
heart of Eucharis.

I

It was two months now since these twin creatures
had begun their outlook on the world; and the four
dark eyes and the rosy twin lips, which were all
that were left the little imprisoned beings wherewith
to express their small personalities, had already
learned and expressed a great deal, and communi-
cated an unutterable amount of delight.

Old words of endearment hovered on the grand-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I5I

mother's lips, and forgotten stores of nursery wis-
dom and nursery lore. And Clement had come
back to the old home, drawn by the attraction of
the helpless little ones.

The anguish so faithfully combated and con-
cealed had not indeed vanished as an unreal dream,
it had entered into the depths of his being and
enriched and deepened ever3rthing within, as all true
sorrow and all true joy must.

And now through these little creatures, this new
Charis and Ion, whose future might reach on so far,
all his labours and victories had heirs — had a per-
petuity of value which endeared them tenfold.

Every oldest memory of the grandmother's child-
hood, every newest vine and fig-tree in the gardens,
had a meaning and an endurance reaching on
through these baby hands to generations yet to be.

These new precious lives were not only the
blossom of all the family life, they deepened all its
roots, and gave every possession a solidity which
almost lifted it among the things which abide.

Such thoughts passed through Clement's heart
as he trained the straggling vine-branch around the

152 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

porch in which they sat; so calm, so well rooted, so
complete seemed this innocent, hallowed family life
of theirs among the hills.

The last note of the evening hymn had but just
died away, the household had but just dispersed.
Valerian was late that night, and when he came a
doud was on his brow which made Eucharis gently
lay the baby in her arms on Viola's knee, and go
apart with her husband.

When in a few minutes she came back the
gravity was as deep on her face as on Valerian's;
and, kneeling beside the grandmother, she took her
hands and looked imploringly in the strong venerable
face.

"You know what it means, mother," she said.
"You wiU help us all."

"Poor helpless hands to help any; fit for little it
seems but to fondle thy babes. What threatens us,
my child? The Goths you are so tender to? the
Numidians? or an insurrection?"

Then, as if the light came suddenly to her from
the depths of the young mother's eyes, grave and
wide open under the straight smooth brows, she

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 53

clasped her own hands over her face and mur-
mured —

"A persecution! It has come! It has come at
last! From whom? From what quarter?" she added,
after a moment's silence. "Perhaps it is only local,
only the mob, only some temporary fury of the
heathens at Carthage. There have been droughts
in some places, and we know the proverb, *Non pluit
Deus, due ad Christianos.' We could flee! perhaps,
even I! Or it might never penetrate to this quiet
nook."

"We have tried to help so many," said Viola,
taking comfort; "surely no one hates us, or would
like to see us suffer."

"There is no fleeing, mother; there is no place
whither to flee," said Eucharis. "It is the Emperor
that has issued the edict."

Valerian sat silent, but all the little group
clustered close around him. He shook his head.

"It is too true. It is the empire that persecutes,
and beyond the empire is nothing — nothing but the
barbarian and the desert."

154 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

At that moment the brisk step of Priscus was
heard on the threshold,

"I came to warn you," he said. "I heard your
evening hymn on the other side of the valley. It
is madness at such a time. Any pagan labourer
returning from his day's work might hear it and
denounce you."

"Denounce us?" said Eucharis. "I thought they
would not wait for that. I thought the edict was
that every Christian was to repair to the Tribunal
to sacrifice, or was to die."

"Of course that is the meaning of the edict —
next week at latest. The Emperor Decius is bent
on exterminating the Christian Church and religion,
nothing less. But you need not surely take this op-
portunity of proclaiming ostentatiously to the whole
world that you are Christians."

"Our every meal, every day, our every act in
common proclaims us," said Viola.

"Of course, if you so choose," said Priscus. "Of
course the Emperor cannot exterminate the Church.
The Emperor is a madman to attempt it. But at
the same time, in a combat with madmen, we may

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 55

have, for a time, to bend to their delusions, for their
sakes even more than our own."

"To sacrifice for Caesar? To deny Christ?"
came in different tones from all sides.

"I never suggested such a thing. You have
what is more precious to many of the heathen than
the torture and death of peaceable fellow citizens.
You have lands and money. I came to suggest
that exemption may be purchased. I do not say it
should. But since sacrificing for Caesar means no
more even to the intelligent heathen than acknow-
ledging him to be Caesar; since we know from the
highest authority it is lawful to pay tribute, even by
an idolatrous coin, to Caesar "

"To become Libellatici!" exclaimed Valerian,
"to buy a lying certificate that we have sacrificed!
It is adding lying to treachery."

"Of course there are two sides to everything,"
replied Prisons. "For myself, I can do what I please;
but when you have other precious lives depending
on you — ^I should have thought — ^I venture to offer
no counsel," he continued, "only I thought it right
to give you a friendly warning about the hymn."

156 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

And with a brief leave-taking he vanished, re-
turning to the city. Heavy silence fell on the little
company when that busy buzzing voice was gone,
which seemed to bring with it the buzzing of swarm-
ing Carthage.

" Children,'* said the grandmother, "read from
the Apocalypse. Read it through."

And late into the night they sat.

Solemnly, as if fresh from heaven, fell on their
hearts the faithful warnings to slumbering and fail-
ing churches, the tender bringing into light of the
least good thing in the worst.

And then the lifting of the veil of heaven, and
the vision of the prismatic light, and the fulness of
varied life around the throne.

Then the sweeping outbursts of judgment — the
seven trumpets of doom echoing through heaven, the
seven vials outpoured.

War, and tumult, and anguish, and wrong, and
even in heaven the cry, "Oh Lord, how long?"
Strangely, inextricably blended, the thunders and
lightnings, the crystal calms, the woes, and the hal-
lelujahs. But at the end victory and purity, evil

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 157

overcome with good, the city as a bride, the tree of
life for the healing of the nations, the serving
day and night, the presence of God, himself the
Temple.

"The smoke of her tonnent shall go up for ever
and ever," said Valerian, as they closed. "Every
wrong will be avenged."

And Clement almost moaned, "Blessed is he
that overcometh."

"I saw the Heavenly City, New Jerusalem,
descending out of heaven from God," said Viola,
"prepared as a bride. Every true heart will be
satisfied."

"King of kings, and Lord of lords," said Justa,
"He shall wipe all tears from their eyes."

"They shall see His face," murmured Eucharis.

"Children," the grandmother said, "read me
the words I love from *the master,' and then we will
pray."

Viola read: "Old world prayer used to free men
from fires and beasts and famine. But how far
more operative is Christian prayer! It does not
station the angel of dew in mid-fire nor muzzle

l6o LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

He who knew what a storm was about to burst had
gathered this frail vessel into port before it came.

But no one seemed to mourn so much or to
lose so much in her as Eucharis, so tender had the
welcome of the aged woman been to the orphan
stranger, so closely had she clasped to her heart her
grandson's bride.

Eucharis loved to go and sit beside the venerable
form day and night.

When Valerian came back in the evening he
found her there, with one babe in her arms asleep.

He shuddered to find her there. The great
thunder-cloud lowering over them all filled the
heavens with portents and the air with mutterings
and the heart with evil omens, and he shrank to see
his beloved, his life of life, in such close and volun-
tary communion with death.

She was not weeping, though her eyes were
moist, as she looked up with an expression of exalted
trust into his face.

"She has breasted her last storm," Eucharis
said, "and see how peaceful it has left her! That
look comes, not from this shore, nor from the stormy

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. l6l

sea, but from the other shore. She is waiting there,
with the blessed ones she so loved and reverenced,
for us. See, beloved," she added gently, rising and
trying to kiss the trouble from his brow; "that is
what is meant by what we call shipwreck; being
tossed on our own shore, being tossed home, just as
I was."

He drew her gently away.

"It seems as if thy spirit went with her, my
own," he said, "and that may not, must not be. We
are in the tempest-tossed fleet together — together
still. To me it seems as if all the past died with
her. While she lived TertuUian lived for us, and
Irenseus, and even Polycarp, all whose voice she had
heard, with whom she had breathed this mortal
air, all even whose children and comrades she had
known."

"Is it so with thee?" Eucharis said. "To me
they all seem to live the more, now that she whose
kiss has been on my lips and my babes', whose dear
voice has called us tender, childish, petting names,
is with that solemn company, is as they have long
been. They seem to grow familiar to me, as if

Lapsed^ hut fiot Lost. 1 1

1 62 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

they, too, might welcome us with motherly smiles
and endearments."

"She is indeed on the safe shore," he said.
"She is underneath the altar. But we, we are not
only tempest-tossed towards that shore, the whole
fleet is broken, scattered, flung hither and thither,
the fairest vessels making full sail for alien ports,
some running foul of each other, some creeping
away out of sight, hugging the shore of this world.
It has been a terrible day in Carthage."

Clement and Viola and Justa joined them as he
spoke.

"Have our brothers fallen, brother?" said Cle-
ment.

"Call them not brothers," said Valerian, his face
flushing. "They went out from us because they
were not of us. They have not even waited for the
appointed day of sacrifice, two days hence. I saw
them to-day, a wretched, traitor-troop, creeping be-
forehand to swear by the genius of the Emperor;
some making light of it, others palHd and shivering
like a troop of panting ghosts. The very heathen
jeered at them. But worst of all are the Libellatici.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 63

Priscus showed me his certificate this morning. *See/
he said, *the lie is not mine but theirs. They know
I do not mean what I pay them for saying I do.'
And the coward expected me to acknowledge him
still as one of us!"

"You refused to speak to him?" said Clement.

"Certainly," Valerian added.

"Did he seem angry?" asked Clement.

"He turned crimson, and then death-pale,"
Valerian said calmly. "Perhaps the arrow hit what
he has left living of a conscience. For he turned
away sullenly and said, * There are worse apostates
than the Libellatici. The Church receives such
back. The last may yet be first.' I suppose,
threatening me."

"Threatening thee!" said Clement. But there
was not so much astonishment as deep sadness and
solicitude in his voice.

"Does the Church receive back the Libellatici?"
asked Eucharis.

"In these soft and indulgent days, yes!" said

Valerian. "But no one can make us welcome them

back to our homes."

II*

164 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"Ah, my Valerian!" she said softly, the tears
filling her eyes, "to welcome any lost ones back is
sweet, is sweetest of all, if only they really come."

"Threatening thee!" Clement reiterated, as if
lost in musing. "But ah, not only thee; me, thee,
all of us! I was reading this night, as I kept vigil
in the chamber of our dead, the letter she loved
from the churches of Lyons and Vienne to their
mother church in Asia Minor. The humility of
those martyrs was so deep they earnestly rebuked
those who dignified them with the name of martyrs.
*To One only that sacred name fully belongs,' they
said, bleeding and exhausted as they lay in prison
for Him, *to the faithful and true martyr, the First-
bom from the dead, the Prince of life, or at most
to those whose witness to him has been sealed by
constancy to death. We are but poor lowly con-
fessors.' They sent no messages of absolution from
prison; they sent humble entreaties for prayer that
they might endure to the end. And when those
whom the torture had overcome were thrown among
them in prison, they received them with the tenderest
pity and love; they prayed God that their Lord

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 65

would once more restore these dead to life; and on
their betrayers and tormentors never a word of ven-
geance!"

"Read the letter to us," pleaded Eucharis.

"Not now, I think," he said; "the tortures were
terrible, and I know not that it helps to dwell on
these. The brethren write, that through all their
torments they were 'bedewed and strengthened by
the spring of living water that flows from the heart
of Christ; for nothing can be dreadful,' they say,
'where the love of the Father dwells; nothing harm-
ful where the glory of Christ prevails.' The story
moved me deeply," he added. "But it was not so
much their suffering or their consolations; it was
that the very image of the Crucified seemed to shine
through them, forgiving, trusting, loving to the end,
only distrusting themselves as, necessarily, He could
not distrust himself. It gave me a little hope," he
concluded.

"A little hope, brother, my brother!" said Va-
lerian; "as if any of us could fear for thee!"

"I have feared for myself," he replied. "Such
small things are temptations to me; such little things

1 66 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

are delight and grief to me; a drought, a failure in
any of the fruit-trees, the devastations of insects on
the vines, or the rain-floods sweeping away our ter-
races. I have said, *If these things so move me,
how shall I stand those? Who shall dwell with the
devouring fire?' And then came the answer, 'Even
then He would strengthen me who has not suffered
me quite to fail even in these.' It is a disgrace that
such trifles should have tempted me, but I have not
sworn deceitfully. I have ever thrown away the
bad and sold only the good, and estimated all at its
true worth. And if the * devouring fire,' the bruising
stones, the rack and cruel scourges, are to come,
then we may trust that we also may see the King
of saints as never before in His beauty, and be not
unwilling to go to Him in the land that is very
far off"."

So many words from Clement moved them all to
the heart — from Clement whose words were so few.

But yet they, in their ignorance, half accepted
his verdict about himself. They half believed he
had been too covetous over his vines and fig-trees.

And none of them knew the "devouring fire"

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 67

that had laid waste his heart and shrivelled his
fondest hopes. All saw and loved the gentleness,
but none else knew, nor did he conceive to what
strength that hidden fire had tempered his will and
his heart.

The fatal day named in the Edict dawned. Every
Christian throughout the empire was to swear by
the genius of the Emperor, to lay incense on the
altar; or to be liable to torture and death.

The day passed tranquilly at the farm. It was
the funeral day of the grandmother.

The sacred casket of the treasure that had passed
from them was laid with the tenderest reverence
in the catacombs, near the martyrs she had so
loved.

And at the Holy Eucharist, the family, and many
Christians who had known her, commemorated her
for the first time as among those in "the land of
the living," and for ever at rest, still gathered around
one Holy Table, still waiting beneath one sacred
altar, still living by one Immortal Life.

It was a day of solemn hush and expectation.
That evening, any hour in any day or night after

1 68 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

that, the blow of the persecutor might fall, the tread
of the inexorable officers of justice might be heard
on the threshold of that quiet home.

The unity of the attack is something difficult for
us to comprehend in these days of extended empire,
of many tongues and many kingdoms.

Underneath all that wide dome of sky which
they thought roofed the world, the civilised world
was absolutely one. What lay beyond seemed to
them scarcely to be called the "inhabited earth."
It was a ragged edge of wilderness, bordering the
true human world, haunted by wild beasts and wilder
men, by hordes and hordes of wild men, pressing,
indeed, in these last years on the empire, but no
more possible to be dwelt among peaceably than
the arena when filled with Numidian hons and
gladiators. And the power of this whole world was
in the hand of one who was set on exterminating
the Christian Church from the earth, deliberately,
legally, not by riots and irregular passionate mobs
which might irregularly massacre and might irregu-
larly spare; but by the agency of a most elaborately

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 169

organized government, still alive to the extremities
of the empire to punish, if not to defend or save.

By exterminating the Christian Church, the men
who had undertaken it by no means meant a general
massacre of Christians. They meant, deliberately,
every engine of persuasion, or of torture, applied
perseveringly, unremittingly, skilfully, discriminatingly,
to every individual Christian, to make them cease
to be Christians, and so once more begin to be
"good citizens and subjects."

The first onset succeeded beyond the most
sanguine expectations. The mixed multitude who
had gathered around the Christian host during the
thirty years of peace scattered at once, melting into
the fluctuating indefinite masses around.

The cupidity of the local magistrates disposed of
many more, accepting fines and payments instead of
sacrifice.

The band that met in the Christian churches in
Carthage the Sunday after the day of sacrifice was
visibly thinned.

Yet the sifting was far from accomplished. As

I 70 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

yet the Proconsul was absent from the city, and the
persecution was carried on with some languor.

Many who had commercial relations with other
cities had time to pack up their treasures, arrange
their affairs, even sell houses and gardens, and de-
part to places where, being less known, they might
have more chance of escaping denunciation.

Once more Priscus came, and, undeterred by the
coolness of his reception, counselled the family to
take this alternative before it was too late.

The Bishop Cyprian himself, he said, had retired
to a place of seclusion on the coast, deeming him-
self better able at that moment to serve the Church
by ruling and exhorting her thence than by dying
in her midst.

A purchaser might, he thought, be found for
some portion of the farm; and there was some in-
troduction of the name of Viola. But no encourage-
ment was given to any of his counsel, and his sug-
gestions appeared to be so entirely incomprehensible
to the family, that he retired baffled, and returned
to Carthage.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I 7 I

But the alternative he had indicated had made
more impression than he knew.

Clement, walking round the gardens that night,
binding up straggling branches and pruning away-
superfluous leaves, uprooting weeds, half- uncon-
sciously, with the old habit of order and care, fell
into great questionings of himself.

So dear to him were these gardens and fields
he had made, dear as a picture he had painted, a
poem he had written, as a treasure held in trust for
the happiness of those he loved, as the work the
Master had given him, on every inch of which the
seal of His blessing seemed to be visibly stamped —
could it be that cowardice, for him, lay in cleaving
to those familiar things, not in abandoning them?

Might it be that the true sacrifice he was called
to was to sell this creation of his, and go forth a
pilgrim and stranger with the rest?

He returned to the house in the hope of judging
more clearly in the solitude of his chamber, un-
distracted by the haunting presence of these things
which seemed to claim his care. But no steady
deep came to him, only a bi6kei\. ^\mto^^\ , ^^i^ "^

172 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

troubled dream of lying buried deep down in a
grave under the hills, with roots of great fig-trees
and tendrils of vines twining themselves about the
fibres of his heart, growing bone of his bone, draw-
ing their nourishment from his life, the things given
to man to feed on actually feeding on him, and he
not dead, but conscious of it, yet helpless to escape.

He awoke as if a burden had been disentangled
from him; in his ears seemed to echo the words,
"A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the
things which he possesseth;" in his heart he an-
swered, "Yea, Lord; nor shall my death consist in
the abundance of these things possessing me."

"Valerian," he said, the next morning, "I am
ready, if we all think it best. Let who will buy the
farm, if thereby we may get the sisters and the
babes into some secure place. What the Bishop has
done cannot be wrong for us to do."

But Valerian was sitting with the manuscript of
TertuUian, "De Fugi in Persecutione," unrolled be-
fore him.

"The matter stands thus," he read; "we have
either both things in out o^vii ^cwet, ox xJc^k^ ^\salV{

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I ^ I

But the alternative he had indicated had made
more impression than he knew.

Clement, walking round the gardens that night,
binding up straggling branches and pruning away-
superfluous leaves, uprooting weeds, half- uncon-
sciously, with the old habit of order and care, fell
into great questionings of himself.

So dear to him were these gardens and fields
he had made, dear as a picture he had painted, a
poem he had written, as a treasure held in trust for
the happiness of those he loved, as the work the
Master had given him, on every inch of which the
seal of His blessing seemed to be visibly stamped —
could it be that cowardice, for him, lay in cleaving
to those familiar things, not in abandoning them?

Might it be that the true sacrifice he was called
to was to sell this creation of his, and go forth a
pilgrim and stranger with the rest?

He returned to the house in the hope of judging
more clearly in the solitude of his chamber, un-
distracted by the haunting presence of these things
which seemed to claim his care. But no steady
sleep came to him, only a broken slumber, with a

I 74 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

afar; we are mere legionaries; we have but to stay
at our post and stand."

"But the women and the babes?" said Clement.

"If these led us to flee and fail," replied Valerian,
almost fiercely, "then were the worst the austerest
say of marriage true."

Eucharis looked up with a quiet courage. "Chris-
tian women are not mere lambs," she said, "to be
folded and sheltered; we are your fellow-servants
and soldiers, to share the conflict and the suflering.
Few persecutions without some of us among the
martyrs!"

Clement said no more. And as the days passed
by he began to think the safest as well as the
happiest course might be to remain where they
were.

Prisons had returned humiUated and sullen to
Carthage.

That evening he had had an invitation to an
entertainment at one of the best heathen houses in
the city.

He had hesitated about going. Whichever way

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I 75

he turned his self-love was wounded. The Chris-
tians evidently looked on him as an alien, and the
heathen as a soldier looks at a deserter from the
enemy, or as a patrician at a freedman pretentiously
claiming equality with the always free.

He resolved, however, to make the plunge. He
must be one thing or the other. And mere security
demanded that he should not seem to shrink from
the society whose ranks he had joined.

There was much jesting about the dolorous way
in which these new Christians kept the festivals; but
they would imlearn their morose ways in time.
Prisons himself was complimented on his ease and
gaiety, and was apparently admitted to the circle
with an intimacy which charmed him. It was cer-
tainly a freedom to have left the old ascetic rules
behind, and to have no limit to one's society but
that it should be the best of its kind. Cliques must
always be narrow, and what was the Church but a
clique?

Gradually he was drawn into conversation about
one and another of his Christian associates, and
especially about the family at the farm.

176 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"They seem too good to belong to such a mis-
anthropic sect," the host concluded. "It would evi-
dently be a service to them to persuade them, though
by means a little severe, out of so servile a supersti-
tion; especially this Valerian, of whose eloquence
and large-mindedness you say so much. He must
be recovered at any cost to the State. And this
farm itself," he added, "seems a possession not to
be despised."

"Far from me to draw down what they would
consider trouble on the good people," Priscus said
apologetically. "I think some of them would never
yield — perhaps none of them easily."

"No doubt you honourably shrink from involving
old associates," said the host, not without a tone of
sarcasm in his voice; "ever3rthing shall be done with
discrimination. , But there are evidently treasures
there worth recovering for the State; and, of course,
easy or not, the decree must be carried out. But
all that will be arranged when the Proconsul returns.
Meantime, sir, we thank you for your valuable infor-
mation."

The familiar manner had retired into the ofl&cial.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 177

Priscus felt himself sifted, comprehended, used, and
dismissed.

With an uneasy sense of humiliation he went
home. Had he then given "valuable information?"
That meant virtually. Had he made a terrible
denunciation? Had he sunk so low already as to
be an informer, a traitor? Should he go again to
the farm to warn them of the peril?

Of what use would it be? They had evidently
despised his advice, or looked at it as a temptation
of the devil.

*

And, after all, if he had not quite meant to lay
them open to the persecution, there was certainly
something insufferable in that cool confidence and
contempt of Valerian's. Such pretensions as his
ought to be tested.

And Clement had an abundance of common
sense; he would probably find some way out of the
difficulty. It would make them all more merciful in
future; and surely mercy was one of the first Chris-
tian graces.

And yet, and yet, in spite of all his self-de-

LaJ»sedy but not Lost. 12

178

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

fence, the peaceable little home haunted him in his
dreams.

And he woke with a burden on his mind. "An
irrational burden," he said to himself. "I at least
am on the safe side; it is merely the reaction of
yesterday's feasting. I am on the safe side, and
there one can best help one's friends on the danger-
ous side. Who knows what I may be able to do
for them yet?"

S<
at the

E^
Sunda

So
alien.

said oi

vas fa

discipli

k>wliiie

md te]

I darts o

bamini

Th<

the tha

empty

that re;

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I 79

CHAPTER XVL

Solemn and blessed were the weeks that followed
It the farm.

Every gathering at the Holy Eucharist on the
Sunday showed some diminution of the numbers.

Some were in prison for the faith; many had
fallen.

"The Church," as the old African master had
;aid of a former persecution, "was awe-struck. Then
N2LS faifh more zealous in preparation and better
disciplined in fasts, and meetings and prayers, and
lowHness, in brotherly kindness and love, in holiness
and temperance. These tortures will be the fiery
darts of the devil, by which faith gets a ministry of
burning and kindling."

The thinned ranks pressed closer to each other;
the thanksgivings and the prayers had meaning, all
empty words being pruned away; many of the faces
that remained had the calm and inspiration of earUer

12*

l8o LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

days, and others were wet with humbling, penitent
tears.

Intervening voices grew faint; the One Voice
that commands, the One Face whose light can sus-
tain, the One Lord for whom, if such were His will,
they were to suffer, grew nearer and clearer to the
menaced company every day.

Letters came among them also from Cyprian.
"I gladly rejoice and am thankful," he wrote to the
confessors, "most brave and blessed brethren, in
hearing of your faith and virtue, wherein the Church
our mother glories. Of you I find some are already
crowned; while some are now within reach of the
crown of victory; but all whom the danger has shut
up in a glorious company are animated to carry on
the struggle with an equal and common warmth of
valour as behoves the soldiers of Christ and the
Divine camp. It shall be no light contest for you
since God appoints the struggle." He warned them
to humihty. "Before His Passion," he said, "the
Lord himself girded himself and washed the dis-
ciples' feet."

Deep sank the brave and s)niipathetic words into

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. l8l

the softened hearts. They knew it would have been
easier to the Bishop to die with them than thus to
live apart from them.

At last the summons came.

One morning once more the family had gathered
at the chapel of the catacombs.

The words of St. Peter had been read to them,
echoing through the old Punic vaults, "Think it not
strange concerning the fiery trial that is to try you
as though some strange thing happened unto you;"
and as they issued forth again into the light, in the
comer shadowed by the rock where the lapsed
husband and wife had knelt, a little band of
government officers stood drawn up to intercept
them.

One of the officials gave a sign to the others,
as Clement and Valerian came out, and the brothers
were at once seized and bound to be led away.

Eucharis and the sisters pressed close to them.
"We are all one," they said; "take us all!"

"We have no commission beyond these," was
the grim and brief reply. "Your time, no doubt

will come."

1 82 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

The rest of the congregation were suffered to
disperse, even the priests and the deacons, but none
were suffered to Hnger about the catacombs.

The soldiers compelled the little company to
divide in their varied homeward directions, and then,
surrounding the two captives, they marched rapidly
away to Carthage.

It had come at last, all that they most dreaded.

Not in a thunder-clap; with all external quiet-
ness, the officers doing their duty without passion,
the brothers submitting to the doom without resist-
ance; the band of men, captors and captives, silently
marching down the shaded paths among the vine-
yards and gardens; the Httle forsaken band of
women, the three sisters, silently watching, as so
often before, until they were hidden in the valley
on the way to Carthage.

Eucharis seemed endued with supernatural
strength. She had comprehended the whole possi-
bility in an instant, and, as Valerian was led away,
for one moment she held his hands iji hers, and,
looking up with undimmed eyes into his, she said
with low rapid utterance —

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 83

"Beloved, fear nothing for me. Inordinary deaths
we cannot choose, and we might have to go separately.
In this we can choose, we must choose. And we will
go to our Lord together."

The wonderful radiance of her smile Ht up her
face as she spoke, as if, through it, her whole soul
were embracing his; and in that illumination, as in
a halo, her face was enshrined to him as he went
away.

And as Clement looked back, being the last, the
smile lighted up again as with a faint but tender
after-glow, shining indeed individually on him, and
full of reverence and sweetness, but as if from far
above, like a soft dew of light from the wings of an
angel.

So the women went back to the lonely house to
weep and pray, and carry on the household duty,
and, defenceless as they were themselves, to guard
as best they might the defenceless babes. Few words
passed between them.

Although, in one sense, the blow had fallen, in
another there was still a time of suspense; and a

184 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

suspense whose balance is weighed down mainly on
the side of fear leaves little desire for speech.

Nor, indeed, did they weep much. There were
too many sacred duties left them to do. The gardens
and farm were still Clement's, and as his creation,
his possession, or his memorial, every trellised vine
and carefully watered orchard was sacred.

The slaves clustered about them for commands
and for consolation. For the most part Christian,
and from father to son settled on the farm, they were
faithful and attached, but smitten, at first, into help-
lessness by terror and by the loss of the master; until
by degrees they began to feel that the order of the
household was to be unbroken.

The first impulse of the sisters had been to aban-
don the routine of daily life altogether — the routine
which had become so unmeaning — and to give
themselves to one long unbroken vigil of fasting and
prayer.

But Eucharis would not have it so.

At the sunset she firmly insisted on summoning
the household for the evening prayer.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 85

"It is a confession. You remember Priscus said
so," she said, with shining eyes. ^^They are confess-
ing gloriously, and we shall be joining our feeble
voices to theirs." And clear through the gardens
rang the rich tones of her voice in the familiar even-
ing hymn —

" Joyful light of holy glory
Of the Immortal Father,
Blessed, Holy Jesus Christ 1"

At first her voice alone, but soon joined in tremu-
lous, tearful tones by sisters and servants, aged and
children, till at last the notes pealed like a hymn of
triumph through the valley.

They had not long closed when Priscus appeared,
cautiously creeping up in the dark.

"I came to see if I could help in any way," he
stammered, in a feeble voice of remonstrance. "But
you must be mad — mad. Do you not know that
every note is a summons to the enemy to fall on
you?"

"We do know that every note is a confession of
our Lord," said Eucharis. "Did it sound like it?"
and she added in a low, firm tone, "My place is at

1 86 LAPSED, Birr not lost.

his side; you know, I am vowed to that. I shall
wait to see whether they call for me. But, sooner
or later, no one can hinder my sacred right to be
there 1"

I

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 187

CHAPTER XVII.

Clement and Valerian went silently along the
familiar garden-paths to the walls of Carthage, their
hands bound, and hurried by occasional rough touches
from the staves of their captors, for the soldiers had
orders to be expeditious.

Valerian flushed and his lips parted with an in-
dignant exclamation as the first indignity of blows
fell on him.

And for the first time the whole meaning of mar-
tyrdom flashed on him.

The story of the Cross and the acts of the
martyrs had to him from infancy been sacred his-
tories.

Around those thorn-crowned brows unconsciously
he had seen a halo of glory. The very thorns had
become a crown, not of scorn, but of redoubled glory;
the cross was the most sacred of symbols; the rack,
the scourges, the torture-chambers of the martyrs,

1 88 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

had, unconsciously to him, been attended in his
imagination by the tender, reverent presence of sym-
pathetic fellow-Christians.

And now a rude blow fell on his shoulders, on
his cheek, with a coarse laugh or curse, just as blows
and curses might fall on any troublesome and re-
fractory slave, and the indignant expression of resent-
ment scarcely formed on his lips had been answered
by a buffet on his mouth.

As they entered the gate Priscus was standing
near, and, at the moment their eyes met, some mis-
chievous boys threw handfuls of mud into Valerian's
face, which filled his eyes and for the moment
blinded him. He heard the mocking laughter and
felt the helplessness of the bound hands, and when
he opened his eyes again he saw a smile on the face
of Priscus at his bespattered face and clothes. Eyes
smarting from a trick of mocking boys, hands unable
to shelter them, not glorious scars, but a bespattered
face, bruises, buffets, petty insults, the sufferings in
themselves so small that a child might have laughed
at them, and the associations so mean and low; —
was this indeed the first taste of martyrdom, so little

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 89

in itself elevating and sacred, so like any other kind
of small misery, so entirely without an)^hing peculiar
in it to ennoble, and to strengthen to endure it? He
had unconsciously thought of martyrdom as in itself
a kind of sacrament, which would bring its own
strength. He found it simply like any other of the
many tests and temptations, any one of the many
rough, common steps of life, all sacred as being steps
of a pilgrimage, or none.

To Clement also came the same petty insults,
and to him also came the thought, how like these
first steps of martyrdom were to others trodden be-
fore. But to him the thought came not as a bitter
but a joyful surprise. Were the rough steps of this
lofty untrodden path so like the humble daily steps
of the old well-trodden path? These few rugged
steps which might be the last, and might prove such
a rapid ascent to the very gates of the city, to the
feet of the Saviour.

For, almost more than he suffered himself to
think, these petty mockings and buffetings recalled
the bitter steps trodden for him by Another. A flood
of joy he scarcely dared admit into his heart came

190 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

with the adoring thought how "they smote Him on
the face," and blindfolded, mocked, and buffeted
Him through all the long tumultuous night, how He
was "despised," how the first steps of the way of
the Cross itself were petty insults and mockeries,
and how He pitied and loved through all. "Can it
be possible," he thought, "that Thou sufferest us to
walk so close in Thy own steps? Could the simple
habit of following lead to a following so near, so
evident as this?"

His eyes met the restless gaze of Priscus, and he
also saw the half- triumphant smile which Valerian
had resented. But over his heart came a pang of
pity for the deserter, which for the time made him
forget himself entirely. The kind frank eyes rested
with a long grave gaze on, the face of Priscus, and
there was something in their expression that made
Priscus for a moment see himself as he was, and
turn away, not angry, but humiliated and ashamed
at heart.

At the prison the brothers were separated. Cle-
ment was thrown into a room with many others.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. I9I

Valerian, for some reason unknown to him, was
alone; perhaps because those who had to dis-
criminate knew what would prove the severest test
to him.

Clement had the ordinary distresses of the prison
— stifling air; the rude pressure of crowds, some of
them criminals for low crimes; coarse fare, coarse
speech; bad air, no light suffering to him with his
habits of healthy, regular, country work, his life on
the fresh, open hills, the unwontedness to him of
din and crowding. He had no solitude, and found
little time for the quiet regular devotion he was
used to. His prayers had to be little more than
ejaculations, the presence of the sins and sufferings
of those around lay so close and thick upon him;
stories of homes left desolate by being deprived of
the head; fears of untried hearts expecting to be
summoned to confession and torture; men who had
left them a few hours before vigorous and young,
returning feeble and tottering, bleeding and maimed
from the preliminary examination. For, as Tertul-
lian said, in other trials men were tortured to con-
fess; in this, having confessed and being ready to

192 LAPSED, BXTT NOT LOST.

die, they were, contrary to all law, tortured to for-
swear themselves and deny.

And besides these, there were the heathen
criminals, over whom Qemenfs soul yearned un-
speakably.

But to Valerian none of this was appointed;
none of this mingling him with the common crowd,
which might have nerved him by touching his heart
with the wants of others.

He was set, as one of another class, in a room
apart, airy, and furnished. He was served with
civility and provided with wholesome food; and he
was treated with consideration, and his solitude re-
spected, except when occasionally one or another
Roman official with whom he had been acquainted
came and courteously remonstrated with him.

"He was so much above this kind of thing! Of
course all educated men knew the valuelessness
of popular superstitions; and as far as Christianity
was a high moral teaching and a philosophy, which
on some sides many were quite ready to admit it
was, there could be no reason against his retaining
it. It was even granted that there might be some-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. IQ3

thing fanatical in this assault on the religion. It
was in part political, arising from the necessity Decius
felt to put down the partisans of his predecessor,
PhiUp the Arabian, who had been said to favour the
Christians. It was merely a temporary thing, this
violent assault. It would only be necessary to bow
for a while till the hurricane blew over. That he
should be required to make a concession might be
tyrannical; but what he was required to yield were
the merest externals, a mere acknowledgment to
satisfy a new government a little uneasy at the way
it had arrived at power, by showing that no dis-
loyalty was intended.

"The Christian Church had of late proved itself,
it must be admitted, rather a strong organization;
and strong secret societies were of course impossibi-
lities in any strongly organized state.

"And if any concession were demanded, surely
nothing less could be required of any than an ac-
knowledgment of the genius of Caesar — whatever that
meant, an antiquated mode of saying that you were
a subject of Caesar — and a few grains of incense offered
to whom, or to what, who pretended to explain?

trapsed f hit not Lost, 1 3

194 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

One of their own great teachers, it was reported,
had said, *An idol was nothing at all;' well, a few
grains of incense cast forth into nothing, into the
void, what were they?

"And what did he concede? Simply the vulgar
superstition which had encrusted that high philo-
sophic morality, which no one could fail to admire;
if a little severe and joyless, always high and pure.
After all, it was to a popular superstition he yielded
in refusing to sacrifice. He himself must surely be
above that! He but yielded one superstition to an-
other. An unfair demand, perhaps, but how sHght!
And after all he was a Roman, an imperial officer,
and knew how Rome was beset, and how essential
it was that she should rule."

Such things were said to Valerian by many
friendly, familiar voices of old acquaintance, mean-
ing not to tempt but to help — meaning him not evil,
but good.

"You have made us almost Christians," they
said, "often before now, by your eloquent words, by
your good pure life. You would not destroy this
influence by letting us imagine that your religion,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 95

like the rest, is after all only a blind superstition, or
the obstinacy of a secret revolutionary sect?"

And all this only as an echo to the conflicts and
questionings in his own mind.

For, in this terrible soUtude, it became clearer
and clearer to him that to him Christianity had been
chiefly a combination of two things: a great philo-
sophic morality, and a mighty organization.

And now he was not even called upon to deny
this philosophy, he was not called upon even to say
an unworthy word against the Sacred Name. He
was only called on to disjoin himself temporarily
from outward adhesion to a society which the State
thought dangerous — a society in which he knew too
well how mixed the elements were, how low and
poor some of the Hves.

Christianity to him had been a philosophy and
a patriotism. It had scarcely been a faith. But his
whole true and loyal nature shrank — shrank as the
heart of a citizen of old Rome — from an unpatriotic
act, from deserting what to him was the fatherland
of his people, and the city in which he was enrolled

I

•

196 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

as a citizen, in this her hour of humiliation and
ruin.

Steadfastly, therefore, he resisted all these
friendly appeals, and went forth to confess and to
suffer. At the tribunal once more the brothers met.
From the lips of both came the same confession—

"I am a Christian."

"I will not sacrifice."

But the eloquence seemed to have passed from
the countenance and the voice of Valerian to Cle-
ment.

Stem and fixed as the face of a Roman soldier
required to take a post or die was Valerian's mobile
face as the brief words came from his lips. His
glance was not upward but forward, not upward as
one who looks for an invisible presence, nor frankly
on any around, except when he gazed on Clement
whilst he spoke the fatal words. And there his gaze
seemed riveted; such a radiance was on the elder
brother's face, such a repressed joy in his tones, as
they rang through the Ustening assembly, that the
brief sentence, "I am a Christian," in those tones,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 197

was in itself a Te Deum, an eucharistic hymn, a
song of triumph.

Almost bitterly Valerian turned his eyes away.
He seemed looking through his brother's eyes, as
sometimes we look through the eyes of the dying,
into a world he could not see, up to a Face he could
not see; and with a feeling almost of reproach against
God, the thought came to him, "Thou hast hid these
things from the wise and revealed them unto babes,"
and an echo of his grandmother's words, "Do you
think the arena is the only place where the devil
does not suggest that there are two sides to every-
thing?"

But seeing or not seeing, shadow or substance,
rejoicing or despairing, for this same cause, in this
same Church, he had to suffer.

And he suffered; limb racked from limb, flesh
torn with scourge and cruel hooks, he endured all
without a word, almost without a moan, until the
anguish took away his senses, and he was remanded
to the prison.

And through the agony, as if from another world,

198 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

came to him in the tones of his brother's voice, the
words, as from an earlier maityi:

"Thanks to Thee, O Christ! Help me, O Christ!
For Thee do I suffer thus, O Christ! for a short
while, with a wilhng mind. Let me not fail.

"O Lord Jesus Christ, we are Christians! Thee
do we serve. Thou art our Hope! O God most
holy, O God most high, still this tempest of persecu-
tion. Give rest to Thy servants. Give peace to
Thy Church. Forgive these, forgive, as Thou hast
forgiven us.

"Thou who hast come to save, Thou who hast
died forgiving, forgive these! O Lord Christ, for-
give — forgive and save!"

With Valerian's more finely strung nerves, every
pang, moreover, intensified by an imaginative tem-
perament, the bodily strength succumbed earlier
than with Clement.

The last words that fell on his ear before he
fainted were these, "Thou who hast died forgiving,
Lord Christ, forgive and save!" and never did their
echo die from his heart.

Alone again in the prison! through the long

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 1 99

hours of fever and pain. But not this time in the
easy furnished chamber; still alone, but thrust down
into a dungeon, damp, and utterly dark, with foul
and noisome creatures crawling about him, as he
lay helpless there; and always the terrible thought
haunting him: "For what am I suffering? For what
the mart)rrs suffered? For Him whom Clement
adores? Am I? Is it not rather, as they say, from
obstinacy to an old persuasion, from fear of being
despised by my own society, from horror of being
among the lapsed, pointed at by all? Is it courage
or is it cowardice for which I suffer?"

At midnight, it seemed as if from some fresh
order of the government, they took him from the
dungeon, placed him again in the chamber he had
been in before, dressed his wounds, and gave him
food and cordials.

And then, while it was still dark, Priscus, not
triumphant, but looking haggard and troubled, came
to his couch and said, "You have confessed nobly.
You have suffered enough. I come with a proposition
made to few."

200 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Valerian shrank as if from a serpent. " Only tell
me, what do you know of Clement?"

"He was taken back to the prison, given up for
dead," was the reply. And there was a tremulous-
ness and depth in his voice. "Your brother is a
saint," he added. "I did not know him. I thought
he was an ordinary good man, and would have suc-
cumbed to the needs of the time."

*^Fou thought?^* said Valerian abruptly, "Was it
then you who brought us to this?"

"Nay," was the confused, stammering reply. "I
would have kept you all safe. But now just let me
warn you of the new peril that threatens. Your
wife threatens to come and denounce herself. She
says her place is at your side. She has waited
hitherto to be summoned; but she said she would
not wait long. And when once she hears that you
have confessed and suffered, she will be here, and
you will see her tortured before your eyes."

Valerian rose and laid his hand fiercely on
Priscus.

"I will not hear of this," he said.

"Then how will you bear to see it?" was the reply.

Lapsed, but not lost. 201

Valerian fell back on his couch and hid his face.

"For an unmeaning act, for some angry looks
from the Bishop! They make the terms marvel-
lously easy. They permit you even now, not to
sacrifice, but to purchase a certificate. No public
act at all. A little transfer of property, and this
very moment you are free, before your wife has
heard of your torture. She need know nothing but
that you have confessed nobly, suffered, and then
been liberated. Otherwise she will be to-morrow as
you were yesterday. See, I have the certificate,
ready signed; only to be accepted. Not a word.
Only to resign a portion of the farm."

"If Qement is gone the farm may well go,"
Valerian said. And he accepted the certificate, and
was free.

Feeble as he was from the torture, he was not
disabled, and before the dawn broke he crept out
of the prison doors into the cool morning air.

Prisons would have accompanied him to sustain
his feeble steps; but he declined the hateful com-
panionship, now more hateful than ever, and crept
home alone: free.

202 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XVIIL

Home! was it home? Clement had gone home!

Free! was he free? Clement was free!

It was still dark as he went forth from the gate
of Carthage.

Alone! that at least was certain; alone for eveir;
alone everywhere; alone as those two lapsed Chris-
tians^ from whose touch he had shrunk as from
pollution.

He felt it as he passed the portico of one of the
temples, from which a noisy band of revellers were
coming. Alone in the midst of these; of their com-
pany he would never be, nor would they believe it if
he could pretend it. He felt it far more as, thread-
ing the less known streets, he passed the famihar
door of a house where, especially in these late
troubled times, the Christian Church had been
wont to assemble. Alone there also. Famihar
door, but open no more for him. Sacred threshold,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 203

which he had crossed side by side with Eucharis.
Holy table and altar, where he had knelt with her,
with Viola and Justa, and with Clement — with Qe-
ment, now a crowned victor, for ever out of his
sight!

For by a terrible Nemesis it seemed to him that
the very act by which he had abandoned Chris-
tianity had made Christianity to him the only per-
fectly sure reality. His denial had smitten his
doubts into the nothingness they were. His denial
had smitten his wavering faith into conscious sub-
stance.

And as, feebled and bruised, shattered in body
and soul, he tottered along the walls, up and down
the steep of the narrow streets, this great solid
Roman Carthage, with its temples and tribunals, its
quays and docks, its harbours filled with laden
ships, its palaces and paupers, seemed as much a
dream as the ancient Punic Carthage that had sat
enthroned a millennium before by the same seas,
and now lay buried below.

Punic Carthage had vanished like a tale that is
told, Roman Carthage and Rome herself were

204 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST,

vanishing" like an echo of the old story; all, all was
shadowy and unreal, except, only except, the Christ
Clement had died confessing and rejoiced in dying,
except the Christ he had doubted and denied, ex-
cept the world of untold joy into which Clement'
had entered, and the world of untold sorrow to
which he had sold himself!

As he approached the city gate it occurred to
him he should have difficulty in passing it. With
his torn and bespattered clothes, the haggard look
he must have, and the feeble and limping gait of
the wrenched limbs, he must seem like what he
was — an escaped criminal or a dangerous vagabond.
And what answer could be given to the questions
the Roman guards were sure to put? Falsehood
was new to his lips; yet to say the truth was to set
his seal to the falsehood which had set him free.

The difficulty was solved for him again by
Priscus, who was there before him and spoke a few
words to the guard, in virtue of which he was suf-
fered to pass out.

His progress was slow, enfeebled as he was, and
before he reached the garden paths along which

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST; 2O5

Viola had been wont to watch his coming from the
point above the sea, the dusk was giving way to
dawn.

No slow process with that sudden impetuous
southern sun, a giant from the first moment of his
appearing, rejoicing to run his course.

In those last minutes of the dusk, all but wearied
out, he sat down to rest on a stone by the edge of
a wayside well.

Below him stretched the path down into the
little valley which was -the last but one before he
reached the farm. Every stone, every tree and
flowery thicket, were familiar and scarcely aroused
his attention. The tremulous shining of the sea in
the distance, under the touch of dawn, drew his
gaze for a moment; then looking down the familiar
path and up the slope he saw a Hght figure ad-
vancing.

Old, familiar sacred symbols came to him on the
wings of the dawn.

"Joyful light of holy glory.
Immortal holy Jesus Christ."

No more a joyful light to him. But most surely

206 U^PSED, BUT NOT LOST.

a light, most surely the light, real, substantial, eternal
as never he had known before.

Christianity had passed for him from the airy
region of thought and imagination and emotion,
into the solid land of conscience and will.

He stood on no dream-land now. No twilight
of unreal, transitory, exaggerated lights and shadows.
It was day. And he had sold himself to night, and
stood a black unconcealable blot upon the day, a
block of unchangeable ice within the sunlight.

Condemned, [shivering, conscience-stricken, for
ever in the Presence, once so gracious and pitiful,
now one pursuing all-pervading tide of judgment;
once a sea of light, now a pursuing lava-tide of fire.

Terrible words of TertuUian's came to him.

Such "sparks" of anguish and outward contempt
as he had himself to bear, what were they but
"some few missiles and sportive darts from an ^in-
estimably vast centre of fire?"

He withdrew his eyes from the intolerable lights
and looked languidly down the familiar path, and
up the slope, he saw a slight woman's figure still
advancing swiftly, and it seemed stealthily, keep-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 207

ing warily in the shadows of wall and stone and
tree.

Something in her movements riveted his eyes,
and in another minute there was no doubt.

It was Eucharis. She was alone, and crept
silently along in the shadows, looking cautiously
around her as if she wished to avoid observa-
tion.

His first impulse was to rise and exercise his
right to care for her; the next to shrink farther
into the shade, and never meet her gaze again.

For she was on her way to the prison, to him,
to martyrdom, to die for Christ, with him.

The contending impulses whirling through his
brain and heart seemed to benumb him into stone.
He sat motionless with bowed head and clenched
hands, and saw her pass, felt the sweep of her light
dress.

She did not look up when she came near; tl^e
dusk and the shadow partly hid him; and timidly
she hurried by, without recognising him.

Was he then so changed by those few hours
of bodily, torture, by that night of inward torture?

208 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

She had passed. In a minute the swift Hght
steps would take her ^ut of sight and hearing.

She would pass on to the city, to the prison,
and find him gone. She would press on to the
tribunal, and give herself up, and be tortured
and die.

And to save her from this he had given himself
up to death and shame eternal!

His limbs seemed to refuse to bear him after
her. It was all like some terrible dream. Perhaps
his voice was gone; it was all a dream; already he
was a haunting voiceless ghost on the immutable
shore! ^^She knows me not." Depart from me.
I never knew thee. "She will never know me;
Eucharis; nor Thou!"

And with the anguish came at last a cry of
despair, a long deep echoing moan, an exceeding
bitter cry.

At the sound Eucharis turned, moved by an
instinct of pity.

She turned and looked back.

He stretched out his arms, and almost involun-
tarily uttered her name.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST, 20$

In a moment she was beside him, at his feet,
her head on his bosom folded in his embrace. How
feeble the clasp of the poor wrenched arms had
become ! Yet they held her dose.

She looked up steadfastly in his face.

"Love, how they have made thee suffer! Thou
hast confessed! my confessor! my martyr! and what
miracle has set thee free?" . . .

She bathed his hands with kisses.

"Dear sacred hands, racked and tortured for
Thee."

He did not deny it. He had suffered.

But he gave her no kiss. He could not kiss
her pure brow with lips that had denied and were
forsworn.

And he could not speak.

"What miracle, love? What miracle of mercy
in the hearts of the tormentors has set thee free?
Ah! they are men. His redeemed men, even they!
Thou hast touched and melted their hearts with
thy words, with thy patience. They could not find
it in their hearts to carry out their cruel work.
Thou hast wakened up the Christian soul in the

l,apsedt but Moi Lost ^4

210 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

heathen. The rack and torture-chamber have been
more eloquent than thy eloquent speech; the blood
they shed has been a font of baptism for those who
shed it. I knew some marvel would come for thee.
The worst men have such divine possibilities of
pity in them, and thou wert sure to touch the
\<rorst."

Still he spoke not.

He even withdrew his hands from her kisses.
Those hands had accepted the lying certificate.
They were no longer worthy to touch her. He
spread them over his eyes; a terrible suspicion
crossed her for a moment. Had they maimed him
and made him speechless — for ever silenced the
eloquent tongue? Such things had been done
often.

"Valerian!" she cried out in a tone of anguish,
"you can speak? Surely I heard thy voice! I
heard thee say my name!"

How could he soften it to her. Could he say
the truth, that it was for her sake he had done it?
That would be bitterest of all to her, that she
should have dragged him down.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 211

There was no possibility of softening it to her.

He withdrew his hands from his face, and
looked with inexpressive steady eyes into her up-
turned face.

"Eucharis," he said, "I have set myself free.
Not God; I myself. I have accepted a certificate
of sacrifice. I have become a Libellaticus. Priscus
had obtained it unasked for me, and he told me
thou wert coming to denounce thyself and give
thyself up to torture and death with me. And I
accepted."

She said not a word, she did not shed a tear,
but sank down at his feet, crouching low, there on
the ground, as if she had been the penitent.

And then, after some minutes' silence, she rose,
and standing behind him, gently laid his head on
her shoulder, and pressed her hands on the burning
brow, and bent over and kissed the quivering eye-
lids.

"Beloved," she murmured, "my own! you did it
for me."

"Thou knowest, O Christ," she moaned, "he

2 1 2 LAPSED, BUI' NOT LOST,

did it for me. Thou knowest that he loves Thee.
He did it only for me."

There was no passion in her tone, but the most
loyal trust and reverence, as well as the tenderest
pity. "Look up at me, at thy own Eucharis!" For
a terrible memory came over her of the lapsed
husband and wife at the catacombs — the wife who
had tempted to betray, and the husband whose eyes
had never rested on her since.

"Look up at me. Neither thou nor I have
really changed." He did venture to look up in her
eyes, and there he met the old look of infinite
reverence and trust, blended with a compassion that
was half-motherly, half-angelic. And he drew down
her hands, bent his head over them, and imprinted
one long kiss on them, and hot tears fell fast on
them which he did not try to check.

"No more a Divine ideal and leader to thee,"
he said, "but a poor failing mortal creature, yet
dear to thee still!"

"Thyself still," she said. "To be thy highest
self, thy best, for ever!"

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 21 ^

And when he looked up again the old radiant
smile was on her face, and she said —

"I seem to see a false self coiling and twining
round the true. Softly gliding and twining with
fond, snaky, treacherous wiles. And I seem to see
thee, thine own true self, lulled to slumber in its
coils, and at last I see it dart out its fangs and
sting thee thy true self, to the heart. And thou,
thy true self, writhest in mortal anguish, but thou
art awake, and knowest the enemy. And," she
added, as if she were chanting an inspired hymn,
"I see Him who bruises the serpent's head coming
down to thee, and trampling on this serpent, and
setting thee, my own beloved, free; feeble and
wounded, my beloved, but free.''

So she believed in him still, altogether, for
ever. He knelt before her, humbled, smitten,
fallen. But in this humiliation there was the be-
ginning of a sweetness he had never before known,
a glimpse of a Divine pity, which, while faithfully
humbling to the dust, would never lower or despise;
would crush and kill if needful, but only to restore

214 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

and make alive, and create anew the true being
God had meant to be the likeness of himself.

And she also was learning through him, learning
of Christ; for as she knelt beside him and they
prayed together, he daring not to utter a word, she
appealed, not as was her wont to Him as the good
Shepherd; they seemed rather to her to be kneeling
together close in the shadow of the Cross, of the
crucified, and all she could say was, "O Lamb of
God, who takest away the sins of the world!
'Agnus Dei qui toUis peccata mundi, miserere nobis!
Agnus Dei qui toUis peccata mundi, dona nobis
pacem!'" and then slowly they crept home to-
gether.

But with the first glimmering of hope came a
purpose to Valerian — a purpose he distrusted him-
self almost too much to dare utter, even to Eucharis.

His steps grew more and more tottering and
feeble, and but for her he could scarcely have
reached the house.

And when they came in sight of the house a rush
of memories overpowered him, and the purpose was
uttered.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 21 S

"It is a sacred pUce/' he munnur^<Jj "it is Cl^
mentis home, Clement's creation. How Qan I ent^r
there, a traitor? Eucharis, I may die yett, not a dis-
honour to him, to thee, or the babes. Make ijie a
couch of leaves to-night in some outhpuse. Let mj^
not pollute the house with the presence of a traitor
— even for a night. And to-morrow I shall be strong
enough to walk. Let me creep back to Carthage,
and confess, and die!"

"If it is God's will, thou shalt go," she replied,
for she had thought of this from the first. " We will
go, as I had meant, together."

"You think I might dare, I might be accepted
yet, and be no dishonour to his name and thine?
You think it possible I might yet be permitted and
strengthened to do this? If I were at the tribunal
now it would, I think, even now, be different. I
should confess, not a philosophy, not even the
Church, but Him, the Christ himself, and I think
He would help me, as he helped Clement. But
dost thou think so? He could strengthen me, be-
loved, even to see thee suffer, if that must be! Alas!

2l6 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

I have made thee suflfer more than any heathen tor-
mentors ever could."

This she could not deny.

But she persuaded him to come into the house,
and be laid in his own chamber.

And then she went and told the sisters, telling
them also his purpose to go back on the morrow.

But on the morrow the racked and fevered limbs
were powerless to move.

Long days and weeks and months of perilous
illness followed; the fountain of life drained to its
lowest by anguish of body and mind, and loss of
blood, and the consuming fire of fever, the brain
wandering wildly.

The dark thoughts that were in the air around
him , of marriage being not so much a divinely
meant completion of human life as a fall to a lower
life, had often clouded even his brightest days. And
now that the spirit for the time had lost its balance,
and its power of shutting up its struggles within
itself, terrible questionings came. Eucharis seemed
a terror to him, and yet for both their sakes she
would suffer no one to know and share this anguish.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 2 1 ^

*^She has not fallen," he would say, "she is an
angel of light. Only I. I fell once from what Thou
mightest have made me be, and so again, the
second fall is easy — easy. But she was no tempter,
not to the first nor to the second fall. Satanas,
that is thy lie! Where two Christians are, Christ
is, and thou canst not come. But I am no Christian
— no Christian; in that thou sayest truly. And so
thou comest. Thou hast power to ten\pt. She never
tempted. She never fell. Only I, twice. She does
not know it. She must never know."

Silently she knelt beside him, while he tossed
from wave to wave of this tempest; out of sight,
when she could, and always praying.

Then, at last, her prayer seemed heard. For gra-
dually that terror seemed to pass away.

And then it seemed that another terrible dialogue
went on within the shattered spirit.

Through the hushed and quiet house, through
the open windows across the gardens, appalling the
slaves at their work, rang in severe, penetrating,
commanding tones the words —

"Depart, depart! I never knew you — never, never!"

2l8 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

And then a piercing cry of agonizing entreaty,
"Lord Christ, forgive, forgive!" "I knew Thee not.
I never knew Thee!"

And then again, stem and clear —

"Depart, depart!"

But then this terror seemed to vanish, and the
mind vibrated chiefly between a spasmodic struggle
to go back to the tribunal and the torture-chamber,
the echo of Qemenfs last words, "Thou diedst for-
giving: forgive and save," and a restless search for
some lost persons unnamed, whom, at first, no one
could comprehend. "I must find them, even were
it in hell!" was the bitter cry. "I must find them,
and bring them; no entrance without these. Depart,
depart! In that ye did it not to these; in that ye
despised these, the least, ye despised Me."

"But where. Lord, where? It is all dark; fire,
tumult, yet dark, all dark." s

At last it flashed upon Eucharis that it was the
lapsed husband and wife for whom his poor bewil-
dered soul was searching, and from that moment it
seemed to relieve him greatly that he was not alone,
but she with him, in the search.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 219

"We will find them, beloved," she said in her
calm, low voice; "we will surely find them."

"I must not come without them," he said, with
a wistful bewildered look; "He will have mercy and
not sacrifice — mercy, mercy! Without these He will
not let me in. No crowns — not crowns of martyr-
dom will do — nor Clement's prayers — only these
two — only to bring these in our hands. Then, per-
haps, He will let us in."

There were many relapses.

But as the reason came back the longing to find
those lost ones (}id not pass away.

"That was no delusion," he said. "It was the
voice of our Lord; and He means it. We must find
them and bring them home."

This purpose even divided his mind with the
resolution to go once more to the tribunal and con-
fess, so deeply had the words been imprinted on his
heart, "I will have mercy, and not sacrifice."

At last the lost strength came back so far that
he could creep up the hill to the catacombs, where
the little "church of threes," which TertuUian thought
so blessed, still ventured to assemble.

220 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

The next expedition was to be to Carthage, to
the tribunal, to resign the certificate and accept the
penalty. In a few days he would be strong enough
for this.

Once more the little broken family went up the
shaded path through the vineyards together, Valerian
in the garb of penitence, coarse sackcloth, intending
to kneel in the nook in the rock outside.

Eucharis knelt there beside him.

She would stay in the dark outside with him.
It was her right and her place, she said, and none
could deprive her of it.

But when the Holy Eucharist was celebrated, and
the separating words were uttered, "Holy things to
the holy," and the faithful knelt within to communi-
cate. Valerian touched her and said, "Go, it is His
call; thou wilt be nearer me with Him than here
outside by my side."

She hesitated a moment, and then went.

She came back with the old radiant smile on
her face. And on Valerian's face, also, was a look
of peace she had not yet seen.

For in the meantime the two lapsed penitents

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 221

he had sought so long had crept up to their old
place behind him; he had looked round and per-
ceived them, and silently moving back beside them,
close beside those from whose touch he had shrunk
as from pollution, he held the thin hand of the man
pressed on his heart

And when Eucharis came to kneel beside them,
the three looked up with an expression of new won-
der and hope in her face. And her smile embraced
them all like a sunbeam, like the wings of an angel.

222 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XIX.

That evening, as Valerian and Eucharis sat
among the vines on one of the terraces Clement had
last finished, the little children playing at their feet;
Valerian said —

"To-morrow, then, at last, I go again to Car-
thage."

" We will go," she said, laying her hand in his,
"if indeed thy strength is restored. I would not ask
that we should delay a day."

"Strength will be given," he said quietly. "But
I must go alone."

"Thou wilt not distrust me?" she said. "Have
I ever weakened thee by look or word? Surely,"
she added, raising her clear soft eyes to his, "the
old terrible fear is not creeping back over thee?
Thou dost not fear I am to be a tempter to thee?"

"Nay," he said, "given by God that we should

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 22$

make each other His very best; given to me as His
guard and angel abiding with me to lead me on!
But, beloved, I am not going to denounce myself—:
to proclaim myself as one who has a right to seek
the martyr's crown. I am going simply to unsay a
lie. For thee to offer thyself up with me would be
tempting them to do a wrong."

"Is this a sudden thought?" she said.

"I have thought of it for weeks," he replied,
"but have not dared to tell thee. And," he added,
taking the babes in his arms, "there are these; thine
and mine for ever. How dare I suffer these to be
bereaved of thee?"

"Nay, I am Mne first and for ever," she said.
"Of that I am sure. Do not seek to bewilder me
from this."

"It is true," he answered; "it is true. If God
calls thee, it will be; but not to-morrow. See what
to-morrow brings to me."

"Dost thou command?" she said.

"I feel sure God would have it thus," he replied.
"To obey is better than to sacrifice. He knows, be-
loved, what a sacrifice this obedience is."

I

\

24 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

1 She said no more.
" All night she struggled silently with the agony

of lOu^. ^ ^^ gQ ^-^1^ him.

But in the i. ^j-i^ing she was ready.

As they knelt to^^^ther alone, perhaps for the
last time, she said, "Not our will, but Thine be
done." And then, when they rose, she added, "Be-
loved, thy will is mine. God wtfl have mercy, and
not sacrifice. I will not cause any r«^ do wrong. 1
will stay with thy babes, and with thb lapsed ones
thou lovest, and one day we will bring tJW]^ home
together." ^^a

And so he went forth in the early dusk, ald^p^^'
but with a buoyancy of heart he had never feB ^ ^^
his brightest days, back to Carthage. tB

When he was out of sight Eucharis went / ^^^
told the sisters, and, together all day, the tHa^^^^
women had but one thought in their hearts, (rely^^^
neither of them spoke of it. "th

And neither of them said any words of prayel^ *
I They knew not what to ask, and scarcely what to
j wish. Only, all day long, as they wa.td\ad XV^ \iiki^'s»

/

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 225

and went about the household work, they were of-
fering that most precious Kfe to God.

The household task was done. In the heat of
the noontide Viola was reading in a low voice the
last letter from Bishop Cyprian to Justa, resting
wearily on the couch.

Eucharis was watching beside the sleeping chil-
dren, when a step was heard, familiar, and yet
sadly changed from the old buoyant tread, heavy
and slow.

No one else heard it, and her heart seemed to
stand still, and she almost fainted, for she felt if it
was Valerian it could be no joyous return; and
rapidly she crept out to intercept and meet him,
that whatever sad tidings he had to tell he • might
tell to her alone.

She met him outside the gate.

"I am come back to work for thee and thine,"
he said, trying to put a cheerfulness into his tone
and looL

But she only took his hand, and drew him apart
into ibeir own room.

226 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"A burden has been laid on thee, my beloved,"
she said. "Let me share it."

He sat down on the couch, and for the first time
in her sight broke down utterly, the vainly repressed
sobs convulsing his whole frame.

"They will not accept me. God will not take
me," he said. "Thou must bear with me still, dis-
graced and dishonoured as I am. God may forgive,
but the lost steps can never be retraced: the lost
moment for confessing Him can never be given
back."

Gently she drew the whole story from him.

The officials had treated his retractation quite

lightly, as a thing of no importance. At first they

had spoken sarcastically, as if they thought Valerian

wished to escape paying the fine involved in the
>
certificate.

"Excuse us," they said; "you have duly paid
part of the price in the encouragement to your sect
to follow your prudent example, which we under-
stand many did; but we cannot spare you ^le rest,
a portion of that excellent farm. Just now the
Government is more in want oi iaxm^ lo buy addiers

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 22 7

to fight the Goths with, than of Christians to make
exampkfe of. The order for the suppression of the
sect f^r the moment has relaxed. At present we
r^uire nothing but the lands."

And when he insisted on giving up the certi-
ficate, they at first refused to receive it, and then
after a consultation one of them said —

"There are two meanings to this agreement.
On6, that it is a pledge of your lands being made
ovet to the State. That is irrevocable. The other,
that it is a sign of protection to you. That, if you
please, you can certainly resign. Yours has been
a wisely timed decision. The Emperor Decius is,
as> perhaps, you have heard, in Pannonia, on the
borders of the empire, sorely pressed by the bar-
barians* Perhaps even worse. And for the moment
we have other things to occupy us besides the
scruples of the Christians."

"And so," Valerian said, after concluding this

naifative> "I was dismissed. And there is no going

back, ao recovering the lost ground, no unsaying the

evil words, no undoing the base deed for ever."

She looked up in surprise.

IS*

230 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

yet. This rumour about the Emperor might yet be
disproved. And, of course, it is hardly to be ex-
pected they should relax as to the estate."

The hot blood rushed to Valerian's face.

** Prudent!" he said. "Do you think I waited
till it was prudent? I went at the first moment I
had strength. But why should you beHeve me?" he
added, in a changed tone — "why should any one?"

Then, with a new impulse, putting himself aside,
he held out his hand to Priscus,

"You meant well by me, I think," he said.
"Perhaps, yet, you and I may stand together, not
outside, but inside, not in yielding, but confessing."

Priscus hesitated. The generous impulse called
out one in him.

"You did confess," he said, "and suffered bravely.
And I — I never meant to forsake Christianity in the
end. And now that that madman is slain, all will
be right again."

Valerian felt unable and unworthy to debate.

And after a pause Priscus resumed.

"I am sorry about the farm. But I know you
never had your heart in it as your brother had.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 23 I

And, in the hands of a friend, it will be much the
same, if you will stay."

"In the hands of a friend?" said Valerian, be-
wildered.

"I felt no one would make such an advantageous
arrangement as I could," Prisons replied. "And that
money of my uncle's falling in just at the time made
everything easy. I cannot be much here. Indeed,
I often think of settling in Rome. The manners of
the people one meets at Carthage are so provincial.
The Christians have no tolerance, and the heathen
no cordiality. You can live here as long as you
like, and manage it for me, and send me a rent. I
should not demand anything exorbitant."

This then was the "furnace" for the present; to
live on in the old home, as tenants and servants of
Prisons, the betrayer, the Libellaticus, the tempter,
and be subject to his commands and his visitations.
No burning, fiery furnace set up on the plain in
sight of all the people, where the Three Martyrs
might walk triumphant in the flames. A common
household furnace heated with very common-place
fuel, but hot enough to bum out a good deal of dross.

2^2 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XX.

Patiently, and with a content of heart he could
scarcely comprehend, Valerian took up the yoke
laid on him, and set himself to make the best of
the little fertile world Qement had created, for the
new master, taking lessons of the old slaves in
details he did not understand. He had agreed to
pay a rent in kind, and thus to be rather a tenant
than a bailiff. But it was not in the nature of
Prisons not to assert his rights of proprietorship in
detail. The form and time of paying the rent were
frequently changed; fault, not always unjust, was
found with the cultivation of certain fields and gar-
dens, as compared with their state in Clement's
time, and the weight of inferiority to Priscus and
to Clement was made in a thousand ways to press
sensibly on Valerian. The best rooms in the house*
were by degrees reserved for Priscus, and the family
lived in those of the servants.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 233

But, in no morbid sense, humiliation had ac-
quired an indescribable sweetness for Valerian. He
accepted slights at times almost with gaiety, as if
they were hints and tokens that his penitence was
not rejected. In some strange manner he felt more
in the right way, and more consciously treading a
path, less drifting in a pathless wilderness, than ever
before.

The footprints of Clement seemed before him;
and, now and then, more than footprints of An-
other Whom he had begun first truly to follow when
he seemed to desert; more than silent footprints of
a vanished life — a Voice, saying, in each call of
humble every-day duty, in every step down towards
the lowest place, "Follow Me."

Healthy work of the hands it was to which he
was called, the merciful, wholesome toil in the sweat
of the brow to which the multitudes are called: the
work of liberating nature from her oppressors, which
he had once envied Clement, not, however, pursued
as by Clement, with the stimulating sense of gather-
ing an inheritance for his beloved, but simply as a
day labourer, working for their daily bread.

234 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

But to him this was simpler and sweeter; not
that he coveted humiliations, but since the destitu-
tion of martyrdom had become for him truly the
highest place, property had ceased to be a thing to
be coveted for him or his. By degrees also, as he
began to cease to covet martyrdom as a restoration
of his own dishonoured name, the ambitions of love
began to displace the ambitions of self. And if at
first even these brought suffering, as he felt to what
his fall had reduced those he loved, the joy in their
patience and cheerfulness, and all the treasures of
mutual help poverty brought out in them, made the
thankfulness sometimes deeper than the pain. It
was given him also to have at their humble table
the two lapsed Christians who had been brought so
close to his heart; at this table he sat beside them,
apart from the family, below the lowest slave, ac-
cording to the rules prescribed for penitents.

Every day he sat beside them, and knelt beside
them as the hymn went up at evening, the three
silent voices which as yet dared not take up the
Sacred Name in praise, adding depth to the music
of all the rest.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST, 235

Every day he kept the man, Justin, beside hixtx
at his work in field and garden, their hands and
their eyes meeting in the famiHar labours, training,
pruning, sowing, reaping, gathering together, till the
terrible strained look slowly passed from the worn
face, and human glances of recognition replaced
the fixed impersonal gaze. Fellow-labourer and fel-
low-servant at least he had become with other men,
and, through these common services, the hope of
the reknitting of the deeper ties might dawn at last
on the troubled broken heart.

Morning and evening for a moment his face
brightened always as he met the smile of Eucharis,
the first human glance he had willingly met for
years.

She called him always by his name, Justin, not
the feigned name he had chosen to give himself,
but the true old name the wife had told her; and
although at first he had resented this as a betrayal,
by a severe glance at his wife, by degrees the
familiar syllables in the quiet, glad tones seemed to
welcome him like the touch of a mother's hand.

But tender and considerate as Eucharis was to

236 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Justin, her manner to Candida, his wife, had an in-
expressible sweetness, a reverence of pity, a patience
of undying hope, at times a sisterly gaiety, at times
a daughterly attention, that robed and crowned the
poor, forlorn, despised one in the sight of all as with
bridal or royal robes; yet always unobtrusive and
spontaneous, as a thing inevitable and in the natural
course of things.

She herself smoothed the masses of hair sorrow
had early made silvery, and (in defiance of Tertul-
lian) arranged it around the well-shaped head in
plaited coils.

She insisted on adding those tender touches to
the coarse penitential dress, which gave to the slight
bent form the simple grace belonging to it, turning
the marks of time and grief on the worn face and
bent figure, from signs of neglect as of something
trampled on, to claims for reverence, as on a land
hallowed by sacred, fruitful furrows. Yet the eyes
of her husband steadily avoided her still; on her his
reviving glance of human sympathy and recognition
never rested.

Valerian's bearing to her was reverent as a son's,

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 2^^

St. PauFs brief golden code of all chivalrous courtesy
towards women being in her case blended with a
peculiar tenderness.

But Eucharis could not induce him to plead for
her with her husband.

"It would be useless," he said; "and, besides,
whatever other duties God laid on him must for a
long time to come, he felt, be fulfilled through deeds
rather than through words, so worthless had the
most eloquent speech become from lips that were for-
sworn!"

At length, therefore, Eucharis herself took courage,
and lingering behind with Justin and Candida as
they returned one morning from the church of the
catacombs, sending Candida on with a message to
Valerian, she walked by Justin, and said to him, in
a low grave voice —

"You are beginning to hope you may be for-
given!"

A strange unwonted severity in the gentle voice
startled him, and he looked up. The eyes were as
grave as the tones.

238 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"You told me to hope!" he said, in a tremulous
voice.

"Our Lord has forbidden us not t<d hope," she
said. "But He has also far oftener forbidden us not
to forgive."

He glanced at her with a quick flash of inter-
rogation.

"We must forgive all save the tempter," he re-
plied, with a burst of bitterness. "The tempter is
the devil; she was my temptress."

"What! are we not all children of a temptress?"
Eucharis said; "a poor, bewildered, tempted, lapsed
wife, who tempted her husband — and was better,
nevertheless," she added, with a sudden flash of
indignation, "than the husband she tempted. For
he was base enough to accuse her to God, which
she would never have done. The devil himself is
an accuser as well as a tempter. Poor, tempted,
fonaken Eve, how did she feel when she he^rd her
husband accusing her to God? Shall I tell you
how I think she felt? I think, being but a poor
tempted wotnAn, yet to be the mother of all lifing,
God never suffered the fountain of love to be

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 239

quenched in her heart, and while Adam was ex-
cusing himself and accusing her to God, and ac-
cusing God for giving her to him, I think poor Eve
was prostrate in the dust of the wilderness at her
husband's feet, at the feet of God, in the anguish
of her humiliation accusing no one but only herself,
and excusing him. And therefore I think, perhaps,
in the heart of Eve, and not in his, first sprang up
a Divine hope as she embraced her first-bom, and
welcomed him as *a man from the Lord,' the man
from whose race at last the Son of Man was to be
given. But remember," she added, the look of joy-
ful inspiration shining once more in her eyes, "Son
of Man because Son of Mary, blessed for ever,
blessed above all women. And from blessed Mary's
lips came the first response which first reversed the
curse. It was the adoring heart and subject will of
a woman which, accepting the will of God, began
to reverse the curse of Eve. Eve was tempted and
fell, and herself tempted, but she never sank so low
as to lose love and become an accuser." Then lay-
ing for an instant her hand on his, she concluded,
"Our Lord may forgive those who having been sorely

240 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

tempted, fail and even tempt. But He cannot for-
give those who being faithfully loved refuse to love,
who being entreated for forgiveness refuse to for-
give. Not Bishop Cyprian, not a council of the
whole Catholic Church throughout the world, not
the dying pleading of martyrs, not the dying lips of
the Christ himself, can absolve the heart in which
such sin is cherished."

Justin fixed his eyes on her face with a mingled
expression of anger, wonder, and awakening hope.
And she left him.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 24 1

CHAPTER XXL

It was evening, and after the sultry heat of the
day the family were once more gathered together at
the evening meal — the sisters Viola and Justa at the
head of the table, the slaves below them, and apart
from all, in the garb of coarse sackcloth, Justin and
Candida, with Valerian and Eucharis close to them,
when a bent and feeble figure, in coarse raiment,
soiled with sordid work and the dust of travel, ap-
peared at the door, leaning Hke an old man on a
thick staff.

No sound escaped the lips; the frank, wide-
open blue eyes were fixed with a bewildered, horror-
stricken gaze on Valerian. And Valerian was the
first who, with a low cry of awe, such as might
have greeted a disembodied spirit, uttered his name.

"Clement!" he exclaimed. "Brother" he did
not dare to say; but in another moment he was at
his brother's feet and embracing his knees.

Lapsed f but not Lost. I^

242 L-\PSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Clement threw aside his staflf, and, stooping
down, threw his arms around his brother's neck
and kissed him, and, finding himself unable to raise
him, knelt down beside him, locked in a dose em-
brace.

Then rising himself, and resting his hand on
Valerian's shoulder, he saidT—

"What does this garb mean? Who has so
wronged thee? He was a confessor; he was tor-
tured to the last point of endurance! I saw him.
He fainted. I thought he had died, and that I
should never see him again."

And slowly, as if recounting the deeds of a
hero, Clement went over all the humiliations and
torments they had inflicted on Valerian, and told of
his silent, unmurmuring endurance unto what seemed
death.

Eucharis knelt beside her husband, the tears
streaming over her face as she looked up through
them with a radiant smile at Clement.

"I knew how thou hadst endured," she said,
"though thou wouldst never hear me speak of it!"

"Who has so wronged him?" Clement resimied.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 243

"I. None but myself. Who could have so dis-
honoured me but I myself?" Valerian answered. "I
accepted a certificate of sacrifice; I sold thy birth-
right for it. Betrayed at once thy Lord, and thee,
and all. This home is ours, is thine, no more," he
added, in a tone almost of despair, "and all through
me."

Then Eucharis spoke to Valerian with a tender
severity,

"Hast thou a right to malign thyself before us
all?*' she said, "and before this blessed one, who
loves thee as his life, and to break his heart?" And
then she told how Valerian had repented im-
mediately and sought to return, of the long, perilous
fever and agony, and of his journey back to Car-
thage, and resigning the certificate before the persecu-
tion closed.

Then a joyful smile came over Qement's face,

which seemed to take the weary, care-worn, aged

look away. He insisted on raising his brother; and

with his arm around him he said, "This is no Libel-

laticus. I have been in the mines, and they call me

a martyr or confessor. But he endured more than

i6^

2 44 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST,

I before he fainted; he has endured more since; and
the Church must recognise and honour him. And
together we will go to the altar, together to God
our exceeding joy."

The whole little company pressed ardently around
Clement's feet. "Confessor! martyr!" they cried,
kissing his feet, his hands, the hem of his poor
travel-stained miner's garments. —

And Valerian murmured, with head bent down
and lips pressed on his brother's arm —

"To the altar, if ever, brother, absolved through
thee!"

But Clement gently disengaged himself from
their passionate, almost adoring homage.

"Brothers, sisters," he said, with a tender austerity,
looking down on all, "You humble me in the dust.
You make me wish to sink and hide beneath the
earth, in the grave, in the mines whose darkness
has covered me so long. Who am I, that you so
honour me? What but a common soldier that has
simply stood in his rank — has been called to do
what the whole host would have done if they had

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 245

been called?" And laying his hand on Valerian, he
added in tremulous tones, "He endured more. What
were my sufferings, with my easy, quiet nature, my
nerves braced by out-door work, my imagination
like a child's unburdened with more than the
moment's load, to his? Take a courser from the
Arab tents, sensitive, eager, the noblest creature of
its kind, and try to make it endure what you inflict
on a dull beast of burden. Some can suffer more
in one nerve than others in their whole body. The
quick imagination can gather the agony of a life
into a moment. And," he added, lowering his voice,
"the heights must be measured by the depths.
Think what he had to lose. Yet I am not defending
him, unless against himself. I am only defending
myself against your homage. What is a Christian
but a sinful creature Christ has redeemed, a feeble
creature Christ upholds? What is a 'confessor,*
martyr even (and I am no mart3T), but simply one
who cannot bring his lips to say the Son of God is
not what He is. Have you so little faith in Him as
not to know He has the making of His martyrs in
you all? This is our martyr after all!" he con-

246 lAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

eluded, tenderly laying his arm with a smile on the
shoulder of Justa.

Eucharis lifted one of the children, the Uttle
Charis, to his arms. But the little one was shy and
frightened at the strange, earnest voice and soiled
garments, and hid her face on her mother's shoulder,
and set up a little moan.

"See," he said, with a smile, "the babes under-
stand better, they know I am but a weary, worn,
mortal man. Take me back as the son from the
far country; if you will, kill the fatted calf for me,
and give me the new robe, and shoes on my feet,
for they have had none these many days. But I
pray you set me on no cold and lonely pedestal.
Take me among you once more as one of yourselves."

And so in a short time, after the bath and the
change of raiment, Clement sat among them as of
old at the simple meal, and that evening went his
old journey of inspection round the farm, observing
and directing as of old, so that one of the old slaves
shook his head, almost grumbling, in a bewildered
way, and said that night to another as he went home
from work —

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 247

"Is that all the difference it makes to be a
martyr? No more change than that? He spoke as
sharply about the old horse having a sore on its
shoulder, and cared about that branch of the vine
being broken for want of support, as if he had not
been at the tribunal at all."

"Very strange," was the reply. "And they do
say it is all none of his now — all sold to that dainty
gentleman from Rome. Yet if he had died under
the torture he would have had the crown. What
becomes of the crowns when the mart3n:s do
not die?"

But Eucharis heard them, sitting with her chil-
dren gathering grapes under a thick trellis, as they
passed. And she rose and met the old men, and said —

"Do not you see the crown? The holy angels
see it. And I think they saw it long before he went
to the tribunal."

And as she went down the terraces he had made
so carefully, and along the garden he had watered,
she sighed bitterly as she said aloud to herself,
"None of it his now! None of all this dear world,
that he made so fair, ever more his own!"

248 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

But little Charis was possessed with the thought
of the crown.

"Do you see it, mother?" she asked eagerly.
"Is it of gold or of flowers?"

"We shall all see it when our eyes are opened,
darling," she said. "Of gold more beautiful than
flowers, and flowers more lasting than gold."

The little ones were prattling on together, when
Clement joined them, and Charis was quite content
now to be enthroned in his arms.

She pressed her small dimpled hands investigat-
ingly on his forehead, and looked wonderingly in
his eyes.

But all the evening she would not leave him,
until she fell asleep with her head on his breast.
She did not wake until her mother had taken her
from his arms and had gently laid her on her own
little bed.

And then suddenly she woke, and sat up and
said —

"Mother, I didn't /<?^/ it either, the crown. Where
is the crown?"

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 249

"He has laid it at the feet of Jesus, the Good
Shepherd," she said.

"I am so glad," she said. "I couldn't lay my
cheek close against a crown." And, contentedly,
she fell asleep again.

When Eucharis came back she found Valerian
and Clement alone in earnest debate.

Clement looked up at her and said, "Sister, if,
by being allowed to confess and suffer, I have
earned anything from you, it is that you should
believe me. You who see the sufferer may, in your
generosity, exaggerate the sufferings you do not
share into something unlike all the rest of life, and
us who suffer into a patrician order apart from the
people. What it may be with others I know not.
But I do know what this confessing and suffering
has been to me. If I was strengthened to take that
last step which seemed to you a soaring flight, I
know I was only able because it was one of many
previous steps. And, perhaps," he added, in a low
voice, "not the roughest. Cease to set me apart as
a consecrated being, otherwise than as you all are

250 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

consecrated. For me, at least, inside this shrine of
martyrdom, the exaggeration and the halo did not
exist. There, alone in the mines, toiling through
the days that were nights, for gains that would
never enrich me or mine, I learned some lessons. I
learned, beloved, that I had sunk below the true
place of a soldier of Christ, the glorious place of the
day-labourer, and had been labouring, not gloriously
as one with a commission from the King, for Him,
but sordidly, as those who know Him not, for the
things themselves. I do not exaggerate. It was not
entirely so, or the steps would, have led the other
way, and not, as thank God they did, to the mines.
Dear to me was every stone of these rebuilt ter-
races, every one of these fields and trees and vines;
for your sakes, I had thought, for His sake who gave
the work, I thought, but too much I know now for
their own. I waked to it, first, the night when
Priscus told us of the persecution. I dreamt the
soulless things were feeding on my dead heart, on
me buried and entombed beneath them. A,nd in
the mines, once more — nay, as never before — I woke
to the glorious joy of being not my own, but alto-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 25 1

gether redeemed, and doing every stroke of work as
a slave, a ransomed willing slave of the crucified
King, the Son of God. And every stroke of the
pickaxe made music in my heart, as if it had been
a note in a Eucharistic hymn. See, beloved, God
knew me and taught me; and a pure joy it was to
hear those poor old men to-night say I cared as
much for the work and looked after it as sharply as
if it were still all my own. Not you, brother! God
— God has abased me, has raised me thus a little
nearer the place He took whose poor garments, given
in charity, were gambled for before He died. And,
brother," he continued, laying his hand on Valerian's
shoulder, with a tenderness in his tone which obliged
the downcast eyes to lift themselves to him, "brother!
in other ways I think our Lord has been teaching
thee. We had all set thee on a pinnacle; and ah!
beloved, there is no serving and little praying on the
pinnacles. And now thou art beside the lowly ones,
loving, honouring all, ready to place thyself beneath
all. And beside thee, there, I see Him who made
himself of no reputation, and, holy and immaculate
for ever, was baptized among the publicans and

252 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

sinners. Only, by the laws of the Church and the
external order which must be reverently obeyed, to
thee it is given to show thy penitence and to wear
the sackcloth; while to me, though the faithful
honour and exalt me with an honour which, for His
name's sake who strengthened me, I dare not refuse
— to me, beloved, knowing all the while what I was
and am, it is only permitted to wear the sackcloth
inwardly, wrapped around my soul. But to-morrow,"
he said rising, "I go to Bishop Cyprian and ask him
for thy absolution."

"Never without a public penance," Valerian said
in a low voice. "Not even, brother, as the price of
thy suffering. Am I wrong? Is this also pride?"

"I think not," Clement said. "I understand.
The sackcloth would be welcome to me."

"But thou mayst use thy patrician rights," Vale-
rian added, "for those two lapsed ones; they sacri-
ficed, which men think a deeper fall. Plead for
them. For the desire of my heart is, if ever I am
permitted to receive the Holy Eucharist again, it
may be with them — by their side."

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. ^SS

CHAPTER XXII.

Decius was slain in battle, perishing with his
army on the Pannonian frontier at the hands of the
Goths. The persecution ceased for the time, and
once more the purgfed and sifted Church of Carthage
was free to meet openly in the city.

Strange separatings and unitings! Since last
they met, testings by fire, revealings by fire of what
had been or had not been before the fire came to
try it.

There was Celerinus, with "the bright evidences
of his wounds, his limbs and his sinews worn out
with tedious wasting away," grandson and nephew
of martyrs, now "the first in this new struggle, the
leader of the soldiers of Christ," so that "the title of
confessor," as Cyprian said, "was no unfamiliar or
novel thing in his race; he simply advanced in the
footsteps of his kindred."

And his reward was "to read the precepts and

254 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

gospel of the Lord to the Church/' so that "the
voice which had confessed the Lord might be heard
daily in those things which the Lord spoke. There
is nothing in which a confessor can do more good
to the brethren, than that, while the reading of the
gospel he so bravely and faithfully followed is heard
from his Hps, every one who hears should imitate the
faith of the reader."

There was Aurelius, very young, yet twice a con-
fessor, "excellent in dignity and lowly in humility,"
taking as the highest honour, "after the sublime
words which spoke out the witness of Christ, to
read the gospel of Christ whence martyrs are made,**
and "since joy is always hasty and gladness can
bear no delay," reading on the Lord's Day for Cy-
prian himself.

There was Numidicus, chosen to be ordained
presbyter, "illustrious as he was by the brightest
light of confession," his first exhortations having
been uttered on the pile among the flames and
stones, where he encouraged many to die, his own
wife dying at his side, and he himself left for dead,
scorched, and bruised, and crushed among the stones

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 255

and ashes, whence his daughter, searching for the
corpse, had the strange joy of bringing him out
alive.

There were numbers of tender, lowly, and faith-
ful ones who pleaded for the pardon of the lapsed.
Celerinus, "leader and first," fervently pleaded for
his own lapsed sister. For such, Cyprian had words
of fervent homage and gratitude.

There were also some whom their confession
seemed to have lifted up so that they demanded
absolution for the fallen as the price of their own
blood. For these Cyprian had fatherly warnings.

Had they not suffered anything rather than sacri-
fice? and would they have the Church treat sacri-
ficing as if it were nothing?

And corresponding to these among the lapsed
were easy and self - excusing consciences, who
claimed their pardon, not as the gift to the repen-
tant of the Christ they had denied, but as an indul-
gence to sin.

To these — germs of more than one separation
and real schism from undisciphned pride— Cyprian
was austere as our Lord to the Pharisees.

256 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST,

Sin, sin, faithlessness, failing was the evil. True
forgiveness, which might make the forgiving Lord
and the absolving Church of the faithful dearer than
ever, he could not refuse to declare. But easy ab-
solution, which might be an indulgence to sin, was
poison. No physician, he said, would give the food
of the healthy to the sick. "God was not the God
— the Church not the Church — of the dead, but of
the living."

But for those who were contrite and broken-
hearted the Bishop had welcomes, grave indeed and
sad, such as truly penitent hearts would desire, but
inspiring to new hope and to new possibilities of
faithfulness in the future.

He had returned to Carthage.

And his words of mercy, discriminating faith-
fully between one sin and another, and one re-
pentance and another, fell like healing dew on the
broken hearts of Valerian and Candida.

"God did not make death," the Bishop said.
"Assuredly He who wills that none should perish
chooses that sinners should repent, and by repentance
should return again to life. In the Psalms we read

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 257

as well the rebuke as the clemency of God, threaten-
ing at the same time that He spares, punishing that
He may correct, and when He has corrected, pre-
serving.

"The Lord also in His gospel setting forth the
love of God the Father, says, *If ye, then, being evil,
know how to give good gifts unto your children, how
much more shall your Heavenly Father give his good
things to them that ask Him.' The Lord is here
comparing the Father after the flesh, and the eternal
and liberal love of God the Father.

**But whereas the Lord left the ninety-and-nine
who were whole, and sought after the one wandering
and weary, and himself carried it, when found, upon
His shoulders, we, on the contrary, not only do not
seek the lapsed, but drive them away when they
come to us.

"See! a wounded brother lies stricken by the
enemy on the field of battle.

"There, the devil is striving to slay him whom
he has wounded; here, Christ is exhorting that he
whom He has redeemed may not wholly perish.
Whether of the two do we assist? On whose side

Lapsed t hut not LosU 1 7

258 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

do we stand? Whether do we favour the devil that
he may destroy, and pass by our prostrate lifeless
brother, as in the gospel did the priest and Levite?
or rather, as priests of God and Christ, do we imitate
what Christ taught and did, and snatch the wounded
man from the jaws of the enemy, that we may pre-
serve him healed for God the judge?"

With tender fatherly discrimination he entered
into the various temptations which had led to the
fall, distinguishing those whose lips no unholy food
of sacrifice had touched, whose hands had thrown
no incense on false shrines, from those who, ad-
vised, perhaps, by false friends among the clergy or
laity, had accepted the certificate, and so saved
their kindred. And even among those who had sa-
crificed he recognised many degrees of temptation
and of sin.

These distinctions gave no comfort to Valerian,
whose whole rest lay in accepting the lowest place.
But there, in the depths, Cyprian's strong declara-
tions of "the will of God being life," of "the large
and liberal love of the Father," flowed like a fresh
baptismal stream over his soul.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 259

Only to Justin the Bishop's words, and the per-
mission for pubHc confession and penitence, and the
promise of absohition, seemed to bring no peace.

Still he gnawed his heart apart.

"She tempted me," he said to himself, "and I
fell. But for her I might have stood where Clement,
where Celerinus, where Aurelius stand."

Yet the words of Eucharis had pierced his con-
science, if not his heart.

And on the morning of the day of public
penance, as they stood together, he and his wife —
she with her masses of silvery hair falling loose and
dishevelled around her, as at a funeral, he with
shaven head like a criminal, both in sordid sack-
cloth, sprinkled with dust and ashes — he took her
hand, and looking steadfastly in her face, without
tenderness, but without anger, he said, calling her
for the first time by name, "Candida, my wife, may
God forgive thee!"

And she', sinking on the ground at his feet,

looked up with streaming, imploring eyes, in his

grave, worn face, venturing at last to utter to him

the self-accusation which ceaselessly filled her heart.

17'

26o LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

"Thou wert so strong and brave, and couldst
have done so much, and I have made thy life a
waste and a ruin! There is forgiveness; but what
can give thee back the lost years?"

As she spoke, like a vision from heaven, Eucharis
appeared at the door, she also in sackcloth, and
with her masses of chestnut hair around her like a
veil.

She was withdrawing, but the words of Candida
and the agony in her face, and the stony gravity
of his, drew her forward in spite of herself, and,
standing before him, with her eyes not fixed on him
but looking far away —

"Brother! brother!" she said, "there has been
ice in thy heart. Take heed that the heart which
has so fondly clung to thee be not taken from thee
to Him who loves. There has been hell in thy
heart. Not she, but the merciful Christ, who knew
thee better, kept thee, kept thee through her fond
foolish words, from dying what might have seemed
the martyr's death. For not for Him wouldst thou
have died! Thii^k what it might have been to rise
from the stake and the confession, not to His wel-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 26 1

come and the martyr's crown, but to the blank look
of rejection in His face, and the words * Depart from
me, I never knew you,' you who never knew love."

But Candida sobbed, "Ah, lady! lay no fresh
burden on him; you did not know him. I did. He
might have been a Cyprian but for me."

Then Eucharis knelt down for an instant beside
Candida, and pressing the throbbing heart to her
breast, and kissing the tearful eyes, she rose and
left them once more together.

For some time they neither of them moved.

And then Justin knelt down beside her, and
taking her hand laid it on his heart, and said — no
more in his hollow impassive voice, but in tremulous
broken tones —

"Lord Jesus, we have sinned against Thee and
against each other; but I more; longer, and much
more."

Then rising, he drew her gently up beside him,
and laid the drooping head on his breast and
smoothed the silvery tresses, half in benediction, but
more with something of the old fondness, and mur-

262 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

mured old familiar words of endearment which she
had never dreamed she would hear again.

The public confession and penance were com-
paratively little to those whose bittetest and sweetest
confessions had been made long before to each
other and to God, and whose penitence was bound
for ever in blessed humiliation around their inmost
hearts.

Yet were they a solemn seal and consecration,
and a recognition of the unity of the Body of Christ
— the Church; all sin being sin not only against
Him, but against her, against each other; all grace
of forgiveness or of faithful suffering being part of
the common tide of life flowing from the sacred
heart through all the many members, through all
the one Body.

Together side by side the three knelt and con-
fessed before all, and before all received with bowed
heads the absolution of all the Church through the
hands of the Bishop and the clergy.

And beside them knelt Eucharis, though by her
husband's command forbidden to wear the peniten-
tial garb she had put on, kneeling in her simple

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 263

white robe among the penitents, and receiving the
benedictory touch from Cyprian's hands.

And together, by his especial sanction, they went
afterwards to the altar of God, to God their ex-
ceeding joy.

264 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The home among the hills continued more
peaceful than ever. Candida and Justin remained
on the estate, living apart in a cottage trellised with
vines. Clement pursued his old work of aiding and
liberating nature from her foes, and guiding her to
her highest ends; no longer complicated by the
peril of being buried beneath the multitude of the
things that he possessed, since he worked as a day-
labourer for Priscus, whose conscience, quite healed
of its little scratches of regret, inclined him to look
on himself as a benefactor whose gift of prudence
had saved the family of his friends from ruin.

He still regretted, indeed, that Viola would not
be induced to take the same view, and he had an
uneasy sense that neither the Church to which he
was reconciled nor the heathen world quite ap-
preciated his position. But at all events they ap-
preciated his farm and Yvvs fe^.'sXs, ^xA \sv \3cv>& vav-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 265

perfect world, Priscus concluded, one cannot have
ever3l:hing.

There are certain stem and towering virtues,
there is a certain exalted and rigid piety, he con-
sidered, which no doubt have their value; and the
lowly dwellers on the lower levels, without whom
the common needs of those lofty souls could not be
supplied, must be content with their easier paths
and their tamer glories.

With him, then, remained the splendours and
the gains and the cares; with them the honours and
the heights. Only, sometimes he thought it was,
perhaps, rather an uneven distribution of Providence,
that not only the lofty joys of religion, but the
simple joys of human life, seemed assigned more
largely to these exceptional Christians.

There was a gaiety of heart in the impoverished
and toiling family, laughter as joyous as that of
their children's, a freedom of heart, and it seemed
even a capacity for giving, greater than his; for they
had received more than one orphan of those mar-
tyred in the persecution, and it was clear that the
bent and aged man whom Valerian had chosen to

266 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

associate in his penitence ("as if a Sacrificatus and
a Libellaticus were to be mentioned in the same
breath!") could not earn his salt. \Vhereas he who
had their house and estate found that the servants
and the entertainments and the style of living ex-
pected of a man in his position quite absorbed his
revenues.

Yet, if he had watched as Eucharis had watched,
or even Clement, he might have known there was
one heart in that happy, tranquil household, which,
with all its penitence and humility, and even con-
tent — ^with all its wealth of love and of loving —
never lost the longing to be trusted once again and
tried, to be given once more something hard to do,
something mighty to say for the Church and the
Lord.

Great gifts had been given to Valerian; not
those external gifts which can be contentedly laid
down and which may enrich in being resigned, but
interior gifts of heart and mind which can never
be laid down, and which eat into the soul when
they lie unused— imaginative insight into other

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 26 ^

men's hearts, eloquent speech to move men's hearts
to their depths, and lift them to their true heights.

He was content, indeed, as long as it should be
appointed him, to be silent, to labour with his hands
from morning to night; but with him the work of
the farm was not as with Clement, work of vocation,
and therefore employment of the whole being, but
work of endurance, which left the larger half of his
nature unemployed.

Therefore to him this toil and silence could only
be preparatory. They might last thirty years and
prepare for three of ministry; no Christian could
murmur at that proportion; they might last all this
earthly life and prepare for service in the large
enduring world, where they serve day and night.
But brief, or long, or hfe-long, this could be to him
only a time of waiting and training.

The end was coming sooner than he thought, though
slowly. A terrible shadow of death was sweeping
over the shores of Africa. The plague was approach-
ing; in two years it spread from Ethiopia and Egypt,
along those thickly peopled and fertile coasts, creep-
ing slowly and steadily on, irresistible and inevitable,

268 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. —

folding its deadly coils round one after another of
those prosperous cities which rose within sight of
each other, till at last it reached Carthage.

There, like an organized blood-tax, like one of
those cruel tributes of young and cherished lives
claimed by a victorious foe, it passed systematically
from house to house and from street to street, until
all the land was foul and dark with it.

Clement and Valerian both watched the slow
advancing of the murderous tide, with awe and sym-
pathetic horror, but yet with a strange difference of
feeUng unconfessed to each other or to themselves:
Clement as if it were to be an end, Valerian as if it
were to be a beginning, a call through death to
higher life.

Into house after house the relentless enemy cam(
with terrible abruptness and swiftness, carrying
rich and poor in the fulness of life. Some fled th<
houses, and many fled from the city. Some
their dead and dying out from their houses, ",
they could cast out death with the dead."

The streets were strewn with corpses, unbW

r
The city became an open cemetery. >

f

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 269

Then Cyprian appeared at the head and front of
the peril.

He had retired from the persecution to a place
of refuge near, as a true chief and leader choosing
the reality of service to his people rather than the
reputation of personal courage. He had been con-
tent to be misunderstood by some, and even accused
of cowardice; whilst by wise and sober yet burning
words he had from his exile encouraged the con-
fessors to suffer, touched the impenitent lapsed with
noble shame, and inspired those who despaired after
their fall to renewed courage and hope, and while
rendering ardent and loyal honour to the martyrs,
had restrained the exaggerated homage which would,
ultimately, have lowered both the martyrs and the
whole Church.

But now that every street of Carthage was a
focus of infection, and the true peril was that the
Church might abandon her duty, Cyprian was in
the midst of his flock again.

He gathered his people together in one place,
and implored them not to do as the heathen were
doing around them, forgetting all care and duty in

270 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

a panic of selfish terror. He reminded them how
God loved mercy, and inspired them with noble
examples from times of old. Nor would he suffer
them to let their mercy be limited to the Christians,
to their own people. A glorious opportunity was
open to them of recompensing with loving service,
at the peril of life, the scourge, the rack, and the
stake so lately inflicted on them. They must not
be content with cherishing their own people, there
was nothing wonderful in that; publicans and sin-
ners would be kind to those who were kind to them.
They were called to something more — to love their
enemies, as the Lord had done and had commanded
them; to practise a clemency which was like that
of God, of Him who made His sun to shine on the
evil and the good, exhibiting all these kindnesses not
to his own only, but to aliens.

"It becomes us," he said, "to answer to our birth,
and it is not fitting that those who are bom of God
should be degenerate, but rather that the sonship of
a good Father should be proved by the emulation of
His goodness."

At once the multitude before him, the Church

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 27 I

of Carthage, from a portion of the broken and panic-
stricken crowds around, rose at the Bishop's word,
and by his guidance to the sense of their true dignity
and place and power, into a great society of benefi-
cence, an organization of mercy in this needy,
stricken world.

"The various ministrations," says C)rprian*s friend
and deacon, Pontius, "were carefully distributed ac-
cording to the quality of men and their degrees.
Many who by the straitness of poverty were unable
to manifest the kindness of wealth, manifested more
than wealth, making up by their own labour a service
dearer than all riches.''

Some devoted themselves to the burying of the
multitudes of dead, and meantime to the scaring
away of the troops of dogs which began to feed on
them.

Some distributed bread among the women and
children deprived by the pestilence of the bread-
winners.

Some gave water and food, and such medicine
as they knew of, to those already stricken with the

2'] 2 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

plague, or soothed the poor dying sufferers, exhausted
with fever and loss of blood, and all the loathsome
symptoms of the disease.

They did this, knowing well themselves, and
warned by Cyprian, that they were armed themselves
with no charm against the infection. "Some won-
dered," he said, "that there was no exemption for
the faithful from the ravages of this terrible plague,
no distinction between the heathen and the Chris-
tian. The distinction, he reminded them, lay not
in exemption from deaths hut in what death had de-
come to them, the gate of hfe and everlasting joy."

And so, with the scars and mutilations of perse-
cution fresh on them, maiming and enfeebling their
bodies, these Christians went forth joyfully at the
word, and in the steps of the Master, to "do good
to those who had entreated them spitefully and per-
secuted them."

And the Church rose for a time incontrovertibly
and visibly to her glorious place as an organization
of charity through the world.

The brothers Clement and Valerian came hastily

, LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 273

back from C)rprian's eloquent oration to organize the
household at the farm for aid in the work.

Priscus had long since fled, seeing nothing but
insanity, moral and mental, in exposing his precious
life to this indiscriminating foe. If he wished, he
said, Clement might send what he liked to Carthage,
reserving a moderate rent for him. The provinces
evidently were not the sphere destined for him, and
he did not think he should return.

The whole products of the farm, therefore, were
at the disposal of the Christian family.

Justa alone remained constantly at the home, to
take care of the children, to direct the slaves, and
to send off every morning fresh fruit and milk and
provisions of all kinds to the city. Viola was to
come every morning and evening to bring tidings
of what was most needed, and to guide the distri-
bution.

Clement undertook the most perilous office of
burying the dead.

After a faint resistance Valerian suffered Eucharis
to join him in ministering to the sick and the dying
in the city.

Lapsed ^ hut not Lost, ^^

2 74 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

Together they commended their children in
prayer to God, and then to the arms of Justa and
Viola,

Even these precious little ones were not to be
exempted from their share in the peril, since Viola
and the slaves were necessarily to come and go con-
tinually between the house and the infected city.

Alone the husband and wife went forth in the
early morning together.

Clement had gone the night before, and Viola
was to follow, with Justin and Candida, from their
hut, with the provisions.

Once more along the familiar paths among the
vineyards and gardens, the fresh breezes from the
sea playing around them, the sweet wholesome vines
and fragrant shrubs sending up their delicate incense
through the dewy air, up and down Qement's fami-
liar terraces, through the shadows of the gently stir-
ring leaves, they walked together.

They paused for a few minutes on the seat by
the wayside well, where they had met in that terrible

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 275

dawn when Valerian was returning vanquished from
the prison.

"It is given us at last," she said, "to encounter
peril for Him, for our Lord, together."

He was silent for a minute, and then he said,
with a tremulous voice, but with a look of hope
and resolution such as she had not yet seen in his
face —

"Together now, beloved. But the pestilence is
no common scaffold where voluntary martyrs suffer
death together and together go to God. Death in the
pestilence is lonely as in the home. Are you prepared
even for this?"

For he thought of himself as summoned at last,
and of her returning, perhaps, alone by those familiar
ways.

"I am not ready, beloved, to part from thee,"
she said. "How can anything make me ready for
that but the hand of God? I am content we should
be in the hands of God. I cannot say more than
that. I cannot look at such a horror; but need I?
I can look at Him — at His hand, our Lord's, pierced

for us — at His face — is not that enough?"

i8»

276 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

They knelt together a few minutes in speech-
less prayer, and then they went on to the stricken
city.

A few days afterwards, in the deserted house
where they had nursed a plague-stricken mother to
recovery, Eucharis and Valerian were alone together
once more: she, stricken, on a lowly couch, he kneel-
ing beside her.

The summons to the bitter parting had come,
but not for him.

It fell on him as a terrible impossibility, some-
thing incredible and contrary to nature, which it
would be quite simple and natural that any miracle
should be sent to counteract.

This angel of mercy that had risen for them out
of the sea, this heavenly creature who had inspired
him to hope and other lost souls to love , full of life
and joy as a happy child, full of immortal strength
and helpfulness, he thought, as the young men in
shining raiment at the sepulchre, it was impossible
that she could be seized and holden of death , of a
common loathsome pestilence like this.

{

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 277

The room must be full of holy succouring angels
watching over her, ministering to her even as she lay
there.

He had but to wait; he might not see them, but
one would surely come and take her by the hand,
and death would fall off from her like the chains
from Peter, and she would rise and go forth with
him!

The angels were there indeed, though he did
not see them, and some Divine touch was laid on
her burning hands, and death, with the mortal life
he had smitten, did fall off from her like a broken
fetter.

But never more would she go forth with him.

"Dost thou remember," she said, with interrupted
breath, "when we knelt together outside at the cata-
combs, and thou badst me go up to the altar,
'nearer: thee there with Him, thou saidst, than even
by thy side?' It was true, beloved, and I am go-
ing." And then with a long, wistful gaze upwards,
"I am ready. I see Thy face. It is enough." Then
one more long, wistful gaze on him, "The babes —
this poor world — ^need thee a little longer. Never be

278 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

afraid of loving too much. I am going to Christ;
and He is love. Nearer thee, beloved, with Him, nearer
thee."

At intervals she tried to speak again, but often
the parched lips refused utterance.

Yet once he thought he heard words like "To
those who know Him not, to those who never
heard "

And again, "Lord, I have not loved him too
much. He has not loved me too much. Love is
Thy will, is Thyself. More love — more — to Thee —
to all; not less, more love — more of Thee. Go
forth, beloved," she would murmur; "do not stay
with me; go on with the succour — you will follow
me soon."

And then as a refrain recurring often, "Nearer
thee, beloved, with Him, nearer thee."

And so she passed away from his sight. And
he was called to the sacrifice which was the sacrifice
to him, which was death, which was the Cross; yet
not a terrible wrong and mistake, but the very foot-
steps in which he had asked to tread.

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 279

Together the brothers laid the beloved in a quiet
place they found a little out of the city.

And for the first time, as they embraced each
other beside her grave, a vision came to Valerian of
how Clement had loved her.

"Thy sacrifice," he murmured, "was made long
ago. No wonder thou wast ready for martyrdom."

They did not linger by the sacred grave. They
raised a cross to mark it, and then resolutely they
went back to their post in the stricken city; Clement
to lay the dead in the earth consecrated by her lying
beneath it; Valerian to succour the sick and minister
to the dying.

Alone, and yet he felt not alone. His lips seemed
opened, as if the dear silent voice spoke through
them; all the old eloquence came back to them,
and to many who heard him his words of faith and
love were as the priests' feet of old bearing the ark
and keeping back the waves, so that they passed the
dreaded river as the King's highway, and entered
the King's presence as through the Beautiful Gate
of the Temple.

2 So LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

CHAPTER XXIV.

The little hut where Justin and Candida had
once found a home was empty. The two she had
so loved and succoured were summoned from their
labours of love in Carthage to trace the same path
as Eucharis. The farai had become a home for
orphan children and young maidens left destitute by
the persecution and the pestilence.

Patiently Valerian went back to the old life with-
out Eucharis, to fulfil her purposes and carry out her
life in the old familiar ways, if such were the will of
God, alone.

But this was not demanded of him.

The true sacrifice, as so often, was one God only
could recognise, but his devoted service in the pesti-
lence was a sacrifice the Church and the Bishop
could recognise as an expiation for his failure in con-
fession, and as a claim to ordination.

He was chosen and ordained deacon and pres-

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 28 1

byter. He was called to be much about Cyprian,
seeing the gravity and joyousness, strictness and
severity, of his rule and life.

Once more it was given to him to speak eloquent
words to the listening people, with the weight of a
true life to sustain them, and with a faith which left
him no doubt what was shadow and what was sub-
stance, with a love to Christ which by degrees made
it even a joy to think that Eucharis had the joy of
being with Him.

Not long after her death, Cyprian had sent a
large contribution to Bishop Numidicus to ransom
several Christians who had fallen into the hands of
the Goths when the Emperor Decius was slain and
his army lost.

With this ransom Valerian obtained permission
to go among the Goths, to fulfil his old purpose,
and the dying wish of Eucharis, to bear the name of
Christ among those who had never heard it.

And Clement and the sisters, abiding in their
calling and place in the Church, felt nearer him in
what they felt to be his true place and calling than
if he had remained with them.

282 LAPSED, Birr NOT LOST.

After he left the persecution broke out again
under the Emperor Valerian, but this time especially
directed against the bishops and chiefs of the
Church.

Cyprian was as ready now to suffer death at the
head of his flock as before to suffer misunderstand-
ing and exile to succour them.

He was arrested in the gardens near the city,
which he had once sold for the poor, and which the
Church had purchased back for him.

Tranquil and majestic, the officers of justice
treated him as a fallen prince, and the multitudes,
Christian and heathen, thronged his road to the
scaffold as if he had been a sentenced emperor.

"Art thou Thascius Cyprian," the Proconsul
asked, "the Bishop of so many impious men? The
most sacred Emperor commands thee to sacrifice."

Cyprian answered, "I will not sacrifice."

"Consider well," the Proconsul rejoined.

"Execute your orders," was Cyprian's reply. "The
case admits of no consideration."

The orders were clear for the Proconsul and for
the Bishop. He was led by the racecourse to finish

LAPSED, BtJT NOT LOST. 283

his course with joy; the Christians pressed around
him with passionate homage for a look or a touch;
and in an open field close to Carthage, surrounded
by trees which the multitudes climbed to see him
die, gentle and fearless and tranquil, he submitted
his neck to the axe and was slain,

A century and a quarter passed over the North
African Church, and the persecutions of Christianity
by the Roman empire were over for ever. Still the
Church was militant in the world, and in a chapel
by the coast of Carthage, dedicated to St. C)rprian,
a Christian mother spent the night in agonies of
tears for her son, lost, it seemed, to her and to
God.

The greatest Father of the African Church has
told it in his Confessions: —

"But why I went hence and went thither thou
knowest, O God! yet shewedst it neither to me nor
to my mother, who grievously bewailed my journey,
and followed me as far as the sea. But I deceived her;
holding her by force that she might not either keep
me back or go with me, and I feigned, that I had a

284 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

friend whom I could not leave till he had a fair
wind to sail.

"And I lied to my mother, and such a mother!
and escaped: for this also hast Thou mercifully for-
given me, preserving me thus full of execrable de-
filements from the waters of the sea for the water of
Thy grace whereby, when I was cleansed, the streams
of my mother's eyes should be dried, with which
for me she daily watered the ground. And yet re-
fusing to return without me, I scarcely persuaded
her to stay that night in a place hard by our ship,
where was an oratory in memory of the Blessed Cy-
prian. That night I privately departed, but she was
left behind in weeping and prayer.

"And what, O Lord! was she with so many tears
asking of Thee but that Thou wouldst not suffer me
to sail?

"But Thou, in the depth of Thy counsel, and
hearing the main point of her desire^ regardedst not
what she then asked , that Thou mighiest make me wJiat
she ever asked,

"The wind blew and swelled our sails, and with-
drew the shore from sight, and she, on the morrow^

LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST. 285

was there frantic with sorrow, and with complaints
and groans filled Thine ears, Who didst then dis-
regard them; whilst through my desires Thou wert
hurrying me to end all desire; and the earthly part
of her affection to me was chastened by the allotted
scourge of sorrows. For she loved my being with
her, as mothers do, but much more than many; and
she knew not how great joy Thou wert about to
work for her out of my absence. She knew not,
therefore did she thus weep and wail, and by this
agony there appeared in her the inheritance of Eve,
in sorrow seeking what in sorrow she had brought
forth. And yet, after accusing my treachery and
hard-heartedness, she betook herself again to inter-
cede with Thee for me, she went to her wonted place
and I to Rome."

Monica to her desolate home and Augustine to
•^ome, to Milan, to Ambrose, to his conversion, to
Christ, to God, to his bishopric, to his martyrdom
in his episcopal city of Hippo, by the Arian Van-
dals.

A few hundred years more and the whole North

286 LAPSED, BUT NOT LOST.

African Church in those flourishing cities by the
coast was swept away, trampled to death under the
iron pressure of Islam.

Yet still the sweet and sacred names of her three
saintly mothers — the two young martyr-mothers Per-
petua and Felicitas, and Monica, pure and fervent
type of self-sacrificing mother's love — for ever per-
fume the whole Church of God as with the ointment
very precious from the broken alabaster vase.

And still from the three eloquent voices of her
three great men and fathers, Tertullian, Cyprian, and
Augustine, "the echoes roll from soul to soul," the
living inspiration breathes from heart to heart, in lands
and languages they never dreamt of, from age to age,
throughout the Church of Him for whom they lived
and died. For, as Tertullian said, ^*this community
will be undying^

THE END.

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