vengeance virtue, murder mercy; when once the syren song of supernatural love fell upon their ears, it turned those hearts of stone into lamps of light and furnaces of love, and greater wonder still, where all trace of heart had ceased to be, it created images of the Sacred Heart. Charity and humanity fell like beams of sunshine on the darkness of their souls, and the night of their moral nature. Sons ceased from being parricides, parents from infanticide. While the edicts of the Capitol, the decrees of the Forum, and acts of Parliament, but much more of cabinet councils and star chambers have filled the earth with disaster and lamentation, the soldiers of the Cross of Love have outstripped their inflictions, or following in their train have turned their curses into blessings. "They have gone abroad; let us look at home. We have heathens in our streets; to thousands in Londinum or Lutetia,* Christ is a cypher, a future life, a fable. They have never seen the warm smile of love, they are a people that still sit in darkness and have not yet seen the great light. Oh! brethren, carry this torch of love to them, bear it into the garret, the cellar, the gaol, and the casual ward, and they will be saved. These poor creatures are thirsting for the waters of life at our door, and shall we not give them even one cup of cold water? As the new metropolitan lines grind through the pens and pestilential stalls in which they are packed like negroes in the middle passage, the shriek of the engine drowns their wail of despair, and they starve with trains of prize cattle at their door and dog shows in the next street. Little children love one another' such is the Christian Utopia, which, unlike all other schemes of political and social regeneration, could be realized to-morrow and finish our night-mare history. "Black deeds of night cast their shadows over the page of history; murder hangs like a bloody shroud over a Paradise of Beauty; revenge and persecution seethe and scorch with the breath of hell, and a pandemonium has been let loose like a tempest on earth; but amidst the night, and the gloom, and the tempest, love has beamed and burst forth like a gleam of sunshine in winter's gloom, and a glow and radiance of other worlds have lighted up this scene of things." With beaming countenance Augustine continued: “O infinite, divine, ineffable love, essence of deity, balmy breath of heaven, what power, what principle, what reality can earth, or time, or science show, compared to thee? * Latin for London and Paris. "There was in our Rome a structure, great among the greatest, whose giant arches and Titan's buttresses seemed designed to scale the vault of heaven. Treasuries and the spoils of the known world had been used to raise it. Adorned with marble and studded with precious metals, it glittered in splendour and beauty. It is now deserted and decayed. This mountain made with hands was the great loadstone to attract the fashion and beauty of Rome. Here trooped the fair and frail, the toga'd sage, the crested chief, the Roman world in all its wickedness and all its splendour is there. Gladiatorial shows were the curse and the mania of Rome. Incredible was the ardour of the people after these spectacles. For it was not the witchery of Muses, or scenic illusion, or the conference and discourse of genius that brought those thousands to the spot. It was the butchery of brothers, the shambles of humanity. Sickening are the details of this secular Golgotha. Fabulous seem the efforts of Roman leaders in the promotion of torture and agony. Thank God 'tis past; but what led to the suppression? A Christian monk suddenly starts up before our eyes, and in emaciated form, but with dauntless front, upbraids the generation of Cain. Received with a shower of stones, he soon goes to his reward and passes to his rest, and his glorious monument still shines aloft, a cross rising above the ancient scene of blood and sorrow. And thus will it be to the end in the silent march of charity over the nations. Who knows how soon the new men of a gentler earth may turn up with wonder and with shining angel tears, the evidence of our shame and bloodshed, while a cloud of sadness steals across their radiant faces as they think of our cities of the plain. Again, a plague desolates our homes, the monster stalks abroad, and selfish natures skulk away, leaving the first offices of kindness to the hands of charity, for the sisters of mercy step in with noiseless tread, and defying all terrors, minister to agonising thousands. The theatres and places of revelry are deserted and closed, the hospitals are cranimed, the churchyards choked. Nothing is heard but the passing bell, nothing is seen but the procession of mourning. "Nature seems a charnel house, and the very sky a pall. But above the rattling of hearses, the nailing of coffins, and the shriek of delirium, are heard the sweet tones of the ministers of charity breathing peace and comfort over the pillow of raving despair. "Love is better than faith, for God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God. Love is better than works, for he that loveth is born of God and cannot sin, and by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. Love is better than knowledge, for it alone can make us wise unto salvation. "In short, Christianity is love, the spirit of Christ is the spirit of love. Oh that men would cast away controversy and calumny and all profession in writing and talking, together with pride and presumption, sects and bigotry, paper charity and preaching hypocrisy, respectable religion and decent conformity; and instead of all this rubbish, oh that man would imbibe the spirit of Christ, and live the life of His members! The world would be saved and sin no more. We should not want the awakenings of history, the thunderstorm of revolution, the earthquake of reformation and of Communism: the inundation and purgatory of the scourge of God, of Huns and Vandals, of famine, pestilence, and black deaths, for the curse of Cain would leave us, and the fields of earth shine again in the eternal sunshine. We should no longer want societies and pledges, and prisons and laws, for earth would be holy, and the voice of praise resound day and night in that day of jubilee. Love one another; this is salvation, this is heaven, this is divinest socialism, this is angel's creeds, and Christ's only law. Be persuaded, O children of men! love one another, and this earth from a very hell becomes a heaven, and man a very angel." Silence descended on the shadowy conclave as Augustine concluded his earnest appeal, and silently the shades departed, leaving Metella's tomb to the solitude of that solemn night. CHAPTER LVIII. A NIGHT IN THE CATACOMBS. - JULIUS, AURELIUS, AND SEBASTIAN.. THE next night our traveller was going again, as usual, to the tomb of Metella, when, as he passed the entrance to the catacomb of St. Sebastian, an invisible force opposed his progress, and led him irresistibly to stop, to summon the guardian of the catacombs, and, torch in hand, to descend into them. Groping his way along, viewing with interest and reverence these sepultures and subterranean churches of generations of persecuted early Christians, our traveller reached at length a small chapel, with stone altars and many sarcophagi, where the dust of early saints had rested. Then, provided with a bundle of torches, he begged the guardian to leave him, and now alone he gave rein to his thought amidst the mysteries of the catacombs, dimly lighted by his torch. Long did he remain, leaning pensively his head on his hand, resting on that stone altar, till at length the appearance of vapour gathered in the distant passages. Presently forms seemed to move within the ancient sarcophagi. He looked again, thinking himself the subject of optical delusions, but soon the solemn vaults were filled with moving groups of those long since departed. A vast procession seemed approaching up the distant passages, and in the uncertain light of his torch he was astonished to see they all had crowns of shining light upon their heads. Warriors, and aged pontiffs, and workmen, and delicate virgins were there, many in blood-stained garments, but all with crowns upon their heads. And soon again three forms stood forth prominently in front. In the first he recognised the great Julius, only crowned with laurels; next to him the calm, intellectual Aurelius ; lastly, a more youthful, graceful soldier, Sebastian, the early martyr: his body pierced with arrows, but crowned with a diadem of light. Meanwhile, the shadowy procession gathered round, and filled the chapel, their crowns of light illuminating all recesses of the underground passages. Soon a kind of platform was raised by the shades of departed Christians, once slaves, now all crowned with light, and after a little confusion in the crowd, three venerable persons of judicial appearance stood forth and occupied a kind of couch placed on the platform, in front of which stood the three, Julius, Aurelius, and Sebastian. The traveller was at a loss at first to know who these venerable judges could be; they were also crowned with crowns of light; but looking on three rolls of papyrus placed on a table in front of each, he read the names of Jerome, Cyprian, and Clement. As soon as all places were filled, complete silence reigned in the vast assembly, till the first of the venerable personages, with deeply marked thought on his striking features, and a fringe of silvery hair round his crown of light, stood up and addressed his colleagues and the assembled shades in reference to the Imperator Julius, who stood in a calm, dignified attitude, listening to his sentence with marked attention. In a tone uniting solemnity with a certain expression of almost painful sympathy, Jerome thus began: "What human soul exists without aspirations? where is the man without ambition? I speak not of the channels that it follows, but there is not a mortal man with faculties raised above the night of idiocy who does not wish for something more. That is ambition. "1st. Let us consider the ambition of Cæsar. Its nature is self; it seeks to aggrandize self in its appendages. Justice, truth, and charity must bend, must break, before it. Matter is its limit-for mind transcends this world with its appendages of hollowness and shadows. "This foolishness of man strives to varnish our lump of perishing clay with a false lustre, and to pass away in a cloud of gold dust, after having glittered on the stage of life for a few brief hours, like the fire-flies and glow-worms of a Brazilian forest. "Because the Forum makes a plaything of his name for good or evil; because his initials are scratched upon the sands of time, soon to be stamped out by his more fortunate successor; because a crowd of painted slaves uncover and hail their god wherever he appears in public, the great man of earth-Cæsar-thinks himself the favourite of Fortune, destined to descend with fame to the latest posterity. It matters not if his deeds be good or evil, so long as he creates a sensation in the world. The Milky Way, the nebulæ, the illegible or doubtful hieroglyphics and unknown characters of Egyptian and Etruscan sepulchres read him no lesson on the emptiness of human fame. He thinks that "When he appeared the world did tremble, And nobody notices its petty reptile life. Thus the ignoble mass departs in crawling generations, A god bursts upon earth in starry splendour.' He cannot be controlled by the swaddling bands and apron strings of paltry laws and customs; the narrow limits of those duties which nature enforces on vulgar men, under whose control they pass a happy, quiet life, are galling chains to the eagle flight of genius. "Great and prodigious natures have no measure in this life, no control, They bring their own law and virtue with them, |