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LIVING TORCHES 483
clothed with irresistible strength pleasure and self-indulgence
drowned in wretchedness; misery and martyrdom
:
exulting with joy unspeakable, and full of glory. On the one
side was the splendour and civilisation of the City of the
Dragon revelling in brutal ferocity and lascivious pride on
;
the other side the down-trodden and the despised of the
City of God rose to a height of nobleness which no philosophy
had attained, and enriched with sovereign virtues the ideal of
mankind. While the deified lord of the empire of darkness
with his nobles and his myrmidons sank themselves below the
level of the beasts, paupers and nameless slaves, young boys
and feeble girls towered into tragic dignity, faced death with
unflinching heroism, and showed that even amid satyrs and
demons humanity may
still be measured with the measure of
a man that is, of the angel.
Herein lay the secret of the victory of Christianity. In
the Rome of Nero heathendom showed the worst that she
could be, and the worst that she could do ; and Christianity
showed, coinstantaneously, that manhood can preserve its
inherent grandeur when it seems to be trampled into the
very mire under the hoofs of swine. The sweetness and the
dignity with which the Christians suffered kindled not only
amazement but admiration in many a pagan breast. It was
seen that with the Church in its poverty and shame, not with
the world in its gorgeous criminality, lay the secret of all
man's happiness and hope. Many a senator, as he looked
on the saturnalia of lubricity and blood, felt that the Christian
slave-girl, tied naked to a stake in the amphitheatre for the
wild beasts to devour, was more blessed than the jewelled
lady by his side, whom he knew to be steeped in baseness ;
and there were youths to whose taste the apples of the Dead
Sea had already crumbled into dust, who in their secret
hearts felt themselves nothing less than abject compared
with those Christian boys who, with the light of heaven on
their foreheads and the name of Jesus on their lips, faced
without flinching the grotesque horror of their doom.
But Nero and Tigellinus, and those who advised with
them, never wavered in their hideous policy of purchasing
popularity by making the murder of thousands of the innocent
subserve the brutal passions of the multitude. They
thought to abase the Christians, and they kindled round their