262 I'LL WEEP WITH THEE TEAR FOR TEAR. during heart. For without God's aid, there is a limit to the soul's capacity to endure affliction. As the body can only sustain a limited amount of agony, so the soul is filled to the top with a certain amount of mental agony; beyond that measure it can contain no more, as a sponge which is thoroughly saturated cannot contain one additional drop, even though the waters of the ocean rolled over it. Here the heart-broken soul was relieved by copious streams of penitential or devotional tears, which streamed down the wrinkles of the cheeks, as torrents through the beds which they have furrowed out for themselves down the mountain's sides. Here in those darksome recesses, this "food of gushing tears" relieved and refreshed the weary soul as would a balmy bath. Oh! they were to it as a genial shower to the earth on a springtide midnight! Here the poor widow in her bereavement opened her eyes as sluices for streams from the deep well-spring of tears which had been accumulating within her soul, and which had been oozing in big drops after drops for lengthened years! There the fond father of the faithful, who bore "the solicitude of all", received all, consoled all, the saint and the sinner, those whose earliest and most cherished hopes were blasted, and those who were forlorn and deceived by the vanities of a false and deluding world. He welcomed all, he sympathized with all, and wept with the child of misfortune. "If thus the young hours have fleeted, When sorrow itself looked bright; If thus the cold world now wither INNOCENCE DEFIES MALIGNITY. 263 Here amidst the pious congregations of the early Christians, after stealthily entering under the guidance of secret information, sometimes stood the agent of a Nero or a Diocletian, an officer like Fulvius, or an executioner as Catulus, whose whip thirsted for the Christians' bloodhere he stood to recognize and convict those children of light. But he became awe-stricken at the sacred aspect of the sight, and imagined he heard a voice like Moses', "Come not hither; take off the shoes from thy feet, for the ground upon which you stand is holy !" Innocence defied his malignity. Their very helplessness became their shield and impregnable fortress-the very passion of the savage heathen blushed with confusion-touched by God's grace, he prostrated himself before the very altar he came to eradicate-and he who intended to wield the axe, was often the first who subjected his neck to its stroke, for the love of Christ. How wonderful the circumstances and events which were combined in this mysterious temple of the Christians! True light without the sun-the angels of life and death fraternizing to keep watch over these sacred precincts, and twining together the chaplet of cypress and laurel the altar and the tomb-the victim, the king-the redeemed, a creeping clod-virtue perfected in infirmitydeath without a sting, the grave without a victory-the desert of the world and the threshold of Heaven-the desolation of the one, and the gleaming rays of the other, mingling their lights and shades together, combining to form a light neither of earth nor of Heaven, neither of the sun nor of the moon, but seeming the union of the golden rays of the one and the silvery streams of the other, forming the morning rays of the orient on high, rising over the dark horizon of our night. 264 ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND SPECTATORS. The Coliseum by Moonlight. IN this day the confraternity of Calvary, and members of many other confraternities, called "Sacconi", from wearing a canvas sack with a hood, to conceal themselves during the exercise of their good works, and other pious votaries of the cross, go in lengthened processions to perform the stations of the cross, and hear a sermon at the Coliseum, the earliest garden of the Church in her spring time, in which "the blood of martyrs was sown as the seed of Christians". They sing psalms and hymns on their way, and amongst others they join in chorus in singing the simple sweet little Italian hymn, " Viva la croce, la croce". The stations of the cross are erected all round the interior of the structure, and a cross is erected in the centre, by kissing which with a penitential spirit, the well disposed may gain an indulgence of two hundred days. This vast amphitheatre was founded by Vespasian, in the year of our Lord 72, and was completed by Titus in the year 80, ten years after the destruction of Jerusalem. Many thousand Jews were employed in its erection during their captivity. The grand design was the conception of Gaudentius, who was a Christian architect. Though extensive the present ruin, it is supposed to comprise no more than one third of the original pile. The elevation of the walls is 157 feet, and the major axis is 620 feet in extent. It is built in four stories, two of the Corinthian order, one of the Doric, and one of the Ionic order. It was capable of accommodating nearly 100,000 spectators, who here assembled to witness the public sports, and the gladiatorial combats, and the A ROMAN HOLIDAY. 265 martyrdom of the early Christians, devoured by wild beasts, or otherwise tortured to death, "Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday". Originally it was called the "Flavian Amphitheatre", but when it acquired the name of the "Coliseum" it is not easy to discover. The earliest period at which, it was so called that I know of, was that when Venerable Bede alludes to it in connexion with an old prophecy : "While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; The Coliseum at all times overwhelms the visitor with its imposing effect. It is, however, when visited in "the blue midnight", that its silent vastness and mysterious grandeur are fully appreciated. At that time it seems a place of weired beauty-a region inhabited by super natural spirits and flitting phantoms. Its distant outlines are lost in dreamy-like indistinctness, and merge into the hues of some sombre cloud, and when the beams of the moon and the stars shine through its arches, fissures, and "rents of ruin", like vistas through the broken cloud, it appears as if its moles of masonry ceased to be material, and were lifted above the earth, and belonged to the etherial regions. Whilst standing on the towering heights of the upper galleries, and looking to the right through " the timeworn breach of the battlements", the Via Sacra and the Roman Forum are revealed to my view, and give me a hazy glimpse of the Capitol in the distance, with the arch of Septimius Severus beneath, and in the lengthened intermediate line, between that and the triumphal arch of Constantine on the left, I see ranged at either side the 266 ROME'S NODDING RUINS. nodding ruins of the ancient Temple of Peace, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the three beautiful Corinthian columns of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans, the Mamertine Prison, the Temple of Fortune, the Temple of Mars, the Comitium, the Meta Sudans, the Temple of Venus, the Lacus Curtius, and immediately opposite me the Palace of the Cæsars; and to the left, on the Celian hill, the Church of San Gregorio, the site whence Gregory the Great commissioned St. Augustin and his associate missionaries to convey the Gospel truths to the inhabitants of Britain. These remains of stupendous fabrics indicating the eras and successive periods of ancient, mediæval, and modern Rome, ages of paganism and Christianity, are like stationary petrified pulsations in the life of time. In surveying them we resemble him who, seated on a rock near the sea shore, observes the successive undulations of the waves, and takes nature's wrist in his hand to count the beatings of her ocean pulse. When these majestic piles, nodding with age, are viewed, as they sometimes are by the sentimental visitor, in the serene balmy atmosphere, in the stillness, the breathless quietude of an autumnal midnight, when the foreground and all their prominent architectural features radiated by mellow silvery streams of effulgence from the broadest disk of an Italian moon, and their impenetrable recesses are shrouded in gloomy mysterious shades, they seemed to me like barriers that impeded the flow of time, and reversed the stream, and that the mind, drifting away on the receding ebb, was wafted back to classic and heroic days that passed thousands of years ago—that it is carried beyond the confines of all the vulgar ways of men-has entered on an ideal existence, in which it is are ir |