Christian fiction; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600 -- Fiction
This was bitter medicine; but I had deserved it, and it did me good. My
cheeks burned with shame as I recalled his words “It is not like you
to say what you don’t mean.” Had I come to this? Was this the result
of my study of these Jewish writings? And yet, did I not “mean” it?
Was not the fact rather this, that in my own mind I did to some extent
mean and believe it? But it was a dormant belief. And I had no power to
communicate it to others. Then I perceived the reason. I had said “Wait
and trust.” But Isaiah said “Wait thou _upon the Lord_.” In preaching my
gospel to Glaucus I had left out “_the Lord_”—the life and soul of the
precept! If “the Lord” had been in me, as He was in Isaiah and in Paul, I
could not have left Him out. But I left Him out because He was not in me.
The truth was that I had no true gospel to preach.
In great dejection I was on the point of retiring to rest when it
occurred to me that I had left unfinished, and indeed hardly begun, the
study of Christ’s words in the Corinthian epistle. Too weary to resume it
now, I extinguished the light and flung myself down to forget in sleep
all thought of study. But I could not forget. All through the dreams of
a restless and troubled night ran threads of tangled imaginations about
what those words would prove to be, intertwined with other imaginations
about the words of Christ to Paul at his conversion. Along with these
came shadows or shapes, with voices or voice-like sounds:—Epictetus
gazing on the burning Christians in Rome, Paul listening to the voice of
Christ near Damascus, Elijah on Horeb amid the roar of the tempest. Last
of all, I myself, Silanus, stood at the door of a chamber in Jerusalem
where Christ (I knew) was present with His disciples, and from this
chamber there began to steal forth a still small voice, breathing and
spreading everywhere an unspeakable peace—when a whirlwind scattered
everything and hurried me away to the Neronian gardens in Rome.
There, someone, masked, took me by the hand and forced me to look at the
Christian martyrs whom he was causing to be tortured. I thought it was
Nero. But the mask fell off and it was Paul. The martyrs looked down on
us and blessed us. Paul trembled but held me fast. I felt that I had
become one with him, a persecutor and a murderer. They all looked up to
heaven as though they saw something there. At that, Paul vanished, with
a loud cry, leaving me alone. Fear fell upon me lest, if I looked up, I
should see that which the martyrs saw. So I kept my eyes fixed on the
ground. But the blessings of those whom I had persecuted seemed to enter
into me taking me captive and forcing me to do as they did. Then I too
looked up. And I saw—that which they saw, Jesus the crucified. I tried to
cry out “I see nothing, I see nothing,” but my voice would not speak. I
struggled to regain control over my tongue, and in the struggle I awoke.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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