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The Psalms in services, ceremonies, and the catacombs; use in persecution Crispin and Crispinian, Theodore the Martyr, the Saracen convert, the Emperor Maurice; in public worship; in ordinary life Origen, the family of Gregory Nazianzen, Monica; on deathbeds Basil the Great, Ambrose, Paulinus of Nola, Cyril of Alexandria; influence of the Psalms in Monasticism the Egyptian Anchorites, Basil and monastic communities of the East, Athanasius and the West, Jerome and Paula. Martin of Tours; the Psalms in action struggle between Church and State Athanasius and Constantius, Basil and Valens, Ambrose and Theodosius; the Psalms in human thought Confessions of Augustine.
THOUGH the influence of the Psalms has been confined to no age, no nation, no class, and no creed, there have been special periods when they have spoken with peculiar force^ This has been particularly the case in times of persecution, YsEben circumstances gave to the words an immediate personal application. Such a period was the infancy of Christianity. Secretly, under cover of night, or at early dawn, children cast out by their parents, slaves oppressed by their masters, citizens suspected by their neighbours, subjects proscribed by their rulers, gathered for prayer and praise in the catacombs of great cities, in workshops, or in the upper rooms of retired houses on the outskirts of towns. Of their religious services the Psalms formed a conspicuous part, and special Psalms were soon appropriated to particular occasions, such as the 73rd for the morning and the i4ist for the evening worship. These little companies of wooworkers, cobblers, fullers, craftsmen, and slaves "the most vulgar and illiterate of mankind" with whom assembled a handful of persons of higher rank, centurions, government officials, and ladies of noble birth, met together in danger of their lives. The ceremony which admitted them into this proscribed and perilous company found its symbol in a psalm. The hart (Ps. xlii., verse i) was the emblem of those thirsting souls who, in the cooling streams of the baptismal font, drank freely of the fountain of eternal life. Once admitted, they were as "sheep appointed to be slain"; but the Lord was their Shepherd, and their trust in Him, conquering their fears, still speaks in the rude pictures on the walls of subterranean Rome.
The language of the Psalms was ever on the lips of those who, in the early history of Christianity, suffered violent deaths for or in the faith. A Psalm (xxiii.) was fitly chosen by Augustine as the hymn of martyrs. It was in the words of Ps. cxv., verses 4 and 5, "Their idols are silver and gold," etc., that Christians defied the imperial order to sacrifice to Caesar, and it was with a psalm that they met the torturer or the executioner. At Soissons, for instance, in the Diocletian persecution of 288, two brothers, Crispin and Crispinian, afterwards the patrons of shoemakers, suffered torture and death. For love of Christianity, they had renounced the honours of their birth, and made shoes for the poor. In their prolonged torments they were sustained by the words of Ps. Ixxix., verses 9-10, "Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Thy Name. . . . Wherefore do the heathen say. Where is now their God ? " Their bodies, thrown into the river, were carried to the sea. The waves, so runs the legend, for love of the Blessed Feet which once had walked upon them, wafted the mangled bodies of his martyrs to the shores of Romney Marsh, where the inhaitants received them in joy, and built in their honour the church of Lydd. Theodore the Martyr, the young soldier who rashly burned to the ground the temple of the Mother of the Gods at Amasea in 306, found strength to endure the torture by chanting Ps. xxxiv., verse i, "I will alway give thanks unto the Lord; His praise shall ever be in my mouth." Another illustration is the story told by Gregory of Decapolis. A noble Saracen, converted by a vision of the Lamb of God, sought a Christian teacher, learnt the Psalter by heart, and returned to his native land to preach the faith of Christ. But his countrymen refused his message, and stoned him to death. In his agony he repeated Ps. xiii., verse 3, " Lighten my eyes, that I sleep not in death." It was, again, a psalm that encouraged the Emperor Maurice to bow to the will of God. During the twenty years in which he had ruled the Roman Empire, he had shown many of the virtues which, in 582, marked him out to succeed Tiberius II. But the army turned against him, and in 602 he fled, with his wife and children, to Chalcedon, to escape the fury of the deformed and disfigured Phocas. He did not long remain in safety. By order of Phocas, he and his five sons were seized and executed. He was the last to die. As, one by one, the boys were murdered before his eyes, the father cried aloud, with each stroke of the sword, "Righteous art Thou, O Lord, and true is Thy judgement" (Ps. cxix., verse 137). Firm in his adherence to truth, he rejected the kindly fraud of the nurse, who gave her own child to save one of the royal princes, and thus supplied to Comeille the plot of Heraclius.
As Christianity spread and became a power, the Psalms occupy a larger, and still larger, space. Their use in public worship varied in different Churches. Custom prescribed the portions that should be read, or sung, or expounded; but they formed the substance of most of the daily services. "When other passages of Scripture," writes Ambrose, "are used in church, the words are drowned in the noise of talking. But when the Psalter is read, all are dumb." Still more striking was their use in daily life, as an expression of the feeling that God was everywhere present. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata (vii., sect. 7), says, "We praise God as we till our lands; we sing to Him hymns as we are sailing." Sidonius Apollinaris describes how the boatmen, toiling with bent backs to urge their laden barges against the stream, sang psalms till the riverbanks echoed their hallelujahs. "Any one possessed of his five wits," writes Ambrose, "should blush with shame if he did not begin the day with a psalm, since even the tiniest birds open and close the day with sweet songs of holy devotion." "Of other Scriptures," says Theodore of Mopsuestia, "most men know nothing. But the Psalms are repeated in private houses, in streets and market-places, by those who have learned them by heart, and feel the soothing power of their divine melodies." When Paula and Eustochium wrote from Bethlehem their famous letter to Marcella, they exhort her to flee from the tumults and distractions of Rome to the solitude of Christ's village. Here, they say, is the quiet of country life, unbroken save by the chanting of the Psalms. The ploughman, leaning on his plough-handle, sings in them his praises to God; the sweating reaper lightens his labours with the chanting of the Psalms; the vinedresser, as he prunes his vines, raises one of the songs of David. " The Psalms are our poetry, our love-songs, our pastorals, our implements of husbandry."'
If any records were preserved, it would probably be found that the Psalms profoundly influenced Christian homes in the early ages of the Church. But glimpses of the inner life of families are as rare as they would be precious. In the boyhood of Origen, one significant fact is recorded which proves that the Psalms had their part in the education of children. Jerome says that the boy learnt Hebrew so well that he vied with his mother, who was possibly of Jewish origin, in the singing of psalms. Better known, perhaps, than that of any other Christian household, is the domestic life of Gregory Nazianzen, the poet of Eastern Christendom, and one of the greatest of its orators and theologians. Gregory's mother, Nonna, a woman of ardent piety, born of a Christian family, 1 Hsec sunt in hac provincia carmina, hae, ut vulgo dicitur, amatorise cantationes, hie pastorum sibilus, haec arma culturae. " Letter to Marcella," Palestine Pilarims' Text Society [12]. and carefully trained in the faith, was "a housewife after Solomon's own heart" so her son describes her " submissive to her husband, yet not ashamed to be his guide and teacher." It was Nonna's constant prayer that her husband, Gregory, should become a convert, for, though a man of high character and exemplary life, he was a pagan. A dream inspired by a psalm, helped her to gain her heart's desire. Pagan though he was, her husband seems to have known the Psalms, for he dreamed that he was singing the words, " I was glad when they said unto me. We will go into the House of the Lord " (PS. cxxii.). impression too deep pass away awoke. After preparation, baptised, eventually became, forty-five years remained. Bishop Nazianzus (329-74). Gorgonia, daughter Gregory Nonna, though not baptised till short before lived Christian life. She long felt, says brother, desire ?depart with Jesus.? great longing, that produced presentiment approach anticipation time when place. looked for day found aged parents, husband, daughter, gathered round bedside. When taken leave each turn, bystanders thought she already dead. But once lips were seen move, watchers, stooping over bed, heard familiar their use an evening psalm, fitted close her earthly day, I will lay me down for death, the last verse became more dear to him, he would gladly sing, and hear sung, those soothing words, ? Ich lieg und schlafe ganz mit Frieden.? in peace, take my rest? (Ps. iv. 9). So died Gorgonia. The verse, it may be added, was by Luther. Writing from Coburg Ludwig Seuffel, asked compose him a requiem. From his youth, said, had always loved concluding verses of 4th Psalm. But, learned understand its full meaning, as hourly prepared>
Yet another instance is afforded by the death of Monica, the mother of St Augustine, whose patient perseverance in prayer, and reward in the life of her son, have comforted thousands of mothers in all ages of the world's history. On Easter Sunday, 387, Augustine had been baptised by Ambrose at Milan. In the summer he set out to return to Africa with Monica. At Ostia they paused to recruit from the fatigues of their long journey, and prepare for the coming voyage. Mother and son were leaning on the ledge of a window, which looked upon the garden where they lodged. Alone together, away from the crowd, God in his secret ways having so ordered it, they talked of the eternal life of the saints, and of what sort it should be, " panting with the lips of our souls for those heavenly streams of Thy fountain, the fountain of life which is with Thee." It is the moment chosen by Ary Scheffer for his famous picture:
"The dear consenting hands are knit, And either face, as there they sit, Is lifted as to something seen Beyond the blue serene."
To the mother it seemed that the purpose of her life was achieved, now that she had seen her one longing gratified and her son baptised a Christian. Five or six days later, while they were still waiting to embark, Monica was struck down by fever, and died in the fifty-sixth year of her age. It was in the Psalms that Augustine found comfort in his sorrow. When the first gush of weeping was over, his friend, Euodius took up the Psalter, and began to sing, the whole household joining with him, Psalm ci. " My song shall be of mercy and judgement; unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing," etc.
Forty-three years later, in his own city of Hippo, closely besieged by the Vandals, Augustine himself died. " It was," says his biographer, Possidius, " a plain and barely furnished room in which he lay. The seven Penitential Psalms were, by his orders, written out, and placed where he could see them from his bed. These he looked at and read in his days of sickness, weeping often and sore." So, with his eyes fixed on the Psalms, Augustine passed to his rest, August a8th, 430. It was with the words of a Psalm upon his lips, " Into Thy hands I commend my spirit" (Ps. xxxi., verse :6), that Basil the Great breathed his last at Cesarea, January ist, 379, his deathbed surrounded by citizens who were ready to shorten their own lives, if so they might lengthen the days of their Bishop. In 397, Ambrose lay dying at Milan. He had, as is well known, introduced into the Western Church the antiphonal method of chanting the Psalms which was practised in the East. Almost his last labour was a Commentary on Ps. xliv.: "It is painful to wait so long for the day when mortality shall be swallowed up of Life; but, happily the torch of the Word of God does not quit mine eyes." He died as he reached verse 23 : " Up, Lord, why sleepest thou: awake and be not absent from us for ever." Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), as the hour for Vespers approached, and the lamps were being lighted in the church which he had built, stretched forth his hands and passed away, repeating the words, "I have ordained a lantern for mine Anointed " (Ps. cxxxii. 18). With the same words on his lips, in June 444, died Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, whose life-long struggle for the purity of the Christian faith has been overshadowed by his alleged complicity in the hideous crime of the murder of Hypatia.
But if we pass from domestic or deathbed scenes to episodes of a more public character, the recorded instances of the influence of the Psalms are multiplied. No figure in the early history of the Church is more attractive than that of Origen (185-253). The son of a martyr, the master of disciples who braved martyrdom, himself a confessor who endured imprisonment and the torture of the chain, the collar and the rack, he dominated the century as much by his character as by his genius. In his childhood, as is told above, he vied with his mother in singing the Psalms, and his commentary upon them, his notes, and his homilies bore witness to their abiding influence on his mind. During the persecution of Severus, his father, Leonides, was beheaded, encouraged by Origen, then a lad of seventeen, to die without thought of those he left behind. The lad himself was only prevented from sharing his father's fate by being imprisoned in his own home. In after years, the persecutions which he endured from the State as a Christian scarcely exceeded those which, as a heretic, he suffered from the Church. Yet friends were as enthusiastic as enemies were bitter. Even those who compared him to Satan paid homage to his gifts by admitting that, if he had fallen from Heaven, his fall was like the lightning flash. Driven from Alexandria, he travelled from place to place, fascinating some by the splendour of his teaching, terrifying others by the boldness of his speculations. So journeying, as the story is told, he came to Jerusalem. Somewhere in his wanderings, even his intrepid spirit had recoiled from dread of torture. He had consented to sacrifice to Caesar; incense had been thrust into his hand, which was forced over the altar. Remorse overwhelmed him, when, at Jerusalem, he was entreated to preach. Taking the Psalter in his hand, he prayed, and, opening the book, read the words of Ps,_J^,vprsf Tfi- " But unto the ungodly said God: Why dost thou preach My laws, and takest My covenant in thy mouth ? " He shut the book, sat down speechless, and burst into tears. "The prophet David himself shut the door of my lips," was his bitter lament, as he applied to his apostasy the verse (Ps. Ixxx. 13), " The wild boar out of the wood doth root it up; and the wild beasts of the field devour it."
As the fourth century dawns, the long struggle between Paganism and Christianity entered its final stage. On the death-agony of the ancient faith, still enshrined among us by lingering superstitions and a thousand graceful fictions in art and literature, history is comparatively silent. But its downfall was marked by a period of moral relaxation and social corruption, which fostered the belief that it was the highest duty of a Christian to shun a polluted world. The longing to flee away and be at rest from the fury of persecution, and from the contamination of the heathen, encouraged the growing feeling. Solitude tempted some men as a refuge from spiritual danger; to others it appealed as a bolder challenge to the powers of evil; to yet another class it seemed to offer at once a shelter from the world/and the supreme test of self-denial. Of the ascetic principle, the most famous example was Antony (251-356), born in the lifetime of Origen, known throughout civilisation by the pictures of Caracci, Guido, and Salvator, and by the quaint legends that have gathered round his name. The influence which he and his followers exercised upon Christendom, and the impulse which they gave to the monastic life, are almost incalculable. A psalm was at once the weapon, the paean, and the rule, of two of the earliest leaders in the new movement.
Rich, young, and an orphan, Antony gave all his possessions to the poor, and devoted himself to the ascetic life. Unlike the anchorites who had preceded him, he retired to a distance from his fellow men. To combine in himself the special virtues, to which other ascetics had respectively attained, was his constant effort. To be as prayerful as one, as courteous as another, as patient of vigil and fast as a third this was the rivalry on which his ambitions were centred. There were times, for he was still young, when his enthusiasm failed, his courage flagged, and the temptations of the world and the flesh swept over him with all their storms. Yet still his faith triumphed over every assault. The Psalms were the weapons with which he met the evil tendencies that, to his over- wrought vision, presented themselves in material and often grotesque forms. It was, for example, with the words, "Some put their trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the Name of the Lord our God " (Ps. xx., verse 7), > that he put Satan to flight. It was with a psalm that he sang his paean of victory. So sorely beset was he within the ruined tower where he lived, so vehement were the sounds of the strife, that the multitude, which had gathered to see and hear him, believed that the saint was attacked by the people of the country. Suddenly the clamour ceased. High and clear rose the voice of Antony alone, as he chanted Ps. Ixviii. in triumph at his victory over his spiritual foes.
Is Browning's use of the same words an echo of St Antony? As Giuseppe Caponsacchi watches by the side of Pompilia, hears her moaning in her restless fevered dreams, and sees her wave away some evil spirit that threatens her, he cries:
" Oh, if the God, that only can, would help! Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends? ( Let God arise and all his enemies Be scattered" By morn, there was peace, no sigh Out of the deep sleep." 1
1 The Ring and the Book, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 1300-1304.
Among Antony's most distinguished disciples was Pambo. Eminent for his austerities, he had taken for his special rule of life the words of Ps. xxxix., verse i, " 1 said, I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not in my tongue," and, in his constant effort to keep the door of his lips, he is said to have excelled even Antony himself. Half in banter, half in earnest, Browning describes Pambo \ " arms crossed, brow bent, thought immersed," from youth to age pondering over the verse, and finding in the seeming simplicity of the command enough to absorb every faculty of mind and body, so long as life endured.
The influence of Antony and other hermits spread from Africa to Asia. Monastic communities multiplied rapidly, and in their religious services the Psalms held the chief place. Of such communities in Eastern Christendom, Basil (329-79) was the chief organiser. The secluded place, in which he himself fixed his own temporary retreat, lay on the banks of the river Iris, near NeoCesarea in Pontus a spot as beautiful in his eyes as " Calypso's Island." He describes the devotional exercises which his communities of monks practised. While it was yet night, the brethren rose, as in the days of persecution Christians had risen for concealment, entered the house of prayer, and, after confession to God, turned to the singing of psalms. Now, divided two by two, they answered each other; now, one led the chant, the rest following. Thus passed the night till the day began to dawn. As morning broke, they all in common, with one mouth and from one heart, lifted to the Lord the Psalm of Confession (Ps. cxviii.). As the day began, so it ended.
Nor was the fame of the Egyptian anchorites confined to the East. It crossed the sea to Europe. In Roman society, as the fourth century advanced, two opposite tendencies were equally marked. A startling contrast was presented between the unbridled luxury of the Imperial City and its inclination to the solitude and severity of monastic life. From 340 to 343 Athanasius, an exile and a fugitive, had found a refuge at Rome. The spell of his mastermind, his enthusiasm for the monks of the desert, the life of Antony, and the presence of two Egyptian anchorites, seized the imagination of Roman patricians. Slumbering fire leaped into flame, as Athanasius revealed the grandeur of human self abnegation, and he thus became, through Antony, the spiritual ancestor of Western monasticism.
A few years later, Marcella, a young and wealthy Roman widow, who had, as a child, heard from the lips of Athanasius descriptions of the Thebaid and of Antony, bade adieu to the world, and made of her palace on the Aventine Mount her cell, and of its garden her desert. Round her gathered a little knot of women, likeminded with herself, who devoted their lives to the study of the Scriptures, psalmody, prayer and good works. That they might sing the Psalms in the native tongue, they learned Hebrew; that they might study the Gospels, they learned Greek.
1 Jocoseria, Pambo.
Among the most illustrious of these women was the high born Paula, whose ancestors were the Scipios and the Gracchi, and in whose veins ran the blood of the half fabulous rulers of Sparta and Mycene. She and her daughters, Blesilla, Paulina, and Eustochium, and her granddaughter Paula, breathe and speak and move in the glowing pages of Jerome. To Paula's daughter, Eustochium, is addressed the first code of Christian virginity; to her stepdaughter, Lseta, is penned the first treatise on the Christian education of women.
Of the family of Paula, Jerome was at once the spiritual guide and historian. Born in 346, at Stridon in Dalmatia, on the southern slopes of the Illyrian Alps, Jerome had studied at Rome.' After his baptism he had settled at Aquileia, the Venice of the fourth century, the great seaport of the Adriatic, a city situated, as the Bordeaux Itinerary shows, on the highway by which pilgrims travelled from the West to the Holy Land. There his enthusiasm for study and his inclination towards asceticism grew stronger and stronger. His two favourite texts were, " But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law will he exercise himself day and night" (Ps. i., verse 2); and, " O that I had wings like a dove! for then would I flee away, and be at rest" (Ps. lv., verse 6). Where, except in solitude, could he gratify his longing or follow the law of the Lord night and day ? At last, as the Egyptian anchorites had fled from the lusts and anarchy of the world to find rest in the silence and discipline of the desert, so Jerome fled to the depths of the desert of Chalcis. In 382 he came to Rome, emaciated and weakened by the austerities of his life, but with his fiery impetuous spirit yet untamed. At Rome, he revised from the Septuagint the Latin version of the Psalms. There, too, he became the teacher of the devout ladies who assembled on the Aventine Mount at the house of Marcella.
In 385 he left Rome, where he had made many friends and not a few enemies. Convinced, as he says, that he had tried in vain to "sing the Lord's song in a strange land" (Ps. cxxxvii., verse 4), he embarked for Palestine. After him sailed Paula, heartbroken at the death of JBlesilla, and with Paula went her surviving unmarried daughter, Eustochium. They met Jerome at Antioch, wandered through Palestine, visited the Solitaries in the Nitrian desert, and finally settled at Bethlehem. There were built a monastery, of which Jerome became the head; a convent, presided over by Paula; a church, and a hospice for pilgrims. At Bethlehem in his site of the Nativity, energy till his death in 420. At Bethlehem, in this realised "City of the Saints," fauioiwed and died. Their efforts to induce - i-^Qin in the Holy Land, -' ^Hi
and who in gratitude became the healer's protector and faithful servant.
Years before the death of Jerome, Martin of Tours (316-96), whose influence on French history has been accepted by the most secular historians, whose fame not only spread to the most distant lands, but is commemorated in scores of quaint legends in provincial France, had founded a monastery in Gaul. The young soldier, who, at Amiens had divided his cloak with a naked shivering beggar, saw in a dream, Christ Himself clad in the halved garment. Accepting the dream as a call to religion, he was baptised, left the army, and enlisted under St Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, as a soldier of the Cross of Christ. During his friend's exile, he himself settled near Milan; but on Hilary's return to Gaul, Martin fallowed. In order to be near the bishop, and also in order" to'preach on the great Roman road 'from Poitiers to Saintes, he built the wooden hut at Ligug6, on the river Clain, five miles from Hilary's see, which is regarded as the earliest of French monastic institutions. By a strange coincidence, Rabelais, twelve centuries later, found refuge close to the Abbey Church of Ligug6, the cradle of that system which, in its decadence, he keenly satirised. From Liguge the fame of Martin spread to Tours, whose inhabitants were eager to have him for their bishop. Enticed from his monastery by a trick, Martin visited the city. Crowds had collected for the election. The vast majority favoured Martin; a few led by a bishop, named Defensor, objected to the meanness of his personal appearance, his unkempt hair, his squalid garments. It was by a verse from the Psalms that the election was decided. A bystander, opening the Psalter at hazard, read the verse, "Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, because of Thine enemies;
That Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger" (Ps. viii., verse a). In the version then in use, the words are, "Ut destruas inimicum et defensorem." The words were hailed as an omen. Defensor and his supporters were confounded, and Martin was consecrated Bishop of Tours (372). Two miles from the city he founded his majus monasterium, now Marmoutier, which eclipsed the fame of Liguge, and became the most celebrated of French monasteries.
Thus in Africa, Asia, and Europe a great movement had begun which, every year, assumed larger proportions. In the fourth century, multitudes of men and women, in solitary cells or monastic communities, sought a retreat from a world of conflict, change and persecution. That this should have been the case is not surprising. The time was one when the Te Deum of victory alternated with the Miserere of defeat, when the secular power first accepted religion as its ally, then endeavoured to employ it as a servant, and finally & acknowledged it as a master. Among the great ecclesiastics of the century no names stand higher than those of Athanasius, the impersonation of purity of faith; or of Basil, the upholder of order and discipline in the Church; or of Ambrose, the champion of ecclesiastical authority. With striking scenes in the lives of each, the Psalms are inseparably connected.
In October 346, Athanasius returned to Alexandria from his second exile. The people streamed forth to meet him . "like another Nile." Every point of vantage was crowded with eager spectators. The air, fragrant with the smoke of incense, and bright with the blaze of bonfires, rang with cheers and the clapping of hands. Nearly nine years of peace followed in the troubled life of Athanasius. But the interlude was only the lull which preceded the storm. The Emperor Constantius was in the hands of his Arian courtiers; a great majority of the Council of Milan (355) had condemned Athanasius; and it became evident that some violence would be attempted against the archbishop in his own city of Alexandria. The Psalms had been his constant study. His Exposition of the Psalms, his Titles of the Psalms, as well as his frequent allusions to them in his writings, prove how deep was their hold upon his mind. His favourite Psalm was the 7and. "Against all assaults upon thy body," he says, "thine estate, thy soul, thy reputation, against all temptations, tribulations, plots and slanderous reports, say this Psalm." So now, in the hour of his own and his people's danger, he turned to a psalm for help.
At midnight, on Thursday, February 8th, 356, Athanasius was holding a vigil in the Church of St Theonas. The building was thronged with worshippers preparing for the service of the morrow. Suddenly the church was beset by soldiers, and the clash of arms resounded in the precincts. "I thought it not right," says Athanasius, "at a time of such disorder, to leave my people. Rather I preferred to be the first to meet the danger." At the extreme east end of the church was the archbishop's throne. Sitting down upon it, Athanasius ordered the deacon to read Psalm cxxxvi., and all the people to respond with " For His mercy endureth for ever," and then to withdraw to their homes. The act of faith was hardly finished, when the doors were forced, and the soldiers rushed in, discharging their arrows, brandishing their swords and spears in the dim light of the building, as they crowded up the nave. "The clergy and the people," continues Athanasius, "prayed me to escape. I refused to move till all were in safety. So I stood up, called for prayer, and bade the people leave. Many had gone; others were trying to follow, when some of the monks and of the clergy came to my throne and carried me away. So then I passed through the crowd of soldiers unseen, and escaped, giving thanks to God that I had not betrayed my people, but had secured their safety before I thought of my own." But Athanasius only describes that part of the scene which had passed before his eyes. In the buildings that surrounded the church, there were fighting and slaughter. The dawn of day revealed lifeless bodies, and blood stained steps and passages; and Alexandria mourned not only the disappearance of the beloved archbishop, but the murder of many of her citizens.
Imperial tyranny failed to subdue the spirit of Athanasius, who confronted the world in order to assert the principle of the eternal Sonship of his Redeemer. Equally powerless was it against Basil, whose character inspired the genius of Hooker, and extorted the admiration of Gibbon. How great a share the singing of psalms held in the life of his monastic communities, has been already shown; and it was in part the awe that the sound of chanting inspired which saved him from the violence of Valens. On the feast of the Epiphany, 372, the emperor, surrounded by his guards, entered the chief church of Cesarea. At the eastern end of the nave, behind the altar, stood Basil, supported by his clergy. Tall, erect, his clear-cut features sharpened by his austerities, his bright eyes gleaming under his arched eyebrows, he faced the intruders with silent dignity. The emperor's presence was ignored. The service proceeded with the order and reverence which Basil had introduced. As the crowd of worshippers, who filled the building "with a sea of people," continued to chant the Psalms with an imposing volume of sound, the weak, excitable Valens almost fainted before the impression which the scene and sound created. The mind of the Arian despot was overawed, his eyes were dimmed, his nerves shaken, by the manifestation of a Divine Kingdom which was entirely regardless of his power. He abandoned the thought of violence, returned in peace, and, for a time, Basil reasserted over him the influence of his character.
Before the intrepidity of an Athanasius and a Basil, Constantius and Valens had recoiled. But though emperors had failed to subdue the spirit which great ecclesiastics represented, they had not acknowledged the supremacy of religion in the domain of conscience. That acknowledgment was made by Theodosius in the Cathedral of Milan, and in the words of a psalm his confession was clothed.
In 390, a well known and popular charioteer had been imprisoned by the Gothic governor of Thessalonica. The populace, careless whether the sentence "was just or unjust, clamoured for the release of their favourite. Their demand was refused, and a tumult arose, in which the governor and several of the magistrates were killed. Theodosius was determined that the punishment of the Thessalonians should he signal. The secret was well kept. The officials of the city summoned the inhabitants to the circus, as though they were to witness an ordinary spectacle; but, as soon as they were assembled in the arena, armed soldiers surrounded the place, and put to the sword every living being, man, woman, or child, who fell into their hands. In the massacre, seven thousand persons are said to have perished.
Horrified at the news, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, wrote to the Emperor Theodosius, urging him to throw himself as a penitent on the mercy of God. " Sin," he pleaded, " is effaced neither by tears nor by penitence: neither angel nor archangel can remove its stain; God, and God only, can take away sin. You have imitated David in your crime ; imitate him also in your repentance." For eight months Theodosius refused, and for eight months he was interdicted from the consolations of religion. At last he yielded. Conscience conquered pride, and he submitted to receive his sentence and his pardon from the Church. Prostrate on the floor of the Cathedral of Milan, with tears and lamentations, the emperor prayed in the words of the psalm (Ps. cxix., verse 25), " My soul cleaveth to the dust; O quicken Thou me, according to Thy word." The spiritual victory was complete, and its effect on the popular mind was deep and lasting. The new relations between the Church and the Empire were summed up by Ambrose in the trenchant phrase, " The Church is not in the Empire, but the Emperor is in the Church." The words were used of the religious sphere; but they might have been the text, on which the political and spiritual despots of the Middle Ages were the bold commentators, and to which the actions of a Gregory VII. or an Innocent III. form only the exaggerated conclusions.
In the sphere of human action, the power of the Psalms was great; but in the domain of thought, it would be probably found, if evidence could be traced, that their sway was equally universal. Take, for example, such a religious autobiography as the Confessions of St Augustine, and through the first nine books, which end with the death of Monica, follow the influence of the Psalms. From the beginning of the Confessions, opening, as they do, with the quotations, " Great is the Lord, and marvellous; worthy to be praised." " Great is Our Lord, and great is His power; yea, and His wisdom is infinite " (Ps. cxlv., verse 3, and cxlvii., verse 5), down to the "Prayer for his dead mother," with which the ninth book closes, there is scarcely a page without a reference to the same source.
"With my mother's milk," so says Augustine of himself, "I sucked in the name of Jesus Christ." Through all the wild excesses of his youth, the ambitions and intellectual wanderings of after life, the religious impressions of infancy remain distinct. His soul "longed after God"; it was "athirst" for Him. He never lost that passionate desire to know the living God, which bursts from his lips in the opening passage of the Confessions : " Thou madest man for Thyself, and the heart knows no repose till it rests in Thee."
Ever craving for something ideal and enduring, haunted by the solitude of his own mind, he obeyed the wild impulses of youth, pursued delights that appealed to his artistic or sensuous nature, sought distractions in objects pleasing to the eye, in games, theatres, or music, or in the indulgence of animal passion. Yet, tortured by reproaches of conscience, he reaped no harvest of repose; he only gleaned self loathing. Ambitious of worldly fame, he pursued with eagerness his studies of literature, of rhetoric, of the sciences. Still restless, he turned to higher and better things. The Hortensius of Cicero inflamed him with a passion for wisdom, " for Wisdom alone, as she might reveal herself." Yet, even under the mastery of this longing, he " turned to flee back from the things of earth to God."
In his eager quest for wisdom and truth, he sought them among the Manichees, who claimed the possession of rational knowledge, and derided the Christians for their blind belief. For nine 'years Augustine wandered in the mazes of their speculations, his intellect subdued by their subtleties, his imagination charmed by their symbolical interpretations of nature. Here, too, he found no abiding happiness; his faith in their system was gradually undermined. When, in 384 A.D., he came to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, he came embittered by a sense of deception, inclined to general scepticism, yet still asking of his soul the reason of its sadness and disquietude.
At Milan, Augustine fell under the influence of Ambrose. He loved the man, was charmed by his eloquence, and through his preaching learned to study the Old Testament. He was standing at the gate of the sanctuary; but a hard struggle was to be faced before he crossed the threshold. His mother Monica was now at his side. She had crossed the sea from Carthage to be with her beloved son, and her prayerful confidence in his ultimate triumph over doubt could not fail to influence his mind. Slowly the conviction came to him that the peace of God was not to be won by the mind alone. The lofty idealism of Plato turned his thoughts upward and inward; but it brought him no moral strength to raise himself from the earth. Then he gave himself to the study of the Bible, and especially to the study of "St Paul's Epistles. Here he learned the source of that power which enables men to embody high ideals in daily practice. In the pages of the Platonic writers he finds, as he says, no trace of the " humble and contrite heart," no " sacrifice of the broken spirit " (Ps. li. 17). No one sings there, " Truly my soul waiteth upon God; from Him cometh my salvation: He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my strong tower; I shall not be greatly moved " (Ps. Ixii., verses i, 2). " It is one thing," he continues, " to see afar off, from some tree clad height, the fatherland of peace, yet to find no path thither, and, struggling vainly towards it, to wander this way and that among wilds beset by the ambushments of lurking runagates, with their prince, the lion and the dragon (Ps. xci., verse 13). It is another thing to tread securely on a highroad that leads directly thither, built by the hand of the Heavenly Emperor, whereon no deserters from the celestial host lie in wait to rob the traveller, for they shun it as a torment."
His struggle grew in intensity till it became an agony. The flesh lusted against the spirit; the law in his members warred against the law of his mind, and held him captive. But the supreme crisis was not far distant. It came in September 386, in the thirty-third year of his age. He had thrown himself down in a retired corner of his garden at Milan, and there, under the shade of a fig tree, poured out a flood of tears. " How long, O Lord, how long ? " he cried. " How long wilt Thou be angry ? Oh remember not our old sins! " (Ps. Ixxix., verses 5, 8). As he prayed, he seemed to hear the voice of some boy or girl, which he knew not, repeating in a kind of chant, the words. Tolls, legs ! Tolle, lege.' " Take and read ! take and read!" "I checked," he says, "the torrent of my tears, and raised myself to my feet, for I received the words as nothing less than a Divine command to open the Bible, and read the first passage on which my eyes lighted." Was not Antony, of whose life he had recently heard, converted by a similar oracle of God ? Running to the spot where he had left his Bible, he snatched it up, opened its pages, and read the words: " Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof." The shadows of doubt were dispersed; the light of peace irradiated his heart; as he finished the sentence, he had neither desire nor need to read further.
The passage, as he read it in the ascetic spirit of the age, told him not only to renounce his wild life, but to forego his marriage, abandon the pursuits and honours of the world, and dedicate himself wholly to the service of Christ. The vintage holidays were at hand. As soon as they began, he resigned his office as a teacher of rhetoric, and withdrew to the hills above Milan to prepare for baptism. There he read and reread the Psalms, spending half the night in their study, and finding in their words the expression of his own deepest feelings the sad lament of penitence rising into the triumphant song of praise for the infinite mercy of God. " How, O God," he says, " did I cry unto Thee, as I read the Psalms of David, those hymns of faith and songs of devotion, which fill the heart against all swellings of pride. I was still but a novice in Thy true love, a beginner, keeping holiday in a country/ place with Alypius, like myself a catechumen, and with my mother in garb indeed a woman, but in faith a man, in the tranquillity of age, full of a mother's love and Christian devotion! How did I cry unto Thee in these Psalms! How did they kindle my heart towards Thee! How did I burn to rehearse them all over the world, if so I might abate the pride of man!"
It was especially the 4th Psalm that worked upon his mind:
" When I called upon Thee, Thou didst hear me, O God of my righteousness: Thou hast set me at liberty when I was in trouble; have mercy upon me, and hearken unto my prayer " (verse x). As he read it, he mourned over the Manichees, pitying their blind rejection of the antidote which might have cured their madness; " Would they could have heard, without my knowing that they heard, lest they should have thought it was on their account I spoke, what I cried as I read these words! In truth I could not so have cried, had I felt that they were watching. Nor, indeed, if I had used the very same words, could they have meant to them what they have meant to me, as they poured from my heart in that soliloquy which fell on Thine ears alone. For I trembled with fear, and I glowed with hope and great joy in Thy mercy, O my Father. Yea, joy and hope and fear shone in my eyes and thrilled in my voice, while Thy good Spirit turned to us, and said, ' O ye sons of men, how long will ye blaspheme Mine honour ; and have such pleasure in vanity, and seek after leasing ? ' " (Ps. iv., verse 2).
On Easter Sunday, April 24th, 387, Augustine was baptised by Ambrose at Milan, and at his baptism the 43rd Psalm was sung. Throughout his subsequent career his lifelong study of the Psalms may be traced. It is proved by his two commentaries on the book; by his vision of Ps. cxix., rising like a Tree of Life in Paradise ; by the inscription of Ps. xxxii. above his bed, that his eyes might rest upon the words at the moment of waking; by the closing scene of his life in the bare room within the walls of beleaguered Hippo. As Gregory Nazianzen began his Apologia against the Emperor Julian with a quota" tion from Ps. xlix.; as Ambrose was moved to write his treatise on the Duties of the Clergy, by the patience, simplicity, and contempt for riches which marked Ps. xxxix.; so Augustine chose for the motto of his work on " The City of God," the words, "Very excellent things are spoken of Thee, thou City of God " (Ps. Ixxxvii., verse a). That noble treatise (413-26), written, as it were, in the glare of burning Rome, expresses with glowing eloquence, his sense of the eternal destinies of the City of God. The same intense conviction of everlasting endurance amid decay, speaks in the inscription" Thy Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom " (Ps. cxlv., verse 13) which is written in Greek characters, unobliterated by time or enemies, above the portal of the church at Damascus, once a Christian cathedral, but now, for twelve centuries, a Mahomedan mosque. It is again the same conviction, that God's City, in the midst of an ephemeral world, stands firm for ever, which dictates the inscription in the Cathedral of Saint Sophia at Kieff, the oldest church in Russia, built by Yaroslaf in 1037. On the mosaics behind the altar is a colossal figure of the Virgin, bearing the inscription, <( God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed " (Ps. xlvi., verse 5).