YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE
COLLEGE OF MISSIONS LIBRARY
at the
YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL

• GATHEEING CLOUDS
A TALE OF THE DAYS OF ST. CHRYSOSTOM

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

DARKNESS AND DAWN;
Or, Scenes in the Days of Nero.
AN HISTORIC TALE.
8vo. $2.00.

LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
NEW YORK AND LONDON.

GATHERING CLOUDS

A TALE OF THE DAYS OF ST. CHRYSOSTOM

BY
FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D.
DEAN OF CANTERBURY
AUTHOR OP 'DARKNESS AND DAWN,' ETC.

NEW YORK
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND LONDON
1895

Copyright, 1895,
By F. W. FARRAR.

All rights reserved.

TROW DIRECTORY
i >r«D BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

FILIIS CARISSIMIS
R. A. F. E. M. F. F. P. F. I. G. F.
HANC CORRUPTS QUIDEM ECCLESLE
FIDEI TAMEN INCOLUMIS ADUMBRATIONEM
D. D.
PATER AMANTISSIMUS

PREFACE

In ' Darkness and Dawn ' I endeavoured to illustrate in
the form of a story an epoch of surpassing historical and
moral interest — the struggle in the first century between
a nascent Christianity armed only with 'the irresistible
might of weakness,' and a decadent Paganism supported
by the wit, the genius, the religion, the philosophy, the
imperial power, and all the armies of the world. I
showed that the victory of Christianity was won by virtue
of the purity and integrity which it inspired ; and that
nothing was able to resist a faith which placed the attain
ment of the ideal of holiness within the reach of the
humblest of mankind. I tried to show some glimpse — so
far as it was possible — of the frightful spiritual debase
ment for which a heathendom which had become more
than half atheistical was responsible ; and of the noble
characters which Christianity developed into a beauty till
then not only unattained, but unimagined, alike in the
high and in the low. So far as the historic outline was
concerned the picture was not an imaginative landscape,
but an absolute photograph. Every circumstance, every
particular, even of costume and custom, was derived
directly from the history, poetry, satires, and romances of

viii GATHERING CLOUDS
classic writers, or from the literature and remains of the
early days of Christianity. If I had not followed this
method I should not have been faithful to the main object
which I set before me.
I acknowledge with gratitude the kind reception
which was accorded to ' Darkness and Dawn ' by a large
number of readers ; and, from many communications
which have reached me, I trust that I did not wholly fail
in making my aim understood and appreciated. I did
not appeal to the ordinary novel-reader. I wished to
create an interest far deeper and higher than that of
passing amusement.
I dwell on this because my plan in the following pages
is closely analogous to that which I endeavoured to follow
in 'Darkness and Dawn,' though the truths which I
desire to illustrate and the characteristics of the age with
which I have to deal are altogether different.
I there showed the influences which enabled the
Church to triumph over the world : it is now my far
sadder task to show how the world reinvaded, and partly
even triumphed over, the nominal Church. I there
showed how the Darkness had been scattered by the
Dawn : I have here to picture how the Sun of Righteous
ness, which had risen with healing in his wings, was
overshadowed by many ominous and lurid clouds. ' Of
the Byzantine Empire,' says Mr. Lecky, 'the universal
verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single
exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form
that civilisation has yet assumed. . . . The Byzantine
Empire was pre-eminently the age of treachery. . . .

PREFACE jx

The Asiatic Churches had already perished. The Chris
tian faith, planted in the dissolute cities of Asia Minor,
had produced many fanatical ascetics, and a few illus
trious theologians, but it had no renovating effect upon
the people at large. It introduced among them a prin
ciple of interminable and implacable dissensions, but it
scarcely tempered in any appreciable degree their luxury
or their sensuality.'
The apparent triumph of Christianity was in some
sense, and for a time, its real defeat, the corruption of
its simplicity, the defacement of its purest and loftiest
beauty. Yet, however much the Divine ideal might be obscured,
it was never wholly lost. The sun was often clouded ;
but behind that veil of earthly mists, on the days which
seemed most dark, it was there always, naming in the
zenith, and it could make the darkest clouds palpitate
with light. No age since Christ died was so utterly
corrupt as not to produce some prophets and saints of
God. These saints, these prophets, in age after age,
were persecuted, were sawn asunder, were slain with the
sword by kings and priests; but the next generation,
which built their sepulchres, had, in part at least, profited
by their lessons.
' The Church,' said St. Chrysostom, ' cannot be shaken.
The more the world takes counsel against it, the more it
increases ; the waves are dissipated, the rock remains
immovable.' In reading this story, then, the reader will be pre
sented with an historic picture in which fiction has been

x GATHERING CLOUDS
allowed free play as regards matters which do not affect
the important facts, but of which every circumstance
bearing on my main design is rigidly accurate, or, at any
rate, is derived from the authentic testimony of contem
porary Pagans, and of the Saints and Fathers of the
Church of Go*d.
F. W. Farrar.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

 ? 
The Gathering Storm „

PAGE

II.

The Riot .

III.

The Agony, and the Consoler

. 15

IV.

Two Visitors by Night .

V.

The Hermit and the Boy

. 33

VI.

The Demoniac 

. -. 40

VII.

The Judgment on the City .

. 46

VIII.

The Thunderbolt averted .

. 53

IX.

Philip is baptised 

X.

xr.
XII.
The Presbyter 
XIII.
Two Archbishops ....
XIV.
Another Archbishop 
90
XV.
The Capture of Chrysostom
. 101
XVI.
Tales by the Way 
. 107
XVII.
XVIII.
The Emperor and Empress
. 126
XIX.
Guests at an Imperial Banquet .
. 135
XX.
First Impressions ... . .
144
XXT.
Anxieties and Troubles; Friends and Foe
s . 150
XXII.
164
Xll

GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
XXVIII. XXIX. XXX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV.
XXXVI.
XXX VII.
XXXVIII. XXXIX. XL.
XLL
XLII.
XLIII. XLIV. XLV.
XLVI.
XL VII.
XL VIII.
XLIX. L.
LI.

PAGE
Face to Face with Shams .... 178
The Consulship of Eutropius .... 187
The Goths  195

The Fall of Eutropius .
In Sanctuary .....
Inevitable Nemesis ....
Eutyches is Indignant
The Goths at Constantinople
The Doomed Three ....
Three Youths save Constantinople
The Massacre 
Gainas meets his Doom
Walamir and Eutyches .
His Murdered Father's Head
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Fresh Troubles ....
Bad Ecclesiastics and Base Plots
A Visit from Vigilantius
A Farewell
The Misdoings of Severian
' ecce iterum crispinus !
Epiphanius intervenes
Episcopal Conspirators
The Earthquake
Eudoxia's Statue
The Forged Sermon .
Intrigue Triumphant
Prolonged Agony
Driven Forth

203
•21.17
218
226234
245251
262
271 277285
295 308318329
340350363376386397409
410420425 435

CONTENTS

Xlll

LII. Conflagration .....
LHI. Dragged on his Way
LIV. A Reign of Terror .
LV. A Burning, Fiery Furnace
LVI. Eutyches and Philip in Profundis
LV1I. Gleams of Returning Dawn .
L.VIH. The Return of Kallias .
LIX. Walamir and St. Telemachus
LX. The Vengeance of Heaven
LXI. Philip and the Emperor .
LXII. Philip visits St. Nilus
LXIII. Philip and St: Jerome
LXIV. Philip and the Desposyni
LXV. Two Happy Bridals .
LXVI. Philip at Antioch
LXVII. The Exile at Cucusus
LXVIH. The Martyrdom
LXIX. A Last Visit to Arcadius
LXX. Affairs in the West
LXXI. Happy Children and Prosperous Days
LXXII. The Great Reparation .

PAGE 443 450 454457
463479488 493506517 523527532541544 549
555 565572581 584

L'ENVOI
LXXIII. The Good Count of the East

591

BOOK I

ANTIOGH

CHAPTER I
THE GATHERING STORM
Phoebese lauri domus, Antiochia
Turbida . . . et amentis populi male sana tumultu.
Ausonius, Ord. Nob. Urbium.
February 26, a.d. 387, was a memorable day in the fort
unes of Antioch, the loveliest and one of the most famous
capitals of the Eastern Empire.
On that morning a herald had proclaimed to the people
that, owing to the necessities of the imperial exchequer,
the great Emperor Theodosius had decided to levy a sub
sidy on the most opulent cities of his dominion ; and that
Antioch, renowned all over the world for her luxurious
prosperity, would be required loyally to pay her share.
The 'ignorant impatience of taxation' is inherent in
human nature, and there is no monopoly of it either in
modern times or in the British nation. If it was neces
sary that cities should be taxed in proportion to their
wealth, the contribution of Antioch would form a large
quota of the sum which had to be raised. She had Phoe
nicia to the south, and Asia Minor to the north. The rich
beauty of the vegetation which clothed her plain testified
to the unwonted fertility of her soil. Nowhere were more
blooming vineyards than those which clothed the slopes
of her Mount Silpius. The deep and rapid waters of her
river — the legendary Orontes — not only clothed the
banks with flowering masses of pink oleander and deli
cately scented jasmine, but also refreshed her groves of
laurel and myrtle and irrigated her gardens full of every
delicious fruit. Caravans from Mesopotamia and Arabia
brought to her all the riches of the East through the
passes of Lebanon. Her fresh lake and her rushing riv
ulets supplied her with fish and ample stores of food.
3

4 GATHERING CLOUDS
Ships from every port of the Mediterranean poured the
abundance of many lands into her harbour of Seleuceia.
Wealthy proprietors — Greeks, Romans, Jews, Syrians —
had thronged to her suburbs, to fix their voluptuous homes
in scenes where they could enjoy the soft western winds
which, even in winter, tempered her climate. There, in
courts and villas lustrous with marble and enriched with
the finest works of ancient art, they would loll on soft
couches beside fountains which cooled the summer heat.
No wonder that Antioch on the Orontes was one of
the favourite . residences of all who loved the delights
of effeminate indolence, diversified by wild dissipations of
thrilling excitement. And was not the delightful grove
of Daphne only five miles distant — enchanting Daphne,
with its rose-gardens and perennial fountains and abound
ing shades ? Who could be dull if he went there to watch
the Pagan pilgrimages which at one time had made it ' a
perpetual festival of vice ' ? The self-restraint of Chris
tianity had, indeed, controlled the ' Daphnic morals ' which
had once filled the sanctuary of Apollo with gayest revel
ries. Constantine's statue to his mother, St. Helena, had
usurped the reverence once given to the marble colossus
of the god of song. But the road to Daphne still passed
through gardens and palaces, and in the ten-mile circuit
of the old Paradise of Heathendom the possibilities of
pleasure and amusement were not yet utterly extinct.
But if the delightfulness of Antioch had made it the
chosen home of so many hereditary millionaires', success
ful merchants, and 'gorgeous criminals,' what was more
reasonable than the demand that the city should con
tribute its fair share to the urgent needs of the Empire ?
Theodosius was compelled to gratify his hungry soldiery
by some sort of donative, and that was impossible without
fresh taxation. It was not a question of choice, or of
display and luxury, but of dire necessity, if the army,
on which depended the defence of the whole Empire,
was to be kept in allegiance and good humour.
The soft Antiochenes did not see the matter in this
light. The proclamation of the imperial requisition had
been received in the most indignant spirit by the multi
tude assembled in the great Forum. Usually, all public

THE GATHERING STORM 5
business was accompanied by shouts, acclamations, and
intense excitement, and not infrequently by the jests and
witticisms for which the quick and volatile multitude
of Antioch was celebrated. But on the present occasion
there had been neither applause, nor shouts, nor jokes.
The grim silence struck chill into men's hearts, like the
hush before the outburst of a storm.
The governor of the city, who rejoiced in the sound
ing title of ' Count of the East,' had been accompanied
to the scene by all his high officials, and by his side sat
the most celebrated literary man of the day, the Pagan
sophist Libanius, the chief instructor of all the intellec
tual youths who aimed at oratorical distinction. Liba
nius was a native of Antioch, and, struck by the omi
nous stillness, the Count turned to him with uplifted
eyebrows, as though to ask for an explanation of the
strange phenomenon.
' This is something quite new to me,' said Libanius.,
' When a multitude is too sullen even to roar or hiss
there is room for anxiety. " I fear lest from this silence
calamity should burst forth."'
' Tush ! ' said the angry Governor. ' It is only another
phase of the foolery of this mongrel population of Syrians,
Greeks, and Jews. I beg pardon of your patriotism,
Libanius, but you are too cosmopolitan not to recognise
that the ordinary Antiochene is an amalgam of frivolity
and prejudice.'
'This subsidy will heavily tax their resources,' said
the orator.
' Nonsense ! ' said the Governor. ' A little haemorrhage
will do all the good in the world to their plethora.
Do the fools think they can have all the privileges of
government for nothing? To what do they owe their
wealth, if not to the decade of peace and economy which
the great Theodosius has secured for them ? And yet
they murmur at this very modest proposal. They treated
your friend, the Emperor Julian, in just the same way.
He asked for necessary funds, and they yelled at him in
the Circus, "Plenty of everything; everything dear!"
What would happen to the Empire but for our strong
Emperor ? It would break into fragments, like the

6 GATHERING CLOUDS
vertebrae of a serpent which an eagle has dropped out of its
talons, and each vertebra would turn into a new serpent to
sting all the rest. Here are the Goths and the Isaurians
and the Vandals, and I know not how many nameless bar
barians, hanging on all our frontiers and threatening to
merge us in floods of ignorance and rapine. After the
defeat of Adrianople there seemed to be nothing between
us and destruction. Theodosius has given us peace, unity,
fiscal reform, and wise administration. But for him Anti
och would have been more surely laid in ruin long ago than
by the worst of her earthquakes.'
' He might economise,' said Libanius.
'Nay,' said the Count, 'you are not fair to him, Libanius.
You are a Pagan, and he has done more to suppress the
worship of the old gods than anyone since Constantine.
This requisition is in reality a signal proof of his economy.
This is the ninth year of his reign, and, nominally, the fifth
year of the boy Arcadius. You know that on such anni
versaries every soldier in the army expects to receive five
gold pieces. The sum required would drag a Croesus into
the mire. It cost the young Valentinian sixteen hundred
pounds of gold. It was to avoid the necessity for two
ruinous donatives that Theodosius determined to antedate
by a year his own decennalia, and unite them with the
quinquennalia of his son. The poor are already overtaxed.
What could he do but turn to the rich ? '
' Let us get back to the Prsetorium,' said Libanius hur
riedly. ' I don't like the look of the mob and their sinister
silence.' ' Oh ! it is nothing,' said the Governor. ' Half an hour
hence they will be roaring for the Green or the Blue fac
tions of charioteers in the Circus, or crowding round a
sword-juggler in the street of Tiberius.'
'Nevertheless, let us hurry back,' said Libanius. ' There
have been riots in Alexandria, and it required strong
measures to put them down.'
The party of officials, surrounded by their small but
glittering escort, made its way to the PrBetorium, which
was at no great distance. Libanius was in bad spirits.
' Look,' he said, ' at yonder grim, gigantic head on the
slope of Mount Silpius.' He pointed to the Charonium

THE GATHERING STORM 7
which stood out in the sunshine, but cast a dark shadow
on the mountain behind. 'The huge features seem to
frown terribly on this lovely city.'
'Sheer imagination!' said the Governor; 'but — what
is that?' One of the imperial archers, who had been posted at the
omphalos in the centre of the Colonnade of Antiochus
Epiphanes, came running up to the Governor's escort at
full speed and in obvious alarm.
' What means this rudeness, you white-faced coward ? '
said the captain of the escort to him in a stern voice.
' Where are your manners ? Do you want to know the
feel of the rhinoceros-hide round your shoulders ? '
'No more coward than you, sir captain,' said the archer;
' but this is no time to bandy words.'
' What is the matter ? ' asked the Governor, who had
overheard the brief altercation. ' Bring the archer here.'
'The city is in an uproar, my lord,' said the man,
stepping forward. ' Listen ! '
They listened, and there came to their ears a dull
roar like the sound of many waters. It was the angry
hum of voices, broken every now and then by cries
for vengeance. The Count of the East looked uneasy;
the fine features of Libanius had settled into the deepest
pallor. ' Is the crowd dangerous ? ' asked the Governor.
' Most dangerous,' answered the soldier. ' This is no
mere faction fight of the amphitheatre. I was standing
by the statue of Apollo, in the Tetrapylon, when fierce
groups came surging from Singon Street in one direction
and Herod's Colonnade in another, in mad rage. I never
heard so many hot curses in my life, and I have heard a
good many. A yelling mob was gathered round the statue
of the " Fortune of Antioch," calling down the vengeance
of the gods with uplifted hands. Only one man tried to
allay the excitement. It was John the Preacher ; and
though all the Christians love him, and even the Jews and
Pagans respect him, his words were of no avail. If some
of the Church-people had not forced him away he would
have been half torn to pieces by the mob. Hark, my
lord ! I see them in the distance, I hear the trampling of

8 GATHERING CLOUDS
their feet. In ten minutes more they will be upon you.
Take refuge in the palace.'
' Is it the riff-raff of the Forum ? '
'No, your Excellency,' said the archer. 'I saw some
of the chief men of the city among them, even senators
and old officers of the army. The whole city is in wild
fury.' ' Make your way home with all speed by back streets,'
said the Count to Libanius. ' Captain, take a dozen of
my escort, ride under the wall to the Golden Gate, and
make your way to Daphne. To the palace, soldiers ! '
He drew the sword with which he was girded in sign
of his office, and the escort rode at a gallop, across the
bridge which spanned the Orontes, into the gorgeous palace
of the old Seleucid kings, which was used as the residence
of the Governor. They were not a moment too soon.

THE RIOT

CHAPTER II
THE RIOT
Continuoque animos vulgi et trepidantia bello
Corda licet longe prEesciscere. Veug. Georg. iv. 69.
The gates were closed, and some twenty resolute sol
diers stood on guard outside. With spears and drawn
swords they kept the threatening mob at bay. The for
eign athletes and adventurers who formed the mass of the
crowd, though bent on mischief, were worthless cowards,
and did not like the look of bare steel.
' Let us away to the Baths of Caligula,' shouted one of
the rioters ; and the multitude, with an answering shout,
rushed off towards the valley of the torrent Parthenius,
near which the Baths were built. Rushing in tumultu-
ously, they swept the attendants before them, smashed the
benches, broke the taps, daubed the frescoes with mud,
tore down the candelabra, broke off the heads and noses of
the statues, hacked at the trees in the grounds with axes,
and in ten minutes committed ravages which it took years
to repair.
When they had wrecked the Baths the furious mob
streamed back to the palace. The little band of soldiers
still stood before the gates. The captain kept a brave
mien, though he saw that it would be hopeless for his
handful of comrades to hold out against the rush of
thousands. ' What do you want ? ' he called in stentorian tones to
the foremost rebels.
' The Governor ! the Governor ! ' they shouted.
' He is no longer here,' said the captain. And this was
true, for, as he had no troops at hand, the Governor had

10 GATHERING CLOUDS
availed himself of the brief respite to escape by a back
way, and ride off to summon a detachment of guards,
who were encamped near the grove of Daphne to prevent
the disorders which frequently arose from the contending
jealousies of Christians and Pagans.
'Then look out for yourselves,' yelled the mob, 'for
we mean to burst in ! '
' Open the doors, men ! ' said the captain. ' I will
enter last. When we are in, close them, and escape.'
The soldiers with swift discipline executed the manoeu
vre ; and no sooner had the captain stepped inside than
the sound was heard of the heavy bolts and bars being
shot into their places.
But the mob was not so to be baffled. They rained
blows upon the gates with axes and hammers, and at last
improvised a battering-ram from the top of a marble
bench, until the oaken valves were shattered and fell
inwards with a crash. Through the courtyard the people
rushed into the great Hall of Judgment. It was empty,
but the awe of the place, where they had heard so manjr
sentences of death passed upon offenders, fell for a few
moments on their minds. Round the chair of state at
the back of the apse, in which the Count of the East
often sat with his assessors, rose the bronze and marble
statues of the imperial family. Highest of all, with the
diadem round his brow, the arm outstretched as though
to give command, clad in the cuirass with the Gorgon
head at its centre, towered the figure of Theodosius.
Beside the statue of the Emperor stood that of Flaccilla,
the beloved consort whom he had so recently lost, whose
gentle nature had always exercised a beneficent sway over
his tempestuous impulses. On either side of them were
the smaller statues of their two sons — Arcadius, a boy of
nine, and Honorius, a child of five.1 A little on one side
was the statue of Count Theodosius, the brave father of
the Emperor. After saving the East from imminent peril,
he had fallen a victim to the jealous ingratitude of the
Emperor Valens, and deserved the remorseful homage of
every loyal subject, whether in the East or West.
1 Considerable uncertainty hangs over the exact dates of the births of
Arcadius and Honorius.

THE RIOT 11
The 'divinity which doth hedge a king' surrounded
with tenfold protection the majesty of a Roman emperor.
He was the one bulwark between civilisation and chaos.
It is true that since the days of Constantine, as before them,
the reigns of these Caesars and Augusti had been brief, and
their fate for the most part terrible. In the three centuries
which had elapsed between Julius Caesar and Constantine
there had been sixty-two emperors, so that their average
reigns had scarcely exceeded five years. Of these sixty-
two, no less than forty-seven had died violent deaths.
Forty-two had been murdered, three had committed suicide,
one had perished in a rebellion, two had abdicated, one
had been drowned, one had mysteriously disappeared.
Eleven only of the entire number had died in the ordinary
course of nature. Nor had the state of things been much
better in the eighty-seven years which had elapsed since
the death of the first Christian emperor. Their super
human exaltation continued to be nothing but a dizzy
precipice. A glance at their fates reveals a perfect Iliad
of disasters. Constantine, indeed, had died in his bed, but
not until he had imbrued his hands in the blood of his
eldest son, Crispus. Of Constantine's three sons, Con-
stantius inaugurated his reign by a massacre of the seed-
royal ; Constantine II. perished in attempting to invade
the realm of his brother Constans ; Constans was murdered
by his own soldiers ; Gallus was beheaded by Constantius ;
Constantius died while hurrying to suppress the revolt of
Julian ; Julian, at thirty-seven, fell, perhaps by the arrow
of one of his own soldiers ; Jovian, at thirty-two, was suf
focated by the fumes of a brasier in a half-finished house ;
Valentinian I. died in a burst of fury at an imaginary in
sult ; his brother Valens was burnt to death in the terrific
rout at Adrian ople ; both his sons were murdered — Gratian
at twenty-four, Valentinian II. at twenty. Of his succes
sors, two only in the entire century had died by natural
and untroubled deaths ; and of their widows and families,
not a few perished by poison, despair, or broken hearts.
As the prophet Hoshea says in describing a similar epoch,
'blood touched blood' on the crimson footsteps of the
throne. Such had been ' the sad stories of the deaths of kings ' ;

12 GATHERING CLOUDS
yet the awful sacro-sanctitude of the imperial person was
ideally unimpaired, and the spirit of the old Lex Majesta-
tis still haunted the minds of men. Was not the emperor
the lord of the universe?
What would have happened next no one can tell.
Perhaps the mere emblems of imperial power might have
been sufficient to restore the people to their senses, and to
convince them of the futility of a riot for which it was as
certain as destiny itself that they would be called to give
a heavy account. But now an incident occurred which
swept to the winds all remorse and all moderation ; for
suddenly a stone flew over the heads of the mob, and, with
a sharp ring, struck the cheek of the statue of Theodosius.
A boy had flung it in mere gaiety of heart. To the boys
of Antioch the riot had only been a wild and more than
usually exciting holiday. They had not the smallest sense
of the seriousness of that day's proceedings. Were not
their fathers, and even their schoolmasters — yes, and even
some of the senators, amid the throng? Surely they must
know what they were about, and it was not for the boys
to spoil the fun. They could shy stones if they could do
nothing else ; and was not that lordly bronze statue a quite
irresistible cockshot?
A shout of laughter followed the ring of the bronze
when the stone so effectually struck its mark ; but it was
drowned by savage cries of 'Down with the Spaniard!
Down with the tyrant ! Down with the usurer ! ' as the
mob now swarmed on to the judgment seat, and began to
strike the imperial statues with every implement whicli
they could improvise. The effigies of the two young
princes being the smallest, were naturally the first to be
dashed off their pedestals, and were soon battered into
shapeless masses.
' I have got the nose of His Majesty Arcadius,' boasted
one man. ' And I have got a curl of his Supreme Baby-
dom Honorius,' said another. 'I beat you both,' said a
third, ' for I have got one of the Spaniard's hands entire,
and shall keep it as a relic. I warrant you no crown gold
shall be put in it for his favourite Goths.'
The statue of Flaccilla was the next to fall, and neither
the piety, the purity, nor the unassuming good temper of

THE RIOT lg
the dead Empress, nor the keen recent sorrow of the
Emperor for his bereavement, were sufficient to protect
her image from the brutal insults of the mob. But the
worst indignities were reserved for the statue of the
Emperor himself. They tore off the bronze diadem, and
smashed it to pieces. They beat off the arms. They drove
the eyes in with the sharp end of hammers. The eques
trian statue of the Count his father was treated with equal
contumely. They pelted, and battered, and tore it down,
amid shouts of ' Defend thyself, great cavalier ! ' After
they had trampled and tripudiated on all five statues to
their hearts' content, they tied ropes round the shattered
hulks, and dragged them in triumph along the red granite
flags of the main street and the white slabs of Herod's Col
onnade, finally flinging them in undistinguishable fragments
at the base of the statue of the tutelary genius of their city.
Encouraged by impunity, the fiercest spirits of the
multitude meditated still more irreparable misdeeds. It
was a common thing in Alexandria to add terror to a
sedition by a fire. Why should they not try the same
at Antioch?
'How shall we answer for it to the Emperor?' asked
a timid voice.
' May all the gods and goddesses confound him ! '
shouted a Pagan rioter in the crowd named Hernias.
' Why cannot we revolt to Maximus, as Berytus has
threatened to do?' called a voice.
' The burgher Aretas has counselled submission, the
coward ! Let us burn his house ! ' shouted Hermas, who
was in a state of wild excitement.
The counsel was adopted. Lighted torches began to
appear, as though by magic, in many hands, and some
began to fling them into the windows of the public build
ings, and to do their best to kindle a conflagration in which
the glorious city might have been irretrievably damaged.
But, happily, at this moment a cry arose of ' The archers !
the archers ! ' and the steady march of armed men was
heard approaching from the Golden Gate. The Governor
had galloped full speed to the camp at Daphne, and was
returning at the head of an entire company. The news
spread like lightning, and the crowd slank off in every

14 GATHERING CLOUDS
direction. Most of them did not offer the faintest show
of resistance, but fled the moment they caught sight of
the glittering uniforms and the bent bows. A few only
of the more resolute, who had seized swords or clubs, held
their ground in the Tetrapylon, half sheltered by the
pillars of the intersecting colonnades and by the pedestals
of the numerous statues. Headed by Hernias, they made
a sudden rush on the troop, and struck a dozen men bleed
ing to the ground. But the indignant archers let fly a
shower of arrows among them, and when the crowd saw
some fifty rioters fall to the earth, pierced through and
through, they raised a yell of terror, and fled with wild
precipitation. In the course of half an hour not a man
of them was visible anywhere. They had taken refuge
in their houses and barred the doors and lattices. The
archers paraded the empty streets. The riot had only
lasted three hours. By noon all was over, and Antioch
lay like a city of the dead.

THE AGONY, AND THE CONSOLER 15

CHAPTER III
THE AGONY, AND THE CONSOLER
Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days ?
Isaiah xxiii. 7.
It is difficult to describe the agony of terror which fell
on the wretched inhabitants of the gayest city of the East
when they awoke to a sense of the folly into which they
had been driven. These soft Syrians had no real leaders
and no settled purpose of rebellion. They had simply
yielded to a childish impulse of vexation. They had
rebelled against an increase of taxation which might be
burdensome, but was by no means intolerable. Indeed,
multitudes now pressed forward, anxious to pay the tax
at once. How infinitely wiser would it have been for the
people of Antioch to submit to the inevitable ! In the
dark hours of the night, and the dreary silence of a city
reduced to torpor by paralysing fear, they cursed their
insane folly, and gnawed their tongues for very anguish.
For now, what had they to expect ? They had exposed
themselves, a defenceless prey, to the fury of him whom
they might contemptuously call ' the Spaniard,' but who
was a just and lenient emperor, to whom the whole of
the East and the West owed the deepest debt of grati
tude. Theodosius was the sole barrier between them and
the flood of barbarians which was already beating with the
first restless waves of an overwhelming tide against the
confines of the Empire. Nay, not only against its con
fines; for the mingled pusillanimity and infatuation of
Valens had admitted a multitude of Goths across the Dan
ube, and the result of the infamous manner in which they
had been starved and oppressed was that massacre of
Adrianople, which was a more overwhelming catastrophe

16 GATHERING CLOUDS
to the Empire than the old disaster of Cannse. The
Emperor might be but a mortal, and the purple was no
protection against the dagger-thrust ; but the power of the
Empire, which for the time being he represented, was
invincible, and what was to prevent him from obliterating
Antioch from the face of the earth, and sowing with salt
the furrows which would be driven over her mounds of ruin?
There was something awful in the contrast between the
city in its normal condition and under the black cloud of
depression which now settled on her inhabitants. Usually,
the busy hum of life did not cease till the scent of the
lilies and jasmines breathed through the starry twilight.
Through the colonnades bright with innumerable lamps
the light-hearted crowd of many nationalities, and in
bright costumes, used to roam about, far on into the night,
laughing, chatting, love-making, buying, selling, and feast
ing their eyes on the splendour of the bazaars. But now
the streets were deserted, and, if any were seen abroad,
they hurried along with timid and stealthy tread, like
ghosts, casting furtive glances to the right or left. And
if in some byway one or two chanced to meet, they only
stopped for a moment to ask if there were any news, or to
speculate on the nature of the punishment which awaited
the city, and might bring on many an individual some
frightful death at the hands of the executioner. Even
these hurried communications were rare; for many were
implicated in the common guilt, and no one knew how to
trust a neighbour, who might turn out to be an informer.
Wild stories of portent were passed from lip to lip. Men
had seen a spectral woman, tall and horrible, passing
through all the streets with a whip, which she cracked in
the air with terrific noise. Surely they must have been
the victims of a demoniacal possession ?
And on the third day after the riot the spell of terror began
to be broken by the anguish of retribution. The Count of
the East, knowing that he would be held responsible for
the deadly insult which had been inflicted on the Emperor,
determined to show his indignation by ruthless vengeance.
Men told each other in terrified whispers that either there
had been spies of the Government among the rioters, or
that some were turning informers to save their own lives.

THE AGONY, AND THE CONSOLER 17
Decurions of archers, each with his little band of ten, were
not only patrolling the streets, but were seen to stop every
now and then at different houses, and to lead away with
them some prisoner in chains. Even boys were arrested
and dragged to the Justice Hall, and the street would be
startled by the wild shriek of a mother who saw her bright
lad led away to a trial which was nearly certain to end in
death. Next day the trials began. No advocates appeared.
The evidence was quickly taken down; the sentences were
summary and frightful. The commonest doom was decap
itation, but some, and even boys among them, were sen
tenced to still more appalling forms of death. The very
first to be condemned was Hermas, who had been one of
the most passionate and determined leaders of the entire
riot. After a trial of less than five minutes he was sen
tenced to be flung to tigers in the amphitheatre.
Except the Count and his assessors, scarcely anyone
dared to be even a listener in the vast Preetorium, where
the battered fragments of statues and the signs of violent
damage bore silent but eloquent testimony to the ferocity
of the insurgents. Only outside the door stood groups of
women, like spectres, clad in the garments of woe.. Their
cheeks hollow and bathed in tears, and their long, dis
hevelled tresses defiled with dust, might have melted the
iciest heart.
The agony of two women was long remembered. Their
sons were boys of fourteen, and some abject sycophant had
sworn that he saw them pelting the sacred statues with
showers of stones. They, on the other hand, swore that
they were going to the class of their teacher when the rush
of the crowd swept them away before it, and that they sim
ply stood in the hall watching the scene, and had not flung
a single stone at the statues ; though, being Christians,
they had for fun tried to hit the Gorgon head on a statue
of Athene in a recess behind the judge's chair. But the
Governor had not recovered from the wrath he felt at
having been driven to escape out of the back door of his
own palace, and he condemned both boys to death.
One of them was led out first, and his mother cried
eagerly to the archer who held his fettered hands : ' He is
innocent ; has he been set free ? '

18 GATHERING CLOUDS
' He will be, soon enough,' said the archer brutally ; for
the men had been rendered callous by the fate of some of
their comrades who during the riot had been beaten or
stoned to death by the mob.
' How is he to die ? ' she faintly asked.
' By wild beasts in the amphitheatre,' said the archer.
' There will be a fine sight for some of you, and it will teach
you a lesson.'
With a shriek the mother sprang forward and flung her
arms round the boy's neck ; but she was repulsed by the
archers, and during the little struggle which ensued the
second boy was led out.
' Is he to die, too ? ' asked his mother, with a face pale
as ashes.
' Yes.'
' By the lions ? '
'No, he is to be burnt in the amphitheatre. Antioch
will not be in such a hurry to revolt again,' said the
archer. But the poor woman did not hear the taunt. The
shock of horror had killed her. She had fallen dead into
the arms of her frieijds.
Those frightful sentences were carried out, and many
more. Even the innocent were burnt with torches and
beaten with leaded whips to make them give evidence.
Few witnessed the horrid scenes except the executioner.
The chill had struck so deep into the hearts of the Antio-
chenes that they were too dejected to haunt the Circus
or the Amphitheatre, which ordinarily were their chief
resorts. Yet, if they looked out from their houses by night
they saw the gruesome spectacle of prisoners, often among
the wealthy and noble, led away by torchlight between
two lines of soldiers, loaded with chains, and scarcely able
to drag themselves along from the effects of torture. They
were sometimes followed by wives or daughters, who wrung
their hands in speechless agony. All who were able fled
from the city. The brigands who infested the neighbour
hood took advantage of this, and the Orontes daily swept
along its waters the corpses of men who had fled from
uncertain dangers to certain death.
Six days after the riot it was announced that John, the

THE AGONY, AND THE CONSOLER 19
great Christian preacher, who in later years was to be
known by posterity as St. Chrysostom,1 or the Golden-
mouthed, intended to address the people in the Church of
St. Babylas ; and knowing that they would be safe from
immediate molestation in that sanctuary, and longing for
courage and consolation in the sick agony of their fear, the
people thronged there in thousands.
It was a church built in the shape of an octagon and
roofed with wood from the grove of Daphne. The audi-
' ence stood, and the building was crowded to the doors.
Many were unable to enter', and there was not a vacant
square foot in the church, except within the rails of the
presbytery. After a brief and mournful Litany, John came
forward, and a deep hush fell over the congregation.
He was short of stature, and therefore did not address
them from the pulpit, but from the ambo ; yet the im
pression left by his appearance was one of great dignity.
Let us look at him, as he pauses for a moment and glances
round on the upturned faces of the multitude, whose hearts
he was about to bend and sway as the breeze bends and
sways the river reeds, or makes the yellow corn ripple
before its breath into waves of light and shadow.
He was at this time about forty years old, and his voice
was yet fresh, for he had only been ordained presbyter
the year before. For six years he had been deacon ; but
the duties of a deacon were not to preach, but to attend
to the affairs of the Church, and look after the poor. On
the other hand, he was already well known as a man of
distinction by his writings, and as a man of sanctity by his
ascetic life.
He began in a low and unimpassioned tone, but from
the first his voice, clear and resonant, and reaching to the
farthest corner of the building, arrested eager attention.
It was an eminently sympathetic voice, of which the accents
were thrilled through and through with the emotions of
the speaker. He never shrank from a quaint phrase or a
humorous illustration if it came into his mind ; nor were
smiles, and even laughter, deemed derogatory in those
1 We find the name ' Chrysostom,' or ' Golden-mouth,' first given him
by St Isidore of Hispala before .a.d. 636; but Theodosius II. is said to
have applied the term to him before the middle of the fifth century.

20 GATHERING CLOUDS
days to the sacredness of the House of God, provided only
that they were not caused by vulgar buffoonery or trivial
ity. But if he could, as often as he chose, make the faces
of a thousand listeners flash with smiles, he could within
a few moments make them white again with tears. At
one moment his sarcastic banter would make them blush
for their own hypocrisy ; now some winged arrow of con
viction would pierce their hearts, and now he would break
into plain thunderings and lightnings, and the boldest
would cower before his fulminant denunciations. Two
things instantly struck those who heard him : one was
the utter fearlessness of the man, the other his absolute
sincerity. As to his courage, it was impossible to hear him long
without the conviction that ' he feared man so little because
he feared God so much.' It was evident that here was no
silken Pharisee absorbed in ceremonial functions, no self-
seeking opportunist euphuistically ' steering through the
channel of no-meaning between the Scylla and Charybdis
of Yes and No.' If he thought it right and needful to
say a thing, no ulterior consideration would ever prevent
him from saying it. He left intrigue, and soft manipula
tions of the truth, and sounding utterances which said
nothing, to multitudes of sleek and popularity-mongering
priests, who were always ready to answer men according
to their idols. The one thing — the only thing which John
cared for — was truth. The one thing which he despised
was compromise ; the one thing which he dreaded was to go
before the God of the Amen, the God of eternal and essen
tial verities, with the unclean sacrifice of a lie in his right
hand ; the one thing which he desired was to see the things
that are, and to see them as they are. A firm believer in
the great truths of Christianity, to which he had been
converted either from heathendom or from indifferentism,
he yet held that theology was valueless unless it were
made the stepping-stone to godly living. That which
most overwhelmed him with its inherent majesty was the
grandeur of the moral law, and he regarded dogmas and
observances as altogether lighter than vanity itself, unless
they produced the fruits of a holy life.
The sense of his sincerity was deepened in the minds of

THE AGONY, AND THE CONSOLER 21
his hearers by his entire disdain for the allurements of the
world. He did not shrink from the world's power, for he
was indifferent to its smile. What could the world give
him ? Did not every man in Antioch know that he was
of noble birth on both sides, and that when he had begun
a public career he had dazzled all by his wit and eloquence
to such an extent that Libanius said he would have named
him his successor if the Christians had not stolen him ?
But though he then had the world at his feet, he had
yielded to the impulse of a soul to which earth had become
as nothing because God had become all in all,, and had
adopted the life of a recluse. The influence of his mother,
Anthusa, who, though left a widow at an early age, had
devoted the whole remainder of her life to his service, had
barely prevented him from at once becoming a hermit.
She had taken him by the hand, and led him into the room
in which he first saw the light, and by her tears and en
treaties had persuaded him to live at home with her, though
he practised at home all the austerities of the severest an
chorite. His modesty, and his tremendous sense of the
dignity of the priesthood, led him to avoid the perilous
honours of the episcopate when they were thrust upon him.
This showed his superiority to the temptations of earthly
honour ; and when Anthusa, unwilling any longer to re
sist the bent of his desires, had withdrawn her opposition,
he had gone to the mountains, and there, with no other
home than a cave, had devoted himself to such severe studies
and such stern discipline as to have subdued and annihi
lated the desires of the flesh. Ha. had, indeed, brought on
such perilous indisposition that he was compelled to return
to the city, lest he should become guilty of throwing his
life away. The saintly Bishop Meletius — ' the honey-
named and honey-natured,' as his friend Gregory of Nazian-
zus called him, who was so beloved that his portrait was
still in every house — had ordained him a reader in 3.81 ;
and a year before the riot he had been admitted to the priest
hood by Bishop Flavian, who had succeeded Meletius in the
disputed patriarchate.
Such was the man who now stood up in the ambo to re
prove, to exhort, and to console the miserable people. It
was useless to speak to them on other subjects till he had

22 GATHERING CLOUDS
calmed the tumult of their minds ; but from the first sen
tence he uttered he had cast his spell upon them, and as
his voice now swelled into hurricane, and now sank to a
whisper, no other sound was audible, except an occasional
storm of sobs from the listening multitude. It was cus
tomary to applaud in the churches, but on this and subse
quent occasions the attention of the audience was riveted,
and they would not run the chance of missing a word. In
his later homilies during this crisis there were a few timid
outbursts of acclamation; but they were instantly dis
countenanced by the preacher. They paid him that spell
bound attention which speaks a thousandfold more for the
power of the orator than the superficial signs of outward
popularity. ' What shall I speak ? ' he said. ' It is a time for tears,
not for talk ; for wailings, not for words ; for supplications,
not for harangues, such is the greatness of the daring crimes
which have been committed, so incurable the sore, so deep
the wound. It is too great for earthly medicament ; it
needs assistance from above. We should sit on our dung
hill like Job, and other cities should come to us to lament
our calamity. Then the devil danced over all the substance
of the saint, now he has rioted over our whole community.
I have waited, but I must speak at last. How terrible is
our case ! Even were the Emperor not to punish us, how
should we bear the infamy of our misdeeds ? I can scarcely
speak for grief. Once nothing was more blessed than our
city ; now nothing is less delightsome. Once we filled the
Forum as bees buzz round their honejrcombs ; now it is
desolate. As the leaves droop and drop in an unwatered
garden, so it is with us. We must say, as the prophet said
of Jerusalem, " Our city has become like a terebinth which
has shed its leaves, and as a garden that has no water."
Our citizens are fleeing from the land they loved as from
a home wrapped in conflagration.
' Yet it is not for these things that I blush and am con
founded. Last year our houses were shaken with earth
quake ; now it is the very souls of their inhabitants which
shake and tremble. Must we not cry, " Send for the wail
ing women, and let them come " ? Ay, weep, and let your
eyelids stream with tears. We have wronged him who

THE AGONY, AND THE CONSOLER 23
has no equal among men ; we can only fly for protection
to the King of Heaven. Unless we gain His mercy there
is no consolation left for our recent misdoing.
' Oh, let us awake, then, to a sense of our sins. Repress
and punish the oaths and blasphemies, which are so com
mon among you. You would not listen to my exhortations
before ; act upon them now. Nay, applaud me not. I
care not for such praise. The only glory I desire is to see
you following my counsels. I would rather see the eyes
of one among you wet with the tears of penitence than
that this church should reverberate with the hollow echoes
of fugitive popularity.'
And then, with perfect faithfulness and fearlessness, he
seized his opportunity, and urged upon them the duty of
making this an occasion for signal penitence. He warned
them of the vanity and uncertainty of riches, and urged
them to the duty of almsgiving. He set before them that
their great calamity might be turned into a precious boon
of Heaven if it wrought in them a deeper sincerity and
holier aims. He pointed them to God as their hope and
strength, a very present help in trouble ; and so he ended
his first great discourse, 'On the Statues,' with wishing
to them all the blessing of the Eternal Peace.
With bowed heads and faces bathed in tears the people
left the great basilica, too much moved to join in the frivo
lous discussion of this and that phrase in the sermon, or
this and that peculiarity of the orator, which formed the
staple of their Sunday chatter at other times. They still
whispered to each other of their fears, though the manly
courage of the orator had tinged their dark prospects with
a gleam of hope. But there was hardly one among them
who did not rejoice that when the hearts of all other citi
zens had become as water there was at least one man
whose high dauntlessness could look calamity — yes, and
even death —boldly in the face, and who, fearing to do
wrong, feared nothing else.

24 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER IV
TWO VISITORS BY NIGHT
Accipiam hospitio, si nox advenis. — Plaut. Rudent, ii. 4.
John would have been more than mortal if he had not
felt some of the gratification which the orator derives from
the sense of his own power. Nor could he be otherwise
than conscious that among the hungers, fevers, appetites,
and malignities around him he was wielding the power of
a true man. But he resisted all tendency to pride ; and
mere vanity could have no place in a soul so noble as his.
He lived in Singon Street, in which, as he delighted to
narrate, Paul and Barnabas had also lived when they first
began to preach to the Gentiles, and had won so many
converts that the brethren were first called ' Christians '
at Antioch. Those who had fixed on that hybrid nick
name, half Greek and half Latin in form, and expressive
of a Jewish conception, had little dreamed that a title
which was then synonymous with stupid fanatic and semi-
malefactor was to become the most glorious in the world.
As the great preacher walked home in the gathering
dusk his eyes sought the ground, his lips moved in silent
prayer. For though he had spoken in terms of lofty en
couragement, he had not concealed from his hearers the
awfulness of the crisis, and his hope was placed far less in
man than in the living God.
He was somewhat weary after his effort, and looked
forward to one of those evenings of quiet study which
he dearly loved. His mother, Anthusa, met him on the
threshold, and strained him to her heart. She had pre
pared for him one of those frugal meals of fruit and vege
tables which alone he would take, and she had placed the
lamp on the table of his little room. The house was fur-

TWO VISITORS BY NIGHT 25
nished with extreme simplicity, but the taste and the beauty
of many of the objects in the court and hall and tablinum
showed that it had belonged to a person of distinction.
For John's father, Secundus, was an officer who had risen
to the high rank of an illuatris, and had bequeathed an
ample provision to his widow. If the undisputed control
of this patrimony had been in the hands of Chrysostom,
very little would have been left undevoted to works of
beneficence. He had reduced his own wants to the sim
plest necessities of life.
He had scarcely ended his slight supper when he was
surprised by a low summons at the door. Phlegon, the
slave, who opened it — a slave in name only, but treated
like a brother beloved — hesitated to interrupt his master's
studies, and told the stately stranger that unless it was
a case of sickness or spiritual urgency John did not see
visitors at so late an hour.
' He will -see me,' was the answer. ' Tell him that
Libanius desires an interview.'
John arose immediately on hearing the name, and
hastened to salute his former teacher. ' What brings the
world-famous orator and worshipper of the gods to the
house of the Christian presbyter?' he asked.
'I come, John,' he said, 'to talk to you about the truly
deplorable state of the city. Can nothing be done for this
miserable people ? '
' If anyone can do anything for them it should be
Libanius,' answered Chrysostom. 'You are not like us
poor Christians. You are known to all the noble and the
mighty. The Count of the East is your personal friend.
Further, men know that you sympathise with the miser
able, for they have read the admirable letter, which
does you so much credit, on behalf of a poor man op
pressed by a cruel governor. Why not go to Con
stantinople, and plead the cause of Antioch before the
Emperor ? '
'I?' answered Libanius. 'It is eight hundred miles
off. The mountains of Taurus lie deep in snow. My
life has not suited me for such sacrifices. And the effort
would be useless. Theodosius is a rough Spanish soldier
with no literary culture. My polished periods would be

26 GATHERING CLOUDS
wasted on him. Besides, he is a Christian, and detests
us who do not believe in the Nazarene.'
' It is idolatry and Pagan sins that have brought down
his retribution on our city,' said Chrysostom.
Libanius waved his hand with a gesture of depreca
tion. 'We will not enter into that discussion now,' he
said. 'If Zeus hurled his lightnings every time men
sinned, he would soon be weaponless. But have you
nothing to suggest ? '
.'I have,' said Chrysostom. 'There are a hundred thou
sand Pagans in Antioch, and none of them will help.
Even their advocates will not plead for the accused in
these cruel days. There are thousands of Jews in Antioch,
but neither they nor their Archon will lift a finger; for
though Herod beautified the city, they still see the great
Cherubim of their Temple where the hated Titus fixed
them over our city gate. But Flavian, our bishop, will
plead for us all. He is old. The journey is long and
painful. The weather is wintry. His sister is dying,
and Lent, with all its extra burdens, is close at hand.
But the brave old Bishop will face every toil and every
peril, and will leave his dying sister, and has yielded to
the entreaty which I and others have urged upon him.
He has already started. I hope much from his interces
sion.' ' I rejoice to hear it,' said Libanius. ' It will immensely
promote the cause of you Christians. And, though I
believe not in your creed, this I will say for you, that you
have hearts of pity. Julian himself, my great and friendly
Emperor, the last defender of the gods, reproached us
with our indifference to the sufferings of our fellow-men.
And, heavens ! what women you Christians have ! What
beautiful Pagan widow of twenty would have remained
a widow all her clays, as your mother, Anthusa, has done,
to serve her only son ? You can never persuade me to
accept your worship of the Crucified, but when I see your
good works I feel within a little of being a Christian.'
' So King Agrippa said to our Paul long ago,' answered
Chrysostom ; ' and Paul, whose name is the true glory of
Antioch — not your grove of Daphne, nor your crowned
Charonium — Paul answered, uplifting his fettered hands,

TWO VISITORS BY NIGHT 27
"Would to God that not thou only, but all these who
hear me, were altogether such as I am, except these
bonds." Yours, Libanius, is, as our Tertullian said, "The
testimony of a mind naturally Christian." '
Libanius shook his hand. ' It is your compassion which
I admire,' he said, ' not your creed ; your good deeds, not
your Christianity.'
' Our good deeds are our Christianity,' answered Chry
sostom; 'that is, they are its test, its issue. They are the
golden fruits which grow on the Tree of Life. Love is
the fulfilling of our law, and we hold that he who doeth
righteousness is born of God.'
' Your words sound to me like the echo of far-off
dreams,' said the sophist ; ' but I wish I could share your
good hopes of the clemency of Theodosius. I know him.
He is frightfully choleric. You remember how philosophi
cal your great Constantine was when the mob inflicted
that atrocious insult at Edessa? They took down his
brazen statue, and actually whipped it, exactly as boys are
whipped in schools, to show that he was more fit to be
a schoolboy than an emperor ! Yet he showed no rage,
sought no revenge, and did not punish the city at all.
But Theodosius is not like that. He might forgive the
insult to himself, for he is not without magnanimity; but
he will not forgive the insults to his beloved Flaccilla, to
his two boys, to his honoured father. Already all the
rich are flying from this doomed city, and carrying their
treasures with them. I feel half inclined to follow them.
Many a city would welcome me.'
'Despise such selfishness,' said Chrysostom; 'choose
the nobler part. Stay here, and throw the shield of your
eloquence and your influence over the trembling popu
lace.' Libanius mused for a few moments with bowed head.
' I will,' he said ; ' I will. After all, what matters it ?
Man, as Pindar sang, is but the dream of a shadow. Fare
well, John. You are a braver man than I, my old pupil;
but we will work together.'
As Libanius stepped into the deserted street, and muffled
his face in his flowing robe, he muttered to himself: 'A
noble fellow is John, in spite of his creed ! His heart is

28 GATHERING CLOUDS
better than his head. Yet he is a deeper thinker and a
greater orator than I. It is strange ! '
And Chrysostom thought to himself : ' He is a man of
good impulses, but they are poisoned by timidity and self-
interest. The god of this world has blinded his heart.'
He composed himself once more to his studies, but he
was not destined to be undisturbed that evening. He
had not read for many moments when he again heard at
the outer door a low but peculiarly wild and agitated
knocking. He lifted his head to listen, and when Phlegon opened
the door he heard a boy's voice crying, ' I must see John
the Presbyter! I must see John the Presbyter ! '
' Who are you ? ' asked the old porter, with a roughness
unusual to him. ' It is not for every street-boy of Antioch
to come rushing here at all hours, disturbing the studies
of the Presbyter.'
' Oh, let me see him ! let me see him ! ' pleaded the
boy. ' It is dark, and late, and most of the household have
gone to bed. You must come to-morrow.'
'Oh! I must, I must see him!' said the boy; and
brushing past the astonished slave, he sprang to the partly
opened door of Chrysostom's study, through which there
was a gleam of lamplight. Pushing the curtain aside, he
stood dazed for a moment by the sudden glow after the
darkness of the street, and, shading his eyes, caught sight
of the Presbyter seated with a manuscript before him.
Chrysostom saw at once from his style of dress that he
was a young boy, probably the son of one of the wealthier
traders of Antioch, while the golden bulla which hung
down over his tunic showed that his father was a Pagan.
He saw, too, that he did not belong to the lower class
of the Antiochene gamins, the noisy and mischievous
hangers-on of the dregs of the Forum. His neat dress, the
bright eyes, the ingenuous features on which there was
none of the furtive look of vice, the dark curls which it was
evident had known a mother's tendance, won for him a
kindly feeling before he spoke.
But Chrysostom had barely time to glance at him
when the boy flung himself down on the floor, and, grasp-

TWO VISITORS BY NIGHT 29
ing the hem of the Presbyter's toga, kissed it, and began to
implore his pity and protection.
' What is it ? ' said John kindly. ' You are a Pagan.
Why do you not go to one of your own temples ? '
The boy was sobbing so wildly that it was some time
before he could find voice to speak ; but Chrysostom laid
a kind hand upon his head, and bade him take courage, for
he would help him in any way he could.
' Oh, sir ! ' he cried, ' it is true that I am not a Christian.
My father used to sell the little silver shrines of Apollo
which the visitors to Antioch buy ; but oh, sir ! I have no
father now. His name was Hernias, and he was one of
the leaders in the riot. They flung him yesterday to the
beasts in the amphitheatre — '
Again he stopped, and sobbed as if his heart would
break. — ' He hated the Christian emperor, who has ruined his
trade. And I know that my mother will die of fear and
anguish, for the archers are on my track too.'
' On yours, my poor lad? Why, what can you have
done ? '
The boy turned pale as death, and glanced round the
room with terror.
' There is no one to hear you,' said John ; ' speak to me
without fear.'
" Oh, sir ! ' said the boy, ' you will not betray me? '
Chrysostom could scarcely forbear a smile.
' Betray you ? ' he said. ' Ah ! I see you have never
lived among Christians. No, you are quite safe, my
son ; and we Christians are taught to do good unto all
men.' 'Sir,' said the boy in a low voice, and trembling in
every limb, ' it was I who threw that first stone which hit
the statue of the Emperor in the Prsetorium.'
Chrysostom looked very grave. What frightful conse
quences had issued from that thoughtless act ! The boy
caught the expression of the Presbyter's face, and cried,
' Oh, father, forgive me ! I meant nothing. I was not
thinking of the Emperor, or of the taxes. I was only
amused and excited by the doings of the crowd.'
' Did anyone see you ? '

30 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Yes, the two boys who were with me saw me. And,
oh, sir !  ' Here he broke into such a paroxysm of
weeping that he could not proceed. Chrysostom suffered
his anguish to find its natural relief, and then asked :
' Have they informed against you ? '
' No, sir,' sobbed the boy. ' Alas ! alas ! they are dead.
When I had thrown the stone they began to throw stones,
too, at the other pictures and statues, but not at the Em
peror's. And some spy saw them, and the archers dragged
them from their homes, and yesterday  '
Again it was long before he could speak.
' Yesterday,' he said, after a deep shudder, ' they cast
Achillas to the lions, and — oh, horrible! horrible! — they
burned Eros, who was my clearest friend, in the amphi
theatre. I crept there. I hid myself behind a statue of
the Quoit-thrower. The shriek of Eros when the flames
reached him will ring in my ears until I die. For the
first time in my life I fainted away, and  '
' But the two boys did not tell of you ? '
' No, they loved me too dearly, as I loved them. But I
had been seen with them, and as my father was a ring
leader in the riot  Alas ! alas ! — oh, that shriek ! those
flames ! '
The boy hid his pale face in Chrysostom's robe, and gave
way to unrestrained grief, during which John could only
stroke his dark curls in pity.
' But,' he asked, ' why have you come here ? What can
I do for you, my son ? '
' Oh ! hide me, father. Hide me for the sake of the
immortal gods. Oh! I forgot — yet hide me from the
avengers, for the love of Heaven. Let me not be flung
to the lions or burnt as Eros was ! '
' Hide you ? ' said John ; ' how can I hide you in this
small house, which many visit? Who bade you come here?'
'My mother, sir,' he said. 'She is ill — I fear she is
dying ; but friends will tend her, and she bade me fly in
the darkness to your house, for she said the Christians are
kinder and braver than our people. But, sir, if you can
not hide me I will return. The archers are certain to
come for me to-morrow. I can but die. But oh, my
mother ! my mother ! '

TWO VISITORS BY NIGHT

31

He rose from the floor and prepared to go out; but
Chrysostom bade him stay while he considered what to do,
and at the same moment Anthusa entered.
' John,' she said, ' who is this boy ? I heard sobs and
cries, and I have come to see if I can be of any use.'
The boy hid his face with his hands, through which
the tears streamed, while Chrysostom briefly told her the
story. ' And you would have suffered him to go, John ? ' she
asked in surprise. ' That would have been utterly unlike
you. My boy, we will save you.'
He seized her hand with transport, and kneeled and
kissed it.
' Nay, mother,' said Chrysostom, ' I never dreamed of
leaving him unhelped. I was only perplexed what to do.'
'Let my woman's wit help you,' said Anthusa with a
smile. ' He shall sleep here to-night ; early in the dawn
a few touches — even a veil over his eyes and a pallium —
will suffice to disguise him as though he were one of my
girls, and I will go with him up the ravine to the cavern
of the hermit Macedonius. Christian women and others
sometimes go to consult him, so that even if we are seen
on that lonely track it will excite no surprise ; but at early
dawn, and in the present deserted state of the streets, it is
unlikely that we shall meet a single human being.'
' Macedonius the barley-eater ! ' said Chrysostom with a
smile. ' Imagine this bright Pagan lad, accustomed to the
streets of Antioch, and the Circus, and the Amphitheatre,
and the games, and all the gladness of life in youth, shut
up in the damp, dark cavern with the old man who eats
nothing but barley, who spends his life in scourgings and
fastings and vigils ! Why, mother, before a week was
over he would almost wish to come back and face the
archers. Remember, mother, I have tried the life, and
know what it is.'
'Macedonius is very wise, as well as very good,'
answered the lady. 'I did not mean to leave the lad 
What is your name, my boy ? '
' Philip, lady ; but they named me after the great
Macedonian, not after your apostle.'
' Well, I did not mean to leave you with Macedonius in

32 GATHERING CLOUDS
the cave of Mount Silpius, Philip, but only to ask his
advice about you.'
'I have heard of him, lady, and would fain see him.
The horrors of these few days, and the death of my friends,
have entered deep into my heart. In my agony I found
no Pagan who would help me. I would know more of
the religion which makes men brave and kind.'
' God bless you, my poor Philip,' said Chrysostom. ' I
leave you in my mother's hands. With her you will be
more than safe.'
Anthusa with her own hands prepared a little cubicle
for Philip that night. Not one of the slaves was admitted
into the secret, except her nurse Damaris and old Phlegon.
The lad slept the deep sleep of sorrow and weariness, and
by dawn Anthusa, accompanied by her two trusted ser
vants, was on her way with him to the cave of Mace
donius. They met no one ; but near the track which climbed
to the cave one of the vilest beggars of Antioch, half-
beggar, half-brigand, saw them, and recognised Philip,
whom he had often noticed in the streets as one of the
brightest boys in Antioch, as he passed down Herod's
Colonnade on his way to school. The boy, from habit,
had put on his golden bulla — an ornament unusual in his
rank of life, but his father had seen better days — and the
mendicant, seeing it gleam through the front of the pal
lium, had looked at him more attentively, and had pene
trated his too slight disguise.

THE HERMIT AND THE BOY 33

CHAPTER V
THE HERMIT AND THE BOY
And heard an answer, ' Wake,
Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life
Of self-suppression, not of selfless love ! '.
Tennyson, St. Telemachus.
Macedonius the hermit, the barley-eater, was seated at
the entrance of his cavern, and enjoying — so far as he
thought it not sinful to enjoy — the cool air of the dawn
and the glorious pageant of sunrise. He allowed himself
but little sleep at any time, and long before the dawn he
had been watching the stars, which hung like the cressets
of angels in the purple night, and shed on the world their
almost spiritual lustre. The unintelligible mystery of the
universe, which often lay so heavily on his soul, seemed
to be lightened as he felt himself alone with God, amid the
strength of the hills, under those vast and silent constella
tions. Then, across the dark and silent valley he saw the
first beam of morning smite into vivid crimson the topmost
summit of the range of Taurus, and the mountainsides
began to shine as though the angels were pouring river
after river of pure gold over their snowy cliffs. Then the
Orontes, far beneath his feet, began to gleam out here
and there in streaks of silver under the rich foliage of its
banks, and he saw the grove of Daphne, with its lightning-
scathed shrine of the dethroned sun god, and in the far
distance Mount Casius flung its huge dark shadow over
the glimmering sea.
Accustomed to long hours of unbroken solitude, he was
surprised to see three figures approaching him so early up
the steep mountain track. It was evident that they were
seeking his cavern home, for the rocky and scarcely distin
guishable path led to no other spot, and hadj in fact, been

34 GATHERING CLOUDS
mainly worn by his own feet as he descended the cliff to
fill his maple dish with water, or to find his winter fuel
and supply his daily needs. As the figures approached
him he recognised Anthusa, whom he had sometimes seen
after she had waived her opposition to her son's wish to
lead the solitary life, and who visited John once or twice
in the year when he, too, lived with the hermit Syrus in a
mountain cave.
She knelt for his priestly blessing, for Flavian had con
strained him to accept the priesthood. He addressed her
in few words. To be talking to a woman was to the
hermit, as to the Pharisees of old, a perilous condescension,
and he involuntarily drew back his robe of skin as she
bowed before him. Anthusa knew the prejudices of his
Order, though her son did not share them, and she briefly
told him that she had come to confide to his protection a
boy from Antioch Avho was in danger of his life.
The -hermit was startled by her request. He shrank
from the invasion of his solitude. His one luxury was to
feel himself far away from the world, and alone with God.
How could he provide for a boy from the gay, guilty city
whose temples and palaces gleamed far below? He felt
inclined to refuse the responsibility, and Anthusa read his
hesitation in his eyes.
' Is the boy a Pagan ? ' he asked.
' He is.'
' How can I be responsible for one of those servants of
the demons ? '
' If God can bear with them, and love them,' she said,
' cannot Macedonius ? Had not Christ compassion on the
ignorant and on those that are out of the way ? '
But Macedonius was still troubled. 'How can he live
on barley, as I do,' he asked, 'and endure life in this
oppressive silence, where no sound is heard but the roar
of the mountain cataracts, or the fall of crags which the
earthquake has set loose ? '
' Father,' she said, rising from her knees, ' I know that
you dare not refuse the charge. It is God who says to
thee, " Take this boy, and save him for Me." He will tell
you all. Farewell, or I shall be missed at home. Philip,
may God be with thee ! We shall meet again.'

THE HERMIT AND THE BOY 35
She turned to go, and Damaris followed her. She had
already taken off from Philip the veil and pallium, and
the boy stood before the solitary in his everyday dress.
He modestly awaited what the old man would say, but
fixed his frank and fearless eyes on the gaunt face and
emaciated form.
Macedonius was but fifty-seven years old ; but age is
not told by years only. His eyes "had grown dim with
many tears, his cheeks were sunken, his hair was thin and
grey. He sat down on a ledge of rock and leaned his
trembling hands on a staff, for at that moment he was
faint with continued abstinence. The long years seemed
to separate him from this lad like wastes of the 'salt,
unplumbed, estranging sea.' Yet as he looked at him he
recalled his own happy, unforgotten youth. He, too, had
once been as bright, as active, as well-knit as the boy who
stood before him. Youth, which 'dances like a bubble,
nimble and gay, and shines like a dove's neck or the
colours of the rainbow,' had once been his. He, too, had
heard the siren songs singing enchantment to him across
the smiling summer waves. To him, too, Circe, the
daughter of the sun, had offered her charmed cup. He
had plunged into the follies and dissipations and delirious
dreams of youth, and known the fatal glamour of Satan's
bewitchment. Then God had broken in succession all his
idols. He had gambled away his patrimony ; he had been
abandoned by his love, and by his friends ; he had been
smitten with terrible illness. And as he sat like the
Prodigal, friendless, forsaken, penniless, in rags, and amid
the swine, a star had looked through the midnight. For
Meletius, the good bishop, had visited him in his illness,
and through his gentle, gracious ministrations the snare of
the fowler had been broken and he had been delivered.
But when he rose from the bed of sickness utterly
changed in heart, he felt driven to fly from the world.
Even the Church could not satisfy him, for it was tainted
with worldliness and rent with partisanship. As a youth
he had been accustomed to the trimming attitude of mind
which made the old Bishop Leontius mumble the Gloria
in such a way that no party could claim him for its own
shibboleth; and he had heard the old man say, as he

36 GATHERING CLOUDS
touched his white hairs. ' When this snow melts there will
be plenty of mud.' Plenty of mud there was ! Not even
the blameless life, 'the sweet, calm look, the radiant smile,
the kind hand seconding the kind voice ' 2 of the much-
loved Meletius, could exorcise the intruding world from
the schism-troubled Church. Macedonius not only saw
the sad spectacle of at least three Christian bishops of
Antioch — ¦ an Arian and two orthodox bishops — • but he
saw the heated votaries of two such good men as Paulinus
and Meletius railing at each other in the assemblies, and
even assaulting each other in the streets. In vain, had
Meletius said to his rival, ' We hold the same doctrines ;
let us be friends. If the episcopal chair be a source of
rivalry between us, let us place the Holy Gospel upon it,
the symbol of Christ Himself, and let us sit on either side
of it till one of us dies, and then the other shall become
sole bishop.' But ecclesiasticism, theological pettiness,
sacerdotal arrogance, and the fatal force and fascination of
opinionated orthodoxy, were too strong for Divine charity;
and the thoughts of Macedonius were not of these things.
He cared but little for nice dogmatic definitions and curi
ously articulated formulae ; what he longed to do was to
save his soul and keep himself unspotted from the world.
He loathed the petty baseness of partisan wranglings, with
their accompaniment of subterranean intrigues and bitter
personalities. As though amid the spiteful flash of petty
runnels turbid with shallow mud, he heard the far-off
voices of the great sea of eternity. He determined to
retire from the world. The ideal of contemplative cceno-
bitic communities living apart from the world under strict
est discipline had dazzled the age in which he lived. False
and unscriptural as the ideal was, entirely alien as it was
from the example of Christ and His Apostles, yet in these
seething and troubled times the life of ' the sainted eremite '
exercised a maddening fascination over countless men of
high faculties, until this 'unsocial passion' leavened a great
part of the Christian community, filling many a household
with anxious forebodings and needless suffering. When
hermits were looked upon as representing the perfection
1 Gregory of Nyssa.

THE HERMIT AND THE BOY 37
of Divine philosophy, it was hardly strange that the ambi
tion to reach these imagined altitudes haunted many a
youthful mind.
So Macedonius had joined a little community of monks
near Antioch, of which the famous Diodorus of Tarsus
was the abbot. He sought always the most menial offices.
But he soon found that the world could intrude even into
a monastery. He could not escape from disputes about the
episcopal claims of Meletius and Paulinus, and about the
nice questions respecting the hypostatic union. Mace
donius found no comfort in such matters. What he was
aiming at in the great warfare which has no discharge was
to subdue the flesh to the spirit, to secure a tranquil empire
over himself. He left the coenobium, and began to live as
a hermit on the hills.
But any empire over himself which he had gained was
infinitely far from tranquil. As he had found that the
monastic life did not involve any exception from trials, but
only a substitution of meaner and smaller ones for those
which had of old assailed him, so it was his bitter expe
rience that by flying to the mountain cave he had not
escaped either from the devil or the flesh. He carried
himself with him as all men do, and it was contrary to
the law of life that he should find any condition which
temptation left unassailed.
The conquest was granted to his sincerity, but the same
reward would have been given to him, with less frightful
struggles and more complete blessedness, if he had lived
as Christ lived, among his kind, and not done violence to
the laws of Nature and the ordinances of God. How con
stantly had he to wrestle with the instigations of spiritual
pride ! How often did the secret devil of his loneliness
whisper into his soul high flatteries of his spiritual suprem
acy, telling him that his name and fame had spread through
all Syria and Asia — yes, and even to the great western
and southern realms of Italy and Spain and Africa ! Thus
did Satan strive to puff him up with vain self-exaltation
in that inner world of the soul which remains untouched
by outward ordinances. How often, in spite of his auster
ities — nay, not only in. spite of, but (had he only known
it) because, of them — did evil and carnal thoughts come

38 GATHERING CLOUDS
over him like a flood! The enfeebled body was too Aveak-
ened to fight against the rebellious soul. His bones, as he
sank back and writhed on the rocky floor of his cave, clashed
like those of a skeleton, yet all the while his imagination
was still rioting, in spite of himself, amid the sinful scenes
of his youth in Antioch.
As these thoughts passed through his mind, writing all
his past history as on flashes of lightning, the hermit kept
a long and embarrassed silence ; but rousing himself at
last, he said :
' Boy, the mother of John the Presbyter told me that
you would explain why she has brought thee hither.'
' My name, sir, ' he said, ' is Philip, and the Lady An
thusa led me here in disguise because I am in imminent
peril of death for having flung a stone at the statue of the
Emperor.' ' You should not have done it, Philip,' said the hermit.
' " The powers that be are ordained of God." ' But when
he saw that Philip hung his head, he added gently, ' Tell
me the whole story, lad.'
Then, often interrupted by the barley-eater's eager
interrogations, Philip told him of the imperial proclama
tion, of the outbreak of the populace, of the wreck
ing of the Baths, of the bursting into the Judgment
Hall, of the destruction of the statues, of the fear and
silence which had afterwards fallen on the city, of his
father's execution, of the cruel deaths of his young com
panions — of one of which he had been the horrified
spectator. Macedonius listened with an interest all the more in
tense because news from the world rarely reached his cave.
As he heard the story he seemed himself to be passing
through the whole scene, and, catching the contagion of
the boy's anguish, he was carried away by a storm of pity
and indignation. Philip was amazed to see how his whole
form seemed to dilate and his eye to flash with its old fire
as he strode up and down the cavern when the tale was
ended. Then, raising his hands to heaven, he said, ' Anti
och shall not be destroyed, shall not be decimated! Theo
dosius shall listen to God's voice through me. Useless, I
fear, and evil has been my life, but its sacrifices shall not

THE HERMIT AND THE BOY 39

have been all in vain. They have given me a right to
speak. I will gather all the hermits of the hills around me.
We will go clown to Antioch. We will in the name of
God forbid all earthly vengeance. Yes, I will at least render
this one service to my country before I die ! '
He spoke more to himself than to his solitary listener,
but again realising the lad's presence, and glancing up at
the sun, which was now high in heaven, he said, ' Forgive
me, boy ; you must be hungry, and I have nothing for you
but my sole food, which is barley ; and I drink only the pure
diamond of God which sparkles in yonder rill.'
' Hunger is the best sauce, father,' said Philip smiling.
' Yes, but I cannot bid thee share my privations. Not
far away is another hermit whose fare is not so meagre. I
will go and ask him for something for thee. Canst thou
kindle a fire? Canst thou bake a barley-cake in the embers?
Yes? Then, by the time it is ready I will be back.'
Philip deftly kindled a fire, and kneaded the barley-meal
into two cakes, and the hermit soon returned. He had
brought with him some dates and dry grapes and 'figs, and
the boy enjoyed them with a very healthy appetite, while
the hermit watched him with large eyes. When the meal
was over Macedonius said :
' Boy, it is impossible for thee to stay in this my wretched
abode ; but four miles distant is the monastery of Diodore,
and at this moment the great Bishop is in his old house.
There are a few young novices there of thine own age, and
if he will receive thee, thou wilt there find work, and
safety, and holy companionship. I will go and intercede
with him.'
He took his staff and set forth over the steep mountain
tracks. When he reached the monastery he was warmly
welcomed by Diodore and the brethren, who promised to
shelter Philip till the peril was over. His soul had been
much troubled all the day ; it was troubled still more by
an incident of his return.

40 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER VI
THE DEMONIAC
Opf er fallen hier
Weder Lamm noch Stier.
Aber Menschenopfer unerhort. — Goethe.
The mountain-range of Amanus was full of fissures and
ravines, and as he crossed one of the deepest and darkest
of these a strange and almost naked figure, as of one of
the demoniacs of Gadara, sprang out before his path.
'Away! away, Macedonius!' it cried, with wild gestic
ulations. 'I know thee, Crithophagus. Hast thou come
to torment me ? Am I not wretched enough, lost enough ?
Away, away ! '
Macedonius at once recognised him, though in his dark
hour he was but rarely seen by human eyes. It was the
miserable Stagirius, before whom the pillar of life had
once moved in golden fire, with its dark side undreamed
of. The favourite son of a father of wealth and noble
birth, everything seemed to smile upon his early years.
His parents were Christians. He might have served God
honourably in Church and State. But a vein of pride in
his disposition, urging him to something exceptional, com
bined with an extraordinary veneration for the life of the
desert solitaries, had led him to defy the wishes of his
father, and to leave his rich home at Antioch for the grim
life of the hills. A very short experience made it intoler
able to him. He hated the nightly vigils, he grew utterly
weary of the long studies and meditations. He felt no
better, but rather, and in all senses, worse than he had
done in the daily life of the city. His miserable soul
was torn by struggling self-conceit and self-disgust, but
false pride kept him from acknowledging what he felt to
have been a fatal error. Thinking that other employ-

THE DEMONIAC 41
ment might help him, his brother-monks set him to tend a
garden and an orchard; and, feeling the uselessness of his
misdirected life, he would sometimes ask them in fierce
petulance whether his noble hands were thus meant to
load dung-carts and dig at roots. Then, perhaps, the pen
ances and discipline would subdue him for a time to hum
blest self-prostration. The severity of the inward tempest
was too much for an ill-balanced temperament and a frame
delicately nurtured. He had become liable to convulsions
and fits of epilepsy, which all men mistook, and which the
wretched youth himself mistook, for demoniac possession.
In vain he travelled to the most esteemed saints and the
most celebrated martyries. He had his lucid intervals, but
he never got over the effects of his disordered body and
haunted imagination. In vain Chrysostom, whose own
health had been for ever shattered by the unnatural priva
tions of his hermitage, had written to warn him against
this satiety of penitence, this wantonness of despairing
misery. Stagirius continued to be the frequent victim of
fits of frenzy and fierce impulses to blasphemy and suicide.
At this moment Stagirius was in one of his wildest par
oxysms. How he lived no one knew. He had- not even
the garment of skin-and-hair over a linen tunic which most
of the solitaries wore. He only had a coarse cincture of
goatskin round his loins. His eyes glared with the light
of madness through the dirty and matted locks which
streamed over his shoulders. The sun smote him by day
and the moon by night, and the dews dropped on his
nakedness. Like Nebuchadnezzar, he ate grass, his hair
grew like birds' feathers, and his nails like wild beasts'
claws, and he tore up roots for his sustenance. He looked
scarcely human, and the terrified hermits sometimes heard
his screams reverberated by the mountain rocks, as he fan
cied himself to be wrestling with troops of demons. His
nights were haunted by frightful visions, and many a time
he had attempted self-destruction. And this was the gay
Stagirius, once the favourite of fortune, the envy of the
youths of Antioch for his beauty and his wealth !
Macedonius paused irresolutely, for he was unnerved by
privations, and he had a horror of the madness which he
attributed to the presence of malignant devils. As Stagir-

42 GATHERING CLOUDS
ius approached him with yells and threatening gestures,
he drew back, made the sign of the cross, and muttered
the formulae of exorcism. They produced no effect.
Stagirius seized him by the arm, and cried, ' I know thee !
Away ! away ! lest the demon who has possession of me
tear thee limb from limb ! '
' Lord Jesus, save me ! ' cried Macedonius. At the
name a convulsive spasm passed through the frame of the
unhappy maniac ; his face became purple, his eyes were
distorted, he foamed at the mouth, and fell writhing on
the stones of the ravine, where he lay as dead.
Macedonius was lost in pity and horror. He knelt by
the unconscious sufferer, sprinkled water over him, and
supported his head upon his breast. After a short time
Stagirius opened his eyes. Macedonius gently spoke to
him by his name, and pressed him to eat some of the bar
ley-cake which he had carried with him. Then the hermit
prayed for the trembling maniac, and left him sane and
comforted, though terribly shaken. He offered to take
Stagirius back to his own cavern, though he was loth that
Philip should see so deplorable a spectacle. But Stagirius
refused. 'Leave me to my misery,' he feebly moaned.
' The sun has set. To-morrow I will go to Diodore. After
a short time I will make my way to Egypt, and see the
saintly Nilus. It may be that he will be able to drive out
these demons that have, seized the temple of my soul.'
Weeping and deeply troubled, Macedonius blessed him.
It was night before he reached his own cave," inexpressibly
wearied with the exertions and emotions of the day.
As he entered, the flickering embers of the wood-fire
showed him that Philip had gathered himself a bed of dry
leaves, and lay there in the peaceful slumbers of his youth.
Moving very gently, he took his little earthenware lamp,
and, lighting it at the feeble flames, shaded the light
with his hand as he gazed at the sleeping boy. There he
lay carelessly outstretched on the leaves, his head with its
dark curls resting on his arm, while his breast rose and fell
with the regular breathing of deep and placid slumber.
He was the picture of ruddy health and strength and life,
and the hermit involuntarily made the sign of blessing
over him. Usually he scourged himself before his nightly

THE DEMONIAC 43
orisons, but he would not do so now lest the whistling
cords should waken the sleeping boy. But his prayer that
night was full of doubt and agony. Had he, after all,
done right in the adoption of a life so far removed from
the ordinary conditions of humanity? Was there this un-
bridged abyss between the' secular and the religious ? Was
selfishness the less selfish by being expanded to infinitude ?
Had not God, who placed us in the world, intended us to
work in it, and, being in it without being of it, to use it
without abusing it ? Why should not the boy who lay so
sweetly slumbering there grow up to be a useful, happy,
Christian man, with all the innocent joy of home about
him, meeting the heavy trials which would come to him
as they come to all, but not increasing them by self-
invented tortures ?
Then the wild vision of Stagirius came before his mind.
What a deplorable shipwreck of high hopes ! What a
triumph of the impure demons was there ! And he him
self — Macedonius — what had he really gained by his will-
worship and voluntary humility ? Had his severity to the
body been of any real value against the indulgence of the
flesh ? It seemed to him too late to alter his career. This,
however, he determined to do — to make his life more use
ful to others. That vow he offered to God in his long
prayers that night.
Next morning he went with Philip over the mountains,
and entrusted him to the care of the abbot who had suc
ceeded Diodore. There the boy was happy. They em
ployed him in rustic occupations, and gave him all such
innocent gladness as was in their power. For the teachings
of Diodore had made them a large-hearted community, and
the young novices were under gentle and loving training.
Mingling with these youths, seeing their quiet dutifulness,
sharing in their lessons, Philip gradually learnt something
of the essential truths of Christianity. Almost without
knowing it, the grace of God took gradual hold of his
heart. But he became in nowise enamoured of the monastic,
and still less of the eremitic, ideal ; and this was chiefly
due to the dislike, almost the repulsion, forced upon his
mind by one of the youngest of the novices. His name

44 GATHERING CLOUDS
was Simeon, and he afterwards grew up to be the cele
brated pillar-saint. Simeon was a short, strong, good-
looking boy, entirely uneducated, who had spent most of
his life as a shepherd tending the flocks of his parents.
His head was full of fantastic perversions as to the nature
of duty, largely mingled with the signs of degeneracy,
which in these days would be called egomania and mega
lomania. He had been in a monastery in which the Abbot
Heliodorus had lived from earliest childhood, and Simeon
thought it was an almost miraculous merit that the Abbot
'had never once in his life seen either a pig or a cock!'
Philip did not feel at all edified by the merit, and made
Simeon positively morose with the way in which he ridi
culed his vain anecdotes about himself. Simeon told the
novices how he once wanted to buy some fish, and when
the fish-girl said falsely that she had none, the fish leapt
out and began to jump about Simeon's feet, till he quieted
them by a word ! The story caused an involuntary burst of
laughter — -the first laugh which Philip enjoyed since his
recent troubles. Simeon's pride was severely hurt by this
way of receiving his supernatural narratives. He was still
more displeased when Philip expostulated with him about
the dirtiness of his person, asking him what religion there
could be in that, and reminding him of a verse which he
had heard one of the monks read : ' Having our minds
sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed
ivith pure water.'' As for the visions which this strange
shepherd-boy constantly narrated, Philip called them mere
indigestion. He disliked Simeon's way of wearing a cord
tied round his naked waist till it grew into his flesh, and
his habit of keeping himself awake by leaning on a round
piece of wood, which slipped under him if he gave way to
drowsiness. When the Abbot heard of these extravagances
he forbade them. He warned Simeon that such meaning
less austerities might only be a sign of overweening pride.
Simeon was so much offended that he ran away and hid
himself. After long search and anxiety he was found in
an empty cistern full of all sorts of objectionable reptiles.
The Abbot could do nothing with the stubborn, opinionated,
maniacally excited boy, and dismissed him to the career of
verminiferous glory which he afterwards attained as the

TfiE DEMONIAC 45
first of the Stylites. But the effect he produced on the
mind of Philip was that of disgust: he determined that
no morbid impulses should ever make him join the half-
demented band, in which many who had been mere mendi
cants and criminals surrounded themselves with the same
halo of sham sanctity which is to this day enjoyed in the
East by many a semi-idiotic yogi or repulsive fakir.
He never met Simeon again, but in after-years he
heard, with a somewhat disdainful smile, of the Stylite's
performances in the barely human life which lie spent in
numberless genuflexions on the filthy summit of his pillar.
'I once watched him,' said an admiring observer long
afterwards, ' and during his prayer he prostrated himself
one thousand two hundred and forty-four times ; and after
that I left off counting.'
Philip was a Christian in those days, and his only reply
was, ' I find nothing in the Scriptures as to the advantage
of bowing the head like a bulrush, or wasting inhuman
lives in an atmosphere of dirt.'
The notion of living on the top of a pillar had not oc
curred to Simeon spontaneously. He had borrowed it from
an Eastern hermit named Nicander. The practice was so
revolting to the good sense of the West, that when a
certain Wulfil did attempt in the sixth century to intro
duce it at Treves, the bishop demolished his pillar; but
even in the East, Nicander had been indignantly reproved
by the good sense of St. Nilus, who, besides accusing
him of levity, warns him that his extravagance was due to
pride, and that he who exalted himself should be abased.1
1 St. Nilus, Epp. 114, 115.

46 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER VII
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CITY
Saeva Necessitas,
Clavos trabales et cuneos maim
Gestans ahena. — Horace.
Twenty-two days had now passed since the riot, and
such a Lent had never been kept in Antioch. In ordinary
times it was an unholy city. Even the Emperor Julian,
Pagan as he was, had taunted its inhabitants with their
vices, their violence, drunkenness, incontinence, impiety,
avarice, and rashness. But this Lent, when the people
felt that the sword of Damocles hung over their necks by
a single hair, the amphitheatre was empty, and whenever
it was known that Chrysostom would preach, which he
did frequently, the church was densely crowded. Usually
even the Christians paid but little attention -to sermons.
Many only came to church on feast days, if then ; and,
when they came, many stayed at the back of the church
among the heathen and the unbaptised, while the men
busied themselves with secular gossip, and the women
almost drowned the voice of the preacher with their
chatter about their children, their woolwork, and their
domestic concerns. John's splendid oratory did, indeed,
command their attention, and they listened to him so
intently that the pickpockets and cutpurses were able to
ply their busy trade among them undisturbed. But what
they cared for was the rhetoric, not the spiritual truths ;
the grand sentences, not their practical application.
When the sermon was over they broke into a cackle of
conceited criticism, systematically turned their backs on
the Holy Communion, and those that remained, then as
now, were but as planks and broken pieces from the ship
wreck of the congregation. But now all was different.

the judgment on the city 47
The orator played on their emotions as on the strings of
a harp, now elevating them to fortitude and resignation,
now awakening the heavenly aspirations in which alone
their souls could find repose.
But on the twenty-second day arrived the two Imperial
Commissioners, Hellebichus and Caesarius. They entered
the city at the head of their troops. The selection of
such men was a hopeful sign, for they were Christians,
and' were known to be men of kindly temperament.
Their lofty rank showed the importance which the
Emperor attached to their mission, for Hellebichus .was
Master of the Forces, and Caesarius was Count of the
Offices. But they bore sealed despatches, and no one
knew what doom might hang over the rebellious city.
On their way the Commissioners had met Bishop Flavian,
hastening to intercede with Theodosius ; but not even to
him had they been allowed to intimate the judgment
which the Emperor had pronounced. It was morning
when they made their entrance into Antioch, and the
dejected populace lined their route in thousands. Ordi
narily they would have ridden through festal and rejoicing
ranks, they would have been welcomed with laughter,
applause, gay interpellations, and garlands strewn in their
path. Now they were received in silence by a multitude
robed in garments of woe, who held out to them their
appealing hands. They were glad when the dismal ride
ended at the Forum. There they ascended the rostra,
and read out to the breathless audience the sentence of the
Emperor. It declared :
First, that Antioch was to be stripped of its rank as the
capital of Syria, and that the distinction was to be trans
ferred to the rival city of Laodicea.
Secondly, that until further notice all the baths, circuses,
theatres, amphitheatres, and places of amusement in the
city were to be closed.
Thirdly — and this came on them as the crushing climax
of misery — the trials which had been already held by the
Count of the East were to be revived, and all who were
proved guilty of complicity in the riot were to be severely
punished.

48 GATHERING CLOUDS
Fourthly, the Imperial dole of bread to the poor, which
was distributed at Antioch, as at Rome and Constantinople,
was henceforth to be stopped.
Such was the decree, and no one could deny that it was
just and moderate ; but if it removed the agony of dread,
it substituted for it the reality of depression. To the proud
patriotism of the Antiochenes it seemed an insufferable
humiliation that the paltry Laodicea should be crowned
with the privileges of which they were deprived. The
closing of the places of amusement, and, above all, of the
public baths, not only eclipsed their gaiety, but involved
a loss of health and comfort. Worst of all, a terrible trial
for life or death, torture or confiscation, hung over numbers
of the citizens, and especially those who stood highest in
rank and wealth.
They listened in mute despair, and then the Commis
sioners adjourned to the Hall of Justice. There a long
list of names was read out of those who had been accused,
and among them was the name of the boy Philip. Archers
were despatched on all sides for their arrest, and the mean
wretch who had seen Philip on his way to the cave of
Macedonius gave eager information where he might prob
ably be found. That night he was seized at the monastery
of Diodore. The brothers would doubtless have claimed
for him the rights of sanctuary ; but the archers caught
him in the orchard outside, and took him with them to
Antioch, with a cord drawn round his wrists so tightly as
to cause him great pain. That night he was thrown with
masses of the humbler offenders into the common prison.
All that the brethren could do was to send to Macedonius
and tell him the fate of his young charge. It made his
soul burn with still hotter indignation, and he spent the
next twenty-four hours in summoning the hermits of the
hills from every side to meet him on the following morn
ing at the point where the road down the ravine of Parthe-
nius led to the city. Chrysostom also was informed of the
boy's fate, and that very night, regardless of clanger, he
visited him, comforted him, soothed his terrors, and promised
to use every effort in his power to procure his acquittal from
the capital sentence. He could not promise that he could
save him from the horrible scourge, which in the case of a

THE JUDGMENT ON THE CITY 49
boy often caused death, and seemed almost worse than
death. It was the suspense, the uncertainty, which gnawed
so deeply into Philip's heart, and it was amid this anguish
that, encouraged and comforted by Chrysostom, he offered
his first timid prayer to the Son of God. That prayer was
heard. The Commissioners, who numbered many friends among
the society of Antioch, felt profoundly saddened by the
task which they were ordered to fulfil. ' What a difference
this city presents to its aspect the last time I visited it,' said
Caesarius as he sat at supper that evening. 'Then the
waves of life flashed like the Orontes in the sunshine. Now
there is nothing around us but lamentations and mourning
and woe.'
'Yes,' answered Hellebichus, 'but if it was a joyous
city, it was also a tumultuous city, and full of stirs. It
has set to the Empire the worst possible example, and
justice demands punishment, though I wish the infliction
of it had fallen to other hands than ours. At least we
can do our best to temper justice with mercy.'
Next morning they made their reluctant way to the
Court of Justice, in which many of the accused, and Philip
among them, were already ranged in fetters under the
guard of the archers. In the city reigned a silence as of
death. Many of the inhabitants had fled as far even as the
barren heights of Mount Casius. Only two or three men
were seen creeping here and there about the Forum like
living corpses. Some Christian priests, indeed, clung to
the robes of the envoys as they entered the hall, and,
embracing their feet and knees, implored them to promise
compassion. In the hall itself, not one Pagan advocate
had the courage to come forward. Chrysostom was there,
indeed, for he had to watch the case of Philip and others
whom he knew, and though, as being a Christian presbyter,
he could no longer plead at the bar, he was ready to come
forward and give evidence. Outside the door stood
groups of agitated mourners. They reminded him of
watchers upon the shore who see ships tossing in the
storm, for whose imperilled mariners they can only pray.
The spectacle inside was still more heartrending, for there
were many soldiers armed with swords and clubs, coercing

50 GATHERING CLOUDS
all present into deep stillness. Even outside the doors
the women — mothers and wives and sisters — were com
pelled to keep at a distance, lest their wailing should
disturb the proceedings within. The saddest sight of all
was to see them lying prostrate in the dust, with veiled
faces, in squalid robes, their long hair sprinkled with
ashes, without friend, or neighbour, or even handmaiden
to solace or protect them, while with lacerated hearts
they listened to the sounds of blows within, and heard the
cries of those who were suffering under the rods. What
could these poor women do but look heavenwards, and
entreat God to give fortitude to the sufferers?
So. there were tortures within the hall and tortures out
side of it, and the hearts even of the judges were almost
paralysed with woe. Chrysostom never forgot that dreary
and miserable day. It made him think of that great assize
when each soul must stand alone, with neither father,
nor son, nor friend to help, before the judgment-seat of
Christ. Things grew worse and worse as the dreary hours went
on; for some were doomed to death, and others were
laden with heavy chains and led away to prison, and the
wives and children of others, whose goods were confiscated,
were turned loose into the streets, penniless after all their
wealth. As Chrysostom expected, the case of Philip came on
that day. He had been seen in the midst of the rioters
with the two poor boys, his friends Achillas and Eros, who
had already expiated their boyish thoughtlessness by cruel
deaths. Moreover, he was the son of Hermas, who had
been executed as a ringleader in the riot. But the only
voices which could have testified that he had flung the
first stone were hushed in death. That secret, which
would have inevitably doomed him to the same fate, was
buried in the breast of Chrysostom. Straining prerogative
to the utmost, and with no small danger to himself, the
Presbyter with passionate eloquence had pleaded Philip's
youth, the absence of proof against him, the absence of any
proof of malicious forethought, the sacred claims of com
passion to one so young. It was all in vain, and he was
dreading to hear the terrible fiat of death pronounced, when

THE JUDGMENT ON THE CITY 51
a slight interruption diverted for a moment the attention
of the Commissioners. It was by this time late in the
evening, and Libanius had at last summoned up sufficient
courage to creep timidly and almost surreptitiously into
the Court. But the quick eye of Caesarius caught sight
of him, and recognising his face and his position as the
intimate friend of the late Emperor Julian he beckoned
him to come and sit by his side on the tribunal. Libanius
was so cowed and dejected that Caesarius even ventured
to whisper into his ear that they were earnestly desirous
to exercise their summary jurisdiction as leniently as the
stringent orders of the Emperor rendered possible.
' Do, by the immortal gods ! ' murmured Libanius. ' Nay,
I forgot that you were Christians. Then be merciful for
the sake of Him who you say was merciful. And if you
will spare the trembling city, I will immortalise you in one
of my orations, the finest I can write. It shall be a stream
of gold, it shall be like the girdle of Hera, woven of gems
and purple.'
While this whispered conversation was going on, Helle
bichus had been looking at Philip, and was deeply touched
by his innocent face and helpless boyhood. ' It is clear,'
he said to Caesarius, ' that this boy was at least as guilty as
some who have already been put to death, but do you not
think that it would be. enough to order him a scourging,
and postpone till to-morrow the question of further evi
dence ? '
So the doom was passed. Chrysostom stood by the boy's
side, pressed his hand, bade him be brave, and said he
would entreat God to enable him to bear his pain. Then
the sentence was carried out. Though even the execu
tioner, moved with pity, mitigated his ferocity, and would
not strike with his full force, yet at the first blow of the
rods the boy grew pale as death ; the second wrung from
him a deep moan ; at the third he uttered a heartrending
cry and fainted. After that he felt no more, and a few
minutes later he was carried back to the prison, bleeding
and half-dead.
It was called a prison, but the number of accused and
suspects was so great that they were really shut up in a
great circle of walls, exposed to the open air, in masses of

52 GATHERING CLOUDS
hopeless and helpless wretchedness. And in that circle of
misery Chrysostom also spent the night, doing all that he
could do by consolation and tenderness for many of the
sufferers, and sitting for hours by a heap of straw on which
Philip lay, holding him by the hand, and gently attending
to all his needs.

THE THUNDERBOLT AVERTED 53

CHAPTER VIII
THE THUNDERBOLT AVERTED
Thou art a king, a sovereign o'er frail men ;
I am a Druid, servant of the gods ;
Such service is above such sovereignty. Mason, C'aractacus.
Next morning the Commissioners, with sad hearts,
mounted the horses which stood for them at the palace
gate in splendid caparisons, and rode towards the Court
in solemn state, accompanied by their bodyguard with
drawn swords. Again they rode through a mourning and
praying populace, but at one part of the main street they
were struck with an unwonted spectacle.
For there a group of men who looked hardly human
had taken their stand. Some of them were clad in
leather, some in rough skins, some with little more than
rags, the remains of robes which had long nearly fallen
to pieces. Over their shoulders streamed their unkempt
locks. Many of them had not washed for years. Their
features were gaunt and grim, their gestures uncouth,
repellent, yet commanding. Their faces were for the
most part entirely unknown, and many of them had not
trodden for many a long year the streets of Antioch or
any other city. Yet in the bearing of these wild-lookiug
men there was no timidity or reverence. They did not
bow, or kneel, or weep, or supplicate, but stood upright
in an attitude almost of menace. They were the hermits
whom Macedonius had assembled from all the clefts and
dens and booths of Mount Silpius and Mount Amanus
and Mount Casius to come to intercede for the guilty
city. Among them even Stagirius had come, no longer,
indeed, in paroxysms of violence, but with the light of
madness still gleaming in his restless eyes.

54 GATHERING CLOUDS
While the Commissioners were wondering at this
strange assemblage Macedonius strode out, and Caesarius,
to his amazement, saw his bridle and his robe seized by a
gaunt old man whose goatskin was grimy and tattered,
but who, speaking in Syriac — the only language he knew
— imperiously ordered both Commissioners to dismount.
'Who is this madman?' he exclaimed indignantly, turn
ing to his guard, and raising his hand to strike him away
with the flat of his sword.
'It is Macedonius the barley-eater,' exclaimed several
voices in awestruck tones.
The name filled both the Commissioners with an almost
overpowering sense of dread. This, then, was the saint
with whose fame the world rang. Here was a man who
had given up all for Christ — the Elijah of his age. Surely
his mandates must be messages from God? Without a
moment's delay the two great nobles sprang from their
horses and knelt on the ground before him, while Caesarius
entreated his pardon for his rude exclamation and intended
blow. Of all this Macedonius took no notice.
He was neither impressed nor terrified by the long
array of steeds and armed soldiers, and ' grooms besmeared
with gold,' nor with the supreme jurisdiction of the
legates. While all the nobles and rulers of Antioch
trembled with the trembling population, he felt his soul
dilated with the flame of inspiration.
' Go, my friends,' he said, ' and say to the Emperor
" Thou, too, art but a man, ruling over men. Darest
thou destroy the image of God? Statues are easily
replaced, as thine have already been, but canst thou
restore to life the image of God which once thou hast
defaced? Canst thou make one hair grow again of the
men whom thou hast doomed? " '
' Yea,' said the other hermits, ' and we are all ready to
lay down our lives for this city. We will die for those
whom you condemn. Some of us will go on an embassy
to the Emperor in the name of all the rest, nor will we
leave this city till it is pardoned.'
The Commissioners felt that they were powerless to dis
regard what they accepted as a supernatural intervention.
They knew the reverence with which the pious Emperor

THE THUNDERBOLT AVERTED 55
regarded men whom the current opinion enshrined on the
summit of human holiness. They rode on to the gates of
the Praetorium to consult together. There all the bishops
who were in the city met them, and said that unless they
would promise to be merciful they should only pass into
the hall over their bodies. They promised, and then the
bishops kissed their hands. A poor mother had been hold
ing the bridle of Hellebichus all the way, as the two judges
passed through the crowd. Seeing her son among the fet
tered prisoners, she flew to him, flung her arms round him,
covered him with her long, dishevelled locks, and, drawing
the youth to Hellebichus, bathed the feet of the Commis
sioner with her tears, imploring him with cries and sobs
not to rob her of the support of her old age, but rather to
kill her there and then. The hearts of the two judges
were overwhelmed. They could not proceed with their
business. After consultation they decided to check any crude and
ill-advised embassy of the hermits to the Emperor, and to
postpone all further action until Caesarius had returned to
¦Constantinople for the further commands of Theodosius,
while Hellebichus remained at his post. The decision was
announced to the people, and though the accused were left
in chains, and the families of those whose property had
been confiscated were homeless, yet the respite caused
such joy and hope that they broke into acclamations and
benedictions. Caesarius started by night with only two
servants. The hermits wished to accompany him, but he
declined. 'The journey,' he said, 'is long and difficult;
the fatigues will exhaust your age ; and its expenses would
be beyond your power. But I will gladly be the bearer of
your written intercession.'
Few of the hermits could write; most of them could
only speak Syriac. But Macedonius drew up a brief epis
tle, boldly reminding the Emperor of his last day, and of
the judgment of God which awaited him, and to this the
hermits who could write appended their names and the
others their marks. Then Caesarius set forth. He trav
elled night and day. He did not once descend from his
chariot, either to take food, or to rest, or to change his
clothes ; and thus he traversed in six days the three hun-

56 GATHERING CLOUDS
dred leagues which separated Antioch from Constantino
ple. He reached the palace gate of Theodosius at noon
on the Tuesday in the fourth week of Lent. But he found
that his task was already accomplished. Eight days before
Bishop Flavian had moved the heart of the Emperor to
pity, and Antioch had been forgiven.
When the aged Patriarch of Antioch was admitted into
the Emperor's presence he was overwhelmed by the sense
of his position. Theodosius did not affect the superficial
splendours of Byzantinism, but stood on a dais at the end
of the hall, a strong, handsome Spaniard, surrounded by
the noble-looking Gothic guard in whom he delighted —
white-skinned, majestic Amali and Baits, wearing their
golden collars, and with their long fair hair streaming
over their shoulders. The shadow of the Empire clung
about him in a certain magnificent stateliness of demean
our, showing him to be conscious that 'the rule of all
things' was in his hands. Weary with age and with hasty
travel, and burdened with the responsibilities which he had
left behind him and the thought of the dear dying sister
who had so long been the companion of his loneliness, and
whose eyes he feared would now be closed by a stranger's
hands, Flavian was far more overwhelmed by the thought
that he represented in his own person a city which had
been guilty of crimes against the imperial majesty such
as might well be deemed unpardonable. He could not
approach, but stood far off at the end of the hall, his look
fixed on the ground, his white head bent, his aged eyes
bathed in tears. He could not speak. The heart of The
odosius had been' fiercely exacerbated, but he could not
brook that spectacle. He descended from his throne,
came forward, and taking the old man by the hand, gently
pleaded with him, as though he himself were on his defence.
' Did I,' he asked, ' deserve such treatment at the hands
of Antioch ? Had I not always been generous to the city,
and was it not my intention to visit it in person ? Or, if
they had any cause of offence against me, why did they
insult my noble father, the defender of the Empire ? Why
did they insult my young and harmless boys ? Above all,
why did they heap their outrages on the sweet Empress
whom I loved so tenderly, and have so recently lost?

THE THUNDERBOLT AVERTED 57
Was she not gentleness and goodness itself? Were not
the poor and the sick her peculiar charge ? Did she not
go, Empress as she was, alone and unattended to the sick
and the poor? Was not her voice raised to me day by day
in favour of all that was gentle and kind? It is too much,
father, it is too much ! How can I forgive the brutal mul
titude who would hack to pieces the image of my Flaccilla,
and drag it with foul insults through the streets ? '
'We have sinned, we have sinned,' said the weeping
bishop when at last he found words to speak. ' We ac
knowledge all your generosity ; we owe you nothing but
love ; we do not deserve your compassion or your forgive
ness. It was a fraud and malice of the devil which led
the multitude astray. But oh ! forgive, forgive them !
Thus can you best frustrate the malignity of those evil
demons. When the devil had robbed man of Paradise, did
not God open heaven to the ruined race ? Oh ! be thou
like God. The eyes of all, Jews and Pagans, Greeks and
barbarians, in Antioch are on you. If they see mercy
prevailing over judgment, and forgiveness dispelling wrath,
will they not exclaim with one voice, " Heavens ! how
great is the power of Christianity ! " And oh, Emperor !
bethink thee of the magnanimity of the wise Constantine
when his statues were pelted, and he only smiled, and,
raising his hand to his cheek, said that he felt no hurt.
Bethink thee too of thine own gentleness, and thine excla
mation in setting the captives free in the great pardon :
" Would that I could also recall the dead ! " Worse to us
than our earthquakes, worse than our conflagrations, has
been our crime and thy anger. Oh ! bethink thee of the
day when thou too shalt stand before the bar of Him who
said, " If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will
your Father which is in heaven forgive you your tres
passes." Forgive the insults inflicted on thee, as Eternal
God daily forgives the insults which men heap on Him,
and, in spite of them, still causes His sun to shine on the
evil and on the good, and His rain to fall on the just and
on the unjust. Thou art kind and gentle : prove thyself
nobler than our ill-deserts. Otherwise, I myself will never
return to my native city, but will hide my shame in some
far place of exile.'

58 GATHERING CLOUDS
Theodosius was so deeply moved by these words that,
like Joseph before his brethren, he could scarcely refrain
from giving way in the presence of his courtiers, and he
had to turn aside to hide his tears. He had been struck
most of all by the plea that- he stood to men in the place
of God, and must forgive even as God forgives.
' Oh ! ' he exclaimed, ' was not Christ crucified by the
very men whom He came to save ? Yet He forgave them !
And must not I forgive my fellow-men?' When once
his wrath was calmed he gave free scope to his emotion.
' Return,' he said to Flavian ; ' return with all speed. Say
that I forgive. I rescind the decrees which I sent by Cae
sarius and Hellebichus. Antioch shall not be degraded;
the accused shall be amnestied.'
On hearing the words the revulsion of unlooked-for joy
in the heart of Flavian was so strong that he sank back
fainting into the arms of the attendants. When he re
covered he hid his face in his hands, and could only mur
mur in broken words his gratitude to God and to the
Emperor. Asa last favour he begged that he might take
back with him the boy-Emperor Arcadius, as a pledge of
mercy and love to the rejoicing city.
'Nay,' said Theodosius, 'I cannot send him, but offer
up all your prayers for me, that my war with Maximus
may be successful, and after that I will visit Antioch in
person. Speed! speed! and deliver the people from the
agony of their suspense.'
But the weariness and infirmities of age prevented
Flavian from travelling back without rest as he had come,
and a swift courier was despatched with the entrancing
news. Nay, more, Theodosius even sent with him an
autograph letter, brief, but full of kindness and dignity,
in which, less in the tone of a wrathful emperor, or even
of an offended father, than of a friend who wishes to be
reconciled, he gently reproached them only for having for
gotten what they owed and what the world owed to his
beloved Flaccilla.
Meanwhile, before this news could reach Antioch, Chrys
ostom had not been idle. He continued to pour forth
his impassioned harangues in the Cathedral. Might he
not justifiably glory in the fact that the only gleam of

THE THUNDERBOLT AVERTED 59
hope, the only intervention on behalf of pity, had come
to Antioch from Christians ? No Pagan magnate or ora
tor had gone to intercede, but Flavian, ready like a good
shepherd to lay down his life for the sheep. It was not
the long-bearded, large-cloaked, self-exalting Pagan cynics
who had bestirred themselves for the city. They had hur
ried away, anxious only to save their goods and to save
themselves ; but the monks, descending like angels from
their mountain solitudes, had overawed the majesty of the
sword and sceptre with the glory of holiness. 'And now,
why,' he asked, ' are you so ungrateful and so womanish
as to plunge into pusillanimous murmurs about your pun
ishment, though it is so far less severe than what you
dreaded? Ought you not rather to burst with praises,
and to sing, "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, Who
hath visited and redeemed His people " ? Like children
you are crying, " Oh, unhappy Antioch ! how art thou
dishonoured?" Dishonoured! What dishonours a city?
Its vice, its squalor, its greed, its cruelty, its drunkenness,
not the forfeiture of a nominal prerogative. " But Antioch
has lost her glory ! " Children that you are ! What is
her glory? Not her palaces, not her statues and marble
streets and bright colonnades, not her Grove of Daphne,
nor her fountains, and cypresses, and soft air, and multitudi
nous population ; nay, but such virtues as Christianity has
brought forth in her, and the glory which not even Rome
can equal, that here the disciples were first called Christians.'
Nor did John's labours end with his sermon. The
words rang in his ears, ' I was in prison, and ye visited me,'
and he made his way to the crowded city jail to console
the captives, and above all to tend the hapless boy over
whom his heart yearned in pity. He was conducted into
the place where Philip lay. It was crowded with other
victims, chiefly of the poorest rank. The air was
poisonously foul ; the misery and anguish were intense ;
there was a total lack of all decency, or tendance, or
wholesome food. Here in a corner the poor lad lay like
an image moulded in wax, faint and sore, scarcely able to
speak, and seemingly almost at the point to die. The
soul of Chrysostom was moved by mingled pity and
indignation as he witnessed his condition.

60 GATHERING CLOUDS
Murmuring in his ear a few words of prayer and
comfort, he went straight to Hellebichus, and, promising
to become surety for Philip, entreated the Commissioner
to allow the boy to be removed. The heart of Hellebichus
had been greatly softened by all that he had witnessed,
and he wrote the requisite order. The sick lad was gently
placed in a soft litter and carried to the house of
Chrysostom. There Anthusa tended him with womanly
solicitude as lovingly as if he had been her own son ; and
under her gentle nursing the young life began to take
colour and fragrance again, like a flower which has been
beaten by storm, and revives in the dew and sunlight.
During the fifth week of Lent the express courier
from Constantinople arrived. He was wreathed with
olive and myrtle, and carried a branch of olive in his hand,
and the people knew that he must be the bearer of good
news. When Hellebichus without delay announced the
free forgiveness of the Emperor, not even the rules of
Lent could check the outburst of general joy. Tables
were spread in the public ways, and all feasted at the
lectisternia. Hellebichus himself, with a garland on his
brow, promenaded the principal streets, amid the acclama
tions of the multitude. Libanius was by his side, pausing
now and then to deliver some florid euphuistic passage
from one or other of his orations, written to move or
to thank Theodosius, or in praise of Hellebichus and
Caesarius. Antioch, with a great rebound, felt that she
was herself again. The people even begged Hellebichus
to stop and partake in their festivity. They made him
sit clown, and were delighted to see him graciously eat a
little fish at one of their tables.
On Easter eve Flavian himself arrived. He was
followed, he was borne along by great floods of the
populace, who broke into shouts of gratitude and welcome.
The public baths were opened. Banquets were spread in
the open air, and every house was gay with garlands and
festoons. That night the streets of the city were bright
as day with universal illumination ; and the tender heart
of the old bishop was further gladdened because he found
his sister still alive.
Never did Easter morn rise more brightly over Antioch.

THE THUNDERBOLT AVERTED 61
It seemed to many of the people as though that day they
too had risen with Christ from the dead. The church
was wholly unable to accommodate the thousands who
thronged to it. The sun shone in on a mass of garlands
and myrtle boughs. It was on this occasion that Chrysos
tom delivered the famous harangue in which he described
the mission of Flavian. In speaking of the demonstra
tions of joy — the Forum hung with wreaths, the many
lamps, the couches strewn in the streets for banquet —
he bade them join with these another and a purer festival
— to crown themselves with the roses of virtue, to kindle
in pure souls the lamps of wisdom and holiness. Then
Flavian himself stood before the holy table, and stepped
forth with the consecrated elements in his hands. The
choir broke out into thunders of glad psalmody ; sons
flung their arms round the necks of fathers whose lives
were saved, and happy mothers clasped their laughing
children to their breasts.
And when Chrysostom returned and broke the glad
news to Philip a wan smile for the first time flickered over
the boy's pale features. He grasped the hand of the Pres
byter in a pressure of speechless gratitude when he was told
that the peril was passed for ever, and that henceforth the
house of Chrysostom and Anthusa should be his home.

62 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER IX
PHILIP IS BAPTISED
In every church a fountain springs,
O'er which the Holy Dove
Hovers with softest wings. — Keble.
The exertions of Chrysostom during this memorable Lent
produced their natural reaction. His bodily frame, weak
ened by years of asceticism, was incapable of sustaining the
tremendous tension of soul and spirit necessitated by the
events of the last two months, and he fell ill. It was not
strange, for while he lived the life of a solitary for two
whole years, and. devoted himself to the study of the New
Testament, he never lay down to sleep. The consequences
had been a permanent weakness, and after his severe
labours he completely broke down. Extreme languor con
fined him to his chamber and his bed.
And now he reaped the fruits of his kindness to Philip.
The boy had completely recovered the effects of his cruel
flagellation, and the amnesty accorded to the city had
secured his safety ; but meanwhile he had been left an
orphan by the death of his mother, who died of a broken
heart during the troubles which followed the execution of
her husband. She had, indeed, left him a small patrimony,
but he had no home. Chrysostom and Anthusa therefore
decided to make Philip an inmate of their household, and,
while he was nominally an attendant, Chrysostom really
regarded him as an adopted son. His father, Hernias,
had given the boy a good training, and he had meant him
to follow the profession of a rhetorician. He had even
aspired some day to make him a pupil of the much-admired
Libanius. It was the ruin of all his prospects, and the
consequent blighting of his ambition for the son of whom
he was so proud, which had kindled the fierce wrath of

PHILIP IS BAPTISED 63
Hernias against the Emperor. This bitterness of heart
had driven him headlong into the riot, which had caused
the forfeit of his life.
Philip felt a passionate love for his protector, and
Anthusa supplied to him the place of his lost mother.
While Chrysostom lay weak and ill Philip was tenderly
assiduous in every ministration. He would read or talk
to him, or when the Presbyter was too weary for even this
he would sit silently by his bedside, anticipating every
want. He was still ostensibly a Pagan ; but he read the
Gospels and the Acts to his protector, asked him eager
questions, and shared in the simple devotions of the family.
Of course his life was very different from what it had been
in the old days, when he might have been seen singing
with his schoolfellows in the colonnades, or shouting in
the circus, or looking on with laughter at the shows in
the streets. But a life of gay excitement was no longer
needful to him. The terrible loss of his father, the sad
death of his mother, his own imminent peril, his talk
with Macedonius amid the strength and silence of the
hills, his re-arrest, the frightful experiences of the flagel
lation and prison, had exercised a sobering influence over
the natural brightness of his temperament. Meanwhile
he had caught something of the most attractive side of
the new faith. The chaste dignity of its continence, and
its serene gaietjr, so free from all dissoluteness, allured
him to grasp, as it were, the holy hands extended to him.
One thing only held him back — the memory of his father's
love. He did not see in the home of Chrysostom the un
speakable weariness which so often overshadowed the
lives of the Pagans. Disenchanted of the old, won by the
happy freshness of the new, he was drawn to Christianity
day after day, by almost insensible gradations, like the
happy catechumens with whom he had . spent too brief a
time in the monastery of Diodore. Chrysostom would not
force the workings of the grace of God in the lad's heart.
He waited for some new sign from Heaven.
The sign came quite naturally, yet in a way which
they regarded as a Divine interposition. Philip had been
reading the story how the young Christ had been found
among the doctors in the _ Temple ; and at night he

64 GATHERING CLOUDS
dreamed that the boy Christ had appeared to him, bright
and smiling as the Christians love to imagine. Him in the
days of the catacombs, and said to him, ' Hail, beloved
one ! ' And he, wondering, but not recognising Him, said,
'Who art thou? for I know thee not.' 'How is it that
thou knowest me not?' said the Vision, 'since I sit so
often by thy side, and go with thee wherever thou art ?
Look in my face, and see what is written there.' And
Philip looked, and saw written there, '- Jesus of Nazareth.'
' This is my name,' said the Vision ; ' write it on thy fore
head, and it shall be thy safeguard.' x
He felt too shy to tell that dream to Chrysostom, lest
it should seem presumptuous ; but it left his heart full
of sweetness. A few nights later he had been reading in
the Gospel of St. John those last discourses of Christ,
' so rarely mixed of sadness and joy, and studded with
mysteries as with emeralds.' The words, ' Have I been so
long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me,
Philip ? ' haunted his memory, because he bore the same
name as the Apostle of Galilee. That night he dreamed
again that Jesus Christ appeared to him in the dignity and
gentleness of His manhood, and said to him the words,
' Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou
not known Me, Philip ? ' And, won by the ineffable
tenderness of His voice and look, Philip had answered in
his dream, ' Lord, if Thou wilt take me, I aim Thine, and
will be Thine henceforth for ever.'
This dream he told to Chrysostom with great modesty,
and offered himself as a catechumen. Chrysostom em
braced him in a transport of thankfulness, and his recovery
was hastened by joy at the youth's conversion. From
that day Philip was carefully instructed, and in due time
he descended in white robes into the baptismal font in the
Church of St. Babylas, while Anthusa and Chrysostom
stood beside him; and even Macedonius came down from
his mountain cave, and wept for gladness as he stood
sponsor for the young fugitive to whom he had hardly
been persuaded to give refuge. Many besides Philip had
been won to the faith by the love and self-sacrifice recently
shown by its adherents.
1 Some readers will recall a story of the boyhood of St. Edmund of
Canterbury.

PASSING YEARS 65

CHAPTER X
PASSING YEARS
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis Eevum. — Hok.
Happy years of fruitful and blessed work flowed over
Chrysostom after the memorable events of 387. They
were the most peaceful and untroubled years of his life.
He used them in the highest duties of his sacred office as
a writer and a preacher. Two hundred homilies are still
extant as a proof of his industry. As a preacher he did
not merely thrill his audience with witching oratory, but
built them up in Christ, fearlessly exposing every form of
fashionable vice. He made some enemies by the plainness
of his speaking and the uncompromising loftiness of his
denunciations. He would have been utterly ashamed of
himself had he not done so. He knew that friendship
with the world was enmity with God, and the tumul
tuous applause which accompanied his grander outbursts
troubled more than it pleased him. It made him fear that
the moral lesson would be lost in the intellectual excite
ment, and that his . arrows of lightnings had but played
before the imagination instead of blazing in the conscience.
But if he made some bitter foes, there were many who
loved him, both in the Church and in the world, and,
happy in the comparative obscurity of his rank, he was
less obnoxious to the hatred of the bad.
His one intense desire was to change nominal Chris
tians into real Christians. To the heathen he was gentle
and generous, understanding their difficulties, and trying
to win them by the force of his arguments and the beauty
of his ideal. He did his utmost to turn Christians from
the Pagan corruptions which had begun to invade the
Church on every side. Plence his energetic warnings

66 GATHERING CLOUDS
against the drunkenness and luxury of wedding and
funeral feasts, the superstitious use of amulets, and the
orgies of immorality which strangely disgraced the nightly
celebration of saints' days and festivals.
Nor was his preaching only moral. Antioch was full of
error and heresies, and he endeavoured to refute them, not
by virulence and venom, not by misrepresentations and
anathemas, but by fair, honourable, and kindly reasoning.
During these years, too, he added to his already vast
stores of Biblical knowledge, and enriched Christian lit
erature with commentaries which, like those of his friend
Theodore of Mopsuestia, were framed on principles of
true criticism, and, if less learned than those of St.
Jerome, were saner and more beneficial than any which
were written for a thousand years.
Of course the happy years were chequered with the
natural sorrows of life which happen to us all. His heavi
est loss was the death of his mother, Anthusa, whose
unbroken love and care he repaid with the deepest filial
affection. Her death, though in many respects an irrep
arable calamity, yet did not alter his domestic circum
stances. She left him surrounded by faithful and attached
servants, and Philip, now a fine youth, full of vigour,
shrewd sense, and practical capacity, attended his steps,
lightened his burdens, relieved him of all worrying details,
acted as his amanuensis, and amused his leisure hours
with the flow of his natural gaiety. Philip would not
allow himself to be ordained a reader. Chrysostom repre
sented to him the best ideal of manhood he ever hoped to
see, and the youth knew that in helping him and bright
ening his life he was rendering higher services to the world
than any which could come from his independent action.
Old friends of Chrysostom died as the years flowed on.
His Christian teacher, Diodore of Tarsus, died in 394, and
his Pagan teacher, Libanius, in 395 ; but Philip's compan
ionship saved him from being lonely, and Philip's younger
friends, who all looked up to and loved the great Pres
byter, surrounded him with a garland of their young
enthusiasm. Meanwhile Chrysostom was ever watching with the
deepest interest, and often with profoundest apprehen-

PASSING YEARS

G7

sion, the menacing horizon of the future, both in the
Church and in the world. The year after the riot he had
rejoiced in the victory of Theodosius over the usurper
Maximus. That bad adventurer had been an accomplice
in the murder of the young Emperor Gratian ; and at the
instigation of Spanish bishops, but to the disgust of St.
Ambrose and St. Martin of Tours, he was the first who
allowed Christians to be murdered by their fellow-Chris
tians because of their opinions. Theodosius defeated the
usurper in two great battles, and drove him to Aquileia.
There Maximus was seized by his own soldiers, the purple
robe was torn off his back, the purple sandals from his feet,
the purple and jewelled diadem from his brow, and, bound
hand and foot, he was dragged into the presence of Theo
dosius. It was August 25, 388, five years almost to a day
since the murdered Gratian had suffered the same fate.
Theodosius looked at the defeated usurper with a mixture
of pity and contempt, and after a few disdainful questions
dismissed him without deciding his fate. His captors took
the law into their own hands, and struck off his head
outside the imperial tent. Andragathius, the admiral of
Maximus, and the actual murderer of Gratian, hearing of
his master's defeat, drowned himself in the Adriatic ; and
Ambrose, of whose deeds Chrysostom always heard with
the profoundest admiration, secured the mercy of Theo
dosius for the common herd of the vanquished.
But heart-shaking news came fast and thick. The year
390 was marked by terrible events. The people of Thessalo-
nica were passionately devoted to chariot-races. They rose
in fury against Botheric, their governor, because, on the
complaint of his cupbearer, he had righteously punished a
charioteer, who was their favourite, for one of those enor
mities which were the plague-spot of Pagan antiquity.
Refusing to release the man from prison, Botheric fell a
victim to the rage of the mob, who murdered him and
many of his chief officials, and dragged their bodies with
insults through the streets. There was every circumstance
in this heinous crime to awaken the uttermost indignation
of Theodosius. He loved Thessalonica. There he had
long resided; there he had been baptised; and he had been
to the city a conspicuous benefactor. And now the lewd

68 Gathering clouds
factions of the multitude had brutally murdered his per
sonal friend and his responsible officials. The news trans
ported him into one of those paroxysms of fury to which
his Spanish temperament was liable.
At last, mad with rage, Theodosius committed the one
crime which most deeply stained his life. There was to be
another great race in the circus at Thessalonica, and he
knew that the people would assemble in thousands to wit
ness it. He issued an edict worthy of a Caligula or a Nero,
that when the multitude was assembled the doors of the
circus should be closed, and the soldiers should enter and
massacre indiscriminately the innocent and the guilty.
The moment that his insane wrath had thus found expres
sion he repented, and, like the Athenians after their
atrocious mandate to massacre the people of Mitylene,
he sent messengers of mercy to overtake the avengers of
blood. But our words and deeds are often made retributively
irrevocable that they may transform themselves into their
own avenging furies. The repentance came too late to
prevent the consequences of the crime. The frightful
command arrived before the news that it was already re
scinded. There wais no Flavian, no Chrysostom at Thessa
lonica ; and if there were any hermits to interpose, the
horrid deed was not known till it had been accomplished.
The scene which ensued was one of the most horrible
recorded in history. With drawn swords the soldiers
entered the crowded circus, and slew and slew, alike the
innocent and the guilty, alike strangers and citizens, alike
young and old, till their swords were blunt, and their hearts
sick, and their arms weary, and their eyes dim with the
mist of blood, and themselves intoxicated with its sickening
fumes. They struck to the ground, they stabbed, they
murdered even children on the bosoms of their mothers, till
they left only bleeding and ghastly heaps, where the living
writhed among the wounded and the slain, and a horrid
silence buried the wild shrieks of agony and fear. For
three hours of inconceivable and brutalising horror the
work of hell went on. One historian says that 15,000 fell;
but even if we accept the lowest computation, and place
the number' of victims at 7,000, such guilt must have made

PASSING YEARS gg
the remorseful heart of the Christian Emperor exclaim
with the midnight murderer :
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand ? No ! this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red !
The dreadful news reached the Antiochenes. That fate
they too might have suffered if the voice of the Church
had not mollified the swelling anger of the Emperor. But
Chrysostom heard with proud thankfulness how the daunt
less Ambrose, overwhelmed as he was with shame and
anguish, had maintained the violated rights of humanity ;
how he had towered above the repentant Emperor like his
embodied moral sense ; how he had written for his private
eye a letter full, indeed, of manly tact, yet stern and un
compromising as that of a Hebrew prophet ; how he had
refused to him the Holy Communion ; how he had declined
to admit him into the Church without a public penance ;
how he had repulsed from the door of the Basilica of Milan
the foremost man in all the world.
The conscience of the Emperor sided with the rebukes
of the great bishop. The hands which were red with inno
cent blood were impotent to strike his judge. Theodosius
could be transported out of himself by the evil genius of
his anger, but he could not act like a deliberate tyrant.
He accepted the penance imposed on him. After long
exclusion from the Church Ambrose required him to renew
the admirable law of Gratian, which enacted that a period
of thirty days must always intervene between judgment
and punishment. Then the Emperor laid aside all the
insignia of royalty, and, prostrate on the ground, bewept
the sin into which he had been misled, and cried, 'My soul
cleaveth to the dust ; quicken Thou me according to Thy
word.' Fortunately, Ambrose had to deal with an emperor who
was emphatically a man — a man of ability, and not deaf to
the dictates of conscience. Such a person as his minister,
Rufinus, would have cared nothing for ecclesiastical pen
alties. One day, when he found the Emperor bathed in
tears, he could hardly conceal the disdainful smile Avhicli

70 GATHERING CLOUDS
passed over his features. ' You smile,' said Theodosius,
'because you do not feel my misery. The Church of God
is opened to slaves and beggars : to me it is closed, and
with it the gates of heaven.'
The year 392 was darkened by the murder of the youth
ful emperor, Valentinian II., who had been found dead —
probably murdered by Arbogast the Frank. Chrysostom
mourned his sad fate. An emperor since his childhood,
that magnificent inheritance had brought him nothing but
misery. He had suffered terror, flight, exile, and manifold
perils, only to become the puppet of an insolent barbarian.
He was devoted to Ambrose, whom he longed to see once
more, and he had struggled out of every fault and error of
his boyhood. As he was strolling in his garden on the
banks of the Rhone at Vienne, Arbogast had strangled this
pure and innocent boy, and had .hung his body on the
branch of a tree with his own handkerchief, to make it
supposed that he had committed suicide. When the assas
sin seized him, he had called on the name of Ambrose, and
cried, 'Alas! what will become of my unhappy sisters?'
Arbogast, being a barbarian, dared not make himself em
peror, but he chose the tenth-rate rhetorician, Eugenius, as
a suitable block on which to hang the imperial purple.
Utterly condemned by the Church, Arbogast and his pup
pet-emperor could only stand for a moment by posing as
the champions of Arianism and Paganism. In 394 Theo
dosius advanced into Italy, with young Alaric — among
others — as one of .his allied chieftains, and defeated the
rebel army in the memorable battle of the Frigidus. Eu
genius was put to death, and Arbogast, flying to the
mountains, fell on his own sword.
Then Chrysostom heard the alarming news that on
January 16, 395, the great Theodosius had breathed his last
in the arms of Ambrose, leaving his life ' like a ruined sea
wall amidst the fierce barbarian tide, beyond which were
ravaged lands.' There could not but be vast changes for
the worse in the reigns of his two orphan sons — the
stupidly dull Arcadius, who was now eighteen, and the
malignantly dull Honorius, who was six or seven years
younger. The Empire was divided between them, never
again to be reunited. The successors of the brave and up-

PASSING YEARS 71
right Spanish soldier were two vapid and lymphatic boys,
the one sullen and stupid, the other impotent and half
imbecile : neither of them capable of. being aroused, unless
it were to some transport of murderous jealousy against
the men who overshadowed their insignificance. And both
of them were left under the tutelage of rival aliens, who,
it was clear, would wield all the real power. The gover
nor of Arcadius was the Gaul Rufinus ; of Honorius, the
Vandal Stilico. The main object of each was to undermine
and overthrow the other.
But amid all these tragic and solemn events Chrysostom
was still pursuing his .daily duties. He had made more
than one effort to win over to Christianity his old tutor,
Libanius ; but the sophist, though he was an honourable
and open-minded man, could not be convinced. Chrysos
tom powerfully met all his other arguments and objec
tions, but there was one on which Libanius dwelt with
cogent force, and to which the Presbyter could give no
reply which satisfied either Libanius or himself. It was
the evil lives of so many nominal Christians; the fact
that genuine, untainted goodness seemed to have become
entirely etiolated; the usurping claims and worldly lives
of so many priests ; the haughty and tyrannous ambition
of so many prelates ; the furies of mutual antagonism
which rent Christians into fierce dissensions ' respecting
incomprehensible minutiae of theological definition ; the
violence and fury of hordes of intolerant monks; the
revolting self-maceration of multitudes of Mlf-idiotic
hermits. As Libanius dwelt on these evils, and quoted
in proof of his allegation, not only Pagans like Euna-
pius, Zosimus, and Ammianus Marcellinus, but even
the writings of St. Basil, of the Gregories, of Am
brose, and of Jerome, Chrysostom bitterly felt that such
facts must be a terrible stumbling-block in the path of
Pagan inquirers, as the chief argument against Chris
tianity. Yet were we not forewarned of this? 'When
the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the
earth?' Philip had been present during the discussion between
the Presbyter and Libanius; and Chrysostom, deeply
attached to the boy, and ever anxious for his welfare,

72 GATHERING CLOUDS
exclaimed, ' 0 Philip, my son ! Libanius has not shaken
your faith, I trust ? '
' Nay,' said the boy smiling. ' Many things which
Libanius said were sad — and yet seemed true. But the
Argonauts could not listen to the Sirens while Orpheus
sang to them, and he who has heard Christ's voice cannot
listen to any other.'
' May He be with thee, my son, now and evermore ! '
said Chrysostom ; and he laid his right hand gently on
the boy's dark hair.

GOTHS AT ANTIOCH 73

CHAPTER XI
GOTHS AT ANTIOCH
Oh ! thou goddess,
Thou divine nature, how thyself thou blazon'st
In these two princely boys ! — C'ymbeline, iv. 2.
One day in the year 395, as Chrysostom and Philip were
walking down the grand main street of Antioch, under
the colonnades which sheltered them from the almost
blinding sunlight, they saw an unwonted sight. No less
a person than the all-powerful Rufinus had come to Antioch.
Nominally sent on a mission by Arcadius, he had really
come to avenge a terrific private grudge against Lucian,
the Count of the East. Lucian had been a favourite of
Rufinus,. and had purchased his promotion by bribes ; but
he had used his power well, and had refused to commit
an injustice to benefit Eucherius, the Emperor's uncle.
Eucherius complained to the Emperor, and as his anger
endangered Rufinus's plan for marrying Arcadius to his
daughter, he was filled with fury against Lucian for his
honest independence.
As his mission was aimed against so powerful an official
— for Antioch ranked with Constantinople, Rome, and
Alexandria, among the four first cities of the Empire —
the Emperor had attached to the escort of Rufinus some of
those Gothic guards whose fine presence his father, Theo
dosius, had regarded as the most splendid ornament of
his palace. They marched around the chariot of the Min
ister in the splendour of their armour — their necks en
circled with collars of gold, the tawny wolfskins belted
over their breasts, the quivers on their backs, the huge
bow carried in the left hand, and their fair locks, the ad
miration of all the East, flowing under their helmets
adorned with pheasant's plumes.

74 GATHERING CLOUDS
They had brought with them some of their youths to
witness the glories of the Eastern city, and on the morn
ing after Rufinus had. made his secret midnight entrance
into the city and taken possession of the palace of the
Seleucids, these Goths, laying aside their accoutrements,
stalked out over the island-bridge into the streets. Bar
barians of this stature and distinction were almost unknown
in Antioch, and wherever they went the slim, dark Syrians
and the inquisitive Greeks thronged to stare at them,
much to their indignation. Their knowledge of Greek
was highly imperfect, and of Syriac they knew nothing.
They did not like to condescend to ask their way, for if
they did the impudent boys in the crowd laughed at their
pronunciation and their blunders, and had more than once
hopelessly misdirected them. They had managed to get
to the Forum, but with little notion where they were ; and
there a crowd of the loungers who infested Antioch gathered
in knots about them. Treating the starers with ais much
indifference as they could, one of the Gothic youths had
ventured to ask, in bad Greek, ' What that building was ? '
pointing to the Hall of Justice. The gamin appealed to
gave some ridiculous answer, which made the crowd roar
with laughter; and another tried his wit by giving the
Goths the nickname of ' cranes,' in reference to their slow
find stately gait. This amused the Antiochenes still more,
and the strangers were saluted with general cries of
' Cranes ! Cranes ! ' till one of the younger Goths, more
quick-tempered and less disdainful than his brothers, gave
a buffet to one of these ill-mannered tonguesters which
laid him sprawling and howling in the dust. The rest of
the crowd shrank back to a more respectful distance ; but,
jealous of the superior size and beauty of the Goths, and
not liking to see their comrade so lightly felled by a mere
barbarian, the boys began to pelt them with stones. Then
the Goths indiscriminately seized some of their tormentors,
and so soundly boxed their ears, or beat them with the
flat of their swords, that the amusement of the crowd
began to be mingled with a little salutary dread.
At this moment Chrysostom entered the Forum with
Philip, and the youth's quick glance at once took in the
scene.

GOTHS AT ANTIOCH

75

mi

' My father,' he said — for so Chrysostom had told hi...
to address him — 'I think you are seriously wanted 'here,'
and in a few words he rapidly told him what was going on.
Chrysostom woke from one of the reveries in which he
was often lost, and, advancing to the crowd, who all knew
him, and by all of whom he was deeply reverenced, he said
to them very sternly :
'Mischievous idlers, what is this? Do you not know
that these Goths have come here with Ruflnus, and belong
to the very Bodyguard of the Emperor? Can you be so
senseless ? Do you want another affair of the statues, or
do you wish to undergo the fate of Thessalonica ? Back
to your business, if you have any, before I summon the
archers.' The crowd slank away, filled with alarm ; and Philip
picked up the sobbing gamin, much more frightened than
hurt, whom the young Goth had knocked down. He told
him to apologise, which the street-arab was only too glad
to do. Meanwhile Chrysostom, speaking slowly and dis
tinctly in the simplest Greek, expressed his regret to the
Goths that they should have been thoughtlessly annoyed,
and courteously offered to be their guide through the city.
The Presbyter was only of middle height, and the tall
Ostrogoths looked like giants by his side ; but they recog
nised a man when they saw him. They instantly recovered
the good temper which had only been ruffled for a moment.
' I did not know that your streets at Antioch buzzed
with so many insects,' said their chief ; ' but I would not
willingly hurt them.'
' The people are more accustomed to you in Constanti
nople,' answered Chrysostom. ' They have never seen men
like you before, and are, perhaps, a little envious.'
The Goths smiled with gratified vanity at a perfectly
sincere compliment, and, recognising from something in
definable in his manner that Chrysostom must be an
ecclesiastic — though in those days the clergy wore the
ordinary costume of the laity — he asked, 'Are you not
John, the famous presbyter?'
' Not famous,' said Chrysostom ; ' but I am John.'
' Ah ! ' said the Amal, ' you have spoken kindly to me,
and let me tell you a story. I once went to visit the

76 GATHERING CLOUDS
Frank Arbogast, and asked him if he knew the Bishop
Ambrose, at Milan. " Yes," said Arbogast, " and have
often sat at his table." " Ah, chief ! " answered one of his
guests, " that is why you are so victorious, because you are
a friend of the man who can make the sun stand still." '
' I cannot compare my insignificance to the greatness
of Ambrose,' said Chrysostom.
'I don't know,' said the Goth, 'but you, more than any
man, saved Antioch from the fate of Thessalonica, and
our Fravitta and our Gainas, whose sons these two boys
are, have heard of you and honour you.'
' Would that you, noble Goths, were not Arians,' said
Chrysostom, whom no consideration could ever prevent
from saying what he thought was right.
' Oh ! ' said the Goth, laughing, 'it is not possible for us
Northern soldiers to enter into your theological niceties,
about which Constantinople idly chatters, and lives like
Gomorrah all the same. We follow the doctrine of our
great bishop and teacher — Wulfila, " the little wolf," so
we called him out of love for him. He translated our
Bible for us, and never meant to be otherwise than
orthodox.' Chrysostom saw that it would be useless to pursue the
subject, but he did his utmost to interest the Amals and
their boys. He showed them the flowering banks of the
Orontes ; he pointed out to them the best statues ; he
walked with them to the huge Charonium, which amazed
them above everything; he gave them a glimpse of the
ravine of Parthenius, and took them to the Golden Gate
to show them the colossal Cherubim, the spoils of the
Temple of Jerusalem, which Titus had placed over its
arch. Philip, meanwhile, with Greek grace and versatility,
had made himself perfectly at home with the younger
Goths, and Chrysostom gave them a little banquet at his
own house.
'Tell me your name, Greek,' said one of the young
brothers to Philip. ' We like you. You have been cour
teous to us.'
' My name is Philip. And yours? '
'I am Thorismund, the son of Gainas.'
' And I,' said the younger, ' am Walamlir, the son of

GOTHS AT ANTIOCH 77
Gainas. We are both Amalings — that is, of noblest birth
— and I hope we shall meet you again, Philip.'
• It is not likely,' said Philip, ' for I shall never leave
the Presbyter, and Constantinople is far away. But if
you ever return to Antioch, come and see us, and I hope
that the street riff-raff will behave better.'
'Oh! never mind them,' said Thorismund; 'and if the
young scamp who went down under my buffet was hurt,
give him this,' and he put a broad silver piece in Philip's
hand. ' I will give it to him,' said Philip, ' but you must not
think, Thorismund, that we shall all of us fall down at the
mere wind of a blow.'
' Would you like to try a friendly wrestling bout ? '
'I am quite willing,' said Philip, laughing, 'if the
Presbyter doesn't object. We might wrestle here on this
grass-plat in the garden, and your chief and the Presbyter
shall be umpires.'
Chrysostom was a little scandalised by the suggestion,
but he good-humouredly acquiesced, if the trial of strength
was to be quite friendly and for fun.
The two youths rose, and smilingly locked each other
in a firm grasp. They were of about the same age, and
fine specimens of Greek and Teutonic beauty. It soon
appeared that Thorismund was the stronger, and Philip
the more skilful, having long been trained in the boyish
games of the palaestra. In the first trial Thorismund had
some trouble to hold his own, but at last by sheer strength
lifted Philip and threw him ; but at the second trial Philip
with his heel struck the hollow of Thorismund's knee, and
down he fell, with Philip uppermost. They were about
to try a third bout, when both Chrysostom and the chief
Amal interfered.
'Enough,' they said; 'you have both done well. So
part and be friends.'
'That we shall be,' said Thorismund, 'and in sign of
it I will ask Philip to accept this.' He took from the
purse at his girdle a silver fibula, and said, ' This will do
to fasten your toga.'
' Well, but,' said Philip, ' we must be like the Homeric
heroes, and if I take your gift you must take mine.' He

78 GATHERING CLOUDS
fetched from his room an armlet of his father's workman
ship, and Thorismund welcomed the gift.
' Do you know what those runes on your fibula mean,
Philip ? ' asked Walamir.
' No,'
' They are the two words, " Chaste, Faithful," and you
may remember our names by them ; for of our ancestors
young Thorismund was called " the Chaste," and Walamir
"the Faithful.'"
So they said farewell to each other with mutual friend
ship and esteem.
Philip gazed after them as they strode down Singon
Street. ' What noble fellows ! ' he exclaimed. ' How they
tower over the sly, slim, swarthy Antiochenes ! Those two
youths with the sunlight turning their short curls into
•gold might be young Apollos. If the Lystrenians saw
them they would say, " The gods have come clown to us
in the likeness of men." '
' Yes,' said Chrysostom. ' They seem to belong to a
nobler, stronger, purer race than ours. We cannot stand
against them. Surely the future must belong to them!
We have to go to them alike for our soldiers and our gen
erals. Oh that they we're not Arians ! '

THE PRESBYTER 79

CHAPTER XII
THE PRESBYTER
Salt is good ; but if the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be
seasoned y — Luke xiv. 34.
The next morning, however, threw a lurid light on the
visit of Rufinus to Antioch. He had glutted to the full his
private enmity. Lucian, Count of the East, Governor of
Antioch, had been arrested by his order in his own palace,
and, after the merest mockery of a trial, beaten to death,
on the neck, with the frightful whips laden with knobs of
lead known to the ancients by the name of plumb at ce. The
unhappy Count had been thrust into a litter in a dying
condition and carried back to the palace. The horrid deed
could not be hid, and nothing but terror prevented the
Antiochenes from avenging his death by another insurrec
tion. Rufinus further purchased their complicity by order
ing the completion of an Imperial Hall of Pillars, which
long continued to be the most stately building in a city of
palaces. How little did the Minister dream that a deed of ven
geance which illustrated at once his ferocit}' and his all but
absolute power was the chief moment in his own headlong
downfall ! His ultimate aim all along, though he was only
an adventurer and the son of an Aquitanian cobbler, was
nothing less than the Empire. He had cherished this mad
ambition ever since the day when Theodosius, angry at
the complaints of favours neaped on the intriguing and
aspiring Gaul, had pettishly exclaimed, ' What is there to
prevent me from making him emperor ? ' As a step to the
fulfilment of this gorgeous dream Rufinus wished to marry
Arcadius to his daughter. But when the sweet gratifi
cation of personal revenge had taken him to Antioch, his
rival, the supple eunuch Eutropius, outwitted and under-

80 GATHERING CLOUDS
mined him. He slipped under the dark eyes of the young
Emperor, as if by accident, a picture of the beautiful Eu-
doxia, daughter of the Frank general Bauto, who came from
a house which hated Rufinus. This palace intrigue was
buried in profoundest secrecy. On April 25, 395, a public
rejoicing was ordered. Eutropius was seen to be busy in
taking from the imperial wardrobe some of the splendid
robes and jewels of former empresses. They were osten
tatiously handed to attendants, and attracted a crowd
before the palace gate. Everyone thought that they were
a marriage gift to the daughter of Rufinus, and indulged
in jeers against that hated official. But no ! the procession,
solemnly escorted by soldiers and preceded by Eutropius,
suddenly turned into another street, and stopped at the
home of Promotus, where Eudoxia lived. The multitudes
then broke into shouts of joy. Rufinus found that he had
been out-manoeuvred by the astuteness of the eunuch, and
learnt for the first time the name of his future empress.
Chrysostom heard all these events with no other thoughts
than those of a citizen, a patriot, a Christian. How little
did he dream that Eudoxia, Eutropius, and the Goth
Gainas, the murderer of Rufinus, would be so closely min
gled with his future destinies, and that their names would
go down to history in such immediate connexion with his
own ! We live in blindness of all that may await us in
the unknown future years, and often those things happen
of which we have dreamed the least.
The Presbyter could not but feel solicitude for the fut
ure of the Empire, yet were there many seasons of depres
sion in which he felt deeper anxiety about the future of
the Church. The Church had conquered the world, and
now the world had re-invaded and was re-conquering the
Church. In former days golden priests had used chalices
of wood; now wooden priests used chalices of gold. In
earlier days life had been full of simplicity, love, and sweet
ness. Now Christianity had become largely nominal, as it
had become all but universal. He saw much that was weak
and bad in Antioch, much that he knew to be false in doc
trine and unprimitive and unscriptural in practice. The
corruption of the best is worst. There is no stench (so
said St. Francis de Sales) so intolerable as that of rotten

THE PRESBYTER gl
lilies. In reality there was little to choose between the
better theoretical Paganism, as it exhibited itself in honest
men like Libanius, Symmachus, or even the late Emperor
Julian, and such Christianity as that of the loose livers
and ambitious Pharisaic priests who on every side were
trying to lord it over God's heritage, while they set the
worst possible example to the flock. He was to become
familiar hereafter with worse types than he ever yet had
seen. 'Salt like this, which had utterly lost its savour,
was in a certain sense worse than anything which had been
seen on the dunghill of pagan Rome, and was fit for noth
ing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of man.'
This was the sad thought which most painfully haunted
the heart of Chrysostom ; and it was the one passion of his
life so to live, so to write, so to preach as to stem the shal
low, muddy, yet drowning and ever-advancing tide of a
merely functional, ecclesiastical, and nominal Christianity.
If he had one conviction stronger than all others, it was
that ' what the Supreme and Sacred Majesty requires of
us is innocence alone ' ; that Christ came not to elaborate
recondite shibboleths, but to create holy characters ; not
to elevate priests into an usurping autocracy, but to give
unimpeded access to God to the humblest and guiltiest
soul, and to fling wide open to all who love righteousness
the gates of everlasting life. The indignation of Chrysos
tom burned hot against all who named the name of Christ,
yet did not even attempt to depart from the forms of
iniquity which Christ most hated ; and most of all against
the priests, who combined the privileges of angels with
the temper of executioners, and carried into the sanctuaries
of the Church the most hateful of the vices of the world.
But such beliefs meant immediate failure ; and such
aims, in the ordinary condition of Churches, involved cer
tain martyrdom.
The day of martyrdom had not yet come, and the hour
for that ultimate triumph — which, because truth is im
mortal, had all the inevitableness of a law — was yet far
off.

BOOK II

BAYS OF STORM

The time is out of joint:— 0 cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right ! Hamlet, i.

CHAPTER XIII
TWO ARCHBISHOPS
O Simon Mago, 0 miseri seguaci,
Che le cose di Dio, che di bontate
Deono essere spose, voi rapaci
Per oro et per argento adulterate. Dante, Inferno, xix. 1-4.
On September 27, 397, Nectarius, Patriarch of Constanti
nople, lay dead in his stately palace.
On the Good Friday of that year (April 4) had died a
very different prelate, the great St. Ambrose. He had
died immediately after receiving the Sacrament, after
lying many hours with his arms outstretched in the form
of a cross. His friends, the chief citizens of Milan, who
adored him, had entreated him to pray that for the sake of
the Church his days might be prolonged, for he was but
fifty-seven years old. But he answered, ' I have not so
lived among you that I am ashamed to live; and yet —
for the Lord is merciful — -I do not fear to die.' 'It is
a death-blow for all Italy,' exclaimed the brave Vandal,
Stilico, when he heard it. And he was right.
No human being would have dreamed of making any
such remark about Nectarius. He was commonplace of
the commonplace ; he was of the world, worldly ; he was
a luxurious worldling, profoundly ignorant of theology.
When appointed archbishop he was a layman; he had
never even been baptised.
He was, indeed, a strange successor to the humble, holy,
fervid St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the greatest theologian
and one of the greatest orators of his day. But Gregory
had shown himself too mild, too noble, and too good for
the magnificent office of which he may be said to have
created the possibility. When Gregory was carried by
85

86 GATHERING clouds
force from his humble bishopric at Nazianzus to preside
over the little handful of the orthodox at Constantinople,
the city, besides being execrably corrupt, was predomi
nantly Arian.
Gregory lived in a lodging, and preached in a single
room, which was large enough to receive the shrunken
congregation. It was through his earnestness and fame
that the room had gradually grown into a chapel, and the
chapel into 'The Church of the Resurrection.' He was
no imposing orator, but short of stature, and though only
fifty years old, was pale, meagre, sickly, and prematurely
aged, with bald head and beard already sable-silvered.
He wore an aspect of continual melancholy ; his careworn
countenance was often bathed in tears: And so far from
valuing the worldly eminence of his rank, his dress was
more like that of a mendicant than of the bishop of the
queen of cities, the capital of the Eastern world.
It was, of course, impossible that so good a man as
Gregory should escape a storm of odium. That is the
compliment which vice pays to virtue. He had as many
stones flung at him as bad men have roses ; his only criti
cism of them was. they were so ill-aimed. His life was
often in danger. On one occasion a furious swarm of
Arians, headed by ' beggars who had forfeited their claim
to pity, monks who looked like goats or satyrs, and women
more frightful than Jezebels,' armed with sticks, stones,
and firebrands, wrecked his church, assaulted his congre
gation, mingled with blood the wine of the chalice, and
nearly murdered him. He escaped, but because one man
had been killed in the tumult he was summoned before
the magistrates for a breach of the peace. Then he was
nearly ousted by the intrigue of one of the basest class of
clerical adventurers in whom that age abounded. Gregory
hated the place ; he hated the work ; he hated the preva
lent hypocrisy ; he hated the universal talk about religion,
without a semblance of its reality, which left him hardly
anyone whom he could trust.
Utterly against his will he was compelled to accept the
archbishopric, which involved the care of the Church of
the Apostles. He had not the least desire to be a bishop.
He had never cared to hang about the doors of the great.

TWO ARCHBISHOPS

87

With singular independence, he declared that he had never
wished to clasp the bloodstained hands of rulers, ' under
whose hands the whole world is ruled by a little diadem
and a small rag of purple.'
He found the presidency of the Second CEcumenical
Council the most distasteful of his duties. He describes it
as a scene of faction, disorder, jealousies, and disgraceful
violence. He found that the assembled ecclesiastics were
chiefly interested in personal questions. They appeared
as antagonists in a battle, bandying bitter accusations,
and leaping from their seats in transports of mutual ani
mosity, until Gregory was thoroughly ashamed of them.
He describes them as chattering like cranes and showing
their teeth like wild boars, and no sooner had he ended a
wise and conciliatory speech intended to raise them to a
higher level, than the younger clergy buzzed about him
like wasps. It is curious that the two best saints of the
fourth century, St. Gregory and St. Martin of Tours,
had a rooted dislike of ecclesiastical gatherings. Gregory
breathed an earnest prayer that he might have nothing
more to do with them, and Martin said that he had never
known anything come of them but mischief. The great
Bossuet agreed with them. ' You know ' — so he wrote to
a friend — ' what kind of things these assemblies"usually
are.' Warning the congregated bishops that they were be
come a byword of strife and partisanship, and finding that
they were intriguing to get rid of him, he offered to resign.
With disgraceful alacrity the assembled Fathers took him
at his word. He left his episcopate to be sought for
by the restless ambitions of time-servers and hypocrites,
' angry lions to the small and fawning spaniels to the
great,' and, sick at heart, retired ' to gaze on the bright
countenance of truth in the mild and dewy air of delight
ful studies.'
Nectarius owed his election to the Patriarchate to the
most casual incident. He was a Praetor, and as he was
going to Tarsus he called on Chrysostom's old teacher,
Diodore, Bishop of Tarsus, to ask if he could take any
letters for him to that city. Struck with his venerable
appearance and his placid temper, Diodore mentioned him

88 GATHERING CLOUDS
to Flavian as a possible candidate for the vacant arch
bishopric. Flavian laughed at the notion, but out of com
pliment to Diodore put down the Praetor's name at the
bottom of the list of selected candidates, which was
handed to the Emperor. Theodosius passed his finger
clown the list, paused at the name of Nectarius, read the
list through a second time, and then declared that he
chose Nectarius.
' Nectarius ! Who in the world is Nectarius ? ' asked
everyone in astonishment, and it turned out that he had
not even been baptised! But Theodosius had very little
opinion of any ecclesiastics except Ambrose, and Ambrose
was a layman when the voice of the people had called him
to the Archbishopric of Milan. So Nectarius stepped from
the baptismal font to the most influential patriarchate of
the world, and to the presidency of the Second CEcumen-
ical Council!
But Theodosius was grievously mistaken if he supposed
that Nectarius was going to be a second Ambrose.
On the contrary, he was just one of those purpureal,
imposing, nugatory personages who, because of his easy
going nullity, his commonplace, worldly shrewdness, and
his total absence of zeal and genius, suited the corrupt
luke-warmness of a semi-Christian city.
Nectarius rose to the full height of the pomposity
which had been impossible to Gregory. He could, indeed,
give no help to the Emperor in the intense perplexities
caused by theological disputes. The bishops heard a
terrifying rumour that Theodosius even meant to consult
the heretic Eunomius, who openly argued the Son was
unlike the Father. The world, as after the Council of
Rimini, might wake with a groan to find itself Arian ! As
no help was to be obtained from the ignorant Archbishop,
Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium, threw himself into the
breach, and determined to give Theodosius a picture-lesson.
He went with other bishops to a Court gathering. Theo
dosius was seated on his throne in all his splendour, and
by him sat his little son Arcadius, only eight years old,
whom he had recently invested with the diadem, and
whom the courtiers were surrounding Avith flattering hom
age. Amphilochius saluted the Emperor, and did not

TWO ARCHBISHOPS 89
take the smallest notice of Arcadius. ' What ! ' said the
Emperor, angrily, ' do you not see my son ? ' ' Oh ! ' said
the Bishop, carelessly, 'I forgot. Good morning, my
child ! ' and he actually had the audacity to pat the august
infant on the cheek and tickle him with his finger !
' Turn that man out ! ' roared Theodosius, in a flame of
anger. Then Amphilochius, facing him, said, ' You see,
Emperor, you cannot tolerate an indignity to your son.
Doubt not, then, that God shares the same feelings, and
learn your duty.' The Emperor was deeply impressed,
and the world was saved from the heresy of Eunomius !
Under the courtly archiepiscopate of Nectarius the
clergy of Constantinople became utterly corrupt and
utterly worldly ; but then, Nectarius was such a good
manager — he kept everything so quiet, and he gave such
good dinners ! And under his sway the Church, to use
Kingsley's phrase, 'swaggered on, arm in arm with the
flesh and the devil.'

90 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XIV
ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP
Paul did not say, Let everyone desire the episcopate. It is a work,
not a relaxation ; a solicitude, not a luxury ; a responsible ministration,
not an irresponsible dominion ; a fatherly supervision, not a tyrannical
autocracy. — Isidoee ov Pelusium, Ep. iii. 216.
Nectarius, then, on September 27, 397, lay dead in his
splendid palace ; and the breath was hardly out of the
Archbishop's body when there were a dozen ' austere
intriguers ' in the - field, and the subterranean plots and
whisperings began, and the wirepullers were incessantly
at work. The floodgates of ecclesiastical ambition were
opened, and poured their muddy sluices over the capital
of the East.
All Constantinople buzzed and clacked with the counter-
solicitations of eager interests, and every nameless pre
tender to the episcopal throne put into play every secret
method in his power to win the coveted prize. For did
not the Archbishop rank among the noblest in the whole
land? Had he not the precedence over the most illustri
ous civilians at Court and in the houses of the great ? Was
not the Patriarch of Constantinople practically higher in
position than even the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch,
and Rome ?
The electorate with whom the choice rested was a little
ill-defined. The provincial bishops were supposed to have
weight in the matter, and as a synod of them happened
at the time to be assembled in the city, under the presi
dency of Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, their influ
ence was regarded as highly important. But then the
illustres and honorati — all who had high civil offices, had
also to be consulted. The people, too, had an undeniable

ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP 91
voice in the nomination of their prelate ; and the supreme
court had necessarily to be reckoned with.
So, for four weary, dreary, and shameful months Con
stantinople became a turmoil of cabals. There was the
cabal of bishops, each trying to further the promotion of
his own favourite, or of himself. There was the cabal of
the clergy of Constantinople, some striving with all the
reckless passion of self-interest to procure their own pre
ferment; others, who had no possible chance, trying to
curry favour with anyone who, if elected, might advance
their future interests ; there was the cabal of influential
personages who felt intensely interested in the result,
because they had pitted their importance against each
other, and the failure of their candidate would be a
diminution of their prestige. And each separate faction
strove to calumniate and undermine all the candidates of
the rest.
Incomparably the most odious of these cliques were
those of the clergy, who seemed to hesitate at no moral
humiliation which would further their ambitious plans.
There was no flattery, no complaisance to which they
would not stoop, if they could only capture popularity
among the lowest of the people. They trumpeted their
own merits in every direction, and got them still more
effectually trumpeted by the dictated eulogiums of their
partisans. On the other hand, no amount of subterranean
calumny was too gross if it served to dim the hopes or
dash the prospects of a possible rival. As for the civil
functionaries and Court officials, they were constantly
receiving the visits of the clergy, who bowed before them
with the most abject abasement. Money was spent with
profusion in the furtherance of their intrigues. From
dawn to dusk the baths, the colonnades, the church
porches, the markets, had but one theme of common
interest — who was to be the new Archbishop?
' I know,' some bourgeois would say mysteriously as he
stood in a group of gossip-mongers.
' You know ? ' another would answer, with disdainful
curiosity. ' Who is it, then ? '
' Ah ! that's telling. But I don't mind giving you a
hint. It's one of the priests of the Church of the Anastasia.'

92 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Oh ! you mean Alopecius,' said a third. ' There
you're out. They could not possibly elect so mere a
booby ! '
' Ah ! but,' said a fourth, ' he knows Castricia, and she
has only to whisper his name in the ear of the Emperor,
and he's certain. It's not for nothing that he gave her
that pair of gold-embroidered shoes which he got all the
way from Damascus.'
' Nonsense ! ' said another. ' Isaac, the monk ; he's the
man. Trust him ! ' — and a number of nods, and winks,
and wreathed smiles seemed to appeal to something eso
teric in the knowledge of the hearer.
' You're about right,' chimed in another. ' Besides, he's
got hold of Marsa, who is much more powerful than Cas
tricia, for she's a sort of aunt of the new Empress.'
'How sapient you all are!-' answered another. 'None
of you know the least thing about it. Isidore the Egyp
tian — he'll be the man, you'll see. The Patriarch Theoph-
ilus is moving heaven and earth to get him elected — no
one knows why, unless it is that he may keep him under
his thumb, and rule Constantinople with a rod of iron, as
he rules Alexandria.'
' What a shame to thrust a low Egyptian on us ! ' they
murmured. ' You are all reckoning without your host, and Theoph-
ilus too,' said another. ' There's one person who'll have
more to say to the matter than even the Emperor himself,
and that's the eunuch.'
' Eutropius ! ' they all exclaimed.
' Yes, Eutropius ! Did you ever know any pie in which
he had not his finger since he got rid of Rufinus ? '
' Ah ! ' said another, ' then that's why a certain person
took a costly necklace of pearls to the Chamberlain's sister
yesterday.' ' A certain person ! Who ? '
' Serapion,' answered the speaker, who hated Serapion
with a perfect hatred, because he had been reproved by
him for cheating and perjury.
' That's just a lie out of your own wicked head,' hotly
retorted the other. ' Whatever the other may be, Serapion
is a perfectly honest man, and if the patriarchate can

ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP 93
only be picked out of the gutter, he would not stoop there
for it.'
All this odious chatter was going on day by day and
week by week ; and the clergy, who were so largely mixed
up with it, were sinking lower and lower into the contempt
of all earnest Christians. There were many who even
dreaded that the rivalry of cliques might deluge Constan
tinople with cruel massacre, as it had deluged Rome in the
struggle for the Papacy between Damasus and Ursicinus
in 367, when a hundred and thirty-seven corpses had hide
ously defiled, not only the Italian and Liberian basilicas,
but even the floor of the Church of St. Agnes.
There seemed no end to the matter, and at last even the
populace grew so weary and so ashamed of a struggle
which seemed to banish from the Christian Church even
the dregs of spirituality, that they agreed in a public
assembly to leave the decision in the hands of the Em
peror, entreating him to choose neither an intriguer, nor a
nonentity, nor a time-serving worldling, but someone who
by his ability and by his goodness would sustain the best
traditions of a see over which a Gregory of Nazianzus had
once presided.
That seemed likely to settle the matter in favour of the
Egyptian presbyter, Isidore. The Emperor was believed
to incline to him ; Arcadius had succumbed to the ascen
dency of the bad hypocrite, Theophilus of Alexandria,
a man who, in his boundless ambition, his hateful unscru-
pulosity, and his fierce cruelty when he was aroused to
envy or hatred, was perhaps the worst type of many bad
forms of priestliness in an evil age.
Nobody who knew him dreamt of crediting Theophilus
with any pure motive. It was not generally known why
he had pledged all his influence in favour of his obscure
presbyter, Isidore, but it was generally believed that he
would like to see a man of no distinction appointed, that
he might bind him to himself by personal gratitude, and
sufficiently dominate over him to render the throne of
Constantinople entirely subordinate to that of Alexandria.
No doubt that motive existed, but there was another
and a worse behind. Isidore was in possession of one of
Theophilus's many dark secrets, and the Patriarch was

94 GATHERING CLOUDS
prepared to pay any price to obviate the serious, but quite
imaginary, possibility of being blackmailed by his own
presbyter. He need not have been afraid. The only
blackmailer was his own guilty conscience. Isidore was
an honest man, and so little was he cognisant of the designs
of his Patriarch, that when they were mentioned to him
he fled back to Alexandria.
For Theophilus, whose eye was ever fixed, not on
Heaven, but on the main chance, had seriously compro
mised himself nine years before ; and the sense that he
had done so must have been one of the many skeletons
which occupied the dark places of his soul. In the year
387 the usurper Maximus, taking advantage of the youth
ful helplessness of Valentinian II., had invaded Italy, and
though Theodosius had advanced to the defence of the
young Emperor, the issue of the contest was highly uncer
tain. Theophilus wanted to profit by the victory of either ;
but as he had not the gift of prophecy, and could not tell
which was the more likely to succeed, he prepared presents
and sent letters of congratulation both to Maximus and to
Theodosius, which were to be delivered according as vic
tory declared for the usurper or the Emperor. Someone
had necessarily to be taken into the Patriarch's confidence,
and he entrusted Isidore to proceed to Rome with the
duplicate letters. As fortune decided for Theodosius,
Isidore presented to him the letter which bore his address.
But he did not bring back with him to Alexandria the letter
addressed to Maximus. He returned home precipitately,
as though in great alarm, and declared that the deacon
who accompanied him had stolen the letter to Maximus.
Had that been the case, there was little doubt that the
letter would be heard of again ; but Theophilus wrong
fully suspected that it was still in Isidore's possession, and
there were popular rumours to that effect. The silence
and complicity of Isidore were worth purchasing at any
cost. His allegiance might be finally secured at the su
perb price of the Archbishopric of Constantinople, and
Theophilus felt so sure of carrying his election that, for
the first time for many years, he began to feel a little more
at ease.
We shall hear the final fate of Isidore hereafter. His

ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP 95
ultimate ruin was only one of a long black-list of crimes
committed by this man, who was amongst the most emi
nent ecclesiastics of his day. But the times were very
bad in the Church, as in the State. The evidence under
this head which comes to us from every side is overwhelm
ing and conclusive. Another Isidore, the famous saint
and abbot of Pelusium, says : ' Once pastors would die for
their flocks ; now they destroy the sheep by causing them
to stumble. . . . Once they distributed their goods to the
needy ; now they appropriate what belongs to the poor. . . .
Once they practised virtue ; now they ostracise those who
do.' 'Once men avoided the episcopate because of the
greatness of its authority ; now they rush into it because
of the greatness of its luxury. Abate your pride, relax
your superciliousness, remember that you are but as they.
Do not use the arms of the priesthood against the priest
hood itself.' ' There are bishops who live up to the Apos
tolic standard. If you say '¦'¦very few" I do not deny it.'
The decision as to the Archbishopric of Constantinople
was now in the hands of the Emperor Arcadius, which, as
everyone knew, meant that it was in the hands of the
eunuch Eutropius. The Chamberlain was not in the
slightest degree interested in the intrigues either of The
ophilus or of any of the clergy of Constantinople. They
only filled him with an amused but cynical disgust. He
had determined on a coup de thedtre; he meant that
Chrysostom, whom no one had ever mentioned or dreamed
of, should be Archbishop. He had heard Chrysostom
preach in Antioch, and had been stirred to the depths of
his heart. He filled the Emperor with the praises of his
eloquence, and of his genius.
' He will be the glory of your Empire,' said Eutropius.
' His fame will throw the Patriarchs of Alexandria and of
the West into the shade. His speech rushes like the Nile
in flood. No one has ever heard anything like it.'
Arcadius obeyed the behest of his Minister with his
usual sheepish nonchalance. His government was a mere
slumber, in which he never did anything but what he was
told by his master for the time being.
' But will John come ? ' he asked.
' I will manage that,' answered Eutropius.

96 GATHERING CLOUDS
' But will not the Antiochenes rebel, and prevent his
removal ? '
' Oh ! I will manage all that. Only let your Eternity
leave it to me, and enjoy the pageant I have provided for
you to-night.'
That night, when the palace revels were over, Eutropius
gave am unusually magnificent reception at the house of
his sister. The clergy attended it in throngs, with the
intense desire of currying favour and making themselves
agreeable. Theophilus was present in all his pomp, and
was surrounded by their adulations. Wherever he turned
they were on their knees, beseeching the blessings whicli
he scattered on all sides with the most peach-ripening of
smiles. He felt perfectly certain of success, and was con
vinced that before the reception was over Eutropius would
announce that the decision of the Emperor had fallen on
his presbyter, Isidore. Eutropius did not undeceive him,
but with a very humble bow, before the assemblage broke
up, said to him in the general hearing :
' May the humblest of the human race request a word
with your Beatitude before you retire ? '
' Certainly,' said the Patriarch, with bland alacrity,
now more than ever sure that his long intrigues had been
crowned with success.
' I thought that it might be interesting to your Sanctity,
and to our friends in general, to know that the long vacancy
in the Archbishopric has now at last been filled up.'
The eye of Theophilus glittered as he expressed his
conviction that the Emperor's sacred majesty would be
sure to have made a worthy choice, which all the world
would approve.
' Surely, surely,' said the eunuch, devoutly. ' His
Eternity the Emperor, son of the holy and orthodox
Theodosius, could not possibly do otherwise.'
' And the new Archbishop is  ? ' asked Theophilus.
' I quite agree with your Beatitude that the nomination
will give universal delight,' said Eutropius, who, with a
keen sense of amused malignity, was playing with the
Patriarch and the assembled clergy as a cat plays with a
mouse.

ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP 97
' Only you have forgotten to name the fortunate candi
date,' said Theophilus. 'Doubtless it is my saintly pres
byter, Isidore.'
' Oh no ! ' said Eutropius, blandly; ' it is no Egyptian.
It is someone much more worthy and much more widely
known than the nobody-in-particular Isidore.'
Theophilus was in an agony of dread and disappoint
ment. ' Who is it? ' he asked, almost foaming with rage.
' Yes,' said Eutropius, pretending not to have heard the
question. ' Quite true. I was telling the Emperor all
about him this afternoon. He is the idol of his Church,
the favourite of his people, a great writer, an ascetic, most
purely orthodox, a man of dauntless independence, and of
burning eloquence.'
It would have required a layman adequately to express
the fury of Theophilus. He felt a mad desire to throttle
the eunuch then and there, or at least, as he was accus
tomed to do in Egypt, to smite him such a blow in the
face that the blood would flow. But he had to master his
passion, and as the little, bald, wrinkled old man continued
to rub his hands and to eye him with a gratified smile, he
turned his back, and said :
' If you choose to play with the feelings and insult the
patience of all these reverend bishops and presbyters, and
to conceal from us the Emperor's nomination, this is no
place for me, and I can only retire.'
' Oh ! ' said. Eutropius, ' have I not mentioned his name ?
I beg your Beatitude's pardon a thousand times. It is — '
after a slight pause, during which he watched the Patriarch
with wickedly twinkling eyes — ' it is John, the Presbyter
of Antioch.'
' John — the — Presbyter — of — Antioch ! ' repeated
the clergy, in astonished tones.
'John, the Presbyter of Antioch,' repeated the Cham
berlain ; ' an eloquent man, as Paul says, and mighty in the
Scriptures.' It was as though a thunderbolt had fallen into the
midst of them, shattering a multitude of ambitions. But
no one was more profoundly disturbed than Theophilus.
He had been outwitted — and by an eunuch ! His influence
had been set at nought, his earnest solicitations thrown

98 GATHERING CLOUDS
back, as it were, in his face ! But that was by no means
all. He had heard enough of Chrysostom to know that
he was the last man to allow himself to be overpowered
by domineering arrogance, the last man to play the part
of a complaisant subordinate and a flattering colleague.
Theophilus might have made many another man — even
such a man as St. Jerome — the tool and catspaw of his
machinations, but John of Antioch ? No ! And was not
John the favourite presbyter of Flavian, who had deliber
ately set' at nought the citations of Theophilus, and had
called htm ' an arrogant and overweening Egyptian ' ?
' I am sure that your Beatitude will feel exceptional
gratification in consecrating John,' said Eutropius, rippling
with laughter, which became less and less controllable as
he marked the Patriarch's fierce discomfiture.
Something very like a curse was smothered in the
voluminous folds of the beard of Theophilus, as he hissed
out, ' I will never consecrate him.'
Eutropius heard, and laughed more merrily than ever,
but affected not to have heard, and said: 'I must now
wish good-night to all your reverences and your sanctities,
and all the other illustrious guests who have honoured by
their presence my poor abode; but perhaps his Beatitude
of Alexandria will deign to give me one word in private
before he departs.'
The glittering assembly buzzed into groups, and speedily
broke up, leaving Theophilus standing alone. He was
so absorbed in passionate thought that he hardly remem
bered where he was till a hand pulled his robe.
He started, and saw the eye of the Chamberlain fixed
on him.
' Excuse me,' said Eutropius, whose whole manner had
changed to one of insolent triumph, ' I think you said you
would never consecrate John.'
' Never ! ' said Theophilus.
'What! Never?'
' Never ! ' repeated the Patriarch, stamping his foot,
and with a glance which, like that of the basilisk, would
have struck the eunuch dead if its power had equalled
its will.
Eutropius smiled, and drew from his bosom a little

ANOTHER ARCHBISHOP

99

bundle of papers. 'Look here,' he said. 'Here is a
certain letter you once wrote to Maximus. Double-deal
ing is dangerous — especially for Patriarchs; and high
treason is a very serious matter.'
The face of Theophilus grew pale as death, and he
trembled. 'You will consecrate John,' said the Chamberlain, 'or
 ' ; he tapped the papers with his finger, and saluted
him with a mocking bow. He left him; but after he
had taken a few paces he turned round to look at him.
Theophilus was standing in an attitude of despair, and
had lifted his clenched hands to heaven ; but when he
saw Eutropius looking at him he turned haughtily and
indignantly away.
'What can I do?' he exclaimed to himself when he
reached the sumptuous chamber which he occupied. ' The
wretch holds my life in his hands. Curses on him ! But
I will watch, and by the God of heaven I will be avenged,
I will be avenged ! '
Eutropius went into his library, and flung himself on
the chair of ebon inlaid with ivory which stood before
his writing-table. He recalled the past, and contrasted
it with the present. 'I have triumphed,' he said. 'I
am avenged on the cruelty and baseness of the world.
My own parents betrayed my helpless infancy; they
received my price from the slave-dealers of Armenia.
They sold me to an Egyptian master. While my youth
and beauty lasted he was kind to me, and I loved him;
without one pang he sold me to Arintheus, and I had to
do his vilest messages. Arintheus gave me to his
daughter ; I became a slave of the Gynaeceum. I had to
fan women with peacocks' feathers, to heat their baths, to
carry their burdens, until that hateful Megaera, not even
deigning to sell me, turned me out of doors as of no value.
Would to God I had flung myself into the Nile, and not
borne those years of turpitude and infamy! But Abun-
dantius got me a place among the lowest eunuchs of the
palace ; and now,' he cried, striking the table with his
fist, ' now I am here ! My own skill, my own genius has
lifted me. Theodosius himself sent me on the mission to
John, the Egyptian eremite, who foretold his death in

100 GATHERING CLOUDS
Italy when he wenf to fight Eugenius. I struck down
the mighty Rufinus in his towering pride. As for Arca
dius, I lead him about as if he were — a cow. I have
brought every one of my foes to my feet, and now I have
humbled to the dust this wicked and wily Patriarch.
Stilico himself fears me. My name is eulogised by mil
lions of lips. I am practically the ruler of the world ;
and — ' he broke into a storm of bitter sobs, and laid his
head on his folded hands — ' and the vilest wretch who
sweeps the streets of Constantinople is happier than I.
Would to God I had never been born ! '
A hand was laid gently on his shoulder. He looked
up with a start. It was his sister, who had silently entered
the room — the only being on earth whom he loved. She
was past middle life, but still showed something of the
beauty which once had marked them both.
He smiled at her sadly, the tears still in his eyes. She
would not notice them. ' You have done a noble deed,
my brother,' she said, 'in making John of Antioch the new
Patriarch . He is a good man.'
' I am a Christian and a Catholic,' he answered. ' Would
that I were a better Christian ! ' He paused ; and his con
science whispered to him that he relied on words and
formulae alone, and that his many misdeeds — his greed,
his revengefulness, the malice and hatred and wrath which
he nursed in his heart against all mankind — were utterly
unchristian. 'But,' he said, 'John of Antioch was the
best man whom I knew among all the clergy of the
Empire, and in selecting him I have acted right, and in a
way which will win me deserved popularity. But as for
gratitude, sister — alas ! I never found a trace of it on
earth ! '

THE CAPTURE OE CHRYSOSTOM 1Q1

CHAPTER XV
THE CAPTURE OF CHRYSOSTOM
Fortune ? There is no fortune ! All is trial, or punishment, or recom
pense, or foresight. — Voltaire.
It was a morning in February. Chrysostom was arrang
ing with the faithful and indefatigable Philip the duties
of the day after they had shared the morning meal of
bread and dates. Suddenly they heard a summons at the
door, and old Phlegon came in to say that there stood out
side a slave in the gorgeous livery of the governor of the
city, who had brought a letter.
' What can he want at this early hour?' said Philip as
he cut the silken band, broke the Government seal, and
handed the letter to the Presbyter. Chrysostom read with
some surprise, ' Asterius, Count of the East, requests the
Presbyter John to give him the honour of his company
an hour hence at the Roman Gate, that he may have the
advantage of visiting in his company the Martyry of St.
Lucianus.' He handed it to Philip with a smile.
' Well, that upsets all our plans,' said Philip. ' But
how odd! An interest in martyries was the last thing of
which I should have suspected his Excellency. But it
will be a delightful little excursion along the banks of the
Orontes. You will let me walk with you as far as the
Roman Gate ? We must start almost immediately to get
there in time.'
A few minutes later they set forth from the house in
Singon Street, in which Chrysostom had been born, in
which he had lived nearly all his life, and in which his
father Secundus, his mother Anthusa, and his only sister
had died. It was a burning morning of the Syrian spring,
and as they passed in happy spirits through the streets —

102 GATHERING CLOUDS
gazing now at the great Charonium, now at the statue of
the Fortune of Antioch, now at the house which had been
Philip's former home, and now at the glancing river, seen
in glimpses here and there, and at the long colonnades,
and the palaces, and the distant hills gleaming in the sun
shine — the last thought which could occur to their minds
would have been that thenceforth, to one of them for long
years, and to the other for ever, those bright scenes would
from that moment vanish from their lives, that they would
never again tread, side by side, those old, familiar streets.
Chrysostom could not have left the home of his parents,
of his childhood, and of so many happy and fruitful years,
without many a sob had he distantly suspected that when
he walked from his paternal door so unconsciously he
would never again set foot upon its threshold. Philip's
heart would have been torn with reminiscences of his
father's execution, his mother's sad death, his cruel pun
ishment, the horrible fate of his boyish friends, if he could
have dreamed how long it was before he could look on
Antioch again.
A little before they reached the Roman Gate Asterius
met them, all smiles and complaisance. Several of his
bodyguard and slaves had escorted him, and fell back as
Chrysostom and Philip approached. They were a little at
a loss to know why he smiled so much, and was so very
deferential ; but they were soon to learn that
A man may smile, and smile, and be . . .
— well, no, not exactly a villain, but the accomplice in a
little plot.
The Martyry was not far beyond the city walls, and lay
in an umbrageous grove of oaks and laurels. Asterius was
walking with Chrysostom, and Philip followed them, a little
in front of the escort. But no sooner had they turned into
the path which led to the chapel than Asterius took Chrys
ostom by the arm, and requested him to step into a chariot
which was there waiting.
' I am sorry, Count,' said Chrysostom, ' but I have my
duties at Antioch, and directly we have paid our devotions
at the shrine of the martyr I must return.'

THE CAPTURE OF CHRYSOSTOM 1Q3
' Pray oblige me,' said the Count, still all smiles ; and
meanwhile the escort had come up, and, with gentle and
respectful violence, lifted the astonished and agitated Pres
byter into the chariot, and instantly started off at full
speed. ' What is this, Count? What does this violence mean?
Have you entrapped me? What has happened? Am I to
be suddenly murdered, as Count Lucian was ? '
'Pray be at ease, Father,' said the Count. 'I cannot
explain matters at present, but not the smallest harm or
incivility is intended you.'
'¦ Incivility ! ' said Chrysostom. ' Is it, then, no incivility
to seize an unoffending presbyter, entrap him into a chariot,
and drive away with him he knows not where?'
' Pardon me, dear Presbyter,' said the Count, still with a
smile of provoking amiability. ' The chariot is bounding
along at such a rate over this paved road that I can scarcely
hear you. But, pray, do not be agitated. Not the least
injury will be done. Quite the contrary. I am only taking
you a little drive as far as Pagrae, the first station.'
Chrysostom sank into silence, for, though he was lost in
the wildest conjectures, it seemed useless to attempt to
obtain any more information from the sphinx-like Count.
But Philip?
When the chariot bounded off at full speed he was
extremely alarmed, and all the more because before it dis
appeared in a cloud of dust the soldiers and slaves who
had accompanied the Count burst into roars of laughter.
They were not in the secret, but they knew that no crime
was meditated, and to them the situation had considerable
elements of amusement. To Philip's wildly-eager inqui
ries they could furnish no information, beyond the assur
ance of Asterius that all was well, and that they should
hear more on the Count's return. One thing only they
were sure of — that Chrysostom would be detained away
from Antioch for some time.
Philip was a youth of courage and swift decision. He
instantly determined what to do. He hurried back through
the Roman Gate, hired a horse, galloped to Singon Street,
told the troubled servants that their master had been taken
off by Count Asterius, and would be absent for some time.

104 GATHERING CLOUDS
Then, not wasting a moment, he threw into a leathern bag
some of Chrysostom's manuscripts and the things which
he thought he would most immediately need, and once
more galloped towards Pagrae at the utmost speed to
which he could urge his horse.
A little before he reached the station, which was twelve
miles from Antioch, he met the returning chariot of Aste
rius, in which, besides the Count, there was only one
attendant and the charioteer. Asterius seemed still to be
lost in smiles. He had a notion that the Presbyter John
would be in a perfectly ecstatic state of mind when he first
learnt the secret that he was to be Patriarch of Constanti
nople.1 Philip reined in his horse, and, forgetful of everything
but his own alarm, called to the Count:
'Oh, my lord! what has become of the Presbyter John?'
' Don't be alarmed, my good youth,' said the Count, wav
ing to him a gracious and much-ringed hand, but not stop
ping the chariot.
Philip again darted forward.
At Pagrae there was quite a commotion — for there
were two imperial chariots, with their gorgeously ca
parisoned horses, and by them stood two persons, evi
dently of the highest distinction, escorted by two decuries
of mounted soldiers in full armour, which flashed in the
sunlight. There were again the same mysterious smiles, the same
marked deference, but the same obvious determination to
control the movements of Chrysostom. The two officials
at once approached with most courteous salutations.
' I,' said one of them, advancing, ' am Amantius, the
almoner of the Empress Eudoxia, and I offer my most
respectful greetings to John the Presbyter.'
' And I,' said the other, ' am Aurelian, Magister Milium
of the Emperor Arcadius. And these two bands of sol
diers are at your service as an escort, for they are under
my command.'
' What do you want with me ? ' said Chrysostom, indig-
1 The actual name • Patriarch ' is not found in public documents till
rather later, but the historian Socrates uses it, and it was almost certainly
current in common parlance.

THE CAPTURE OF CHRYSOSTOM 1Q5
nantly. 'The Count of the East has simply carried me
hither against my will.'
' I fear we shall have to take the- liberty of conveying
you a little farther,' said Aurelian, with polite deference.
' Whither ? ' said Chrysostom.
Aurelian glanced at Amantius, to know whether it was
safe to tell him his destination. The official shook his
head. ' At present, John, we cannot tell you,' he said ; ' you
shall know a little farther on.'
' But I have brought absolutely nothing with me. I
merely started from home for a morning walk. May I
not send to Antioch for things absolutely necessary ? '
'We have everything which you can possibly require,
and it is entirely at your disposal. But, pardon me, time
is very precious. We have ample refreshments for you
in the chariot, and at the next station we will sup.'
At this moment Philip galloped into the courtyard of
the hostelry, and, catching sight of his master and adopted
father, flung himself into his arms, and asked what had
happened. ' You must ask these gentlemen, my Philip,' said the
Presbyter. 'They will give me no information.'
'I have brought you some things from home,' said
Philip, 'and wherever you go I will go.'
' Nay, that cannot be, my good youth,' said Aurelian,
kindly. ' We have no orders to conduct anyone but
John.' Philip glanced from the soldier to the kind face of the
eunuch, who seemed to be higher in authority, and he
said: ' Oh, sir ! may I speak to you privately ? '
' Only for one moment, then,' replied Amantius, step
ping aside ; ' we are wasting very precious time.'
' Sir,' said Philip, ' the Presbyter John is a man of very
delicate health. His digestion was utterly ruined when
he lived as a hermit in the cave on Mount Silpius. In
everything which concerns himself he is as simple as a
child. He would never trouble himself about food or
anything else unless someone attended to him. I have
waited on him for years as a son. I entreat you, let me

106 GATHERING CLOUDS
accompany him. I will be entirely faithful. I will make
no plots. I am ready to go with him either to prison or
to death.'
' You are a brave and gracious youth,' said Amantius,
gazing with admiration on Philip's flushed but beautiful
face. ' Well, I will stretch a point, and will speak to the
Commandant.' He told Aurelian what the youth had said.
' Will you be responsible for him ? ' asked the soldier.
' Yes.'
' Then he may come. But we must at once mount the
chariots. Young man,' he said to Philip, ' we are sending
one of our soldiers to Asterius. He. can ride your horse
back to Antioch, and you can borrow his.'
'And feel no alarm, my young friend,' said Amantius.
' John is happy to have such a faithful attendant as you.'
' I thank you, sir,' said Philip. ' He has twice saved my
life. I owe him everything.'
'Forward, soldiers! ' shouted Aurelian; and the chariots,
with their mounted escort, started at full gallop.
It was useless to ask any more questions. If he at
tempted to do so,
The Chamberlain, sedate and vain,
In courteous words returned reply,
But dallied with his golden chain,
And, smiling, put the question by.
But Chrysostom, who was accustomed to kind care in
all personal matters, as greatly cheered and relieved,
whatever should happen, by the company of his beloved
and faithful Philip; and for the rest, wholly unable to
conjecture in his simple mind what the future had in store
for him, he resigned himself and his fortunes into the hand
of God.

TALES BY THE WAY 1f)7

CHAPTER XVI
TALES BY THE WAY
For Heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
King Richard II., iii. 2.
Apart from the fatigues of travel and the necessary un
certainty and anxiety, the journey of eight hundred miles
towards Constantinople was as pleasant for Chrysostom as
his captors could make it. The modern love for beautiful
scenery was in those days but little developed ; but John
was one of the few who keenly enjoyed the beauties of
Nature, and he could not be indifferent to the glorious
scenes through which the journey lay. When they did
not arrive at their station till after dusk he would often
sit silent, gazing on the stars — ' those eternal flowers of
heaven,' as St. Basil calls them — and musing on his own
unknown future, and on the little lives of men. He was
also deeply interested in seeing the home of St. Paul's
boyhood as they passed through Tarsus, and looked on
the silver Cydnus, up which Cleopatra had rowed in her
gilded barge.
Had the circumstances been less mysterious Philip
would have been wild with delight as he galloped among
the soldiery of the escort. He felt the exhilaration of
change and exercise, and new glimpses of the great world ;
and he was naturally a favourite with the soldiers, who
delighted in his witty Antiochene jokes and in his buoyant
freshness of spirits, while they were struck with the gen
uine innocence and sweetness of his character. He did
not share their rough quarters, but took his meals with
Chrysostom and the two great officials, and slept at his
master's feet, or in an anteroom.
They reached Pessinus, the capital of Galatia, after

108 GATHERING CLOUDS
several days of almost unbroken travel. There Chrys
ostom and Philip looked with interest on the legend-
haunted heights of Mount Dindymus, and saw the ancient
temple of the mother of the gods, in which the Emperor
Julian had recently paid his devotions.
Amantius and Aurelian had become more and more
attached to their captive and his young companion ; they
no longer made any secret of the fact that they were con
veying him to Constantinople. They pretended that it
would be as much as their lives were worth to say why he
was wanted ; and he could not himself even form a guess,
for he dismissed as preposterous the only conjecture which
flitted across his mind. That he could have been elevated
to the Patriarchate of Constantinople seemed to him an
absurdity ; and he would have shuddered at the prospect
instead of being elated by it.
The sight of the Temple of Cybele, from which the
heaven-fallen image had been carried to Rome six cen
turies earlier, naturally turned their thoughts to heathen
idolatry, and as they rested in the evening Aurelian said :
' Idolatry is, I suppose, nearly as ancient as mankind
itself ; but such is the epoch in which we live that I have
myself seen it receive its deathblows.'
' Do you refer to the edicts of Theodosius ? ' asked
Chrysostom, 'or to Ambrose's crushing answer to Sym-
machus, when he pleaded with Gratian to restore the
altar of victory in the Senate-house of Rome?'
' No. I refer to the destruction of the Temple of Serapis
and the battle of Frigidus. I was present at both.'
' Do tell us about the destruction of the Serapeum.'
' It was an event of deep interest,' said Aurelian, ' but
I wish I could regard it with unmixed approval. The
Christians, especially the monks, after Theodosius had
forbidden sacrifices in 386, had headed many furious
assaults on temples. Heathens like Libanius say that
they found their account in doing so. They did not
always escape unpunished. Rustic populations were
passionately devoted to ancient shrines, like this one as
Pessinus, which were mixed up with all their memories
and traditions. You have, no doubt, heard how Marcellus,
the lame Bishop of Apamea, was killed in his attack on

TALES BY THE WAY 1q9
the great Temple of Jupiter. But no temple was so
famous as that of Serapis. It had been founded by the
first Ptolemy, and Alexandria itself was called " The City
of Serapis." The temple stood on a mound which was
ascended by a hundred marble steps. It was of enormous
size, had a great library, and was full of exquisite statues
and precious works of art. The very walls were covered
with plates of silver and gold. The rising of the Nile, and
therefore the prosperity and almost the existence of Egypt,
was, by the mass of the population, believed to depend on
the favour of Serapis. Libanius had unwisely taunted
Theodosius with leaving untouched the great temples at
Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria, while he allowed
the smaller temples to be assaulted, destroyed, and, alas !
plundered by the monks. Theophilus of Alexandria,
saving his reverence a bold, bad man, at once sanguinary
and avaricious  '
' Hush ! ' said Chrysostom, who never hesitated to rebuke
even the greatest if he thought it a duty.
' Well,' said Aurelian, ' he really is all I say, and
worse ; and the blessed Paul told the High Priest that he
was a whited wall.'
' Yes,' answered Chrysostom, ' but directly he knew
that he was the High Priest he apologised, and said, " It
is written, Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy
people." '
'I stand corrected, John,' answered Aurelian with a
smile, for he was a soldier, and admired straightforward
courage. ' But to continue. Theophilus had already pro
faned and dismantled a temple of Osiris, and the wor
shippers of Serapis, fearing the next step, garrisoned the
Serapeum. The Christians assembled to attack it, and
there would have been bloodshed, but the magistrates
secured a truce till the Emperor could be consulted.
Theodosius decided for the demolition of the temple, in
revenge for the Christian prisoners whom the Pagans had
tortured and killed. It was at once despoiled and de
molished. But when the multitude entered the shrine
where the huge gilded idol sat enthroned, with the basket
on his head and the three-headed monster in his right
hand, they paused in superstitious dread. Heaven and

HO GATHERING CLOUDS
earth would collapse, it was believed, if the majesty of
the god were violated. But one of my rude soldiers had
no such fear. He put a ladder against the statue, and
ascended it, amid the breathless silence of the multitude,
with a huge battle-axe in his hand. Then the audacious
legionary dashed his axe on the face of the image with all
his force, and smote off its cheek. The mob expected to
see him struck dead or blind ; but no lightning flashed, no
cloud darkened the blue of heaven. He smote again and
again, while the hall rang with the echo of his blows. In
a minute or two the hollow head of the image rolled with
a clamg on the marble floor, and out sprang an immemorial
colony of rats, whose home had been thus rudely invaded.
No sooner did the mob see the black, voracious creatures
leaping and scurrying off in every direction than supersti
tion was changed into angry contempt. The protector of
heaven and earth had not been even able to protect his
own rats ! The people broke into shouts of laughter,
swarmed up the pedestal, tore down the image, tripudiated
on its shattered fragments as they dragged them through
the mire of the streets, and ultimately flung them into a
huge bonfire. There was a little delay in the rising of the
Nile, and when it did rise it threatened a deluge. " Sera
pis," they murmured, "will avenge himself." But no;
the waters sank to the due fertilising height, and even in
Alexandria Serapis will never be worshipped more ! '
Chrysostom listened, and mused.
' But, sir,' said Philip, modestly, to Aurelian, ' you said
you had also witnessed the other deathblow to Paganism.'
' Ah ! I see,' said Aurelian, ' your youthful blood is all
on fire to hear about battles. I have been in many.
Believe me they are frightful things, even when we are
victors. I remember only too well the massacre of Adriaui-
ople. I was near the person of the Emperor Valens on
that awful August 9, 378. It was only by a moment's
delay that I was shut out of the cottage in which he was
burnt to death with his followers, while the barbarians
were massacring two-thirds of the Roman army, of which,
but for the darkness, none would have escaped. Alas ! it
was the Nemesis of our crimes ! If Valens admitted the
Goths over the Danube to the hospitality of Roman terri-

TALES BY THE WAY HI
tory, he should not have suffered them to be insulted and
starved. Yet, even after the retribution of Adrianople we
were guilty, that very year, of the horrid butchery of all
the deceived and unarmed Gothic youth, which I for one
regard as the most frightful of all evil omens and hateful
crimes.' ' I would not ask you about those shocking scenes,' said
Philip ; 'but how did the battle of the Frigidus put an end
to Paganism?'
' I must answer you briefly,' said Aurelian. ' It was
September 6, 394 ; Eugenius, the puppet-emperor of Arbo
gast the Gaul, had pretended to espouse the cause of the
Pagans. In the mountainous passes he had placed stat
ues of Jupiter, with his right hand uplifted as though to
strike, and armed with golden thunderbolts. The battle
was very risky, for Arbogast had posted his forces with
great skill. The first day the enemy got the best of it.
The Goths of Arbogast routed those under Gainas and slew
10,000 of them. Theodosius, pressed by many of his gen
erals, would have retreated to a safer encampment, if he
had not thought that this would look like a defeat of Chris
tianity. "Our Labarum, which bears the cross on it," he
cried, "shall never retreat before the image of Heracles."
'There was among the allies one superb young Goth,
named Alaric, who, if I am not much mistaken, will be
heard of again ; he, almost alone, urged the Emperor to
renew the battle. The enemy spent the night in songs
and revelries ; Theodosius spent it in prayer. When he
slept he saw two terrible figures on white horses, who told
him that they were St. John and St. Philip come to fight
for him. Next morning he dared not narrate the dream
to his troops, lest they should think it a fiction, until a
soldier said he had dreamt the very same thing. Then
Theodosius told his vision. His robe was wet with tears,
and when he took it off to don his cuirass he hung the wet
purple garment on a tree, as though in silent appeal to
Heaven. Our men were filled with wild enthusiasm ; but
even then I doubt whether we should have won if sud
denly — may I say supernaturally ? — the bora, the blind
ing, driving, sleet-laden whirlwind of these mountains, had
not burst in the very faces of Arbogast's troops. We

112 GATHERING CLOUDS
rushed upon them in the track of the storm, and utterly
routed them. Theodosius charged into the thick of the
fray, shouting, " Where is the Lord God of Theodosius ? "
Eugenius was not fighting, as Theodosius did, in the fore
front of the battle, but his tent was pitched on a knoll at a
safe distance, and he sat in the tent-door in his purple and
his diadem. 'He was seized by soldiers who, he fancied,
had come to drag Theodosius a captive into his presence.
They tore off his purple and dragged him to the feet of his
conqueror, Avhere he prostrated himself, trembling. Theo
dosius upbraided him with the murder of the young Valen
tinian. While he was pleading for life one of the soldiers
swept off his head with a sword, and put it on a pike.
Then our men flung down the statues of Jupiter, and,
seizing the golden thunderbolts, took them to Theodosius.
" Keep them for yourselves," said the Emperor, who was
in one of his gayest moods. " Thank you, Emperor ! "
said the soldiers ; " may we often be smitten by such
thunderbolts ! " Theodosius rolled in his saddle with laugh
ter at their rough wit. They took up the laugh — -and so
Paganism perished, at Alexandria and at the Frigidus, in
two shouts of mirth ! '
' How sad that Theodosius should have died so soon
after his great victory! ' said Chrysostom. ' But John, the
Egyptian hermit, prophesied that it would be so.'
' Yes ! he exchanged the laurelled car for the coffin, and
passed from triumph to the funeral. He has died just
when he was most needed. You are hardly likely to have
read the verses of a new and splendid Roman poet named
Claudian, the eulogist of Stilico, but he makes the dying
Theodosius say, and quite truly — you understand
Latin ? — Res incompositas, fateor, tumidasque reliqui.' 1
' Were you with him when he died ? '
'I was. I was on guard, and a wonderfully pretty and
touching scene took place in his sick-room. Knowing
that his last hour was near, he sent for his younger son,
Honorius, then little more than a child. The Emperor
1 Claudian, De Bell. Gild., vi. 293.

TALES BY THE WAY H3
was so weak that he could not preside all day at the
games of the circus given in honour of his victory ; so in
the afternoon the little boy Honorius took his place. To
secure the allegiance of Stilico he married the boy to
Maria, the daughter of Stilico and Serena, his niece, who
had always had a great influence over him. The two
lovely children knelt by his bedside — Honorius with his
placid, regular features, and Maria with her rosy cheeks
and long golden locks. Stilico was there, his white head
nobly conspicuous as he towered over the rest of the cour
tiers. The beautiful Serena bent over her little daughter.
She wore the superb necklace of pearls which she took,
perhaps wrongly, from the neck of the statue of Rhea, the
mother of the gods.'
' Did not the old Vestal Virgin prophesy that one day
she would be strangled with that very necklace ? ' asked
Amantius. ' Ay,' said Aurelian, ' but I don't think it likely that the
prophecy will be fulfilled. I could tell you many more
incidents. I witnessed, for instance, the murder of that
bright, youth, the Emperor Gratian. But we must now
go to sleep, for we have a long ride before us to-morrow.'
At Nicaea, on the eastern shore of Lake Ascanius,
Chrysostom visited with deep interest the church in which,
seventy-two years earlier, the first Christian emperor had
been present at the first great Oecumenical Council. From
thence a day's journey brought them to Nicomedia, the
capital of Bithynia, the favourite residence of Diocletian
before his Self-corrected mind
The imperial farces of the world resigned,
and he retired to find greater happiness in the cultivation
of cabbages at Salona. As they passed the village of
Ancyron the chariots were stayed for half an hour that
Chrysostom might visit the house and the room in which
the great Constantine had ended the splendid and troubled
dream of his strange life.
He suggested that evening that Amantius should en
liven their journey with some of his reminiscences.
' I have been, naturally,' said Amantius, with a sigh, ' a

114 GATHERING CLOUDS
man of peace ; yet I have seen one or two scenes which
interested me in the East, as Aurelian has in the West.
He has said something about the great Ambrose. I could
tell you something about the great Basil and his brother,
Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus ;
something, too, about the Emperor Julian and his ways.'
' Tell us something about Basil of Caesarea,' said Chrys
ostom. ' The only time I saw him,' said Amantius, ' was in the
great cathedral of his metropolis. The Emperor Valens
was not only an Arian, but a persecutor. He entered the
densely thronged cathedral with his spear-bearers — it is
nearly twenty years ago — to overawe Basil into communi
cating with the Arians. The people were pressing on each
other like the waves of the sea, and were thundering forth
the Psalms of the day. Behind the Holy Table, facing the
people, stood the Archbishop, his crosier in his hand, the
episcopal ring on his finger, the white pallium, embroidered
with its four crosses, over his shoulder. He stood there
tall, stately, immovable as a statue. His beard was long and
white, his features thin but noble ; his ardent gaze was
fixed on the Holy Table; the presbyters stood round him,
and the fervour of devotion and beauty of holiness which
reigned through the church so struck the timid and con
scientious, though cruel, Emperor, that when he came to
present his offering he tottered, and would have fallen
heavily to the ground if a presbyter had not caught him in
his arms. But Valens inspired no respect. The mob of
Constantinople openly jeered at him when he went to meet
his fate, and from the walls of Chalcedon the people
insulted him with shouts of " Sabaiarius," or " small-beer
drinker." If they had behaved in that way to his brother,
Valentinian I., he would have flung them wholesale to his
two bears, Golden-Flake and Innocence, which he kept in
a den near his bedroom, and fed on human flesh.'
' The brute ! ' said Philip, sotto voce.
' Basil was as great in the East as Ambrose in the West,'
said Chrysostom; 'but Philip whispers to me that he is
dying to know whether you witnessed the murder of
Rufinus.' ' Yes ; and a grim sight it was. Rufinus did not feel a

TALES BY THE WAY 115
doubt that on that very day Arcadius would nominate him
Augustus. His purple, his diadem, his Court, his largesses,
his banquets, his unequalled palace of " The Oak," at
Chalceclon, were all prepared; the oration of thanks was
hovering on his lips. He had been baptised by Gregory
of Nyssa. The holy Ammonius, one of the four "Tall
Brothers " of Egypt, had stood sponsor for him. He was
murdered in the Hebdomon, seven miles from Constanti
nople, just after the golden coffin of Theodosius had laid
in state in the Church of the Apostles, with the livid face
exposed. Rufinus was so eagerly impatient for the con
summation of his ambition, which should turn the pro
vincial cobbler's son into an emperor, that he had the
audacity to pull Arcadius by his purple robe to hurry him
on. Then the chief Gainas and his Goths closed round
him in threatening circle, and a soldier suddenly plunged
his sword into his heart. The Emperor's robe was stained
in the blood of his Minister, and he fled in terror. They
struck off the head of Rufinus and put it on a pole, fulfill
ing the prophecy he had received in the morning, " that
he should come back that day with his head higher than
all." Then they hacked his body to pieces. One soldier
had hewed off his hand, and managed to make the fingers
open and shut by the severed tendons. He reaped quite
a harvest of money in the streets by carrying round this
hand, and crying, " Give an obol to the insatiable ! " What
a lesson it was of sudden Nemesis in the moment of over
weening hopes ! '
'But have you no reminiscences to tell us, John?'
asked Aurelian.
'Nay,' answered Chrysostom; 'what should a humble
presbyter like me have to tell ? You know all about the
affair of the statues at Antioch, and you would hardly care
for my trivial experiences in a lonely mountain cave. Yet
— let me see — I can tell you one little anecdote. You
know that Valens, who was intensely superstitious, was
at one time in a paroxysm of alarm about magic'
'Why was that?' asked Philip.
'Because a group of foolish persons at Antioch had
tried by Pagan sorcery to discover the name of his suc
cessor. They wrote the letters of the alphabet in a circle,

116 GATHERING CLOUDS
and held a ring by a hair in the middle of the circle
after elaborate incantations. The ring vibrated till it had
touched in succession the letters THEOD. But, besides
this, it was afterwards declared that the letters magically
chosen were in four heroic verses, which said that the suc
cessor of Valens would be a great prince ; that they would
be put to death for their curiosity, but that vengeance
would fall on their murderers, who would perish by fire
on the Plains of Mimas. No one knew what was meant
by " the Plains of Mimas " till after Valens was burnt
alive in the peasant's cottage near Adrianople, when they
found there an old tomb inscribed with the words, " Here
lies Mimas, a Macedonian Captain."
' The result of the divination was whispered abroad.
Filled with fury and jealousy, Valens began to take ven
geance. Woe to the man whose name began with Theod !
Many Theodoruses and Theodotuses were put to death,
and many changed their names ; but, after all, his real
successor, Theodosius, escaped, for he was then living
as a private gentleman on his Spanish farm. But the
horrors of that day will not soon be forgotten. Spies and
informers sprang up, and flourished like a crop of mush
rooms on rotten wood. The punishments were frightful.
I myself ' — he said, with a shudder — ' saw the philoso
pher Simonides burnt alive in the Forum of Antioch. He
died laughing, saying " He fled from life as from a mad
mistress." One youth was executed for possessing a magic
book, another for using a love-spell. An old woman per
ished for curing the daughter of a proconsul of fever by a
crooning song, a boy for getting rid of a stomach-ache
by muttering the vowels of the alphabet. The world
went mad with silly superstition. Whole libraries were
destroyed by the owners, lest they should be condemned
to torture or death for being the unconscious possessors
of a single book of sorcery. Many valuable works have
thus perished for ever. Well, in those days of grotesque
and horrible panic, when one was almost afraid to speak
above a whisper, I was walking to the martyry of St.
Babylas with my friend Theodore, now Bishop of Mop-
suestia. He was in great danger, humble as he was,
because of the fatal Theod in his name. We were walk-

TALES BY THE WAY H7
ing under the flowering groves on the banks of the
Orontes, when we saw something white floating on the
river. It looked like the leaves of a book, and, moved
by curiosity, we fished it out of the water with our staves.
What was our horror when a glance showed us that the
papyrus was written all over with magic formulae. A
soldier was close at hand. We suspected that he was an
informer, and had laid a trap for us. We wrapped a stone
in the leaves and flung them into the middle of the river.
For days afterwards we were in an agony of apprehen
sion ; but by the mercy of God nothing came of it. If
the soldier had seen us we should have been lost. To this
day I count it as my greatest deliverance from imminent
peril.' 'He was a poor creature — that Valens,' said Aurelian.
The next evening they reached Chalcedon, and the
waters of the sea shone before them like a sheet of gold.
Across the narrow strait of the Bosporus they saw the
gleaming walls and towers and palaces of Constantinople,
the new Rome.

118 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XVII
CONSTANTINOPLE
Urbs etiam magnse dicitur aemula Romae,
Et Chalcedonias contra despectat arenas. — Atjsonius.
A spacious barge, gay with streamers, was moored for
them beside the quay at Chalcedon, with a gilded dragon
at its prow and a gorgeous canopy of purple silk. It was
manned by five rowers in the imperial livery, who speedily
conveyed them across the sparkling waters. To the be
wilderment of Chrysostom, whose unworldly simplicity
had not even yet divined the secret, a vast multitude lined
the opposite shore, and received them with acclamations
and shouts of joy, in which he repeatedly heard his own
name. The tall chariot of the Praetorian Praefect, who
stood highest among ' the illustrious,' awaited them, and
in this they were driven at a rapid pace to the Patri-
archeion, or house of the archbishop. The streets were
cleared before them by a band of liveried runners. The
Presbyter looked in mute inquiry to his friendly captors.
They only informed him, with renewed smiles, that for
the present he would find rooms prepared for him in the
Palace of Nectarius, and that, after he had refreshed him
self by a bath and a morning meal, some of the palace
officials would be waiting to conduct him to an interview,
first with the Grand Chamberlain, and then with the
Emperor himself.
Resigning himself to circumstances, and suppressing to
the utmost of his power every impulse of curiosity, though
he was conscious that some great crisis of his life was at
hand, Chrysostom gave himself up to silent prayer. But
Philip, in the young enthusiasm of his life, wais in the
highest spirits, and was all eyes. His journey had been
full of exhilaration to him, and he delighted to catch a

CONSTANTINOPLE H9
glimpse of a great unknown. Who could fail to look with
interest on the famous city which was the rival of Rome ?
In that rapid drive he could only get confused glimpses of
cupolas, and baths, and pillars, and statues, and churches,
and ancient temples scattered over the seven hills of Byzan
tium, until they entered the second of the fourteen regions
of the city. It covered the hill on which Constantine
had pitched his tent, and he chose it as the site of his
principal forum. The chariot drove under a triumphal
arch, and on all sides were porticoes filled with the choicest
works of ancient Greek statuary. Beside the arch, in a
shrine, was the old statue of Cybele,. which the Argonauts
were said to have brought from Mount Dindymus. It
had been turned into a statue of the genius of the city by
removing the lions at the feet of the goddess, and altering
the arms from a gesture of command to one of suppli
cation. In the centre of the Forum stood a pillar of
marble and porphyry 120 feet high. On its summit Con
stantine had placed a statue of himself, which, with that
half-and-halfness which characterised his religious attitude,
might be regarded as wearing the attributes either of
Christ or of Apollo. Round its head were some of the
nails said to have been brought by his mother, St. Helena,
from Jerusalem as the nails of the Cross ; but Pagans
might, if they chose, regard them as the radiated crown of
the old sun-god. This statue had, however, been replaced
by one of Julian, and Julian's by that of Theodosius, which
now surmounted the column. In this open space stood
the Church of Santa Sophia, or the Holy Wisdom, once a
Temple of Peace. South of it was a second forum, a long
rectangle, bounded on one side by the wall of the Hippo
drome, and on the other by the wall of the Augusteum,
or Imperial Palace, now the Seraglio. In this stood the
famous Milion, from which all the roads of the East were
measured. It was a domed building, surrounded by an
arcade of seven pillars, embellished with statues, and con
taining those of Constantine and St. Helena. On the east
side of this second forum ran a long portico, called ' The
Passage of Achilles.' The adjacent baths of Zeuxippus
were enriched with the Athene of Lindus, the Muses of
Helicon, the Amphitrite of Rhodes, the Pan consecrated

120 GATHERING CLOUDS
by the Greeks after the defeat of Xerxes, and others of
the loveliest works of the greatest Greek sculptors. Nortli
of the famous Baths stood the Senate-house built by Julian,
and no sooner had the chariot passed this building than it
drew up at a stately palace next to it. This was the Patri-
archeion, the residence of Nectarius, and of the Archbishop
of Constantinople. How unlike the humble lodging which
had sufficed for the great St. Gregory of Nazianzus !
Here Chrysostom and Philip alighted after a courteous
farewell to Aurelian and Amantius, whom they thanked
heartily for their many acts of kindness and courtesy.
' We shall often meet again,' said Amantius. ' Indeed,
we shall see you at the palace in an hour's time.'
A sumptuous breakfast was already laid out, and attend
ants were in waiting ; but Chrysostom told them that he
required but little food, and that Philip would wait on
him. Philip opened the bag which he had hastily packed
at Antioch, and provided the Presbyter with new garments
instead of his travel-stained suit. He took the same op
portunity to array himself in his best Antiochene costume,
and, though he was not vain, a glance at one of the great
polished silver mirrors told him that he looked well. When
they were a little rested and refreshed Chrysostom, with
Philip following him, was conducted in state to have an
interview with Eutropius, the all-powerful Minister.
Passing through the great hall of the Patriarch's house
— known as the Tho mattes — they passed by the little
Church of ' Our Lady the Theotokos,' which stood in the
quarter of the Jewish bronzesmiths, the Chalkoprateia. In
the palace-wall was a gate, called the Gate of Meletius, in
honour of the saintly Bishop of Antioch, through which
the Emperor used to walk to the private wooden staircase
— the Skepaste Skala — which spanned the space between
the Church of Our Lady and that of St. Sophia.
Through this entrance they were conducted to the suite
of rooms occupied by Eutropius — the Prmfectus sacri
cubiculi, or Grand Chamberlain.
The outer hall was full of attendants, and here Philip
had to stop ; but Chrysostom was ushered to the inner
room. The officers who were conducting him knocked with

CONSTANTINOPLE 121
their golden wands on the folding doors, which were flung
back, and Chrysostom saw the Chamberlain seated at a
table inlaid with precious marbles, on which lay a large
golden inkstand, and a large pen-case, also of solid gold.
On one side of him stood the Count of the Sacred Ward
robe, the Count of the Palace, and the Groom of the Bed
chamber ; on the other stood Amantius, as almoner of the
Empress Eudoxia, and Aurelian, as captain of those palace
bodyguards who were known as Silentiarii and Palatini.
On either side of the doors stood four of these armed
soldiers. With these great palace officials stood the two prime
favourites and most trusted agents of the Grand Chamber
lain, men whom he had lifted out of the mire to set among
princes. One was the Spaniard Osius, once a cook, and
always a scoundrel, whom Eutropius had elevated to the
post, first of Count of the Sacred Largesses, and then of
Master of the Officers. The other was Leo, once a weaver,
now a fat, cheery, bibulous general. He was nicknamed
Ajax because, unlike Tydides
Whose little body held a mighty mind,
his greatness was wholly corporeal. Claudian describes
him as Abundans
Corporis, exiguusque animi.
Eutropius instantly rose, and made a profound bow to
the embarrassed Presbyter. Chrysostom saw before him
the practical lord of the Eastern Empire, who shaped
every whisper of the throne.
He was a little bald old man, with a fringe of grey hair
round his baldness. His face might once have been beauti
ful in its features and pleasant in its expression, but now
it was withered with premature old age, and there were
deep wrinkles on the forehead. Years of degraded humil
iation, years of anxious misery, years of triumph, avarice
and guilt, years of cunning diplomacy, during which he
held in his effeminate hands the threads of empire, had
left their manifold, and therefore not easily decipherable,

122 GATHERING CLOUDS
traces on his countenance ; and if something of that which
was, or might have been, good in him still sometimes shone
in his glance or twinkled about his well-shaped mouth, the
expression of his face more predominantly expressed astute
ness, ill-dissembled arrogance, and flashes of the bitter
hatred and contempt which he felt for the majority of
mankind. Like Sir Robert Walpole, Eutropius held that
nearly every man has his price'; and he had repeatedly
enjoyed the sinister satisfaction of seeing men who stood
very high in the civil and religious world ready and even
eager to kotow to him, to kiss his feet, to sell their souls
to him for a mess of pottage. It had been the curse of his
life to be driven to radical disbelief in human nature. He
despised almost every human being whom he knew ; he
trusted scarcely anyone, unless, indeed, their personal
interests were, like those of Osius and Leo, indissolubly
connected with his own.
But if there was one man in the world whom Eutro
pius did respect, and in whose moral superiority he firmly
believed; it was the Syrian presbyter who had now been
ushered into his presence. He had heard the thunders of
his impassioned rhetoric waking the echoes of the great
dome of the church of Antioch. In that fulminant elo
quence he had recognised the cry which comes from a true
human heart. Never before had he heard the unmistak
able accent of intense and fervent sincerity. It had pierced
like lightning through the thick crust of revenge, bitter
ness, and Oriental craft, under which, like a dying spark
beneath vast accumulations of embers, lay the true nature
of Eutropius as God had meant it to be. Yes, this was
indeed rhetoric — the ornate, if too Asiatic, rhetoric of a
pupil of Libanius ; but under the rhetoric burned the flame
of conviction and of truth. Eutropius had heard and
turned pale ; and at the moment, trembling and terrified
at accents so unlike those which breathed softly through
the borrowed platitudes of Nectarius and the silken euphu
isms of the corrupt and intriguing priests of Constanti
nople, his conscience had started up with pointed finger
and outstretched arm. At those ' grave rebukes invinci
ble,' though they were not addressed to him, and though
Chrysostom had been wholly unaware of the presence of

CONSTANTINOPLE 123
the then obscure and miserable eunuch, Eutropius had
stood abashed, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape, how lovely ; saw, and pined
His loss.
The impression had never been quite obliterated : he felt
it now. But it gratified him to think that he had in con
sequence tried to do at least one purely good deed in his
life, by elevating the preacher to an office which, in the
hands of a great man, might practically be regarded as the
highest in the world.
Chrysostom did not lose his self-possession, though he
could not but be a little agitated to feel that now the well-
kept secret, which any mind less absolutely unworldly
than his would long ago have divined, must at last be
revealed. He returned with dignity the low bows of Eu
tropius, of Osius, of Leo, and smiled faintly back to the
smiles of his friends Aurelian and Amantius. But Eutro
pius, hardly knowing what excuse to offer for the way
in which he had trepanned his -visitor, stood there, still
bowing, and a little uneasily, washing his hands in air.
'I must,' he said, with yet another bow, 'apologise to
your Beatitude  '
' My Beatitude ! ' exclaimed Chrysostom in amazement.
' Babai ! ' (which we m.iy render ' Good Heavens ! ') ' I am
but a humble Syrian presbyter of Antioch, and we are not
addressed by such titles there.'
The officials, even Eutropius, could not help a little
laugh at this; but the Chamberlain continued:
'Pardon me, sir, you are no longer the humble pres
byter of Flavian at Antioch ; you are Archbishop of Con
stantinople and Patriarch of the East.'
Here, then, was the secret ! It had, indeed, once flitted
across the thoughts of Chrysostom in his journey, because
the quick and. curious Philip had suggested it to him as a
possibility. But he had instantly rejected it as too wildly
improbable to be even contemplated.
He stood there troubled and almost thunderstruck.
' Oh, spare me ! ' he cried at last, with one of those quick
gestures of repudiation which come so spontaneously to

124 GATHERING CLOUDS
an Oriental. ' I do not wish for this honour. I do not
love this burden. I foresee that it will only end in trouble
and misery. You yourself will repent of it, and regret it.
I have never been consulted. I was wiled away from my
home against my will. Oh, Amantius ! oh, Aurelian !
you have been cruel friends.'
' Nay,' said Eutropius, ' the Presbyter John must forgive
us all. We doubted whether he would consent; and we
knew that the Antiochenes love him too well to part with
him readily. That was the sole object of our little ruse,
and we trust that in all other respects your wishes and
comforts have been attended to.'
' Oh ! all that is nothing,' said Chrysostom, wringing his
hands. 'But I must refuse. I cannot, I cannot be Patri
arch of Constantinople. I am not ambitious. I am no
courtier. Better by far the damp cave on Mount Silpius,
in which I so nearly died. Would it had been God's will
that I had died there rather than that this should befall
me.' Eutropius was a little taken aback. He had meant to
confer an immense favour ; he had been foolish enough
to expect an effusive gratitude. Why, he knew no other
bishop or priest in Constantinople who would not have
kissed his feet in transport for so magnificent a boon. And
now he was finding it necessary to apologise and to plead.
' I bear you witness,' he said, ' you have not sought this
responsibility ; but we must not shun responsibility when
it comes. His Eternity the Emperor  '
' His Eternity ! ' exclaimed Chrysostom, on whom, unac
customed to the fulsomeness of Byzantine Courts, the title
jarred like a blasphemy.
' Oh ! ' said Eutropius, ' it is only a title ; ' while Leo
and Osius were so struck by this strange specimen of in
dependence that it was with difficulty they refrained from
laughing outright.
' It is surely a most unbecoming title,' said Chrysostom
gravely. ' I thought it had been laughed out of fashion
by Athanasius, even in the days of the Emperor Constan
tius. What higher title could you give to Christ Himself?
But to give it to a man ! All flesh is grass. The grass
withereth, the flower fadeth. " His Eternity ! " — oh !

Constantinople 125
let me return to my humble home in Antioch. I cannot
.breathe this perfumed atmosphere.'
' By Bacchus ! ' whispered Leo, whose expletives were
not very carefully chosen, ' you have caught a Hun ! '
Eutropius was fairly disconcerted. Here he was con
ferring on this man one of the most supreme of sacred
distinctions, and, so far from thanking him for the favour,
he had already rebuked him twice ! But the very rebukes
made him feel more keenly the royal independence and
sincerity of the Presbyter. Almost for the first time in
his life he was met by a Christian and a disinterested

man

' Well, well, my dear Presbyter,' he said, ' we will waive
these little forms of speech ; but I was going to say that
we must all obey the wishes of the Emperor. He is now
expecting you in the Purple Chamber. Are you ready to
see him ? '
' I am ready,' murmured Chrysostom. ' Would it had
been otherwise. But God's will be done ! '

126 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XVIII
THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS
He hath two greyhounds in a leash,
Terror and Force ; two slaves that serve his will,
Pleasure and Pomp. Lokd Lttton, The Siege of Constantinople.
The great official personages rose in a body and preceded
Chrysostom, by whose side walked Eutropius.
The Purple Chamber, into which they were ushered
by a crowd of slaves, was so called partly from its pave
ment and walls inlaid with porphyry, and partly from its
rich purple hangings embroidered with gold. The luxury
of modern days would almost seem like childish simplicity
before the lavish pomp of Byzantine splendour. The floor
along the centre was sprinkled with gold dust, brought
from distant lands in ships and chariots at enormous cost,
that the sacred feet of the Emperor might not be dese
crated by treading on anything less profoundly precious.
The walls of alabaster and other lustrous marbles were
inlaid with agate and cornelian, and the eastern sunlight
glowed hotly on pillars of the Numidian marble, rose-
coloured or golden. Chrysostom was almost blinded by
the sudden blaze of splendour, to which he was wholly
unaccustomed. Two lines of the palatine soldiers stood at
intervals down the centre of the hall. They wore Sidonian
war-cloaks so richly dight that there were pearls on their
girdles and emeralds in their helmets.1 Between and
behind them were massed a number' of courtiers in all the
ranks of Byzantine officialism — perfectissimi, egregii, illus-
tres, and spectabiles. Round the apse at the end stood a
guard of tall and fully armed Gothic soldiers in their collars
1 Claud., de Laud. Stil., ii. 88.

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS 127
of gold, and nearest the Emperor stood the four Praetorian
Praefects, conspicuous, like him, in the purple robe, or man-
dye, which they, however, wore only to the knees.
In the centre, on a throne supported by four huge
golden lions, lolled Arcadius on silken cushions fringed
with pearls. His robe of purple was woven in gold with
dragons, which were his imperial insignia. His person
was a blaze of jewels. Huge rubies and emeralds were
pendent from his ears. Necklaces of large orient pearls
gleamed round his neck, and over his breast hung chains of
precious stones chosen for their size and lustre. The pas
sion for gems, which Constantine had fostered, had lin
gered among later emperors. Round the dark hair of
Arcadius was the diadem, a band of purple silk woven
with pearls and the choicest rubies and emeralds.
Arcadius was but a youth of nineteen, but it seemed as
if all the fire of his blood, all the manliness and fervency
of youthful life, had either never existed in his ill-shaped
body, or had long ago been drained out of him by the
hollow and dreary magnificence in which his days were
passed. His intellect was of the feeblest; his character
was flabby and invertebrate. Chrysostom took him in at
a glance. He was a youth of short stature, of feeble
health, of thin person, and of sallow complexion. His
thick eyelids drooped over his eyes, and gave him the
aspect of being always half-asleep ; and, except in the very
rare cases in which he was for a moment aroused out of
his listlessness, his speech was apt to dribble out in low,
lazy, and half-finished sentences. He was steeped to the
lips in indolent and sensuous luxury, and though he was
too languid to be actively vicious, this lord of the world
was the born slave of everyone who had sufficient astute
ness and opportunity to turn him into a helpless tool.
The look of Arcadius — who had been an emperor since
he was eight years old, and who had been married at seven
teen — betrayed nothing but infinite boredom. He had not
even his younger brother's resource of keeping pet hens.
He scarcely had as much activity as used to make Louis XV.
take a courtier by the buttonhole and say, ' Ennuyons-nous
ensemble ! '
Chrysostom could not help wondering how it happened

128 GATHERING CLOUDS
that such a poor creature — and his equally poor brother,
Honorius — could be sons of the able, stalwart, and hand
some Theodosius ; and why the destinies of the world
should be committed to hands s'o unequal to the burden.
And, if there was ever a man to be pitied, it was this
hapless potentate. There was no bliss in his youthfulness.
He cared for no one, and believed in no one. He regarded
even the Ministers who domineered over him -with a dull
jealousy and suspicion, and would soon have got rid of
them if he could only have summoned up the energy to
do without them. Eutropius only suited him because he
saved all trouble, relieved him of the intolerable burdens
of empire, transacted the minute details and functions of
necessary business, and arranged for him the amusements
which served to dissipate his deadly dulness and to
Disguise the querulous morrow
From its unseen reproval of to-day.
But meanwhile the wretched little human deity felt an
inexorable weariness of everything :
Because his greatness, being of a kind
Which grew from all men's littleness combined,
Dwelt self-condemned among the multitude
Of voices lifted to proclaim it good.
And so he sat in his vast hall and in his 'sacred' chambers
An undelighted man. To him all meat
Was tasteless and all sweetnesses unsweet;
To him all beauty was unbeautiful,
All pleasures without pleasantness, and dull
Each day's delights.
The Chamberlain and officials advanced with genuflex
ions and prostrations, and with hands which shaded their
eyes, as though they were blinded with the divine and
sunlike radiance. of the Emperor. Chrysostom bowed low,
and then advanced in the simple dignity of his manhood.
Eutropius took him by the hand and presented him to
Arcadius. ' This, sire,' he said, ' is John, the Presbyter of Antioch,
whom your sacred Majesty has been pleased to appoint to
the vacant Archbishopric'

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS 129
' Oh ! ' said Arcadius, slowly and languidly. 'I am glad
to see you.'
Chrysostom bowed again, and since Arcadius seemed to
have nothing more to say, he replied :
' I thank your Clemency, though, had I been consulted, I
would gladly have remained in my former obscurity.'
'Well,' said the Emperor, 'you shall be consecrated
Archbishop on the twenty-seventh of this month. Mean
while, as my Chamberlain has doubtless explained to you,
the palace and the revenues of the Patriarchate are yours.'
'May God help me to do my duty!' said Chrysostom,
and as Arcadius had now exhausted his conversational
resources he bowed once more and stood aside. Eutro
pius gave his arm to the Emperor, who stepped down from
his throne and retired. Then all the egregii, and spectabiles,
and the rest, thronged round Chrysostom to load him with
congratulations and fulsome compliments. From this
embarrassment he was set free by a message that her
Sacredness the Empress Eudoxia desired to see him ; and
his friend Amantius, as her almoner, conducted him into
the presence of the young Nobilissima.
Eudoxia was a very different personage from Arcadius.
She was a Frank, brilliant, beautiful, impetuous, full of
passion and vivacity, determined, as far as possible, to
brighten by every sort of excitement, mundane and relig
ious, the dull though gilded prison of imperialism. Her
reception of the Archbishop — for as such he was now
regarded — was in singular contrast with that of her pale-
blooded lord. One or two high officials were present in
her audience-room, and among them the showy Count
John, who was her favourite, and whom the scandal
mongers of Constantinople declared to be her lover and
the father of her children. At that time she had only one
daughter, Flaccilla, who was now a year old, and whose
rosy little face shone out of the glowing silk of her
cradle inlaid with gold and ivory, beside the chair of the
Empress. Eudoxia rose to greet Chrysostom, and so far from
allowing him to kiss her hand, she herself passionately
pressed to her lips the hem of his garment. Eudoxia had,
or fancied she had, deep religious feelings, and she cer-

130 GATHERING CLOUDS
tainly had strong superstitions, which she took for religion.
Her religiosity was intense, but almost exclusively external.
It impelled her to give alms, to build churches, to attend
services, to prostrate herself to her favouiite priests, and
to adore the relics of martyrs; but so long as. she mani
fested her devotion in this way she did not think it of any
importance that it should regulate the passions of her
heart and the duties of her daily life. Her one object at
this moment was to depose the hated Eutropius, and to
put herself and her favourite, Count John, in his place.
She respected and liked Amantius, who was a man of
unaffected piety ; but his character was too pure and his
temperament too placid to give her material help in her
ambitious designs. From the first she had intended to
attract Chrysostom, and never doubted for a moment that
she could make him her devoted ally.
'Most heartily do I congratulate your Sanctity,' she
said, ' on this high promotion.'
' I thank you, Empress,' he replied ; ' but may I ask you
to call me by some less flattering title ? I am strange to
the world of sounding designations which I hear on every
lip around me. Sanctity ! There is none good but One.'
The Empress smiled, for it was new to her to be cor
rected. Chrysostom had spoken with humility, but his
independence was something delightfully unusual. It
would make him a powerful friend, and to her Frankish
temperament it was infinitely more refreshing than the
slavishness with which she was surrounded from morning
to night.
' You shall not be again offended by the title,' she said.
' I know that we shall be friends, and that I shall con
stantly enjoy the privileges of your holy counsel. You
will have great demands upon you for the needs of the
Church and of the poor ; and your friend and my treasurer,
Amantius, has my commands to further your benevolence
with the largest liberality. Rely on my best assistance in
all your good endeavours.'
Chrysostom warmly thanked her; for while he had no
personal desires, he had an intense appreciation of alms
giving and munificence to churches. He felt favourably
to the Empress, whose avarice and duplicity had not

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS 131
yet revealed themselves, because she had chosen for her
chamberlain a man so gentle, blameless and pious as
Amantius. ' You must show your gratitude,' she said sweetly,
' by coming to our banquet on the 24th. It is Lent, I
know, but that day is the Festival of St. Matthias.'
Chrysostom could not refuse ; but now he was glad to
make his escape into privacy. The Empress asked him
to give his blessing to her and to her child; and Amantius
conducted him back to the outer hall, where they found
the faithful Philip impatiently awaiting them.
No sooner had they left the Palace and entered the
Patriarcheion than the youth, who was bubbling over with
excitement and gratification, exclaimed :
' So the secret is out, my father. To tell you the truth,
I had guessed, or half-guessed, it might be so some days
since. And only to think that you are Archbishop of
Constantinople, lord-paramount over bishops innumerable,
one of the four great Patriarchs of the world, and with
the precedence over all but Rome ! '
' Ah, Philip, Philip ! it is natural for youth to be daz
zled by honours and externals. I was disenchanted of
them all long ago in my mountain cavern. To me they
have not the smallest attraction. Life has but one real
boon — the blessing and peace of God.'
'But there is much to do,' said Philip. 'Won't you
let me write at once to Phlegon and the other servants
at Antioch to come here, and bring with them all you
need ? They tell me that Osius is the Postmaster-General,
and while you were with the Empress I saw him, and he
will put vehicles at your disposal. Don't take any
trouble, father — or my Lord Archbishop I must now call
you, or your Beatitude, or your Sanctity, or  '
'Nay,' said Chrysostom, 'call me "father" always,
Philip. Let me feel that I have still some ties to a past
which I already feel will have been far happier than the
future can ever be.'
' Well, I will arrange it all ; but won't you come and
look round this enormous palace which is now yours ! '
' Oh, how much I prefer the little house in Singon
Street?' sighed Chrysostom.

132 GATHERING CLOUDS
They went on their tour of inspection, accompanied by
some of the sumptuous slaves whom Nectarius had left.
Chrysostom tolerated the great marble hall Thomaites, and
the halls of justice for ecclesiastical cases which opened
out of. it; but he groaned as he passed over the rich car
pets and saw the silver vases and superb furniture of the
room which the late Patriarch had occupied.
' Alas ! ' he said to Philip, ' this will never do. I could
not live in all this sumptuosity. How can it befit those
who ought to wash one another's feet? I cannot retain
these luxuries ; they must be sold and given to the poor.'
The slaves of Nectarius, who stood behind Chrysostom
as he spoke the words, lifted up their hands and shrugged
their shoulders in displeased astonishment.
' Babai ! ' whispered one to another, ' does he think that
the palace of a Patriarch is to be no better than a damp,
unpleasant mountain-cave?'
Chrysostom selected for his own use an airy room with
an antechamber, in which Philip could sit, and intercept
needless chatterers, intruders, and wasters of time. It
was the most simply furnished room in this Palace ; but
he gave orders to remove from it everything approaching
to luxury, and he proposed to fill it with the old familiar
books and simple surroundings of his former home as soon
as' they could arrive.
When the slaves had conducted the strangers round
the Palace, they took them into the garden which lay
between it and the Senate-house, and there, for the first
time, Chrysostom was genuinely delighted.
' Ah ! ' he said, ' Philip, most things have their allevia
tions. Our dear old home would go into this Palace ten
times over ; and we have not here the snowy mountains,
or the river, or the ravines, though we have the sea !
But this garden — yes, it will be delightful to me; and
perhaps among these palms and cypresses and vines I
may sometimes sit in the shadow and forget the crush
ing burdens of my new life. As for the fine gentlemen
behind us, we must dismiss as many as possible of them
with all convenient speed.'
There was no difficulty about this, for when Philip
ordered the simple meal of bread and vegetables and

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS 133
dates, with the commonest wine, which, thin as it was,
Chrysostom scarcely ever touched, the servants, accus
tomed to the Salian banquets of Nectarius, were utterly
disgusted. ' Why,' they said to each other, ' we might as
well go into monasteries at once. Only to think of having
such a Patriarch ! He is banatisos ! '
But Chrysostom ^ went into the room which he had
selected, laid his head on his hands, and fairly sobbed.
The day had been to him infinitely trying, and now a
revulsion of feeling came over him like a flood, drowning
his past excitement in despair. Why, oh! why had he
been torn from the old scenes, the old ties, the home of
his childhood, the happy and peaceful past? ' Ah, Lord ! '
he cried, ' how many have wished for this high office,
how many would be transported with delight to have it
bestowed on them ! Thou knowest I sought it not. I
love it not. But if Thou hast put me to this work, oh,
give me strength for it ! I have but one prayer, O Lord ;
it is, " Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for
Thou art my God ; let Thy loving Spirit lead me into the
land of righteousness." '
Philip would not interfere with his dark hour ; but
seeing him given up to uncontrollable sadness, he came
with the gentleness of a son, and, laying his hand on his
shoulder, he said :
' Dear father, is it all so dark ? Is not God at Constan
tinople as He was at Antioch? Will not He make your
way plain before your face ? I wish you many and happy
days as Patriarch of the East.'
' Not many, my Philip — and that, perhaps, is well —
and certainly not happy. Mere paraphernalia of rank
and wealth are hateful to me. Ever since I heard of this
promotion, as they call it, a heaviness has been growing
on my spirit. This great, wicked city seems to me like a
haunt of the demons. How can I ever do the good which
I desire, at which I must aim ? My happy days are over,
Philip, for ever. I shall have very few to love me. Try
to support me with your true affection, my son, my son ! '
And again the new Patriarch of the East bent down his
head, and wept in his splendid palace, till Philip once
more came to him, and said :

134 GATHERING CLOUDS
' My father, your meal is rea'dy. Be comforted. Man
cannot do the work of Providence, but he can do his best,
and await all that God will send.'
' You are right, my Philip,' saiid the Archbishop ; ' I will,
by God's grace, at once shake off this despondency. No
cross, no crown.'

GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET 135

CHAPTER XIX
GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET
Sumptuous gluttonies and gorgeous feasts. — Milton.
The Patriarch had a few days of respite before his con
secration would plunge him into the incessant, onerous,
and intensely responsible duties of his new office. They
were only broken by the banquet at the Palace.
'What am I to wear among hundreds of bejewelled
popinjays ? ' he asked Philip in amazement. ' I have no
conception in what sort of costume Nectarius would have
appeared. Fortunately, I shall henceforth imitate the
great Nazianzen, and refuse all invitations.'
Philip was equal to the occasion.
'You have,' he said, 'the white robe which Anthusa
embroidered for you in gold with calliculae and gammadias
that you might wear it at Count Lucian's. That will do
splendidly.' So he was conducted by some of the palace eunuchs
to the banquet, looking more dignified by far in his sim
plicity than the glittering courtiers whom Arcadius and
Eudoxia had invited.
What a scene it was, and how distasteful to the simple
Presbyter !
He was led up stairs carpeted with crimson cloths of
which the borders were stiff golden broideries, and between
tall lamps in which fragrant flames were burning, and of
which the pedestals were covered with wreaths and gar
lands. The tables were of thyine and other precious woods,
and were laden with crystal and myrrhine vases which
had once been carried in Roman triumphs, and were now
crowned with the choicest Chian, Lesbian, and Thasian
wines. Between them were large golden salvers heaped

136 GATHERING CLOUDS
with the most delicious fruits, and there was no dainty of
the earth, the air, or the sea which the thousand cooks of
the Palace did not procure for the Emperor's table. As
for the richly dressed attendants, it seemed impossible to
count the number of eunuchs and pages, of which the
younger, specially chosen for their beauty, wore their hair
in long, essenced curls. The whole spectacle was to
Chrysostom inexpressibly distasteful. This materialism of
luxury wearied and repelled him. The only thing which
made it seem even excusable to his conscience was his
reminiscence of Solomon feasting the Queen of Sheba in
his halls of Lebanonian cedar, amid the dazzling display
of gold and Tyrian purple, and slaves, and souls of men.
He was led to a seat at the sigma, or crescent-sharped
table of rich mosaic rimmed with silver, which was pre
eminently the seat of honour. The Emperor sat at the
centre, on a dais, in a chair of gold, with the Empress at
his right. Next to her sat Theophilus of Alexandria.
Chrysostom was placed at the left of Arcadius, and next to
him sat Eutropius. The only others admitted to the
royal sigma were the four Praetorian Praefects, who were
highest of all in official rank.
Chrysostom barely touched either the dainties or the
wines. Considerations of health, as well as his own tastes
and wishes, made him habitually and to the highest degree
abstemious ; and, indeed, the chronic indigestion caused
by the excess of his youthful austerities usually compelled
him to take his meals alone. But all, or nearly all, of
these assembled clarissimi and illustres were to be under
his spiritual care, and he was interested in gazing round
upon them.
Arcadius had the misfortune, for a ruler, of being in
tensely shy. He was overpowered with self-consciousness.
After one or two half-attempts at commonplaces, uttered
with blinking eyes, he gave up the fatiguing effort to con
verse. But the liveliness of Eutropius, who was in great
good-humour, helped to while away the time. He pointed
out to Chrysostom the three famous widows ¦ — Marsa, Cas-
tricia, and Epigraphia — in their upper robes of gauze,
woven in gold with scenes from the Gospels, their neck
laces, their earrings, their hands hidden with rings, and their

GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET 137
shimmer of numberless jewels. Chrysostom gazed at them
with a look of disapproval, but in his own mind contrasted
them most unfavourably with three others of the noblest
ladies present, who were conspicuous for the severe and
almost nun-like simplicity of their adornment. One of
these was Olympias, once the betrothed of the Emperor
Constans ; another was the Princess Salvina ; the third
was the good Nicarate, who was — what was rare in an
cient days — an old maid, and who found her sole delight
— ¦ so Eutropius bore her witness — in deeds of kindness to
the poor.
Chrysostom looked longer at the male guests. He did
not know Theophilus by sight, and asked the Chamberlain
who that stately and richly clad ecclesiastic was.
' That,' said Eutropius, in a meaning tone, ' is the Patri
arch of Alexandria.'
'Why does he scowl so heavily at me when he looks this
way?' 'Because of jealousy, defeated intrigue, envy, hatred
malice, and all uncharitableness.'
' Impossible, surely ! ' said Chrysostom. 'I have never
seen him before. How can I possibly have wronged
him?' ' I cannot tell you the whole story ; but he wanted his
presbyter, Isidore, elected instead of you. The man has
a sinister and evil eye. May Christ protect you from it ! '
' Amen,' muttered Chrysostom. ' I will speak to him
after the banquet in all friendliness. But will the Em
peror like us to talk in this way, and neglect him ? '
' Oh ! ' said Eutropius, laughing, ' His Eter  I beg
your pardon, his Sublimity, is more than half-asleep already,
and will be fast asleep soon. He will not notice.'
' Well, then,' said Chrysostom, ' tell me the names of
those two Gothic warriors sitting near the 'top of the
tables below us.'
' The elder is Fravitta,' said Eutropius. ' Though he
is a Pagan, as his fathers were, he is most friendly to the
Empire, and can be absolutely trusted. Have you never
heard how he saved the life of the Emperor Theodosius ?
'No.'' When you have been here a little longer, and begin

138 GATHERING CLOUDS
to understand the intricate wheelwork of our intrigues,
you will learn that there are two factions of Goths. One
is thoroughly loyal to the Empire. It is scanty in number,
and would be almost impotent if it were not headed by
that noble Fravitta, a man who rises above the faithless
ness of many of his fellows. One day Theodosius, who
was always kind to the Goths, invited some of them to a
banquet, unaware that Eriulph, the head of the hostile
Gothic faction, was plotting to overthrow the Empire.
When Fravitta and Eriulph grew warm with wine they
fiercely quarrelled, and Theodosius had to break up the
banquet. Fravitta, fearing that Eriulph directly he left
the palace would stir up a civil war, impetuously drew
his sword, and, taunting him with treachery, stabbed him
to the heart. A fierce tumult arose, and Fravitta would
have been torn to pieces by Eriulph's followers if he had
not been saved by the Imperial Guards. It is more than
lucky for us that the Goths are not at one.'
' Do you foment their disagreements ? '
' On that subject,' said Eutropius, smiling, ' as iEschy-
lus says, "A great ox hath passed upon nry tongue."
' This man,' he thought W himself, ' has no idea of
diplomatic secrets. He divines everything by sheer force
of honesty.'
The Chamberlain was quite right, for Chrysostom re
plied :
' I see you have not forgotten the old Roman secret of
" Divide and rule." But who is the other Goth ? '
' An entirely different kind of person. He is an Arian ;
and all the Goths are so devoted to the memory of their
missionary, Wulfila, that I doubt their ever being con
verted to orthodoxy. You must have heard his name
often, for he has played a great part in recent events. It
was he who brought down God's vengeance on the guilty
head of Rufinus. It is Gainas.'
Chrysostom did not like the bitter tone in which the
words were spoken ; but as he was silent Eutropius con
tinued :
' Do you not mark his discontented look ? He is a
conspirator, and will, I fear, create trouble from his in
fluence over the army. Near him is his countryman, the

GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET 139
barbarous tribigild, and, if I am not much mistaken, they
are at this moment hatching perilous plots.'
' I see a group of bishops seated at yonder table.'
' Yes, they are assembled under the presidency of
Theophilus to settle some small ecclesiastical matter.
Some of them have been here for weeks. Constantinople
is constantly full of bishops. One cannot walk down the
Chalkoprateia without stumbling across them. I see them
very frequently at my humble abode,' he added — his
eyes and features all a-t winkle, as they always were when
some mischievous fancy reminded him of men's weaknesses.
' I wish they would remain in their own dioceses,'
thought Chrysostom, with a sigh ; but he only said, ' It
would be kind if you would tell me the names of one or
two of them, that I may address them afterwards.'
' Well, if I may lay aside formality in talking to your
Beati  Oh ! I beg your pardon. Well, in talking about
bishops, I will describe the one or two of them whom I
know best. You see that ponderous — I had almost said
elephantine — specimen of humanity ? That is Maruthas,
Bishop of Mesopotamia. The little, slim, highly venomous-
looking personage  '
Chrysostom looked reproof, and Eutropius, more and
more convinced that his Patriarch was quite a new phe
nomenon at Constantinople, said :
' Oh ! I mean nothing ; but for freedom's sake let me
talk in my own way. After all, my dear Archbishop, I
am simply telling you the bald truth about the man, and
setting down nought in malice. You will be able, later
on, to judge for yourself. Well, the small man is Cyrinus,
Bishop of Chalcedon. That portly, handsome, florid eccle
siastic, who looks as if one of our thousand palace-barbers
had arranged his curls as well as those of the pages, is
Severian, Bishop of Gabala, who would be exceedingly
glad — -if he could — to be bishop of something else. I
could tell you a good deal about him, but I do not wish to
shock your charity. Lastly, not to weary you, the old
gentleman who is so heartily enjoying his dinner is Aca-
cius, Bishop of Beroea.'
'I wish, Chamberlain, you would speak more respect
fully of the bishops.'

140 GATHERING CLOUDS
'I have caught a Hun, as Leo remarked,' thought Eutro
pius. ' He does nothing but reprove me. No other presby
ter or bishop speaks to me like this.'
' Seriously, and quite apart from all levity,' he said, ' I
wish I could. But, in sober truth, I have not found that
even the most exalted pretensions always carry with them
the most elementary Christian graces. Sadly I say it to
you, I find their Religiosities just as worldly and ambitious,
just as unfair and bitter, as any of us poor laymen. Like
priest, like people.'
' Yes,' said Chrysostom, with a deep sigh, ' but the
reverse is also true. Priests are what people make them.
But there is one ecclesiastic whose face and manner pro
foundly interests me, and you have not told me who
he is.'
'That,' said Eutropius, laughing aloud, 'is a very dis
tinguished person — Synesius of Cyrene.'1
'I have heard of him. He is a brilliant writer. But
why do you laugh ? '
' He is a great man,' said the Chamberlain, ' a poet, an
orator, honest to the heart's core, but the oddest mixture
in the whole Church. I suppose he is an orthodox Chris
tian, but he is a pupil and ardent admirer of the beautiful
Pagan Neo-platonist, Hypatia. He is also a most enthu
siastic sportsman, breeder of horses, and patriot. He is,
moreover, a married man. He loves profane studies, is
not very sure of the Resurrection, and  '
' Then how did he become a bishop ? '
' You must ask Theophilus, who overcame his scruples,
allows him to philosophise at home, and excused him from
preaching what he calls " fables " abroad. But then, he
has a genealogy of seventeen centuries, and much must be
naturally excused to a lineal descendant of Hercules and
the Spartan kings ! '
' What brought him to Constantinople ? ' asked the Arch
bishop, without noticing the sarcasm.
' He came as a sort of ambassador from Cyrene, and b}^
the interest of his friends, to say nothing of the crown of
1 1 have ventured here on a slight anachronism. Synesius was at Con
stantinople for three years about this time, but he did not become a bishop
till a.d. 410.

GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET 141
gold which he brought to Arcadius, he was allowed to
deliver a great oration on the " duty of kings " before the
Emperor and his Court. I never heard such audacity in
my life ! ' (' Even you would hardly have surpassed its
boldness,' he added mentally.) • In the plainest way he
arraigned the Emperor and the whole official system, and
even me! If his  if the Emperor had not been fast
asleep long before he got to the middle, and if I had not
been very tolerant, the strange bishop might have lost his
head. But people do me injustice. I am a very kindly
and merciful person.'
' Why, what did he say ? '
' It is easier to tell you what he didn't say, for he passed
a sweepingly comprehensive condemnation on things in
general. He represents what is called the Roman party.
He called the Goths " Scythian fugitives " ; openly blamed
Theodosius for admitting them into the army and into
dignities ; denounced them for avarice and contempt of
our civilisation, and compared them to the stone suspended
over the head of Tantalus. He told the Emperor — most
lucky for Synesius that he was asleep — that he ought to
be like his predecessors, who were soldiers in fight, leaders
in counsel, flying hither and thither to defend the Empire,
and that he should entrust our defence to a native army,
not to barbarian mercenaries, whom he ought either to
reduce to the condition of helots or to drive back into the
solitudes of Scythia. I expected to see Gainas or one of
them send an arrow through his heart, but, luckily, most
of them did not understand half he said.'
' Was the Emperor much influenced by his oration ? '
Eutropius laughed long and loud.
'I have told you he did not really hear it, and knew
nothing about it, though it was the talk of all Constanti
nople. His only remark was that it was dull and very
long. The next thing he did was to make Alaric the
Visigoth Master-General of Illyricum. After all, what
can Arcadius do ? Have not our native troops become so
slothful that, in the reign of Gratian, they actually laid
aside their defensive armour because it bored them to
wear it? Alas ! we live in degenerate days. Our soldiers
now wear neither helmet nor cuirass, nor carry broad-

142 GATHERING CLOUDS
sword, nor pilum, nor even shields ! Most of them have
sunk down to miserable bows.'
' But to object, to foreign mercenaries was hardly to
attack the Emperor.'
' No ; but he went on to say that a king who knows
nothing about soldiers is like a cobbler who knows nothing
about shoes ; and then — after the condescending remark,
" Do not be vexed at what I say ; the fault is not yours "
— he actually declared that the ruin of the Empire was
due to surrounding the king with a theatrical pomp and
semblance of " Divine mystery." " It reduces you " (this
to the Emperor !) " to a sort of State prisoner. You see
nothing, you hear nothing that can be of any use to you.
Your only pleasures are sensual. You live, the life of a sea
anemone ! " Imagine anyone saying this to a Theodosius !
If he had said it to Valentinian he would have been flung
to the bears in no time. Then he continued : " You think
yourself great because you are arrayed in purple and gold ;
because you have gems from mountains and barbarous
seas in your hair, your sandals, your robe, your girdle,
your ears, your seats ; and because, by walking on gold
dust, you indulge the very soles of your feet in luxury.
Things were far better when emperors were men with
tanned faces, of simple habits, and in coarse dress." :
' But you were awake if the Emperor was not. Did he
attack you ? '
' I should think he did ! ' said Eutropius. ' He accused
the Emperor of repelling the wise and noble, and admit
ting to his familiarity mere counterfeits of humanity.
"You patronise men," he said, "with small heads and
scanty brains, with idiotic grins and equally idiotic tears,
to relieve by buffoonery the cloud of tedium brought upon
you by the unnatural character of your life." But you
see the satire was too ludicrous to hurt me ; otherwise he
should have had the fate of  '
' Of  ? ' asked Chrysostom.
'Never mind,' said Eutropius.
He was ashamed to blazon the wicked and ungrateful
revenge which he had inflicted on Abundantius, who had
first introduced him into the palace, and whom he had
driven into beggary ait Siclon; on the sausage-seller Bargus,

GUESTS AT AN IMPERIAL BANQUET 143
whom he had used as his tool to defame and ruin the
brave general, Timasius ; and on Timasius himself, whom,
by virtue of the forgeries of Bargus, he had got banished
to Libya, where he was never heard of agaiin. His widow
Pentadia only saved herself by flying into sanctuary.
But at this point Arcadius began to show signs of
vitality, and dismissed the guests. Chrysostom was deeply
troubled by much that he had seen and heard. He paid
his homage to the Emperor and Empress, and took the
earliest opportunity to retire to his home.

144 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XX
FIRST IMPRESSION'S
And yet bubbles o'er like a city with gossip, scandal, and spite.
Tennyson.
On February 26, 398, the humble Presbyter of Antioch
attained the dignity for which so many had longed, in
trigued, and bribed, and which myriads of ecclesiastics
would have regarded as uplifting them into the seventh
heaven of gratified ambition and satisfied desires.
The imposing ceremony took place in the cathedral
of Constantinople, the great Church of St. Sophia. Its
magnificence illustrated the altered fortunes of Christian
ity since Constantine had first placed the jewelled cross
on the purple silk of his labarum. Its great doors were
of shining bronze enriched with bas-reliefs ; the windows
were formed of thin slices of alabaster and other trans
parent marbles. The pillars and their capitals, carved
with foliage, were all of porphyry or of Numidian giallo-
antico. The floors were of lustrous and many-coloured
marbles, with which also the walls were tessellated ; the
domes and architraves were inlaid with mosaic on a gold
ground, and picked out with polychromes of blue and
vermilion.1 The Holy Table, which even then had begun
by a false analogy to receive the unscriptural and unprimi-
tive designation of ' altar,' stood in front of the apse, not
against the wall, but in the middle of the chancel space.
It was of gold decorated with precious stones, and between
the columns which supported it hung curtains of silk, em
broidered in gold with figures of our Lord, St. John the
!The Church of St. Sophia is described by Paul the Silentiary and
others. The descriptions apply to the Church of Justinian, but are gen
erally true of the other church also.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 145
Baptist, and St. Paul. The iconostasis was of silver, with
a frieze of medallions representing Christ, the Virgin
Mary, and the Apostles. In the apse was the Throne of
the Patriarch and the synthronus, or stalls of the presbyters,
which were canopied and were of silver-gilt. The choir
extended nearly as far as the ambo, or reader's pulpit,
which was of precious marbles with mosaics of lambs,
doves, fishes, and peacocks, inlaid with gems. It was
ascended by two flights of steps, one on the west side,
one on the east, and the canopy above it rested on eight
columns. The space below it, enclosed by railings, was
occupied by the choir and the readers. The soleax, or
division which marked off the seats of the clergy, was
made of onyx. The tapestries which usually shrouded
the sanctuary were drawn back for the service. The seats
for the Emperor and Empress were on the south side ;
and not only were they present, but they came in their
utmost pomp, attended with crowds of perfectissimi and
illustres arrayed in their most, brilliant robes.
Chrysostom was consecrated Archbishop by the darkly
scowling Theophilus, and was the reverse of happy. The
rasping voice of the wicked and black-browed Patriarch of
Alexandria was hoarse with antagonism. It almost made
him shudder, by the same subtle instinct which makes the
nobler animals tremble at the hiss of the serpent. He felt
the man's magnetic hatred, jealousy, and burning spirit
of revenge in his very touch. But, besides this, he could
not but mourn that God had called him to a work which
he felt would be painful and stormy. He sighed for the
love which had surrounded him in Antioch, and even more
for the peaceful days of his monastery and mountain-cave.
What were these rich carpets and gleaming floors to the
grass that groweth on the mountains, and the lilies in the
valleys of Mount Amanus ? What were these crimson and
gold-embroidered tapestries to the shadows of the blossom
ing trees on the banks of his loved Orontes ? How could he
ever acquire over this luxurious, turbulent, money-loving,
pleasure-hunting, worldly throng of curious strangers, of
whom so many were already inclined to hate him, the gen
tle influence which he had wielded over his former flock ?
With a heavy heart and a mind over which flitted many

146 GATHERING CLOUDS
a sombre cloud of misgiving he uttered his enthronisation
discourse. In it he touched on the various spheres of duty
which he regarded as belonging to his place as Archbishop
of this metropolitan see. As yet, of course, he could only
speak generally. ' There are still Pagans,' he said, ' in
Constantinople : I will try to win them by setting a Chris
tian example, and endeavouring to promote the true ideal
of the Christian life. There are many Arians and other
heretics : I will use no other weapon against them than the
sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. I will be a
bishop, not a gladiator. I hate as unchristian the bitter
spirit of unfairness in theological controversy. I repudiate
as execrable the use of violence in ecclesiastical propa
ganda. Rather than exacerbate differences, I will willingly
incur the ignorant calumny aimed at the great Basil of
Csesarea, that his teaching was like a river avoiding rocks
to hide itself in sands. Theological battles and ecclesiasti
cal cabals are an incomparably poorer proof of orthodoxy
than simple faithfulness. " The bees," said Basil, " fly in
swarms, and do not begrudge each other the flowers. It is
not so with us. We are not at unity. More eager about
his own wrath than his own salvation, each aims his sting
against his neighbour." And, because of this, Basil was
called a heretic ! But his only answer was : " I have deter
mined to neglect no labour, to shun no humble word or
deed, to excuse myself going no journey, to decline no
burden, if I may obtain the reward of the peacemaker." '
' As for myself,' said Chrysostom, ' I will, God helping me,
boldly rebuke vice ; I will make no agreements with death,
no covenant with hell. In marshalling the hosts of right
eousness to the Armageddon battle against sin, the trumpet
in my hands shall give no uncertain sound. To wicked
ness and vice I must, by the very call of God, be an un
compromising enemy ; but to the offenders themselves I
would ever act in the spirit of compassion, and, as far ais
in me lies, will live peaceably with all men. But, beloved,
man is nothing. God is all-in-all. Oh ! help me by your
sympathy ! Oh ! support me by your prayers ! '
The sermon was not one of Chrysostom's greatest. There
was but little of the cadenced rhetoric, little of the Asiatic
luxuriance, nothing of the volcanic passion. Yet there

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 147
was enough to show to the good that he was a good man,
that he would not be one of those who mistake pride for
dignity, or require people to speak to him out of the dust.
But most of the fashionables in the audience were dis
appointed by what they regarded as the tameness of the
discourse, and they said so to one another with little cir
cumlocution. It is a merciful provision that preachers do not hear the
remarks and criticisms of their dispersing congregations.
At every door such remarks hover in the air, like flocks of
ravens, to peck away any good seed which may chance to
lie on the trodden road of men's hearts.
But Philip, who was not known by sight, did hear many
of the remarks that were made, ais he stood by the great
bronze door, waiting for Chrysostom to come out, that he
might conduct him home.
A group of ladies passed by. ' How very poor ! How
very tame ! No dazzling metaphor ; no flights of rhetoric ! '
' Ah ! ' thought Philip, ' it won't be long before you, my
fine ladies, will have eloquence enough for you. I hope
it won't singe your gay feathers too severely.'
'I thought the fellow could speak,' said an exquisite,
who had intrigued and bribed in vain for Isaac the Monk.
' Why, he was as heavy as lead and as dull as ditch-water! '
A group of bishops passed by, escorting Theophilus of
Alexandria. They were talking in tones which showed
that they did not in the least object to be heard.
'I feel sure he is secretly unsound,' said Cyrinus of
Chalcedon, venomously. 'Look how leniently he spoke
of heretics.'
' Yes,' said Severian of Gabala, ' he will be like Thera-
menes, whom the Greeks called " Cothurnus," because
that buskin fits on either foot ; or rather, as the proverb
says, " more slippery than a slipper." '
'A regular trimmer, I fear,' murmured Antiochus of
Ptolemais ; — and an alarmed titter, instantly suppressed,
ran through the group, for everyone knew that i Amphal-
lax,' or ' Trimmer,' was a recognised nickname of Theoph
ilus, and the black look which the Alexandrian turned
on the speaker seemed as though he took an accidental
slip for an intentional insult.

148 GATHERING CLOUDS
' What does your Sanctity think ? ' asked Isaac the
Monk in a deferential tone.
' I think,' said Theophilus, savagely, ' that if we give
him enough rope he will soon hang himself.'
' Who would have supposed,' murmured the priest Elpi-
dius, who had founded a cheap reputation for wit on vapid
malignities, ' that even as an orator we should so soon have
to regret Nectarius ? '
Philip was literally boiling over with indignation as he
watched the receding group. ' These be your Christian
bishops ! ' he muttered. ' It is almost enough to make one
turn Pagan. What! more of them?' he said, for another
group of ecclesiastics was approaching.
' Not one appeail to the clergy ! Not one compliment to
them!' said a presbyter. 'What a churl he must be!
Look how Archbishop Gregory of Nazianzus publicly
praised Maximus the Cynic'
'A most unlucky instance,' said the Archdeacon Sera
pion, with much scorn, ' seeing that Maximus turned out
to be a rogue of the deepest dye.'
' Hurrah ! ' said Philip to himself, ' the priestling did not
get the best of that.'
Next passed Eutropius, with Osius, Leo, and others of
his parasites.
' Surely, surely, Eutropius,' said Osius, ' he might have
said at least one word of gratitude to you, who lifted him
out of nothing.'
' I did not expect it,' said Eutropius. ' He despises me,
but I respect him. He is a true man.'
' Well said, Chamberlain ! ' thought Philip ; ' in spite
of your crimes you are — or, if the baseness of the world
would have let you, would have been — more of a man
than the men who fool you to the top of your bent.'
' He might at least have said something of his Eternity
the Emperor and of the lovely, pious Empress,' said the
fat and waddling Leo.
'I wonder whether a lion ever dies of asses' kicks?'
muttered the young Antiochene, shaking his fist at Leo's
retreating back.
'Ah! my young friend,' said Aurelian, who at that
moment was passing out of church with Amantius, and

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 149
noticed the gesture, ' your master is coming. Look after
him. He will need all your care in the sink of virulence
and vileness which he will find in Constantinople.'
' I will, sir,' said Philip. ' In courage, in nobleness, in
learning, he is a man of men ; but in domestic matters he
is a child.'
'I have already noticed,' said Amantius, 'that he is but
little versed in the world's ways. You may be most use
ful to him, Philip. I am very glad that we let you come
with him.'

150 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXI
ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES
Insomnes longo veniunt examine Curae.
Claud., In. Ruf. i. 38.
Chrysostom's first care after his enthronisation was to
arrange his household, and then to master the manifold
duties — diocesan, social, and patriarchal — of his high
station. His faithful servants had come from Antioch, and had
brought with them the simple furniture of his paternal
home. Old Phlegon was installed as porter at the Patri-
archeion ; and when he was vexed with the throngs of
visitors and the incessant summonses which brought him
out of his porter's cell, he sighed for Singon Street as
much as his master. Social duties lay on Chrysostom
with a heavier weight than the work of his archiepisco-
pate. Nectarius had given frequent and superb entertain
ments, not only to the bishops who visited Constantinople
from every quarter of the world and to the leading clergy,
but also to the praetorian praefects, the great senators, and
all the high Court officials. The Emperor himself had
sometimes been his guest. It would have been profoundly
distasteful to Chrysostom to undertake anything of the
kind. Valuing all the intercourse of private life which
might be used for high and noble ends, he shrank from
the pleasures and unprofitable frivolities of society as from
a dreary and barren Sahara. He was impatient of 'the
quotidian ague of frigid impertinences.' This was soon
discovered by the worldly, the dissipated, and the idle, the
illustrious dandies, and the fine ladies. The very aspect of
the Archbishop's Palace became so severely simple that it
kept then) off.

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 151
' Philip,' said Chrysostom, ' I cannot bear the sight of all
these curtains and tapestries and gorgeous superfluities.
The bishops tell me that there is no harm in them ; that
hospitality is a duty; that I have a position to keep up,
and so forth. It may be so. I blame neither Nectarius
nor anyone else ; but as for me, these things always seem
to reproach my hermit notions with the thought of the
carpenter's shop at Nazareth, and of Him Who had not
where to lay His head. Surely St. Peter or St. John had
a position to keep up, yet did not need these outward
splendours to help them? You must get rid of them aill
for me.'
'But, your Beatitude  ' said Philip.
'Nay, nay, my boy. If I must bear those tinsel titles
from others, never call me by any other address than
" Bishop " in public, and in private (as I told you) use
the old, dear name of " father," as at Antioch.'
' Well, my father, my best happiness is to save you
trouble in every way.'
' And you do, dear Philip. Often, when I have a happy,
quiet hour in my study or in the garden, with St. Matthew,
or the Acts of the Apostles, or the works of Basil and
Gregory on my table, I know that you are doing all kinds
of necessary business for me, and sheltering me from need
less worries in matters in which I am helpless. And I
know that you do it all kindly, courteously, and with
perfect tact.'
That was quite true. Philip was Chrysostom's controller
of the household, master of the ceremonies, and factotum.
He meddled, of course, with no ecclesiastical business,
except in arranging mere outward details. All that was
done by Serapion, the Archdeacon. Serapion's position
near Chrysostom was a misfortune to him. He was a true
man, but was blunt and brusque ; the mass of the clergy
hated him because of his plain forthrightness and impa
tience of all shams. But Philip managed the servants,
arranged all domestic matters, saw importunate beggars,
deftly dealt with various genera of lunatics who came to
the Patriarch with peculiar hobbies, inspirations, and dis
coveries about the Apocalypse ; answered all merely busi
ness letters ; kept an eye on tradesmen ; fended his master

152 GATHERING CLOUDS
from fussy intrusiveness ; sifted the visitors who might or
might not see the Patriarch ; acted as an invaluable screen
between the Archbishop and the irrelevances, nonentities,
and little nothings which would otherwise have wasted his
time and worried his temper. And all this he did with
consummate fidelity and grace. He might have abused
his really important position in a thousand ways. Many
tried to flatter, and even to bribe him, and to induce him
to pull the wires for them and their interests as though he
had been a Palace official. But though he Avas always
bright, good-natured, and exquisitely courteous, he had
rejected the overtures of party intriguers and slanderers
with such contempt and indignation that it speedily became
known that he was useless except for all honourable and
disinterested ends, and had no sympathy with ' prejudices,
private interests, or partial affections.'
' What am I to do with the grandeurs, father ? ' he
asked. ' Sell them, and give the money to the poor.'
' As to selling them, I can manage that, if you wish it.
I have made a friend named Michael in the Chalkoprateia,
who is the soul of honesty and holiness, and he can get
that done for us easily. But on what principle will you
give them to the poor ? '
' There are thousands of the poor in Constantinople,
Philip. At every door of Dives there lie a multitude of
starving Lazaruses, who watch the banquets and purple
and fine linen. They even throng the church-doors.'
' Yes, but the difficulty is to know the real Lazarus
from all the sham ones. The impostures of the beggars
are, as you know, sickening and endless. Some of them
actually blind and maim their own children to make money
by them. They terrify weak women by menaces or by ad
jurations, and are mixed up in many villainies.'
' You are right, Philip. One must not encourage the
wretched and wicked trade of mendicity, which makes
not a few nominal beggars rich. We must never give
without some inquiry.'
' Even that does not always insure certainty,' said
Philip. 'You know young Eutyches — that beautiful
half-Gothic lad, left an orphan — the youth who looks as

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 153
if he wore a nimbus when the sun shines through his light
hair ! Don't you know him yet? Well, he is being trained
for a reader, and the deacons sometimes send him on mes
sages. The other day a woman had come to them in
paroxysms of distress, saying that her husband was dead,
leaving her with five young children, and that she had no
money to bury him. They sent Eutyches to inquire. He
heard some shuffling before he was admitted, but the
woman told him that all her children were out, and
„ pointed to the figure of her dead husband, who was laid
out on a long bier, under a covering. When Eutyches
returned to the deacon — the house was at a distance, near
the Forum of Constantine — he found that he had forgotten
his tablets. Coming back for them, and entering suddenly,
he surprised the corpse in the act of reading his tablets
and eating a large dish of sausages.'
Chrysostom laughed, and then sighed.
'I do not mean to lavish the money, as our saintly
friend Olympias does. I mean to give it to found one or
two greatly needed hospitals for lepers and others, as the
Lady Fabiola has done in Rome, and as Basil did at
Caesarea. I shall want large funds. You must sell for
me not only the magnificent furniture, but all those fine,
pompous robes.'
' What ! the pontifical vestments ? '
'Yes. I cannot be pageanted about the cathedral as
if I were some gaudy idol. Paul had but his one sea-
stained cloak, for which he wrote to Troas ; John had his
garment of camel's hair.'
' But the High Priest had his golden robes and ardent
Urim.' ' We have no High Priest but Christ, Philip, nor are we
Jews. Moreover, the High Priest only wore his robes for
half an hour on one day in the whole year ; ordinarily he
dressed in simple white linen.'
' You will offend the clergy.'
' I would not willingly offend them. But these sacer
dotal pomps are a thing of yesterday; they represent
no needs, and real needs are clamorously urgent. The
great Basil wore one old threadbare dress ; Ambrose sold
even his church plate to redeem captives ; and I am

154 GATHERING CLOUDS
told that my brilliant and saintly brother, Augustine, who
three years ago was made Bishop of Hippo against his will,
when a gorgeous cope is given him, declines to wear it,
and sells it for the common good.'
' They shall be sold,' said Philip. ' But, father, may I
say something more, or are you too busy?'
' You never waste my time, Philip.'
' Well then, father, if I am to help you, I have really
more to do than I can manage. May I have a fellow-
secretary — or even two ? '
' Certainly you may, Philip. I have noticed lately that
you seemed overworked.'
' Thanks, father. Then give me Eutyches for one assist
ant. He is as good as he is beautiful ; I never knew a
whiter soul. And for the other  ' Philip paused and
blushed. 'Who is it?'
' Father, it is the son of Michael, whom I mentioned.
His name is David. He is seventeen, writes swiftly and
exquisitely, is very clever, knows Latin and Hebrew, as
well as Greek. He would make you a first-rate secretary
and attendant.'
' What ! he knows Hebrew? Is he a Jew? '
' No,' said Philip, ' a baptised Christian, and a real one,
as his ancestors have been for nearly four centuries ; but
of Jewish race, and that,' he added in an awestruck tone,
' the highest, the very, very highest.'
'You interest me,' said Chrysostom.
' Father, you know that the Jews keep their genealogies
most sacredly. Bishop Synesius says he is descended from
Hercules. Well, my David is descended from King David ;
and more than that.'
'More than that?'
' Yes. You know that there was a family in Palestine
called the Desposyni, because they were the earthly rela
tives of St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin.'
'I know it,' said Chrysostom. ' The Emperor Domitian,
in jealousy, sent for them to Rome in a.d. 94, as though
they were claimants for a kingdom. They told him that
they were of the family of Nazareth, and had for years
cultivated the little farm which they had inherited. And

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 155
when he saw that their hands were hard and horny with
labour, he dismissed them with contempt, as though they
were insignificant peasants.'
' The descendants of the family still exist. Father,
Michael and David, though out of deepest reverence they
never speak of it, are of the family of the Desposyni.'
Chrysostom was awestruck. ' But how did you dis
cover the secret, Philip ? '
' I was in the Chalkoprateia when I saw people rushing
away from a dog which was snapping and foaming, and
was evidently mad. A little crying, half-naked child of
five was in its path, and was in terrible danger. I rushed
after the dog, and luckily seized it by the back of the neck.
At the same moment I saw Michael spring out of his
bronzesmith's shop, and catch up the child in his arms.
The great fountain is close by, and some good angel
inspired me to hold the dog under water till it was
drowned. I was frightened, and suppose I looked pale ;
and as I passed Michael's shop David stepped out and
invited me to come in. There they gave me some deli
cious libban and pure wine. On the wall I saw a little
simple painting of the youthful Christ, copied, Michael
told me, from one in the catacomb of St. Callistus at
Rome. It could only have been fancy, but David looked
to me exactly like that picture — so happy, so pure.
Michael seemed greatly pleased with my seizing the mad
dog, and in talking he told me about his descent. He said
I might tell you, but no one else. Then David and I took
the little child to the deacon's, who restored him to his
home.' ' You must ask Michael to bring David, and come to
see me.'
' I will. But, dear father, I would not conceal anything
from you.' Philip seemed embarrassed, and a still deeper
blush mounted on his cheek. 'David has a very beautiful
young sister. I saw her that day, and have seen her
since.' ' Philip, has Love lit his torch in your heart ? I have
ever hoped that you would some day be one of my
presbyters.' ' No, father, that can never be. I feel no vocation for

156 GATHERING CLOUDS
that sacred work ; and, to tell the honest truth, what I
have seen of most of the clergy here does not make me
wish to join them. When I hear their worldly plans and
slanderous speeches — when (pardon my frankness, father !)
I contrast their immense pretensions with their very scanty
virtues — it almost seems to me as if a man like the Cham
berlain Amantius or the tradesman Michael were far
nearer than they are to the Kingdom of Heaven. Father,
have I your sanction, if I can win Miriam's love ? '
' Philip,' said Chrysostom, ' your happiness is dearer to
me than my own ; but ah !  '
He thought of the day when Philip must inevitably
leave him, and he was too old to make new friends. But
he would have been the last to let selfish feelings stand
in the way of the happiness of a youth, or of anyone whom
he loved.
' I am sorry you cannot seek the priesthood, Philip,'
he said ; ' but God bless you ! The callings of men are
different, and many (I know) serve Him unspeakably
better in the world than some do in the priesthood.'
So Eutyches and David were duly installed with Philip
as secretaries and acolytes. There was ample work for
them to do, and it was not often that all three could be
in the anteroom at one time, for there were constant mes
sages to be taken, and visits paid, and details arranged.
But they were happy of temperament and they were young
and pure of heart, and in their presence and ready faith
fulness Chrysostom found some of the scanty happiness
of his troubled life.
The room in which they sat communicated with Chrys
ostom's study, and was curtained off from the large outer
hall called Thomaites. If the Archbishop was engaged,
visitors of importance often sat to wait in the room of the
three youths, or on divans beyond the curtain.
In the hall itself often sat Serapion, the Archdeacon,
who saw the clergy, heard their petitions or complaints,
and gave them any advice or assistance which did not
necessitate the intervention or sanction of the Archbishop.
Philip soon became well acquainted with such true
friends of Chrysostom ais had no private interests to serve,
and Avere attracted rather than repelled by his unworldly

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 157
simplicity. Among these was a group of noble and saintly
ladies. The society ladies of Constantinople — the Marsas,
Castricias, and Epigraphias — at first thought 'the dear
Archbishop ' on the whole piquant, and declared that they
should like him; but soon found his sincerity alarming,
and began to beAvail their lost Nectarius, avIio never re
buked them, but was always ready to exchange courtly
compliments. He, in his rare sermons, distressed no con
science, but steered triumphantly through the shallow
waves of platitude. But there were some ladies who,
themselves earnest and sincere, Avere drawn as Avith a
powerful magnet by the unmistakable earnestness and
sincerity of Chrysostom. Foremost among these Avas the
beautiful, noble, and wealthy Olympias. Daughter of a
count of the Empire, who left her the heiress of an im
mense fortune, she had been wedded in early youth to the
young and handsome Nebridius, who, after two years, left
her a childless widow. A widow she determined to re
main, and to devote her life to good. She even braved
the wrath of Theodosius by refusing to marry one of his
kinsmen. Gregory of Nazianzus, while he was Patriarch,
had loved her as a daughter, calling her ' his own Olym
pias.' Gregory of Nyssa had dedicated to her his Com
mentary on the Song of Songs, written at her request.
Her good deeds and austerities Avere known to the Avhole
Church, and her palace was the constant home of bishops,
who rarely left her without immense grants in aid of their
dioceses. Her gifts were so lavish and so freely bestowed
that ecclesiastics of the baser sort preyed on her credulity.
Among these was Theophilus, who on one occasion pros
trated himself before her in a burst of crocodile gratitude
and kissed her knees, which so shocked her humility that
she flung herself Avith tears at his feet. Nectarius had
made her a deaconess, and, being entirely ignorant himself,
frequently consulted her. She was now at the head of a
little college of younger deaconesses. She became the
almoner of Chrysostom, and helped him in his great mis
sionary and other designs, both at home and abroad. It
was his painful duty to warn her against the exploitations
of Theophilus and other episcopal vultures. He told her
that she was responsible to God for the use of her vast

158 GATHERING CLOUDS
wealth, which should be not merely lavish, but also wise
and Avell considered. Part of the many sources of fury
against Chrysostom in the bad heart of Theophilus and
other bishops Avas due to the fact that he had dried up a
fountain of beneficence which was wasting itself in barren
sands. Another devoted Church-worker was the virgin Ni-
carete. She was so humble that, in spite of a host of
good deeds, she would never become a deaconess or accept
the headship of the Consecrated Virgins, Avhich the Patri
arch pressed upon her. Her little foible Avas the belief
that she was herself more skilled in healing than any
professional physician. She went about with her little
box of drugs and simples, which she pressed upon all with
affectionate and confiding solicitude.
'No, Lady Nicarete, no pills for me to-day, thank you,'
said Philip, as he laughingly ushered her into Chrysostom's
room ; ' I am in riotous health, which I do not wish to be
disturbed.' ' Foolish boy ! ' said Nicarete, smiling. ' But now, does
not your young friend Eutyches want a little medicine ?
He looks pale.'
' Pale ! ' said Philip, ' why there is a whole Daphne of
roses on his cheeks ! And, Nicarete, I really must inter
dict you from pressing any of the contents of your medi-
. cine-box on the Archbishop. He is not in riotous health,
but his digestion is in a sufficient state of conflagration
already, and he is so good-natured that he will destroy
himself by taking all you give him.'
' You naughty lad ! ' said Nicarete ; ' how shall I punish
your sauciness? Eutyches is much more polite.'
'That is because he takes your prescriptions like an
angel ; but if you look in his drawer, you will find them
all there, untouched.'
'Don't you mind what he says, Lady Nicarete,' said
Eutyches ; ' he laughs at us all.'
Far different from Nicarete was the deaconess Salvina.
She, too, was of the noblest rank — a daughter of the
unhappy rebel, Gildo, Count of Africa, and the AvidoAv of
the nephew of the Empress Flaccilla, avIio had been edu
cated Avith Arcadius and Honorius. She had two children,

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 159
and, young as she Avas, determined to remain a Avidow.
She devoted herself to good works, and became the pat
roness of the Churches of the East, and of all the clei'gy
Avho visited the Court of Arcadius. Such was her fame
that even St. Jerome had from his cell at Bethlehem
Avritten her one of his anti-matrimonial letters, of Avhich
the tone Avould have been resented in our days as su
premely distasteful. Her life Avas absorbed in the educa
tion of her son and daughter, the due management of
her wealth, and the service of God in all holy works.
And like her in ardent allegiance to Chrysostom Avas
Pentadia, widow of the great Consul and Master of the
Forces, Timasius. Eutropius — it was one of his basest
crimes — had foully done the braive soldier to death by
the agency of the ungrateful sausage-seller, Bargus, whom
Timasius had befriended. The general and his son both
disappeared — the victims, probably, of secret murder —
in the oasis of Libya. Eutropius had marked out Pentadia
also for destruction ; but she fled to sanctuary, which, in
spite of the efforts of the all-powerful Minister, the Arch
bishop would not allow to be violated. When it Avas safe
for her to leave the asylum she became a recluse, rarely
leaving her home except to go to the church, but helping
in all sacred and charitable organization.
These were Chrysostom's friends, and, among the great
men of the Court, officials of high character like Amantius
and Aurelian. And the mass of the poorer population of
Constantinople soon learnt to be devoted to him. They
saw in him a sincere and holy man, who, whatever might
be his faults, had not a single ignoble or personal aim, and
whose one object it was to support the weak and to fight
against oppression, robbery, and wrong. But among the
clergy very few are mentioned among his friends. The
quiet, indeed, and the good and the faithful, grappled him
to their souls with hooks of steel ; but those Avho usually
arrogated to themselves the title of ' the Church,' and all
their organs of public opinion, were fiercely antagonistic
to him. They hesitated at no calumny, sneers, or false
hood, and as they were the noisy, the pushing, and the
intriguing, they claimed to be the sole representatives of
clerical public opinion. To them nothing that Chrysos-

160 GATHERING CLOUDS
torn could do was tolerable, and nothing that he could
say was right.
It happened one day thait two of the bishops, who from
the first had set themselves most determinedly against the
Patriarch, though as yet in secret, were seated in the great
hall, Avhich happened to be empty, except that the Arch
deacon Serapion was sitting at a table there with papers
before him. They lounged on the divan by the curtain,
which was not drawn back, for Olympias was with Chrys
ostom, consulting about his new hospital. They were
Cvrinus of Chalcedon and Antiochus -of Ptolemais ; and
they began to indulge in the gossip about the Patriarch
which was already current in all clerical circles. Serapion,
an Egyptian by birth, was a hot-headed and yet a taciturn
man. They did not knoAV his unwavering loyalty, and
assumed that he would be a sharer in the ordinary eccle
siastical opinion about his chief. At first the bishops
conversed in low tones, and although they did not exclude
Serapion from their discussion, they did not often address
him. These bishops condemned what they Avere pleased
to call the squalid niggardliness of the Patriarcheion
under the present regime. They severely denounced
Chrysostom's intention of selling for the poor the splen
did marbles which Nectarius had collected to decorate the
Church of the Resurrection. They more than hinted at
private peculation. To much of this conversation Sera
pion paid no attention, though he sometimes made a
contemptuous nod of dissent when they appealed to him.
But as the bishops lit up the smouldering fumes of each
other's malice they began to talk in louder and more
excited tones.
'He utterly neglects the duties of hospitality,' said
Cyrinus, ' but they say that by himself he indulges in
Cyclopean orgies.'
' Yes,' said Antiochus, ' and it is very unseemly that he
should be often closeted with ladies. Olympias is always
with him. She is with him now. You really should call
his attention to some of these things, Archdeacon.'
These last remarks completely upset Serapion's usual
disdainful indifference to Avhat people said. He usually
followed the rule, 'Get the thing done, and let them howl.'

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 161
He often compared the tittle-tattle of society to the whir
ring of idle grasshoppers in the fields or the monotonous
croak of frogs in a malarious marsh.
He rose from his seat in towering indignation, and, stand
ing in front of the astonished prelates, he cried :
' How can you talk in that way ? Are you neither afraid
nor ashamed to let your tongues rage like fires, and Avorlds
of iniquity set aflame of hell, and thus to run riot in de
faming and defacing your spiritual head, who is a saint of
God, which you are not ? Cyclopean orgies ! You spend
more over One of your meals, Cyrinus, than the Patriarch
does in six months. And you, Antiochus, is it not an in
famy too black even for you to hint your foul insinuations
not only against Chrysostom, but also against a saint like
Olympias ? Fie on you ! You are not worthy to be bishops,
you are not worthy even to be exorcists of the lowest rank,
since you have not yet cast the evil spirits out of your
own hearts.'
Had a thunderbolt fallen before the two bishops they
could hardly have been more amazed than by this out
burst. They were bishops, they lived amid the incense
of flatteries and lordlinesses , and to be addressed thus —
and by a mere deacon !
' You forget yourself,' said Antiochus, ' and you forget
who we are.'
' I forget not,' answered Serapion hotly. 'I honour bishops
who are bishops indeed. I honour not you ; I honour not
backbiters and slanderers.'
' You shall smart for this — you and your master too,'
said Cyrinus.
' I know that there are scorpions, and that they can
sting. But if God be Avith the right, what has John to
fear from you ? He shall tread upon the adder and the
dragon. Go, false bishops, and abase yourselves in the
dust, if haply the wicked thoughts of your hearts may be
forgiven! '
' My cousin, the Patriarch of Alexandria, shall hear of
this,' said Cyrinus.
' Let him ! ' said Serapion. ' I neither respect nor honour
him. Go home to your neglected sees, you hireling shep
herds. You have come here for your ambition and your

162 GATHERING CLOUDS
greed, to air your rhetoric and fill your purses. I know
you, and fear you not.'
The storm was over. The bishops, without waiting any
longer to see the Patriarch, swept out of the hall in fierce
anger. Serapion's wrath was honest, but he had gone too
far in giving place to it. What he had said was true, but
it was dangerous and unwise ; and when he went to speak
to Philip in the anteroom, still throbbing with suppressed
passion, he told him what had occurred, and admitted that
he had done wrong to put no curb upon his denunciation.
' You certainly did not spare them, Archdeacon,' said
Philip. ' Really, if I had heard such lies and such insinua
tions I should have found it hard not to seize them both by
the neck and fling them out.'
' Ah ! ' said Serapion, ' you are young, Philip ; but I am
older, and should have put more control upon my feelings.'
'But into what a nest of hornets we have come ! ' said
Philip. ' " Cyclopean orgies " indeed ! ' and then the
ludicrousness of the accusation struck him, and as he
thought of the crude apples and thin wine which too
often constituted Chrysostom's sole meal, he laughed till
the room rang again.
Not long after this Chrysostom asked Acacius, Bishop
of Beroea, to dine with him. He had quite forgotten what
Eutropius told him at the imperial banquet of the Bishop's
foible for good living, and he had given no special order
for the meal. Acacius, who had been accustomed to sup
with Nectarius, was mute with surprise. Such a scant
meal ! and not a single dainty ! and no Thasian, nor even
Chian wine ! He Avaited for at least some dainty Avhich
should prove that Chrysostom had done honour to his
episcopal dignity. Chrysostom, entirely unconscious of
his feelings, was talking to him, not about dinners, but
about hospitals, and missions to the Persians, and St. Paul's
visit to Beroea. Acacius got more and more sullen, and
determined to go back and cline at home. So completely
had he lost his equanimity that he exclaimed loudly as he
passed through the hall, ' I'll cook a dish for him ! '
Philip, who heard the remark, could hardly help
laughing, for he Avas quick to see the ludicrous side of
things.

ANXIETIES AND TROUBLES, FRIENDS AND FOES 163
' Tantaene animis coelestibus irae ? ' he said, turning to
David, with whom he had been reading Virgil.
' Yes,' said David, smiling, ' but another Latin poet says :
Longissima coenas
Spes homini.'
' Yet I am sorry, too,' said Philip. ' Here is one enemy
more, and the Archbishop has enough already. We lived
so simply at Antioch that I humbly confess my deficiencies
as regards the kitchen department. What can one do,
Eutyches? An epicure like you ought to be able to
advise.' The others laughed too, as Eutyches was the most
abstemious of the three ; but he said :
' I will tell you, Philip. You must speak to Olympias.
You are no good ; you let him starve himself, and other
people, even me.'
Philip shook his fist at him.
'I let you off,' he said, 'only because of your good
suggestion. Olympias will know all about it.'
' And he?' — the youths often spoke of the Archbishop
among themselves as ' he ' — ' he must ask Acacius again,
and give him a Salian banquet.'
' Too late ! ' said Philip, sighing. ' The good Bishop
Avill never again expose himself to so frightful a risk.
When those red herrings came in, you should have seen
his face ! '
They consulted Olympias, and from that time she looked
after Chrysostom's kitchen : saw that he had proper food,
and that he did not starve himself; and that he kept a
table for guests which, though in comparison with that of
his predecessor it was only ' as moonlight unto sunlight,
and as water unto wine,' yet was not so wholly inartistic
as that which had so deeply stirred the Avrath of the old
Bishop of Beroea.
But when Olympias mused over the story she was
hardly surprised at the remark she read in St. Isidore of
Pelusium, that there were very few bishops who inspired
any respect for their holiness ; or at Avhat Chrysostom him
self had said in one of his homilies, that he feared more
bishops would be lost than saved.

164 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXII
MANIFOLD STRUGGLES
Truth is cruel. — Pere Hyacinthe.
Every day brought upon Chrysostom the burden of new
and incessant duties. The care of Constantinople and its
diocese would have been enough to exhaust the energies
of any man ; but the affairs of many other dioceses, over
which custom gave him a patriarchal jurisdiction, came
before him ; and besides his schemes of reformation and
beneficence at home, he felt an intense eagerness to further
the cause of the Gospel by missions among the Persians,
the Phoenicians, and other nations. Meanwhile he was
getting an insight into the general corruption and worldli-
ness into Avhich the Church had fallen, and was preparing
to put in force every possible remedy. He saw on all sides
of him a Christianity which was a Christianity in name
alone ; a Christianity passionately eager about theological
shibboleths ; a Christianity Avhich plunged into all the vices
and follies of the world, while it busied itself with all the
functions and formulae of the Church ; a Christianity which
relied for salvation on orthodoxies and amulets, while it
neglected the weightier matters of the laAV, justice, mercy,
and truth. What shocked him most was to find these false
forms of a Christianity which had become hollow and nomi
nal chiefly rife among the clergy. Their condition illus
trated ' the eternal Pharisaism of the human heart.' They
said, and did not. No word was more common on their lips
than the word 'scandal.' Every petty divergence from
their own conventionality, every recognition that the river
of the grace of God might be deeper and broader than
their straight-dug ditches, every cordial sign of union with
brethren Avhose opinions or organisation differed slightly

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 165
from their own, was always a ' scandal.' But the scandal
of their own pettiness, narrowness, subterranean meanness,
and total want of charity, was to them a source not of peni
tence, but of pride. The rottenness of dying superstitions
and a feeble pretence at perverted intellectualism had half
strangled Christianity with ever-new watchAvords and ever-
new creeds. Eyes blinded by immoral partisanship were
incapable of recognising pure goodness. The thin dust on
the balances of orthodoxy, and small ecclesiastical scrupu
losities, had become more to them than the solid gold of
righteousness and love. Strong in their opiniated self-
satisfaction, they often yielded without a struggle to the
coarsest temptations. Their hypocrisy became so ingenious
that it even deceived themselA'es, and they voided the most
envenomed virulence on those Avho repudiated their pre
tensions and loathed their habitual manoeuvres.
All this had been seen and had been bewailed already
by some of the greatest and holiest of the saints of God.
Chrysostom had read the vieAvs of St. Hilary, St. Gregory
of Nazianzus, St. Basil, St. Jerome, St. Isidore of Pelusium,
and St. Nilus, the many letters to lapsed virgins and fallen
monks, and the many stories of much-admired clerical
adventurers ; but he was slow to admit the reality of the
sad condition of things which more and more was forcing
itself upon his conviction. He would not act on impulse
or in a hurry ; he would wait, and watch, and pray, and
discriminate, and use his private influence to the uttermost
before he gave vent to any public utterance or struck any
open bloAV.
It was the Emperor's custom to leave Constantinople
in the summer, and retire to the voluptuous privacy of
Ancyra. The plan had been devised by Eutropius, whose
one object was so completely to absorb Arcadius in luxuri
ous self-indulgence that he might leave all serious business
in the hands of his Chamberlain. At Constantinople he
kept him engaged day after day in the Hippodrome and
the Circus, where he might see the runners, and the
chariot-races, and the wrestlers, and the fighters, and
excite himself, as far as his languor permitted, with the
factions of the Blue and Green. Lolling and sleeping on
soft silken cushions in the Kathisma, or Emperor's box,

166 GATHERING CLOUDS
Arcadius could occasionally diversify his satiated boredom
by looking on while funambulists walked upwards and
downwards on tight ropes, or gymnasts, to the stupefac
tion of the mob, balanced a pole on their foreheads, on the
top of which a little boy Avould go through all sorts of
antics. Sometimes a thrill of delicious sensation would
pass through the audience when the funambulist missed
his footing and was dashed dead on the orchestra, or the
boy tumbled from his balanced pole and broke a leg. If
such an accident tended to cause too much emotion, the
jesters called moriones, or cordaces, were at hand, who
acted the part of clowns, and soon set the audience in a
roar of laughter.
But lest monotony should jade the Imperial mind, espe
cially during the burning heats of summer, Eutropius had
provided the palace at Ancyra. The day of the journey
was announced, and then the Chamberlain gratified the
mob of the city with a gorgeous spectacle. On that occa
sion the Emperor always wore a crown of gold set with
the most precious gems. His robes Avere of purple silk
Avoven with golden dragons. He Avore the most splendid
of his earrings, and strings of orient pearls hung one
beloAV another over his breast. The attendant guards were
decked with golden chains and armlets, and the heads of
their lances were gilded, with silken streamers of purple
pendent from them. The Palatini also carried dazzling
shields with bosses of gold, round Avhich were painted
golden eyes. The chariot of the. Emperor was a blaze of
gold, and was covered with thin laminae of flexile gold,
which moved and glittered as it advanced. The Avhite
mules which drew it Avere shod with gold, their housings
were blazoned with golden broidery, and the reins glittered
with gems. Crowds of bedizened courtiers, and hundreds
of attendant pages, and eunuchs of every age and of every
race, walked in sumptuous procession before and behind,
through streets thronged Avith thousands of sightseers,
many of whom had been patiently Avaiting since the morn
ing to see the palace gates flung open and the pomp issue
forth. Yet, as one penetrates into the depths of a pyramid,
to find at last only the ashes of a monkey or a cat, so the
centre of universal interest was Avith the occupants of the

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 167
chariot, and they Avere only a salloAV, sleepy youth and a
wrinkled, kotowing eunuch. Nevertheless
the rich retinue long
Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,
Dazzled the crowd and set them all agape.
The procession AA^ended its way to the harbour, Avhere lay
crowds of gilded barges to convey the Emperor and his
Court to the other side of the Bosporus, whence they Avent
by land to the soft climate of Phrygia. At Ancyra Eutro
pius amused and enervated the Emperor Avith banquets, and
spectacles of dancing-girls, and with every costly diversion
which the ingenious luxury of idleness could devise.
Philip and his young friends had watched the Emperor's
departure with the curiosity and not ungenial cynicism
of youth- As for Philip, he was an observer of human
nature, and never missed the chance of seeing anything.
Full of fun, he accused David of envying all the glory.
' Why should I envy the bloom on the wings of butter
flies ? ' said David.
' Oh yes, you are a philosopher, DaA'id. But you,' he
said to Eutyches, ' confess that, in spite of your protesting
look, you would give your eyes to be one of those proces
sional gentlemen, and strut in gold amidst the cheers of
the mob. I feel sure that you are saying to yourself, " Oh
that I could be Eutropius for but one hour! " '
Eutyches turned to him his laughing face. ' You knoAv
better,' he said. 'I greatly prefer to be a clerk at the
Patriarch's. As for Eutropius, if I had an enemy, and if
I wanted to curse him  '
' Two impossible suppositions for you, Eutyches,' said
David. 'Well, if I had, and if I could, I should say, change
lots with Eutropius ! '
'Curses wait round him open-eyed,' said Philip; 'but
you Avould like to be Aurelian, now?'
' What, Avith Typhos, that wicked brother of his, dogging
his heels and secretly trying to devour him ? '
'All very fine, Eutyches; but you know you asked the
Patriarch to come and see the sIioav.'
'And do you know what he called it?'

168 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Vanity of vanities, probably,' said Philip.
'Well, something like it. He called it gilded misery
and painted tears. But, Philip, you are the culprit. You
are dying to enjoy an armlet and a gold collar, and so you
accuse us ! '
'Perhaps,' said Philip. ' Who can tell?'
An old man in the cloak of a philosopher had overheard
them. ' Ah ! young man,' he said, ' do you Avant riches,
power, honour? Well, I have Avhat you desire.' And
then he opened and shut his hand three times.
' Is that a sort of incantation ? ' asked Philip, laughing.
'No,' said the old man. 'I have grasped the wind.'
But though the Patriarch had not cared to leave his
books and waste his time to stare at the procession, he
had gone the day before to pay his fareAvell respects to
Arcadius, and he had taken the opportunity of holding a
very serious conversation with the powerful Chamberlain.
Eutropius welcomed him almost effusively. His pres
ence seemed to the favourite to give a touch of reality to
a world of phantasms. Most of the insects who thronged
about his noonday beam he utterly despised. He knew
the value of the transports with which they kissed his hand
or grovelled at his feet. He knew that their one object
was self-interest, and that they would be ready to spit at
and trample on him to-morrow if his fortunes fell. But
among these spectres the presence of Chrysostom brought
him in contact with a man who desired nothing from him,
who neither feared nor flattered him, but who did deeply
and genuinely care, if not for his temporal, yet for his
supremest, interests.
'I welcome the visit of your Beatitude,' he said, after
Chrysostom's simple greeting, 'though you constantly
oppose my wishes and show little respect to my office.
Why, praefects and patricians have barely left the room,
every one of whom treated me almost as if I were Emperor,
and you address me without the smallest approach to
ceremony ! '
' Do not I thereby honour you ? To me you are Eutro
pius, a soul for whom Christ died. To be a Praefect of
the Sacred Chamber is little, is nothing, but to be a man
is something ; and if a man be but a beggar, and yet a true

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 169
Christian, his dignity is more glorious than that of many
an emperor.'
' You have come, I see, to reprove me. I am a claris-
simus ; I am the greatest man under the Emperor. In
farthest cities, to the remotest corners of the Empire, I
wield the sacred power of Arcadius. Suppose I refuse to
be reproAred ? '
' You can refuse ; but have you never heard the Word :
" He that, being often reproved, hardeneth his heart shall
suddenly be cut off, and that without remedy " ? '
' But what right have you to lord it over me, as though
I were a culprit, and you my judge ? '
'Nay, nay,' said Chrysostom. 'As a man I am but
your poor fellow-sinner ; but regard me as the impersonal
voice of your own slumbering conscience.'
'I am not so black as I am painted,' said Eutropius
indignantly, as he began to pace to and fro. ' I am not
one atom worse, perhaps I am not nearly so bad, as many
of your bishops and clergy.'
' Ah ! how idle are all such comparisons ! ' said Chrys
ostom. ' Ultimately, for each human being there are but
two entities — God and his own soul. May I speak to you
plainly, Eutropius, not in priestly arrogance, yet without
.subterfuge, without disguise? I speak not as a judge,
nor as a Pharisee. I would only fain help you to see the
eternal realities.'
' Speak,' said Eutropius. ' You are the only living man
from whom I would tolerate such freedom.'
' I would ask you, then, To what end is this vast
accumulation of wealth, this dishonourable traffic in high
offices? You are old. How long have you to live?
Can you carry with you your gold, your estates, your
palaces ? '
' Wealth is power,' he answered sullenly.
' But how stable is your poAver ? The Empress is
your enemy. Gainas is your enemy. Your poAver rests
only on a prince's favour. Put not your trust in princes.
Put not your trust in wrong and robbery. All these will
fail you. God alone, if you seek Him, will fail you not.'
'You speak to me very boldly,' said the aggravated
eunuch. ' Look out into yonder square. You will see

170 GATHERING CLOUDS
my statues in bronze and marble in every attitude. Go
into the houses of the nobles, you will see my statuettes in
gold and silver. I have but to touch this bell, and princes
and senators- will crowd in to flatter me. I sit in the
theatre, and the nobles shout applause and the illustrious
call me the Father of the Emperor, and the third founder
of Constantinople after Byzas and Constantine.'
' Does it make you happy ? '
'Happy?' said Eutropius; 'how could such an one as
I, the victim of men's brutalism, stupidity, and vileness —
how could I be happy? Think of whait my childhood,
my boyhood, my youth were. Think how I have been
trampled into the mire, insulted, taunted, by the very
meanest of mankind. Is it nothing that hoav I sit among
princes, and that all the world rings with the two names
of Stilico and Eutropius ? '
'And yet, Eutropius, all this would be sold cheap for
one self-approving hour. You are angry that I resisted
you about the right of sanctuary. I did, and I will con
tinue to do so. On Avhose behalf? Does the story of a
lady like Pentadia awaken in you no stings of remorse?
When you hear the name of the wronged Timasius, of
the wronged Abundantius, do the Furies never shake
their torches in your heart ? '
' Leave me ! ' said Eutropius. ' You have deeply wounded
me.' ' Faithful are the wounds of a friend,' said Chrysostom.
' It is only the kisses of so many enemies which are deceit
ful and poisonous, Eutropius. I love thee better than thy
flatterers : I who reprove thee, not in my own name, but
in His Avhose thou art — care for thee far more than thy
false friends. Oh ! forgive me if I seem to have been hard
on thee, and think on all these things before the fall of
night ! '
' Too late ! too late ! ' said Eutropius, deeply moved.
' I have chosen my lot ; I must follow it to the end.'
' It is never too late to repent, never too late to be for
given,' said Chrysostom. 'Nay, I will not let you part
from me in anger. FareAvell, and may God be merciful
to me and thee ! '
How often did that warning ring in the memory of the

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 171
unhappy Chamberlain! Next day, when he sat beside
the Emperor in the blaze of splendour, men noticed that
his face was very sad, though on those occasions it was
usually wreathed in the blandest smiles. He was think
ing of Chrysostom and his reproof.
And so the days passed by, bringing their changes and
their varied duties. That year was marked at Constanti
nople by the horror of unusual storms and earthquakes.
A huge wave rolled over the Bosporus, and laid in ruins
many of the houses nearest to the seashore. The quak
ing and yawning earth swallowed up others, and flames
issued from the rent fissures. The distress was unspeak
able, for supernatural fears added terror to these catas
trophes, and while there were some who tremblingly
anticipated that the end of all things was at hand, and
plunged into the most slavish superstitions, others, in the
mad defiance which always characterises such epochs of
calamity, flung themselves into reckless debauchery, like
sailors who break open the stores and drink themselves
drunk when it is too late to save the foundering ship.
Amid such scenes Chrysostom kept his strong heart un-
cowed, and many a time in St. Sophia he comforted and
inspired the timorous throngs of his people, trying to calm
them with that peace of God which can face all the perils
of life, because it has no fear of death.
But the Archbishop rarely had rest for long. When
the earthquakes ceased the Arians began to give trouble.
They had been a poAverful party in Constantinople since
the days of Valens, and they were strong in the adherence
of so many of the warrior Goths of Gainas. By a decree
of Theodcsius they were not allowed to worship within
the walls of Constantinople, but they still cherished the
determination to get a church assigned to them. They
began to inaugurate nightly processions, which marched
through the streets and colonnades chanting in antiphon
the strange theological hymns of Alius. Among these
was one which had the taunting refrain :
Where are now the men who say,
In their enigmatic way — •
Who the riddle right can see ? —
' Three are one, and one is three ? '

172 GATHERING CLOUDS
Having chanted such strains all the night, they retired at
dawn to their church outside the walls.
Chrysostom was the more vexed because, though his
own conviction Avas unshakenly orthodox, he had always
endeavoured to treat the Arians with courtesy and fair
ness. He consulted two very different persons — Michael,
the humble Desposynos, and Serapion, the uncompromis
ing archdeacon.
Michael was not unfrequently summoned from his
bronzesmith's shop by his son David to come and talk to
the Archbishop, who valued his counsel — though he hardly
knew what to make of his immense liberality and his total
indifference to ecclesiastical conventions. The favourite
quotation of Michael was the saying of Tertullian, ' Christ
is truth, not custom ; truth, not tradition.'
'Hoav would you counsel me to deal with these noisy
and troublesome Arians?' asked Chrysostom.
' I would humbly advise that you treat them with all
gentleness, with all meekness, with all courtesy — nay, with
all love.'
' They are heretics,' said Chrysostom. ' It is necessary
to be firm with them.'
'I counsel meekness, Bishop, not weakness. Love is
not weakness. Which do we need most, Catholics or
saints ? '
' We must not betray to the Arians the true divinity
of Christ,' said Chrysostom.
' No, nor yet to the Apollinarians His perfect human
ity,' answered Michael. ' But oh ! it Avas an evil day for
Christianity when men began to hate each other for Avatch-
words and definitions, instead of loving the Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, in sincerity and truth, and show
ing their love to Him by love to all for whom He died.'
' But we cannot regard the Arians as Christians.'
' The Goths have learned their Christianity from Bishop
Wulfila. Was not he a saint of God? '
The Patriarch was silent, for, like all men, he loved
and honoured the memory of the holy Wulfila.
'Did Christ come to affirm a creed, Bishop, or to create
a character? Is not he a Christian who does the works
of Christ? Did not Christ say, "If thou wouldst enter

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 173
into life, keep the commandments " ? Did not the Beloved
Disciple say, " He that doeth righteousness is righteous,"
and " He that doeth righteousness is born of God " ?
May we not be received into eternal life with many wrong
opinions ? The Arians, too, believe that Christ was Divine,
though they err in the nature of His divinity. And when
John said, " We forbade him because he followeth not us,"
did not Christ say, " Forbid him not, for he who is not
against us is on our side " ? '
' Yes, but did He not say also, " He who is not for us
is against us " ? '
'Both principles are true in their proper perspective,'
said Michael. ' The one does not falsify the other. No
deadlier disservice could be done to the cause of Christ
than the angry clashing of formulae, in which love and
humility are lost. How far better is meekness of Avisdom,
and the emulation of good works ! '
' What, then, would you advise ? '
' Send for the leaders and priests of the Arians.
Reason with them kindly and forbearingly, not in wrath
and strife. Point out to them that these nightly proces
sions can but annoy and embitter their opponents, and
disgrace their cause. Do this, and all will be well.'
Philip had been present while they talked, and he
ventured very modestly to express his earnest hope that
the Patriarch would follow Michael's advice. ' Shall I
carry a message for you,' he asked, ' to the Arian bishop? '
' No, Philip, not yet. I must talk the matter over
with Serapion.'
Serapion, as usual, was unconciliatory and uncom
promising. He never joined the suaviter in modo with
the fortiter in re. He talked of betraying the cause of
Christ, of seeming to favour heresy, of the need of severe
repression ; and he advised the getting up of counter-
processions and counter-litanies.
So the streets were rendered hideous with the harsh
shouts of contending theologies. The processions swelled
in numbers and attracted all the idlest riff-raff of the
wicked city. Nothing was less devotional than hymns
chanted in rivalry, by voices harsh Avith anger, amid jibes
and jeers. The theatres parodied and ridiculed the ani-

174 GATHERING CLOUDS
mosities of Christians, and made the multitude roar with
laughter at mock processions, singing lewd and fantastic
songs. Then the Empress took up the matter, for at that
time she Avas most anxious to use Chrysostom as a power
ful ally against Eutropius; — and that Avas one reason
why she bade Amantius lavish her treasures upon him for
hospitals and churches, the designs of which she dreAV
with her own hands. She furnished the processions of
the Catholics Avith silver crosses ; she paid for devices and
banners, and she ordered her Chamberlain, Briso, himself
to walk at the head of the procession. The result might
have been predicted: the crowds increased, the Arians
grew more and more irritated. Scuffles began to take
place, then furious attempts of each party to break up or
disorganise the procession of the other. At last there
were sanguinary conflicts. Philip, David, and Eutyches,
loyally went out Avith the processions, though they did not
like them, and always exerted themselves to keep the
peace. One dreadful night not a few were left dead in
the streets, and many were wounded. Philip came home
with a broken collar-bone, and both the other youths had
been hurt. The august Briso himself was seriously
wounded by a stone which had struck him on the head.
After that the indignant Empress left Arcadius no peace
till he had interfered by peremptorily forbidding all Arian
processions, Avhile he alloAved those of the Orthodox to
continue. But Chrysostom, grieving that the holy name
of Christianity had thus been smirched and degraded by
mutual hatreds, Avas sorry that he had not followed the
advice of the humble Desposynos.
One more event marked the close of the year 398.
Chrysostom had received as a present from Synope the
relics of the martyr Phokas ; and Vigilius, Bishop of
Trieste, had also sent him the remains of the martyrs
Sisinnius, Martyrius, and Alexander. He announced that
he would conduct them in a solemn procession at mid
night to the Church of St. Thomas at Dry pi a, near the
sea, a distance of nine Roman miles from the city. The
huge procession Avas accompanied by a multitude of officers,
and many illustres, spectabiles, and clarissimi were seen
edifyingly commingled with the poor, and amicably walk-

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 175
ing with them side by side. More than all, the Empress
Eudoxia in person Avalked the whole way on foot, in the
simplest of robes, without a single ornament. She joined
in the chants, and humbly held a fringe of the rich silken
corporal which covered the relics. Although she had very
little regard for righteousness, Eudoxia Avas genuinely
superstitious, and Chrysostom, deceived as yet, took her
superstition for true religion. He was carried away by
the extravagance of his joy. He thought that the Em
press would be indeed a protectress of the poor, a pillar of
the true faith. When they reached the church his excited
feelings found vent. 'What shall I say?' he cried.
'What shall I speak? I exult, I am beside myself with
joy. See what an example the Empress has set! As
though- she were a maidservant, she, the wearer of the
diadem and the purple, she Avhom not even all the officials
of the Palace are allowed to see, has walked behind the
holy relics. Blessed be thou, O Empress ! Not Ave only,
but all generations, shall proclaim thy blessedness. Thou
hast been the hostess of the saints, the mother of
Churches. Thy zeal almost equals that of the Apostles.
We count thee among the saintly matrons, for in building
sanctuaries, and upholding martyrs, and pulling down the
errors of heretics, thou usest thine earthly royalty as a
means for the attainment of everlasting felicity.'
After the discourse the multitude streamed homewards,
and criticisms, as usual, were rife.
' Did you ever hear such a welter of Asiatic rhetoric ? '
said Antiochus of Ptolemais, ' and such indecent fulsome-
ness of praise ? "I dance, I am mad ! " Did ever Patri
arch disgrace his office by such trash ? '
' How different, how stately, how classic would have
been your own chaste eloquence,' said Severian of Gabala,
Avho had made Antiochus his model, and determined to
walk in his steps.
Unluckily, Chrysostom's youthful secretaries Avalked
near the bishops, as the Patriarch's attendants, and again
Philip was forced to hear these unsympathetic and carp
ing criticisms of the master whom he so fondly loved.
Eutyches and David, though vexed, remained silent, and
as they passed greeted the bishops with the usual demon-

176 GATHERING CLOUDS
strations of profound respect. But Philip looked in the
opposite direction, and Avould not bow.
They were very angry. ' Who is that rude young
churl ? ' asked the Bishop of Ptolemais.
' Oh ! an Antiochene A\diom the Archbishop says he has
adopted,' ansAvered Severian.
The next day Arcadius himself went to the Church
of St. Thomas, accompanied by soldiers ; and he, too,
honoured the martyrs by laying aside his purple, his
armour, and his diadem before their shrine. Chrysostom
again delivered a discourse ; but it was impossible to ele
vate the thin-blooded Arcadius into either a hero or a
saint, and the language of his eulogy was much more
measured. Next day Philip looked in to see Michael ; for he rarely
missed the chance of visiting the Desposynos, in the hope
of seeing Miriam, whom, though silently as yet, he loved
Avith an ever-deeper devotion, and whom he belieAred to
be not indifferent to him. He had a powerful ally in
David, who loved Philip so much that in the family they
always called him Jonathan, and David was never weary
of singing Philip's praises.
' Is it not delightful,' said Philip, ' to see their Sublimi
ties taking so much interest in the festivals of the
Church?' Michael smiled dubiously. ' Yes,' he said ; ' but I am
sorry that " he," as you boys call the Patriarch, lends so
much sanction to the rage for relics.'
'Is it not natural to honour the mortal remains of saints
and martyrs ? '
' To honour, if you will, though they are but dust. Yet
their cult has been pushed to fatal extremes. It has led
to such gross imposture that sham monks go about cheat
ing silly women Avith the bones of Noah or Methuselah.
St. Martin discovered that his people were Avorshipping
the relics of an executed criminal, and Bishop Ccecilian
had to reprove a wealthy lady for kissing and hugging a
supposed martyr's bone. It is twelve years since Theo
dosius had to pass a strong edict against this relic-worship,
which seemed to him idolatrous and degrading. That is
why the Pagans call us cinerarii (" worshippers of ashes ").'

MANIFOLD STRUGGLES 177
' Everyone seems to approve of it,' said Philip. ' Is it
not a Catholic custom ? '
' I fear that many things are called " Catholic " now
adays,' said the Desposynos, ' which are neither Scriptural,
nor primitive, nor Christian, nor in any sense true. Your
experience will soon teach you, Philip, that the current
opinion of fashionable religiousness, however widespread
it may seem, is often unspeakably shallow, as well as
turbid. The life of the Apostles, of Athanasius — nay, of
the Lord Christ Himself — proves to us that it is only one,
with God, Avho is always in a majority. Many a true man
has to cry with Elijah, " I, even I only, am left." '

178 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXIII
FACE TO FACE WITH SHAMS
Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti,
Sta come torre ferma, che non crolla
Giammai la cima per sofflar de' venti.
Dante, Purg., v. 13-15.
The errors of Chrysostom were errors of judgment only.
He might have been equally inflexible without producing
so deadly an exacerbation. Ambrose had been no less
masterful than he, and no less fearless ; but the training
of Ambrose in civil offices had taught him the art of deal
ing with men. Even in his most bold proceedings he dis
played a certain tact. We are apt to despise tact as a
petty accomplishment ; but just as a trivial oversight may
ruin the smooth Avorking of complicated machinery, so
trivial faults of tone and manner, or a little lack of con-
ciliatoriness, which is something wholly different from
unfaithful concession, may throw out of gear the move
ment of great societies.
Certainly there had been little in the past experience of
Chrysostom to bring this quality prominently forward.
He had as little of it as Savonarola, whom he resembled
more closely than any other historic parallel.
His long years of ascetic, monastic, and. eremitic soli
tude, while they revealed to him many abysses of the
deceitful human heart, and burned into his conviction the
indefeasible supremacy of the moral law, had but little
fitted him to bear the infirmities of the weak. He was
out of touch Avith his surroundings.
Men are sometimes called upon to cleanse Augean
stables without the Herculean strength by Avhich alone
the task can be accomplished. Men of unflinching
honesty and flaming zeal are sometimes placed in the

FACE TO FACE WITH SHAMS 179
midst of societies hopelessly corrupt, and their heroic
efforts only seem to precipitate their oavii destruction.
Such a man was Gregory of Nazianzus, and Chrysostom,
and Hus, and Luther, and Whitefield. Such men are
forced, as it were, to dash themselves against barriers of
adamant. And his experiences in the mountain-cave had done
Chrysostom another disservice. By hopelessly ruining
his health they had caused also a sort of irritability — not
so much of feeling as of tone and manner — which was
more a physical accident than a moral defect, but which
made Avhat he said seem less easy to bear than otherwise
it might have been. To this we must add the fact that
his inexhaustible vocabulary and impassioned style made
his words smite their hearers like a storm of hail. He
Avas himself unaware of the effect produced by his own
utterances. It Avas often more tremendous than he had
intended. Even a platitude, wrapped round in the
lightning of his fervent rhetoric, sounded like a paradox
and a defiance. Sometimes, when he had preached a
sermon in which he only seemed to himself to have
enunciated the most obvious moral certainties, he found
to his astonishment that he had thrown all Constantinople
into a ferment of agitation. If, for instance, oppressed
by social problems and the glaring contrast betAveen
plethoric wealth and starving populations, he simply
enunciated the plainest truths inculcated by Christianity
and the Apostles, he found himself on the one hand
besieged by applications from gross impostors who cursed
him as a hypocrite if he refused their claims, Avhile at the
same time the upper classes were denouncing him as a
dangerous Socialist and a reckless demagogue.
' How is it, my son,' he once said to Philip, ' that over
and over again I only utter truths which hundreds have
said before me, yet when I say them they seem to rouse
men to fury, and when others say the very same thing
they are set down as commonplaces ? '
' There are ways of saying things, father,' said Philip,
smiling ; ' the gnats buzz, and the thunder roars, and the
ultimate elements of sound are much the same, but they
produce different effects.'

S3

180 GATHERING CLOUDS
' You odd boy ! ' said Chrysostom — for their intercourse
was always playful and unrestrained — ' I think you must
have learnt your style of talking at Antioch.'
'I thought Ave were both Antiochenes,' said Philip,
demurely ; ' but as you don't appreciate my simile, I Avill
give you another. I shake this table, and no one notices
it except a fly or tAvo; but when an earthquake shakes
things, even emperors and empresses get in a fright.'
' You haven't solved my perplexity, Philip. Gregory,
Basil, Ambrose, Jerome — they are all every bit as much
earthquakes as I am, but they didn't shake everything
round them into a chaos of hatred.'
' Didn't they ? ' said Philip, innocently. ' Gregory had
to leave Constantinople, shaking the dust off his feet, and
comparing the CEcumenical Council to geese and cranes.
Basil, I haAre heard you say, almost broke his heart at
the savagery with which he was attacked, especially by
bishops like Eusebius and Atarbius. Ambrose had to be
defended in his church by the populace for days together.
Jerome was driven from Rome by the rich, and by the
monks, and by the clergy, and as he left Rome he called
the city a pitrpurata meretrix, and compared her to
Babylon.' 'Nevertheless, Philip,' said Chrysostom, 'it remains
true that when Severian, for instance, or Antiochus, say the
very same things that I do, the air does not become full
of flame. You don't help me, Philip; I shall ask Serapion.'
' It all comes to this, father,' said Philip ; ' there are
ways of saying things, and it makes a difference whether
they are spoken from the heart, or through masks and
cotton-wool. One man may steal a horse, another may
not look over the hedge.'
' You are as riddling as the Sphinx, Philip. Send
Serapion to me ; I will ask him.'
Philip left the room laughing. He had but little ex
perience of life to help his natural shrewdness, but he felt
that Avhat made Chrysostom's enunciation of a truth sound
so tremendous, when on the lips of a Severian or an Isaac
the Monk it would seem like a mere dulcet platitude, Avas
that the one meant and acted on Avhat he said, Avhereas
everyone knew that the others did not.

FACE TO FACE WITH SHAMS 181
But Chrysostom asked Serapion Avhether he spoke too
strongly, and Serapion, akin to him in all his feelings,
entirely repudiated the suggestion.
'You have rebuked the luxury of the rich,' he said.
' Have you said anything stronger than St. James ? You
have warned voluptuous women. Have you spoken more
plainly than Isaiah ? '
Chrysostom had asked these opinions because he had
long had it in- his mind to summon in the Thomaites two
large meetings — first, of .the \rirgins, the widows, and the
deaconesses ; then of the monks and clergy ; and Avhile he
felt it to be his duty to address them with the utter faith
fulness Avhich they needed, he Avas anxious to tell the truth
in love, and not willingly or needlessly to exacerbate or
wound. The meeting of the ' consecrated ' Avomen took place
first, and Chrysostom Avas grieved that he could not spare
their vices. He Avas infected Avith the unscriptural and
dangerous error of his times about the inherent sanctity
of celibacy. Ignorant of marriage, and living at a period
when, owing to the doAvn-trodden position of most Avomen
in the East, the loftiest ideal of matrimony was but
rarely realised, he could paint Avith caustic severity its
trials and drawbacks, but did not fully recognise its
supreme sanctity.
So far as words Avere concerned he repudiated the
Manichean notion of the inherent taint of matter, and
maintained that outward chastity was worthless if accom
panied by iiiAvard depravity ; yet he looked on marriage as
an inferior condition. He drew for himself the loveliest
ideals of virginity and consecrated Avidowhood. In such
a consecration of Avomanhood he saw the existence of a
new and unsuspected force on the side of Christianity, such
as had already baffled the Emperor Julian at Antioch, and
might still stem the swelling tide of corruption. It was,
then, infinitely painful to him to think that worldliness,
frivolity, and corruption could so invade the inmost
recesses of the sanctuary as to falsify the conditions Avhich
ought to have been a pattern to all mankind. An Olym
pias, a Salvina, a Pentadia, seemed to him to have attained
a conception of life which, if it became more common,

182 GATHERING CLOUDS
might regenerate the world. But to see virgins wearing
their ostentatiously coarse robes with almost meretricious
coquetry; to see them adopt a demeanour so piquant
that the dress was actually adopted by the lowest of their
sex to enhance their own fascinations ; to see them use
the freedom and emancipation gained from their position
to overstep the bounds of modesty, to gad about in pro
miscuous assemblies, to be seen in questionable places
of amusement; to see widows who were so far from
being ' widows indeed ' that, like the women whom Isaiah
denounced, they 'sewed pillows to all armholes,' and
abounded in Avimples and crisping pins; to see deacon
esses at once bold and mincing, to see them forward,
intriguing, uncharitable, slanderous — all this was as gall
and AvormAVOod to the burning sincerity of the Archbishop.
And of all this he spoke to the seething throng of official
religionism with a directness and power Avhich made their
cheeks blush and their hearts burn. The few of them
who Avere sincere rejoiced to be reminded that position
is one thing and character another; but the majority of
them winced, and hated him with the quintessence of
perverted femininity. He had carefully avoided Avhat
could be regarded as obvious personality, and spoke to
classes, not to individuals ; but his style was so pictu
resque, and his rebukes so unsparing, that not a few felt
as if the masks as well as the veils had been torn off their
faces, and their becoming religious costumes, which had
fascinated so many sacerdotal eyes, had been torn and
tattered on their backs. These were not in the smallest
degree penitent; on the contrary, in their hearts they
cursed and raged. They swelled with indignation, and
their noses seemed more vengefully sharp than ever as
they peered out of their hoods. Was it not monstrous that
they, 'the religious,' they, so accustomed to veneration
for saintliness, should be treated thus ! How unlike their
dear Nectarius was this Antiochene intruder ! He was no
bishop ! They could only pray for better times. And so
all the well-springs of 'human vinegar, sour and cold,'
were stirred up, and Chrysostom, who had hitherto had so
little experience in that line, had to learn the '¦JSfotumque
furens quid femina possit!' Henceforward as he met

FACE TO FACE WITH SHAMS 183
these ladies in the street, young or old, not a few of them
drew back their garment's hem as though it Avere a pollu
tion to touch him, and he was struck dead by forked
lightnings from female eyes.
Then came the meeting of the clergy. To them the
Patriarch had to speak truths even more disagreeable, and
again he did not spare. He began Avith denouncing their
ambitious Avorldliness. What had they to do with idle
luxuries, when they ought to be setting the pure example
of plain living and high thinking? Had not the eremite
of Bethlehem, one of the ablest writers of the West,
warned even a bishop against giving sumptuous banquets,
and feeling flattered by the sight of the lictors and guards
of a consul hanging outside his doors? 'You ought,'
said Chrysostom, ' to live more frugally and more simply.
It is painful to see presbyters of Christ indulging in
parasitical flatteries to nobles who deseiwe their sternest
rebukes. Do not tell me that you want to get money
from them for your charities, or to intercede for poor
criminals. Simplicity and sincerity would procure j^ou
an influence ten times more legitimate and ten times
more avaiiling. How can you rebuke extravagance Avhen
you practise it ? and avarice when you are yourselves
so deeply tainted Avith it ? and luxury when you indulge
in it? and ambition Avhen the one aim of so many of you
seems to be to induce some palace eunuch to get you a
bishopric ? I would not speak of myself, but have I not
tried to set you an example in these respects ? I do not
give Avasteful entertainments.'
' No,' whispered Antiochus to Severian ; ' witness the
dinner he gave to the poor Bishop of Beroea, of Avhich
Acacius is never tired of complaining.'
' No,' hissed Cyrinus in the ear of one of his presbyters,
' but they say, at any rate, that he indulges in enormous
feasts all by himself.'
' Even in the palace of the Patriarch,' continued Chrys
ostom, not noticing the whispering bishops, ' I try still to
live the life of a monk and an ascetic I never so much as
set foot in the Court of the Emperor unless I am sum
moned, or unless some great need of the Church demands
my intervention.

184 GATHERING CLOUDS
' But though these evils are bad enough, there are others
which are worse. You are unmarried. Though the Council
of Nicaea did not require this of the clergy, the Council of
Eliberis demanded it, and so does the custom of the East.
The Fathers of Nicaea allowed you to retain your wives,
and listened to the impassioned appeal of the monk and
hermit, Paphnutius, Avhen he pleaded as St. Paul pleaded
— and in accordance Avith the words of Him Who said that
all men Avere not able to bear celibacy — that this burden
should not be laid on your shoulders, and become a snare
to you. But this celibacy has led to the all but universal
adoption of a custom unseemly, nay, dangerous, nay, dis
graceful, a custom Avhich naturally and necessarily defames
you, sometimes, not even rarely, Avith absolute criminality,
but always with inevitable suspicion. It is a custom at
which the very buffoons in the circus and the theatre aim
their broadest sneers, amid the laughter of the multitude.
The Council of Nice allowed you, if unmarried, to have
your houses managed by a mother, a sister, or' an aunt ; but
many have shamefully abused this rule. You live in the
same narrow house with epeisactm — with maidens who are
no relations to you at all. You call them your "spiritual
sisters," and this has become an offence and a source of untold
iniquity. You are either Aveak or strong. If you are Aveak,
it becomes the most sacred of your duties to shun tempta
tion, to beat it back as you would beat back with a redhot
iron a raging beast; but you surround yourselves with
temptation, you court temptation, you liAre in the very
atmosphere of temptation. But if you aire strong, then
you have no excuse, for in encouraging others to folloAV
an example which you profess to be harmless to yourselves,
so far from bearing the infirmities of the weak, you render
then fatal. It were far better than this that you should
marry outright. A married presbyter could not possibly
diminish his influence so much as one avIio, living with a
young, perhaps attractive, maiden as the manager of his
house, either tampers with sacred chastity, or leads others
to think that he does so, and to do so themselves. Heaven's
shame upon you ! '
As he thus poured out the lava stream of his moral indig
nation, scorching the consciences of most of his hearers —

FACE TO FACE WITH SHAMS 185
for there were very few who had not rendered themselves
liable to this reproach — a deep murmur of wrath rose
among the offended presbyters, and fierce exclamations
Avere heard.
Serapion started indignantly from his seat at Chrysos
tom's right hand. ' Bishop ! ' he exclaimed, ' you will
never subdue these mutinous priests till you drive them
all before you with a single rod.'
' Nay, nay, Serapion,' said Chrysostom, with a depreca
tory gesture, ' I speak not of all. There are some, I knoAv,
Avho live alone, or only with their nearest relations, or with
poor and aged women. But I speak of those Avhose rooms
you cannot enter, though they profess to be celibate priests,
without seeing the place strewn with caps and ribbons, and
wool-baskets, and fashionable trumpery. Is it not mon
strous to see such a man going to the silversmith's to ask
for his lady's mirror, and thence to the perfumer's for her
scents, and thence to the haberdasher's for her furbelows ?
Is it not even more distressing and unseemly to see them
making room for these ladies in the very churches, and
proudly stalking in front of them as though they Avere
young dandies or gallants? Oh, my brethren, my brethren !
when I see all this my heart bleeds and my spirit faints
within me. And noAv, turning to you monks, I know not
whether a still sharper pang does not strike into my soul
when I see you — you Avho profess the sole Divine philoso
phy, you who should lead the angelic life — when I see you
going about idle, oiled and curled, haunting the antecham
bers of the Avealthy, Avhispering into the ear of painted
matrons, begging in every direction for dubious objects,
vending sham relics, merged in the black mud of ignorance,
stirring up turbulent fanaticism, mixing yourselAres with
worldly intrigues, breaking your vows every day and in
every direction. When I see this I feel inclined to cry
with Elijah, " Now, O Lord, take away my life ! "
In the description of false monks Chrysostom had not
intended to depict one person in particular. But it was
characteristic of the pictorial character of his intellect that
he ahvays saw everything in the concrete, and that, in
describing a class, some prominent representative of the
class rose spontaneously before his view. There Avere

186 GATHERING CLOUDS
many monks and clerical adventurers of the kind which
he had denounced. Every great city of the Empire
swarmed with them, and in country places there Avere
Avhole sets of them — like the Remoboth — who were
regarded as positive nuisances. Bonaventura tells us that
even in the second generation of the Franciscans people
fled from mendicant friars as from the pestilence ; and Au
gustine and others had said much the same of the wandering
monks who belonged to no definite community. But on
the lips of Chrysostom all this sounded like a neAV and
unheard-of attack. While he spoke many, with the facil
ity which most men have of applying the sermon to the
man in the next peAV, and being keenly alive to the way
in which he must feel it, had turned their glances towards
Isaac, the Syrian monk. That portly and despicable per
sonage, Avho went about Constantinopolitan society like a
sort of saintly dandy, oozing over with unctuous nonentity,
and with his hair gilded and essenced and carefully
arranged in curls, answered in every particular to Chrysos
tom's description. He thought that the harangue had been
designedly and exclusively aimed at him. He left the hall
with the rage of a demon in his false heart, a rage which, Avith
his access to all the great officials, ecclesiastics, and Court
ladies, he felt sure that sooner or later he would be able to
gratify to the full. The Church of the fourth century
reeked — by the confession of her own best saints — with
frightful phenomena, but the most portentous of them all
were men like Isaac the Monk.

THE CONSULSHIP OF EUTROPIUS 187

CHAPTER XXIV
THE CONSULSHIP OF EUTROPIUS
This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him ;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost. Henry VIII. , iii. 2.
' I have a piece of news for you,' said Eutyches to his two
young friends ; ' quite a first-rate piece of news. And I
crow over Philip, who always fancies that he has the
monopoly of news.'
' Out with it,' said Philip, ' before you burst ! '
' Who do you think is to be the Consul for next year ? '
'Who? I don't believe you knoAv ; it is mere gossip.'
' But I do ; and the news is certain.'
' Well, who ? ' said Philip.
' No, no ! ' said Eutyches, ' I am not going to gratify
your burning curiosity so cheaply.'
' I'll guess it in three guesses.'
'No you won't. I'll give you fellows ten guesses be
tween you. If Philip guesses right I'll give him a picture
of the Archbishop in gold on a blue ground, to stick up on
his bedroom-Avail ; if DaAud guesses right I'll give him an
earthenware vase full of roses from the flower-market ;
and if neither of you guess in ten guesses, what will you
give me ? '
' Sly fellow ! ' said Philip. ' It's a sort of bet. But if
we don't guess, I'll go to the brass-market and get you a
little bronze  '
'Who's the sly fellow now?' said Eutyches. 'One
Avord for me, and ever so many for yourself. We all
know why Philip buys all his presents at the brass-market.
We all know why the Archbishop's bills at a certain shop
are so extravagant  '

188 GATHERING CLOUDS
' You young scoundrel ! ' said Philip. ' Whoever heard
such impudence ? ' Eutyches dodged the box on the ear,
and Philip chased him round the room. Finally, when
the boy Avas driven into a corner, he snatched up a chair,
and held it out with its legs towards Philip by way of a
fortification. Chrysostom was wondering what made his young friends
so lively in the next room, but he was ahvays pleased to
think that they were merry and happy in the dull Patri-
archeion. ' What mischief are you boys about ? ' he called out from
his study.
' It's only that noisy Eutyches, sir,' said Philip. ' That
young person is ahvays up to his pranks.'
' We all knoAV how staid and quiet you are, Philip,' said
Chrysostom. ' There now ! ' said Eutyches. ' You've disturbed him
and maligned me. Now begin your guessing. You first,
David.' ' That's to give him the best chance,' said Philip, ' be
cause the roses Avill cost less than the picture I mean to
win. But I see through you.'
'As the Avasherwoman remarked Avhen the bottom of
her tub fell out,' said Eutyches, keeping on the alert for
another assault from Philip.
' Well, if I don't guess right,' said David, ' I'll give you
a little alabaster pen-tray. I guess Aurelian, the new
Praetorian Praefect.'
'HeAvouldbe a first-rate Consul,' said Eutyches; 'but
you're Avrong. Now Philip.'
' Asterius, Count of the East.'
' Wrong,' said Eutyches.
' Caesarius, Master of the Offices,' guessed David.
' Wrong. Philip thinks he's got it now.'
'Yes,' said Philip, 'the excellent Anthemius. He's
young, and that is the reason why you are surprised.'
' Ever so Avrong ! ' said Eutyches.
' Hellebichus,' guessed David.
' Wrong again, David.'
' I've got it ! ' said Philip. ' Gainas the Goth. It's no
use guessing respectable people, as David does.'

THE CONSULSHIP OF EUTROPIUS lg9
' Wrong, O master of Avisdom ! I shall get my bronze
— whatever it is to be. There are five wrong guesses.
Now try again.'
'Arcadius himself,' said David. 'It will be his fifth
Consulship.' ' Wrong. Now, Philip, try number seven.'
'Leo the Paunch,' said Philip. 'That would account
for your excitement.'
' What ! Ajax ? ' laughed Eutyches. ' A jax the ex-
weaver, Avhose huge body holds such a little mind? 'No.'
' I'll try no respectability this time,' said David ; ' Osius.'
' Osius the ex-cook ! No, David, you're quite out of it.'
' I have it,' said Philip. ' It's Count John.'
' What ! the Empress's handsome favourite ? Wronger
and wronger. Oh, you imbecilities ! You've exhausted
all your guesses. Philip, go straight to the Chalk  '
' Take care,' said Philip.
' And buy me my bronze, whatever it is,' said Eutyches.
'I believe you guessed wrong on purpose to get an ex
cuse for going.'
' Give me one guess more, to soothe my wounded vanity,'
said Philip.
' Very Avell.'
' It can't be Eutr  No, that would be altogether too
absurd. Yet it must be somebody odd, or you Avouldn't
make such a fuss about it. Let me see. ... I have it !
It must be that old Pagan, Fravitta the Goth.'
' Hurrah ! ' said Eutyches, clapping his hands. ' Eleven
guesses, and every one of them wrong. Never make the
smallest pretence to political sagacity again, Philip.'
' Do give me only one guess more, to make the round
dozen,' ' Oh you cheat ! ' said Eutyches ; ' and then, perhaps,
if you guess, you won't be able to go and see Mir  .'
' Look out ! ' said Philip, seizing him by the collar.
' I mean you won't be able to go to the Chalkoprateia
after all. Well, one guess more.'
'Typhos, the demon brother of Aurelian.'
'Wrong again; and you Avill be wrong ad infinitum,'
said Eutyches, ' so I shall get my bronze Avhat's-his-name
after all.'

190 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Do tell us,' said David ; ' we are wild Avith curiosity.'
' What do you say to Eutropius himself ? '
' Eutropius ! ' they both exclaimed, Avhile
Up went the hushed amaze of hand and eye!
'None other,' said Eutyches.
' Good Heavens ! ' said Philip. - 1 had his name again
and again on the tip of my tongue, and rejected it as too
insanely preposterous. Arcadius must have been asleep,
and have nominated him in a nightmare.'
' Very likely ; but the new Consuls are to be Eutropius
for the East, and Mallius Theodorus for the West.'
' What a contrast ! ' said David. ' Theodorus is a scholar,
a poet, a man of blameless integrity, Avho has Avritten on
Plato's " Ideas " and on the origin of the world, whom men
honour for his probity, to Avhom Augustine dedicated his
treatise on the "Happy Life." Eutropius is  '
' You will have to leave Philip to express your feelings
for you, David,' said Eutyches. ' You are quite too gentle ;
you want a few years at Antioch to enrich your vocabulary.'
' I will say it for him,' said Philip, who was too deeply
moved to notice the chaff of Eutyches. 'Eutropius. is an
insect of the harems, an incarnate rapacity, a whisperer of
bedchambers, an old, bald, wrinkled creature only one
remove above a monkey  '
' Oh oh, Philip ! ' said David. ' Slack the bow a little.'
'Well, but  ' said Philip. 'That a fellow who has
filled baths for house-slaves should sit on the curule chair !
That a thing accustomed for years to flap fine ladies with
peacocks' fans should sway the world's imperial fasces !
Shades of the Decii ! shades of the Camilli ! have we come
to this ? '
' You ought to have been born in Rome,' said Eutyches.
' They would like to hear you declaim thus in the Senate.
You will see that the East Avill stand it well enough.
We are accustomed to the portentous spectacle of women
and eunuch favourites Avho rule the world. But Avhat will
the West say ? '
' It is really an aAvful business,' said Philip. ' I wonder
whether he Avill guess ? Let's ask him.'

THE CONSULSHIP OF EUTROPIUS 191
' Sir,' he said to Chrysostom, going through the curtains,
' can you spare us a minute ? '
The kind-hearted Patriarch came in.
Eutyches, sir, has been gossiping in the Palace as usual,
and  '
' Philip never does so ? ' said Eutyches, ' though he's as
eager as an Athenian for news ; only he's rather jealous
that I have forestalled him.'
' Never mind him, Eutyches,' said Chrysostom ; ' we all
understand Philip.'
'And he thinks he has found out who is to be the new
Consul,' said Philip, ' and he wants you to guess, only he's
too shy to ask.'
' He need never be shy with me ! ' said Chrysostom.
' We've guessed Aurelian, Asterius, Caesarius, Helle
bichus, Anthemius, Gainas the Goth, Count John, Leo,
Osius, Arcadius himself, Fravitta the Goth, and Typhos,
and all twelve guesses were Avrong ; so you Avill see, sir,
that it must be a very odd appointment. Eutyches has
been getting out of us all sorts of presents  '
' Bronze things, and others,' said Eutyches, demurely,
while Philip kicked his shin under the table.
' And no doubt Avants to get one out of you, sir, unless
you hit it off in five guesses.'
' Very well,' said Chrysostom, entering into their fun.
' I'll give Eutyches a little ivory diptych if I don't succeed ;
but after your experience perhaps I shall.'
' Take my advice, sir, and guess the oddest persons you
can think of.'
'I will,' said Chrysostom. 'Is it Synesius?'
' No.'
' Saturninus, then ? '
'No.'
' Perhaps it's this neAV Count Tribigild, who has come
here from the Gruthonges, and whose tribe has to be
gratified ? '
'No.'
' It cannot surely be Amantius, the Empress's almoner?'
'No ; but you're getting near it.'
' Briso, then ? ' said the Archbishop.
' To make up for his broken head,' said Philip, laugh-

192 GATHERING CLOUDS
ing. ' No, sir ; and now Eutyches, who practically told
us Ave were idiots, for not guessing, Avill have to  '
'How am I to stop his audacious tongue, sir?' asked
Eutyches. 'You don't really mean to say that the Emperor has
ventured to nominate Eutropius?'
' You have guessed it, sir,' said Eutyches, clapping his
hands, ' and they didn't.'
' Oh ! this is serious indeed ! ' said Chrysostom. ' I
fear the Chamberlain will have utterly destroyed himself
by this insane ambition. It is dementation before doom.'
Philip had lightly anticipated that the effects of the
Emperor's new 'stupidity would produce a far less intense
impression upon the East than upon the West. The East
received the strange intelligence Avith easy laughter, and
contented itself with the cynical emphasis Avith which they
called Eutropius the Father of the Emperor. But the first
rumours which reached Rome and Milan Avere received Avith
astonished incredulity, which, on the confirmation of the
report, broke out in a thunder of indignation. The Con
sulship, it Avas true, was now mainly functional ; it Avas*
shorn of any effective power. Nevertheless, the Consul
stood at the summit of all official rank ; he had unques
tioned precedence ; he gave his name to the year ; he was
the inheritor of centuries of heroic traditions. And that
the honour should be bestowed on an obscure eunuch,
born no one knew where, hawked about for sale by Arme
nian slave-sellers, subject to years of infamous degradations,
a curler of women's hair, Avho had at last been turned out
of doors — as not worth selling, and as too ugly to be even
ornamental — to beg his bread in nameless purlieus  !
And that such a man Avas not only to be made a patrician,
but to sweep through the streets in gorgeous paludaments,
attended by lictors, and to hold the ivory sceptre at the
meetings of Senators ! It Avas a portent ominous of
blighted harvests and prodigious births or absolute infe-
cundity \ It Avas an outrage on ten centuries of history
and thrice three hundred triumphs ! It Avas an omen of
frightful decadence. It Avould make the Roman Avorld
the open gibe of hosts of brave barbarians! It must not,
it should not be !

THE CONSULSHIP OF EUTROPIUS I93
The official confirmation reached Honorius in the Court
at Milan as he and his warrior father-in-law, the brave
Vandal, Stilico, were giving stately audience to an em
bassy of Germani and Suevi, who had been sent to ask for
treaties of peace with promises of allegiance. Their pres
ence was a proof that the glories of Rome were not yet
dead, and that she could still boast of Saxons defeated, of
Britain defended from the Picts, of subjugated races on
the borders of the Danube and the Rhine. Crowds of
Italians gazed with a thrill of pride on these stalwart bar
barians in their mantles of skin, with their long red
moustaches and lofty stature. And Avas it at such a
moment that the dignity of Rome Avas to be humiliated
by the association of her noble Consul, Mallius Theodorus,
with a creature swept out of the scum of the Gynaeceum ?
Claudian, the soldier-poet, whom Stilico had elevated
into a military tribune, was present at this audience, and
he became the impassioned voice of the indignation of the
West. He appealed to the young Honorius. ' You, O Prince ! '
he cried, ' you, the son of Theodosius the Great, have been
four times Consul; and you, 0 Stilico, victor of a hun
dred battles, you have been Consul. Will you allow the
Imperial fasti to be stained with this foul blot ? Will you
wage the Avars of Rome. under these womanish auspices?
Are eunuchs to leave their fans and array themselves in
the trabea ? Are the hands Avhich held umbrellas over
dowagers to wield the axes of Latium? Spirits' of the
Avarrior dead — Bruti, Cornelii, Scipios, Claudii: — start
from your marble sepulchres, drive off this half-man avIio
would Avear your robes, would parade your insignia ! Let
the East, if it will, corrupted by the evil models of the
Arsacidae, accept the inert and slavish dominance of creat
ures who never drew a sword, who rarely stepped out of
a bedchamber, who are only fit to fold up Tyrian robes
and have the custody of secret jewel-boxes.'
The sonorous lilt of Claudian's hexameters echoed the
wrath of the Western world, and Stilico and Honorius
were not sorry to shoAv their contempt for Arcadius and
Constantinople by refusing to disgrace the Consular fasti
Avith the eunuch's name. The year 399, by the first prec-

194 GATHERING CLOUDS
edent during twelve hundred years, was named after a
single Consul. It was the consulship of Mallius Theodorus
alone. Not many in the East could speak Latin; they were
more Greeks than Romans. They did not read Claudian's
heroics, and Avere untouched by his thunderous wrath.
On the Calends of January Mallius Theodorus was in
stalled as Consul in the ivory chair in the Capitol at
Rome ; and Eutropius, in the imperial palace of the
Caesars, was seated in all his grandeur in an ample robe
broidered Avith golden palms, and surrounded by all the
nobles and servants and great officials, who were emulous
to kiss his hands, or, if more highly favoured, his withered
cheeks. And as they bowed the knee before him the hall
rang with acclamations which saluted him as the safeguard
of the laws and the saviour of his country. Then the
palace doors were thrown open, as though it were the
residence of Eutropius himself, and in rushed the eager
crowd with jests and shouting. After the reception Eutro
pius, still wearing his palmata vestis, arose, and, surrounded
by his lie tors and an escort of palace soldiers, went in
stately progress to the Curia of Constantine, where he
Avas formally inaugurated. Then he paced all round the
Forum with its fine porticoes, and Avith intoxicated vanity
saw images of himself clad in toga or military harness,
and equestrian statues of marble and gilded bronze,
among those of warrior-benefactors and ancient deities.
A host of paid claqueurs rent the air Avith venal shouts,
repeating the pompous titles engraven on the pedestals,
and hailing him as the third founder of Constantinople.
How little he realised that he was seated on a razor's
edge ! The frenzy of his superhuman success clouded the
usual shrewdness of his intellect. It was, as Chrysostom
had said, the irony of impending doom. From two oppo
site directions, little as he had dreamed of it, destruction
Avas marching on him with mighty strides ; and Destiny
had placed these dazzling crowns upon his head only to
smite upon it, with deadlier force, her Avedges and her
shattering club.

THE GOTHS 195

CHAPTER XXV
THE GOTHS
Rem Romanam alius circumsteterat metus totius Gothise.
Amm, Makcell., xxx. 2.
As Chrysostom began to understand the general condition
of society and politics at Constantinople he found that
there were three predominant and fiercely antagonistic
parties. He was more or less concerned Avith the affairs
of them all. In each of the three parties he had some
friends ; Avith each he had some points of sympathy. The
result was that every trouble and agitation in Constanti
nople became more or less a trouble or agitation for him,
and he had to suffer from
Desperate currents of a whole world's anguish,
Forced through the channel of a single heart.
First, there was the old Conservative Roman party, at
the head of which stood his friend Aurelian, avIio, in spite
of the desperate intrigues of his wicked brother, only
knoAvn to history by the nickname of Typhos, was now in
the high position of Praetorian Praefect. The literary
exponent of this party was his friend Synesius. Although
Constantinople was regarded as the capital of the East, it
was called New Rome, and all of the old stock disdained
to regard themselves in any other light than that of
genuine Romans. They therefore looked with • horror on
the constant increase of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, and
Vandals, who now not only crowded the ranks of the
Roman army, but constituted at least half of its numerical
strength. They saAV a fatal menace for the future in the
fact that the three commanders-in-chief of the Roman
forces — Stilico, Alaric, and Gainas — the three generals

196 ' GATHERING CLOUDS
who were thought to monopolise the military genius of
the day, were all barbarians. The object of the great
oration of Synesius before Arcadius had been to arouse
him to a sense of the immediate dangers and of the certain
peril to the ultimate fortunes of the Empire involved in
this state of things.
Opposed to this Roman party was the Gothic party,
headed at Constantinople by Gainas, formidable in arms, in
numbers, in physical strength, in native manhood, and
in military experience.1 Even if they could have found
none but barbarians to help their cause, it would have been
difficult to resist them ; but they were aided by the inces
sant intrigues of Romans like Typhos, who cared for
nothing but their own pelf and advancement; and also by
the intricate feminine intrigues of evil-living ladies like
the wife of Typhos. If Gainas had even been such a man
as Stilico, or, still more, such a man as Fravitta, who,
though he still continued to be a Pagan, had married a
Roman wife, and felt himself bound by laws of honour
and loyalty, the Ostrogoths, who were the nominal de
fenders of Constantinople, would have constituted a less
threatening factor in the problems of the day. But
Gainas was a man of fierce, restless, unstable character.
He was actuated by the passions of ambition and revenge
which Avere common to him Avith most of his countrymen.
He was discontented. He had helped Theodosius both
against the unsurper Maximus and the usurper Eugenius,
and deemed himself inadequately rewarded, though he had
received honours and donatives of Avhich his fathers had
never dreamed. Unhappily, too, the party of Gainas Avas
not only the Gothic party, but the Arian party. The
Arians, as we have seen, were still numerous. In the
days of Nectarius they had even risen and burnt down the
Patriarcheion. Fanatically devoted to their heresy, they
were willing to make common cause with the Gothic
chieftain, who fancied that even the diadem itself might
not be beyond his reach. Arbogast, indeed, had thought
that a barbarian could not venture to assume the purple,
but things had advanced since the days of Arbogast.
1 The name Gainas is an abbreviation of Gaisananths, 'spear-bold.'
Zosimus writes it Tatvris, Socrates Taivas.

THE GOTHS 197
Arians had been emperors, and Goths had made emperors ;
why could not a Goth and an Arian elevate the glory of
Wulfila even to the throne of Constantine ?
The third party was that of Eutropius: the party of civil
officialism and palace favourites, the party of eunuchs and
wirepullers. It derived its sole strength from the subser
vient ineptitude of the reigning emperor, but wielded an
immense prestige from the fact that it could invariably
command the influence of the Throne.
Typhos, indignant at his brother's elevation to the Pre
fecture, on which he had set his heart, began to intrigue
secretly Avith Gainas, and the unscrupulous wife of Typhos
Avith the Avife of Gainas. The Goth, full of cunning and
suspicion, was Avilling to utilise them both, but he was
much too cautious to betray to them his own private plans.
Those plans were now nearly ripe for action. A kins
man of the Goth — Tribigild, a military tribune and chief
tain of the Gruthongs — had come to Constantinople partly
to compliment Eutropius on his elevation to the Consul
ship, but in reality to plead for higher office for himself
and larger subsidies for his warlike nation.
Eutropius simply dallied with and fooled the Gruthon-
gian chieftain. He despised his tribe as a distant section
of the Ostrogoths too numerically feeble to be formidable.
After manifold delays he snubbed Tribigild altogether, and
sent him back Avithout added pay, without presents, with
out even the cheap reAvard of empty titles. It was a fatal
impolicy, due to the vertigo of his unwonted exaltation.
No doubt such requests as those of Tribigild were an inces
sant Avorry to the Court ; but Eutropius might have had
sufficient foresight to see that a relation of Gainas, and a
chief of high pretensions, could not be duped and insulted
with impunity.
What passed between Gainas and Tribigild is not knoAvn,
but there seems to be little doubt that they concocted be
tween them a disastrous conspiracy.
Angry and dejected, his Scythian breast, as Claudian
calls it, inflamed with want, his pride humiliated, his hand
empty of gifts, the Gruthongian chieftain made his way
home. His Avife saw him approaching from a distance, and
flew to meet him. She Avas one of those strong and lofty-

198 GATHERING CLOUDS
statured Teutonic Avomen, by whose side the enervated
Roman ladies looked so puny and slight-natured. She Avas
clad in robes of fine linen, fastened at the breast with a
jeAvelled brooch, and her long, fair tresses were confined by
a band clasped with golden serpents. Joyously meeting
him, and flinging her Avhite arms round his neck, she asked
Avhat titles he had won, what presents he had brought for
himself and her, Avhat largesses for his tribe. Doubtless
he had some necklace of orient pearls or emeralds for her,
and some shield with its golden boss set round Avith gems
to hang upon the Avail of his banquet-chamber, and testify
the admiration of Arcadius for a loyal chief ?
' Ask me not ! ' he answered with sullen anger ; ' I bring
nothing. My requests have all been refused-. No larger
subsidies are conceded. They have not given me the title
of Count. I have been insulted — and by a eunuch.'
Then, in all the old passion of a barbarian woman, his
wife tore her cheeks with her nails and poured out her
fierce taunts.
' Back, then, to your plough,' she said, ' husbandman,
unfit to be a warrior ! Fling away the sword, and take to
the harrow. Let your Gruthongs sink to the level of an
earth-grubbing peasantry. Oh ! why did fortune link me
Avith a poltroon ? There are other Gothic women whose
husbands have not been content to sweat over spades,
whose homes are adorned Avith the spoils of cities that
their husbands have laid Avaste, who are Avaited on by fair
Argive and Laconian maidens. But the chief of their clan
was an Alaric, and not a Tribigild.'
' My tribe is small,' said Tribigild, ' my warriors are
few.' ' Tush ! ' she said ; ' war will give you allies, war will
crowd your ranks. Fling off the half-Roman ; be a true
Goth once more. They have spurned your fidelity; let
them dread your injuries.'
No Goth could resist such appeals. Tribigild roused
his tribe, and fieAV to arms. Multitudes of slaves and
barbarians joined him. The rich plains of Phrygia lay
before him, and its cities were only defended by Avails
which had long crumbled into decay. He devastated the
whole country with fire and flame, and the terrified people

THE GOTHS 199
appealed to Constantinople for protection from massacre
and ruin.
At first Eutropius affected to make light of the catas
trophe which his levity had precipitated. ' It is but an
incursion of brigands,' he said to the frightened Emperor.
' They want chains, not troops. I will send a Praetor, not
a Tribune, to punish them.' It was, as Claudian says, the
policy of the ostrich, which hides its head in the sand,
and thinks that its enemy will not see it. Secretly, how
ever, he sent to negotiate Avith Tribigild. Experience had
given him an immense belief in the omnipotence of
bribes. In this instance they were vain. The Gru thong
had. already enriched himself Avith abundant spoil. He
disdained to accept donatives Avrung from fear. He
affected to despise the honours Avhich came from an
eunuch. 'What, then, do you want?' said the emissaries.
' I want neither a countship, nor presents, nor a dona
tive,' he answered.
' Will nothing content you ? '
' Yes ! I want revenge. Send me the head of the
eunuch and I grant you peace.'
Gainas made matters much Avorse by doing his utmost
to increase the general consternation. ' My cousin
Tribigild,' he said, ' is a first-rate general, and those
Gruthongs are splendid fighters.'
Eutropius was in despair. At hist he summoned such
advisers as he could trust. But he had few on whom to
rely except dandy }rouths and loose old men, whose chief
glory it was to discover neAV refinements of luxury for
their banquets, and to have peacocks and green parrots
among the entremets. The chief subject of their chatter
Avas the description of dresses and the discussion of the
rival merits of athletes. Their very rings and their silk
dresses were a burden to their decrepit enervation, and
their chief aim was to look effeminate and have a good
supply of lewd witticisms, while they talked of the
wrigglings of acrobats and the dancing of actresses. But
now Eutropius told them that affairs were serious.
What Avas he to do ?
They agreed that it would be unwise to send Gainas to
suppress the rebellion. He was a Goth, and could not be

200 GATHERING CLOUDS
trusted to put down Goths. His allegiance Avas more
than suspected, and Tribigild was his cousiu. No; there
was nothing for it but to appoint Leo general.
Even in that conclave of his creatures the suggestion of
Eutropius was received Avith an ill-suppressed titter, in
Avhich his prime favourite, the Spanish ex-cook, Osius,
joined. For Leo Avas a common joke. He Avas so fat that
he could neither Avalk without waddling nor speak without
panting. What soldiers, whether Gothic or Roman, could
respect or would obey such a general? Yet he valiantly
exclaimed that he would drag this upstart Tribigild and
these Gruthongian deserters behind his chariot to Constan
tinople. So, while oavIs screeched their evil omens, he was sent
forth to meet his doom, and to feed the Molossian vultures
with the carcases of his soldiers. Never was there such a
dissipated and ill-disciplined host. No one knew how to
choose encampments. No scouts brought neAvs of the
enemy ; no guides led them by the shortest routes ; no
sentries watched the vallum at night. Like a disorderly
procession, the motley host marched towards the valleys
and mountain-passes of the Taurus.
Tribigild, by a pretence of alarm, lulled the Roman army
into fatal demoralisation. Leo, Avith senseless ignorance,
had chosen his camp at a spot' where a vast marsh at his
rear cut off all hope of retreat. His insubordinate army
spent the night in revelry and drunkenness. At darkest
midnight Tribigild and his Goths burst over the unguarded
rampart, and massacred at their will the drowsy and
drunken soldiers. There Avas no battle — only a slaughter
and a rout. Leo mounted his horse, and fled headlong
towards the marsh, in which thousands of his miserable
soldiers were already floundering. The horse, covered
with streaming sweat under the precipitate career and
enormous corpulence of its rider, stumbled in the marsh,
and flung Leo over its head. The wretched general tried
in vain to crawl out on his belly through the mud and
slush. Sunk down by his own weight, he died, partly of
terror, and partly of suffocation. Tribigild could leave
the wasted regions of Phrygia behind him, and burn and
pillage at his will the rich plains of Pamphylia and Pisidia.

THE GOTHS 201
Arcadius had now no choice but to leave Constantinople
practically undefended, and to send Gainas to check the
dangerous caireer of the rebel. He crossed the Bosporus,
and ostensibly marched to crush the enemy. But ' dog
will not eat dog,' and he practically did nothing. The
Emperor was mocked by missives in which Gainas lauded
Tribigild as the best general of the age, and the Gruthongs
as the most invincible soldiers. He saw no hope of defeat
ing them. But they were inclined to be loyal had they not
been so grievously offended. If the Emperor Avould only
grant Tribigild's just demand for the head of the Chamber
lain — Gainas would not call him Consul — the chief
would lay down his arms and return to his own land.
Was the safety of Eutropius to be preferred to the well-
being of the entire Empire ?
Nor was this all. A new terror began to threaten
Arcadius. Bahrain IV., King of Persia, had been his
friend and faithful ally; but now the anti-Roman party
had succeeded in effecting the murder of Bahram, and the
first act of his successor, Izclegerd, Avas to send an army
to attack Syria. Surely the omen of the Consulship of
Eutropius had been sinister, and even deadly. For worse
Avas still behind. If there was one person whom Arcadius
hated, it was Stilico ; and if there Avas one person against
Avhom he cherished a malignant jealousy, it Avas his brother
Honorius, who, though he was such a poor specimen of
humanity, was yet on the Avhole his superior. Honorius
and Stilico had disdainfully refused to acknoAvledge his
new Consul, and now it began to be openly rumoured that
Stilico, impatient of the disgraces and disorders of the East,
meditated the suppression of Arcadius altogether, and the
union of the dissevered empires of the East and West
under a single emperor. This Avas the news Avhich, more
than any other, made the pale blood of Arcadius run cold.
' How will it be with me if I am dispossessed ? ' asked
Arcadius of himself. ' Hoav if I am rendered incapable of
further rule, not only by imprisonment, but by akro-
teriasm ? '
The frightful meaning of that word haunted him. It
meant the cutting off of his hands and feet. He pictured
to himself an abject cripple lying mutilated in a foul

202 GATHERING CLOUDS
dungeon ; and that cripple was himself, while the hated
Honorius and the hated Stilico revelled in the purple
chambers of the Byzantine Palace.
Harassed to misery by these sources of dread from many
quarters, even Arcadius could hardly refrain from asking
himself, ' Can I not avert the worst of these catastrophes
by the sacrifice of one wretched old man ? '
Whether his hesitation would otherwise have been broken
down we cannot tell ; but a sudden act of insane folly on
the part of the eunuch called down the avalanche on his
OAvn head.

THE FALL OF EUTROPIUS 203

CHAPTER XXVI
THE FALL OF EUTROPIUS
Tolluntur in altum
Ut lapsu graviore cadant. Claudian.
The mixture of dread, irritation, and intoxicated vanity
which had come upon Eutropius as Patrician and Consul
had clouded the usual keenness of his intellect and over
thrown his shrewd judgment. He might have seen at
some moments that, as a breath had made, so a breath
could unmake him, and that the most ordinary common-
sense dictated the advisability of his keeping on the best
terms with the Imperial family. But of late Eudoxia had
adopted towards him a tone almost of command, Avhich he
did not like. One day she spoke to him about the ravages
of Tribigild, the insolence and probable treachery of Gainas,
the certainty of a Persian war, and this intolerable menace
of Stilico's intervention. She gave him to understand that
she did not think he had managed well, and blamed him
for sending against the Gruthongs such a man as Leo,
when he might have sent a man of proved valour like
Aurelian, or a man of capacity like Count John.
' Leave me to arrange these matters with the Emperor,'
he said curtly. ' As for Aurelian, his appointment Avould
have irritated Gainas ; as for Count John ¦¦ — ' he shrugged
his shoulders, and looked at Eudoxia.
A blush mounted her cheeks, dyed them Avith crimson,
and rose to the roots of her fair hair ; but she disdained to
notice what she regarded as an insolent innuendo.
' At any rate,' she said, ' you need not have sent a mere
fat, incompetent glutton like Leo.'
' Leo Avas my friend, madam,' he said. ' You are no
judge of his military aptness.'

204 GATHERING CLOUDS
' He has shown it egregiously,' retorted the Empress.
' Who ever heard of a Roman general suffocated in a
scramble through the mud, as he galloped away in head
long flight ? '
'It was his misfortune, not his fault.'
'Such misfortunes seem to come thick in your Consulship.'
Eutropius could not stand this. Was he Consul and
Patrician — had he broken his birth's invidious bar — : had
he sold provinces and appointed praefects — had senators
and nobles grovelled before him — had he made his name
ring through the Avorld side by side with Stilico's, only to
be mocked by a Frankish Avoman Avho owed her position
exclusively to him ?
' Have a care, madam,' he said rudely. ' The same
hand that raised you up can put you down.'
Eudoxia flushed into angry tears at the insult. Start
ing from her seat, she waved him aside with an imperious
gesture, and made her way straight to the Purple Chamber,
where Avere her two children. She took the little Flaccilla
by the hand, and snatched the baby Pulcheria, afterwards
destined to play so memorable a part in history, into her
arms. Then, heedless of all Court ceremonial, she burst
unannounced into the room Avhere the Emperor was sitting,
and flung herself, still weeping, at his knees. She could
not speak for shame and anger, and the beautiful little
children, understanding nothing, but catching the conta
gion of their mother's emotion, wept and Availed with her,
while Arcadius, deeply disturbed, kept asking Avhat was
the matter.
' Am I your Avife,' she cried, Avhen she found voice to
speak, ' or am I not ? Am I your empress, or a slave and
puppet of eunuchs? Are these your children? and is
their mother nothing to you ? '
¦'What is the matter? What is the matter?' Arcadius
kept repeating.
'Eutropius,' she sobbed — ' he has insulted me. I know
that it is only because of him that you have Avithheld from
me the title of Augusta, though I have borne you tAvo
children. But that is nothing. He says I owe my place
solely to him. He threatens to drag me doAvn when he
likes. Is he emperor, or are you ? '

THE FALL OF EUTROPIUS 205
Arcadius for more than a month had come to the slowly
formed conviction that his supine abandonment of every
thing into the hands of his Chamberlain was likely to cost
him dear. Nothing but the indolence which Eutropius
had fostered, and the dread of innumerable worries from
which the Minister had relieved him, had prevented him
from taking some step for the general good. Eudoxia's
indignant fury was the last spark to fire the sluggish
train. He Avould be a slave no longer to his own official.
Eudoxia was now demanding his dismissal as the sole Avay
to protect her from his insults, and, striking Avhile the iron
Avas hot, Arcadius acted on the impulse of a sudden reso
lution. He calmed Eudoxia's passion by a promise that
her wrongs should be redressed, and striking a silver gong
with unwonted energy, bade the officer to go at once to
Eutropius with the order to leave the Palace on pain of
instant death.
The officer Avas thunderstruck. Was he really to give
this message to the Patrician, the Consul, the Grand
Chamberlain, who but an hour ago had wielded abso
lute control of life and death, and had been the most
powerful man in the whole Empire ?
He had not to carry his message far. Eutropius had
marked the wild rage of the beautiful Empress. He rec
ognised that he had gone too far: that she Avas not like
one of those soft Roman and Eastern ladies who cared for
nothing but scents and jeAvels. She was a Frank, the
daughter of a Frank general, and felt herself capable of
rule. The home from which she came had made her un
favourable to Eutropius, much as she owed to him. She
had no intention to be his subordinate. He watched her
go to the Purple Chamber, watched her hurry Avith her
children into the presence of Arcadius, heard the tumult
of cries and sobs, heard the voice of the Emperor raised
to a tone which he had never heard before, heard him
summon an officer. But even he did not anticipate the
summariness and tremendous finality of his doom.
The officer as he passed had mentioned to others the
tenor of his heart-shaking message ; attendants gathered
round the door had overheard Avhat the Emperor said.
The news spread through the throng of sycophantic hang-

206 GATHERING CLOUDS
ers-on in the Palace Avith the rapidity of lightning. In
five minutes it Avas universally knoAvn. Eutropius re
ceived the mandate. He was informed that soldiers were
coming to arrest him. He had not a moment to lose.
The Emperor's private passage spanned the Chalkoprateia,
and led into the Church of St. Sophia. To reach it he
had to wailk through vast antechambers thronged with
slaves, pages, soldiers, Court officials. Ten minutes ear
lier, if he had passed along, he would have been received
Avith prostrations, and genuflexions, and hand-kissings,
and titles of admiration, and wreathed smiles. Now he
saAV only scoavIs, and averted faces, and pointed fingers,
and heard nothing but smothered curses and whispered
jeers. The wretched man recognised that the sun of his
fortune had suddenly plunged into deepest night. He
hurried into the private passage, ran at full speed into the
Cathedral, rushed up the steps among the astonished dea
cons and presbyters, and choosing for his asylum the most
sacred and inviolable spot, he flung himself under the
Holy Table, and grasped one of the gilded columns by
which it was supported.
And there, still in the palm-Avoven robes of his consular
dignity, in the purple mantle of his patrician rank, with
dust scattered over his bald head, and grey thin locks, he
lay and sobbed and grovelled in the dust.

IN SANCTUARY

207

CHAPTER XXVII
IN SANCTUARY
Illatas Consul pceuas, se consule, solvit . .
Sfevit in auctorem prodigiosus honor. Claudian.
Philip had been by accident in the Church of St. Sophia
when Eutropius rushed into it down the private passage
from the Palace which led into the Emperor's gallery, and
down the staircase from the gallery into the nave. Lost
in astonishment, Philip saw the unhappy man speed in
wild affright up the porphyry steps of -the sanctuary and
disappear behind the drawn curtain. Usually the neAv
Patrician and Consul Avas never seen in public except
when he paced to the Theatre or Circus betAveen his lictors,
or in the centre of a throng of soldiers, slaves, and
sycophants, Avhile everywhere the claque of paid adherents
received him with acclamations, as if he Avere a hero or a
god. What could possibly be the meaning of the un
wonted spectacle of the most powerful of living men,
pale, terrified, dishevelled, ungreeted and ungreeting, un
attended even by a single slave, running at full speed,
though with his knees trembling under him, and often
stumbling on the road? Something portentous must have
happened, and Avithout even guessing Avhat it was, the
youth's shreAvd and practical intellect instantly took in
the importance of the occurrence. Whatever else it
meant, it could only mean that Eutropius was taking
sanctuary — was flying to the protection of that right of
asylum of Avhich he had endeavoured to rob the Church
of Christ.
But great men do not fall, any more than great trees
fall crashing over the forest Avhich they OArershadoAv, with
out serious commotion ; and Philip Avas far from sure that

208 GATHERING CLOUDS
Eutropius would not become the victim of his own law,
which had excepted the crime of laisa majestas from the
right of ecclesiastical protection. He foresaw that in
half an hour's time, or less, when the news of the favour
ite's ruin had spread, the church would be transformed
into a scene of the wildest commotion. It Avas necessary
that Chrysostom should be instantly informed of Avhat
had happened.
The Patriarch's palace stood opposite the wall of the
Imperial precincts, and was but a minute's distance from
the eastern gate of St. Sophia. It faced the Milion and
the line of statues Avhich adorned the northern facade of the
Hippodrome. While the feAv who were in the church
were still lost in wonder, aind were crowding up toAvards
the presbytery to catch a glimpse of Eutropius when the
curtains were draAvn, Philip darted home, and passing
straight into the Archbishop's room, said:
' Father, your presence is instantly needed in the Great
Church ! Eutropius has taken refuge in the sacrarium ! '
' Eutropius ? ' exclaimed Chrysostom in amazement.
'He has flecl to sanctuary? What has happened?'
'I know nothing more,' said Philip, 'but I saw him
flash by me as I stood in the nave. He looked as pale as
death. Terror was stamped on every feature. His robes
were in disorder ; his head Avas defiled with dust. In a
few moments there Avill be some terrible scene. There is
not an instant to be lost ! '
' I Avill join you directly,' said Chrysostom. ' I have
but to put on my pallium. Summon Bishop Pailladius,
Serapion, Tigrius, Cassian, Germanus, and all the clergy
who may be in the Thomaites, to accompany me.'
' Come, David and Eutyches,' said Philip as he passed
through the anteroom. 'It is I who have strange news
to-day, but it is beyond all jest. The Archbishop will join
the clergy in the Hall directly. Leave your work and come
to St. Sophia, Avhere you Avill see a scene which Avill be
memorable for all time.'
The youths sprang up, and almost immediately Chrys
ostom caime out, and, attended by his clergy and secre
taries, walked rapidly to the Cathedral. The throng Avas
already very large, and Avas momentarily increasing. The

IN SANCTUARY 209
startling neAVS had spread as though on Avings of fire. It
had reached the streets, Avhere the crowds Avere yelling
Avith savage satisfaction. It had reached the soldiers, who
were in tumult. It had reached the Hippodrome, and
passed as in a moment, none knew how, through its assem
bled thousands. Then a strange event happened. Of
late Eutropius had spent Avhole days in the Theatre and
the Hippodrome, seated in state, graciously unbending to
gratify the multitude, scattering smiles and largesses, flat
tering and flattered, omnia s,erviliter pro imperio, to all
appearance the assured favourite of the promiscuous inhab
itants of Constantinople. Yet now — such is fame, such
the Avorth of the applause of the multitude ! — the Avhole
assembled populace rose as one man, shouting, ' Death to
the eunuch ! '
Chrysostom was not a moment too soon. But for Philip's
swift resolution the hated Minister might ere now have
been torn by rude hands from his place of shelter, and the
sacredness of the shrine been polluted with the horror of
bloodshed. Already there was tumult, and unwonted cries
were heard in the holy place ; but a hush fell on the peo
ple as the Patriarch came in sight in his pallium Avoven
with crosses, and they made way before him as, in stately
solemnity, he advanced towards the sacrarium with his at
tendant presbyters and deacons. They ascended the steps
and passed through the curtain. It Avas there that Eutro
pius and Chrysostom met once more.
There was no manliness, there was no dignity in the
anguish of the fallen Chamberlain : it was abject, it Avas
womanish ; it was calculated to aAvaken contempt rather
than pity. The memory of his crimes added to the degra
dation of his Avretchedness. It Avas as though the spectres of
Timasius and Abundantius towered over him, and pointed
him out to the avenging Furies. The idol which had so
suddenly crumbled to the dust Avas a mean and ugly one.
This was no Marius, sitting hungry and unshorn in his
wretched dungeon, but still clothed in the majesty of man
hood ; no Pompeius, grand even in the midst of his calam
ities. It AA^as a wretched, gilded insect of the harem Avhom
Destiny, in one of her most cruel and sarcastic jokes, had
first elevated from the most degraded slavedom to more

210 GATHERING CLOUDS
than imperial power, and then suddenly, as in a moment,
had flung away her plaything, with utter scorn, to grin
ning infamy.
The moment Eutropius saw the Archbishop he grovelled
face downwards under the Holy Table, and wept and tore
his hair ; but at first his chattering teeth refused to frame
a sound. Then he half rose, but hid his face in his robe,
which was Avet Avith tears and foul Avith dust.
' Look at me ! ' said Chrysostom.
For an instant the eunuch turned to him the deplorable,
wrinkled face of his dishonoured age, with a look of appeal
which Avould have been infinitely pathetic but for the ludi
crous dishevelment and paltriness of the man, which made
even sorrow seem too lofty an emotion for such a spectacle.
Yet Eutyches and David Avere deeply moved, and there
Avere tears in Philip's eyes.
' Destiny is pitiless,' said Chrysostom. ' Pray to God,
pray to Christ to help thee. I fear thou mayst be beyond
the help of man. But He who outstretched His arms
upon the cross has a heart compassionate enough to
embrace all wretchedness, and even the deepest guilt, so
it be penitent.'
Eutropius could not answer. The Archbishop Avas
thinking of the Avorld beyond the grave ; his own thoughts
were all absorbed in the terror of the brief and passing
present. Meanwhile, through the opened curtains of the presbjr-
tery the crowd caught sight of the crouching figure, and
amid the tumult and the menacing cries, which rose louder
and louder, the tramp of soldiers and the clang of armour
made itself ever more distinctly heard.
The sounds renewed the Avildest alarm of the fugitive.
' Oh, save me ! ' he cried, ' save me ! ' And as he spoke
he snatched at the Archbishop's robe, and kissed its hem.
' I Avill save thee,' said Chrysostom, ' if man may at all
save thee.'
' Swear to me,' said the Avretched man.
'Nay, a good man's Avord needs no oath. Fear not.
Leave the Holy Table. Serapion Avill take thee into the
Chamber of the Hoty Vessels.'
Leaving the Archdeacon to attend to the eunuch and

IN SANCTUARY 211
supply his needs, Chrysostom advanced to the front of the
chancel, and ordered the curtains to be drawn behind him.
He looked out on a wild scene. The armed Praetorians
had forced .their way through the dense mob to the front,
and stood there shouting and brandishing their drawn
swords, with cries of 'The eunuch! give us up the eunuch!
He is in hiding here. He shall die ! '
It was always in such scenes that Chrysostom rose to
the fullest grandeur of his undaunted nobleness. Many a
man Avill quail before a mad and mutinous mob who Avill
face almost any other form of menace. But Chrysostom,
as he looked on those gleaming eyes and furious faces, was
as calm as if he had been talking to Philip in his own
room. Not a pulse beat the quicker, and though his figure
Avas not majestic, he seemed to dilate with the grandeur of
his appointed task.
' Silence ! ' he called out in his clear, resonant voice,
which was heard above the madness of the multitude ;
and once more, as they did not heed his command, he
raised his arm in an attitude of authority and again cried,
' Silence, ye people, and ye turbulent Praetorians ! Silence ! '
Astonished and overawed by the fearlessness of the man,
which filled the disciplined soldiery with admiration, the
crowd sank for an instant to silence.
' What mean ye ? What do ye desire ? ' said the Patri
arch, 'that ye fill with your lewd clamour the sacred
silence of the church of Christ ? Depart hence ! The
Hippodrome is the fitter scene for your shouts and tumults.'
' The eunuch ! he is hidden here ! Death, death to the
eunuch ! ' they shouted.
'He has taken sanctuary,' said Chrysostom, with per
fect calmness. ' He has flung himself on the protection
of the Church. She spreads over him her mantle of mercy.
Depart hence ! your errand is in vain. He is inviolable
here.' 'Nay,, but you are breaking the law,' said the Tribune
of the Praetorians. ' He has been guilty of treason. By
the edict of Arcadius, by the edict he himself demanded
and carried, he has no right to protection. You must
give him up.'
' Never ! ' said Chrysostom.

212 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Nay, but we will have him ; we will drag him out
hence by the hair ! ' shouted the soldiers.
' You dare not ! ' said Chrysostom.
' We will soon see whether we dare,' cried the boldest
of them, who were Arian Goths, filled with special hatred
of the fallen Minister ; and some of them began to rush up
the marble steps.
' Back ! ' said Chrysostom, advancing with uplifted
hand and checking their menacing onrush; while Philip
and his two friends, who were watching the scene with
intense excitement and unbounded admiration for their
master, eagerly sprang forward, to protect him if possible,
to die with him if necessary.
' This won't do,' shouted the Tribune. ' We have the
Emperor's orders.'
' The Emperor's orders ? What avail the Emperor's
orders in the sanctuary of God? He is an emperor over
frail men ; we are the servants of the Most High God.
What ! ' he cried, as he laid a firm hand on the cuirass of
the foremost soldier, though he was brandishing his drawn
sword over his head — 'what! do you presume to violate
the sanctuary of your Saviour ? '
' We don't want to hurt you ; but we will have the
eunuch ! '
' Then,' said Chrysostom, spreading out his arms across
the narrow space, ' advance if you will ; but if you do, it
must be over my body — yes, and over the bodies of these
my presbyters ; ' for now they were all standing round
the Archbishop, prepared — all unarmed as they were —
to defend the sanctuary, even with their lives.
' Shame on you ! shame on you, soldiers ! ' cried young
Eutyches, carried out of himself by the scene. ' Would
you defile the Holy Place of God with the blood of His
murdered ministers ? And are you not afraid that the
lightning will flash on you, or the floor be rent Avith
earthquake to swallow you up quick, like Korah and all
his company ? '
' Silence, you young cub ! ' said a soldier, striking the
boy on the cheek, while others still pressed forward, being
almost forced on by the waves of the people Avho surged
behind them.

IN SANCTUARY 213
It was one of those crucial moments when the pos
sibility of enormous crimes trembles, as it were, in the
balance, and when there is but a hair's-breadth between
scenes such as history records for ever, or the averting of
some dreadful catastrophe. At any moment one of those
uplifted swords might descend on the head of the Arch
bishop ; and then the soldiers and the mob, drunken with
blood and fury, would have trampled down the presbyters,
would have dragged Eutropius from his hiding-place, and
hacked him to pieces at the very altar. The cheek of
Eutyches was bleeding with the soldier's blow, and Philip
and David had climbed up the balustrade, their faces aflame
with the very enthusiasm of martyrdom, and had taken
their places close beside their master, ready to shield him
with their bodies.
The absolute calm of the Archbishop averted the peril.
' You have heard,' he said, ' as though God's voice had
spoken to you by a boy's lips — you have heard the awful-
ness of the atrocity which you seem to be on the verge of
committing. Pause ere you drown your souls for ever in
destruction and perdition ! '
' Give us the eunuch ! ' said a soldier, ' and we will dis
perse this multitude with the flat of our swords, march out
in peace, and close the church-gates.'
' I will not give you the fugitive who has flung himself
on Heaven's protection. Listen to ine. Let the Emperor
decide. Take me to him here and now. Take me to him
as your prisoner, if you will. Leave some of your number,
pledged by the word of your Tribune to defend the sanc
tuary from rioters Avhile 1 am absent, and hear whether the
Emperor really bids }rou to desecrate the church of God.'
Not waiting for any consultation, Chrysostom quietly
began to descend the steps. ' I will walk,' he said, ' in the
midst of you.'
' Let us come with you, sir,' said Philip, earnestly.
'These are my young secretaries,' said Chrysostom to
the Tribune. ' They are not formidable. Let them accom
pany us. They may be very useful in writing notes or
taking messages. Your face bleeds, my poor lad,' he said
to Eutyches. ' You might have dealt less roughly with the
harmless boy,' he said to the Praetorian who had struck

214 GATHERING CLOUDS
him. The Goth actually blushed at his words, and shrank
back as he would not have done from the sword of the
strongest enemy.
So the Tribune bade the soldiers form two lines and
walk with uplifted lances or drawn swords on either side
of the Patriarch to the Imperial Palace. The crowd in
the church divided to let them pass ; and in the streets
they walked through myriads of spectators, struck with
the unwonted spectacle of their Patriarch conducted into
the presence of the Emperor by armed Trabantes, who
did not abstain from cries of ' Death to the eunuch ! We
demand the head of Eutropius! '
As the streets were in a state of excitement, Aurelian,
as Praetorian Praefect, had drawn up many soldiers as well
as the Royal Guards before the gate, and through these
the Patriarch and his escort passed in silence, until they
had conducted him to the door of the Emperor's room.
Chrysostom briefly recounted all that had taken place,
and Arcadius feebly pleaded that Eutropius, as a State
criminal who had treasonably mismanaged affairs, and who
had openly insulted the sacred majesty of the Empress,
could not claim asylum from Avhich the law exempted
him. ' It was a cruel, it was a wrong, it was an unjustifiable
law,' said Chrysostom. ' No doubt, if justice Avere per
fect, if there were no officials to do deeds of oppression,
robbery and Avrong, the privilege of asylum might be
abused, and might become dangerous and evil to the State.
But it is not so. It may be that, here and there, it throws
a shield over the guilty, but ten times more often it pro
tects the innocent.'
' Eutropius is not innocent,' said the Emperor pettishly.
' I said not that he was,' said Chrysostom, ' but in the
days of his fortune, in the days when he was your all-
honoured plenipotentiary, in the days when he wielded and
abused all your power  '
Arcadius winced.
'In those days I resisted to his face the arbitrary in
justice of invading the sacred privilege of the Church. I
made him my enemy by doing so.'
' Then why does your Beatitude protect him now?'

IN SANCTUARY 215
' I protect him all the more, Emperor, ten times the
more, because he Avas my enemy. The question is not of
him : it is of the rights of Christ and of His Church.'
' But he is guilty,' reiterated the Emperor.
' Granted, if you will. It does not affect the question.
Think of others who Avere not guilty. Think of the inno
cent, the holy Pentadia, whom but for the rights of sanc
tuary Eutropius might have dragged into torture, or
penury, or to share the death of her wronged and murdered
husband, Timasius. Think of Lucian, Count of the East,
whom, not for wrong-doing, but for an act of noble justice,
your Minister Rufinus beat to death Avith leaded whips.
Had he but foreseen his peril he might have been safe in
the Church of Antioch.'
' But I have passed an edict on the subject.'
'Yes, or Eutropius passed one in your Maijesty's
name.' Arcadius again winced, and almost summoned up
sufficient energy to look angry.
' But though your laws are decisive in all human
questions, one Avho, like yourself, desires to be a pious
emperor cannot pretend to interfere Avith the indefeasible
laws of God. Human law, except so far as it is a part of
the Divine law — what is it ? It is, and it is not. It is
passed to-day, it is destroyed to-morroAV. But Divine
law? Well has the Greek poet sung that it is not of
to-day, or of yesterday, but lives for ever and ever, and
none knoweth whence it was manifested. The laws even
of emperors are invalid if they encroach upon the privilege
of Christ. The wrath of man worketh not the righteous
ness of God.'
The Emperor was overborne. He was timid and
superstitious, and dreaded lest he should kindle the dis
pleasure of Heaven.
' What do you wish me to do ? ' he said helplessly.
' Nothing ignoble, nothing in any way unworthy of
your sublime power : only one of those acts of mercy and
of justice more glorious than the diadem. Come out with
me, and bid Aurelian announce to his Praetorians that the
sacred precincts shall not be violated.'
Arcadius went out in purple and diadem, and when

216 GATHERING CLOUDS
Aurelian genuflected before him, he said, ' I must ask you
to tell your Praetorians it is my will that the asylum of
Eutropius should be respected.'
He spoke — ¦ and stood irresolute ; for, regardless of his
presence, the soldiers, who in the silence had heard his
decision, broke into a wrathful murmur and cries of
' Death to the eunuch ! ' which even Aurelian could not
suppress. The Emperor felt indefinitely strengthened
by the presence of the Patriarch, but the most rigid law of
Court ceremony forbade Chrysostom to speak. Arcadius, in
halting, hesitating words, endeavoured to impress on the
minds of his Guards what Chrysostom had been saying to
him, but the arguments sounded very different on his lips.
The soldiers paid no sort of regard to them.
' Why are you so enraged against the Chamberlain ? '
asked the Emperor. 'If he has done some bad deeds,
surely he has done some good ones, too? '
' What good deeds has he done ? ' asked a Praetorian
rudely. ' My father Theodosius sent him to John, the holy
eremite of Egypt, and he brought back the prophecy of
his victory and speedy death.'
A coarse laugh from the soldiers was the only reply,
and one of them said : ' Why, any fool would have done as
much as that.' The cries of ' Death to the eunuch ! '
were redoubled, mingled with shouts of ' Who murdered
Timasius ? Who put up Gildo ? Who betrayed the army
to Tribigild ? '
Things looked very ominous, for the soldiers began to
leap in the air and shake their long spears. Had Arcadius
thought of ordering either Aurelian or Chrysostom to
address the mutineers, they would no doubt have brought
them to their senses ; but he did not, and the revolt might
very speedily have become a revolution. But at that
moment Arcadius was protected by his very helplessness.
He simply burst into tears, and implored the soldiers for
his sake to spare his disgraced Minister. They were un
accustomed to the sight of an emperor in tears, and they
sullenly consented to abandon their demand.
Chrysostom thanked the Emperor, and Avent back under
escort through the raging mob to St. Sophia. The church

IN SANCTUARY 217
was practically in a state of siege, and it was with difficulty
that the soldiers secured his entrance. He brought to
Eutropius the news of his immediate safety, which the
eunuch received with transports of gratitude. He left
him in charge of a number of the clergy, to whom Aure
lian assigned the protection of a hundred soldiers; and
then he returned home, deeply Avearied with the advent
ures of the day, but thankful to God that he had saved
the life of the suppliant, and successfully defended the
prerogatives of the Church.

218 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXVIII
INEVITABLE NEMESIS
Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning infamy. — Gray.
The next morning was Sunday, and never — not even
at the most sumptuous of Easter festivities — had so vast
a congregation thronged the ample spaces of St. Sophia.
Nave, tribunes, galleries, porticoes, were filled, till there
Avas no standing-room — not so much by worshippers as by
multitudes eager for new and powerful emotions. Virgins
had quitted their chambers, women had left the Gynaeceum
empty, men had deserted the Forum and the Hippodrome.
The Emperor and the Empress were present in the royal
pew, in the centre of groups of betitled and bejewelled
officials ; scarcely a praefect, patrician, or illustris was
absent ; and soldiers in their glittering armour were min
gled with the croAvd.
After the service Chrysostom advanced to the ambo,
and seated himself for his discourse. In the dead silence
he perused for a moment the sea of upturned faces. Many
of them were fixed on him in bitter anger because he had
snatched their enemy from destruction. On other faces
gleamed and flickered the vulgar joy of the base at the fall
of the great into calamity. Others showed only the idle
curiosity Avhich makes dread disasters the sources of pleas
urable sensation, provided only that they fall on their
neighbours, not upon themselves.
It was just such a moment as that in Notre Dame
Avhen as vast a multitude watched Maissillon mount the
pulpit before Avhich lay the coffin containing the mortal
remains of Louis XIV., and when, after a pause, he began

INEVITABLE NEMESIS 219
his sermon and melted all to tears by the simple words,
' God alone is great.'
Chrysostom ordered the curtains of the presbytery to
be thrown back, and there the assembled multitude beheld
the man whom a single day had hurled from the summit
of human eminence to the loAvest deep of human misery.
He was lying under the altar, a pitiable spectacle, pale as
a corpse, clinging convulsively to one of its golden pillars.
If he raised for a moment his miserable face, he saw the
dense throng of soldiers who had formed part of his escort,
of slaves to whom his nod Avas law, of citizens who had
shouted applause to him for hours in public places.
Higher up, in the gilded gallery, he saw the Empress
whom he had elevated from insignificance, the Emperor
whom he had treated like a tame animal. Then the voice
of the sacred orator fell upon his ears, saying :
' " Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher ; vanity of
vanities — all is vanity ! " True always, it never seemed
more true than now. Where now is the splendour of the
Consulate? Where the gleaming of lamps and torches,
the acclamations, the dances, the festivities, the joyous
assemblies ? Where are the crowns and Tyrian tapes
tries ? The flattering murmur of the city, the greetings
of the Circus, the flatteries of thousands of spectators ¦ —
where are they now? All that is past. The hurricane
has swept down upon the tree, and not only scattered all
its leaves, but upturned it by the roots, and whirled it to
the earth. Where are the false friends, the swarms of
parasites, the tables laden with viands, the goblets croAvned
with luscious wines and passing all day long from hand
to hand, the delicacies of banquets, the soft murmurs of
the slaves of power ? What has become of it all ? It has
vanished like a dream when one awakes ; it has faded like
a flower of the spring under the sirocco; it has disap
peared like a shadow. It is scattered like a vapour,
bursten like a bubble, torn like a spider's web. Say, then,
say ever, " Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity ! " Write it
on your walls, on your garments, in your Forum, in your
streets, on your houses, on your windows, on your gates.
Write it most of all on your consciences, that it may be
ever present to your thoughts. Reiterate it at all your

220 GATHERING CLOUDS
banquets, and in worldly assemblies let each repeat it to
his neighbour: " Vanity of va*nities ; all is vanity ! "
' And thou,' he cried, turning to Eutropius, ' said I not
to thee incessantly that riches make to themselves wings
and flee away, and thou wouldst not listen? Said I not
to thee that popularity was vain as the smoke and luke
warm water of mouth-friends, caring only for their own
interests ? Thou wouldst not believe me. And now
experience hath shown thee that wealth is not only a
thankless but a murderous slave. I became thine enemy
because I told thee the truth; but said I not, "I am a
truer friend to thee than they that flatter thee " ? Warned
I thee not that faithful are the wounds of a friend, deceit
ful the kisses of an enemy ? Hadst thou borne my Avounds
thou hadst not been destroyed by their kisses. My wounds
Avere health, their kisses death. Where now are the songs
Avhich Avelcomed thee? Where the army of slaves who
cleared the Avay before thine omnipotence ? They have
deserted to thy foes, they deny thy favours. But I, whom
thou couldst barely endure, have not abandoned thee, and
iioav in thy fall it is I alone who support and solace thee.
Thou foughtest against the Church, and the Church has
opened her arms to receive thee ; thou faA'ouredst the
theatres, and they are shrieking for thy head. When I
warned thee not to tread thus gaily the road to ruin, thou,
with a shrug of disdain, wouldst fly to the Circus. Lo !
the Circus multitude, enriched by thy lavishness, whets the
sword to slay thee ; the Church, troubled by thy rage, is
running hither and thither to snatch thee from thy mis
fortunes ! '
And then the thought seemed to strike the Archbishop
that he had been too severe — that he had not sufficiently
tempered his Avords with pity for the fallen. It was from
no lack of tenderness and compassion ; it was from the
abstract impersonal light in which he regarded the whole
scene. The poor fallen wretch had been the enemy of the
Church, and he Avas no obscure criminal, to be either pun
ished or pardoned, and then doomed to SAvift oblivion. He
had played his part on the world's most brilliant stage ; he
was a man Avhom God had smitten with His thunder, on
whom in all his guilt God's messenger was now 'pronounc-

INEVITABLE NEMESIS 221
ing the humiliation of pardon.' The Archbishop had often
reproved Eutropius for avarice, rapacity, injustice. The
Minister's fall could not alter the mean estimate Chrysos
tom had formed of his character, and he almost forgot
the personal feelings of the sufferer, almost ceased to re
gard him as one that suffered, in the strangeness of the
spectacle, and in the desire to point to the frovolous multi
tude of nominal Christians — above all to guilty, grasping,
luxurious nobles and officials, and to the wealthy classes
in general — the terrible object-lesson which, from the
speaker's point of view, their Saviour Himself had brought
before their eyes. No doubt a man less inflexible of char
acter, less rigid in his unsparing righteousness — a man
with more knowledge of the world, and trained in the
midst of political affairs rather than by monks and hermits
— would have managed the occasion with finer adaptability.
His enemies declared that he had been merciless to the
unfortunate. It was, indeed, the last thing which he had
intended, and in the simpleness of his integrity he doubt
less imagined that he had sufficiently proved the sincerity
of his compassion by the generous sacrifice — by the sacri
fice even of life itself — which he had been ready to make
to protect the Church's suppliant. Still, as the thought
crossed his mind that haply his language might have
seemed harsh, he paused, and said :
'Nay, think not that I desire for a moment to insult
a fallen man ; my aim is to forewarn those -who stand, and
to bid them take heed lest they fall. I stand not here to
fret the sores of the wounded, but to preserve the health
of those who have no wounds ; not to roll the billows over
the head of the shipwrecked, but to point out the hidden
reefs to those Avhose sails are swelled by the favouring
wind as their prow cleaves the gleaming sea. Who Avas
ever so great as this man ? What living man in all the
world could rival him in wealth ? Consul, Patrician, Prae-
fect of the Sacred Chamber — what honour was lacking to
his Eminence? He was the envy of all men, and now he
is as naked as the slave, indigent as the beggar. Drawn
swords, and pits, and tortures, and the path that leads to
execution, are ever before his eyes. These are the things,
not the pleasures which he has exhausted, which croAvd

222 GATHERING CLOUDS
his vision. Why paint the picture Avhich is before your
very eyes ? Behold him !
'I say again I desire not to insult his misery, but to
touch your hearts, to Avarn your consciences, to make of
his misfortunes angels to speak trumpet-tongued to your
carelessness. I know that there are some of you who re
proach me for having sheltered him. Wherein am I to
blame ? He used, you say, to attack the Church. Yes !
but noAV he has taken refuge there. Should we not thank
God that the enemy of the Church has recognised her
mercy and her power ? Her poAver — for she has Avon the
victory ; her pity — for she has pardoned him, and folded
over him the wings of her protection. Should not JeAvs
and Pagans blush to see, in his presence here, the trophy
of her greatness ? He denied her privileges ; he strove to
deconsecrate her sanctuary. He has himself fled to that
sanctuary, and, tenderly as a mother, she hides him under
her inviolable veil from the resentment of the Emperor
and the fury of the mob ! Look at yonder Holy Table !
It is adorned with gold and precious stones ; but its richest
ornament is the fugitive who crouches there.
'An ornament? you cry. This man, so greedy, so
rapacious, so unjust. How can this criminal adorn the
altar Avhich he strove to violate ? Ah ! silence ! Should
you not think of Him who suffered the harlot, out of
whom he had cast seven devils, to wash His feet with her
tears, and wipe them with the hairs of her head ? Of Him
Who, Avhen brutal soldiers Avere nailing Him to the cross,
still breathed the prayer, " Father, forgive them, for they
knoAV not what they do." Murmur not that the man Avho
would fain have closed our asylum should avail himself of
it, for by so doing he has established its sacredness. The
Church is as a monarch, A\'ho is not greatest Avhen he sits
on his throne in purple, Avith the circle of sovereignty upon
his broAv, but when barbarians, their hands bound behind
their backs, lie vanquished at his feet. Come, then, let
us now celebrate the Holy Mysteries, and afterwards Ave
Avill go in a body to the Emperor to implore for Eutropius
his pity and his pardon, and to lay the golden ears of the
harvest of our compassion before his feet ! '
The scene was too memorably striking to be ever for-

INEVITABLE NEMESIS 223
gotten by those who witnessed it, and the discourse of
Chrysostom was too impassioned not to leave the deepest
impression. But the courage of the Patriarch and the
protection of the Church were all in vain. So long as
Eutropius lay hidden in the sanctuary St. Sophia con
tinued to be almost in a state of siege, and the Forum
outside Avas the scene of incessant tumults. The eunuch
himself grew weary of his incarceration. Death itself
seemed hardly less intolerable than the blank and impo
tent existence — dishonoured, aimless, unoccupied — to
which he was iioav reduced. The perpetual moaning in
his ears of chants and litanies; the sight of no one but
presbyters, deacons, and acolytes in the small dim chambers
behind the apse ; the voices which insulted him, the eyes
which glared fiercely upon him, if he stepped into the
sacrarium ; the days so deadly with unbroken ennui ; the
nights haunted with ghastly visions ; the perpetual sense
of the presence of religion without any of its consolations —
became altogether too much for the miserable man. His
overwhelming misfortune presented a contemptible spec
tacle, because it was unredeemed by one touch of the dignity
which it would have derived from repentance or resigna
tion. The sole thing left him was bare life, and he clung
to bare life, but not under the dreary conditions which
now dazed and stunned him. On the Wednesday, as he
was sitting in the sacrarium in infinite despair, he saw
Typhos, the brother of Aurelian, beckoning to him. He
stepped within hearing distance, and Typhos promised him
that if he would give himself up Avithout tumult or re
sistance his life would be spared, and he should be sent
to the island of Cyprus. ' Give me,' said Eutropius, ' the
Emperor's oath that I shall not be slain, and I Avill give
myself up.'
Next day he received the Emperor's sworn assurance,
and in the dusk of evening, when the church Avas empty,
he left the sanctuary. He was hurried in the darkness to
a ship which lay by the quay in the Bosporus, and it at
once spread sail for Cyprus.
But the moment the neAvs was known it became manifest
that his enemies Avould not be content Avith any such
deportation. Is this, they said, a sufficient punishment for

224 GATHERING CLOUDS
his many crimes? and what guarantee have we that he may
not creep back again, Avind himself once more into the
favour of the Emperor, and rule as he did before ?
In vain did Arcadius publish a decree of unexampled
severity against him, which was to be affixed to the walls
in public places in every city of the Empire. The docu
ment is too curious an illustration of the times to be
omitted. It ran as follows:
' The Emperors Arcadius and Honorius to Aurelian,
Praetorian P reefed.
'We have confiscated to our Treasury all the property of
Eutropius, formerly our Praefect of the Sacred Chamber,
having stripped him of his splendour, and delivered the
Consulate from the foul stain of his tenure, and from the
recollection of his name, and the base filth thereof ; so that,
all his acts having been repealed, all time may be dumb
concerning him ; and that the blot of our age may not
appear by the mention of him ; and that those Avho by their
valour and their wounds extend the Roman borders, or
guard the same by equity, may not groan over the fact that
the divine guerdon of the Consulship has been befouled
and defiled by a filthy monster. Let him learn that he has
been degraded from the Consulate and all other dignities
which he stained with the obliquity of his character ; that
all statues, images, and pictures of him, of every material
and colour, be abolished everyAvhere, that they may not
pollute the gaze of beholders as a brand of infamy on our
age. Let him be taken under escort of your faithful guards
to Cyprus, where let your Sublimity know that he has been
banished, so that, being there watchfully guarded, he may
be unable to work confusion by his mad designs.
'Dated January 17, at Constantinople, in the Consulship
of Theodorus, a most illustrious man.' 1
It was a strange thing that Arcadius should be blind to
the fact that it was he, and he alone, who had made Eutro
pius Consul, and that all this talk about the filth and pol
lution of his mere name redounded to the utter discredit of
1 The date January 17 is obviously erroneous.

INEVITABLE NEMESIS 225
the Emperor, who was responsible for his entire career, and
had until yesterday regarded him Avith boundless approval.
But even this sanguinary proclamation did not suffice.
Gainas and Tribigild refused to be satisfied with anything
less than the head of Eutropius. The Western Empire
still openly murmured that his punishment had been
wholly inadequate to his crimes. True that the Emperor
had pledged his oath that the eunuch's life should be spared,
but the oath must be got rid of by any chicanery. Arca
dius was persuaded to salve his conscience with the unction
that he had only promised him safety as long as he Avas in
Constantinople, and that he could be executed on new
charges, though not on the old ones. A ridiculous accusa
tion was accordingly trumped up that Eutropius had some
times placed insignia which were purely imperial among
the ornaments of his consular dignity ; and, still worse,
that he had caused to be yoked to his own chariot the
steeds of a peculiar breed and colour, called kosmoi, Avhich
were never used by anyone except the Emperor himself.
On this trumpery pretext, which was probably an inven
tion for the occasion, and may have had no existence
except in the vengeful brain of the Empress Eudoxia and
her intimates, the hapless eunuch was dragged back from
Cyprus to Chalcedon, seeing on every side of him his own
rent pictures and dismantled statues, and there, after the
most hurried mockery of a trial, his head was placed under
the axe, and a career was ended which, passing in full
circle from nameless abjectness, through imperial splendour,
to immeasurable degradation, is one of the most dramati
cally strange Avhich History has ever recorded on her varied
page.

226 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXIX
EUTYCHES IS INDIGNANT
Botoli trova poi . . .
Tanto piu trova, di can farsi lupi . . .
Discesa poi per piu pelaghi cupi
Trova le volpi, si piene di froda
Che non temono ingegno che le occupi.
Dante, Purg. xiv. 46-54.
In all the later phases of his career Chrysostom had taken
a noble and blameless part, unless a certain want of tact
and of gracious versatility be attributed to him as a crime.
Yet, as is so often the lot of the men to whose shining
virtues the vicious pay the tribute of implacable hatred,
Chrysostom was blamed and abused on every side. His
moral brightness was, as his friend and biographer, Palla-
dius, Bishop of Helenopolis, expressed it, like a lamp flash
ing in sore eyes. The enemies of Eutropius denounced
the Archbishop for having sheltered him ; the enemies of
Chrysostom himself infamously pretended that he had
betrayed him to the soldiers. Eutropius had not a single
friend, but many Avho Avould not have let their little finger
ache to save his life stormed at the prelate, who alone had
pitied him, and Avho, at the risk of assassination, had stood
between him and the swords of his assailants. He had
been too hard and cruel for their delicate sensibilities !
The incarnate vices of society united to sting to death the
one man whose pure virtue was an embodied reproach to
their Avickedness. At Constantinople he
Lived pilloried on Infamy's high stage,
And bore the pelting scorn of half an age.
It happened a day or two after these events that Elpid-
ius, one of the worst of the Constantinopolitan clergy, Avas

EUTYCHES IS INDIGNANT 227
walking on the Avooded shores of the Bosporus with the
Bishop of Chalcedon. Elpidius was in his way a man of
note among the clergy, because, in spite of a character
entirely despicable, he Avas a heated and unscrupulous
partisan. He identified religion with his own personal
views, and, though his intellect Avas mean, his blind party
spirit acquired for him the position of a leader among the
most heated controversialists. His notions of argument
were those Avhich have been prevalent in every age among
such men as he. They consisted in loud and overbearing
reiteration of assertions, supported by flimsy sophisms
Avhich had been over and over again refuted ; in boundless
vituperation of his opponents, Avhich among similar char
acters passed for reasoning ; in the ignoring of the proofs
Avhich had long undermined the sandy bases of his false
and unscriptural orthodoxy; and in the glaring and habit
ual misquotation of the Avoids of his opponents. Such
controversy, deeply dyed in vulgarity, virulence, and
venom, Avas of a kind Avhich no good man could deign to
notice. It Avas mere malice, meanness, and misrepresenta
tion, adapted only to feed the most ignorant prejudices and
worst passions of his partisans. ' The Church ' — a word
for ever on his lips — meant, on the lips of Elpidius, him
self and those avIio held his 'vieAvs.' It was the asserted
authority for every superstitious accretion, for every Pagan
development, for every soul-dwarfing falsity. The teach
ing and example of Christ, of the Apostles, and of the
Christians of the first tAvo centuries, were regarded as
unimportant. Christ's reprobation of errors which were
now thrust forward as the be-all and the end-all of
orthodox religiosity went for nothing ; but if any isolated
phrase in the NeAV Testament could be distorted into the
false semblance of an argument, Avhole systems were built
on it, like pyramids upon their apex. In short, Elpidius
was one of those ' Churchmen,' so common in every
age, to whom shibboleths, ceremonial, and their OAvn self-
exaltation, Avere of infinitely more account than judgment,
righteousness, and truth. He represented the practical
supersession of Christianity pure and undefiled by a dead
Pharisaism and a dead Judaism, mixed up with elements
of Pagan superstition and Pagan ritual. If the decrees of

228 GATHERING CLOUDS
Councils decided in his direction, they were infallible ; if
they traversed his views, they were a collection of obsolete
canons. If bishops supported his party they Avere elevated
into an apotheosis of sainthood, and adored with genu
flexions ; if they opposed him they were a disgrace and
a 'scandal,' to be treated with the most contumelious
indifference. The controversial methods of Elpidius con
sisted mainly in exalting- his own clique, and blackening
all who differed from him Avith boundless depreciation.
His all-absorbing churchliness and supernatural claims of
sacerdotal supremacy were in nowise incompatible Avith
violations of the most ordinary courtesies of a gentleman,
or the most rudimentary virtues of a Christian.
Against Chrysostom Elpidius cherished one of those
burning hatreds which, if opportunity be only favourable,
stop short at no falsehood and ho crime. He never spoke
of the Archbishop without the hiss of the serpent being
heard in every word. Nothing that Chrysostom could
say was tolerable, nothing that he could do was right.
Elpidius had been one of those Avho had been forced to
wince under the Patriarch's scathing denunciation of the
worldliness which hung about the tables of the great, and
of the underhand intrigues which thought all means law
ful if they furthered a favourite ecclesiastical end. He
was notoriously one of the auriscalpii, who abused their
priestly jiosition to lead captive silly Avomen laden with
lust ; one of those who, having frightfully abused even the
safeguarded office of a public confessor, which Nectarius
abolished because of the iniquities to which it led, had
used every influence to get the office restored. He was
one of those who, sanctioned by the abuse of custom, had
lived Avith a young and beautiful agapete, whom he called
his 'spiritual sister,' and for whose richly dressed loveli
ness he ahvays secured a prominent place in St. Sophia,
until Chrysostom had threatened him with instant excom
munication unless he reformed a style of living Avhich in
jured the reputation of the Church. Since then he had
hated Chrysostom Avith a hatred of Avhich a bad lay
man might have envied, but certainly could not have
surpassed, the unscrupulous intensity. He was ani
mated by the one desire and object to blast, and under-

EUTYCHES IS INDIGNANT 229
mine, and overthrow his thrice-detested ecclesiastical
superior. A certain freemasonry of intuition made Elpidius and
others of Chrysostom's enemies aAvare of the venomous
dislike and jealousy entertained against him by the Bishop
of Chalcedon, although Cyrinus had never manifested it to
the world in general, and had, for his oavii reasons, con
cealed it entirely from the Archbishop himself. Elpidius
and he had been discussing the revolt of Tribigild and the
fall of Eutropius, and sat down to rest on a bank, entirely
heedless of the presence of two youths Avho were also rest
ing but a few feet distant from them on the shingly beach.
As the youths Avere but plainly dressed, and evidently did
not belong to the 'classes,' but to the 'masses,' such
exalted personages as the Bishop and the leading pres
byter did not think it Avorth while to notice their exist
ence, or to talk in lower tones because they were so near.
The two youths were David and Eutyches. The affair of
Eutropius had thrown an immense amount of extra work
upon them, and the kindly Archbishop had told them to
go to the shore and breathe a little of the fresh sea air,
especially as the cheek of Eutyches was not yet healed,
and he had been a little shaken by the fierce buffet of the
Gothic soldier. Chrysostom wanted Philip to go, too, but
as business might arise at any moment, Philip would not
leave him ; and besides, though Olympias had now made
herself responsible for his being provided with proper
meals, Chrysostom was as likely as not to forget all about
them, and leave them untouched while he Avas absorbed in
his work, unless Philip were at hand to see that he took
them. ' Were you present at St. Sophia Avhen John delivered
that sermon with Eutropius under the altar?' asked the
Bishop. ' Present, my lord ? ' answered Elpidius in a tone of dis
gust ; ' I should think I Avas ! '
'I am told that it was very fine,' said Cyrinus tenta
tively. ' Fine ! ' answered Elpidius, raising his voice in a gust of
anger. 'I don't know what they call fine. Eloquence?
Turgid rhetoric I call it, empty bombast, the Avind of plati-

230 GATHERING CLOUDS
tudes ; sound and fury, signifying nothing, It Avas shame
ful, it was infamous, it was a perfect scandal ! John had
no business whatever to break the law by giving shelter at
all to such a criminal. But if he did, he had no right to
insult him grossly, and browbeat and denounce him as he
lay grovelling there. And afterwards, I am told, he be
trayed him. Doubtless he got a good round sum, first for
his protection, and then for his treachery which will add
to the treasure of which he robs the Church daily, and
which will supply the secret orgies of the Patriarcheion.
What can you expect of a man like that — a cheat, a
miser, a hypocrite, a liar, a man with a heart hard as a
nether millstone and a fist close as that of a Har-
pagon ? '
Elpidius, as he gave place to the devil, and flung the
reins on the neck of his envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, had spoken louder and louder, so that
all the last part of his remarks had been poured forth
upstanding, and with fierce gesticulations, in a hurricane
of frenzied wrath.
It was lucky that the fiery Philip was not there.
There is no knowing how fiercely he might have rebutted
so deadly an outrage on the character of his adopted
father and benefactor. But such a tornado of brutalities
and insults roused even the gentler spirit of Eutyches
to indignant revolt. Before David — Avho would have
seen the uselessness of any intervention — knew what
he Avas about, Eutyches had advanced to the speaker.
He was a very modest boy, and it Avas not till then
that he recognised the Bishop of Chalcedon. The epis
copal dignity overawed him, but after kneeling to kiss the
Bishop's hand, as was usual, he said :
' My Lord Bishop, I know not who that presbyter
may be, but suffer me to say that he has spoken to you
the most shocking calumnies. The Archbishop gave
shelter to Eutropius because, in defending the Church's
right to sanctuary, he Would have done so to the meanest
of mankind and the worst of his own enemies. So far
from being cruel, I saw him offer his own unprotected
breast to the naked swords of the Goths in his defence.
It was he, and he alone, who pleaded for him to the

EUTYCHES IS INDIGNANT 231
Emperor. Eutropius gave himself up against the Arch
bishop's will, and in spite of his Avarnings and remon
strances. To say that he either protected him for a
bribe, or betrayed him for a bribe, is a wicked falsehood,
whoever says it! Yes,' he added, fixing his clear and
innocent gaze on the face of Elpidius, ' as wicked a false
hood as that the Archbishop is a miser or a hypocrite.
On the contrary, he is profoundly indifferent to gold,
and. is a saint of God, if ever there was one.'
There was something in the words and bearing of
Eutyches Avhich overwhelmed Elpidius, and even Cyrinus,
with confusion. His manner had been perfectly respect
ful, and as he stood there in all the glovir of his ardent
sympathy for the master to whom he was devoted, and all
the bloom of his youthful innocence, Elpidius felt much
as Milton makes Satan feel before the reproach of Ithuriel :
So spake the cherub ; and his grave rebuke,
Severe in youthful beauty, added grace
Invincible. Abashed the devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her form how lovely — saw, and pined
His loss ; but chiefly to find here observed
His lustre visibly impair'd : yet seem'd
Dauntless.
Ashamed to have been thus openly rebuked by a boy,
and especially in the presence of a bishop, Elpidius tried
to assume a disdainful indifference.
' Who is this impudent baby Avith a raw Avound on his
cheek Avho has been eavesdropping ? ' he said in his most
brutal tone.
It was now David's turn to be indignant, but he put
strong control over his feelings. ' This,' he said very
quietly, 'is an orphan boy, one of the Patriarch's sec
retaries, who will soon be ordained a reader. You can
hardly Avonder, my Lord, that he Avas deeply moved when
he heard such shameless defamation of his beloved master
and benefactor shouted to the four winds in a voice which
might have been heard a hundred yards off. And for the
wound on his cheek, it is the mark of a soldier's blow,
Avhom he was trying to keep from assailing the Patriarch
while he was defending Eutropius at peril of his life.'

232 GATHERING CLOUDS
Elpidius and the Bishop looked from speaker to
speaker in silent astonishment. There was something in
their aspect before Avhich vulgar rage was, if not disarmed,
yet rendered impotent. Eutyches, disfigured as he was
at the moment, yet had the face of an angel. There had
been nothing obtrusive, nothing unworthy of the respect
due from youth to age, in the generous enthusiasm witli
which he had defended his master from wanton slanders.
And now David stood by him, in the dress which marked
his humble birth as the son of a tradesman, but with a
face which showed the purest and loftiest type of the
beauty of his race. David could never forget that he was
by birth a Desposynos, that he came from the family of
Joseph, which had once had their home at Nazareth, and
Avhich Avas also nearly akin to the family of the Virgin
Mary. He had that type of countenance which dim
tradition was already beginning to assign to the Son of
Man — the perfectly oval face, the Avaved and wine-dark
hair, the glowing complexion, the eyes whose depths
seemed to be lighted by some holy spiritual flame within —
of Him who had been fairer than the children of men.
Besides this, his voice Avas full of melody, and the gravity
of his demeanour was mixed Avith habitual sweetness and
courtesy to all. The remembrance of his birth was to
David a most sacred amulet. It was no source of pride,
but rather of overwhelming responsibility, which would
have humiliated him to the dust if ever 'the reflexion of
his own severe and modest eye upon himself could have
seen him doing or imagining what was base, Avere it in
the deepest secrecy.' It was impossible, even for the
wretched Elpidius, to resent words spoken Avith perfect
calm and dignity, and with no shadow of anger or dis
respect. Both he and the Bishop felt as if they had been
suddenly rebuked by two good spirits. Conscious of
themselves, and of the unhallowed feelings which too
often ran riot in their hearts, they could not help glancing
with a sense of uneasy humiliation on these two youths,
whose very look and bearing Avere a silent rebuke to them.
Elpidius turned aAvay, and hated the burning hue of
shame Avhich, in spite of himself, mounted to the very
roots of his hair. He would have liked to seize Eutyches

EUTYCHES IS INDIGNANT 233
by the neck, and cuff him on the face ; but as it Avas he
had to sit still, and feel for a few moments the pangs of
Gehenna, as he kicked violently at a tough root of arum
Avhich happened to be growing beside his feet. Eutyches,
half-amazed at his oavii forAvardness, bowed low, and was
about to walk away, but David ended the scene by taking
his hand, and saying to Cyrinus :
' My Lord, you are a bishop ; pardon us if we have
offended, and, before Ave go, give us your blessing.'
' You are strange youths,' said Cyrinus, ' and you should
not listen to words not meant for your ears.'
' My Lord, we listened not,' said David respectfully.
' We Avould fain not have heard, but what this presbyter
said might have been heard almost on the pier.'
' Well, you may depart.'
The Bishop gave them the Greek form of Benediction,
in which the crossed and bent fingers stand for ICXC, or
Jesus Christ ; and they walked home almost in silence.
They agreed not to tell Philip anything that had
occurred, for it made him almost beside himself to know
that the wicked world outside, and the almost more
virulently malignant form of the world which called itself
'the Church,' should ever be pouring on the stainless
name of the Patriarch its oil of vitriol in endless calum
nies.

234 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXX
THE GOTHS AT CONSTANTINOPLE
Bis domitum civile nefas, bis rupimus Alpes :
Tot nos bella docent, nulli servire tyranno.
Claud. In Ruf., ii. 389, 390.
Rufinus, avIio, under the merely nominal emperor, had
wielded the sceptre of the world, had been lynched under
the very eyes of Arcadius by vengeful Goths ; Eutropius,
who succeeded him as the arbiter of the fortunes of the
nations, had been also flung by their influence from the
dizzy pinnacles of greatness into headlong infamy. Gainas
the Goth was now the most formidable personage in the
Eastern world. On him the inevitable doom was next to
fall. The Empress Eudoxia was the inheritress of the
influence of the two murdered Ministers ; but for her also
this ' dread summit of Caesarean power ' involved nothing
better than a few years of storms, remorse, and torturing
anxiety, to be followed by an early, miserable, and unre-
gretted death.
Thrown on his own helplessness by the fall of Eutropius,
and feeling under the absolute necessity of being governed
by someone, the fainiant Arcadius was thankful, rather
than otherwise, to succumb to the more virile yoke of his
haughty Avife. But Eudoxia, in a State distracted by rival
parties, not one of which could be neglected Avith impunity,
felt the necessity of holding the balance between them.
The Court party of slaves and officials had, for the time,
been annihilated by the overthroAv of the Chamberlain, and
Eudoxia thought that she could herself represent the whole
power of the Court if she formed against the Goths an
alliance with the Roman party — the party of Aurelian, the
friend of ¦ Chrysostom, and of Synesius, Avhose ideal object
was the repression of the barbarian element Avhich had

THE GOTHS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 235
recently sprung to such abnormal prominence, both in the
East and in the West.
She had, accordingly, procured the nomination of
Aurelian to the great office of Praetorian Praefect, and of
her favourite, Count John, to the position of Comptroller
of the Sacred Largesses, while she also brought into power
and influence the soldierly ex-Consul Saturninus, the
husband of her friend Castricia.
She had, however, to counterbalance the forces, not
only of the Goths, but of the Arians. The majority of
the Goths were Arians of the moderate school of their
saintly apostle, Wulfila, to Avhom they OAved the precious
treasure of their vernacular Bible. But there were many
other Arians in Constantinople, Greeks and Romans. In
the days of Valens they completely outnumbered the
Catholic party, and they had neArer acquiesced in the tri
umph gained by the orthodox Christians through the
ability of Gregory Nazianzus and the repressive edicts of
Theodosius. They Avere constantly plotting to regain
their ascendency, which they hoped to do through the
power of Gainas.
At the head of these Arians, but more through policy
than conviction, was a dark and dangerous conspirator,
Avhose very name, by one of the curious accidents of
history, remains unknown to us, but who is usually called
by the nickname of Typhos, the Egyptian Satan, given
to him in a narrative of this epoch, written in an allegorical
form, by Synesius. This little romance is called ' The
Egyptians,' and, not deeming it safe to describe actual
events, the Bishop threw his reminiscences into the form of
a story of the struggles between the good Osiris and the
evil Typhos. Typhos was the brother of Aurelian, but
hated him with a deadly hatred, and watched him with
devouring envy.
When Aurelian was made Praetorian Praefect and
Consul-designate, Typhos, who had set his heart on the
office, was sick with rage ; and his no less evilly disposed
wife, avIio had longed for the prestige of a more exalted
rank, did her utmost to abet him. They represented the
most abandoned class of aristocratic society, and their
private entertainments were scenes of gross licentiousness.

236 GATHERING CLOUDS
For some reason unknown to us, but connected either with
contumacious blasphemy or coarse dissipation, Typhos
had established the practice of snoring-matches, and highly
honoured those of his base companions who excelled in
producing what Synesius calls ' the roundest snorts.' His
wife, Avho spent her days in the insatiable pursuit of ex
citement at the Theatre and in the Forum, devoted hours
to the adornment of her person, and filled her assembly-
rooms with women of abandoned character. The object,
both of Typhos and his wife, seemed to be the enlisting
of false religion, immoral pleasures, and ostentatious
Philistinism into a league of contrast with, and defiance
to, the literary culture, orthodox faith, and noble propriety
of Aurelian and his consort. When Typhos Avas disap
pointed of his ambitious desire, he flung himself alike into
reckless debauchery and deep-laid treason, for Avhich he
also was shortly to meet his doom. He and his party
became the Arrabiati of Constantinople.
To console his disappointment by yet more shameless
luxury, he had a lake constructed in his garden, in which
were artificial islands and warm baths. Here he and his
adherents of botli sexes aibandoned themselves to shock
ing orgies. Meanwhile both he and his Avife were in
secret communication Avith the unworthy wife of Gainas,
through whose means they ceaselessly endeavoured to
seduce the Gothic chieftain from all semblance of alle
giance. He was already the chief general of the Eastern
Empire. The Goths accepted his SAvay, and the army
under him was largely composed of German elements.
He aspired to re-establish Arianism and to be the Stilico
of the East — perhaps ultimately to wear the diadem, or
at least to be the Consul, and king of his tribe, as Alaric
was. Gainas was by no means contented with the scanty
results which he had obtained from the ruin of Eutropius.
So far from bringing him the additional honours which
he had expected, it had only issued in the promotion and
strengthening of the heads of the Roman party, whose
opposition to all barbarian interests had found voice in the
outspoken harangue of Synesius before the Emperor. The
alliance with Typhos and his party seemed to put in his
grasp the fulfilment of his wildest ambition.

THE GOTHS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 237
So he threw off the mask, and having up to this time
been in secret communication Avith Tribigild, now openly
joined him at Thyatira. The two Gothic contingents
entered into a perfect understanding with each other.
Gainas marched to Chalcedon, plundering as he went.
Tribigild, with equal impunity, advanced to Lampsacus.
At Chalcedon Typhos and his Avife paid secret visits to
the camp of Gainas, and encouraged him to undisguised
rebellion. Inspired by them, Gainas insolently demanded
that Arcadius should come to him in person at Chalcedon,
and one of the terms upon which he chose to insist was
that the unnatural hatred of Typhos to his noble brother
should be gratified by Aurelian's execution.
Gainas accordingly sent to tell the Emperor that he
did not choose to treat with inferior ambassadors, and
that Arcadius must come in person to Chalcedon, that he
might hear the conditions on which his life, his capital,
and his empire would be spared.
Arcadius had no choice but to submit. The_~R°«™,"~'
forces on which he could rely-waie JWrantrwere scattered
in garrisons throughout the Empire. He had no soldiers
to oppose to the army of the Gothic chief. It seemed as
if the worse fears of Synesius were about to be justified,
and half of the once undivided Roman Empire Avas now
to be enfeoffed to barbarian aliens.
On the summit of a gentle hill near Chalcedon stood a
Church of St. Euphemia, famous for its supernatural sacred-
ness. Here the meeting Avas to take place, and here the
helpless Arcadius had the humiliation of receiving the
dictates of the rebel chieftain. Gainas was to be promised
the Consulship ; he Avas to be made Generalissimo of the
East; he and Tribigild were to be permitted to cross the
Bosporus unmolested. Worse than all, the Emperor was
at once to deliver up Aurelian, the Consular Saturninus,
and Count John, to be put to death, or to be kept as
hostages, as the Goth should choose. Arcadius must con
sent to this, or  Gainas emphasised the alternative
by pointing to the hilt of his sword, and by a wave of his
arm towards the camp of his army of 30,000 men.
What could the wretched son of Theodosius do.' ±o
yield was infamy, to refuse was destruction. The con-

238 GATHERING CLOUDS
cession of the other demands Avas inevitable. But how
could he, without bitter shame, betray the lives of his
blameless Consul-designate and Praetorian Praefect, at
that moment the first man in his Court and capital, and
of the Consular Saturninus, who had in 382 suppressed
the forces of Athanaric, and was the husband of his Avife's
kinswoman and most intimate friend? And what was
the significance of the demand for the extradition of
Count John? His rank and importance were purely
official. He had no independent authority. He could not
be regarded, like the two others, as a leader of the Roman
party. Eudoxia saw, if Arcadius did not see, that this
demand was simply aimed at her. Everyone except the
Emperor knew that Count John Avas in a very special
sense her favourite, and many believed that he was her
accepted lover. She read in the inclusion of his name a
sign that Gainas, with Typhos and his wife to help him,
intended to strike her down as they had struck down her
cTnoroy, Eutropius.
Her anger Ava.-s intense, and she even ventured to taunt
the Avretched Emperor with his impotence.
' Surely,' she said, ' you will never consent to this inso
lently outrageous condition ! You might as well take off
your diadem, and place it on the broAV of that gross
barbarian.' _ 'What can I possibly do?' said Arcadius, as he sat in
limpest attitude on his embroidered cushions.
' Better abdicate,' she said, ' at once than give up at a
breath one after another of your greatest and most faith
ful servants. Is this Goth a Cerberus, that at every bark
he is to be pacified by flinging to him the head of your
noblest subjects ? Do you think that your father, Theodo
sius, would for a moment have tolerated such dictation ?
Is the Empire worth having if you are to sit in chains
under the feet of a Scythian?'
' How can I refuse the general of 30,000 men ? Do you
think that my handful of Silentiarii and Palatini could
stand for five minutes against them?'
_ '_ Then you will betray your noble servants ? ' she said,
rising from her seat with contemptuous indignation. ' You
are emperor in name alone ! Would God I were emperor

THE GOTHS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 239
in your place ! If the Archbishop John Avere emperor he
would die a thousand times rather than yield.'
Eudoxia stood up before him with her face aflame, and
took no pains to veil the scorn Avhich sat upon her
beautiful lips.
1 What can I do ? ' asked Arcadius again in querulous
helplessness. ' Do ? ' she cried. ' Be a man ! You have millions of
subjects. Appeal to their protection. Throw yourself on
their loyalty. Why, even that half-man, Eutropius, would
have shown more dignity and more courage ! '
' I should simply be murdered,' he said.
'Then die like a man !' she answered. 'It were better
not to be than not to be noble.'
But as her words kindled no spark of generosity, she
turned away with a gesture of proud despair, and left him.
Arcadius simply collapsed into a dishevelled heap of
imbecility. Not knowing what to do, and feeling equally
incapable of thought or of action, he let things take their
own course. He was not obliged to give an answer to
Gainas before the next day ; meanwhile something might
turn up.
The terms which Gainas had laid down soon became
known, and the crisis was terrible. Civil war seemed the
least of possible alternatives, for before any Roman forces
could be summoned and concentrated there was nothing
to prevent the sack of the undefended city, full as it was
of Goths and Arians — and perhaps the establishment of a
new and barbarian dynasty.
Under these circumstances Aurelian invited Saturninus
and Count John to meet him at his house for consultation.
He pointed out to them that the other conditions Avere
inevitable, but that Arcadius could not hand them over
against their will without infinite disgrace. And then he
made a proposal worthy of the Decii. ' Let us,' he said,
'go voluntarily and secretly to Chalcedon, and there let
us place ourselves in the hands of the Goth. He will
throw us into prison. It is too probable that he will put
us to death. But Ave shall have saved this distracted
Empire — at any rate, we shall have given it a little
breathing-space.'

240 GATHERING CLOUDS
Saturninus readily accepted the noble proposition.
Count John murmured and hesitated ; but if such was the
decision of two men so much greater than himself, he felt
it impossible to refuse.
They agreed to cross the Bosporus at once, and to be
landed a little to the east of Chalcedon. Thence they
advanced alone and unattended, and, announcing their
name and rank, handed themselves over to the first Gothic
sentries whom they encountered, liy them they were
conducted to the tent of Gainas. His eye gleamed with
vengeful ferocity and gratified ambition as he informed
them that by that day week he would decide their ultimate
fate. They Avere manacled with heavy iron chains, and
Aurelian, as he was led out of the presence of Gainas, was
almost certain that through the partly open tent-folds of
the inner room he caught sight of the dark eyes and ma
lignant features of his brother. He Avas quite sure that,
mingled with the tones of the Avife of Gainas, he heard
the shameless laugh of the Avife of Typhos.
NeAvs always spread Avith miraculous rapidity through
the populace of Constantinople, and David soon heard in
the Chalkoprateia, where he was visiting his father, of the
glorious self-devotion of Aurelian and his colleagues. He
hurried to convey the neAvs to his two friends, who shared
the tension of the general anxiety.
' It is my turn now to be newsbearer,' he said. ' Euty
ches told us of the Consulship of Eutropius ; you, Philip,
of his fall. Neither of you deserved the rewards of good
tidings ; but I do. For the present we are saved. Philip,
your friend Aurelian, and Saturninus, and Count John,
voluntarily went to Chalcedon an hour ago, and gave
themselves up to Gainas to save the Empire.'
' A noble sacrifice ! ' said Philip ; ' but " he " must be
told of it instantly.'
He Avent into the Patriarch's study, and told him. Chrys
ostom Avas struck with admiration at the heroic conduct
of the doomed three, but he Avas also deeply moved. In
the Avhole Court of Arcadius there was no one for whom
he felt a Avarmer regard or a higher esteem than for Au
relian, the Praetorian Praefect.
'I must,' he said, 'go to Gainas instantly, and intercede

THE GOTHS At CONSTANTINOPLE 241
for their lives. You, Philip and Eutyches, come with me.
I will leave our steady David to look after all business in
our absence, and Heracleides and Serapion can attend to
the visitors.'
' But the Goths are all Arians,' said Philip.
'It matters not,' said Chrysostom. 'Am I not by my
office the common father of all? And, though Arians,
they are still Christians. Come, there is no time to be
lost. Those barbarians are liable to sudden and perilous
impulses.' They started immediately, and on landing the Arch
bishop, with his two youthful attendants, was conducted
with great respect into the presence of the Gothic chief
tain. Gainas Avas a Goth avIio had never really identified him
self Avith the interests of the Empire. The veneer of
civilisation which he had received was far more superficial
than that which made the Romans accept the authority of
Stilico, Vandal as he was ; and, unlike Stilico, Gainas had
married a Gothic wife. He was a barbarian whose nobler
qualities had been almost obliterated by contact with cult
ure, while the inherent vices of his race — ambition, ava
rice and revenge — had only been stimulated into excessive
violence. He was a noble-looking Amal, like those whom
Chrysostom had admired in the streets of Antioch, though
the natural beauty and manliness of his countenance had
been spoiled by the dominance of selfish passions.
But, like all men who were really men, he felt a deep
and genuine reverence for the Archbishop of Constanti
nople. He was struck by his natural dignity, and won by
his transparent sincerity and straightforwardness. He
distinguished between him and the ordinary mass of soft
nobles and corrupt officials Avith whom he had to do.. He
recognised in him a prophet and a man of God. He
felt that if there had been such a religious leader among
the Arians his own religious convictions might have
exercised a more real sway over his heart. Mentally, he
always compared him to the Apostle of the Goths, as he
had been described to him by his father, whom Wulfila
had converted.
And something of admiration, Avith more of pity, filled

242 GATHERING CLOUDS
the heart of Chrysostom as he thought hoAv different,
under better influences, this tall, fair-haired barbarian
might have become. Had he but been orthodox — had he
but been throAvn with true Christians, not with nominal
professors of the faith — this noble specimen of humanity
might have been one of the glories of the Gospel in the
day Avhen Christ made up His jewels.
It Avas impossible to mistake the genuine reverence of
the warrior's manner as he rose to receive his visitor. In
sign of deep humility he took the hands of Chrysostom,
and laid them on his oavii eyes. Then he summoned his
two sons, Thorismund and Walamir, from the neighbour
ing tent, and, leading them to Chrysostom, bade them
kneel and embrace his holy knees, Avhile he asked the
Archbishop to bless them. Chrysostom laid his hand on
the fair, short curls of each sunny head, and made over
them the sign of benediction. Then the two youths
advanced eagerly to Philip, avIio at once recognised them,
as they recognised him, with cordial greeting, though
several years had passed since they had met at Antioch
during the visit of Rufinus. They had never seen Euty
ches before, but looked with frank admiration at his
winning face.
While the youths stood apart the Archbishop told
Gainas that he had not been commissioned to come to
him either by the Emperor, or by Eudoxia, or by any
official. He had come at the spontaneous instigation of
compassion. Aurelian was a friend whom he highly
esteemed, and Saturninus had been a worthy and valued
servant of the Empire. Of Count John he kneAvless, but
none of the three had ever injured Gainas, and it was
unworthy of him to wreak on them a vague desire for
vengeance. ' They are the foes of my countrymen,' said Gainas.
' The Roman party, of which Aurelian is the head, wants
to sweep us back across the Ister. It was Aurelian who
procured for Bishop Synesius the permission to deliA'er
that oration before Arcadius in which he openly argued
that we should be cashiered from all offices, and not even
be suffered to serve in the army.'
' I do not share those opinions,' said Chrysostom. ' I

THE GOTHS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 243
am one of those who have long thought that our race,
weakened by luxury and indolence, needs the infusion of
fresh blood. I have long looked forward to see Roman
and Teuton united in one nobler nation. Yet, remember
that the views of the Roman party are not unnatural.
The Goths in the Empire are but of yesterday in a nation
which has been dominant for a thousand years.'
' Yes, and foully have we been treated,' said the Goth.
' Consider how we are subjected to the infamous exactions
of Lupicinus, the corrupt and greedy Governor of Valens
in Thrace. Consider the massacre of our glorious youth
in the cities of the East. Know you that my own eldest
son was murdered in that foul butchery ? '
' I knew it not,' said the Archbishop. ' I grieve for thee.
But there ha\re been wrongs on both sides. It is needless
now to enter into the terrible and chequered past — the
massacre of Adrianople, the devastation of Illyria by Alaric,
of Phrygia by Tribigild, your kinsman. Aurelian and the
others are in nowise responsible for the old wrongs. Surely
your sense of nobleness may be touched by the fearless loy
alty with which they have, of their own accord, placed their
lives at your disposal? Spare them, Gainas, and rise supe
rior to your own lower self. Eutropius may have injured
you ; Aurelian never did.'
' We still have bitter wrongs to avenge,' said the warrior.
' Which is nobler,' said Chrysostom, ' revenge or forgive
ness? Revenge and wrong still bring forth fresh tiger-
whelps which resemble their parents. Since I came to
Constantinople I have learnt a little Gothic, that I might
sometimes minister in the church of the orthodox Goths.
Have you never read these words?' He repeated from
the version of the Lord's Prayer by Wulfila the words:
' Yah aflet uns thatei skulans siyaima, swa swe yah weis
afletain thaim skulam unseraim' ('And let off us that
which debtors we are, so as also we let off our debtors').
'I cannot answer you now,' said Gainas. 'Your elo
quence and your presence bewitch me, and calm down the
rancour in my heart. Come again, Patriarch ; I love to
talk to you. And, ere you go, bless me. I am not alto
gether the demon you take me for.'
' 'A demon! — no!' said the Patriarch. 'Not a demon,

244 Gathering clouds
Gainas, but a noble human being who has too much given
place to the devil. But promise me you will take no step
until you have told me of your decision.'
' I promise,' said Gainas.
' Thorismund,' said Philip to the Gothic youth, ' inter
cede with your father for the life of Aurelian when we
have gone. Aurelian is a noble felloAv.'
'Let that lad with the angel's face make me the same
request,' said Thorismund. 'I should like to hear his
voice.' ' I don't wonder at that,' said Philip, ' for he is a choris
ter, and has the sweetest voice in Constantinople.'
' What makes him look so unlike the Greeks and Romans
here ? ' asked Thorismund.
' Is it your Gothic Avay to compliment each other ? ' said
Eutyches, blushing. ' But I do beg you to intercede with
your father. And you' also, Walamir. And you must
listen to me, for though my father Avas a Roman, my
mother was a Gothic lady.'
' Ah ! ' said Thorismund, ' I thought that you must
have some Gothic blood in you, from the colour of your
hair ; you look too ingenuous for a Roman.'
' Babai ! ' exclaimed Philip ; ' that's a poor compliment
to me.'
' Oh ! you are a Syrian,' said Thorismund ; ' but Ave Avill
speak to our father for your friends.'

THE DOOMED THREE 245

CHAPTER XXXI
THE DOOMED THREE
' Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die.' Byron, Manfred.
' Well, has John talked you . over ? ' asked Typhos, with
a sneer, coining forward from another part of the tent
when Chrysostom had left.
' He has not,' said Gainas.
' Good ! ' said Typhos. ' Leave the little man to deal
with his priests. They, I imagine, will give him enough
to do ere long, and they all hate him like poison.'
' Because he is the best among them all,' said Gainas.
'It may be so,' said Typhos, with a shrug of his
shoulders ; ' but he has no right to come interfering with
you.' He proceeded to undo all the good that the Patriarch
had done by appealing to every evil passion in the warrior's
nature — pride, ambition, and revenge. Gainas almost
decided to execute his three opponents, and so to sweep
them out of the Avay. But Avhen Typhos had gone his
tAvo sons came in.
' Father,' said Thorismund, ' don't behead those men.
They behaved nobly in giving themselves up.'
' What cause have Ave to love or to spare these Romans,
Thorismund ? '
• 'Yet spare them, father! They are voluntary hostages
in your hands. Their lives may serve you better than
their deaths.'
' Is it policy or compassion, son ? '
' Perhaps a little of both, father.'
' And what says my Walamir?' asked Gainas.
' Spare them, father,' said Walamir, who Avas his father's
favourite. ' That boy who looked as if he had never done

246 gathering clouds
wrong in his life asked us both to intercede with you, and
we promised — and he is half a Goth.'
' I will think of it,' said Gainas.
While the fate of the three great officials yet hung in
the balance, no day passed without a visit from the Arch
bishop to the tent of the Gothic chief. He would have
carried his point almost from the first but for the counter
mining efforts of Typhos and of the chieftain's wife, who
had been won over by the wife of Typhos. And these,
again, would have succeeded more easily but for the faith
ful influence of Thorismund and Walamir. So there was
a struggle in the mind of the magister militum, between
the impulse of the barbarian and the softening influence
of his imperfect Christianity ; and it was far from certain
which Avould win the victory. Chrysostom was always
accompanied by Philip, and generally by either Eutyches
or David. While he was pleading with the chieftain, the
Gothic youths took their friends round the camp, to repay
Philip, Thorismund said, for his kindness to them at
Antioch. .
One day, when Chrysostom told them that he should
be detained by business for some hours at Chalcedon, and
bade them come for him in the evening, they seized the
opportunity to take the young Goths to the Patriarcheion
at Constantinople, and to show them the chief sights of
the city. There sprang up between them one of those
warm friendships which often arise amid complete dis
similarity. At last the Archbishop triumphed. He received from
Gainas the definite promise that the lives of Aurelian,
Saturninus, and Count John should be spared. He begged
that he might go to the tent where they still lay, fettered,
under the close guard of Gothic sentries, and be the first
to break to them the glad intelligence.
' Nay,' said Gainas, with a grim smile ; ' I have reasons
of my OAvn why that must not be. Farewell, Archbishop !
Whatever happens in the future — and many things may
happen ¦ — you at least I shall ever hold in honour, and I
beg your prayers. Farewell, but leave those two }rouths
here with my young wolf-cubs. They shall bear you
news of what I do.'

THE DOOMED THREE 247
So Chrysostom went back over the Bosporus, and Avhen
Gainas saw his pinnace on its way, he told his boys to
keep Philip and Eutyches Avith them at the end of the
tent, and not to let them move, but at the same time not
to be themselves alarmed by what they should see. Then,
with a colossal Goth by his side, who leaned on a huge
sword, and whom Thorismund knew to be the execu
tioner, the chieftain ordered Aurelian to be brought into
his presence.
The noble Roman was led in, and neither his chains nor
his untrimmed beard and hair, and the squalor of his im
prisonment, detracted from a dignity of bearing worthy of
the Praetorian Praefect and Consul-designate. He glanced
at the executioner, but did not wince, and confronted the
Gothic Amal with an undaunted look.
' So you are the man,' said Gainas, rudely, ' who wants
me to be ousted from all my offices ? You are the man to
whom all Goths are contemptible Scythians, little better
than animals, who ought to be turned out of the Roman
armies in a mass, and I suppose massacred, as some of
them have been ere now, by you holy Romans.'
' You wrong me, chieftain,' answered Aurelian calmly,
' and you know that you wrong me. I have never despised
your countrymen : there is much in them that I admire. .
As for massacre, I loathe and abhor it. Let there be
Goths in Gothland, and Romans for the Empire, and let
them be allies and friends. But it boots not to argue. I
am ready for my fate.'
' Prepare, then, to die,' said Gainas. ' Kneel at this block.'
' One moment, and I am ready,' he said. He folded
his hands, turned his gaze heavenwards, and his lips
moved in silent prayer. ' Now strike,' he said ; ' I am a
Christian. A Christian does not fear to die.'
He bowed his head, and the executioner raised his
mighty sword. Eutyches trembled and turned deadly
pale. An involuntary cry of anguish and despair had
fcurst from the lips of Philip, and he Avould have sprung
forward, but Thorismund held him back with a hand of
iron, and, putting his other hand upon Philip's lips, whis
pered, 'Hush! Fear not! My father is not a Roman.
He keeps his word.'

248 GATHERING CLOUDS
Down swept the sword, and a rude laugh burst from the
Gothic chieftain's lips. For the descending glaive had
but touched the neck of Aurelian. It had not made a
scratch. It had not eAren drawn blood.
' Rise, Aurelian,' said Gainais, ' and thank the Patriarch
John that your life is spared.'
It was a frightful experience. The sudden revulsion
of feeling was infinitely trying, but the Roman was mas
ter of himself. Rising from the block, he boAved, and
said nothing. Even Gainas Avas struck with admiration.
' Strike off his chains,' he said, ' and lead him away. Only
keep him under guard.'
' Let me go away,' said Eutyches to Walamir. ' This
grim jest is cruel.'
' Nay, you must see it, Eutyches, and tell the Patriarch,'
said Walamir; 'but no blood will be shed.'
Then Saturninus was led in; and he, too, did nothing
common or mean, but bore himself worthily of a Consular
of Rome.
'Kneel, enemy of the Goths!' said Gainas. 'There is
the block. Prepare to die.'
'I have faced death many a time on the battlefields
where I have defeated your countrymen. I am a soldier
and a Roman. Slay me if thou wilt. There is a God in
heaven who will avenge my blood.'
Again the executioner lifted his two-handed SAVord;
again he arrested the blow in mid-air, and only grazed the
neck of the Consular.
' Rise ! Go ! ' said Gainas ; ' you are not dead. Thank
the Patriarch John for your life. Unchain him. Lead
him away.'
Count John was led in last. He was white as death.
He trembled as he saw the huge executioner wiping his
sword, as though from the stain of blood.
' So you are the loArer of the Empress,' said Gainas, dis
dainfully, for he despised the man. ' You are the father
of the Emperor's children. You are the man who Aveaves
plots in the Gynaeceum Avith hags like Marsa and Epi-
graphia.' Count John summoned up all the dignity and fortitude
which he could command. ' Kill me,' he said Avith trem-

THE DOOMED THREE 249
bling lips, ' if you will, but spare your brutal taunts, and do
not slander the sacredness of your Empress.'
' A Frankish woman, an adulteress ; no Empress of mine,'
said Gainas, pointing to the block. ' Kneel. You shall
die.' Count John, who had been one of the gilded youth —
one of the many handsome dandies of Constantinople Avho
murmured at the weight of their own rings and silken dress
— a lady's man, and a debauchee, could not pretend to
regard death lightly, as the Christian and the soldier had
done. A blood-red mist seemed to sweep over his eyes.
He stumbled piteously as he felt for the block.
' Strike ! ' said Gainas. The sword swished frightfully
through the air, and inflicted on the Count's neck a wound
slight indeed, but a trifle deeper than the barely visible
scratch which had been given to the others.
' Rise,' said Gainas, laughing once more. ' You are not
dead, coward.'
But John rose not. Overcome with the horror of the
moment, sensible that the sword had cut his skin, he had
swooned away. Gainas sprang forward, a little alarmed.
' Has terror done the work of the glaive?' he cried, seizing
the arm of Count John. 'No; his pulse beats. He has
only fainted. Fling a bucket of cold water over him.
Carry him away. Enough, Wolf, for the day,' he said to
the executioner. ' There is a gold-piece for thee. Go ! '
Philip and Eutyches were deeply agitated by this stern
spectacle. ' Go back to the Patriarch, and tell him what
you have witnessed,' said Gainas. ' Tell him I have kept
my word; and though I have thoroughly frightened his
three friends — and I really am sorry for Aurelian — I spare
their lives, though so many in the city and in the camp have
urged me night and day to slay them. I swore that they
should kneel at the block, and they have done so. Tell
him further, that for his sake I shall send them into banish
ment, that they may do me no more mischief ; but I shall
not even forfeit their goods. I am not a Rufinus ; I am
not a Eutropius.'
' We Avill tell him, sir,' said Philip.
' My father, you see, has kept his Avord,' said Thorismund
to Philip.

250 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Yes, Thorismund,' said Philip, ' but it was a grim and
cruel jest.'
' It Avas meant to be more than a jest,' said the young
Goth. 'But it will not hurt them. They are men — at
least two of them are.'
The face of Eutyches had not recovered its colour.
His intensely sympathetic character and quick imagina
tion always made him suffer with those whom he saw
suffer. He felt as if he, too, had knelt at the block,
expecting instant death, and had heard the sword rush
down. Walamir was still holding his hand, and swinging
it uneasily, as though he would fain apologise to his Avounded
feelings. At iast he said : ' Do not think Avorse of us, Eutyches.
We are altogether Goths, not Romans or half-Romans.
Trained in raids, or battles and hardships, we think far
less of scenes which seem terrible to you.'

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE 251

CHAPTER XXXII
THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE
Now there was found in that city a poor, wise man, and he by his
wisdom delivered the city ; yet no one remembered that same poor man.
Eccl. ix. 15.
After these events it really seems as if Gainas, to use a
modern expression, had completely lost his head, or, to
give the view of it taken by himself and his contempo
raries, as if a demon had begun to trouble him; for his
conduct became aimless and uncertain. Discontent, re
venge, ambition, and evil counsels destroyed in him all
capacity for wise and generous policy. Contact with the
elements of a corrupting civilisation had deadened in him
the savage virtues of his race, and gave nothing better to
restore his moral balance.
He and Tribigild carried their armies across the Bosporus
into Europe, so that Constantinople found herself over
shadowed by a host of 30,000 men, of Avhom the vast
majority Avere Gruthongs and other tribes of Ostrogoths.
The city had nothing to oppose to them at the moment but
the insignificant handful of Palace troops who were re
sponsible for the immediate safety of the Emperor. The
gates, the barracks, the walls were all in the hands of bar
barians, whose allegiance was wavering, and whose ultimate
objects Avere uncertain. The year 400 opened with the
worst and darkest omens of misery and fear.
For the dominance of the Goths had rendered it neces
sary to fill the high office of Praetorian Praefect, from which
Aurelian had been expelled, by the elevation of Typhos,
his Avicked and unnatural brother. And Typhos inaugu
rated a reign of terror more intolerable than that of Eutro
pius had ever been. He oppressed the provinces Avith
frightful taxes ; he sold the governorships to the highest

252 GATHERING CLOUDS
bidder. Civil office could be purchased by the worst of
reprobates, if they had enough of base skill or of ill-gotten
gold to flatter or bribe the dissolute wife of the new
Minister. Almost every independent voice was silenced.
Synesius, with faithful friendship, did his utmost to sup
port the cause of his friend Aurelian, and had even publicly
pleaded in the presence of his brother. The only result
Avas that Synesius himself was noAV kept under close sur
veillance, and was refused permission to return to his
native Cyrene. Often in those bad days he sought the
counsel of Chrysostom, and, though they were men of
Avidely different sympathies, they had many an interesting
discussion. But for the time being the Patriarch was
personally powerless. The Empress, finding that she
could not make him her tool, was already beginning to
turn against him.
Indeed, the times were very dark. ' Everything,' said
Chrysostom in a sermon delivered at this time, 'is full of
fright, danger, mistrust, trembling and despair; no one
trusts another, everyone is terrified of his neighbour ; no
friend seems sure, no brother trustAvorthy. The civil war
raging in the midst of our society pervades not only all
open, but all secret, relations. Everywhere are countless
treacheries and dark concealments. Under the sheepskins
are hidden a thousand wolves, so that we almost feel more
confidence in the midst of open enemies than of semblable
friends. They who greeted us yesterday with profound
respect, and kissed our hands, to-day have flung aAvay
their masks, and have not only assumed the guise of
enemies, but of our bitterest accusers.'
So Gainas overshadowed the miserable city from with
out ; and Typhos and his wife, and Eudoxia and her Court,
caballed within ; and the Arians, aided by barbarians and
false Romans, resumed the high hopes which they once had
had of winning back the East to the creed of the Council
of Rimini.
As for Tribigild, we hear no more of him. He went
glimmering back into the night whence he had emerged.
He died about this time, suddenly, and not without sus
picious circumstances.
But now Gainas was goaded to shoAv his ascendency

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE 253
by demanding from Arcadius the cession of one of the
churches of Constantinople for the exclusive possession of
the Arians. The only church at present assigned to them
was outside the Avails. ' It is not reasonable,' said Gainas
to the Emperor, ' it is an insult to my dignity, that I, the
commander-in-chief of the forces of the East, and now
the Consul-designate, should be forced to steal out of the
city to worship outside the walls.'
The Emperor, as usual, drifted impotently between ' I
would ' and ' I dare not.' He hated to say ' Yes,' yet hoAv
could he venture in the presence of superior force to say
' No ' ? Chrysostom, hearing of the Goth's requisition,
went to the Palace, and told Arcadius that under no cir
cumstances must he comply with the demand; at what
ever cost, he must peremptorily refuse. The helpless
sovereign clutched at any straw. ' This,' said he to Gainas,
'is a religious question. The Patriarch desires to discuss
it with you in person. Meet him at the Palace in my
presence to-morrow.'
Gainas was nothing loth. Strange to say, he prided
himself on being an irresistible theologian. In earlier days
he had maintained a lively controversy with the far-famed
Egyptian eremite, St. Nilus, in which the Goth boasted,
perhaps seriously imagined, that he had Avon the victory
in argument in favour of the Arian as against the Catholic
creed. He came to the Palace with some of the leading
clergy of the Arian party, and Chrysostom came with some
of his bishops. The interview did not, however, take the
form of a theological controversy, for, in truth, Gainas felt
himself quelled and dominated by the saintly dignity and
fearlessness of the Archbishop. His genius felt rebuked
in that holy presence, and he cowered before John as the
birds cower and lie low when the eagle is in the air. He
did not venture to cross swords with the eloquent Patriarch
in questions of faith and dogmatic definition, but, taking
an entirely different ground, he said:
' I demand a church — one church only — for myself
and my fellow-Arians. Is it just that I should be refused
a church in the city I defend ? '
' Refused a church ? ' said Chrysostom. ' Every church
alike in the city is freely open to you.'

254 GATHERING CLOUDS
' But the opinions they represent are not mine.'
'Is the Catholic Church to alter her opinions to suit
you? Is she to cancel the canons at Avhich her assembled
Bishops and Fathers, headed by such men as Athanasius
and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, deliberately arrived in the
CEcumenical Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople ? Are
creeds to be abandoned and betrayed under the terror of
armed forces ? '
' I have been treated,' said Gainas, ' with injustice and
ingratitude. Am. I not the protector of the East? Did I
not help the Emperor Theodosius to defeat the usurper
Maximus at the great battle of Siscia, and the usurper
Eugenius at the great battle of the Frigidus ? '
' Treated with ingratitude, Gainas ? ' said Chrysostom.
' You amaze me. Surely your services have been not only
amply, but even superabundantly, rewarded. You came
over the Danube a fugitive Goth. You came in hunger,
you came in rags, you came a suppliant for our mercy,
when the Huns were driving you before them like drift
on the sea-wave. Were you not received into the pity and
protection of the Empire? Consider what you now are,
and what you then Avere. You are standing here in the
Palace, splendid in your armour, in the Consular orna
ments, a Count and Magister Militum of the forces of the
East, talking face to face to the Emperor, and. almost
daring to address him on equal terms.'
'I have the right to demand what I wish,' said Gainas,
sullenly. ' How the right ? Where is your solemn oath of alle
giance to Theodosius? Where your fidelity? '
' I can demand what I choose.'
' Yes, if you are false to your allegiance ; but the Em
peror cannot grant your petition. The laws of God tran
scend the laws of man. Emperor, you will refuse, will
you not? Better to lose empire, better to lose life
itself, than be untrue to the Lord who bought you, Whose
you are, and Whom you serve.'
At such high and dauntless words Arcadius plucked up
his courage. ' You see, chieftain,' he said, ' that your
request is impossible. I dare not grant anything against
the rights and privileges of the Church of God.'

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE 255
Gainas was angry, but he was also abashed.
' Then it is useless for me to stay here any longer,' he
said, rudely turning away. 'But it may be you will live
to rue this day.'
' Do you threaten ? ' asked Chrysostom sternly. ' Nay,
Gainas, let your better mind, your better heart, prevail.
Listen not to evil counsellors. Seek not thus madly your
own ends. The path of duty is the path also of safety, of
happiness, and of glory.'
Gainas looked at him almost with a look of appeal.
He humbled himself so far as to kiss his hand. He would
fain, but he dared not, have asked his blessing. But they
never met face to face again.
When the chief left the Palace he strode with great
strides through the city, back to his house, full of sullen-
ness, of fury, of mad plans, which chased each other
through his brain. Now his better self won the victory,
and he determined to abandon wild dreams of universal
dominance, and become a true soldier of the Empire in
the East, as Stilico was in the West; and his two boys
did their utmost to encourage this mood. But then, again,
the sinister shadow of Typhos would fall over him, and
his mind became as that of a demon.
It Avas this mood which, unhappily, prevailed. Two
desperate plans suggested themselves to him, one after
the other. One Avas to plunder the treasures of the gold
smiths and bankers, whose massive plate and uncounted
stores, displayed in their bazaars and offices, excited the
mad cupidity of the worst of his barbarian followers ; the
other, to fire the Palace, and rifle its purple chambers of
their jewels and hoards of gold — and so, in either case,
to break openly with the Roman Empire, and Avith all
civilisation, and fight his way to some independent king
dom of his own.
Both plans were odious to Thorismund, his eldest son.
Though he was so young, he exercised a strong and whole
some influence over his father, which might have saved
him from utter ruin, if it had not been counteracted by
the intrigues of his mother, who was wholly in league
with Typhos and his wife. Thorismund could have no
scruple in endeavouring to defeat designs which he regarded

256 GATHERING CLOUDS
as wicked, dishonourable, and disastrous; for his views
were also the views of the best, Avisest, and least barbarous
of the Gothic chieftains, and of all those Goths avIio,
though they were Arians, were sincere in their adherence
to the morals of the Gospel. They held a secret council,
and empowered Thorismund to use every legitimate
endeavour to prevent the accomplishment of the maraud
ing treachery, which could not but bring on them imme
diate ruin and ultimate destruction. They saw that Gainas
had miscalculated his power and influence, and that, as
Roman troops were being gradually called into the city
by the order of Arcadius, their wisest as well as their
worthiest policy would be to keep the Gothic army on
the footing which had existed previous to the revolt of
Tribigild. To Thorismund, therefore, the noblest leaders entrusted
the task of saving Gainas and the whole body of the Goths
from ultimate ruin by any means in his power. In
deepest secrecy he sought his friend Philip, told of the
nefarious plots Avhich were being concocted, and asked his
advice how best to counteract them without any open
catastrophe. 'Think not, Philip,' he said, 'that in seeking you I
am acting as a traitor to my father, or to my own people.
My father is not himself. I have often heard him groan
ing in his room, and murmuring that his soul is in the
possession of an evil demon. I think that the bad Typhos
must have beAvitched him. Several of the greatest of our
allied chiefs, and his own officials, have authorised me to
save him if I can from this dire infatuation. To reveal
the existence of these plans to the Court or to the people
would be to betray this city to flames and massacre. You
must not tell any great man, you must not even tell John
the Patriarch. The peril must be averted by secret means.'
' Let me think,' said Philip ; and then, when a plan
suggested itself to his quick intelligence, he asked : ' Tell
me two things only, and I will, God helping me, save
your father from this madness, and save the Goths, and
this city, and the Empire. First, May I tell my two
friends, David and Eutyches, whom you know and love?
next, Are the days fixed for these attempts ? '

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE 25?
' I trust your friends as I trust you,' said Thorismund ;
' you are innocent ; you fear God ; He is with you. One
day is fixed for both designs — it is three days hence.
The banks and bazaars are to be pillaged in the morning,
the Palace to be attacked and fired that night. Be wise ;
be secret.'
' Wise as Solomon,' said Philip, smiling to reassure him ;
' secret as death ! '
The young Goth departed, and Philip called David and
Eutyches to council. 'Now, first,' he said, 'keeping this
peril utterly secret from the world in general, how are we
to save the vast treasure of the banks from robbery ? '
David gave his counsel. ' There are,' he said, ' fourteen
districts of the city, and there are rich shops and banks
in only six of them. Let us each undertake two districts.
Let us ask him for a day's holiday, as there is no immedi
ately pressing correspondence. Then let us each take
two districts, and go round in disguise — for that is essen
tial — ¦ to the banks, ask for a private interview with the
head of each, hand him an unsigned letter of warning,
and be off.'
'Disguise!' asked Eutyches; 'how can we manage that?'
'Easily,' said David; 'my father, with the help of
Miriam and her servants, will easily supply us, and we can
steal out at early morning, or at dusk, or, perhaps better
still, at the noonday siesta.'
' Good ! ' said Philip. ' I will Avrite a letter, and Ave
will all make copies of it.'
He wrote : ' Be warned ! Guard your offices, and re
move your treasures for a week to a safe place. Brigands
abroad ! Keep this profoundly secret, or all is lost. —
A Friend.'
They carried out their plan that very evening and the
next morning. It Avas entirely successful. Every banker
and merchant took the hint, and kept his own counsel.
People vainly wondered why the city looked so much less
glittering and gay. The Goths noticed it, too, and saw
that their very loosely guarded secret had got wind. It
did not surprise them; but the intended attack on the
Palace had only been announced to few, and remained
unsuspected.

258 GATHERING CLOUDS
Philip and his friends had not seen how this tremen
dous peril was to be averted. The suggestion came from
Eutyches. 'The Goths,' he said, 'are given over to superstition.
Their terrors of the supernatural are easily excited, and
men are always cowards when they are engaged in nefa
rious deeds. There are no troops to hold the Palace, if
they choose to assault it. Could they not in some way be
terrified from it ? '
' Excellent ! excellent, my Eutyches ! ' cried Philip.
' You are a very Daniel. Just now the Goths are in such
a state of tremor that the sound of a shaken leaf would
make them fly ; that sword-shaped comet, that has seemed
to be rushing eastward from the constellation Cepheus,
has frightened us all ; but to them it has seemed a terrific
omen. And I have heard them talking of a dozen other
portents, especially of an armed colossal vision of the
Archangel Michael, towering over the city and waving
them northward. At this very moment they think that
the powers of Heaven are declaring against them.'
' But we can't get into the Palace,' said David ; ' and
who could trust that mass of corrupt officials and pampered
slaves ? '
'I know two thoroughly good men in the Palace
intimately,' said Philip. ' Amantius is a true Christian,
and he has been my warm friend ever since I travelled
with him from Antioch, when they entrapped the Patri
arch. Briso is also indebted to me, for when he got hit
on the head by a stone by one of the Arian processionists,
and might have been trampled under foot, it was I who
dragged him out of danger, and conducted Mm home.
Both are chamberlains of the Empress.'
' Capital ! ' said Eutyches. ' Then the servants of
Arcadius himself need know nothing about it. Now,
mark — the only places the Goths can attack are either the
wall of the Palace opposite the Hippodrome, at the Royal
Gate, or the short, high wall at the back of the Imperial
Gardens, towards the Bosporus. Station a few ghosts or
angels at both, and the Palace will be saved.'
' Ghosts and angels indeed ! ' said Philip, pulling his
hair. ' Did you ever hear such a midnight conspirator,

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE 259
David? He will be trying some of his ghosts or angels
on us next.'
' Well, it is surely fair, is it not ? ' said Eutyches. ' Did
not Onias, the High Priest, frighten Heliodorus out of
the Temple at Jerusalem by two youths with scourges,
whom the robber took for an angelic vision?'
' Onias ! ' said Philip. ' Oh, you heretic ! Who told
you it was Onias ? It was two real angels. Do you think
all ghosts and angels are of your sort?'
' Never mind his chaff, Eutyches,' said David. ' Your
suggestion is a brilliant one. If the Palace is saved, it
will be you Avho have saved it.'
' All right, you conspiring Onias,' said Philip. ' Now I
am off for a secret interview Avith Amantius and Briso.'
The tact, quickness, and consummate good-sense of
the young Antiochene made him an admirable manager
of practical business. Knowing that Amantius was ex
perienced and altogether trustworthy, and that no time
was to be lost, he first pledged the Chamberlain to secrecy
by a solemn oath, and then told him of the contemplated
attack, concealing only the name of Gainas, and speaking
of a loose raid of undisciplined barbarians. He pointed
out that if once a riot or tumult arose, the consequence
might be incalculably disastrous, and that if the Goths
rose in a body, nothing could prevent the sack and burn
ing of the Palace.
Amantius literally trembled in his shoes, and said,
' Surely it is my plain duty to tell the Emperor at once.'
' Nay,' said Philip, ' you have pledged yourself by oath
not to do so ; and if you do, you will precipitate the ruin
which can now be averted.'
' Who told you of this ? ' asked Amantius. ' What do
you suggest ? '
' Your Dignity must not ask who told me,' said Philip ;
' but you know me, and I am sure that you can and do
trust me perfectly.'
' I do,' said Amantius heartily ; ' but Avhat can be done ? '
' Do not laugh, sir,' said Philip ; ' but the Goths are
children of superstition, and I am convinced that by a
very little contrivance, and at no cost, they may he simply
frip-htened from the Palace.'

260 GATHERING CLOUDS
' I am not skilful, I fear, at masquerades,' said Aman
tius. ' Will your Dignity ask the almoner Briso to come and
consult with us ? '
'Yes,' said Amantius gladly. 'He is much younger
than I, and will help us in this very quaint manner of
averting an aAvful peril much better than I can.'
Briso came. He had plenty of shrewdness and humour,
and it was settled that Amantius should leave all details
to him and Philip, only procuring permission for the free
admittance of himself and his two friends to the walk
which ran along under the immediate summit of the Palace
wall. Briso suggested to Philip that they might utilise
the abundant skill of some of the acrobats of the theatre —
not, of course, letting them into the secret, but only tell
ing them that a silent masquerade was being got up by
some of the Palace servants, and that they were simply to
follow Philip's directions. Leave was obtained for a little
private scene and frolic for a few of Briso's friends. Mir
rors, hidden lights, white robes, stilts, and other scenic
stage properties Avere kept in readiness, and by midnight
all Avas ready. Of course the Goths did not approach en
masse. They crept noiselessly, in small groups, with
muffled tread, from various quarters ; and as the earliest
comers glanced upwards at the Palace, they saw strange
effects. There Avere all sorts of mysterious flashes of fire.
Gigantic figures robed in white gleamed out for a moment
and faded away. Beings of strange aspect, angels or
demons they knew not which, were moving to and fro.
A terror seized the barbarians. They hurried back to the
contingents whom they had left under arms in their camp.
They infected them with their OAvn mysterious and horror-
stricken dread. The shuddering soldiers declared that
nothing should induce them to brave such awful visitants.
The streets and Forum sank into the wonted midnight
silence. The mad designs of Typhos and Gainas had
failed, and the three youths Avho sat in the antechamber of
Chrysostom, unknown to all but one or two, had saved the
Emperor from assassination, the Palace from fire, the city
from pillage and slaughter, the Empire itself from disas
trous wars.

THREE YOUTHS SAVE CONSTANTINOPLE 261
But though the facts were unknown, it soon leaked out
from a multitude of sources that, by merest accident, Con
stantinople had escaped an overwhelming peril from the
hands of the Goths ; and it became more and more imper
ative to deliver the East from the foiked lightning which
now flashed with lurid and scarcely intermittent flames
across the whole horizon.

262 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXXIII
THE MASSACRE
Your hands are full of blood. — Isaiah i. 15.
Foiled at every turn, Gainas began to feel that his star
was no longer in the ascendant ; that fortune had aban
doned him ; that in the game of ambition he had been
finally defeated ; that Nemesis was but aAvaiting her oppor
tunity. Tormented more and more by indecision and dis
appointment, and seeing in their effects the anger of a
besetting demon, he gave out that he was ill, and that he
should resort to the Chapel of St. John the Baptist at the
Hebdomon. It was seven miles distant from the capital,
and stood on the scene of the murder of Rufinus. Gainas
said, ' I will pray for the recovery of my health.' He gave
secret orders to his army to join him there, not in one body,
but by detachments of ten thousand at a time. They were
to bring with them from Constantinople their wives, their
children — all their possessions. He felt that at Constan
tinople, as far as he was concerned, all was over. He
would throw himself back on the wild and roving life of
his ancestors. Asia had long been exhausted by rapine,
but he would plunder the cities of Thrace and of Europe,
and, making his Avay to the Danube, would there reoccupy
the wide regions of Avasted land, and make a new home for
his people away from the curse of a dying and polluted
civilisation. But now disaster after disaster befell him, and never
again did he enjoy a happy day.
Two-thirds of his army had joined him at the Hebdomon,
Avhen one of those Avorkings of God's unseen Providence,
by men nicknamed ' chance,' which by no means unfre-
quently have decided the mightiest crises of history, let

THE MASSACRE 263
loose the rush of the avalanche by which he was ultimately
to be ovei'Avhelmed.
It only remained for the last division of the Gothic sol
diers to shake the dust of Constantinople off their feet and
join their chieftain, eager for fresh fields and pastures new.
The city was full of the most painful disquietude and
alarm. What did the Goths intend ? Whither were they
going ? Was the end of the world at hand ? What pos
sible deliverance could be expected from the tyranny within
or the terror without ?
It was the 12th of July, 399. At the city gate of the
Blachernae suburb sat habitually an old beggar-woman. It
Avas morning, and she had noticed that since the early daAvn
the Goths had been stealing by hundreds out of the city.
She noticed, too, that they Avere all armed, though it
seemed as if they were trying to conceal their arms. She
was seized Avith misgiving. What were they going to do ?
Would they ere sunset assault and burn the city ? Drop
ping her beggar's dish, she wailed, and wrung her hands,
and cried aloud to the gods. The Goths but imperfectly
understood her words and her demeanour. They thought
that she was cursing and insulting them, and one of the fiery
barbarians lifted his sword to cleave her head. Indignant
at such treatment of an old and Avell-known figure, a Roman
struck the Goth to the ground. Then the Goths raised a
wild and angry cry, and curious spectators came flocking
up on every side. In the heat of the quarrel which arose
both the soldiers and the multitude assumed a most threat
ening attitude. As the people outnumbered the soldiers
in a proportion of three to one, the Goths became alarmed,
and blood began to flow freely on both sides. Meanwhile
the whole population of Constantinople seemed to be
gathering in the streets, and there was no mistaking the
significance of the fierce, indignant hum Avhich betrayed
the pent-up feelings of wrath with which the multitude
regarded these alien intruders, who had so long imposed
upon them an odious and insulting tyranny. At that early
hour of morning twilight, before the stream of business and
amusement had begun, all the citizens were free, and they
naturally thronged to the scene of combat. More than this,
the manhood of Constantinople showed on ail occasions a

264 GATHERING CLOUDS
more Roman, and therefore a more vigorous, manhood than
Avas the case in the other cities of the East. The most
fearless of them had not only seized whatever implements
Avere available, but had eagerly torn the swords out of the
grasp of the dead and wounded Goths, and were using them
Avith terrible effect. Hemmed in by a threatening mass of
infuriated and implacable enemies, some of the Goths
hewed their path to the nearest gate and forced their way
through. At the head of these was Thorismund, who had
been left to accompany the last contingent ; for the wife of
Gainas Avas so utterly reluctant to leave the charms of
security and civilisation for the roving life of incessant
battlefields, that she had been one of. the last to leave her
home Avith Walamir, her younger son. She was surrounded
by an escort of her countrymen, but they were far too few
for so frightful and unexpected an emergency. Thoris
mund and the soldiers with him had fought their way
safely out of the city, and, in the self-confidence of Gothic
courage, felt no doubt that the Avhole remainder of the
army would follow them. In this conviction they marched
forward, and chose a place for their camp at some distance
from the wall. But their conviction Avas mistaken. The
populace had completely got the upper hand over their
deeply disheartened and far-outnumbered opponents. In
that street warfare, suspecting treachery at every turn, the
Goths fought Avith far less than their usual resistless impet
uosity. They made a wild effort to keep their mastery
over the gate, to follow their comrades, or at the worst to
give them intelligence of their frightful position, and en
treat them to send reinforcements. But they were too late :
the citizens had seized and manned every path of egress.
When Typhos sent to them, demanding that the gates
should be handed over to his guards, so deep was their dis
trust of him that they flatly refused to obey. Conscious of
their success, they raised the paean of victory. The Goths
outside the walls, being at some distance, mistook its
import, and made sure that it meant the triumph of their
countrymen. One of the Goths managed at the point of
the sword to make his way out of the city by one of the
less guarded gates, and he undeceived them. Then Thoris
mund, at the head of all the most valiant Avarriors whom

THE MASSACRE 265
he could assemble, made his way back to the city. It Avas
in vain. Every gate was shut against him. The walls
bristled with hostile bows and spears. The young warrior
could only rage in vain, while within the fatal circle the hap
less barbarians got more and more entangled in the streets,
and were at last hemmed inextricably into one narrow
space, where, in despair almost too deep for attempted self-
defence, they were being hacked, and hewn down, and
stabbed by thousands of furious citizens, who were noAv
mostly armed.
Through the burning heat of that dreadful morning
the massacre went on, and a dozen Goths were struck
down by stones from the windows, or pierced with arrows,
or beaten to the ground with clubs and swords, for every
one of their assailants Avhom they slew. Religious hatred,
political hatred, race hatred, in their most enflamed bitter
ness, were incited to overwhelm for ever the detested,
overbearing, and heretical barbarians.
The horrid scene still continued, and all attempt at
interference Avould have been hopeless, for the multitude
was mad with rage and the gratification of long-suppressed
jealousy and revenge. The dominance of Gainas, in itself
sufficiently detestable to the citizens, was identified in
their minds with the still more execrated dominance of
Typhos. Now that chance seemed to have offered them
a hope of getting rid of both, they seized it with frantic
avidity. Not much of the tumult was witnessed by
Chrysostom, for the Silentiarii were posted at every
entrance to the Forum, in order to secure the protection
of the Palace. But his secretaries and some of the
presbyters now and then brought him some description
of the blood-bath which was deluging the streets, and
as at least 7,000 Goths were still pent up in the city, the
citizens, with scarcely any effectual retaliation, continued
to slay and slay and slay. Distressed by the cries which
reached his ears, and by his inability to prevent the
massacre, Chrysostom ventured to seek an interview with
Arcadius, and ask whether no energetic measure could be
resorted to which might stay the fury of the sword. But
the Emperor was stolidly obdurate. He regarded this
dire event as a Divine intervention to rid him, in a

266 GATHERING CLOUDS
manner wholly unexpected, alike of Gothic and of Arian
tyranny. Beyond protecting his own palace he refused to
give a single order or take a single step.
On the other hand, the ardent spirit of youth naturally
made it impossible for Philip and his two friends to sit
quietly in the protected Patriarcheion while so fierce a
battle was thundering through the city streets. It was
obvious that they could not join in the fighting, for Goths
and Byzantines alike were under the Archbishop's care ;
but if any opportunity offered itself for deeds of mercy
and service, they desired to seize it. All three of them
were parabolani — that is, they were members of a guild
ostensibly formed for the purpose of burying the dead, a
duty which was often difficult, and was sometimes shock
ingly neglected. But this was not their only function :
they Avere always ready for any other deed of mercy.
By the afternoon the bodies of several hundreds of the
Goths strewed the streets, and among them lay not a few
of the citizens who had perished in the dreadful encounter.
But seven thousand still remained, surrounded on every
side by myriads of threatening faces and fiercely bran
dished arms. They determined to make one more desper
ate effort for their lives, and the Avord was passed among
them to hew their way to the church Avhich had been
set apart for the worship of orthodox Goths. It Avas a
church in which Chrysostom had taken deep interest. He
had fancied that it might become a nucleus of proselytising
influence to win back this grand nation of barbarians to
the faith of the Catholics ; and he had even taken pains to
procure presbyters and mission-agents, familiar with the
Gothic language, to set before the Arians in their beloved
native tongue the fulness of the Nicene verity. Into this
church, then, the Goths determined to fight a passage,
feeling no doubt at all that the sacred right of asylum,
which had protected the life of Eutropius, Avould suffice
to secure their imperilled safety. It never occurred to
them that they, who had so long been servants of the
Empire, and had fought its battles, whatever may have
been the errors into which they had of late been misled by
their chiefs, would be treated with a fury too implacable to
be sated by anything short of their complete extermina-

THE MASSACRE 267
tion. So with stern faces they turned to bay, and, cleaving
themselves a lane through the living barrier of their ene
mies, fought their way towards the Gothic church. It was
outside the great Forum, though at no great distance from
it. They succeeded in their effort, though Avith ever-
diminished numbers, since the crowd harassed them at
every step and cut off every straggler.
David had been occupied in various parts of the city in
tending any wounded citizen whom he could help to his
home, or conduct to one of the Patriarch's hospitals. Euty
ches, who Avas much younger and of a more timid disposi
tion, strayed as little as possible from the side of Philip.
Their dress asparabolani accounted for their presence in the
streets in a peaceful capacity, and it Avas not long before
their benevolent efforts were signally rewarded ; for their
eyes were attracted by a spectacle which would have moved
a heart of stone.
In the centre of the stream of Goths, protected to the ut
most by their shields, yet very imperfectly sheltered from
the missiles hurled down on the doomed warriors from roofs
and lattices, walked a tall and stately woman Avith her son,
a boy of fifteen, a perfect type of manly Gothic beauty, by
her side. She was richly dressed, and the brooch which
fastened her embroidered robes was set with large emeralds,
but she was now in a deplorable condition of fatigue and
wretchedness. -Her long, fair tresses streamed dishevelled
over her shoulders : the jewelled ribbon of silk, Avhich had
confined them at the back of her head, had been torn away,
and they were stained with blood from a wound in her
forehead, caused by a stone, Avhich had struck her with
violence. With feelings harrowed to their depths, she
watched the awful catastrophe which had befallen this
mass of her fellow-countrymen ; and it had long dawned
on her mind that, in the crushing and crimson surge of
massacre which every now and then deluged the heteroge
neous conflict, and for which she herself felt partly guilty,
her life could only be saved by a miracle.
It was Liuba, the wife of Gainas, and the boy by her side
was Walamir, who had formed so romantic an affection for
Eutyches in his father's tent. Walamir had never looked
so beautiful or so noble. He was dressed in the armour of

268 GATHERING CLOUDS
his nation. The light of battle was in his eyes, and the sun
light which burned in his short, bright curls where they
were uncovered by his helmet, made a sort of nimbus round
his face. Boy as he was, he had fought like a hero. He
carried a drawn sword in his hand, and a bow and quiver
Avere slung over his back. Now and then, if chance offered,
he would thrust the sword into its scabbard, snatch an arrow
from his quiver, and aim it at some prominent assailant ;
but his mind was mainly absorbed in the effort to protect his
mother, to whom his restless glances constantly returned.
He himself had evidently been wounded. A sword-point
had pierced his leg, for he limped with painful efforts, and
often stumbled ; and he was pale Avith loss of blood from a
deep arrow-wound in his shoulder, which had dyed his
white tunic and the wolfskin belted across his breast with
deep red stains.
Eutyches was the first to catch a glimpse of him amid the
serried ranks of his warriors. He caught Philip's arms, and
cried in an agitated voice : ' Oh, Philip ! let us press as near
as we can, and try to save him.'
' We will, my boy,' cried Philip ; ' but oh ! I fear the case
is desperate.'
And now the Goths had reached the open space in front
of the church, and by a natural movement they rushed for
ward to gain the entrance. The crowd pressed still more
firmly on their ranks, to prevent them from reaching their
asylum. Walamir and his mother were thrust on one side
by the rush of the narrowing stream of soldiers, and, seizing
his chance, a brutal citizen smote the wife of Gainas on the
head with a club. She sank down Avithout a groan, and
would instantly have been trampled to death had not Philip
leapt forward, and, aided by Eutyches — for the costume
of the charitable brotherhood secured them from molestation
, — dragged her a little aside into the corner of the Galilee.
Walamir had cut down the cowardly striker of a woman
with a blow of his sword, and then, too faint from his
wounds to make any further effort, sank with a low wail
upon his mother's corpse.
Thousands of the Goths had now pressed into the
church, till it was full from end to end, and those who
could not enter were slain with scarcely the shadow of

THE MASSACRE 269
resistance. While the tumult roared about the gates one
rioter aimed an infamous blow at Walamir, who, lying
prostrate and with outstretched arms, was now conscious
of nothing but that his mother was dead and his people
were perishing. The force of the blow was broken, for
without a moment's hesitation Philip felled the man Avith
a blow on the temple from his clenched fist. But Wala
mir had swooned, and Philip and Eutyches, seeing that
his mother was past help, gently disengaged his arms from
her corpse. Philip had often been with his master to the
church, and was well acquainted with its precincts. The
humble residence of the presbyter, a venerable Goth, Avas
at the back of the church, and the entrance to it lay
through a shady little garden, entered by a wicket-gate
Avhich was scarcely observable amid the mass of creepers
which twined about it in rank luxuriance. Through this
wicket he and Eutyches carried the poor wounded lad, and
the humble presbyter, thankful for the opportunity of help
ing one of his countrymen, laid the young Ostrogoth on his
own bed, and entrusted him to the charge of his sister, who
kept his house.
There for a time we must leave him, and narrate the sav
age and shameful tragedy which thereon ensued. For not
even in the church were the hunted remnant of the Goths
to find a secure refuge. They were within ; they had barred
the gates ; they determined, if the place were assaulted by
violence, to sell their lives dear. But the mob of their as
sailants, thwarted for the moment, had forced their %ay
through the soldiers into the Forum, and were now yelling
at the Royal Gate of the Palace, demanding that Arcadius
should give them leave to violate the right of asylum and
• put a final end to the terror of Gothic intimidation. It
was always the impulse of Arcadius to yield. Perhaps he
thought it useless to attempt resistance. Perhaps he fan
cied in his muddled and bewildered religionism that a holo
caust of Arians could not but be a pleasing sacrifice to God.
Perhaps he fell back on his OAvn edict that State criminals
of the worst dye could not be protected by the rights of
sanctuary. Be that as it may, he declined to interfere.
Then the mob fleAV back to the church, pressed into their
service every ladder which could be found, swarmed to the

270 GATHERING CLOUDS
roofs of the sacred building, and tore them up, and broke
them down with axes and hammers and battering-rams.
BeloAV was the dreadful spectacle of thousands of Avarriors
densely wedged together in the sacred space, unable to de
fend themselves, unable to strike a single blow ; above, on
the ladders and walls and roofs, were the faces of their ene
mies, distorted by hatred and malignant triumph. There
are scenes and occasions in which men become transformed
into incarnate demons. It was so on that dreadful day
Avith the mob of Constantinople. Pitiless as at the games
of the Amphitheatre, they gloated on the final scene of
slaughter, Avhich incarnadined the sacred place with rivers
of gore. Many of the Goths, seeing their desperate ex
tremity, embraced their brethren-in-arms, and heroically
fell by their own or one another's friendly swords. Others
sat clown on the pavement, Avith their heads bowed upon
their knees, aAvaiting whatever form of death might come.
Many who were Christians joined in the lilt of some
Christian chant ; others who Avere still Pagans raised frag
ments of the songs of their native land. The butchery
did not last long Avhen hundreds were hurling down on
them showers of stones, and masses of burning wood, and
huge fragments of masonry, and most of them chose rather
to die by each other's hands. In the course of an hour
not one was left alive. Portions of the church had caught
fire, and there were places where the creeping streams of
fire were quenched in blood. By evening, through the dis
mantled roofs of the wrecked edifice, the silent heavens
looked down on masses of ruin, and blackened beams, and
shattered rafters, and heaps of dying men and charred
corpses, and broken arms.
History knows but of one scene Avhich resembles this.
in its tragedy : it is the massacre of Corcyra. But in the
massacre of Corcyra, B.C. 425, only 300 perished. That
was on Mount Istone, not in any temple or sacred place.
In this massacre at Constantinople 7,000 were helplessly
and pitilessly butchered in a church which but a day or
two before had rung with hymns and murmured with
prayers to the White Christ, to the God of all mercy and
all compassion.

GAINAS MEETS HIS DOOM " 271

CHAPTER XXXIV
GAINAS MEETS HIS DOOM
Desinat elatis quisquam confidere rebus,
Instabilesque Deos ac lubrica numina discat . . .
. . . Qui Sidonio velari credidit auro
Nudus pascit aves. Claud., In Rvf. ii. 440.
Such were the frightful tidings which reached the Ostro-
gothic chieftain in his camp at the Hebdomon. His wife
had been slain; one-third of his army had been massa
cred; the gates of Constantinople were closed, and its
walls garrisoned against him. His brave son, Thorismund,
was with him, but he knew not the fate of the son of his
heart, his beloved and beautiful Walamir. But there was
no time to waste in anguish or in funeral obsequies — the
case demanded instant action. Typhos was still left in
power as Praetorian Praefect at Constantinople, and with
Typhos he was in secret agreement. But this last thread
of hope was speedily cut short. True that Typhos seemed
almost indispensable to Arcadius for the moment, because,
bad as he was, the unscrupulous thoroughness of his im
partial oppression helped to replenish the exhausted
treasury. But the breach between the Emperor and the
Goths was now irreparable. Gainas was declared a public
enemy. An extraordinary commission was appointed to
examine into the misdeeds of Typhos. His manifold acts
of treachery were exposed. He was flung into prison.
For a time his execution was only averted by the inter
cession of Aurelian, who was now recalled from his un
deserved banishment. But doomsday came to Typhos at
last, as it comes in turn to all transgressors. Amid uni
versal detestation, unaided by the vast treasures he had
amassed for such brief enjoyment, he expiated his mani-

272 GATHERING CLOUDS
fold malfeasance under the hands of the common execu
tioner, and his wife died, shunned and execrated, in abject
misery. Gainas broke up his camp, and marched forward to
ravage the lands of Thrace. But there comes to many a
man Avho was once the spoiled favourite of fortune a time
when he finds that everything has turned for him to
thorns. Gainas and his army were utterly baulked of the
rich plunder which they had hoped to win from the depop
ulation of Thrace. The Romans had everywhere been
encouraged to contempt and defiance by the disaster of the
barbarians at Constantinople. Gainas found the cities not
undefended, like those of Asia ; not Avith crumbling Avails,
but poAverfully garrisoned and amply fortified. To take
them by siege was impossible : time and siege-trains alike
Avere lacking. In the place of harvests he found only
wastes of stubble : the fields had been reaped already, the
grain stored, the cattle driven into places of safety. It
seemed as if he and all his Goths were engaged in a
fruitless raid, in which at last they would be reduced to
starve. Overwhelmed with anxiety and despair, he made his
way towards the Hellespont. He would once more cross
to the lands of Asia, which, ravaged as they had been,
still seemed to offer an inexhaustible resource. But
meanwhile another event had happened.
Fravitta, a Goth by birth, a Pagan in religion, was, as
we have said, by conviction a member of the Roman party.
He had married a Roman Avife ; he accepted the duties of
civilisation as the only rdle hereafter open to his fellow-
countrymen. The line of Claudian was often on his
lips : — We are all one nation.
' Quod cuncti gens una sumus.'
Already, in his earlier days, he had, at peril of his own
life, saved Theodosius from the dangerous conspiracy of
Eriulph. His fiery youth was passed, but his courage was
unquenched, his allegiance unshaken. He came forward
and offered his sword and his services to Arcadius. The
Emperor elevated him to the rank of Commander-in-Chief

Gainas meets his doom 273
in place of Gainas, and he promised to make the rebellious
Goths accept the yoke, or to drive them back beyond the
Danube. The safety of Thrace had been practically secured by the
prudence of its own inhabitants and the bold front which
they presented to the enemy. Still, Fravitta watched the
movements of Gainas, and received early notice of his
intention to fall back on the Hellespont. Fravitta ar
ranged his forces on the Asiatic shore, and confronted
the Gothic army, which Avas extended along the coasts of
the Chersonese from Parium to opposite Abydos ; he also
assembled a fleet of Liburnian galleys to prevent the
passage of the straits.
Gainas grew desperate. He and his army were suffer
ing from the pressure of famine. Cross over to Asia he
must, at whatever cost ; and yet he had not a single ship,
and there was a fleet to bar his passage !
The Goths did not know the art of shipbuilding, and,
even had they done so, time would have failed them for
the purpose. Behind them was hungry desolation ; before
them a determined army and the wild sea-waves. Gainas
ordered every tree they could find in the peninsula to be
cut down, and rude rafts to be constructed from the
trunks lashed together. These rafts, helmless and rudder
less as they were, were laden with men and horses, and
launched to the chances of the sea-currents to sweep them
whither they would. Gainas felt strangely confident of
victory, and waited on. the shore to watch the success of
his plan. But Fravitta was more than ready for him.
His galleys were at some distance from the coast, and
he had armed them with iron prows. A strong west wind
came to his aid. No sooner did he observe the rafts in the
grasp of the isthmus-currents than he SAvept down on one
of the largest, split it, sank it, and dashed its struggling
occupants, cavalry and infantry together, into the deep sea.
Those who could not SAvim were instantly drowned, the
more easily because many of them were encumbered with
the weight of their armour. Those who could swim flung
away their arms ; but the galleys drove amongst them,
and struck them down, or they were pushed under the
billows by the points of hostile spears.

274 GATHERING clouds
In this way thousands were destroyed. Gainas saw a
vast contingent of his army perish ignominiously under
his very eyes. There was no possibility of assembling a
new host. His prestige was gone ; his auspices appeared
to be branded with fatality ; his troops were daily weak
ened by desertions. Already the advanced detachments
of Fravitta's Romans began to harry his rear as he fled
through the Thracian plains, so void of sustenance. In
despairing rage he slaughtered all the Roman hostages
and prisoners who were with him, and made his. way
towards the Danube, determined to re-seek the home of
his youth, and there achieve some fresh plan of vengeance,
or end the clouded and dishonoured remnant of his days.
By the time he reached the banks of the Danube there
were but few followers with him ; but among them were
his son Thorismund and the band of warriors who were
specially devoted to the service of that fine young chieftain.
Gainas, noAV more than ever in the grasp of the demon,
spurred his foaming warhorse towards the stream, plunged
recklessly into it, and swam it far ahead of the majority of
his folloAvers. Unhappily for him, the shore on which he
landed was in possession of the Huns and their king, Uldes.
This chieftain, who had many plans for the future, was
most anxious to gain the favour and confidence of the
Emperor of the East, and he well knew that he could offer
him no more precious gift than the head of the enemy who
for so many years had kept him in terrified subjection.
Gainas, with about a dozen of his escort, rode up to Uldes,
and asked permission simply to pass through his territory to
their own old lands. The ugly face of the Hun only gath
ered into a frown. He gave a signal to his troop, and they
closed in dense ranks round the unhappy Ostrogoth. He
saw that his time was come. One gleam of joy alone
lightened his last hour : it was that his son Thorismund
was not one of those who had thus been shut up with him
in the serried army of these treacherous enemies, so that
it might still be possible for him to swim back across the
Danube, and escape. Nothing remained but to sell his
life as dearly as he could, and to this task he set himself
with all the stern delight of battle.
'Ha!' he shouted, raising his voice to its full pitch,

GAINAS MEETS HIS DOOM 275
' it is treachery and death. Fly, Thorismund ! But you,
my brave comrades, you are Goths ; let some, at least, of
these grinning fiends accompany us to the realms of Hela !
They think that we will tamely lay down our arms ! They
know us not. At them, my warriors ! '
Gainas himself spurred his horse straight at Uldes ; but
the Hun swerved from his charge, and the Ostrogoth
found himself in the very thick of the Hunnish legion.
He fought like a lion. Many a Hun bit the ground before
his strong arm and practised sword ; but he Avas already
separate from his little band. In a few minutes every
one of them had been slain, and Gainas, now covered with
wounds, was dragged from his steed, and received his
death-stab. In his last moments all the passions and
instincts of his Pagan forefathers had come back to him,
and as his life-blood ebbed away he felt, in one flash of
consolation, that the Valkyrie would not be ashamed of
him, for he had not died tamely, but as an Ostrogoth
should die, with his broken SAVord in his grasp, and leaning
on his broken shield, yet in the midst of foes whom he had
slain. They tore off his golden collar and his ornaments,
and then, from the neck on which it had towered in its
pride of strength and comeliness, they struck off the
warrior's head, and spiked it on the summit of a lance,
to send it to Arcadius as a gage of friendship and the
best pledge of the Hunnish king's allegiance.
And it was thus that Gainas also met his doom.
But Thorismund and his folloAvers, seeing the dread
event, recrossed the Danube at full speed — for of what
use would it be to throAV away their lives in an attack
upon a host which outnumbered them by a hundred to
one ? When they had reached a place of safety they
drew rein, and after brief consultation determined to make
their way to Illyricum, and there offer their swords to
Alaric the Visigoth for his contemplated invasion of the
West. 'Alaric was ever jealous of Gainas,' said an old warrior.
' They rarely acted together.'
' They Avere comrades-in-arms at the battle of the
Frigidus,' said Thorismund, 'and the Ostrogoths are
brothers of the Visigoths. Alaric will not refuse a sup-

276 GATHERING CLOUDS
pliant who will aid him in exacting vengeance from the
cruel and perfidious Romans. They have cheated and
oppressed us. They deceived and massacred our noble
youth. They have just slaughtered whole holocausts of
our warriors in their accursM streets. We will still beat
them to the dust. If not Constantinople, at least Rome,
shall yet be in our hands. Courage, my Ostrogoths !
If we cannot conquer, we will die in our simplicity.'

WALAMIR AND EUTYCHES 277

CHAPTER XXXV
WALAMIR AND EUTYCHES
Like a flower, that cannot all unfold,
So drench' d it is with tempest, to the sun. — Tennyson.
Weeping, ringing his hands, casting up his tear-dimmed
eyes to Heaven, Reikhild, the aged presbyter of the
Catholic Goths, stood in his wrecked, desecrated church.
It was the morning after the battle in the streets, and
the spectacle which met his eyes could hardly fail to
rend the heart of a pastor. What had been his Holy
Sanctuary was now a revolting slaughterhouse, and among
the fallen timbers, and shattered stones, and shapeless
heaps of desolation, lay in their blood the torn limbs and
putrescent corpses of hundreds of murdered men, which
in the fierce summer sunlight had already begun to taint
the air. His church was a ghastly ruin, an evitandum
bidental, of which the Arery site would be thenceforward
shunned as a haunt of demons, which no lustration would
ever purify. On such an Aceldama no church could ever
be built again. In the capital of the East the era of the
Goths was at an end. Henceforward the billows of
barbarian invasion would ' roll shoreAvard, and strike and
be dissipated ' on the cities of the Western world. With
the Church had disappeared the congregation also. The
occupation of the presbyter was gone ; the work of his
life was shipwrecked; the words of Reikhild, the son of
Witiges, were ended.
Shocked beyond utterance by all that he had heard
and witnessed, the old man tottered back to his lonely
presbytery. But the scene had been altogether too much
for him. Never had his aged sister seen him so pale ; she
noticed on his face, for the first time, that grey hue which

278 GATHERING CLOUDS
is the harbinger of death. Nor was she mistaken. That
very evening he took to his bed, and before a fortnight
was over he had passed to his eternal rest.
Walamir still lay unconscious on the couch where
they had laid him, and it was impossible for her to tend
him with the incessant care needed by -his critical con
dition now that she was beset by the new anxiet}7 of her
brother's illness. The parabolani Avere already hard at
work in the ruined church, endeavouring to bury in one
huge pit the unnumbered corpses of the dead Avhich
strewed the sacred precincts and the neighbouring streets.
They laid the Avife of Gainas in a separate grave. Philip
and David had come to help them, while Eutyches went
into the presbyter's house to see his Avounded friend. He
found Walamir in, desperate case, unable to speak a word.
The barb of the arrow by which he had been wounded
Avas still embedded in the flesh of the shoulder, and unless
it were cut out nothing could prevent a fatal termination.
He must obviously be removed, and that at once. Eutyches
hastened to the Patriarch, and begged that the young
Goth might occupy his oath bed and chamber till his
recovery, or death, as he could himself easily sleep in
an adjoining room in the many-chambered palace. Chrys
ostom, ever ready to do deeds of mercy, gladly assented,
and the more so because the very limited hospital accom
modation was already strained to its utmost capacity by
the necessary tendance of wounded citizens, who in the
present exasperation of feeling might resent the invasion
of their privilege by a Avounded Goth, even though that
Goth Avas a mere boy, and though the secret that he was
a son of Gainas was closely kept.
So Eutyches flew back to Philip, and with the aid of
David and others of the parabolani carried Walamir in the
easiest litter they could procure to the Patriarcheion.
There the lad, still entirely unconscious, was laid with all
tenderness on the bed of his friend, and Asclepias, the most
skilful physician in Constantinople, was summoned to
attend him. He pronounced that the arroAV-head must be
cut out without delay, and did not conceal that in the
patient's present state of exhaustion the operation might
end in death. But the boy had the magnificent physique

WALAMIR AND EUTYCHES 279
of his father, and had been in that splendid health which is
the natural result of purity and moderation. There Avas
hope for him when there would be none for another.
He recovered consciousness during the consultation, and
asked that his agony might be ended by the excision of the
rankling barb. In those days anaesthetics Avere unknown,
but Walamir begged Eutyches to hold his left hand, set his
teeth hard, and bared his breast. He avouIcI not scream
under the knife. He bore the agony without a groan, only
when the iron was drawn out he turned Avhite as death, and
fainted away Avith the ensuing haemorrhage.
Nothing more could be done for him, the physician said,
but to give him perfect rest and quiet, and simple, health
ful food in small quantities at frequent intervals. All that
skill and tenderness could do was done. The Lady Olym
pias came daily to the Patriarch's palace to see that the
wants of Chrysostom Avere properly attended to, and she
often cared for the needs of the sick boy. Nicarete also
took his case in hand, and tended him Avith all the skill
which she had learnt from daily attention to the wants of
the sick and suffering in the hospitals and in their own
poor houses. And in the long evenings Eutyches, ' Avith
look and smile a healing in themselves,' sat by his bedside,
carrying out with unwearying solicitude every direction he
had received, and feeling more and more closely drawn to
the now helpless lad, who had so earnestly sought his
friendship. When they had first met in the tent of Gainas,
Walamir had been like a picture of early youth in its finest
promise ; now he lay there worn and wasted, and recog
nising no one, and with fortunes utterly ruined, and very
nigh to death.
But in such a frame as his Nature fought hard against
the ravages of illness. The wound in his leg was com
paratively trivial, and soon healed. The pure, untainted
blood which coursed through his veins gradually wrought
the cure of the other and more serious wound, and if only
he could hold out against extreme Aveakness he might yet
recover. Eutj^ches anxiously awaited the hour when he should
awake to perfect consciousness and the delirium Avould
cease, in which he murmured constantly of the scenes of

280 GATHERING CLOUDS
recent slaughter, which seemed to shroud his memory in a
mist of blood.
At last the hour came. It was evening, and the warm
sunlight streaming through the lattice, with an infinitely
soft air from the sea, which came in laden with the balm of
the innumerable roses in the garden, shone and breathed on
the boy's face. He woke sane, sighed, opened his eyes,
and, looking round him, asked in a low voice :
' Where am I ? '
' You are in the palace of the Patriarch John, Walamir,'
said his friend.
'And you?' he said, fixing his large blue eyes on the
face of Eutyches — 'surely you are — he whom my brother
Thorismund called the boy who looks like an angel ? '
'- 1 am Eutyches, and your friend, and Philip is here,
whom Thorismund loved well.'
' How came I here ? What has happened ? '
' You were badly wounded.'
' Ah ! '
The words let loose upon him an avalanche of memories.
For a time he did not speak ; then a sob shook his frame
and silent tears streamed down his cheeks. ' Oh, hide,
hide from me the horrid vision ! ' he said, lifting his hand
as though he would shut out the phantasmagoria of hideous
recollections. ' My father ? ' he asked faintly.
' The chief marched away with his army into Thrace.'
' My brother ? '
'Thorismund escaped through the gates with some of
his trusted warriors. He joined Gainas.'
'My mother?'
Eutyches was silent.
' Oh ! you need not tell me. I remember, I remember
all ! And my people — what happened to all the rest that
day?' ' Do not talk more now, dear Walamir. You shall hear
all in time. Try now to sleep.'
Walamir was, in truth, too exhausted to ask more. He
lay back and closed his eyes, but could only sink into short
and troubled slumbers. That night Olympias and Pen
tadia took it in turn to watch by his bedside.
Next day he seemed weaker. His mind was working

WALAMIR AND EUTYCHES 281
incessantly, and it had nothing but tragedies on Avhich to
dwell. The next evening he told Eutyches that he did not
think that he could live. But Eutyches cheered him,
holding him by the hand. ' I fear,' he said, ' you do not
desire to live. But you are young ; only think how much
happiness may yet lie in store for you.'
' I am young,' he answered, ' and the sunlight is Avarm,
and the sea air SAveet, and these roses are beautiful ' — for
Eutyches had put by his side the vase which David had
given him, and it was full of roses — ' but what have I to
live for? My father and my brother are exiles, burning,
perhaps vainly, for revenge. My mother is dead. My
people are slain. I am homeless and friendless.'
'Not friendless,' said Eutyches. 'We all love you.
There is many a home which would receive you.'
' Ay, as a slave,' he said, ' or a humble dependent. But
that can never be for a son of Gainas and an Amaling of
the Ostrogoths.'
' Nay,' said Eutyches, ' " sufficient for the day is its own
evil." God will provide. Trust Him for the future. You
are a Christian, though an Arian. Do you not know that
Christ loves you ? '
' Hoav can the White Christ of the Romans love me ? '
he said. ' He must have deserted us. He must be angry
with us about some formula we cannot understand. How
else could He have suffered us to perish ? Why else
could He have thus smitten me into helplessness and
misery ? '
' Oh, hush ! hush ! ' said Eutyches. ' I know little, I
understand little. To confess to you the simple truth, I
seem to care little about the hard, unintelligible Avords of
which every idle tongue prates. But if I do not under
stand the doctrine, I try to do the will. I love Christ, and
I knoAV that Christ is love ; and He is my Master and my
Lord, and I have given my youth to Him, that He may
have it under His own holy keeping, to save it from itself,
and save it for Himself. Do I tire you ? '
The only answer was a pressure of the hand.
'Well then, Walamir, I seem to myself to know noth
ing of life, and to see nothing but its mysteries. I am

282 GATHERING CLOUDS
but an ignorant boy, but I doubt whether even wise men
— whether even he, the Patriarch, really understands
what life means, or why God suffers us to be afflicted. I
have not yet been much afflicted, though I, too, am an
orphan, Walamir. The Patriarch gave me a home, and
Philip loves me, and David, and you — and I am happy ;
and for the rest, doubtless the day of anguish will come
to me, as it has come to you. We are born : let that come
which must come. Only, may God help us for a short
time to bear it, and make us faithful. I am sure that He
cares for us. Try to live, Walamir; pray that you may
live and serve.'
' Tell me more of your faith,' said Walamir.
'I have been trained,' said Eutyches, 'from earliest
childhood in holy homes. My father was a Catholic
Goth. He died early. My mother loved God. I have
been rocked in the cradle and nursed on the knees by
saints of God, and that on which I built all my faith and
all my love is that God is love, and that Christ is God.'
Again the mind of the Gothic boy was actively at work,
and soitoavs rushed in on him like a flood. He felt very
tired, and as if he Avere at the point to die.
'Eutyches,' he said, 'I think that I am dying. Lean
my head upon your shoulder.'
Eutyches took him in his arms and pillowed the weary
head on his shoulder. His tears fell on his friend's cheek
as he stooped over him, but he spoke cheery words.
' Walamir,' he said, ' something tells me you will not die,
but live, and do great deeds. What you iioav need more
than all is- sleep. Nicarete takes care of you to-night.
One night of good sleep, and you will recover. To-morrow
morning I shall bring him to see you.'
' Him ? ' asked Walamir.
'The Patriarch John,' said Eutyches. 'We call him
so among ourselAres.'
' The great and holy Patriarch who blessed me in my
father's tent? He will not care to come and pray Avith a
wretched, wounded, dying Gothic boy.'
'He is all kindness,' said Eutyches. 'He will come,
and you Avill live.'
The next morning, as Eutyches had prophesied, Wala-

WALAMIR AND EUTYCHES 283
mir felt a little stronger. His wound was dressed by the
good Nicarete, who was in her element in a sick-room.
Then Chrysostom came and knelt by his bedside, and
poured forth for him a deep, strong, short, and tender
prayer. We have heard how many a life has been saved
by an affusion of blood from the pulses of strong and
healthy veins. Such a moral and spiritual affusion into
the life of the young Ostrogoth was the prayer of Chrys
ostom. From that moment he visibly amended. Very
soon he could be carried into the garden, and could lie
under a couch in the deep shade, among the flowers. A
little longer and he could Avalk thither, leaning on the
arm of Eutyches, who had been partly set free from work
to tend him in his recovery.
It was then that the very serious question arose what
was to be done with him ; in Avhat Avay they could provide
for his future ?
Philip and his friends were discussing it together. 'Of
course,' said Philip, ' he,' pointing his finger towards the
Archbishop's study — '¦he would readily provide for him;
but how, and where? That is the difficulty. After' what
has happened the people hate the very sight of a Goth.
He would hardly be safe from insult in the streets. If
anyone but ourselves kneAV that he was the son of Gainas,
there are plenty of brutes and villains in the city who
would strike him down.'
1 1 wish we could keep him with us,' said Eutyches.
' Impossible ! ' said David. ' He is a born Ostrogoth.
Much as he loves you, Eutyches, his temperament is as
different from yours in most things as any nature could
be. The spirit and the aspirations of his wild forefathers
are in him. He will be a warrior, and in these days no
other career is open to him. He could not live our quiet
life. The pen may be for us ; the sword must be for him.'
' Would it be possible to send him back to his father ? '
' It would be full of risk,' said David ; ' and in the pres
ent fortunes of Gainas the outlook for him would be des
perate.' ' Then, what has the wise David to suggest ? ' asked
Philip ; ' for I am quite sure that you would not say all
this if you had no plan.'

284 GATHERING CLOUDS
'I have, said David. 'Aurelian has been recalled from
banishment. He is a Christian, a good man, a great sol
dier. You know him, Philip. Ask the Patriarch to go to
Aurelian, and see if he cannot provide Walamir, as soon
as he is quite well, with some place near his own person.
He will do it; and among Aurelian's soldierly surround
ings Walamir may be trained in arms and in the scenes
and exercises which he loves, and yet in a Christian home.'
' Admirable ! ' said Philip ; ' nothing could be better.
We shall change your name immediately from David to
Solomon ! '
' And yours from Philip to Alexander,' said David with
his grave smile.
' Which ? ' said Philip — ' the Great, or the Copper
smith ? '
' Oh ! the Coppersmith, the Coppersmith, of course,' said
Eutyches. 'That accounts for his being so much in the
Chalkoprateia.' ' Will nothing cure your audacity ? ' said Philip, and he
tried to seize him; but Eutyches darted off, and Philip
shook his fist. ' Wait till I catch you,' he said.
'Alexander the Coppersmith did me much evil,' said
Eutyches demurely. ' And that reminds me I never got
the bronze what's-his-name which you owe me for not
guessing that Eutropius was to be Consul.'
' Oh, you scoundrel ! ' said Philip ; ' you forfeited it by
your impudence. But I have no time to thrash you now,
for I must ask him, and then be off to Count Aurelian's.'
Chrysostom was struck by the good-sense of the pro
posal, and Aurelian, who had always retained a kindly
regard for Philip, gave him a cordial welcome, and at once
agreed to receive the young Goth as a member of his house
hold. The Praefect was, indeed, purposely living in com
parative retirement until the exasperation of feeling
between the Romans and the Goths should have died
down. But he still had soldiers about him, and, as he
soon formed a warm attachment to the noble and friend
less boy, he gave him the training of a skilled soldier and
of a high-minded, honourable man, which bore fine fruit in
later years.

HIS MURDERED FATHER'S HEAD 285

CHAPTER XXXVI
HIS MURDERED FATHER'S HEAD
Est genus extremos Scythi® vergentis in ortus
Trans gelidum Tanaim, quo non famosius ullum
Arctos ahit ; turpes habitus, obscsenaque visu
Corpora. Claud. In Ruf ii. 323-326.
So Walamir found a home, and often joined his friends
in the Patriarcheion in their bathes and strolls and games
in the gymnasium, having as it Avere grappled Eutyches
to his soul with hooks of steel. He would have been
even happy — for youth is less grievously haunted than
age or manhood by the gnawing vultures of memory
— if no further events had disturbed his life. But his
happiness was constantly shaken by the dark neAvs about
his father's reverses. There was no way of hearing from
him or communicating with him, nor did the young
Ostrogoth dare to speak of him openly, or to let it be
known that he was his son. He was again plunged in
despair when he heard the intelligence of the drowning
of thousands more of his countrymen by Fravitta's fleet
during their wild attempt to cross the Hellespont on
unguided rafts. After that catastrophe nothing Avas
known for a long time, except that Gainas had ridden
away with his remaining cavalry towards the banks of the
Ister. Walamir feared that he would never again hear
of his father or of his strong brother, Thorismund.
It was noAV January, 401. One day he was Avalking
home Avith Eutyches from a rowing excursion on the
Bosporus, when they saw a crowd of people assembling
in the colonnade of the Forum, and were told that a
deputation of Huns from Uldes, the Hunnish king, was
marching to the Palace with a present to Arcadius and
offers of allegiance and peace.

286 GATHERING CLOUDS
The tAvo youths Avaited to watch the procession. The
foremost Huns, avIio Avere soldiers marching in front of
the ambassador, passed by. They were Taifals, the
ugliest of the human race, and had the universal reputa
tion of being also the vilest and most brutal. Nothing
could be a more complete contrast than that between them
and the fine-looking Goths. They were squat, and short,
and yellow, and inconceivably ugly. Their cunning little
eyes Avere the merest dots and slits in their large Mongo
lian faces. Their shock heads of hair seemed to be of no
particular colour. Their wicked faces looked as if they
Avere all mouths. ' Their faces,' says Jordanes, the Gothic
historian, ' could hardly be called faces — rather shapeless,
black collops of flesh with little points instead of eyes ;
little in stature, but lithe and active ; good riders, broad-
shouldered, good at the boAV, obstinate and proud, hiding
under a barely human form the ferocity of a wild beast.'
Their Avars Avere mere enslavement, lust, and rapine.
They cut down fruit-trees, they stopped wells ; their
chiefs boasted that where their horses had once trod no
harvests ever grew. Their invasions were like the
descent of devouring and disgusting locusts. The land
was as the Garden of Eden before them ; behind them
it was a desolate wilderness.
The Goths looked on these execrable savages with a
peculiarly deadly hatred. It was before the wave on
wave of their innumerable myriads, pressing one after
another out of the vast steppes of Asia, that, first the
Ostrogoths, and then the Visigoths, had been driven
forward out of the lands they loved, the lands of their
immemorial possession. They felt it to be an infamy to
succumb to these semi-human demons, Avho gained their
distorted name of Tartars from the popular belief that
they had been disgorged from the depths of Tartarus.
But how could human valour or human wisdom fight
against numbers numberless, bred as though from ver-
miniferous plains ? Warriors might fight Avith men, but
they shrank from conflict with demon cannibals.
Some of these feelings were struggling in the mind of
Walamir, and he was looking on the hideous phenomena
Avith a shudder, when suddenly another part of the

HIS MURDERED FATHER'S HEAD 287
procession swept round the corner of the Passage of
Achilles into the Forum. Conspicuous among them Avas
a young, swart soldier, clad in skins, but fully armed,
carrying a long lance with something at its summit. It
was the son of King Uldes himself, Avho had been set
apart for what he deemed to be a service of honour.
At that moment Walamir was staring Avith a frown
on the faces of the nearest Huns, not concealing an
expression of unmistakable disgust, for their aspect justi
fied and deepened the old hereditary loathing. But the
quick glance of Eutyches recognised what that thing on
the lance-point was. A dim rumour had reached him of
the fate of Gainas at the hands of the Hunnish king ;
but as it was only a rumour, he had felt himself justified
in keeping it from the ears of his friend. The neAvs was
also known to Aurelian, but he had kindly ordered his
household to conceal it, and he had hoped that the
procession would be over before Walamir returned from
the Bosporus. Eutyches saw at once that the Hunnish
prince was carrying the head of the Ostrogothic Amal
who, when he last left Constantinople, had been Praetorian
Praefect, Consul-designate, and Commander-in-Chief. It
Avas so that one of the Gothic comrades of Gainas had
carried into Constantinople the head of the murdered
Rufinus ; it was so that his own murdered head was now
carried through the streets which had once witnessed his
towering stature and lordly stride. The blood of Eutyches
ran cold. What was he to do ? He knew the fiery and
almost ungovernable impulses of Walamir, and at that
moment the young Goth Avas slowly turning to look at
the new contingent of the Hunnish embassy.
' Come away ! come away ! ' said Eutyches in a hurried
whisper. ' Do not let us look any longer. We have seen
enough of these wretches.'
' No, no ! ' said Walamir. ' Remember, I never saw such
creatures as these before. I must see them march up to
the Royal Gate  God ! what is that ? '
Too fatally, with too frightful suddenness, the grim
spectacle had burst upon him. With a shock of horror
utterly indescribable he had seen the Hunnish prince
stalking nearer with his uplifted lance — and on its

288 GATHERING CLOUDS
summit that livid face, those short, light curls, stiffened
with dark blood. Good God! it was unmistakable! It
was the head of his father Gainas !
With a cry like that of a wounded lion he sprang for
ward, and struck a Avild blow at the young Hun. Happily
for him, happily for Constantinople, Eutyches pulled him
back with all his force. The hand of Walamir did, indeed,
strike the cheek of the Hun, and in his startled fury and
amazement he lost the unequal balance of his lance, and
from its point the ghastly relic rolled in the dust of the
street. Instantly swords flashed out. The son of King
Uldes raised a yell of rage, and bloodshed Avould have
ensued but. for the admirable presence of mind displayed
by Aurelian.
' It is a madman ! ' he said, calmly addressing the Hun.
' We are not responsible. Soldiers, take away the lunatic.
If need be, put him in manacles.'
The Hun had not been hurt, for the blow had scarcely
reached him. He picked up the dissevered head, again
spiked it on his lance-point, patted with insolent brutal
ity the livid cheek, and marched onward with a broad
grin. The attention of the multitude was too much ab
sorbed to notice the incident. The rumour Avhich Euty
ches had heard had begun to spread among them, and
they were receiving the head of Gainas with shouts of
acclamation. But the sight had been too much for Walamir. In
the revulsion of feeling he fell senseless to the ground,
and his wound, which had not long healed, burst out
afresh, crimsoning with blood the Gothic wolfskin which,
at some peril to himself, but in the spirit of defiant
patriotism, he had always refused to discard. Aurelian's
soldiers knew him, and understood the incident. To save
appearances they made a show of arresting him. They
fettered his hands with light manacles, and led him home.
Aurelian, when he returned, excused and forgave his rash
ness, spoke to him a few words of quiet sympathy and
warning, and set him free.
But the lad was nearly broken-hearted. He was again
prostrated by a sharp attack of illness, and during his
recovery he formed the invincible determination rather to

HIS MURDERED FATHER'S HEAD 289
beg his bread than to stay in that hateful, guilty city a
day longer than he could help. As soon as he was per
mitted he visited Eutyches, and consulted with him and
his friends what was to be done.
'I cannot,' he said, 'remain in the house of Aurelian.
I honour, I love him. He has been kind and generous.
But Avherever I walk in the streets I seem to breathe the
crimson fumes of blood from the massacre of my people,
and now I shall never be able to look upwards in the
Forum without seeming to see  ' He waved his hands
before his face as though to avert a vision of horror.
' But what will you do if you leave us ? ' asked Eutyches.
' I have thought of that. The Gruthongs are no more.
Alaric the Bait is a Therving,1 not a Gruthong, but he is
now at the head of my people. I will make my way to him.'
' It will not be easy for you to make your way to Illyria
in these troublous times,' said Philip.
'I can be of use in that matter,' said David. 'Owing
to the known and stainless integrity of my father, he is
often entrusted with commissions by the Jewish mer
chants of Constantinople. Walamir could not travel with
him in his Gothic dress, but if he will condescend to
wear a disguise for three days, till he is well beyond the
immediate boundaries of Thrace, within a week my father
will take him as a companion as far as Illyricum, and even
to iEmona.'
' When does he start ? ' asked Walamir eagerly.
' To-morrow,' said David, ' at earliest dawn. Come to
him now.'
The four youths went, Philip being, as usual, delighted
by eAren a chance of seeing Miriam. They found that
little disguise was needed. An upper garment of striped
cloth, worn like the Jewish abeyeh, and a wig of long, dark
hair under a turban, so effectually disguised the young
Goth that his best friend would not easily have recog
nised him, and they all laughed at the complete transfor
mation. That night Walamir wrote a few lines to Aure
lian. ' Illustrious and kind ! ' he said ; ' after what has
happened this city is to me like a dungeon or a lazar-
1 The Ostrogoths called themselves Gruthongs ; the Visigoths bore the
tribal name of Thervings.

290 GATHERING CLOUDS
house. I thank you with true gratitude. Pardon me
that I leave you. Farewell.' He gave the letter to the
slave in the porter's cell, who let him out at dawn. He
had bidden farewell to Philip and David the evening
before, but Eutyches met him in the Chalkoprateia, before
he went into Michael's house to be disguised. With
hearts full of foreboding that they should never meet
again they embraced each other. Walamir, who owed so
much to his friend, fell upon his neck and wept, and
Eutyches wept on his neck, and, parting to fulfil their
widely and divergent destinies, they saw each other no
more. Walamir travelled with the Desposynos, and,
pitying his almost Avild impatience, Michael pressed for
ward as rapidly as possible on his way. They had no
special adventures on the journey. In tAvo days the youth
was able to discard the disguise, which he could barely
tolerate. Within a Aveek he was at iEmona, the capital
of Illyricum, where the King of the Visigoths held his
Court. It was Alaric's custom every morning to take his seat
in the hall of his palace, attended by Avarriors Avith spear
and shield, and there to receive all Avho brought him their
petitions. The session had scarcely begun Avhen a boy in full Gothic
dress, pale, but of fearless and noble mien, and beautiful as
a young god, advanced alone up the hall towards the King.
The Visigoths looked on in astonishment, for his bearing
was that of a chief's son, and they did not know his face.
Unheeding of the gaze of so many eyes fixed upon him, he
walked straight towards the King's chair, bent his knee for
a moment in sign of homage, and stood before him with
folded arms. He Avas dressed entirely in white. His man
tle of the finest Avhite avooI was fastened on the right shoul
der with a golden eagle. His short-sleeved tunic of fine
silk woven with gold threads Avas tightened round his
waist by a girdle. His leggings reached a little below his
knee, and, like his Avide turned-down collar, were fringed
with an ornamental pattern Avhich indicated his high rank.
Two broad bracelets of gold, after the fashion of his nation,
spanned his strong, naked arms, and through the opening
of his collar Avas visible the torque of fretted gold, carved

HIS MURDERED FATHER'S HEAD 291
with runes, on which one avIio stood near him could read
the words, Gfut annom hai laq (' Sacred to the treasure of
the Goths ').
' Speak, boy,' said Alaric kindly. ' Thy look is that of
a young warrior. Hast come to cast in thy lot among us ? '
' King,' said Walamir, ' I am an Amal of the Gruthongs,
the younger son of Gainas. I have fled from Constantino
ple ; I would fain fight against the cowards and traitors
who have destroyed my father and massacred my people.
My brother — I know not whether he lives or is dead.'
' He lives, brother ! ' cried Thorismund, springing from
his place among the bodyguard, and clasping his brother
to his heart in a long embrace. He had been strangely
moved from the moment his young brother had entered
the hall, but in the months which had elapsed since they
parted Walamir had passed the boundary between boyhood
and youth. He had grown much taller and stronger, and
the golden doAvn was beginning to shine upon his upper
lip. The pallor Avhich his recent shock had left on his
face, together with the improbability that he should be
there, had prevented instant recognition. In truth, Thor
ismund thought that he had been killed with his mother
in the massacre of June.
' My brother ! ' he cried, ' and I thought you dead ! Now,
God be praised ! we will never part again.'
' Is he your brother, Thorismund ? ' said Alaric, taking
him by the hand. ' Young Amal, you shall be as welcome
to me as Thorismund has been. You shall be my page-at-
arms, and you shall both be by my side when we enter the
gates of Rome.'
' We will ! ' said the young Amalings, lifting up their
hands to Heaven.

BOOK III

A CHAOS OF HATREDS

Omai convien che tu cosl ti spoltre,
Disse il maestro ; che scggendo in piuma
In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre.
Dante, Inf. xxiv. 46-48.
'Now needs thy best of man' — so spake my guide —
'For not on downy plumes, nor under shade
Of canopy reposing, heaven is won.'

CHAPTER XXXVII
THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL
The wicked spirit, which at that time had gained possession of the
affairs of men. — Zosutus.
We cannot, for some time, see Walamir again, or live
among the Goths. We must remain in the stifling, cor
rupted city, amidst its meanness, its hatreds, its ecclesias
tics, its society seething with cabals, its Court rank with
intrigues, its base, manifold corruptions of the world, the
devil, and the flesh.
The longer Chrysostom remained at work, the more
pronounced of necessity became his antagonism to the
gross worldliness of a purely nominal Christianity. Un
fortunately, in his struggle with it his unflinching honesty
of purpose did not save him from errors of judgment; did
not enable him alwaj^s to see things in their due perspec
tive, nor to deal with them in the most effective and the
least exasperating way. Already the main body of the
clergy were his deadly enemies, especially the noisiest and
the most domineering of them, and those who arrogated
the right to speak for themselves, and for what they called
' the Church,' by which they never meant anything but
the cliques who shared their own ' views.' A little group
of the best among the ecclesiastics Avas devoted to him.
Men like the bright and earnest Palladius, Bishop of
Helenopolis ; men like the venerable and original Synesius,
as long as he remained in Constantinople ; men like St.
Cassian, who ultimately founded the great monastery of
St. Victor at Marseilles ; good presbyters like Germanus,
the friend and relative of Cassian, and so closely linked
Avith him in friendship that they were said to have but
one soul in two bodies ; sincere enthusiasts and disciplina
rians like Serapion the Archdeacon and the Presbyter
295

296 GATHERING CLOUDS
Tigrius — knew his saintliness, recognised his great in
tellect and incomparable worth. But he was feared and
hated by the majority : by the great mass of loose, greedy,
and fiercely dogmatic monks, led by their Archimandrite,
Isaac ; by the too numerous bishops Avho neglected their
sees for their greed or ambition ; by the great mass of the
clergy, who would not be parted from their youthful
agapetat, or give up their cringing to the wealthy and
poAverful ; and by all the sham widows, and sham virgins,
and sham deaconesses, Avho arrogated to themselves the
reverence of sainthood by virtue of the distinctive dress,
which served them at once as a passport to delightful
freedom and as a broadened phylactery of pretentious
profession. All these detested him with that bitterest
kind of virulence which the world calls 'theological,' and
recognises as not to be paralleled among secular circles.
As for the world of fashion and wealth, at first it did
not make up its mind whether to crush Chrysostom or to
patronise him. It soon found the latter course impossible.
His warnings were so unmistakable in their plainness, so
direct in their aim, so unique in their severity, that they
could not be classed among the other thousand utterances of
vapid pulpit rhetoric, which were generally understood to
mean nothing in particular. This man was not indulging
in the language of professional conventionality. It was
quite clear that he meant what he said, and that he would
act up to it. For he was not content with idle denun
ciation, or with talk which might be regarded as suitable
enough for St. Sophia, but might be safely ignored in
ordinary life. On the contrary, he declared in the most
solemn manner that he would excommunicate the worst
offenders, and that he would repel from the Holy Table
those who obstinately refused to listen to his Avarnings
and to reform their habits.
Preachers in all ages haAre attacked particulars of dress.
St. Jerome was so much disgusted with the innovation of
Roman ladies in sprinkling their hair with gold dust that
he calls it ' reddening their locks with flames of Gehenna.'
Mediaeval preachers used to attack the custom of wear
ing peaked boots. It is not, perhaps, wise to enter on
such vain crusades. Fashions are but symptoms of pass-

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL 297
ing vanity and folly, and their removal would not mean
the cure of the disease. Chrysostom, however, thought it
right to discourage and ridicule the silk-embroidered boots
of young men, Avhich were the marks of the most elaborate
dandyism. He drew scornful pictures of these youthful
dandies carefully picking their way through the streets so
as not to soil their precious shoes. ' Boots,' he said, ' were
made to be soiled. If your boots are so gorgeous, why
don't you take them off and wear them on your heads ?
You laugh, but I feel more inclined to weep over your
follies.' It Avas a more serious matter to kindle against himself
the wrath of the worst part of the female world, but Chrys
ostom thought it his duty to attack the custom of wearing
fringes. To us this might seem unworthy of his good
sense ; but in all such matters we cannot judge unless
we are able to transfer ourselves to the habits of thought
Avhich prevail in other lands and other countries. In the
East, from time immemorial, it had been regarded as worse
than unbecoming for a woman to have her hair uncovered
in public, and especially in sacred places. St. Paul him
self shared this view. He approved of the Oriental preju
dice which, in spite of the custom of Greece, forbade a
Avoman to have her hair uncovered ' because of the angels.'
If a woman appeared with unveiled head, it was believed
that the evil spirits, the Shedim, the impure demons, im
mediately alighted and sat upon it. The belief continued
in the days of Mahomet. Khadijah tested whether it
really Avas Gabriel or not who appeared to the Prophet,
by taking off her veil; whereupon Gabriel immediately
retired, which an evil spirit would not have done. In
Byzantine pictures the hair of the Virgin Mary is, as a
rule, carefully concealed. The same practice continues
among the Eastern Jews to this day. At Constantinople
itself the abandonment of the chalebi, a hideous female
headdress of the East, was held to be a sufficient reason to
account for the advent of the cholera along the coasts of
the Bosporus.
But, apart from this ancient conviction, the Avearing of
a fringe of hair on the forehead had hitherto been the
recognised sign of women of bad character. It seemed to

298 GATHERING CLOUDS
Chrysostom a shameless thing that Avomen professing to be
Christians should have the effrontery — for so he regarded
it — to appear in church in a guise Avhich seemed to defy
public propriety. In public and in private he spoke of
this practice with angry and disdainful sarcasm.
Superannuated coquettes Avho aimed at juvenility of
dress and manner were Chrysostom's pet abhorrence ; and,
unfortunately for him, the leaders of female fashion at
Constantinople in his day were three ladies of high rank,
of luxurious manners, of enormous possessions, and of
a worldly morality which was in no way disturbed by
ecclesiastical scrupulosities of outward observance. They
excited his severest reprobation. They were Marsa, Cas-
tricia, and Epigraphia, and all three were now widows,
which to Chrysostom — accustomed to the unaffected piety
and genuine devotion of his mother, Anthusa — made their
behaviour seem the more detestable. Marsa Avas the
Avidow of the general Promotus, who had been suppressed
and put to death by the jealousy of Rufinus. Theodosius
had taken pity on her two children, and they had been edu
cated with his sons Arcadius and Honorius. Besides this
high title to social distinction, Marsa Avas, on the mother's
side, a cousin of the Empress. Thus, she was the unques
tioned leader of fashion among the ladies of the capital.
Castricia had only recently been left a widow by the
death of the brave Consular, Saturninus, who had proba
bly died during the exile to which he had been doomed
by the jealousy of Gainas. We know nothing more of
her than that she closely resembled her two friends.
The worst of the three, by unanimous testimony, was
Epigraphia. In exact proportion as Chrysostom honoured
a widow who, like Olympias, was a widow indeed, he felt
repelled by a widow who, forgetful of her loss, cared only
-for the pleasures of the world, and gave rise to grave
scandal by her light demeanour. Epigraphia threw open
her house promiscuously to all the clergy of Avorldly
habits and dubious antecedents, and also to women whose
character was known to be the reverse of estimable.
Added to this, the Avay in Avhich she tried to look young
by the resuscitation of her faded charms was, to an ardent
ascetic like Chrysostom, an intolerable folly.

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL 299
It was this pulpit denunciation which would, to these
ladies, seem directly personal, since the glance of the
orator fell directly upon them as they sat in their promi
nent gallery, in proximity to the ambo from which he
spoke. Worse than this, the surging multitude which
always thronged St. Sophia to be thrilled by the Patriarch's
eloquence belonged mainly to the poorer classes ; and
though the populace of Constantinople was not quite
so giddy as that of Antioch, yet there were many
among them whose levity led them to turn their laugh
ing eyes towards the wealthy widows, and emphasise
the points of the sermon by meaning smiles in their
direction. Nor was Chrysostom satisfied with public references.
The three aristocratic ladies were the chief offenders, and
he held it his duty to pay them a pastoral visit, and try
the effect of personal remonstrance, urged with all the
weight of his high authority.
He went first to the house of Epigraphia; and as this
cabal of female intriguers formed their most common
rendezvous in her gossip-mongering drawing-room, he
found them sitting together, and, as it happened, talking
of him with the bitterest anger, at the very moment that
he was announced.
'They tell me,' said Marsa 
But the precious piece of scandal derived from ' They
say ' — who is always much more than half a liar — was
for the present lost, for at this moment the slave, with a
deep bow, announced ' His Beatitude the Patriarch John
of Constantinople.'
The three ladies rose, and, according to the universal
custom, knelt and kissed his hand ; but in other respects
their reception of him was ostentatiously frigid.
Chrysostom had not come to bandy compliments, and,
being incessantly occupied, he could never afford to Avaste
time. Without an allusion to the weather or the move
ments of the Court, he said at once that he had come for
the express purpose of reproving them. He considered
their dress in every sense unbecoming to their age and
widoAvhood. ' Our dress,' said Marsa, coldly, ' is our own concern.

300 GATHERING CLOUDS
What can an ecclesiastic and a semi-anchorite like you
know about a lady's dress ? '
' Our dear Patriarch Nectarius honoured us Avith his
respect and friendship,' said Castricia. ' In his day we
were not subjected to these annoyances and insults.'
'It would be much better,' said Epigraphia, 'if you
confined yourself to your episcopal duties. We do not all
choose to go about as if we were beggars, like Olympias
and Salvina.'
'I do not speak to you in my own name,' said the
Patriarch gravely. 'You know the words of the great
Apostle, St. Peter: "Whose adorning let it not be that
outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and putting on of
gold, and Avearing of apparel, but let it be the hidden man
of the heart, in that Avhich is not corruptible, even the
ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which in the sight
of God is of great price." Look at your dresses ! Pagan
ladies wear their robes of gauze woven with such scenes
as the labours of Hercules. Yours, I see, are embroidered
with the story of the Paralytic, and other scenes of the
Gospels. Do you think that you honour Christ by carry
ing into the Circus, the Theatre, and all scenes of sin and
frivolity, the stories of His Gospel ? Oh that rather you
Avould carry Him in your hearts ! '
'Now that shows the difference between you and a
truly courteous bishop like Severian,' said Marsa. ' When
he saAV us this morning in these very robes, he said, with
a gracious smile : " The King's daughter is all glorious
within ; her clothing is of wrought gold, she shall be
brought in to the King in raiment of needlework." '
' You are not young Jewish virgins at a great nuptial
ceremony. You are aged widows.'
' Aged ! ' almost shrieked Epigraphia, while the other
two winced visibly. Turning her back on the Archbishop,
she said, with as much rudeness as she could possibly
throw into her voice and attitude : ' Pray, is your Beati
tude a milliner ? We dress in accordance with our rank
and our OAvn tastes, and you may rely upon it that, in spite
of your horrid remarks, we shall continue to do so.'
' And shall you,' he asked, ' persist also in Avearing your
hair in curled fringes over your foreheads to the general

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL 30l
scandal, and in painting your cheeks Avith minium and
dyeing your eyes with antimony, to support the illusion
of pretended youth ? '
' This is a mere outrage,' said Epigraphia, rising in a
tornado of spleen. 'Be assured that the Emperor shall
know of it. Marsa will inform her cousin, the Empress,
and she will protect us henceforth from these insults.'
' To reprove is not to insult,' said Chrysostom, rising.
'But since you will none of my reproof, I must say to
you, in the words of the prophet Isaiah : " Take heed, ye
women that are at ease; hear my words, ye careless
daughters." Until I see in you less worldliness, and more
proofs of a life such as becomes widows professing godli
ness, I must close the doors of the Sacrarium against you,
and will not admit you to Holy Communion.'
' There are other churches in Constantinople besides
St. Sophia,' said Marsa.
'If by that you mean the churches of heretics,' said
Chrysostom, ' the guilt be on your own soul. I have but
done my duty. Would that in departing I could give you
my episcopal blessing ; but it would be a mockery to-day.'
' We do not desire it,' said Epigraphia ; ' Ave should
prefer to be without it. And I trust,' she added, with a
low curtsey, ' that your Religiosity will not trouble your
self with another visit. If you do, you may chance to
find the door closed against you.'
He bowed and left them. Isaac the Monk visited them
a few moments later. He passed Chrysostom unnoticed,
except by a scowl, and entered, filling the room with the
scent of his carefully curied, essenced, and gilded hair.
He found the three widows fuming in almost speechless
rage. He heaped upon their wrath the fuel of every
bitter calumny against the Archbishop of which he could
think, and went out rubbing his hands, in the joyful
conviction that his day of vengeance Avould soon be
near. But it was not only with male dandyism or female
coquetry that Chrysostom became embroiled. It was
with the whole world of wealth. He was naturally
shocked by the contrast betAveen boundless possessions
squandered in vain ostentation, and poverty which had no

302 GATHERING CLOUDS
refuge for sickness, and knew not where to provide a
meal. Convinced of the brevity of life and the smallness
of man's needs, he regarded the excesses of luxury and
extravagance as an offence which cried to Heaven. If
even a Pagan moralist could say, ' Cur eget indignus quis-
'quam, te divitef' ('Why is any undeserving person in
need whilst thou art rich?') Chrysostom felt the force of
the question in its full intensity. And, thus feeling it,
and finding it always difficult to raise sufficient sums
for his schemes of systematic benevolence, his hospitals,
and his missions, he denounced display and gluttony and
avarice Avith all his might. He asked the rich whether
they ought not to be ashamed to starve provinces at a
meal, and sweep land and sea to provide their unwhole
some dainties, and whether it would not be wiser and
better to enjoy the healthiness of temperance ? He ridi
culed the fashion of having a Avay made for them in the
streets as though they were dangerous tigers. He satirised
the vulgar fondness for gold, Avhich was so lavish that he
believed there were some who, already filling their houses
with every sort of golden furniture, Avould, if they could,
have the very sky and the very air of gold. He asked
whether, with the utmost expenditure of lavishness, they
could find tapestries lovelier than the ground broidered
Avith vernal blossoms, or fretted roofs so beautiful as the
blue or the starry skies ?
Tired of these expostulations, of which the novel
piquancy was soon exhausted, and to which they never
had the smallest intention of paying respect, the rich
began to desert St. Sophia. Their attendance had never
been very regular, and even on the great festivals a spicy
Atellane interlude in the Theatre, or a good programme in
the Hippodrome, had quite sufficient attraction to make
them turn their backs on services and communions. In
coming to hear the Archbishop at first, they thought that
they had 'done the civil thing,' and that their presence
among his auditors was an act of condescension, for which
he was insufficiently grateful. He had to say plainly in
the pulpit that, if such were the views and objects with
which they came, he was only too glad to dispense with
their presence. He professed open preference for the

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL 303
simple services, in which the nave was thronged Avith his
eager congregation of the poor. In praising them he took
too readily his own ideal of what they should be for what
they were. Perhaps, too, he did not in his own mind
sufficiently notice that the phrase, ' the poor,' in Scripture
is often employed in the sense in Avhich it had been used
by the prophets and by Christ to describe the anavim
(the poor in spirit, the meek and lowly in heart), a class
to which even the rich might belong. His language was
not always prudent. Regarding himself, rightly, as
'the common father of all,' it Avas unwise to praise the
needy too unreservedly, and to say after an earthquake,
without further making his meaning clear, that the city,
which had been nearly destroyed by the vices of the rich,
had been only saved by the prayers and virtues of the
poor. On one occasion Chrysostom told a striking anecdote.
There had been a long drought, causing widespread famine
and distress. There had been many prayers and litanies
for rain, and at last, to the intense joy and relief of the
multitude, rain began to fall, and they thronged into the
churches to thank God. But in the midst of the general
gladness they met a man utterly downcast and miserable.
' Why do you not come with us,' they asked, ' to our joy
ous thanksgiving ? '
' I hate it ! ' he said. ' I had laid up ten thousand
measures of Avheat to sell at higher and higher prices.
Now it has all become useless.'
Such an anecdote might fairly be told to call forth execra
tion against cases of individual hardness and greed; but it
Avould have been well to point out that not all the rich
were monsters such as this, and not all the poor were
paragons of virtue. He did, indeed, find it necessary to
defend himself by pointing out that he did not regard
wealth as a crime in itself, but the wrong use of wealth.
But one who spoke with generous breadth and conviction
did not always safeguard his words in the fashion adopted
by the lukewarm, the Laodiceans, and the half-in-half. He
was not in the habit of trimming and of paring aAvay his
principles by exceptions and limitations until it Avas diffi
cult to say whether they meant anything at all.

304 GATHERING CLOUDS
The result of all this was that the wealthy and the
upper classes were grievously offended. And, in addition
to the other overwhelming grudges Avhich he had excited,
Chrysostom was now openly denounced as a Gracchus in
the pulpit, a seditious demagogue, a flaming anarchist, a
man who for his own evil purposes preached socialism and
set class against class. The rich as a body did not take
the trouble to understand him, or to learn the lesson
which he was endeavouring to teach ; but the poor, who,
as always, formed the vast majority, saw that he himself,
in the midst of enormous wealth, lived in severe simplicity,
and cared nothing for money, except to spend it for the
good of those who had need. Admiring his consistency,
grateful for his protection, they sustained and cheered him,
and, for a time at least, by the passionate enthusiasm of
their devoted love, delayed the success of the clerical and
social plots formed for his destruction.
But, among these many enemies, Chrysostom made
one whose enmity was more fatal than that of all the rest.
The Empress Eudoxia, proud, passionate, impulsive,
domineering, intolerant of any rival in her power or any
barrier to her slightest wish, had become not only alien
ated from the Patriarch, but strongly inimical to him.
Since the death of Eutropius she had ruled Arcadius with
a rod of iron. What he did was simply what she de
manded. The only partial counterpoise to her autocracy
lay in the rank and independence of the Patriarch as head
of the Eastern Church. As soon as she saAV that neither
she nor anyone else could make a tool of him, or induce him
either by fear or flattery or self-interest, to deflect a hair's-
breadth beyond the line of rigid duty, she began to feel
uneasy. But when the arrows of his harangues against
luxury and oppression began to fall, or even to seem as
if they glanced off, upon her, she grew hot with indig
nation and offended pride. Sometimes a sermon or an
appeal smote through the joints of the harness of her con
ventional religiosity ; but she hardened her heart. Two
circumstances made her indignation flame into implac
able Avrath. One Avas her belief — a belief without any
foundation — that Chrysostom had on some occasion be
trayed to the soldiery the hiding-place of her favourite,

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL 305
Count John ; for whom, on the contrary, he had earnestly
pleaded, and whose life he had probably saved by his inter
vention. The other was the fancy that, in preaching about
Jezebel, and Naboth's vineyard, the Patriarch had inten
tionally described a piece of dishonourable chicanery by
Avhich she had robbed a poor widow named Calliotropa of
her estate. Now Chrysostom must undoubtedly have said
something which admitted of this construction, for we are
told so by his visitor, Bishop Porphyry of Gaza. And
this at least is certain, that there has never been an age in
which the prophets and saints of God have not been called
upon to take their stand against the rich and the ruling.
So Abraham in the old Jewish legend defied Nimrod ; so
Isaiah resisted Ahaz ; and Jeremiah withstood Jehoiakin
and Zedekiah ; and Daniel braved the wrath of Belshazzar
and Darius ; and John the Baptist rebuked Herod.
Athanasius had stood up against Constantine, Basil had
resisted Julian and Valens, and Ambrose had braved the
authority of the Empress Justina and the Emperor Theo
dosius. So, in later days, St. Columban defied Thierry,
and St. Anselm resisted Rufus, and Savonarola rebuked
Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Luther faced Charles V. at
the Diet of Worms. If there Avas any truth in the report
of Eudoxia's misdeeds, Chrysostom was the last man who
Avould have shrunk from denouncing them.
The contemporary account written by Marcus, the
companion of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza, on the occasion
of their visit to Constantinople gives us a glimpse of the
state of things. It was early in the year 401. Porphyry
had come to procure from Arcadius an edict to suppress
the turbulent tyranny of the heathen at Gaza, and he
asked Chrysostom to help him.
' My intercession would be useless,' said Chrysostom ;
' for the Emperor practically means the Empress, and the
Empress is embittered against me because she supposes
that I compared her to Jezebel in a sermon about Naboth's
vineyard. But I will procure you an interview with her
through her Chamberlain, the excellent Amantius.'
Accordingly, Porphyry and his brother-bishop were
admitted. They found Eudoxia seated on a golden sofa,
and she apologised for not rising to greet them because

306 GATHERING CLOUDS
she was speedily expecting to become a mother. She was
pleased with the rustic dignity of these provincial bishops,
gave them through Amantius a large sum of money for
their diocesej and appointed another interview with them
next morning.
When they came, she told them that the Emperor had
been put out by the petition, because Gaza paid its taxes
with remarkable regularity, and he was afraid that by
interfering with the heathen he would retard the replen
ishment of his treasury. ' Still,' she said, ' I will continue
to do my best.' Then she asked for their blessing and
their prayers ; and they blessed her, and moved her to a
transport of gratitude by promising that, having been the
mother of three little daughters, she would now become
the mother of a son.
The promise Avas fulfilled, for a few days later Avas born
Theodosius II. , the first Porphyrogenitus, or prince born
in the purple, since the days of Constantine. Eudoxia
attributed her happy motherhood to their supplications.
As speedily as possible the child was baptised with all
splendour. As the procession came out of the Cathedral a pretty
little comedy Avas enacted, whereby Eudoxia gained her
oavii ends; which, indeed, in these days, Avere rarely left
unfulfilled. The Bishop, Avho was carrying the infant in
his arms, stopped by pre-arrange ment, while Porphyry
placed his petition in the little hands. Arcadius took it
from his child and read it. ' I cannot,' he said, ' refuse
the first commands of my little son.'
The infant boy was at once dignified Avith the title of
Augustus; and, much to the displeasure of the whole
Western world, the Empress also — Avho was iioav wielding
all the old power of Rufinus and Eutropius, and wielding
it with equal greed and baseness — received the title of
Augusta. It was not to the mere title of Augusta that
the Roman world objected, but to the fact that the East
ern Empire, in its abject subjection, now to an eunuch,
and now to a Avoman, seemed to recall the old days of a
Bagoas or a Semiramis, and to have lost the stately and
virile virtues of ancient Rome.
And thus, by the stratagem of Eudoxia, an edict Avas

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL 307
passed refusing any further tolerance to heathendom in
the old Philistian city. But such repressive and perse
cuting edicts were not in accordance Avith the old spirit
of Christianity. The rule of the primitive Christians was :
'Force is hateful to God'; the town-clerk of Ephesus
could appeal to the whole people in Avitness that St. Paul
and his companions had never been blasphemers of their
goddess, and in Athens the Apostle had pointed to the
UnknoAvn God, whom, though in ignorance, they' wor
shipped, and Who is the Father of us all.

308 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXXVIII
FRESH TROUBLES
The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of
the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it ; but wounds, and
bruises, and festering sores : they have not been closed, neither bound up,
neither mollified with oil. — Isaiah i. 5-6.
We have already seen enough to show the intense and all
but universal corruption which ruined the true work of
the Church in Antioch, and still more in Constantinople.
It is distressing to find the same moral apostasy, the
same revolting unreality, prevailing like a pestilence over
the whole of Thrace, Asia Minor, and Pontus — indeed,
over the whole of that region to which St. Peter and St.
James had addressed their oecumenical Epistles. As far
back as the beginning of the second century the Church,
on Pliny's testimony, had so far conquered the world,
even in remote Bithynia, as to empty the ancient temples
of the gods ; but now those gods and the vices they repre
sented — Ares and Aphrodite, Plutus and Cybele, Moloch
and Ashtoreth, Mammon and Belial — were reinstated in
Christian sanctuaries under the disguise of the holiest
names, and that by the clergy themselves. There is abun
dant proof of the like intrusion of the world, the flesh,
and the devil among myriads of professing Churchmen
throughout Northern Africa; and if it were Avithin the
scope of our purpose to look at all closely at the Western
world, we should see that Rome was as Constantinople,
and Milan as Ephesus, and Ravenna as Alexandria. All
the faithful might sigh, 'The Church has triumphed —
but where is holiness ? The Church is splendid, dominant,
orthodox, oppressive; services are numerous, ritualism
elaborate ; women kneel to priests and kiss their hands ;
the Holy Supper has become a gorgeous and magic sacri-

FRESH TROUBLES * 309
fice, ending in the creation of a material idol — but where
is the Christ of Nazareth and of Calvary ? ' Pagans like
Eunapius, and Libanus, and Zosimus, said freely among
themselves, ' Christianity, at first so SAVeet and simple in
its moral ideal, has degenerated into a more intolerant
and no less immoral paganism ; it has incorporated the
old superstitions which we had flung away ; it has become
more material, and more abject in its corruption, than
our Neo-platonism ; it has Avorthy sons, but most of its
votaries have lost our manlier virtues, and have not failed
to assimilate our acknowledged vices.' In Egypt, for
instance, there was many an honest waverer who saw
far more beauty and goodness in the life of the heathen
Hypatia' than in that of a hypocritic tyrant like the
Christian Patriarch, Theophilus of Alexandria.
Christians who were Christians indeed felt their darker
hours troubled by misgivings Avhich were almost intoler
able. They looked upon the abhorrent worldliness and
falsity — which often seemed to them to be ' the falling
away ' of which St. Paul prophesied — as a sign of the near
ness of the Antichrist. No language came more naturally
to their lips than that of the HebreAv prophets. A century
had not yet passed since the conversion of the first Chris
tian Emperor and the assembling of the first CEcumenical
Council ; four centuries had barely passed since, on that
first radiant Christmas Eve, the angels had sung, ' Peace
on earth, goodwill towards men,' and already the chief
living saint and most learned writer of the day had left
Rome Avith a curse upon his lips against her Babylonian
wickedness. And if such Avas the condition of the
Church in the so-called See of St. Peter, what was the
state of things elsewhere? Egypt was in a turmoil with
barbarous bishops and brutal monks. The pilgrimages to
Jerusalem were, as Gregory of Nyssa had testified, scenes
of yulgar debauchery. The Holy City itself was a carni
val of violence and littleness. Carthage and its daughter
dioceses were not only trembling under the tyranny of
wicked governors, but were torn with the alternate tur
bulence and persecution of Donatists and Circumcellions,
between whom and many of the champions of Catholicism
there was but little to choose. Asia was in the deplorable

310 ' GATHERING CLOUDS
condition which we shall see immediately. And here, in
the New Rome of Constantinople, there was a weak Em
peror with the soul of a slave ; a Frankish Empress domi
neering and unscrupulous as a Semiramis ; a Court steeped
in frivolity and guile ; a world of officialism cankered
through and through with bribery, greed, and oppression ;
swarms of sham monks and clerical adventurers ; intrigue
and simony rampant on every side ; numbers of presbyters
living with their ' spiritual sisters ' in all but open con
cubinage; coquettish virgins, and nominal widoAvs, and
painted haridans ; the lewdness of the theatre finding
scope for its wit in the scandals of the clergy, and the
rage of the Blue and Green factions of the Hippodrome
uncontrolled in the smallest degree by the nominal Chris
tianity of the population. Throngs of people rushed off
to the public spectacles and wild-beast shows, even on
Good Friday and Easter Day. On one Easter Day they
saw a young charioteer, on the eve of his marriage, horribly
trampled to death under the hoofs of the chariot-steeds.
Avarice and licentiousness were rampant on every side.
Among the lowest classes prevailed a mendicancy seeth
ing Avith atrocious impostures ; among the upper classes,
under the soft surface of voluptuous ostentation, there was
a society rent by cliques and factions, bursting with sple
netic malignity, and filled with such a universal plague of
uncharitableness that, if here and there a saint emerged
who was vexed, like Lot, Avith the filthy conversation and
ungodly deeds of the wicked, he must be content to focus
on himself the burning rays of 'religious,' even more than
of secular, hatred, and to hVe Avith his head in clouds of
poisonous flies. What could good men say of the Church
in those days, as their tears fell on the page of Holy Writ,
but ' Thy silver is become dross, thy Avine mixed with water :
thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves ? '
' The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule
by their means ; and my people love to have it so : and
what will ye do in the end thereof?'
Whether such reflexions be justifiable or no, Avhether
the world had or had not re-intruded into the Church,
Avhether or not the Church had gained from the infiltra
tion of pagan superstitions and the oppressive triumph of

FRESH TROUBLES 311
Pharisaic externalism, the reader must judge from almost
every page of the subsequent narrative, which, in the gen
eral picture presented, is a direct reflexion of the contem
porary testimony of Christian saints.
For now an event happened which was the first distinct
dislodgment of the loose snowdrifts which were soon to
rush doAvn in overwhelming avalanche on the doomed
head of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
It happened that a Synod of twenty-nine bishops was
sitting at Constantinople, under the presidency of Chrys
ostom, to settle some matter of minor ecclesiastical impor
tance. One day in September, A.D. 400, Avhile they Avere in
session in one of the rooms adjoining the apse of St. Sophia,
a bishop who was not a member of the Synod, Eusebius of
Valentinianopolis, an obscure Cilbian village in the valley
of the Cayster, advanced into the assembly, holding in his
hand a written document, and with an air and tone of
intense indignation cried that he had come to denounce a
series of intolerable scandals, Avhich had disgraced the
Churches of Asia.
Startled and horrified, the Synod asked for an explana
tion. Speaking Avith fierce anger, Eusebius said, ' I am
here to accuse and denounce a bishop of Asia of seAren
enormous crimes — of simony, embezzlement, luxury,
theft, malversation, misprision of murder, and incontinence.
'First, he bought his oavii episcopal see for an immense
sum, and to recoup himself deliberately sells other episco
pal sees at a regular tariff.
' Secondly, he has alienated to his own private use an
estate left to the Church by Basilina, mother of the
Emperor Julian.
' Thirdly, he has melted the silver chalices and plate of
the Church to supply money to his son.
' Fourthly, he has taken marbles from the baptistery to
inlay his own private baths.
' Fifthly, he has taken possession of marble pillars which
had been prepared for the church, and has used them for
the adornment of his own triclinium.
' Sixthly, he has, in spite of his episcopal oaths, recalled
his Avife, Avith whom he openly lives, and by Avhom, since
his consecration, he has had several children.

312 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Seventhly, he has retained in his service a youth who
has committed murder and has never, never been brought
to justice or done penance.'
'Who is the offender?' asked the Patriarch.
' He is here ; he is in the midst of you ; he is one of the
bishops of the highest rank in your assembly,' said Eusebius
hotly. ' There he sits ! ' — and he pointed to Antoninus,
Metropolitan of the important see of Ephesus, bishop of
the church in which St. Paul had preached so long, suc
cessor of St. John, the beloved disciple, successor of that
Angel of the Church of Ephesus to whom St. John had
written in the Apocalypse.
Antoninus, avIio knew his own guilt, turned Avhite as a
sheet, and winced before the pointed finger of this obscure
prelate from the Cilbian hills ; and Eusebius continued :
' Yes, and the simoniacal intruders whom he has appointed,
these who have trafficked for their sees, these hucksters of
sacred things, these men who have sold and bought for
money the Holy Spirit of God, they too are here, they too
are of your number.'
'Surely,' said Chrysostom, 'you must be under some
mistake. What you say sounds incredible. Brother Paul
of Heraclea, you are a personal friend of the Bishop of
Ephesus. Will you consider the matter Avith him and his
accuser, and try to reconcile the strong enmity which
seems to subsist between them ? '
' I refuse any mediation,' stormed Eusebius.
The bishops might well be disturbed by an accusation so
vehement and so detailed ; but Chrysostom, who is often
accused of reckless haste, did not for a moment lose his
calm. He acted Avith consummate kindness and circum
spection. He saw that, even if all the charges could not
be denied, some of them might admit of explanation or
palliation. The one which seemed most seriously cir
cumstantial, and which, if true, could not under any cir
cumstances be extenuated, Avas the charge of open and
shameless simony.
' Brother of Ephesus,' he asked, ' what say you to this
grave accusation ? '
By that time the Bishop of Ephesus had partially recov
ered his presence of mind. Summoning such fragment of

FRESH TROUBLES 313
dignity as was left him by his guilty conscience, he rose
and said :
' I am entirely guiltless of all these crimes. They can be
refuted. This man is a false accuser.'
'Eusebius,' said Chrysostom, 'you are evidently in a
heated frame of mind. You seem to be influenced by per
sonal animosity. I entreat you to be sure of your ground.
Do not bring these tremendous indictments unless you can
prove them. Bishop Antoninus has denied your charges.
He says he can disprove them. Beware, then, how you
bring needless scandal on the Church.'
But Eusebius, who was still in towering wrath, refused
to withdraw what he had said, and endeavoured to thrust
his schedule of gravamina into the Patriarch's hands.
'Nay, brother,' said Chrysostom, 'I refuse to receive
your schedule at this moment. We are about to enter the
church. We are about to begin the Holy Office. Think
the matter over ; if, after due prayer and deliberation, and
Avhen you are quite calm, you think that duty, and not
passion, requires you to accuse your brethren, then come
and hand in your charge. The Synod is ended ; let us
enter the church.'
The bishops rose ; Chrysostom led the way to his epis
copal chair at the end of the apse ; and when he had pro
nounced the opening Benediction, ' Peace be with you,'
the other prelates took their seats in a semicircle on either
hand. The service began, when suddenly Eusebius was
seen hurrying up the nave with great strides, and, amid
the astonishment of the crowded congregation, he went
straight up the steps of the sanctuary, passed the Holy
Table, and, stopping in front of the Archbishop, who
was seated behind it, endeavoured once more to thrust the
paper into his hands. As Chrysostom was still reluctant
to take it, he broke into the most terrible appeals, adjuring
the Patriarch by the life of the Emperor not to refuse
justice in a matter which concerned the inmost purity of
the Church. His demeanour was so tumultuous that the
people thought he must be demanding immediate interces
sion for the life of some condemned criminal. Unwilling
to prolong the unseemly spectacle, which was disturbing
the sacred solemnity, Chrysostom took the paper, and

314 GATHERING CLOUDS
the Lessons of the day were read. But Avhen the time
came for the Eucharist, the Archbishop found himself in a
state of such strong mental agitation that, fearful of un
worthy participation, either on his own part or that of the
bishops, who shared his emotions, he begged Pausophius,
Bishop of Pisidia, to consecrate the elements, and made a
sign to the members of the Synod to follow him into the
baptistery. Thither he summoned Eusebius, reproached
him for his violent precipitation, and began the investiga
tion which he so urgently demanded. Some witnesses
were produced, but Eusebius declared that others, and the
most essential, Avere in Asia, and that there he Avould pro
duce them. ' Then,' said Chrysostom, ' since the honour
of the Church is at stake, I Avill myself proceed to Asia
to examine them.'
Matters had now assumed a serious aspect. Antoninus
felt that his scandalous misdoings had been too flagrant to
escape condemnation at the hands of so pure a judge.
He fell back on astute manoeuvres. The times were
troubled. The absence of the Archbishop, in the darkness
of the political horizon, might cause grave inconvenience.
Among his other gross irregularities, the Bishop of Ephe
sus farmed an estate in Asia as agent for one of the great
Court officials. Anxious to gain time for his doublings,
and if possible to avoid being run to earth, this ecclesias
tical Avolf in sheep's clothing went to his patron, and
begged him to use his influence Avith the Emperor to pre
vent permission being given for the Patriarch's departure.
In this he Avas successful. But Chrysostom did not mean
to let matters rest. Since he could not go himself, he sent
a commission of three bishops, one of whom Avas his friend
and ultimate biographer, Palladius of Helenopolis. They
met at Hypaepae, near Ephesus, with the bishops of the
province, and summoned Eusebius and Antoninus to appear
before them.
Meanwhile, by fresh acts of collusive baseness, these two
ecclesiastics had done their utmost to reduce the commis
sion and the inquiry to a despicable farce. The brazen
front of Antoninus Avas not likely to recoil before new vil
lainies, and Eusebius had revealed himself in his true col
ours. The frantic denouncer of simony had himself become

FRESH TROUBLES 315
a simonist; the indignant opponent of Antoninus had be
come his secret accomplice ; the accuser of misprision had
accepted an enormous bribe as the guerdon of misprision.
The judges were mocked with plausible excuses. ' Yes,
certainly Antoninus had his witnesses who could prove
his innocence, and Eusebius had his witnesses to support
his contentions, but to get them together Avas a difficult
and expensive matter. They were scattered over half
Asia.' ' How long, then, Avill it take to collect them ? ' asked
Palladius, who Avas as earnest and upright in the matter
as Chrysostom himself.
' Forty days at least,' said Eusebius blandly.
Forty days ! — and that in the heat of the malarious
autumn! It seemed evident that the delay was inten
tional, and that so long a period was fixed in the hope of
tiring out the patience, perhaps of undermining the health,
of the commissioners. They waited, however — at least
two of them, for the third, a secret ally of Antoninus,
refused to act. At the end of the time Eusebius did not
appear, and was at once excommunicated by the Bishops
of Asia for connivance and contumacy. He had quietly
sneaked off, and was lying hid in the slums of Constanti
nople. This exemplary personage, who, like other bishops,
was saluted as ' your Sanctity,' had egregiously proved his
Avickedness and Avorthlessness. His zeal for Church dis
cipline had been nothing more than a cloak for jealousy
and ulterior designs. What became of his Lordship's
diocese we do not knoAV ; but it must be borne in mind
that there were scores of bishops in those days who, apart
from their title, had not one hundredth part of the duty
or responsibility of even a humble country vicar. When
St. Gregory Thaumaturgus was made Bishop of Neo-
Caesarea, he had only six parishioners under him ; and
Sassima, the diocese to Avhich St. Basil so unworthily and
unaccountably relegated the friend of his youth, the great
St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Avas a roadside horse-station.
Probably the mountaineers of Valentinianopolis, wherever
it Avas, Avere well rid of their scoundrelly pastor.
The commissioners stayed a month longer to no purpose
at Hypaepae, and then returned. When they stumbled

316 GATHERING CLOUDS
across Eusebius in the purlieus of Constantinople, and
taunted him with his mischief-making perfidy, he coolly
asserted that he had been ill.
Meanwhile Antoninus, Metropolitan of Ephesus, had
gone to his last long account, to stand with all his falsities,
embezzlements, and simony on his head before the bar of
that Judge whom no sinner can escape, and where the
guilty man is also
Himself the judge and jury, and himself
The witness at the bar, always condemned,
And that drags down his life.
Among his stolen marbles and appropriated columns,
and perhaps with the sons by his bedside Avhom he had
endoAved by sacrilege and begotten in perjury, the bishop
by purchase of the See of St. John the Divine escaped the
earthly tribunal to stand before the judgment-seat of
Christ, Whose name he had covered with infamy, and of
the Holy Spirit, Whose gifts he had bought amd sold.
And, as always in the case of those great sees — once
more as at Antioch, as at Rome, as at Alexandria, as at
Caesarea, as at Constantinople — there broke out the
blighting storm of base ambition and underground in
trigue which was the normal result of the death of a bishop
of the Church of Christ in those bad days, and which we
need not again describe. And, as at Constantinople, and
Rome, and everywhere else, the faithful few grew sick of
this state of things, and interfered to cut short the mean
rivalries of contending Churchmen. Hating the debasing
turmoil, and dreading the infamies of some new Antoninus,
some of the clergy and neighbouring bishops Avrote an
appeal to Chrysostom. ' For many years,' they wrote,
'all law and order have been violated among us. We
implore your Dignity to come and reimpress some form of
divineness on our distracted Church. Our misfortunes
are unparalleled. On one side the Arians tear us to
pieces, on the other many, like deadly Avolves, are lying
in wait to plunder our episcopal seat. Even iioav bribes
are flowing among us in rivers of simony.'
It was the dead of winter, and Chrysostom felt Avorn-
out and ill ; but he could not resist so solemn and

fresh Troubles 317
anguished an appeal. The earnestness of his soul sup
plied the failing strength of his body. On January 9,
401, he set sail from Constantinople for Apamsea. The
end of the troubles involved in the revolt of Gainas and
the activity of the Arians left no excuse for the Court to
oppose his departure.

318 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XXXIX
BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS
The priests thereof teach for hire, and the' prophets thereof divine for
money: yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say: Is not the Lord
among us ? none evil can come upon us. — Micah iii. 11.
E furon le sue opere e le sue colpe
Non creder leonine ma di volpe. Polci, Morg. Magg. xix.
Chrysostom Avould fain have taken Philip Avith him, for
Philip greAv more and more endeared and more and more
useful to him. But Philip, as manager of the Archbishop's
household and an assistant in all matters of business, could
not be spared for a long absence from the Patriarcheion.
To take Eutyches Avould have been pleasant, but it seemed
undesirable to expose his youth to the inevitable hardships
of rough travel ; and Chrysostom, who hoped for the day
when he might be a presbyter or a bishop, and all that
such an officer of the Church should be, Avas unAvilling to
disenchant him too painfully by those glaring contrasts
between the ideal and the reality Avhich Avould confront
him at every turn in the hoav corrupt, superstitious, and
simoniacal churches of St. Paul, St. Philip, and St. John.
So Chrysostom took Avith him the graver David, Avhom he
esteemed no less highly for his Avork and character, but
Avhose grave temperament had not the buoyancy and
brightness which often refreshed him in the other two.
David also Avas considering the question Avhether he could
face the responsibilities of the presbyterate ; but he had
been more familiarised than Eutyches with the existence
of ecclesiastical unAvorthiness by his longer and more
varied experience.
So Chrysostom set sail, accompanied by the Deacon Her-
acleides — a man of the highest worth — by some other

BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS 319
presbyters and deacons, and by David. He had already
sent before him Cyrinus of Chalcedon, Paul of Heraclea,
and Palladius of Helenopolis, who were to act ais his asses
sors. In the guileless straightforwardness of his disposi
tion he was unaware of the fact that the first two Avere
Avholly out of sympathy with himself, even if they had
not yet assumed the attitude of his open enemies. Still
more generous and guileless was the arrangement which
he made for a substitute to supply his place in the pulpit
of St. Sophia during his absence. He appointed the worth
less Severian of Gabala to fulfil this function, and Severian
of Gabala Avas a contemptible intriguer of the most vulgar
description. Gabala Avas a toAvn of Galilee, and its bishop under
ordinary circumstances Avould have been of less account
in the great world than one of our obscurest country cler
gymen. But Severian Avas ambitious, and regarded him
self as an orator. He did not mean to hide himself at so
dreadful a depth below the surface as Gabala, and so long
as he advanced his own position he cared very little Avhat
became of his sheep in the wilderness. He separated him
self from them for years, Avith little loss to them, but with
out the smallest compunction, so long as he fancied he
could further his private interests. Wealth, rank, fame,
Court favour — these were the dazzling lures which the
devil dangled before him. This clerical opportunist
would hold no vieAVS Avhich were not popular; would
express no opinion which Avould tend to hinder his advance
ment; would reject no alliance, however contemptible,
which seemed likely to elevate him ever so little in the
direction of the inch-high dignities which he coveted, and
which a diseased ambition represented as enormous alti
tudes. With the whole meanness of his soul he was
exclusively devoted to This bubble world,
Whose colours in a moment break and fly.
He Avas thus in every respect the antithesis to Chrysostom,
whose simple godliness, apostolic simplicity, and transpar
ent guilelessness he despised from the whole height of his
own inferiority.

320 GATHERING CLOUDS
Severian's appearance reflected his character. He was
unctuous and portly. His hair was oiled and curled in a
manner Avhich would have reminded our latest Laureate
of an Assyrian bull. His face Avas broad, his features
regular, his dress irreproachable, and he had gained a
character for boundless affability by cultivating a smile
so sunny that it would have ripened a peach. He could
never contemplate the short figure, humble dress, and
brusque manners of Chrysostom without an inward mur
mur against the indiscriminating obliquities of fortune.
How much more popular and imposing a Patriarch he
would himself have made ! He could see himself, in his
own ecstatic imagination, sailing through the small pom
posities of gorgeous functions in a manner so supremely
ornamental that, externally at least, the whole Church
could not have failed to be edified. He would have out
shone Nectarius himself ! Whereas this John of Antioch,
avIio wore no vestments to speak of and gave no banquets,
relied on mere goodness and spirituality, and was only
cared for by the poorer classes. He had been fired to strug
gle out of his provincial obscurity by the ' success ' — for so
he enviously regarded it — of Antiochus, Bishop of another
Syrian town — Ptolemais. Antiochus had left his diocese
for the grander and more glaring theatre of the capital.
He had been asked to preach in St. Sophia ; had created
a certain reputation for eloquence ; had for a time been
' the vogue ' in fashionable circles ; had been introduced
at Court; and Avhenever he condescended to go back to
his humble ' throne ' at Ptolemais, Avent back with a
purse heavily replenished, and in a blaze of popularity.
And yet Severian was quite convinced that, as an- ora
tor, he could easily surpass anything which Antiochus
could do.
So he occupied himself some time in preparing and
committing carefully to memory a stock of sermons ; and
when he felt sure that they were polished into sufficient
sonorousness and inanity, he set sail for Constantinople,
convinced that no misfortune could happen to the barque
which carried Severian and his sermons. Arrived at the
capital, he waited on the Archbishop, treated him with
abject deference, and begged that he Avould ask him to

BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS 321
preach in St. Sophia. The invitation Avas not difficult to
obtain, for strangers, and especially bishops, were fre
quently requested to deliver the sermon ; although the
people were so much fonder of hearing Chrysostom that,
even in the Cathedral, they Avould sometimes venture to
clamour and remonstrate if they saw anyone ascend the
pulpit in his place.
So Severian Avas asked to preach, and, selecting the ser
mon which he regarded as most original and striking, and
practising it in his lodging before a large silver mirror
until he felt himself perfect in the most accidental and
spontaneous gestures, he seized his chance. At first the
people were inclined to titter at his harsh and unfamiliar
Syrian accent; but as soon as they greAV accustomed to
his voice they were delighted Avith the apparently unpre
meditated floAV of sonorous, vapid, and conventional rhet
oric. It tickled their ears without in the least disturbing
their consciences, or giving them the trouble of thinking
of anything which might interrupt their vices or ruffle
their self-satisfaction. The aristocratic world was spe
cially delighted. These sermons were charmingly short
and exquisitely unctuous. One had time, when they Avere
over, to go to the theatre. There Avere no offensive attacks
on dress; no stringent demands for self-denial; nothing
to disquiet the serene conventionality of routine religion
ism, or to force the hypocrite to look inwards at the many-
headed monster of his own ill-regulated passions. Here
indeed was a delightful preacher! Castricia, Marsa, Epi
graphia, could listen to such sermons for ever without
being tired ! Hoav immensely superior to the crude vio
lence and uncourtly personalities of the Antiochene
intruder, for whom they had no one to thank but the
wicked Eutropius ! Severian Avas such a clear man ! The
female Avorld of Constantinople was soon at his feet.
So the Bishop of Gabala was successful beyond his
wildest dreams, and — heaven of heavens ! — the Emperor
and the Empress themselves actually asked that he might
be presented to them. In spite of the obsolete canon which
forfcade the transference of bishops to other dioceses,
Severian might be translated. If he could only kick clown
the humble and hated ladder by which he had ascended, he

322 GATHERING CLOUDS
might — avIio knows? — become Patriarch of Constantinople
itself! Oh! Paradise!
Such was the man whom, in his guilelessness, Chrysos
tom left in his place to be the moral instructor of the
people. It was not his fault. He Avas himself intensely
humble. He Avas so generous a critic that, always seek
ing the good in every sermon, he thought every sermon
good, and better than any which he could preach himself.
Apart from such glaring evidence as could not be disputed,
he would not believe that anyone could be actuated by
rivalries so base as those of Severian ; nor could he even
conceive of a character Avhich, under its film of iridescent
semblance, . could conceal such Dead Sea depths. No
other bishop equally Avell known happened to be then pres
ent in the capital. PhilijJ grumbled openly ; Eutyches
shook his innocent head; DaA'id Avould not breathe one
syllable of approval. Serapion declared quite plainly that
he regarded Severian as a designing hypocrite. Chrysos
tom's best and wisest presbyters — Tigrius, Germanus,
Cassian — expressed their serious doubts about the man
and his aims, and the sincerity of his teaching. Bishop
Palladius did not hesitate to tell the Patriarch privately
that Severian Avas no better than an unsavoury windbag.
But Chrysostom's charity Avould think no evil ; and, in
deed, it Avas difficult for him to make any other pro
vision, for the Emperor, Avho had some right to ask,
had, at the instigation of Eudoxia, made it his personal
request. But though he left the pulpit to Severian, he Avould not
entrust to him (as he wished) the management of the
diocese. He left that in the stern yet faithful hands of
the Archdeacon Serapion.
No sooner had he set sail than he was glad that he had
not taken Eutyches Avith him, for it required a hardj^ frame
to bear the trials of the journey. His ship had barely
reached the Euxine Avhen a north Avind broke on them
Avith unwonted fury. They had to take refuge under the
promontory of Triton, and there for two Avhole clays tossed
at anchor in the storm. The delay Avas so unexpected that
the captain had not even provisioned his ship, so that, to
add to their misery and sea-sickness, they Avere actually

BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS 323
starving. Then, fortunately, the wind changed, and they
arrived safely at their destination.
The first thing to be done was to provide Ephesus with
a new and worthy bishop. The only way to satisfy the
factions which existed was not to exalt one set of partisans
over another by electing their candidate, but to appoint
someone who had never coveted the office. Accordingly,
Chrysostom presented to them his friend and fellow-
traveller, Heracleides. Heracleides had only been a dea
con for three years, but he was a man of mature age, of
learning, piety, wisdom, and knowledge of the Scriptures,
and for many years he had lived with an ascetic community
in the Sketic desert. He was in every way fitted to adorn
his high office ; but he was too good a man for that age and
that country, and the unwished-for elevation which he won
by the eloquence of his friend only plunged him within a
feAV years into an abyss of misery and ruin.
The next step was to inquire into the case of the simo-
niacal bishops ; and at this stage of the proceedings, Anto
ninus being dead, to whom he had sold his silence, the
miserable Bishop of Valentinianopolis reappeared on the
scene. ' I implore your Piety,' he said, ' to readmit me
to communion with my brethren, and to allow me now
to produce my witnesses against the six bishops whom I
accused.' Such was the indulgence with which the man
was treated that his excommunication was removed and
he resumed the r$le of accuser. The six bishops stoutly
asserted their innocence ; but they were overwhelmed with
the counter-testimony, not only of lay persons, both male
and female, but of ecclesiastics. Some even of their own
presbyters, in whom the}r had trusted, inculpated them with
proofs of the time, place, character, and exact amounts of
the bribes by which they had purchased the titles of ' your
Piety' and 'your Sanctity.' When they were no longer
able to deny, they confessed, and humbly begged for par
don for their simony, though not, apparently, for their
persistent lying. They could only offer a twofold plea,
and each plea was disgraceful to the Church in general.
First, they argued that they were not conscious of doing
anything wrong in their trying to purchase the gifts of
God Avith money, because it was a regularly established

324 GATHERING CLOUDS
custom, so that they Avere very far indeed from being the
sole offenders. Next, the reason for their offence was the
same Avhich existed in the case of many others. They
Avere curiales — that is, they possessed farms of more than
twenty-five acres in extent, and therefore, in the horrible
pressure of taxation in troubled times and under an
Administration at once feeble and corrupt, they Avere
not only compelled to pay taxes, but to enforce the pay
ment of them by others. This Avas a duty onerous and
odious, and, being purely secular in its character, Con
stantine had excepted the clergy from the burden. The
consequence had been that many had purchased bishoprics
without a single call to the office, or qualification for it,
solely because they wished to be exempted from the
trouble of civic obligations. All that they could now
say was, ' Habetis confitentes reos.' They threw them
selves and their acknowledged guilt on the mercy of the
Patriarch and his commissioners. Two things only they
asked : the one that, although they forfeited their sees,
they might still be allowed, as ex-bishops, to communicate
with their episcopal brethren within the rail of the sacra
rium ; the other, that the money which they had simonia-
cally expended might be restored to them. For, they said,
the greed of the Bishop of Ephesus had demanded large
sums, and in order to become bishops they had been forced
to strip themselves of all their own possessions, and even
of the furniture and jeAvels of their wives.
All their requests were granted ; only, since the Church
could not repay them their vilely-expended money, they
were allowed to recover it from the heirs of Antoninus in
the courts of law. ChrysOstom was afterwards accused
of haste, violence, and arbitrary injustice ; but so far, at
any rate, he and his fellow-judges seem to have gone to
the extreme verge of a too compassionate leniency.
Whether his subsequent proceedings were less anx
iously merciful, and more summary, we cannot judge, for
we only have the testimony of his enemies. He was
accused of having traversed Lycia, Pamphylia, Phrygia
and Pontus, and there, with usurped jurisdiction, without
even the excuse (as at Ephesus) of any appeal to his
intervention, to have accused, judged, and condemned no

BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS 325
less than sixteen bishops, one of whom, Proaeresius of
Lydia, had been accused by himself alone. It was said
that, in spite of the canons, he had sometimes ordained as
many as four bishops at a time, that he had appointed
new bishops proprio motu, without even consulting the
local synods, and in spite of their Avishes ; and that this
had been done so carelessly that, in some instances, he had
consecrated unenfranchised slaves of a character actually
criminal. Probably there was no truth in any of these allegations,
although it is possible that Chrysostom, filled with shame
at the condition of the Church, thwarted on every side
by perjury and chicanery, and anxious to get back to
the duties of his own diocese, may have been carried into
hasty measures by the passion of his reforming zeail. As
for his jurisdiction in Asia Minor, it rested on prescription.
It Avas only actually established fifty years later, by the
Council of Chalcedon, but no one seems at the time either
to have challenged or doubted it. Chrysostom clearly
thought that he Avas acting within his rights, and Avas
only obeying the painful commands of duty. As for
smaller matters, multitudes of canons existed Avhich, by
universal consent, had come to be. treated as obsolete
almost as soon as they were enacted ; and a man like
Chrysostom, who vieAved all questions in the large air of
moral and spiritual obligations, was not likely to worry
himself with the chicanery of niggling scrupulosities
in which small and peddling minds find their chief
delight. But even now this disastrous mission was not to close.
On his way back through Bithynia, Chrysostom stopped
at its capital, Nicomedia, to bring under his patriarchal
censure this time not only a bishop, but an archbishop,
and one of the strangest specimens whom the office could
produce. He was an Italian named Gerontius, and had
oeen half-physician, half-necromancer at Milan. He fig
ured as a sort of fourth-century Paracelsus or a nineteenth-
century Mahatrna; but whatever skill or knowledge of
medicine he possessed, he eked it out with theurgic pre
tences. He professed to wield a power of evoking demons
and subjecting them to his control, and he was anxious

326 GATHERING CLOUDS
to add sacred claims to those of his worldly profession.
He boasted that on one occasion he had seen one of the
horrible night-spectres known as an Onoskelis, which
sometimes appeared in the guise of an ass. But the
piercing gaze of Gerontius had penetrated the disguise;
he had seized the ghostly impostor, thrown a halter
over its neck, and compelled it to work in grinding a
mill ! He so completely took away the character of the
harmless donkey that it was henceforth regarded as a sub
jugated demon!
This charlatan had managed at first to deceive the
great St. Ambrose, who had ordained him deacon, but
who, on discovering his quackeries, had chased him out of
the Church of Milan. He then transferred his practice
to Constantinople, and used his spells and sorceries
among Easterns, who were more deeply sunk in super
stitious credulity. Here he in some way came across
Helladius, Archbishop of Caesarea and Exarch of Pontus.
Having obtained a footing at Court as a physician, Geron
tius, Avith an eye to future favours, had been able to
render Helladius a service by procuring a first-rate
military commission for his son. Helladius, by way of
gratitude for this use. of backstairs influence, was required
to ordain him, first presbyter, and then Archbishop of
Nicomedia. At Nicomedia, in his double capacity of
healer of souls and bodies, he had acquired great popu
larity. Ambrose, indignant at the elevation of so flagrant
an impostor, had written urgent letters to Nectarius,
entreating him to free the Church from the disgrace of
such dubious presidency. The easy-going Nectarius was
too timid to incur the displeasure of the degenerate
Christians of Bithynia. Not so Chrysostom. He sum
moned Gerontius before him, cashiered him from his
office, and gave the Church a worthy prelate in the person
of Pansophius, a philosopher and a Christian, who had
been the tutor of the Empress Eudoxia. The Nicome-
dians, however, were anything but grateful. As though
their city had been devastated by a pestilence, they Avent
through their streets in funeral apparel, chanting doleful
litanies over the catastrophe which had happened to them,
in order to induce the Almighty to restore to them their

BAD ECCLESIASTICS AND BASE PLOTS 327
bishop. Not content with the signs of public mourning
in Bithynia, their fellow-citizens at Constantinople tried
to excite odium against the Patriarch by there adopting a
similar method of expressing their displeasure.
And thus, as though the hatred which Chrysostom
had created by his fearless righteousness in the corrupt
Church of his own city had not been sufficient, he had
noAV evoked hurricanes of calumny, which were henceforth
to burst upon him from every province of Asia Minor.
Every bad, mean, and worldly ecclesiastic gnashed upon
him with his teeth, as it had been a ramping and a roar
ing lion.
Nor was this the worst. He had been repeatedly ap
prised by letters from his faithful Philip and Serapion
that Severian was abusing his position to intrigue against
him. Lies and sneers and misrepresentations were rife,
and not a feAv of them could be traced back to Severian.
There were in those days no ' religious ' newspapers,
but the battling coteries of unscrupulous partisans served
the same purpose of puffing all their own adherents, and
of blackening all who did not agree with them. Severian
had two plans — the one to pander to his own popularity,
and by any amount of flattery and compromise to in
gratiate himself Avith the powerful ; the other, to omit no
opportunity of surreptitiously creating an unfavourable
opinion of Chrysostom. By these two means he hoped
in time to supersede him. Even his sermons, which
might otherwise have been described as 'syllabubs
whipped in cream,' abounded in innuendoes and side-
allusions, which were intended to glance off and to wound
the hearts of Chrysostom and his adherents.
Of all this Chrysostom was warned; but he was too
magnanimous to stoop to resentment of small annoyances,
or to contentions with unworthy antagonists. The spirit
in which he acted in the face of even the grossest per
versions of truth as regards himself was that of the inscrip
tion on the wall of Marischal College, Aberdeen : ' They
say. What say they ? Let them say ! ' He got the thing
done, and let them howl.
But at last he was informed of an incident which
demonstrated the unfitness of Severian for the sacred

328 GATHERING CLOUDS
functions assigned to him, and was too flagrant to admit
its being passed over in silence. What that was Ave shall
hear a little later on.
The machinations of his enemies throughout the Church,
and above all of the corrupted clergy, had been deadly and
incessant. Among these there were two who would have
been willing at any moment to take his life, if opportunity
should offer. He had excommunicated them both: one
for detected adultery, the other, whose name Avas John,
for murder — since brutality of passion had made him
actually beat to death a young slave who had offended
him. But with them Avere joined all those whom he called
' the priests who ate at Jezebel's table,' and all those whom
his Avitty friend, Bishop Palladius, describes as the ' belly-
Avorshippers, table-giants, and Avomen-hawks,' who dis
graced the ranks of the priesthood. The people, however,
knew how to estimate these gentlemen by a very different
standard from that of their own exalted spiritual preten
sions. They shoAved themselves profoundly indifferent to
the lies Avhich false monks and cunning priests had let
loose. When their weary Patriarch landed from his
returning barque they thronged the quay and the streets
in myriads, received him with louder bursts of acclamation
than were ever vouchsafed to Arcadius or Eudoxia, and
pressed forward in such countless numbers to kiss his
hand that his Avay to his palace was very slow. He bade
them meet him in St. Sophia, and there poured forth into
their enraptured ears the expression of his heartfelt grati
tude for a fidelity which had Avithstood the assault of so
many open attacks and secret machinations.

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS 329

CHAPTER XL
.1 VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS
Quam dissimilis est nunc a se ipso populus Christianus !
Salvian, de Gubemat. Dei.
' Philip and David,' said Chrysostom, ' Proclus has just
told me ' — Proclus was the young deacon who helped
Serapion to arrange audiences with the Patriarch, and he
ultimately became Patriarch himself — ' that I am to
receive a visit to-day from the well-known presbyter,
Vigilantius. He has travelled in many lands, and brings
me a letter of introduction from the Western poet,
Paulinus, Bishop of Nola. I think you will like to hear
something about the great men whom he has met ; so, if
Eutyches will take a little of your work, you may come in
after dinner and meet the Gaulish presbyter.
' Eutyches won't mind, I knoAV,' said David, ' for there
is not much to do to-day, and he is anxious to write a
letter to his friend Walamir, who, as we have just heard,
is now with Alaric at iEmona.'
' Very well,' said Chrysostom. ' Vigilantius will be
here at noon.'
' I hope, father,' said Philip slyly, ' you will give him a
better dinner than you gave to the Bishop of Beroea, or
we shall have more trouble.'
' I shall never hear the last of that unhappy dinner,'
said Chrysostom, smiling ; ' and you know it Avas all your
fault, Philip. But, happily, the Lady Olympias has noAv
taken all that out of your hands, and I have no doubt
she will manage much better.'
So Vigilantius was invited. He was a Gaul, born at
Convenae, and afterwards settled at Calagurris. Jerome
has deluged him with some of the — pardon the phrase,
reader, which, if I dared to quote, would be more than

330 GATHERING CLOUDS
amply justified — of the Avorst clerical and ecclesiastical
Billingsgate. Untaught by the way in which his own
heart had been lacerated by shameless calumnies, the
eremite of Bethlehem Avas disgracefully reckless in the
virulence Avith which he spoke of others. Jerome habit
ually calls him, not Vigilantius, 'the watchful,' but
Dormitantius, ' the snorer,' just as, after his quarrel with
the learned, saintly, and ascetic Rufinus, of whom origi
nally he could speak in no terms of eulogy too exalted,
he pursued that great man, even to his death, with the
name of G-runnius, ' the grunter.' Even when he lay
dead in Sicily, the unforgiving saint, in a commentary on
Holy Scripture, has no better epitaph for the friend of his
youth, whom he had once called ' his true colleague and
brother,' than ' the Scorpion is crushed to the earth between
JEnceladus and Porphyrion, and the hydra of many heads
has ceased to hiss against me,' — this ' hydra ' being one of
the holiest Churchmen of his day, whom Bishop Palladius
describes as a man of 'unequalled learning and unequalled
humility.' It is said that the father of Vigilantius was a vintner ;
hence Jerome calls him ' a base-born tapster, a Samaritan,
a Jew, a man who belches forth his impure crapulousness,
whose tongue ought to be cut out by surgeons, and his
insane head healed.' But, in spite of this torrent of foul
invective, Vigilantius is spoken of with respect by the
voice of history. He was a man of blameless life, of bright
intelligence, of fearless candour, and of a forgiving mod
esty, which is best illustrated by the fact that he never
answered by a single syllable the rancorous and frantic
vituperations to which he had been subjected by the pas
sionate recluse. The extent to which we are forced to
discount the invectives of Jerome may best be estimated by
the fact that he has nothing better to say of Chrysostom,
a saint whose holiness was incomparably superior to his
own, than that he was ' a mad, pestilent, contaminated,
furious, and insanely tyrannical person, who had sold his
soul to the devil,' and ' an impure demon who drags along
a filth of words like a torrent.' Jerome, it is true, only
translated these words from a hideous libel written by
Theophilus; but he lent them the endorsement of his

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS 331
Latin eloquence and his mighty name. And the other
saint of his day — St. Ambrose — he described as 'a croak
ing raven, Avho, himself entirely dingy, laughs in marvel
lous fashion at the colours of all other birds.' There are
some men, and even good men, Avho seem at once to inspire
each other with mutual antipathy ; there are others who
are at once drawn to one another. Vigilantius and Jerome
disliked each other almost from the day on which they
met. Their characters and their temperaments were
wholly dissimilar. But the Gallic presbyter felt at once
drawn towards Chrysostom, and there was something in his
frank impetuosity which attracted the Patriarch's sympathy.
After their brief repast, which the simple Vigilantius
thought excellent, though he had been warned before
hand that Chrysostom's entertainments were profoundly
despised by connoisseurs, the two youths came in.
' Let me introduce to you,' said Chrysostom, ' two of
my young secretaries, Philip of Antioch, and David — of
Constantinople at present, but once of Nazareth.'
'Of Nazareth?' asked Vigilantius. 'I know well the
village where Christ was born. I visited it when I was
staying with the saintly Rufinus at Jerusalem. Never
can I forget its sweet, green valleys, and the prospect
from its hill, on whose summit the Lord Jesus in His
happy boyhood must have stood so often.' He fixed so
earnest a gaze on David's face that the youth was not
sorry when Eutyches came in, and called him to settle
some point in the Patriarch's correspondence about which
he was uncertain.
' Who is that youth from Nazareth ? ' asked Vigilantius.
' I fear I stared at him too rudely, and made him blush.
But my reason was that I have seen in the catacombs of
St. Callistus, at Rome, a picture of Christ of which his
face at once reminded me.'
' A picture of Christ ! ' said Chrysostom. ' Are there
such in existence ? I thought that we had every reason
to disapprove of all attempts to represent Him in His
human aspect. The Council of Eliberis forbade it, and
the great Eusebius of Caesarea was almost indignant with
the Empress Constantia when she asked him to procure
her a picture of Christ.'

332 GATHERING CLOUDS
' That is true,' said Vigilantius. ' This catacomb-picture
is the earliest attempt to represent the Son of God, and
is later than the days of Constantine. But in Palestine I
heard that there were some dim and faint traditions about
His human aspect, which were repeated to me, especially
as to the wonderful sweetness of His smile ; and your
young secretary reminded me both of this description and
of the picture in the crypt of St. Callistus.'
' Ah ! ' said Chrysostom, ' there is a something about
him which, out of reverence and humility, he keeps in the
depths of his heart ; but I may tell you — if you will
promise not to speak of it — - that he is lineally descended
from the family of the Desposyni.'
The wonder and surprise of Vigilantius remained un
expressed, for at this moment David came back; but,
rising from his seat, he grasped the youth's hand, and
apologised for having stared at him, as he was interested
in one who had been born at Nazareth.
David readily forgave him, and Chrysostom said : ' You
have mentioned to us the pictures in the Catacombs ; are
they not being also introduced into churches in the
West?' ' The first church which I have seen painted all over
with pictures,' said Vigilantius, 'is that of my kind friend
Paulinus, Bishop of Nola.'
'It is a Church of St. Felix of Nola, is it not?' said
Chrysostom. ' Yes, he is devoted to St. Felix. He writes a poem in
his hpnour every year ; he has an immense festival in his
honour on the day of his martyrdom, and has painted the
Avhole church with scenes from his history.'
' It is a serious innovation,' said Chrysostom.
' It is,' said Vigilantius, ' and, in my humble opinion, in
these days, a dangerous one. Paulinus calls his pictures
" The Bible of the laity," but it is mainly a Bible of St.
Felix.' ' Who was St. Felix of Nola, sir ? ' asked Philip.
' Only to think that you should not know,' said Chrys
ostom, whose intercourse with Philip was habitually play
ful. ' Why, even a boy like Eutyches would tell you
that.'

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS 333
' Will your Beatitude try him ? ' said Philip, revenging
himself by a title Avhich, in public, his adopted father could
hardly reprove. ' Eutyches ! ' he called out, ' his Beatitude
wants you.'
' Philip does not know who St. Felix of Nola was ! '
said Chrysostom. 'Tell him, Eutyches.'
Eutyches looked puzzled. ' Come, Eutyches,' said
Philip, 'the Patriarch wants you to pour out the stores
of your erudition, and to shame my ignorance.'
' This must be one of Philip's jokes, my Lord,' said
Eutyches. ' Frankly, I don't know.'
Philip smiled in mischievous triumph. ' Well,' said
Chrysostom, ' Vigilantius will tell you.'
' Felix,' said Vigilantius, ' Avas a priest of Nola avIio was
a confessor in the persecutions of Decius and Valerian,
but of Avhom little is known except legends. I will tell
these youths one pretty story about him. On one occasion
he was being pursued b)r the soldiers during the persecu
tion. He had barely time to hide himself in a cave on
the mountain-side, and a spider instantly spun its Aveb
over the entrance. The pursuers, seeing the spider's web,
did not enter the cave. " Ubi Beus est," said Felix as he
came out after they had passed : " ibi aranea murus ; ubi
non est, ibi murus aranea." '
' Translate that for Philip's benefit, Eutyches,' said
Chrysostom. ' " Where God is," ' said Eutyches ; ' but Philip knoAvs
it Avithout my translation — " there a spider's Aveb is a
Avail ; where He is not, a wall is but a spider's web." '
'Thank you, sir,' said Philip; 'and now that Eutyches
has made me blush by his erudition ' — • he looked at the
Patriarch with twinkling eyes — ' he had better go back
to his work, or we shall get behindhand.'
Eutyches punished Philip by an unobserved pull at
his eair as he went out, for Avhich he was repaid after-
Avards. 'Tell us more about the Chapel of Paulinus,' said
Chrysostom. ' Are his pictures really useful ? '
' Far from it,' said Vigilantius. ' The half-Pagan rustics
practically Avorship them.'
'I hope not; that Avere an idolatry to be abhorred of

334 GATHERING CLOUDS
Christians. But surely Paulinus does not venture to
paint Christ ? '
' No ; he stops short there,' said Vigilantius. ' When
he wants to indicate Christ he paints a snow-Avhite lamb
under a bloodstained cross. Another of his novelties is to
have endless candles burning round the shrine of St. Felix,
even in the day time ; and he undoubtedly prays to him,
as if the saints Avere ubiquitous.'
' I am unwilling to say anything severe of a truly good
man like my brother, the Bishop of Nola,' said Chrysostom,
' but I will confess to you that much of this seems to me
to be fraught with danger, and to be utterly unwarranted
by Holy Writ.'
' I love and honour Paulinus,' said Vigilantius, ' but,
my lord Patriarch, I cannot but admit that being, as he is, a
late convert from Paganism, he has carried into Christianity
much Pagan ritual and many Pagan superstitions. Perhaps
I speak with unbecoming freedom before your Dignity ? '
' Speak freely,' said Chrysostom ; ' and as for titles, I
gladly exonerate all my visitors from using them,'
' I was going to be so bold as to say that there seems
to be some truth in the complaint of Faustus when he says
of Christians : " The sacrifices of the heathen you have
turned into love-feasts, their idols into martyrs, whom you
worship with similar devotion ; you propitiate the shades
of the dead Avith wine and vanities ; the solemn days of
the Gentiles you keep with them, and — though this, thank
God ! is not true of all — certain it is that you have changed
nothing from their manner of life." '
' Faustus the Manichee ? Was he not once a teacher of
Augustine of Hippo, some of whose writings I have read ? '
' Yes. Faustus spoke severely, but there is a terrible
substratum of fact under his denunciations.'
' It is too true,' said the Patriarch ; ' there is much to
fear from this re-intrusion of Pagan ritual into the Chris
tian Church ; and the deplorable degeneracy from the old
ideal of Christian innocence causes the deepest misgivings
of my heart. Do you think that this relic-worship, this
blaze of candles in daylight, these pictures, these martyr-
festivals, have a good effect on the people ? '
' None at all, or a bad one, on the testimony of Paulinus

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS 335
himself. I have heard him bitterly deplore the orgies of
drunkenness, and other grave scandals, caused by the
nightly vigils which the Council of Eliberis so strongly
condemned, as Augustine of Hippo has also clone. As for
relic-worship, even Jerome sneers at " superstitious woman-
lings " grovelling over supposed fragments of the true
Cross. If the example of Paiulinus prevails, Ave shall soon
have a new polytheism. What need have we to pray to
imperfect mortals, when we can pray to Christ ? Is it not
monstrous, Bishop, to imagine that they are more com
passionate than He, or that we need to thrust their inter
cession between our souls and His infinite tenderness?
Jerome has no language too abusive to denounce me for
holding these opinions ; he taunts me Avith incredible
ignorance ; he expresses a pious hope that during my
snores I may be destroyed like the firstborn of Egypt.
But when he condescends to arguments, all that he can
adduce seem to my simplicity to be so sophistically mis
applied that even a well-taught child could answer them.'
' Ah ! ' said the Patriarch, ' I am sorry that he should
thus speak and write of you. This ferocity which cannot
forgive a difference of opinion is the plague-spot of our
Christianity. How intensely we all need the verse, "I
said I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with
my tongue." '
' Amen ! and amen ! ' said Vigilantius. ' When I read
how Jerome says that I am more pernicious than Cacus or
Geryon, a more portentous monster than Leviathan or the
Nemean lion, I am only sorry for him, and for the effect
of such a style on the minds of others — not for myself.
It cannot hurt me. His offence is more rank when he
tries to blacken my character by a ridiculous story. He
says that one night, when there was an earthquake at
Bethlehem, I leapt out of bed, equally destitute of faith and
clothing, and, being intoxicated, remained at night pray
ing in the Cave of the Nativity as naked as Adam and Eve
in Paradise. His falsehood that I was intoxicated — which
I have never been in my life — is his way of reviving the
untrue sneer that my father was a publican. May God
forgive him ! I am sure I do.'
' Alas ! ' said Chrysostom, ' it is language like this Avhich

336 GATHERING CLOUDS
makes the heathen say, with a sneer, " There was a day
Avhen even Christians loved one another." But Avhy is he
so vehemently embittered against you ? Were you not his
guest at Bethlehem?'
' I was, Bishop ; and, oh ! with what reverence my soul
was filled when I was sheltered in his cave, which is close
by the cave of Christ's nativity. I can sympathise with
Jerome Avhen he calls the village of Bethlehem more
august than the city of Rome.'
' His must be a delightful life.'
' It might be,' said the Gaul, with a sad smile. ' The
place is full of charm. The fields in spring are embroidered
with blue and purple and crimson flowers, like the High
Priest's ephod, and they ring with the songs of birds. In
summer there are the shadows of the hills, and of groves rich
in foliage. In autumn it Avas pleasant to pace the leaf-
strewn walks. Even in Avinter there was no fear of cold,
for there is an abundance of fuel.'
' Happy Jerome ! '
' No, not happy, I fear. Yet Jerome might be as happy
as anyone. He lives pen in hand, and has the delight of
constant occupations. He daily teaches the two noble
ladies, Paula and Eustochium, who came with him from
Rome ; he writes many letters and many books ; he in
structs the monks; he educates the boys of his monas
teries, and preaches to the pilgrims, who SAvarm in hun
dreds to his coenobium.'
'Then how comes it that you only say his life might
be happy ? '
' For two reasons. First, he makes himself ill, fretful,
and irritable with over-asceticism ; and, next, lie is ahvays
involving himself in a whirl of controversies, which he
renders ten times more bitter by his ferocious eloquence.'
' You have not yet told us why his anger burns so
hotly against you.'
'It is because I dare to hold some of the opinions
which the wronged Jovinian also held, against which
Jerome has written his fiercest denunciations. Jovinian,
as you know, had been a monk and an ascetic, who wore
a single rough tunic, lived on bread and water, and even
Avent about in winter with bare feet. Experience con-

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS 337
vinced him that there was no essential moral or spiritual
profit in this will-worship. He never married, but he
held that it is only a false tradition which imposes celibacy
on presbyters. In that he agrees with the Nicene Fathers.
Surely marriage is in all respects as sacred as celibacy?
Did not Clement of Alexandria say that to disparage
marriage was to disparage the Apostles? Was not St.
Peter married ? Did not the holy Philip give his daugh
ters in marriage? Does not St. Paul say that a bishop
must be the husband of one wife? Did not Athanasius
say that "nothing prevented the right of a bishop to
marry if he chose " ? '
' Marriage,' said Chrysostom, ' is honourable in all.
I have myself ventured to say distinctly, "Enjoy the
married state Avith due moderation, and you shall be first
in the kingdom of heawen, and enjoy all blessing." But
you would not disparage celibacy for such as feel them
selves called to it ? '
'No,' said Vigilantius; 'but when I consider the vile
custom of living with agapetce, with which even imperial
laws have tried to grapple in vain, it is clear to me that
the enforcement on the many of an ideal possible only
for the few, will be in the future, as it has been in the
past, a source of immense demoralisation and a curse to
the whole Church of God.'
' Was this the only ground of Jerome's wrath ? '
'No,' said Vigilantius. 'I have ventured to raise my
voice against what seem to me to be trivialities and
superstitions ; and I have held this to be all the more incum
bent on me, because herein I oppose the current tendencies.'
' Is it true that you have denounced fasting ? '
'No; I have only said that it is nowhere enjoined as
a Christian duty; that it cannot be intrinsically pleasing
to God as an end, but only as a means ; and that for most
temperaments it makes the Christian life not more easy,
but more difficult.'
Here Philip ventured to interpose a question. ' Bishop,'
he said, 'may I ask the Presbyter what he would say to
the words, " But the days shall come when the Bridegroom
shall be taken from them. Then shall they fast, in those
days"?'

338 GATHERING CLOUDS
' I could reply,' said Vigilantius, ' but it will be more
respectful if I leave the answer with the Patriarch.'
'That text does not apply, Philip,' said Chrysostom.
' These are in no sense the days when the Bridegroom is
taken from us. He is with us always, even to the end of
the world ; and much more with us than He could be by
His bodily presence. My views about fasting have changed
greatly since the days when I destroyed my health by it
for ever.'
'As to fasting,' said Vigilantius, '¦ Jerome, in his too
famous letter to Eustochium, shows how absolutely
powerless it was to deliver him even from the temptations
Avhich he most hated. But one of the truest saints I ever
knew told me that fasting made him irritable and ill-
tempered ; that it robbed him of command over his acts,
feelings, and expressions ; that it makes his tongue, lips,
and brain no longer in his power ; that it deprives him in
many ways of all self-command, makes him use the wrong
word for the right, makes him seem out of temper when
he is not, and makes him smile or laugh when he ought
to be serious. Worse than all, he said that when thoughts
present themselves to his mind in fasting, he feels wholly
unable to throw them off any more than if he were some
dead thing, and that thus they make an impression on
him which he is unable to resist. So far from making his
prayers more fervent, he finds that fasting hinders him
from fixing his mind upon them. From sheer languor
and listlessness it tempts him to sloth ; and, Avhat is worst
of all, he says that even moderate fasting is so undeniably
a means of temptation as to expose him to thoughts from
which he would habitually turn with shame and abhor
rence. Yet he persists in fasting, because he says that it
is enjoined by God. Surely this is a fatal error? We are
to fly from temptation, not seek it ; and God would never
have enjoined that which is for most men a source of
greater moral difficulties.'
' The right fasting,' said Chrysostom, ' is habitual modera
tion, and abstinence from evil. My predecessor, Gregory
of Nazianzus, once, most wisely, kept his Lent by silence,
because he felt himself too much tempted to hasty Avords.
And in that beautiful " Shepherd," by Hermas, which I

A VISIT FROM VIGILANTIUS 339
gave to you boys the other day, Philip — you remember
what the good Shepherd says to Hernias ? '
' Yes, sir,' said Philip. ' He tells Hermas that the true
and acceptable fast is the forgiveness of injuries, and the
advance in godliness.'
' That is my view,' said Vigilantius ; ' and even if I be
wrong, I hardly think,' he added, laughing, ' that what I
have said justifies Jerome in his remark that I wish to
reduce men to the condition of swine, or that I call ab
stinence a heresy, or that my object is to enrich my drink-
ing-shops ! I need hardly say that I have none ; but that
matters nothing to such controversialists.'
'My son,' said Chrysostom, 'do not let these assaults
irritate you. There never yet was a good man whom some
did not call Beelzebub, as they called our Master. Forget
them.' ' When I need comfort,' said Vigilantius — 'and I often
do — I think of Him Whom men called a " gluttonous man
and a winebibber," of Whom they said that He was a
Samaritan, and had a devil. Jerome's writings will live,
and I shall be handed down, it may be, to after-ages as a
name of scorn. What matters it ? God is the judge ; not
man.' ' But you must also forgive your slanderer.'
' I forgive him,' said the Presbyter, ' with all my heart.
Jerome, much as he has wronged me, is sincere. The
Church owes him much service, if some Avrongs. I shall
not answer him. I shall not defend myself. I trust my
cause to Him that judgeth righteously. I shall retire, till
my life ends, to the quiet duties of my office and my home.
I kneel for your blessing, Patriarch, and thank you for
your kindness to one whom the Church hates.'
'Farewell, Vigilantius! May God be Avith you!' said
Chrysostom, and over the head of the kneeling presbyter
he pronounced his blessing. ' If you are dear to Christ it
will matter very little that you are hated by some Avho
profess to be the sole true representatives of His Church.'

340 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XLI
A FAREWELL
For I am long since weary of your storm
Of carnage, and find, Hermod, in your life
Something too much of war and broils which make
Life one perpetual fight. — Matthew Aknold, Balder.
' What a long talk you have been having ! ' said Eutyches,
when David and Philip came out of the study. ' Tell me
all about it.'
' Well, first you told us all about St. Felix and the
Bishop of Nola.'
' You witty fellow ! ' said Eutyches.
' Then you pulled my ears, for which you shall catch it.'
' It was less punishment than you deserved.'
' Then Vigilantius told us all about Jerome of Bethle
hem, avIio, according to him, must be a singularly amiable
person.' ' You are no good,' said Eutyches ; ' David is ten times
as patient as you, and is never in a hurry, as you always
are. So I shall ask him all the rest.'
David gave him a sketch of what had passed, though,
with characteristic sweetness, he softened doAvn all that
seemed most unfa\rourable to Jerome. Eutyches listened
with interest, and some surprise.
' Have you written to Walamir ? r asked Philip. ' If
you have, I hope you gave our kindliest greetings to him
and Thorismund.'
'I have,' said Eutyches. 'One of Aurelian's soldiers
happened to be starting for Illyricum to-morrow, and he is
going to take my letter. I must give it him at once. I
shall have to pass through the Chalkoprateia.'
' To the owls with your Chalkoprateia ! ' said Philip ;
'you know I am too busy'to come Avith you.'

A FAREWELL 341
' And when are you going to pay me that bronze what's-
his-name Avhich you have OAved me for ever so long? I
believe you go to the Chalkoprateia once a Aveek, and pre
tend to choose it, but I have never got it ; Avhereas David
gave me the pentray at once, like a man.'
' I don't approve of bets,' said Philip.
' Then Avhy are you always going to choose it at the
Chalk  '
Philip chased the boy out ; atnd when he had started,
David turned to him, and said, ' Philip, I want to talk to
you. What clo you think of all that Vigilantius said?'
'I agree with it heart and soul,' said Philip.
' And I,' said David; ' and it only deepens my conviction
that I can never join the ranks of the clergy.'
' I came to that decision long ago,' said Philip, ' but it
was because I felt no vocation. I can serve God better in
other Avays. But yon are different, David. And Vigilan
tius quoted saints and Councils, as well as the Scriptures,
for his vieAvs.'
' And yet,' said David, ' it is Paulinus, and Augustine,
and Jerome Avho in some of these matters speak the voice
of Rome and of the West; and though in these and other
things their views are not those of the early Church, I
do not wish to join a body by whom Vigilantius is treated
as a monster, and to whom it is due that Jovinian, a pro
foundly good man, was beaten with leaded scourges, and
banished to Dalmatia. I believe as little as Vigilantius
in the exaltation of celibacy, and relic-worship, and the
supreme meritoriousness of dirt and self-inflicted misery,
and the trampling down of the sweet natural affections
which God has given us. It seems to me un-Christlike
and altogether unscriptural. It is based on human ordi
nances, or on false conceptions, twisted out of a few
childishly misinterpreted texts.'
' I agree,' said Philip. ' Our excellent Cassian was talk
ing to us the other day about monkish saintliness. He
exalted one monk above everything because, in holy obe
dience, he walked three miles every day for years, at his
abbot's order, to water an old stick. Could he find nothing
better to do, and the abbot nothing more sane to command,
in a world lying in wickedness ? He told another story of

342 GATHERING CLOUDS
a monk named Marcus, who had a little son eight years old.
To wean him of the crime of affection for this son his
brother-monks purposely left the child dirty and neglected,
and beat him that he might be always in tears. Finally,
the abbot told Marcus to fling the boy into a river — and
he did ! And this unnatural Paganism is exalted as super
human virtue ! And, all the time, our Eutyches was listen
ing to Cassian open-mouthed with admiration. That is
just how young souls are spoiled. I cured him afterwards
by telling him the story of Stagirius.'
' Yes,' said David ; ' and the strange thing is that a holy
man like Cassian still upholds the system, though there is
scarcely a monkish community, however small, Avhich has
not been a hotbed of enormous scandals — even the monas
tery of Jerome at Bethlehem, even the ccenobium of
Augustine at Hippo. Jerome says that in the holy fright-
fulness of the Nitrian desert he found adders as well as
monks, and Augustine speaks of the numbers of hypocrites
under the guise of hermits. Cassian himself dwells on the
horrible liability of the monks to the principal vices which
infest human nature — gluttony, uncleanness, avarice,
anger, vainglory, pride — above all, that despairing and
unaccountable melancholy which they call acedia, and
describe as " the demon that walketh in the noonday."
That is what comes of inventing our own sacrifices, instead
of offering those Avith which God is well pleased.'
' But you can be a presbyter without approving of dan
gerous and unnatural asceticism,' said Philip.
' Yes,' said David ; ' a simple, true presbyter, if that
were all, as St. Peter, and St. Paul, and St. John are con
tent to call themselves. But noAvadays every presbyter will
arrogate to himself the exclusive name of a sacrificing
priest, which the New Testament never once allows them.'
'The Eucharist?' said Philip.
' Philip, is the name of " a sacrifice " so much as once
given to the Eucharist by Christ, or the Apostles, or the
Evangelists? The sacrifice of Christ, of His Incarnation,
and His Avhole life, as well as His death, Avas offered once
only, once for all. It cannot be re-offered. Three of the
Evangelists record the institution of the Lord's Supper.
In which of them is there one syllable about its being a

A FAREWELL 343
sacrifice ? How could it have been, Avhen the Lord still
stood a living man among His disciples ? '
' I don't profess to be a theologian, David ; but I have
a profound trust in the Patriarch, and did not he talk in
one of his homilies of " offering the tremendous sacrifice,"
and speak of " the Lord " Himself sacrificed and lying
there, and the priest standing at the sacrifice, and the
receiver reddened by the blood? '
' Rhetoric is not logic, Philip. I asked him about those
very words, and, admitting at once that this was impas
sioned and metaphoric language, he pointed me to his
Commentary on Heb. x. 9, where he says, " We do not offer
another sacrifice, hut we make a commemoration of a
sacrifice." Philip, half the things which seem to me like
superstitious and materialising aberrations from the pure
and simple faith of the Gospel arise from teaching for
doctrines the commandments of men, or from failure to
interpret in their allegoric significance the. simple meta
phors of the East. This applies especially to the Lord's
Supper. The elements of bread and wine have already
begun to be treated as though they were dreadful idols —
actual flesh and actual blood — although the body of Christ
is noAV a Spiritual Body glorified in Heaven.'
' How do you understand the discourse at Capernaum ? '
asked Philip.
' To my mind,' said David, ' the fact that it was uttered
two years before the Lord's Supper is sufficient to prove
that it referred generally to Christ as the Bread of Life.
The simple Eastern metaphor of " eating " expresses the
closest spiritual union, and has been grossly misappre
hended. That discourse, had it referred to the Lord's
Supper, would at the time have been perfectly meaning
less. It was not so because every Jew kneAv that " to eat
of " meant " to be united with." They had read the
words used about wisdom, " He that eateth Me shall even
live by Me;" they kneAv the proverb, "To eat of the years
of the Shechinah." '
Philip mused awhile, and David added : ' But, dear
Philip, opinions differ, and will differ ; it is not by our
opinions that Christ will judge us, but by our fruits. We
may go to heaven with many wrong opinions, but not with

344 GATHERING CLOUDS
Avicked hearts. I only spoke to you about these things to
show you why I can never become so much as a deacon.
The feeling was rendered invincible by the disgraceful
spectacle of the Churches of Asia, Avhen I went there
with him. But that being so  Oh, Philip ! I am for
many reasons very sorry — but in less than a month we
shall all leave Constantinople.'
'What ! ' said Philip, Avith a movement of sudden alarm ;
'you, and your father, and' — he bowed his face over his
hands — ' and Miriam ? '
' It is so, Philip ; and our one pang, our sole pang,
will be to part with the Patriarch, and Eutyches, and,
aboA'e all, with you.'
' Oh, David ! But why is this ? '
' I will tell you. My father, being the descendant of
Jude, Avhom Apostles and Evangelists called the "Lord's
Brother," has never been in the least ashamed of his
bronzesmith's shop, any more than St. Joseph was ashamed
of the shop of the carpenter at our Nazareth. But God
has largely prospered my father: not only our own
people, but all Constantinople, know his integrity ; and,
besides his prosperous trade, he is employed in many
transactions which make him honourably rich, far above
our simple needs. His brother Simon has long been farm
ing our lands in Galilee, but we have just had news of his
death. His only son was slain in a recent invasion of
Isaurian robbers who swept down even as far as Bethle
hem. My father now inherits those lands, and we are
going to fix our home there. He shares my views, and
approves of my decision never to become a presbyter in
the Church as it now is.'
' Oh, David! ' said Philip, who was now very pale, and
into whose eyes the tears had rushed. ' And Miriam ?
You know that I love her, and I had hoped that she loved
me.' ' She loves you, Philip. There is no levity in Miriam,
She has never seen any youth whom she loves as she loves
you, with a love pure and intense.'
' And yet you doom us never to meet again.'
' Why so, Philip ? She is quite too young to marry
yet, nor would it be right for you to leave him. But there

A FAREWELL 345
are thousands of pilgrims to Palestine every year, and what
is to hinder you from hearing constantly of each other?
We see not Iioav — yet my father does not doubt that the
changing years Avill bring you together.'
But to Philip ait that moment the whole, world seemed
to have turned into ashes ; he laid his head upon his
hands, and wept.
' Do not weep, Philip,' said David. ' God is love.
Build your faith on that.'
' I lose my friend,' said Philip, ' and I have but few ; I
lose my love, and I never had but one — and you bid me
not to weep ! '
' Dear friend of my youth ! ' said David, rising and
embracing him ; ' but you still have your father, and you
have Eutyches ; and, more than all, you have duty, and
you have hopes to shine on you like stars ; and, most of all,
you have God your Father in heaven, and Christ your
eternal friend.' But David Avas himself in tears.
But Philip would not be comforted, and both Avere
silent till, far off, they heard the voice of Eut}rches in the
garden, singing in his blithe young voice, as he approached,
the Latin hymn of Ambrose :
Veni, Redemptor gentium,
Ostende partum Virginis ;
Miretur omne sseculum !
Talis decet partus Deum.
As he approached the garden-entrance of the Patri
archeion he was in high and happy spirits. The soldier
whom Aurelian was sending back to iEmona had come
from Illyricum, and by him Walamir had sent Eutyches
an ancient Gothic silver ornament of great beauty, in the
shape of a gryphon, with a brief letter and the kindest
messages. Eutyches had just been sending to him with
his own letter two little pictures which he knew "would
delight him — one, a really good likeness of the Patriarch,
painted on a blue ground, and the other a likeness of
Wulfila, the apostle of the Goths.
He burst into the room full of his news, and said ' Aha,
Philip ! I have been Avhere you Avould like to be — in the
Chalkoprateia; and I saw by a certain door the veiled

346 GATHERING CLOUDS
figure of  ' He stopped short. ' What is this ? You
cannot conceal from me that you have both been in tears.
What is the matter? Is it possible that David and
Jonathan have been quarrelling ? '
The suggestion sounded so ludicrous to them that they
both smiled. ' Ah ! that is better,' said Eutyches ; ' but,
in the name of Heaven, what has happened?'
' My boy ! ' said Philip, and again his tears burst
forth, 'you will never be able to chaff me again about
my love for the Chalkoprateia. David has just told me
that he and his father and — and my Miriam are about to
leave us for ever.'
'For ever?' said Eutyches, thunderstruck at intelli
gence so wholly unexpected.
' For ever is a very long word, Eutyches,' said David.
' But where are you going to live ? '
'In our old home, not far from Nazareth.'
'Does he know? ' asked Eutyches.
' Not yet,' said David ; ' but the plan cannot be
changed.' ' My poor, poor Philip ! ' said Eutyches. 'I am so
sorry that I hurt you. What will you do without David,
and  Oh ! this is very sad.'
He laid one hand on Philip's shoulder, and grasped
his friend's other hand. But Philip could not trust him
self to speak. It was as though all the brightness of his
life had been quenched in sudden midnight.
Chrysostom Avas deeply sorry to lose the services of
David. After a long and solemn talk with him, and with
his father Michael, he did not feel it right to interpose
any obstacle, but he spoke anxiously about Philip and his
love for Miriam.
' They love each other with a true love,' said Michael ;
' but Miriam is not sixteen. She is too young to marry ;
nor would it be right for Philip to leave you yet.'
' It might be easier in a few years,' said the Patriarch.
'As far as means are concerned in these hard times, Philip
will not be penniless. He is the owner of his father's
house in Antioch, which is let; and Avith it he also
inherited a small sum of money, which is being faithfully
husbanded for him. Besides this, though he does not yet

A FAREWELL 347
know it, I have, by my will, bequeathed to him my old
house in Singon Street, which brings in a yearly income,
and I have divided what remains of my own modest
income between him and Eutyches. I did not include
your David because you once told me that he was Avell
provided for, and needed nothing.'
' He Avhose desires are few is rich, Patriarch,' said
Michael ; ' nor Avould there be any objection on the score
of even poverty, for Miriam will have an ample dower.
But  ' A very troubled look passed over his face.
' My Lord Bishop,' he said, ' God sometimes gives me the
power to look dimly into future years. I know not how
or why. I only knoAv that I can sometimes see something
of the future as though it were present. I know that I
am bidding you farewell for ever. I thank you for all
your goodness and kindness to David, and to me, who am
but a humble artisan of Jewish birth. But forgive me if
I speak. As I look into the future I see clouds before
you, and thick darkness. Fain would I avert my gaze
from those coming years. May the Christ of God be with
you ! I know that you daily hear the Voice saying, " Be
thou faithful unto death, and " — you will need that
promise to sustain you — " and I will give thee the crown
of life." '
' I know it,' said Chrysostom^; ' but He Who for our
good sends our calamities to purge us as gold is purged
in the furnace, never fails also to send grace to help in
time of need. Let us both kneel doAvn, and pray for His
blessing — -even if it comes veiled in darkness — for each
other, and for us both.'
They knelt side by side — the Patriarch of Constantino
ple and the humble Desposynos — and they rose strength
ened for any fate.
The last day of Michael's sojourn in Constantinople
came. Chrysostom, with a heayy and foreboding heart,
had parted from David, and given him the kiss of peace,
and blessed him. He presented him with a beautiful man
uscript of the Commentary on the HebreAVS as a token of
his parting love. The family were to sail away at even
ing, and all their goods were on the barque which lay at

348 GATHERING CLOUDS
anchor by the quay to take them to the port of Accho.
With the full consent of Michael, and in his presence,
Philip and Miriam had pledged themselves to one another
in solemn and sacred vows, and had exchanged their gifts
of betrothal. Philip had given to Miriam a precious jewel
which had belonged to his mother, and Miriam to Philip
one of the little carcanets of gold coins which Eastern
maidens often wear round their hair. It had been for
years a treasure in the family of the Desposyni ; and since
it- consisted of the Maccabean coins of the High Priest
Simon, stamped Avith the lily, had once — it was whispered
among them — been Avorn by the Virgin Mother herself,
and so had acquired in their eyes an inestimable pre-
ciousness. One coin was missing, and it had purposely
been left unreplaced, for they saAV in it an illustration of
'the woman and the lost coin,' and a sign that Christ
would regard all His work as marred if but one soul Avere
missing of those whom His Father had given Him to keep.
To no one — not even to Philip — would Miriam have
thought of entrusting this priceless treasure if Michael
had not solemnly told her that the day would certainly
come Avhen Philip would restore it to her own hands again.
The tAvo lovers had also exchanged locks of each other's
hair, to be worn on the heart till they met again. They
had been suffered to clasp" each other in one long embrace
before they spoke the farewells which ' press the life out
of young hearts.'
' Be brave, dear son,' said Michael to Philip, as he started
with Miriam and her female attendant to the barque.
' It is through much tribulation that we must enter into
the Kingdom of God.'
' My father ! my father ! ' sobbed Philip ; ' I shall see
your face no more. It is that which makes me weep most
o'f all.'
' Nay, Philip,' said Michael, solemnly ; ' fear not. Some
thing tells me, quite surely, that whether you and I meet
again or not on this side the grave, you and Miriam will
be one. I see dark, dark waves before us all — storm and
tempest ; but a sea of light encompasses them, and flows
over them, and in that I behold the infinite love of God.
Farewell ! farewell ! '

A FAREWELL 349
David stayed on shore till the last, to make the last few
final arrangements. The shadows of night Avere fallino-
when Philip and Eutyches walked with him to the quay
on the Bosporus. Philip had given David as his last gift
a silver box made and beautifully chased by his father in
Antioch, and had received from him a golden Eastern
lamp of unknown age and perfect Avorkmanship.
There was no more to say. They knew each other's
thoughts. They pressed each other to the heart. They
could not speak ; they parted in silent tears. David
stepped on the deck, and the vessel spread her sails. It
had very soon melted into the deepening dusk. The
last thing which Philip saw was the Avaving of Miriam's
white scarf from the ship's deck. Then the darkness
rushed down. He turned away, and walked home with
Eutyches in silence, only broken by the occasional sobs
which shook his whole frame. It Avas not only the anguish
of parting from his love, and from his friend, which shook
him. It was an unspoken, immense foreboding. It was an
horizon which looked to him as black as the gathering
midnight. Eutyches knew that it was vain to try and
comfort him. He could only press his hand in silence.
The one thought which flapped its wings like a vulture
over Philip's mind, and returned again and again to tear
his heart with obscene beak, was, ' I have lost my friend ;
I have lost my love for ever — for ever ; nothing remains
for me but despair and woe.'
Many dark days ensued. All that the Patriarch could
do, all that Eutyches and Olympias and Nicarete could do
to lighten that heaAry heart was done; and time laid on
the youth's misery a healing hand. The days were, fort
unately, full of duties and occupations ; but it was long
before Philip's manner resumed its natural brightness and
elasticity, and long ere those who loved him best recog
nised upon his face the glad smile which played over it
like an incessant gleam of sunlight in happier days.

350 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XLII
THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN
Superbia, invidia, ed avarizia sono
Le tre faville ch' hanno i cori accesi. Dante, Inf. vi. 74, 75.
A few clays afterwards the Archdeacon Serapion came
into the room of the Patriarch with a face flushed Avith
indignation. ' I come, my Lord Archbishop,' he said, ' to bring a
complaint of the utmost gravity against the Bishop of
Gabala.' ' What has Severian been doing now ? ' asked the
Patriarch. ' My Lord, I was sitting yesterday in the Thomaites
Avith the Presbyter Tigrius, the Bishop Palladius, Proclus,
young Eutyches, and others, Avhen Severian passed into
the anteroom where Philip was sitting. He asked for
you ; but you had gone to visit a sick presbyter, and he
again passed out through the hall. Eutyches and the
others rose as usual, and with them the Ladies Pentadia
and Olympias, who were awaiting your return, as they had
to see you on business respecting the institution of dea
conesses. I did not rise. I happened to be writing, and
did not observe his presence. If I had done so I should
probably have risen, although I cannot tolerate the Bishop
of Gabala.'
' It were better to rise, Serapion,' said Chrysostom. ' It
is a conventional mark of honour paid to bishops, and has
become usual.'
' I will do so in future,' said Serapion. ' The wish of
your Dignity on the subject is more than sufficient for
me. I cannot, indeed, stand up when he passes with any

THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN 351
pleasure, and do not pretend to feel any respect for
Severian. To me he seems to be a traitorous hypocrite.'
' I grieve that your feelings about him are so strong.
You can, however, respect the office, even if you cannot
respect the man. And should we not fight, Serapion,
against these intense feelings of dislike and disdain for
our fellow-men ? We all have need of large forgiveness,
of infinite forbearance. No man is all devil ; something
of the angel must be somewhere hidden in the depths of
his heart. The Holy Spirit Avithin us may be desecrated,
but never wholly lost.'
' I bow to your reproach,' said Serapion. ' I Avill MIoav
your exhortation, although my disdain has been kindled
by his treachery and baseness toAvards you. But Avhat I
have to report is very serious. Seeing that I had not
stood up, Severian glared at me, and said in a tone of fury,
in the hearing of us all, " Christ was never made man." '
'Surely that is inconceivable, Serapion,' said Chrysos
tom; ' your ears must have deceived you.'
' Mistake was impossible,' said the Archdeacon.
'But Avhat could he have meant?' said the Patriarch.
' What conceivable object could he have had in uttering
words of blasphemy which, if he spoke them, would at
once brand him as an hypocrite ? '
'I cannot pretend to explain,' answered Serapion, 'but
will you question the others ? They are here.'
Those whom Serapion had mentioned came in one by
one. Olympias and Pentadia said that they had been
seated at some distance from the table where Serapion
sat, and the back of Bishop Severian was turned to them ;
but those words, uttered in fierce anger, they unquestion
ably heard. Proclus and Tigrius also heard them, and
noticed the look and accent of fury Avith which they Avere
spoken. Eutyches, Avho had been sitting by Serapion,
and who rose as the Bishop of Gabala passed, said that the
Bishop seemed first to mutter something which he could
not hear, and then burst out with the blasphemous
sentence. ' What did you take to be his meaning, my boy ? ' asked
the Archbishop.
' I thought,' said Eutyches, ' that in his uncontrollable

352 GATHERING CLOUDS
anger he had broken into a sort of oath. May I speak
further ? '
' Certainly.'
' Well, sir, St. Paul, Avhen he speaks about the abuse
of tongues at Corinth, says, " No man speaking by the
Spirit of God says ' Jesus be anathema.' " I have heard
you explain this to mean that in overpowering excite
ment men lost all self-control, and their tongues were
then forced by evil spirits to call out blasphemies. The
word Avhich exploded from the wrath of Severian reminded
me of that.'
' My boy,' said Chrysostom, ' I can no longer doubt that
Severian did speak those awful words, and there may be
Avisdom in your suggestion about them. Let the Bishop
be summoned into my presence.'
Severian came, serenely unconscious -of what had hap
pened — came in with the airs and graces of the handsome,
portly, well-groomed, self-satisfied ecclesiastic. Chrysos
tom rose to receive him, but rose Avith so stern a look
upon his face that the Bishop of Gabala suddenly stopped
short in the well-turned compliments and remarks about
the weather into Avhich he had begun to glide.
' Your Religiosity seems to be disturbed to-day,' he
said. ' Severian,' said the Patriarch, ' it is reported to me by
six credible witnesses, who could not and Avould not lie,
that you exclaimed, in their hearing, " Christ has not been
made man." '
' How can you listen to such vain gabble ? ' said Seve
rian. 'Why, if I believed half, or a tenth part of the
things which are daily said about you, I should regard
you as an utter demon.'
'What may be said about me,' said Chrysostom, with
contemptuous sternness, ' is not the question. If any
man can witness aught against me, let him speak. But,"
he said, with a wave of the hand, ' the charge against you
is perfectly definite.'
' I never said anything of the kind,' said Severian, with
brazen front. ' When and Avhere did I say it ? '
' Yesterday, in the Thomaites.'
' Who says so ? '

THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN 353

' Serapion, Tigrius, Proclus

' All my enemies,' said Severian.
' My young secretary, Eutyches.'
' A pert, conceited boy,' said Severian.
' Silence, Bishop ! ' said the Patriarch. ' Eutyches is
little more than boy, but one more modest and one* more
blameless I have never seen. And, besides these, the
ladies Olympias and Pentadia.'
'Special friends of your Sanctity,' said Severian, with
an undisguised sneer.
'I blush for you,' said Chrysostom; 'would to God I
could see you blush for yourself ! You, a Christian bishop
— do you so much as dare to insinuate that these holy
presbyters, these saintly women, have invented a lie to
injure you? Some of them may not think well of you,
but I would answer for every one of them that they would
rather die than lie.'
' Oh ! well, if you have, in your usual manner, prejudged
the case,' said Severian, ' I can but retire.'
'Again,' said Chrysostom, mastering a strong impulse
to indignation, ' you seem to forget that you are here to
answer a most definite accusation. For the moment I sit
here to examine as to its truth. You will gain nothing
by insolence towards your judge.'
' Everyone knows that you are jealous of me,' said
Severian. Chrysostom could scarcely suppress a smile. Of all
human foibles, jealousy, a mark of mean natures, was the
one from Avhich he was most exempt, and jealousy of
Severian in particular was the last feeling he could possibly
entertain. 'Suppress these irrelevancies, Bishop,' he said; 'the
question is very simple and definite. Did you, or did you
not, in the hearing of at least six persons, use the Avords
" Christ has not been made man " ? '
' The charge is preposterous,' said Severian.
' Well, then, I Avill summon the witnesses.'
' Oh ! ' said Severian, who now saw that escape Avas
impossible, ' stop ! ' and putting his hand to his head in an
affected attitude, as though he were trying to remember,
he said slowly : ' I have some sort of dim recollection that
2a

354 GATHERING CLOUDS
something of this sort happened. Your archdeacon, Sera
pion, the most churlish and ill-conditioned dog I ever
came across  '
' Such language disgraces you,' said the Patriarch. ' It
is unfitting for a Christian, much more for a bishop, avIio
should set an example.'
'Do not try to broAvbeat me,' said Severian, swelling
his portly person. 'I was saying, when you interrupted
me, that in passing through the Thomaites Serapion, that
pink of politeness, that pearl of courtiers, sneered at me,
and did not think proper to rise as the rest did. I sup
pose you have taught your underlings to insult me  '
' I have already desired him to rise in future,' said the
Patriarch, whom the Bishop's insolence could not ruffle.
' He assures me — and I believe him — that he did not
rise simply because he did not see you, being engaged in
Avriting. His supposed sneer is the offspring of your
imagination only.'
' — and in a fit of anger, utterly disgusted with the
man's churlish impudence, I may have muttered in my
wrath — for after all I am only human — something to the
effect that " if Serapion dies a Christian, then Christ was
not made man." As Serapion has never lived as a Chris
tian, I felt sure that he could never die as one, and I
only express the impossibility by a strong hypothesis.'
' Enough ! ' said Chrysostom. ' You have admitted the
use of the Avords. It would have been better for your
truth and honesty if you had not at first denied them.
Your explanation hardly makes them better. Your remark
was grossly slanderous, and the form into Avhich you threw
it was irreverent and disgraceful. As far as Constantinople
is concerned your stay here is ended. By my authority
as Patriarch I cut you off from communion in any one of
my churches. I inhibit you from entering them. You
have disgraced your character and calling. Depart, and
ask God if haply your sin may be forgiven.'
'The Empress shall hear of this,' said Severian, inso
lently. ' Enough ! ' said Chrysostom. ' The Emperor has au
thority in all things temporal ; his sway does not extend
to spiritual censures. You have for years been absent

THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN 355
from your neglected diocese, pursuing here the designs of
your ambition. I recommend you to return to it, and
resume your duties. Philip, conduct out the Bishop of
Gabala.' Purple with rage, Severian swung out of the room,
intending at once to lay his complaint before the Court,
where, by his intrigues and flatteries, he had made himself
a favourite. But when he got outside the Patriarcheion
he found a menacing crowd assembled in the Forum.
Rumours of Severian's treacheries against their beloved
Patriarch had been prevalent among the multitude. They
had long seen through the man who Avas adored by such
ladies as Epigraphia and supported by such reprobates as
Elpidius and Isaac the Monk. It happened that during
the interview which we have narrated some decani —
humble church servants, Avho formed a branch of the
parabolani, and helped to bury the poor — had been in the
garden below, and had heard, the loud voice and harsh
accents of the Bishop of Gabala raised in objurgation.
They had slipped out with the news that Severian was
insulting the Patriarch. A crowd had gathered, Avho would
have1 been glad at a moment's notice to lynch the hated
Syrian. Under his habitual air of bravado Severian was
an abject coAvard. He entreated Philip to conduct him
through the mob, whom Philip succeeded in pacifying,
for they all knew and loved him for his bright face and
witty speech.
' My life is in danger here,' said SeArerian. ' Come
with me, Philip, to the quay. I Avill take a boat to
Chalcedon.' ' As these quarrels have arisen, Bishop, might it not be
better if you left Constantinople altogether?' said Philip
respectfully, as the rowers pushed off the boat.
' We will see to that,' said Severian.
In point of fact he did not remain absent more than a
few days. For Eudoxia and all her clique were furious
when they heard of the inhibition of their favourite. It
was intolerable to the Frankish Empress that, even in the
Church, anyone should presume to exercise any power
except herself. She sent for Chrysostom, and entreated
him to bring back that excellent bishop. ' What fault can

356 GATHERING CLOUDS
you find,' she said, *with so eloquent, gentle, and orthodox
a preacher ? He is the only person in Constantinople to
whom I, and the ladies of my Court, and the Emperor can
listen with the smallest comfort.' And so she went on,
infusing into every sentence the feline malice with which
she hoped to make the Patriarch Avince. She saw, hoAv-
ever, with a pang that she could not even move him to
anger. Chrysostom, serene in perfect integrity, had long
acquired the habit of ignoring contemptible antagonists
and paltry impertinences. The eagle does not Avorry itself
about the chatter of jays.
Then the Empress fairly teased the Emperor into inter
ceding for Severian. By dint of taunts and tears and
persistence she at last stirred him sufficiently to beg the
Archbishop to withdraAV his inhibition. ' The Empress
wishes it,' he said, 'and so, of course, do I. Severian's
sermons do not worry us as — as some sermons do. One
can sleep — I mean, one can listen in peace. We shall
miss him.'
'As far as your wishes are concerned, Emperor, I desire
profoundly to respect them,' said Chrysostom. 'I had
serious misgivings about the Bishop of Gabala, but since
you and the Empress wished it, I left him to fill the pulpit
of St. Sophia in my absence. But the conduct for which I
have been compelled to inhibit him was so reprehensible
as to show his unfitness for his office. My duty to
you is scarcely compatible with my higher duty to the
Church.' ' Then I shall never hear the end of it,' said Arcadius.
'I wish you clergy would leave me in peace.'
' Ecclesiastical offences must be punished,' said Chrysos
tom, ' no less than secular.'
But Eudoxia was determined at all costs to have her
way. On the following Sunday, just before the service
began, she Avas seen advancing up the nave of St. Sophia,
Avith her attendants, and carrying in her arms her infant
son, who was already an Augustus. The complaisance of
the East had given to members of the Imperial Family that
right to pass within the curtains of the sacrarium Avhich
Ambrose, with courteous dignity, had forbidden to Theodo
sius the Great in the West, when he pointed him to a seat

THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN 357
beloAv the step, and said, ' Emperor, this is the place for
presbyters ; your place as Emperor is below.'
After that, even at Constantinople, Theodosius Avould
never accept the invitation of Nectarius to sit inside the
sacrarium. In the sight, however, of the whole congrega
tion Eudoxia advanced, placed the imperial infant on the
knees of the Patriarch, and adjured him in a loud voice,
by the life of the Emperor and by the head of the infant
Augustus, to recall Severian.
To refuse would have been to create a terrible disturb
ance in the sacred building. The eyes of the Patriarch
filled with tears. He bent down, and kissed the sweet
child, whom the Empress had left in his arms. Thinking
only of the little placid infant, his memory reverted to the
sacred scene when the humble Virgin of Nazareth had
placed the Holy Child in the arms of the aged Simeon, and
his heart was softened. He could not resist the feminine
persistence which had not hesitated to go to such strange
lengths for the accomplishment of Eudoxia's purpose.
While his judgment disapproved, the thought came over him
that this was the wife of the Emperor, and St. Paul had
required obedience to the powers that be, because they are
ordained of God. The adjurations of Eudoxia were so
vehement that it seemed like high treason to turn a deaf
ear to them.
' Empress,' he said, ' I am scarcely justified in resisting
these appeals. I regard the responsibility as mine no
longer. On your command, which I understand to be
that of the Emperor, I will readmit Severian to our
Communion.' A swift messenger from the Empress bore the tidings
to Chalcedon, and Severian returned, exulting in his bad
heart at the Patriarch's humiliation. Yet even now he
was dependent on the forbearance of the man whom he
had so disgracefully endeavoured to undermine. For
though the Empress might almost force on the Archbishop
the withdrawal of his inhibition, the populace had a voice
in the matter. They were quite likely to make Constanti
nople too hot to hold Severian, and would have thought
but little of ejecting him by force from any Church which
he attempted to enter. But it was not Chrysostom's way

358 GATHERING CLOUDS
to do things by halves. If he Avere forced to recall Seve
rian, he would cherish no hidden grudges. If he felt it his
duty to respect the Imperial urgency by restoring him to
Communion, he would do so without reservation.
He therefore preached a sermon on the folloAving
Sunday with the object of smoothing down the antagonism
of the people, and inducing them for his sake to abandon
their hostility to the Bishop of Gabala. ' The head,' he
said, 'must be united to the members, and so must the
Church to the priest, the people to the Emperor. As the
branch may not sever itself from the root, nor the river
from its fountain, so sons must be one Avith their father,
and disciples with their master. You have often shown
your love for me, your obedience to me, and you have been
Avilling for my sake even to jeopardise your lives. We are
one in duty, one in affection. As my spiritual children, I
counsel you to peace. We have had troubles among us.
Let them end, let them be forgotten. Receive our brother
Severian.' The discourse was straightforward, simple, and noble,
and the name of Severian had been brought in with con
summate force and skill. The vast congregation felt the
sincerity of the speaker, and they broke into applause.
Chrysostom thanked them for their implied assent to his
proposal, and begged that as they agreed to receive Seve
rian, they would receive him graciously. Such a triumph
of brotherly love would bring peace to the Church and
cause joy in heaven.
To make the reconciliation complete Chrysostom invited
Severian to preach on the following Sunday. His oration
also has come down to us. It is rhetorical, fantastic,
profoundly commonplace, and insincerity rings in every
sentence and accent. Most of it is a sonorous amplifica
tion of the blessings of unity. ' In our cities,' he said,
' the pictures of the august brothers who rule the AArorld —
Arcadius and Honorius — are painted Avith the figure of
Concord standing behind them, and embracing them in
her maternal arms. Even so, now the peace of God
embraces both of us in her throbbing bosom, and teaches
us in separate bodies to keep a single mind. War is
overthrown ; peace reigns.'

THE MISDOINGS OF SEVERIAN 359
The pledge of peace Avas ratified before the Holy Table.
Chrysostom was entirely true to it. Neither by words,
nor deed, nor look did he break it. But Severian went
away to continue as heretofore his lies, his plots, and his
intrigues — the fat, affectionate smile upon his lips belying
the rancour and jealousy of his venomous heart. And the
heavens darkened more and more !

BOOK IV

DEA TH- GRAPPLES

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano ;
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one. Merchant of Venice, I. 1.

CHAPTER XLIII
'ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS!'
Quanti si tengon or lassu gran regi,
Che qui staranno come porci in brago,
Di se lasciando orribili dispregi! Dante, Inf. viii. 49-51.
' Philip,' said Eutyches one morning as he came in to the
day's work, ' there are four of the strangest beings you
ever saw in the Thomaites.'
' Ghosts or angels — which ? ' asked Philip. ' Are they
like those you frightened the Goths with on the Palace
walls ? '
' Neither, you trifler from Antioch ! ' answered Eutyches,
laughing ; ' but they look like spectres. They are old, but
astonishingly tall, and look gaunt, wretched, and half-
starved. They are dressed only in white sheepskins and
sandals. Their black locks are long and matted. Their
arms and legs are bare, and are covered with the marks
of scars ; and one of them has lost an ear.'
' What do they want ? '
' They will only say that they have come to throw them
selves on the protection of the Patriarch. Proclus has told
them that he is engaged, but that they shall be admitted in
a few minutes. Do go, and take a glance at them.'
Philip went into the Thomaites, and saAv the four
strange figures which Eutyches had described. They
stood together, with downcast eyes, at the end of the hall,
leaning on their staves. Their appearance as they stalked
through the streets was so unusual that a crowd of soldiers
and street-boys had accompanied them to the entrance of
the Patriarcheion, and some of these Avere peeping in
through the open gates. But the strangers seemed to be
unconscious of the attention they excited, and stood
363

364 gathering clouds
silent, as if they were absorbed in their own thoughts.
Their lips moved as in silent prayer.
' I guessed Avhom they must be from your description,
Eutyches,' said Philip. ' A glance showed me that they
were hermits from the desert of Nitria. They can be no
other than the four celebrated Tall Brothers. But what
can they be doing here ? I hope that their presence is not
ominous. They belong to that — saving his Sanctity —
that bad Patriarch of Alexandria, and I have heard that
they have been most infamously persecuted by him.'
' Tell me something about them.'
' I will tell you the little I know, Eutyches. The eldest
is Ammonius. He Avas the companion of the great St.
Athanasius when he was exiled in 341, near sixty years
ago, and fled to Italy. He was the first monk whom Rome
had seen. He was then a youth from a desert monastery.
The soft Romans Avere amazed at his gigantic size, his
splendid figure, his sheepskins, his utter simplicity of life ;
for, amid their, gorgeous gluttonies, he ate nothing but
bread and vegetables, and drank only water. It Avas owing
to the strange impulse of envy and admiration excited at
Rome by his complete indifference to the world that mon
asteries have been introduced into Italy by Ambrose.
When Athanasius went back Ammonius became a hermit.'
' How did he lose his ear ? '
' He cut it off ; and that is why he is called Parotes.'
' Why ? Did he think one ear enough ? ' asked Euty
ches, laughing.
' No ; but in those days Theophilus pretended im
mensely to admire these Tall Brothers, and wanted to
seize him by force and make him a bishop. He hated the
thought of it, and only desired to live far away from a
corrupted Church and an evil world. So he fled into the
depths of the Libyan desert. But even thither the agents
of Theophilus pursued him. Finding that he could not
escape, he cut off his ear, and, going out to meet them,
said, " Go ! your purpose is vain. The canons forbid any
man who is mutilated to be ordained " — and he pointed to
his bleeding ear.'
' What a man ! ' said Eutyches. ' But what are those
scars on their arms and legs ? '

'ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUSI' 365
' The Brothers are confessors,' said Philip. ' Those are
the stigmata left on them by the tortures of the Arian
Valens.' ' And the three others ? '
'Theophilus, urging on them the duty of obedience,
made two of them come and Avork as presbyters in Alex
andria. The third, Dioscorus, he seized by force, gagged
him that he might not appeal to Christ against his ordina
tion, and consecrated him Bishop of Thermopolis.'
' What ! Is he a bishop? No one rises when he enters,
or takes any notice of him. And Avhere is Thermopolis ? '
' It is only a squalid village of a few huts near the
deserts, and, practically, Dioscorus never ceased to be a
hermit ; but he is no longer bishop. Theophilus degraded
and expelled him, and has done his best to degrade, to
defame, and even to murder these Brothers.'
' Why? Is he a Pharaoh? ' asked Eutyches..
' A Pharaoh ! ' said Philip, passionately. ' Yes, and a
Nebuchadnezzar, and a Caiaphas, an Annas, and a Judas
all in one ; a whited wall, a whited sepulchre, full of dead
men's bones and all uncleanness. God forgive me if I err
in speaking so of one of the four chief bishops of the faith !
But Truth has her claims as Avell as Charity. Jeremiah
cursed the priest Pashur, and Isaiah spoke thunder and
lightnings against the drunken, hiccoughing priests of
Jerusalem. The Prophets are full of the denunciation of
the priests, and multitudes of them are as bad and false
in these days as then.'
' What makes you so very hot against Theophilus ? '
asked Eutyches. ' Oh, Philip ! since you lost David, and
since Miriam went away, you are so much sadder and
more gloomy. I wish I could ease your troubled heart.'
'Eutyches,' said Philip, 'you are very dear to me. But
for you and him — my father — I know not how I could
bear life, for all around us is blackness and falsity and
Avickedness. But the reason why my anger burns against
this Theophilus is because I know that he is moving earth
and hell to Avreak his vengeance and jealousy on him.
And oh ! ' said Philip, wringing his hands, ' something
tells me that he will prevail. Our Patriarch beside him
is but as a guileless child. He is no match for deceit

366 GATHERING CLOUDS
and treachery. They paralyse him with the same sort of
horrible fascination which makes the bird drop into the
serpent's jaAVS.'
' God forbid ! ' said the boy, making the sign of averting
the evil eye, Avhich is, in the East, of immemorial antiquity.
' Amen ! ' said Philip ; 'but this Patriarch of Alexandria,
this successor of Athanasius, is the wickedest man I ever
heard of, even in the Church — and that is saying a good
deal when one thinks of Severian, John the Deacon,
Antoninus of Ephesus, the sorcerer Gerontius, the bribed
liar Eusebius of Valentinianopolis, Elpidius that deadly
hater, Isaac the Monk, and a good many more.'
' Even in the Church ? Oh, Philip ! '
' Alas ! alas that it should be so ! ' said Philip ; ' but so
it is. A bad priest seems to me the worst of men.'
' You are right, Philip,' said Serapion, who heard the last
sentence as he entered. ' A bad priest is the Avorst curse
the Church can have. He is pledged to meekness, and he
is insolent ; he professes truth, and he is infamously slan
derous ; he should be a servant of all, and he is the most
unscrupulous of usurpers ; he preaches the laAV of liberty,
and he imposes the yoke of bondage; he should be an
example of lowliness, and he lords it over God's heritage.
When you are ordained, Eutyches, remember always that
a Christian presbyter is a presbyter, and in no sense more
a priest than every true Christian is.'
' I do not think that our Eutyches will fail in lowliness,'
said Philip. ' He reserves all his impudence for me.'
' Don't believe him, Archdeacon,' said Eutyches ; ' but
now, Philip, tell me more about these holy Brothers.'
' It must be very briefly, then, for they will be ushered in
directly. Ammonius and Dioscorus remained in the des
ert, but Theophilus insisted on keeping the two others at
Alexandria, where they grew more and more miserable
as they began to see the greed, tyranny, and hypocrisy of
their Patriarch. They entreated to be allowed to return
to Nitria, and Theophilus, who saw their mistrust of him,
has hated them ever since.'
' But they must have offended him in some way.'
' Yes, Eutyches ; and Iioav do you think ? Theophilus
is a very idolater of gold. A legacy had been left to his

'ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS ! ' 367
sister for the use of the Church, and he declared that it
had been promised, to her for her oavii use. Isidore
declared that he had never heard a syllable on the subject.
He then began to defame Isidore, and appealed to the four
Brothers to support his slander. They, on the contrary,
swore that Isidore had ahvays lived a holy life. The
ophilus was mad with rage. He cannot endure being
resisted. He is accustomed to treat his bishops, priests,
and monks as the merest slaves, Avhom he can cashier,
imprison, or put to death without reason at his pleasure.
He can do this the more easily, because most of the Egyp
tian magistrates are in his pay. But since he could attack
the Brothers in no other way, he used his last and most ter
rible resource, which always is to charge men with heresy.'
' What heresy ? '
' What he calls Origenism, the silliest and most unmean
ing of all charges.'
' I thought that Origen was one of the saintliest Chris
tian teachers.'
' The greatest Christian writer since the days of the
Apostles. But some brutal and ignorant monks deem him
a heretic, so Theophilus denounced the Brothers for Ori
genism.' ' What is Origenism ? '
' No one has the least notion. Origen was a voluminous
writer ; even in his lifetime his writings were grossly inter
polated. A bad man like Theophilus finds it easy to call
a man an Origenist, and crush him. Then came the affair
of Isidore.'
' What Isidore ? — the one whom he wanted to make
Patriarch ? '
' Yes ; Isidore become Hospitaller of Alexandria. A
noble lady, knowing that Theophilus is " stone-mad " in
building churches, and that much of his fund is grossly
misapplied, gave Isidore a thousand pounds for the poor,
on the express condition that he would not tell Theophilus.
But Theophilus, who has hundreds of spies in his pay,
heard of it, and in revenge trumped up a false charge
against Isidore, which he suddenly produced at a synod of
the clergy.'
' What was the charge ? '

368 GATHERING CLOUDS
' It is too horrible to tell you, Eutyches. Isidore, who
is an old man of eighty, challenged proof. Theophilus
had bribed a youth to accuse him, but the consciences of
the young man and of his mother smote them ; they shrank
from the wicked perjury, denied the asserted crime alto
gether, and the charge hopelessly broke down. Never
theless, Theophilus forced his Avretched herd of barbarous
Egyptian bishops to degrade Isidore, and he fled to the
Four Brothers in the Sketic desert. I do not know what
happened afterwards.'
'Your story has interested me almost terribly,' said
Eutyches. 'I must slip into the Thomaites and have
another look at these famous men.'
He Avent out, and found the Bishop of Helenopolis
talking to the Brothers. Palladius came, and asked him
when the Patriarch would be free to see his suppliants.
' In a few moments,' said Eutyches.
' Then I will come into your anteroom, if I may,' said
Palladius, ' and Avill myself introduce them when they can
be received.'
When he had entered the anteroom, Philip said to him,
' My Lord, Eutyches is dying to ask you something about
the Tall Brothers, but he is too modest.'
' I know all their story,' said Palladius, Avith whom
Eutyches was a favourite, ' and I shall be happy to tell him.
What does he Avant to know ? '
' Tell us, Bishop,' said Eutyches, ' what happened to
them after Isidore fled to them.'
' It is a \rery sad story, my boy,' said the Bishop. ' The
Brothers came to Alexandria, and, knowing that Isidore
was innocent, implored Theophilus to restore him. He
promised that he Avould — and did nothing. Then they
came again, and Ammonius reminded him that he Avas
breaking his promise. Resistance to his Avill ahvays drives
Theophilus into demoniacal fury. He flung Ammonius
into prison. His brothers declared that they Avould share
his prison. But the Alexandrians were so horrified that
they began to murmur. Theophilus, in alarm, had the
Brothers turned out into the streets, and in their humility
they thought it right to go to him. Ammonius spoke for
them with perfect calmness and dignity, yet as he listened

' ECCE 1TERUM CRISPINUS ! 369
Theophilus sat glaring at them with fierce aspect and
bloodshot eyes, sometimes pale, sometimes livid, and some
times with a bitter sardonic smile. Then suddenly, Avith-
out a Avord of notice, he sprang up, seized Ammonius by
the throat, and smote him in the face so brutally Avith his
heavy hand that the blood gushed out, Avhile he kept
yelling, "Heretic! anathematise Origen!" The mere
name of Origen had not once been mentioned.'
' Had he never read,' said Philip, ' that a bishop should
be no striker ? It sounds incredible.'
' It may well do so,' said Palladius, ' even of a Nero or a
Commodus ; much more of a Christian Patriarch. But he
then summoned in his soldiers, Avith his own hands twisted
a halter round the neck of Ammonius, and ordered the Four
Brothers, laden with chains, to be conducted back to Nitria.'
At this point Chrysostom called to Philip to aidmit the
Tall Brothers. Philip told him that Palladius was present,
and Avould introduce them.
They entered the Patriarch's presence, and Avith great
humility kneeled, and kissed his hand. ' It is a joy to us,'
they said, ' to see your Sanctity.'
' Nay, rise,' said Chrysostom. ' It is I Avho should kiss
the hands of the friends of Athanaisius, the scarred con
fessors under the tyranny of Valens. And call me only
bishop, not your Sanctity.'
' Thanks,' said Ammonius ; ' but the Patriarch of Alex
andria Avill never allow himself to be addressed Avithout
endless iterations of your Beatitude, and your Religious
ness, and your Dignity, and your Holiness. It will be a
far easier task for our rude simplicity if you will let us
address you more freely.'
'Speak,' said Chrysostom, 'as a brother to brethren, as
a man to men.'
' Doubtless, sir,' said Ammonius, who as the eldest spoke
for the others, 'you knoAV our sad story up to the time
when Theophilus sent us back, disgraced and in chains, to
our brethren for no fault, bidding us anathematise Origen,
about whom Ave had spoken no single word.'
' How could you at his bidding anathematise a saint of
God?' asked Chrysostom. 'I thought that Theophilus
himself was an admirer of the Adamantine ? '
2b

370 GATHERING CLOUDS
' He was,' said Ammonius, ' but he turned round in the
strangest way. Origen held that God is a Spirit. But the
illiterate monks whom they call " Anthropomorphites "
maintained with savage fury that God has very hands and
feet and eyes like men, and they rose in one of their
fanatical tumults and rushed to Alexandria to murder
Theophilus for not sharing their view. He was in great
alarm, and, advancing, said to them, "In seeing you, holy
monks, I see the very face of God." Delighted at this
flattery, they embraced instead of killing him, and since
then he has seen how powerful a Aveapon he may wield
against his enemies, and you among them, Archbishop.'
' No man is a heretic,' said Chrysostom, ' because another
man, in ignorance or in malice, may choose to call him so.
But proceed.'
' We returned to Nitria chained, maltreated, slandered,
excommunicated, covered with blood. Then an order
came from the Patriarch that in every monastery every
work of Origen was to be burned. Many of the manu
scripts were comments on Scripture, rare, and holy, and
full of learning.'
' To that I can testify,' said Chrysostom.
' Naturally there were some among us who, highly valu
ing these works, were reluctant to obey an order so unjust.
Theophilus had his spies even in the Nitrian desert, who
informed him of all that we did and said. Five of them
were men of the lowest order, not worthy even to be
porters ; one of these Theophilus ordained a deacon, three
of them presbyters, and for one he created a sham see in a
miserable hamlet. He then entrusted to them a petition
to himself, written by himself, full of false accusations
against the Nitrian monks. After a short time these five
spies left their cells, entered Alexandria, Avent straight to
the church where the Patriarch was officiating, and, prostrat
ing themselves before his throne, presented him, as though
in the deepest grief, his own petition. Theophilus held up
his hands in pretence of holy horror as he read the libels
which his own hand had written, exclaiming that if heresy
Avas to be extirpated he must visit Nitria in person. He sent
to the magistrates to lend him a band of soldiers. To these
he added the numerous servants of his palace and the paid

'ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS ! ' 371
bravoes who execute his vengeance. He deluged them
with drink, and at their head he started for the desert,
timing his visit that he might arrive after nightfall. It
was dark when they reached the mountains and burst upon
us. In the terror of that midnight, multitudes of the monks
fled and hid themselves, like Elias of old, in the rocky
gullies. The cells of the monks were given up to the
brutal soldiery. Few, as you know, were their possessions ;
but their little stores of food, their lamps, their books, and
all that they possessed, were plundered.'
' How came you to escape ? '
' We were the chief mark for his vengeance. To seize
us had been his main desire. But our small laura was
built far away in the recesses of the hills, and a hermit,
flying to us in terror, told us that a wild boar was ravaging
the vineyard of the Lord, and that one of the assailants,
our secret friend, had bidden him warn us that we were
to be slain. Flight was impossible, for all the paths were
blocked by these Sons of Gehenna. Hastily our brethren
let us down with cords into a well, over whose mouth
they heaped wood and stones. They were only just in
time. Scarcely were we concealed than the varletry of
Theophilus burst into our laura. In their rage at not
finding us they sacked our cells, tore our sacred books,
smashed our beds and humble furniture, pierced the very
walls to make sure that we were not in secret hiding, and,
lastly, heaped fuel about our dwelling and set it on fire.
The flames spread rapidly through the wattled huts in the
hot, dry, desert air. We had left a poor boy to save, if
he coulcl, any of our possessions. He was the son of one
who had left all to join our community, and had been
trained among our hills in temperance and holiness. We
all loved him. He perished in the flames.'
The aged face of the speaker was bathed in tears, and
the Patriarch, as he listened to the tale of their misery,
groaned aloud.
' Even the sacred vessels of the Eucharist were melted ;
even the holy elements which had been consecrated Avere
consumed to ashes in the conflagration.'
' Oh, horrible ! ' said Chrysostom.
' Leaving nothing behind him but blackened ashes, amid

372 GATHERING CLOUDS
which lay the half-calcined bones of our poor boy, Theoph
ilus and his brigands departed. When we were drawn
out of our well, half-dead with cold, that was the sight
which greeted us. Whither should Ave go ? As we walked,
hungry and wailing, down the hill, a few fugitives came
from their hiding-places, and told us that as Egypt could
no more be a home for us, they Avould fly to Syria, and
meet us at a spot to the west of the Red Sea. There
eighty of us met. Three hundred had started, but many
were old and infirm, and perished by hunger on the way.
Among the survivors were abbots, presbyters, deacons,
monks — some of great age, many branded Avith the marks
of the tortures Avhich they had endured as confessors for
the faith of Christianity. We determined to make our
way to Palestine and throw ourselves on the protection of
John, the good Bishop of Jerusalem. Everywhere the
people received us with love and reverence; but even here
Theophilus circumvented us. He had sent a most haughty
letter to all the bishops of Palestine, in Avhich, as though
he were a god  '
' It is true,' broke in Palladius. ' He as God, sitting in
the temple of God, shoAveth himself that he is God.'
' I hope not, Palladius,' said Chrysostom, ' for that Avas
written of the Antichrist.'
' Is not that man an Antichrist, my Lord Patriarch,'
said Palladius, ' who, while he assumes the place of Christ,
overthroAvs the work of Christ ? '
Chrysostom made a sign to Ammonius to proceed.
' His brief letter to the Palestinian bishops ran thus :
" You ought not, against my will, to receive these monks
into my cities. I only pardon you because you have done
it in ignorance. Henceforth beware how you admit into
any place, ecclesiastical or private, those Avhom I excom
municate." Before he received this letter Bishop John
desired to show us every kindness. But now Ave Avere
hunted by Theophilus out of Palestine as though we Avere
felons. We took ship at Joppa. Our number is now re
duced to fifty, and we are come, O Patriarch ! to throAV
ourselves on thy protection, knowing thee to be a lover of
righteousness.' ' My brothers,' answered Chrysostom, Aveeping, ' I grieve

' ECCE ITERUM CRISITNUS ! ' 373
for your misfortunes, but you are not under my jurisdic
tion, dt behoves me to Avalk Avarily. A Council, what
ever its character, has condemned you ; until another
Council, or your own Patriarch, has reversed your sentence
the laws of the Church tie my hands. Reveal not Avhy
you have come hither till I have written to Theophilus.
I may not yet communicate Avith you, but my Churches
are all open to you for prayer, and for the supply of your
bodily jieeds.'
' They are very small,' said Ammonius. ' If we can get
palm-leaves, the mats and baskets which we make sell for
prices far beyond their value, and buy us food.'
' Still, the deaconess Olympias and her sisterhood will
see that you are cared for, and as your home I assign to
you the precincts of the Church of the Resurrection, so
dear to my great predecessor, Gregory of Nazianzus.'
No conduct could have been more prudent or just under
circumstances of the utmost delicacy ; and in order to
lose no time Chrysostom Avrote to Theophilus in the
spirit of a brother and a son, entreating him to free the
monks from the ban of excommunication. Of this letter
Theophilus took no notice. Meanwhile the monks, weary
of their long expulsion from the privileges open to the
humblest Christians, drew up a letter full of charges
against Theophilus so horrible that Bishop Palladius
declined even to mention them, because, he says, they
would sound incredible. Unable to obtain redress for
their wrongs, they threatened to appeal to the Emperor,
and to place this document in his hands.
Then Chrysostom again wrote to Theophilus, and told
him of the step to which the monks would be driven in
their despair. The answer of Theophilus was threefold.
He sent some of his own creatures — a bishop and four
monks — to Constantinople to blacken with infamy the
names of the Tall Brothers and their companions, by
calling them heretics and magicians. Among the super
stitious populace the poor sufferers began to be regarded
with such aversion as to be unable without insult to leave
their cells : the precincts of the Church of the Anastasia
became their prison. It Avas here that the unhappy
Isidore, the Hospitaller, whom Theophilus had once striven

374 GATHERING CLOUDS
his utmost to make Patriarch of Constantinople, and had
subsequently ruined by deeds of characteristic infamy,
died at the age of eighty-five. To Chrysostom Theophilus
wrote a curt and arrogant letter of three lines : ' I thought
you knew the Nicene canons which forbid bishops to judge
quarrels outside their own dioceses. If you are ignorant
of those canons, attend to them now. If I ought to be
tried, it can only be before Egyptian bishops, not by you,
who are seventy-five days distant.' Lastly, he excommuni
cated the fourth brother, Dioscorus, had him dragged from
his episcopal throne by black slaves, and abolished his
diocese. Dioscorus fled, and rejoined his brothers.
Several circumstances gave Theophilus an immense
influence, even in Constantinople. The city depended on
Alexandria for its supply of corn from the granaries of
Africa, and for this reason the port was often crowded
with Egyptian vessels, and the streets with Egyptian
merchants and sailors. Theophilus was in all but name
the lord of Egypt. He could, if he chose, reduce the
capital to famine, as Athanasius had been accused of doing
in the days of Constantine. And not only were these
Egyptians, mostly of the lowest orders, at his disposal for
purposes of mischief, but he used his enormous wealth to
bribe every civil and Court official who was open to venal
advances. But as Chrysostom was powerless the Brothers, now
maddened by wrongs and misery, determined at last to
address Arcadius. With his usual ill-fortune Chrysostom,
who desired only to do all that was wise and just, had to
brave the bitterness of a twofold animosity. The friends of
the Brothers accused him of slackness in their cause, at the
same moment that the mind of Theophilus was surcharged
with venomous hatred against him because he had defended
them. But now the monks secured a powerful and unexpected
ally. The Augusta, in her manifold religiosity, was fond of
paying public visits to every church Avhich was regarded as
specially sacred ; and all the more as she had now turned
her back on St. Sophia to show her dislike of Chrysostom.
One day she announced her intention to visit the Church

' ECCE ITERUM CRISPINUS 1 ' 375
of St. John the Baptist at the Hebdomon, where the
unhappy Gainas had prayed for deliverance from the demon
who tormented him. The monks, headed by the Tall
Brothers, placed themselves conspicuously in her path.
She was riding in a splendid carriage surrounded by her
guards. Seeing the strange band in their sheepskin dresses,
she recognised by the tallness of their stature the persecuted
saints, of whom she had heard so much. She ordered her
carriage to be stopped, and signed to them to come forward.
They placed their terrible complaint against Theophilus in
her hands, and explained its purport. Eudoxia had not the
least intention to be braved by Theophilus, any more than
by Chrysostom. What were Patriarchs to her unless they
obeyed her wishes ? Her motto was, L' Empire c'est moi.
' The Patriarch of Alexandria shall be summoned here,' she
said, ' and shall be tried by a Council on the crimes Avhich
you lay to his charge. And you, reverend fathers, pray for
me, and for the Emperor, and for my children.'
She kept her promise. Her chamberlain was at once
despatched to Alexandria to summon the Patriarch to
answer for the high crimes and misdemeanours with which
he was charged. He received the command in savage and
sinister silence. He saw in this summons the manoeuvre
of a rival. The affair of the Tall Brothers Avas now be
neath his notice. His revenge demanded the utter ruin of
Chrysostom. He would come, not only as an accuser, but
as a judge.

376 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XLIV
E PIP HA NI US INTER VENES
As who should say, ' I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark ! '
Merchant of Venice, I. 1.
One way, and one way only, was open by Avhich the
Patriarch of Alexandria might hope to ruin the Patriarch
of Constantinople. Had their rdles been reversed — had
the soul of Chrysostom been burning Avith unholy rage
against Theophilus, he could have brought home to his
adversary crime after crime of the deepest dye, and, by an
appeal to the people, could easily have destroyed him.
But Chrysostom held it better even to perish at the hands
of the wicked than to use their own methods to overthroAv
them. ' Ye have condemned, ye have killed the just ; he
cloth not resist you.'
Lying defamation was a weapon in the use of which
Theophilus Avas a deadly expert. But he might as well
have tried to throw dirt against heaven and stain it, as
attempt to gain credence for lies which could induce
people to believe that Chrysostom was a reprobate. How
saintly the Patriarch's life had been was known to all. No
human being attached importance to the slanders which bad
bishops and criminous clerks disseminated respecting him.
But surely as a youth he could not have been so immacu
late in his white innocence as now he was ? Surely some
old, dead scandal might be raked up against him out of the
fetid embers of bygone calumnies in the vicious purlieus
of Antioch where he had lived till manhood ?
At any rate, it was worth trying, and Isaac the Monk
Avas despatched on the loathly but congenial mission of
attempting to pick up some rag of slander out of the long-
putrescent gutters of the Syrian capital. No fitter emis-

EPIPHANIUS INTERVENES 377
sary could have been chosen than this pestilent hypocrite ;
but his attempt faiiled ignominiously. He could find noth
ing whereAvith to incriminate the Archbishop, even in the
days of his unbaptised and unconverted youth. And when
the Antiochenes began to suspect the object of all these
inquiries of this unsavoury monk, he narroAvly escaped
being kicked and pelted out of the city, and had to run
for his life.
But what did that matter ? If defamation of character
Avas more difficult in the case of Chrysostom than of most
men, nothing was less likely than that the prolific inven
tiveness of ecclesiastical hatred should fail to find some
other means to wreak its purposes upon him. Heresy was
a charge no less fatal than crime. In the hands of an
able accuser it was easily manipulated ; and, of all charges,
that of Origenism Avas the one Avhich filled the minds of
the ignorant with the greatest amount of vague alarm.
Chrysostom should be branded with the stigma of
Origenism. But it would be highly convenient if the charge could
be fixed on him by someone Avhose name would not at
once, like that of Theophilus, excite incredulous scorn as
to his sincerity. Theophilus — avIio had himself contemp
tuously rejected anthropomorphism until it suited his pur
pose to seem to favour it, and who had been in every sense
as much an Origenist as Chrysostom ever was — at first
thought of securing the services of Jerome. The mind of
Jerome was intensely sensitive to the slightest suspicion of
heresy. He had been an ardent admirer of Origen, had
openly extolled his greatness, had translated and dissem
inated some of his books. But noAV, in his terror of being
thought guilty of heresy he turned completely round, and
belied his own honesty and intelligence. There was a
sort of basilisk poAver in Theophilus which paralysed oppo
sition. He induced Jerome to translate into Latin the
letter in which the Egyptian had called his rival ' an im
pure demon who had sold his soul to the devil ' ; but the
timid Recluse of Bethlehem was obviously unqualified to
take part in any active crusade.
So Theophilus determined to make a catspaw of the aged
and highly venerated Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, in

378 GATHERING CLOUDS
Cyprus, whom no one would suspect of ulterior objects.
Epiphanius was saintly and fairly learned, but his simple
nature had two great foibles, which made him an easy tool
in the hands of the astute intriguer. He had written a
book which he regarded as a sufficient answer to all heresies,
and having all his life long entertained that rooted belief
in his own theological infallibility which is the specialty of
many ecclesiastics, he had noAV sunk into a senile vanity
Avhich made him indignant if anyone disputed his oracular
utterances. The meddling instincts of a heresy-hunter had
already led him to a series of gross and illegal aggressions
in the diocese of John of Jerusalem, of which he had quite
needlessly, and somewhat treacherously, disturbed the
peace. It required all the gentleness of John to forgive
and tolerate him ; but Epiphanius, revelling in the incense
of adoration offered by the common people to his saintli-
ness, was blinded by self-conceit to the disorders and
improprieties of which he had been guilty. What were
Church canons to him, when he Avas the only man who
could set the Church right on all matters of religious
opinion? Canons of episcopal discipline could not apply
to a man who had refuted all the heresies.
The name of Origen acted like a red rag to the old man's
self-satisfied infallibility. How could any man say a word
in favour of the Adamantine, when he had shown hoAv
' dangerous ' were his views ? Every competent observer,
except himself, was well aware that he had never read
Origen's books ; that, if he had, he was incapable of under
standing them ; and that intellectually, and perhaps even
morally, he was scarcely worthy to tie the shoes of the
holiest thinker whom the Church had produced since the
days of the Apostles.
Theophilus knew his man. He sent him the decree of
his precious Egyptian synod of sycophants and nobodies
who had condemned Origen, and with it a humble, flatter
ing letter, in which he intensely gratified the old bishop's
egregious vanity by saying that he himself — Theophilus
— had once been entangled in Origenistic errors, from
which the learned wisdom of Epiphanius had liberated him
as a bird out of the snare of the fowler. Would not the
saintly Bishop of Salamis once more save the world and

EPIPHANIUS INTERVENES 379
the Church by summoning a Council to anathematise
Origen and forbid all men to read his books ? Would he
not, especially, save Constantinople and the Eastern world
from its heretical Patriarch, who, with the" Tall Brothers,
Avas perverting his diocese with the Origenistic heresies
which Epiphanius had long ago refuted ?
Epiphanius scented the heresy-hunt from afar, and went
over to Theophilus with a bound. Egregiously duped both
as to facts and opinions, and completely blinded to his own
non-jurisdiction and incompetence in the -matter, he sum
moned his suffragans, and summarily anathematised Origen
and all his works.
To Epiphanius the sole norm of orthodoxy was agree
ment with himself. If anyone had a religious opinion
which differed from his own he was 'a' wrang, and a'
wrang, and a'thegither a' wrang ' ; and was not only a'
wrang, but also perverse, blind, ignorant, and presumably
wicked. He is in this respect one of the commonest of
ecclesiastical types.
Theophilus sent the decree of this ignorant synod and
of his OAvn to Chrysostom with another curt and insolent
letter; but he, seeing through the plot, and profoundly
uninterested in 'the fury of the theological insects' who
were crawling over the sacred dust of Origen, put aside
the whole matter as a petty dispute which did not concern
him, and sent no reply.
Nettled at the unconcern which Chrysostom showed re
specting his decisions — an unconcern due only to the fact
that he was no more Origenistic than most of the wisest
and ablest Fathers of the Church had been — Epiphanius
now accepted the suggestion that, though he was eighty,
he should go in person to Constantinople, and set things
in order in the diocese of a superior in which he had not
the least legitimate footing. He braved the dangerous
winds, sailed through the Cyclades, and landed near the
Church of St. John the Baptist at the Hebdomon.
From that moment his Avhole career at the capital was
foolish and disorderly. He officiated and preached at the
church, and, as he had done in the Diocese of Jerusalem,
again flagrantly violated all ecclesiastical rule by ordain
ing a deacon. In spite of this, Chrysostom and his clergy

380 GATHERING CLOUDS
received him with the respect due to his age and saintli-
ness, and the Patriarch invited him to share his hospitality.
' Not unless you swear to excommunicate the Tall Brothers
and anathematize Origen,' said Epiphanius, rudely. ' Nay,'
said Chrysostom, ' as regards that question we must await
the decision of a General Council.' ' Very well,' said the
Bishop; 'then I shall go to a private lodging prepared
for me by the agents of Theophilus.'
In spite Of this petulant rebuff Chrysostom, in for
bearance to a senility intoxicated with the sense of its
own self-importance, sent Philip to the lodging of Epi
phanius, the next morning, to invite him to take part in
the service of St. Sophia.
' Tell your master,' said Epiphanius, ' that I cannot lend
the sanction of my authority to heresy.'
Philip was unwilling to carry back so crude an insult.
Bowing and reddening, he asked, ' Has your Dignity no
further answer to the request of the Patriarch ? '
' None,' said Epiphanius.
'He may be a saint,' said Philip, indignantly, to
Eutyches, who awaited him outside, 'but he is certainly
a churl.' But Epiphanius, as if he held in his hand the keys of all
the creeds, invited every bishop who happened to be at
Constantinople, denounced Origen with all his might, and
induced not a few of them to subscribe to his condemna
tion, though they knew as little about Origen as Epi
phanius himself. All, however, were not so flexible.
Among them was Theotimus, Metropolitan of Scythia,
whose holiness of life and loving magnanimity at Tomi,
on the Euxine — famous as the scene of Ovid's exile — had
won the Goths to devout admiration, and had even soft
ened his savage neighbours, the Huns, who, struck with
the loving homage by which he was surrounded, called
him, in their ignorance, 'the God of the Romans.' Saint
and confessor, he had even acquired a reputation for
working miracles, and when he rose, wearing the long
locks which he had never cut, there was silence among
the bishops. Educated in Greece, Theotimus had carried
some of the works of Origen to his Scythian see, and
there read them with profound advantage. He drew one

EPIPHANIUS INTERVENES 381
of these manuscripts from his bosom, and read aloud page
after page of teachings full of depth and beauty. ' Is this
the man whom you want us to anathematise ? ' he asked ;
'this saint, whose holy teaching abounds in high and
orthodox instruction ? To condemn him thus indiscrimi
nately is to condemn the sacred books, which he expounded
as no one else has done so wisely. If you find anything
wrong in his books, reject it; but do not because of it
obliterate all the abounding good.'
It was, however, useless to appeal to men whose con
demnation was due either to ignorant prejudice, opiniated
misconception, or hateful ends; and Epiphanius himself
felt that such condemnation was of very little avail. He
wanted to appeal to the people, who received him with
veneration, and he actually had the temerity to announce
that he would preach a sermon against the errors of
Chrysostom in one of his own churches — the Church of
the Apostles. But even Chrysostom, with all his bound
less forbearance tOAvards the intrusive old man, now found
it necessary to interfere with an act of infatuation which
might well have caused a tumult dangerous to Epi
phanius himself. He sent Serapion to inhibit him.
' Bishop,' said Serapion, ' you have acted, and are acting,'
with discourtesy and irregularity. Be warned in time,
or you must take the consequences.'
The firm rebuke made Epiphanius pause in his wilful
ness ; and he received another from the Empress herself.
At this time her little son, Theodosius IL, fell ill, and in
her usual devotion to strange bishops she sent to ask the
Bishop of Salamis to pray for him. ' Tell her,' said the
old man — - whom we can hardly regard as responsible for
his actions — 'that the child will live if she ceases to
favour heresies and heretics.' The Empress was justly
offended. ' Tell him,' she replied, ' that my child's life
is in God's hands, not in his.' Such, however, was her
superstition that she sent for one of the Tall Brothers,
and asked him to speak to the aged Bishop.
All four of them went to him. He had never seen one
of them before.
' Has your Sanctity ever seen one of our disciples,'
asked Ammonius, ' or read one of our books ? '

382 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Never,' said Epiphanius.
' Ought you not, then, to have done so before you
judged us ? ' said the hermit. ' We have done so as regards
you. We have spoken to your disciples ; we have read
your "Anchor of the Faith." There are many who con
demn you as a heretic, and we have ever maintained your
orthodoxy; yet you vituperate us without ever having
cared to ascertain our real opinions ! '
At last the eyes of the old man were opened. He saAV
that he had been hasty, uncharitable, unjust ; he saw that
he had made himself the deluded victim of a wicked
intrigue aimed by bad men against the righteous and the
good. The moment he was convinced of his folly he
threw up his unintentional share in proceedings so ne
farious, grieved that the last conspicuous act of his life
should have been so little to his credit. He hastened to
return to Salamis. Some bishops accompanied him to
his vessel. His disillusioned bitterness found vent in his
farewell words to them. 'I leave you,' he said, 'your
capital, and your palace, and your theatrical hypocrisy. I
depart from you. I haste, I haste away.'
He and Chrysostom parted in mutual anger. He was
the wronger; Chrysostom the wronged. Yet he would
not apologise or admit how egregiously he had been in
the wrong. ' I hope you will not die a bishop,' said he to
Chrysostom. ' I do not think you Avill ever arrive at
home,' replied the Patriarch. Let us drop a veil over the
dissensions of saints — for even saints err. ONE only was
Avithout sin. If the words were ever spoken, they were
sadly fulfilled.
They are the last recorded words of Epiphanius. He
did not survive the voyage home, but died on board ship,
his death being doubtless hastened by chagrin at his total
failure, and by self-humiliation at his unjustifiable and arro
gant intermeddling with affairs which did not belong to
him, and questions which he was too prejudiced and ordi
nary to understand.
So far, then, Chrysostom had behaved with wisdom, self-
repression, and generous forbearance, and had triumphed
almost without striking a blow. But now he fell into one
of those errors of judgment which are so venial, yet so

EPIPHANIUS INTERVENES 383
fatal. A mistake in this world is often far more ruinous
than a crime.
For this was the unfortunate moment which he chose to
launch another of his impassioned diatribes at the worldli-
ness, the luxury, the intrigues, the- meretricious bedizen-
ment of wealthy and high-born women. The sermon has
not come down to us ; perhaps it was purposely suppressed
by the shorthand-writers, lest it should bring them into
trouble. But it Avas at once perverted and misquoted, and
reported to the Augusta in the most malignant form, as
though it had been deliberately intended for a flagrant
attack upon herself. Indeed, Chrysostom could hardly
allude in the most distant and. historic way to Elijah and
Jezebel without being accused of glorifying himself and
fixing treasonable nicknames on the Empress.
This sort of travesty of what he had said had become so
normal that he had chosen as his third amanuensis an
excellent youth, named Kallias, who had made himself so
skilled a reporter that no ' swift writer ' in Constantinople
could equal him in rapidity and accuracy. Left an orphan
in early years, he had been trained in a monastery ; but
finding as he grew to boyhood that he had no vocation for
the monastic life, he had ardently thrown himself into the
task of 'reporting' as a means of gaining a livelihood.
Nothing which could be called ' shorthand ' then existed,
but Kallias could practically take down an entire speech or
sermon in such a way as enabled him afterwards, by the
aid of memory, to write it out exactly as it had been
delivered. It is to Kallias that we owe the preservation of
many of Chrysostom's later homilies; and sometimes, by
referring to the reports of Kallias, the Archbishop was able
effectually to refute — when he deigned to do so — the
hideous parodies of what he really had said which were
falsely attributed to him.
Kallias had been with Philip and Eutyches at the
delivery of the sermon on the sinful extravagances of
women, and Philip saw at once that it was fraught with
peril. As he walked out with the two other youths he said :
' We shall hear again of that sermon. Oh that our
Patriarch had more of the serpent's wisdom with the dove's
harmlessness ! '

384 GATHERING CLOUDS
'He would say, I suppose,' answered Eutyches, 'as I
have often heard him say, that he can only speak what it
is given him to speak at the time.'
' Not for one moment do I presume to blame him,' said
Philip. ' But these sermons will be his ruin.'
' But what can be done ? ' asked Eutyches. ' This
sermon Avill be represented to Eudoxia in a Avay Avhich
will make her mad. What says Kallias?'
' I have done what little I could,' said Kallias. ' I
noticed that the only other " swift writer " present was
Phocas, avIio reports for Severian. I knoAV him of old. I
have observed that he purposely introduces malignant
words and touches, or gives a turn to sentences which they
never had in the context.'
' Oh ! as for that,' said Philip, ' I had not been a month
in Constantinople before I found out that the normal way
of criticism was to attribute to an opponent something
which might pass for what he said. A word or tAvo here
and there, culled out of separate sentences, and pieced
together as a quotation, makes smart criticism, and a
splendid basis for attacking a man Avhose real words were
wholly different.'
' Exactly,' said Kallias ; ' and that is what Phocas tries
to do in the interests of Severian. But to-day someone
has spoiled his little game.'
'How?'' Oh ! there was a great crowd as we left the Cathedral,
and Phocas was sitting on a chair at one side, trying to
write out his notes, when someone upset his inkstand
right over all his tablets, so that he cannot possibly make
them out.'
' Someone,' said Philip, laughing. ' Oh, Kallias ! '
'Well,' ansAvered Kallias, blushing a little, 'I reailly
thought it quite fair after all his deliberate scounclreldom.'
' It won't prevent gossips from retailing the sermon to
the Empress under the worst guise, I fear,' said Eutyches.
'No, Eutyches, it won't. The days are darkening
round us. I expect that before long Ave shall have to say
with the Maccabees, " Let us die in our simplicity." '
The youths were right. Eudoxia was informed that
Chrysostom had savagely preached at her in St. Sophia.

EPIPHANIUS INTERVENES 385
The information, purposely distorted by Epigraphia and
the bishops, monks, and priests, drove her into one of the
paroxysms of rage to which she yielded Avithout restraint.
Hitherto she had sided with the Tall Brothers, and it was
she Avho had induced Arcadius to summon Theophilus
before a synod for judgment. Now the Talk Brothers and
their wrongs Avere nothing to her. She Avrote to Theoph
ilus, urging him to come with as many Egyptian ' bishops '
(so-called) as he could scrape together, and to come Avith
the express object of destroying Chrysostom.
And his bad heart exulted, and he felt sure that at last
the hour for revenge had come !
2c

386 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XLV
EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS
Slander the stylus, Treason plied the knife ;
And, preaching peace, Religion practised strife.
Lord Lytton, Chronicles and Characters.
Theophilus sent his twenty-eight bishops by sea. Strange
bishops they were ! Men with the names of barbarous
Egyptian gods, bishops of collections of mud huts and
crocodile swamps on the banks of the Nile, bishops igno
rant of everything in the choir of heaven and the furniture
of earth, and so completely subservient to their wicked
and terrorising Patriarch that at a crook of his finger they
would have been prepared to condemn Athanasius himself.
And these were the men who, at the instigation of his
deadliest enemies, were in his own diocese to sit in judg
ment on the chief Patriarch of the East, the greatest saint,
orator, and writer of his age, in the teeth of the decisions of
the bishops assembled around him, more, and more honoura
ble than they — among Avhom were seven metropolitans.
The Egyptians were to await their Patriarch at Chal
cedon, where their dull and blind animosities might be
daily exacerbated by the diatribes of Bishop Cyrinus, who
never spoke of Chrysostom except as the arrogant, the
ruthless, and the heretical.
Theophilus himself came more leisurely by land. He
did this with an object. On the one hand, he left the evil
leaven to work ; on the other, he could gather conspirators
in the Churches of Syria and Asia Minor, who received
him with adulations because of his high rank, and to
whom he sedulously announced that he was on his way
to depose the Patriarch of Constantinople. His attempt,
however, was not very successful. In addition to his
twenty-eight Egyptian parasites he only inveigled seven

EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS 387
others from Armenia, Persia, and Mesopotamia. It would
have been well for the unhappy Bishop of Chalcedon if
one of these had never come. It Avas Maruthas, Bishop
of Mesopotamia. He was a man of slouching gait and
elephantine proportions, avIio Avore heavy boots. Cyrinus
Avas sitting on a divan Avith his legs outstretched before
him. Maruthas, as he came blundering in, trod with all
his weight on one of the feet of Cyrinus. The Bishop
uttered a shriek of pain. The points of the iron nails,
Avith which the boots of Maruthas Avere shod, wounded
his foot in four or five places. The result Avas as though
all the venom in the blood of Cyrinus had flowed into
those wounds, in order to wreak upon him the vengeance
of God. The wounds gangrened. It became necessary
to amputate his foot-, and it must be remembered that in
those clays there were no anaesthetics. The stump gan
grened again; and it was again necessary to make an
amputation at the knee. The leg gangrened again.
There was another amputation, and the wretched Bishop
died. He took what part he could in the Synod of the
Oak. He signed its childish and infamous decrees; but
he Avas scarcely ever able to cross over to Constantinople
to aid in its machinations, and men saAv in his frightful
and lingering death a mark of the wrath of God for the
part Avhich Cyrinus had taken in the destruction of His saint.
On Thursday, at noon, in July, 403, Theophilus, accom
panied by his twenty-eight suffragans, crossed the Bos
porus, and landed at a quay knoAvn as the Chalcedonian
Stairs. All the Egyptian corn-ships were decked with
streamers; all the Egyptian sailors received him with
acclamations. He traversed the city to the Pera district,
Avhere the Empress had assigned to his use the palace
named Placidiana, on the other side of the Golden Horn.
In passing the Patriarcheion he disdainfully refused the
hospitality offered with all courtesy to him and his bishops
by Chrysostom. He Avould not even follow the custom of
entering the church to join in Communion. ' This,' said
Chrysostom to his friends, ' is nothing less than a declara
tion of open Avar.'
It is to Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis, as Avell as to
the letter of Chrysostom to Pope Innocent, that Ave owe

388 GATHERING CLOUDS
our knowledge of these events. Theophilus, says the
lively Palladius, had come from Egypt like a dung-beetle,
except that the load which he rolled before him consisted
of the loveliest and sweetest products of Egypt and
Arabia, Avhich Avere to be used to create the stench of
hatred and envy. At the Placidiana the Alexandrian
prelate lived en prince, winning courtiers and clergy alike
by superb banquets and subtle flatteries, and Avorking
in concert with the monkish, clerical, and feminine cabals
Avhich sat in permanence at the house of Epigraphia. He
soon got hold of tools avIio would admirably serve his
purpose: the deacon John, excommunicated by Chrysostom
for murdering his servant, and another deacon avIio had
been condemned for adultery. He Avas also effectually
aided by the three AvidoAvs — Marsa, Castricia, and Epi
graphia — and their clientele, consisting of SeArerian of
Gabala, Antiochus of Ptolemais, and Acacius of Bercea,
together Avith the mass of the corrupt clergy of Constanti
nople and the concubines whom they called their 'spiritual
sisters.' Theophilus felt no doubt of the result, despite
the scruples of Arcadius, to whom it seemed strange that a
number of unknown Egyptians, headed by a Patriarch
accused of enormous delinquencies, should have come
to his own capital to accuse his own Patriarch, whom,
whatever might be his errors, Arcadius knew to be
a saint. Moreover, at this moment the five previous
emissaries of Theophilus Avere under sentence of death for
libel, and it was only by bribery that he secured the modi
fication of their sentence into relegation to Proconnesus.
This, however, was a trifle ; for Eudoxia, not Arcadius,
was the real emperor. The people, it is true, were dead
against the intruders and their own apostate clergy ; but
Theophilus secured his personal safety by getting from
the Empress a guard of honour.
It was, nevertheless, obvious that no Council adverse
to Chrysostom could sit at Constantinople Avithout danger
of a riot, and Severian recommended its transference to
the neighbouring Chalcedon, where it could be held in the
superb palace of Rufinus, possessed years afterAvards by
Belisarius. Here the murdered Minister of Arcadius had
built a magnificent church, called the Apostolaeum, in

EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS 389
honour of St. Peter and St. Paul ; and hither he had, ten
years earlier, summoned Ammonius, the eldest of the Tall
Brothers, as the man whose reputation was the saintliest
in the Empire, to perform his baptism. The palace Avas
called ' The Oak,' and the synod now held there was
perhaps the most contemptible and infamous known in all
the annals of the Church. It proposed to take in hand
three questions — the accusations against Chrysostom ;
the affair of the Tall Brothers ; and a charge of having
stolen a deacon's clothes brought against Heracleides,
Avhom Chrysostom had made Metropolitan of Ephesus.
This ' Synod of the Oak ' Avas known as the Alexandrian
party ; the larger synod of bishops gathered round Chrys
ostom in the Thomaites was called 'the Johannites,' and,
among others, comprised among its members no less than
seven metropolitans. There Avas scarcely an ecclesiastical
offence against the Nicene canons respecting episcopal
jurisdiction Avhich this paltry and Avicked Synod of the
Oak, relying on Court patronage, did not openly violate.
Summoning before it the Constantinopolitan clergy, Avith
outrageous impudence, it first considered the charges
against Chrysostom, preserved for us by the industry of
St. Proclus, who was then a young reader, but who, thirty
years afterwards, became his successor in the See of
Constantinople. John, the deacon excommunicated for homicide, accused
Chrysostom, among other things, of having fettered a
monk as a demoniac; of having embezzled, sold, or
diverted by malversation the possessions of the Church ;
of having published, a book full of insults against the
clergy ; of having charged the deacons with the theft of
his pallium ; of having ordained as bishop a grave-robber
named Antonius ; of having betrayed Count John to
the soldiery: of entering and leaving church Avithout
prayer ; of receiving women alone ; of ordaining men
without Avitnesses ; of secret ' Cyclopean orgies ' ; of vio
lences and irregularities in Asia ; of having smitten Mem-
non in the face in the Church of the Twelve Apostles,
and made him bleed ; of having put on his bishop's robes
as he sat on his throne; and of having eaten a pastille
before the Holy Communion.

390 GATHERING CLOUDS
To these Isaac the Monk, a worthy coadjutor of the
homicide, added that he had favoured the Origenists ; that
he had used such expressions as 'The Table of the Church
is full of Furies ' ; and ' I am mad with love ' ; and - If
you sin again, repent again ' ; and that '- If Christ's prayer
was not heard, He had not prayed aright ' — and that he
stirred up the people to sedition.
Isaac's charges were chiefly concocted out of discon
nected and meaningless scraps fished out of the turbid
waters of notes of sermons garbled by Phocas, the re
porter, suborned by the malign influence of Severian of
Gabala. They Avere about as fair and about as true as
a criticism of an ecclesiastical opponent written by an
anonymous clerical reviewer in a modern Church news
paper. These libels — a heterogeneous amalgam of frivolities
and lies — were redacted, on the suggestion of the two
renegades, by a pen skilful in the manipulation of slander
— that of Theophilus himself. No one regarded these
preposterous charges as anything more than convenient
implements of unscrupulous malignity. Those which
possessed even a shadow of foundation were obviously
steeped in the venom of misrepresentation. Pope Innocent
and the whole Catholic Avorld afterwards characterised
them as ridiculous and contemptible.
There are aiccusations to Avhich a noble-minded man,
conscious of his own blameless integrity, cannot reply,
because he feels them to be beneath his notice. To
scarcely one of all these forty or more accusations did the
Archbishop deign to allude. What need was there for the
most abstemious man in Constantinople, Avhose habitual
diet consisted of bread and vegetables, and who ordinarily
drank nothing but Avater, to declare that he Avas not given
to ' Cyclopean orgies ' ? What did it boot for a man
notoriously indifferent to money to prove that what he
had Avithdrawn from luxury he had expended on benefi
cence? No one, except a couple of perjurers of notori
ously bad character, pretended to vouch for even the least
serious charges. It was only afterwards that Chrysostom,
in a private letter, said that the immorality with Avhich
he was infamously charged had for him long been a

EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS 391
physical impossibility. It strangely illustrates the depths
of anile superstition into Avhich the Church had fallen
from the simplicity of the Gospel that the one charge
Avhich Chrysostom seemed to feel most was that of hav
ing eaten a lozenge before the Holy Communion. This
infinitely frivolous accusation of a purely imaginary sin
he repudiated with strong asseverations, although he natu
rally adds that, even Avere it true, he Avould have done
nothing but what Christ and the Apostles themselves did
when they partook of the first and holiest of all Holy
Communions, at the immediate conclusion of a meal.
Yet, strange to say, while the scoundrelly Synod of the
Oak was jubilant, the more numerous band of bishops
gathered round the Patriarch in the Thomaites was pain
fully depressed. The reason of this Avas their certainty
that Theophilus and his hirelings were backed by the
Court and by the majority of the evil-minded clergy. ' Pray
for me, dear brethren,' said Chrysostom, when he heard
the hideous list of charges brought against him, and knew
that as regards some of them it would be difficult to extricate
himself without injury, because ' A lie which is half a truth
is ever the greatest of lies.' ' Pray for me, for I am in the
toils of Saltan. My God have mercy on me ! ' The bishops,
on hearing these sad words, melted into tears, and, amid
the sound of general sobbing — for they had all heard the
rumour that the Patriarch would be executed for treason
— they poured round him, kissing his eyes, his eloquent
lips, his sacred head.
' Nay,' he said. ' What ! mean ye to Aveep and to break
my heart ? What is life but a dream, a shadow, a vapour,
a nothing less than nothing? Have I not sold this Avorld
that I may win eternal life ? Does my lot differ in any
respect, in its miseries and persecutions, from that of the
Patriarchs, the Prophets, or the Apostles? What was
the earthly reward of the Lord Himself at the hands of
"Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," but first ti be called a
Samaritan and a Beelzebub, and then to be crucified?'
' If Ave Aveep,' said one of the bishops, ' it is because you
leave us orphans and the Church a widow, Avhile we see
her laws trampled and Avickedness triumphant.'
' Enough, my brother,' answered Chrysostom, bringing

392 GATHERING CLOUDS
down his right finger on the palm of his left hand. ' Do
not leave your churches because of me. The Church never
lacks a head. If you behead Paul, you leave Timothy,
and many more.'
' Ah ! but,' exclaimed another bishop, ' they will never
leave us our churches Avithout forcing us to communicate
Avith them, and subscribe to your condemnation.'
' Communicate Avith them,' said Chrysostom, ' lest there
should be a schism in the Church, but subscribe not, for I
am innocent, and you would be setting your names to a lie.'
At this moment arrived two young Libyans from the
Synod of the Oak, commanding John — to whom they did
not even give his title of bishop — to appear before them,
accompanied by Serapion and Tigrius.
The Council of the Patriarch sent their answer to
Theophilus alone. ' Cease,' they said, ' to break the laAVS
of the Church by intermeddling, contrary to thine oavii
express letter, in a jurisdiction not thine own. Come thou
before us. We are forty bishops, of whom seven are
metropolitans. You are but thirty-six, of which twenty-
nine are Egyptians.'
But to the Synod of the Oak — though more than three-
fourths of its members were ignorant creatures of Theophi
lus, without name, without knowledge, Avithout conscience,
or consecrated only to multiply dishonest and dictated votes
— Chrysostom Avrote in his own name. He said that Avhile
he disdained their accusations, and denied their rights, he
would yet appear in person before them if they Avould ex
clude from their body his avoAved and open foes — Theoph
ilus, Acacius, Antiochus, and Severian. Otherwise they
might summon him a thousand times, and it Avould be in
vain. Three of Chrysostom's bishops and two priests Avere
sent with these replies. Then came a message from the
Palace with an order from Arcadius that ' John was to
appear befo 3. the Synod.' Chrysostom gave his reasons
for refusing. Next entered the monk . Isaac and a priest
of Constantinople, Eugenius — Avhose treachery to his
master had been rewarded with a bishopric — avIio once
more curtly cited him. It is Avell that he did not go, for
the synod of bishops at the Oak had been transformed,

EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS 39g
like the robber-synod of Ephesus in later days, into an
assembly of brutal assassins. One of Chrysostom's three
episcopal envoys Avas beaten ; the dress of the second was
torn off his back ; the third Avas fettered with the chains
which had been intended for Chrysostom himself, and was
sent adrift in a boat among the currents of the Bosporus !
— These Avere your Christian bishops !
But as Arcadius seemed to be wavering they hoav
pressed Chrysostom with the charge brought by the monk
Isaac, that he had been guilty of high treason by calling
Eudoxia ' Jezebel.' He had called her nothing of the kind,
though, having lauded her merits Avith earnest warmth
when she seemed Avorthy of praise, he had warned her of
the perils of her imperious passion. In its twelfth session
the wretched Synod unanimously condemned the Patri
arch, and sent their condemnation to the Emperor, sajdng,
in a style of hypocritic ecclesiastical tenderness worthy of
Torquemada and the ' Holy ' Inquisition, that while they
dethroned John for contumacy in refusing to appear be
fore them, they would leave the Emperor to deal with the
capital charge of high treason. In Spanish Papal fashion
they handed him over — so kind and tender were these
holy men! — to the secular arm.
The next matter for them to settle was the affair of the
Tall Brothers. By this time the Presbyter Isidore Avas
dead ; the Bishop Dioscorus was also dead ; Ammonius
was fast dying, and could not answer the citation of the
Synod. Theophilus went through the grotesque comedy
of a reconciliation with the two surviving brothers, who
were of the least courage and of little comparative ac
count. He beslobbered them with crocodile tears ; alloAved
them to return to the monastery of Skete ; afforded them
his gracious forgiveness for the murderous wrongs which
he had inflicted upon them ; and declared that he had
never met so admirable a monk as their brother, Am
monius ! After this abhorrent farce the absence of Hera
cleides of Ephesus prevented them from proceeding any
further with his case. And as for Origen, Theophilus
resumed his former studies of the Alexandrian exegete,
and being one day caught reading one of the treatises
which on pain of excommunication he had ordered to be

394 GATHERING CLOUDS
everywhere burnt, pleasantly remarked that in reading
Origen he culled the flowers and neglected the thorns !
Meanwhile Arcadius ordered Chrysostom to depart, but
took no step to insure the fulfilment of the order, because
the multitude in their serried ranks protected the Patri
archeion day and night, exactly as they had protected
Ambrose at Milan from the troops of the Empress Justina.
Before the palace-gates of Arcadius they shouted, ' We
Avill have a true Council ! We will have a General Coun
cil to try and acquit the Archbishop.' They also filled the
streets and churches with the wail of their entreating
litanies. The second day after the sentence of the Synod, the
showy hypocrite Severian had the impudence to mount a
pulpit in one of the churches and declaim against Chrys
ostom, saying that he ought to be deposed for his pride
alone, if for nothing else, since — so said this peculiarly
humble conspirator ! — pride is of all things most hateful
to God. Such Avas the fury of the congregation at this
barefaced effrontery that they rose in a mass and chased
the wily, oily impostor out of the city so precipitately
that he barely had time to make his Avay back to the
Bosporus, and fly Avith all speed to the diocese on which
he considered his brilliant talents to be so miserably
thrown away.
But on the Avay he thought better of it. Gabala was
not }^et to enjoy the light of his countenance. In hopes
of a reaction he hid himself, Avith his precious colleagues,
Antiochus and Acacius, in the house of Cyrinus. The
gangrene of Avhich the Bishop of Chalcedon Avas dying
by inches was hardly more intolerable than the black
thoughts of these episcopal conspirators.
Chrysostom, on the other hand, was escorted by the
multitude from his palace to the Basilica, and there
addressed them. 'My brethren,' he said, 'the Avaves beat
on the rock, but they can only shatter themselves to foam
on its impregnable bases. The billows curl over the ship ;
how can they submerge it Avhen Jesus is on board? Fear
not for me. What have I to fear? Death? To me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain ! Exile ? The earth is
the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. The plundering of

EPISCOPAL CONSPIRATORS 395
my goods? I brought nothing into this world, and cer
tainly I shall carry nothing out. I despise that which
makes many tremble. I laugh at the riches and the
honours which many covet. Wealth and poverty to me
are both alike ; and if I desire to live, it is solely if I may
be of use to you. God has united us. Tyrants have
endeavoured ere now to crush the Church. Where are
they now ? They have sunk to silence and oblivion, but
the sun still flames in the zenith even where clouds have
overshadowed it. Tyrants have tried to subdue .even
young maidens with iron teeth, and their faith remained
unshaken by torture. Believe me, these storms and threat-
enings are but as a spider's Aveb. As for the Empire
and its laws, all is turning to dishonour  '
The word had scarcely passed his lips Avhen a sort of
wave of emotion Avhich passed over the people showed him
that the word adoxia, which he had unwittingly used for
'dishonour,' was capable of being regarded as a deadly
insult to the Empress Eudoxia, though he had not in
the least intended it. It was so reported to her, and the
next morning a Count of the Palace came to demand, in
the name of the Emperor, the instant departure of the
Patriarch. A boat, he was informed, aAvaited him at the
' Chalcedonian Stairs,' and, if he resisted, the spearmen
were ready to ' carry him off by force.'
By force ! Chrysostom saw at once that the attempt
to use force would mean a bloody battle between the
troops and the populace, perhaps even a terrible revolu
tion. He could not tolerate the thought that blood should
be shed on his account. He determined to surrender
himself secretly. He sent Philip to the Count of the
Palace to inform him of his determination. The Count
entrusted the management of the affair to a detective.
There seems to be no better Avord for the officer who is
called a curiosus. Under his guardianship Chrysostom
slipped out of a secret gate at the back of St. Sophia about
noon, and, accompanied only by Philip, Avas placed in
hiding in a neighbouring house. At nightfall the detec
tive led them to the boat, Avhere the Count awaited them.
They were recognised, but the Patriarch by his authority
suppressed all attempts at a rescue, though multitudes

396 GATHERING CLOUDS
attended him to the vessel and broke into loud cries
against the Empress and the Court.
It was noAv the end of September, 403. Next morning
the Avhole city was like a church, for the poor of every
age and of both sexes poured out of their houses with
tears and lamentations. In the midst of this Avild excite
ment the victorious Theophilus, Avith his guard of soldiers,
took possession of Constantinople like a conqueror, scatter
ing excommunications among the friends of Chrysostom,
and bishoprics or other dignities among his own adherents.
He ordered the perjured priests who had betrayed their
Patriarch to take re-possession of the churches from which
they had been expelled ; but the crowd prevented their
ingress, and each church was barricaded like a citadel.
His own attempt to enter St. Sophia led to a violent out
break. The monks, Avhose vices and furies Chrysostom
had so scathingly exposed, Avere all on the side of the
Egyptian, and fought for him. The soldiers turned
against 'the black men,' as they contemptuously called
them. Blood floAved like water in the sanctuaries, yells
of fury resounded in the place of prayer and hymns, the
very baptismal fonts Avere stained Avith blood. The
Patriarch of Alexandria, coward no less than tyrant, Avas
filled with terror. The people were shouting after him,
and declaring that they Avould without hesitation pitch
him into the sea. He fled in disguise and in horrible
alarm to Chalcedon, and there, hastily embarking Avith
his twenty-eight miserable suffragans, fled back to Egypt.
Ipse suum cor edens, hominum vestigia vitans.
The detestable arch-monk, Isaac, accompanied him in
his flight, and thenceforth, to our relief, vanishes into the
midnight, with the scourge of an accusing conscience
sounding over him and the clutch of the demons on his
gilded and essenced hair.

THE EARTHQUAKE 397

CHAPTER XLVI
THE EARTHQUAKE
"Kri-mfut fiiv Zeis x^iwos, al di irapdivot
plyqaav w's fiKovcrav. — Sophocles, (Ed. Col. 1606.
Philip had been permitted to accompany his beloved father
and master Avhen he Avas conveyed by the Count of the
Palace across the Bosporus ; and his heart was full of an
anguish too deep for tears. All the long future seemed
for him to be not only uncertain, but smitten Avith a blight.
What would come of this banishment? Would Chrysostom
ever be recalled? Where would be his future? He could
never desert the Patriairch Avhile his services were so in
dispensable ; but thoughts of Miriam, and doubts whether
he should ever see her again, mingled Avith his more un
selfish grief.
He was amazed at the cheerfulness of the Patriarch.
Here he was, hurled from his high estate, defeated by his
enemies, an exile, horribly calumniated, not knowing what
a day might bring forth, and yet he uttered no word of
lamentation, and could speak to Philip with a smile.
But Philip was aware that Avhat supported his master
Avas ' the strong-siding champion, conscience.' He might
have made, he had made, many errors of judgment;
he had yielded to occasional impatience and irritability,
caused chiefly by his severe bodily self-denial, both in the
past and in the present; but of any sins such as those
Avith which he had been charged by the foul Synod of
Theophilus and its hired assassins of the truth he was
wholly innocent. He felt that but for his magnanimity
and self-repression nothing would have been more inevi
table than a massacre in the capital, a revolution in the
Empire, a schism in the Church. This had only been
averted by his voluntary surrender.

398 GATHERING CLOUDS
They were landed at a place called ' The Shrine,' not
far from Chalcedon. The Count remained ; the guards
went back across the Bosporus. When they were alone,
Chrysostom said to Philip, ' My scfti, I do not like to
remain in this place. It is too near Chalcedon. In the
neighbourhood of Cyrinus and Severian I do not feel my
life secure. If you will go and hire me a boat, dark as it
is, we can sail at once to Proenetus, on the Gulf of Astacus,
opposite Nicomedia. There my friend Palladius has tAvo
relatives who oavii a little farm, and there Ave shall be safe.'
Not a moment was to be lost. Philip found a boat.
Wind and current Avere favourable, and before midnight
they found themselves hospitably sheltered in the farm,
and treated by the relatives of Palladius with the utmost
courtesy and reverence.
But Philip's heart Avas heavy. ' My father,' he asked,
' what will Kallias do, and poor Eutyches, and old Phlegon,
and your servants? Will the Emperor and the clergy
appoint a neAV Patriarch ? Where will you live ? '
' My boy,' said Chrysostom, ' when you have reached
my age you will learn to say with all your heart, " Be not
over-anxious about to-morroAv. Sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof." As for you, and Kallias, and Eutyches,
and my old servants, perhaps — Avho knows ? — Ave may
all be allowed to go back to Antioch, and live in Singon
Street. I cannot tell. God will provide.'
' Oh ! that Avill be like heaven after that horrible, guilty
city,' said Philip ; and then he became sad and silent.
' Now, Philip,' said the Patriarch, cheerf ulty, ' turn your
attention for the moment to this excellent supper which
our friends have provided. It is much better than you
Avould have had at the Patriarcheion, and a young appetite
like yours should be ready for it, since it is long since you
broke your fast.'
' I am thinking,' said Philip, ' that you will no longer
be the great Patriarch of Constantinople.'
' Nay, Philip, grieve not for my sake on that account.
There can never be real greatness for anyone except such
as is inherent in himself. Honours and titles cannot
make a little man great, nor can the deprivation of them
make a great man little. And Avhat are we at the best

THE EARTHQUAKE 399
but dust and ashes? Can gilding add to their true value ?
If it be so, God Avill have relieved me of an enormous
burden. My elevation was the worst misfortune which
ever befell me. And Avhat are rank or wealth to one
whose chosen home was once a damp cavern ? Tell me,
Philip, don't you think Ave were much happier in the little
house at Antioch ? '
' Yes, father, I look back to those blessed days. There
you were not surrounded by the hatred of the bad and
the lies of the contemptible. Whenever I think of Con
stantinople, it seems to me like that monster, composed
of hissing serpents, which Hannibal saw crashing after
him in his dreams.'
' Well, then, let us kneel down, my boy, and I will pray
for you, and myself, and our beloved. Desposyni, and
Eutyches, and all of us ; and then we will sleep as peace
fully as happy children avIio have laid all their cares on
God.' They knelt. He poured out his soul aloud in simple
prayer. Then they retired to rest, and slept long and
soundly — the youth sleeping at his father's feet.
It was high daAvn when they awoke refreshed, and pre
pared for whatever the clay might bring forth.
How differently had been the night spent by their
enemies ! Theophilus, sick in body and sick in heart, was
tossing on the stormy waves Avith his twenty-eight creat
ures, feeling foiled and humiliated for all his semblable
victory, and still hearing in his dreams the howls of the
angry populace, emphasising the unrest of his own con
science, Avhich barked within him like a furious Cerberus.
Severian, as he tossed on his sleepless couch, farther (it
seemed) than ever from the accomplishment of his personal
ambitions, felt, Avith agony of mind, that he Avas a mean
and degraded impostor. Cyrinus lay sick, body and soul,
nigh unto death, with the anguish of his amputation,
which was beginning to gangrene afresh. Qualms of con
science disturbed the slumbers of Antiochus of Ptolemais.
The old Acacius of Beroea wished, Avith a sigh, that his
long white hair and venerable aspect could gain from him
self the reverence which it won from others. All were
troubled ; but none of them repented. And in the palace

400 GATHERING CLOUDS
of the Emperor and Empress all night long there was
tumult and Avild affright.
For about the time that they retired to rest they heard
from the Hebdomon the first moaning rumblings of an
earthquake, and felt that first, indescribable shivering of
the ground Avhich, more than any other power of Nature,
reduces man to imbecility and paralyses him Avith terror.
The shocks increased in violence as they moved towards
the centre of the city, and at last, again and again, the
Palace Avas shaken as though its walls were smitten with
palsy. To Eudoxia the bodily alarm was tenfold intensi
fied by superstitious horror. Was it not obvious, she
thought, that this earthquake was sent by God in ven
geance upon her for the wrongs which she had inflicted on
His servant, the Patriarch? The violence of the earthquake,
Avhich reduced their Imperial Eternities to the level of the
humblest slaves in their palace, seemed to concentrate itself
in the bedchamber of Eudoxia. She lay pale and palpitat
ing, too agitated even to pray, suffering in her terror a
thousand deaths, till at last, at a shock more violent than
those before, she heard the wall of her chamber crack
terrifically, her bed was tilted over, and she fell shrieking
on the floor.
Her attendants, pale and horror-stricken as herself, came
rushing in to her assistance.
' Throw my upper robes over me,' she gasped. ' Take
me, take me to the Emperor ! '
Arcadius had also been roused from his slumbers by the
earthquake, and Avas sitting by his bedside limp and abject,
Avith some of his trembling chamberlains around him, when
Eudoxia burst in, half-dressed, with streaming hair, and,
wildly clasping his knees, entreated him at once to recall
the Patriarch. ' It is for our wickedness to him,' she cried
. and sobbed, ' that God has sent this earthquake to swallow
us up quick like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, Avho plotted
against God's High Priest.'
' Our wickedness ? ' said the Emperor Avith intense pet-
tishness. 'JneA^er had any quarrel with John. He has
always been loyal to me. f believe him to be a holy man.
I respect him more than the whole crew of hypocrites.
But for you, and your Korahs, Dathans, and Abirams like

THE EARTHQUAKE 401
Severian and this dark-browed Egyptian meddler, the
Patriarch and I Avould have been the best of friends. I
never really supposed that he called you Jezebel, and so on.
All that wais the malignant nonsense of your AvidoAvs and
your priestly satellites.'
'Oh, recall him! recall him!' cried Eudoxia, 'or we
shall all perish. This very moment let us send.'
Another rumble and shock, which seemed to make the
Palace quiver to its foundations, left her shrieking and
sobbing at the Emperor's feet.
'How can we send this very moment?' he answered,
irritably. ' It is the dead of night ; you hear outside the
crash of falling buildings.'
' Well, then,' she said, ' by earliest daAvn. Perhaps by
that time the earthquake will have ceased. It may only
have been meant to Avarn us.'
There seemed to be a pause in the shocks, and Eudoxia,
a dishevelled and pitiable object, returned, not to her
half-dismantled chamber, but to another which seemed to
promise more security. No sooner had she gone than
Arcadius angrily muttered to himself words which, had
she heard them, might have cost him his life by poison or
the dagger.
' This woman worries me,' he muttered. ' She gives me
no rest; she keeps me in a ferment and a turmoil. I was
never half so much worried in the days of Eutropius.
With her one has no peace for a day at a time. Tumults
and riots by day, earthquakes by night. She banishes the
good Patriarch Avith curses one day, and recalls him with
entreaties the next. I wish I had married Rufinus's
daughter after all.'
And with such reflexions the miserable ruler of the
Avorld flung himself back upon his bed — but to sleep no
more. At earliest dawn the Empress despatched a messenger to
the Patriarch at the Hieron with a letter in which, with
sublime self-deceit and disregard of facts, she wrote :
' Let not your Sanctity think that I am responsible for Avhat
has happened to you. I am innocent of your blood.
Bishops and wicked men have devised this plot against
you. God, -whom I serve, is the Avitness of the tears I
2d

402 GATHERING CLOUDS
shed for you. I forget not that by your hands my children
have been baptised.'
But the messenger did not return, for he searched the
Hieron for Chrysostom in vain. Then she sent another,
and neither did he return. Then she despatched a third ;
and at last, in despair, she sent her ' Chamberlain Briso
himself, avIio would, she knew, be Avelcome to Chrysostom
as one of his personal friends. Briso was lucky enough to
light on the boatman who had conveyed Chrysostom so
quietly to Proenetus, and he set saiil to the Gulf of Astacus
to find him.
Meanwhile the populace, wild with joy, heard that their
beloved Patriarch Avas to be recalled, and that messengers
had been sent to find him. They were disturbed and ren
dered suspicious by the non-return of the messengers, and
determined to search for the Patriarch themselves. They
hired every boat they could find, and, hearing that he was
no longer at the Hieron, sailed to port after port in the
neighbourhood. There had been no earthquake at Proenetus. Philip had
aAvaked in a less gloomy mood from a refreshing sleep,
and, as he dressed himself, he saw Chrysostom still placidly
slumbering, Avith a smile upon his face. ' Thou shalt keep
him in peace — peace,' he murmured, ' whose mind is stayed
on Thee ; because he trusteth in Thee.'
Going into the open air, he saw the waters of the Pro-
pontis sparkling in the morning sunlight, and white with
unnumbered sails. He Avas perplexed. Something had
evidently happened, though he could not conjecture Avhat
it was ; but that they were searching for someone was
evident, for they steered into one after another of the
ports which abounded on that populous shore. Was it for
good or for evil ? Who could say ?
At last he saw a sail making all speed for Proenetus.
' Noav,' he thought, ' Ave shall knoAv,' and he hurried in to
tell his master.
' Look,' he said, ' father, at all those sails ! I cannot
make out the cause of the excitement, but something must
have occurred at Constantinople. We shall know in a few
minutes, for a boat is even noAV pushing its beak into the
port.'

THE EARTHQUAKE 403
' Go and meet it, Philip. Use your own judgment as
to what is best to say or do, to make known or to conceal.
I am prepared for whatever God may send.'
Philip went down to the shore, and gave a shout of joy,
for on the prow of the boat stood Briso, waving an olive-
branch. The kind-hearted eunuch recognised him with
smiles Avhich could betoken nothing but good-fortune.
Briso told the good news to Philip, who took him
straight to the little farm. He handed to Chrysostom
the letter of the Empress, and, barely waiting to snatch a
hurried breakfast with them, insisted that Chrysostom
should at once accompany him. He had already de
spatched messengers on every side to say that the Patriarch
Avas found. Boats came flocking into the port, and when
the Chamberlain and the Patriarch embarked, it was in
the midst of an attendant flotilla of hundreds of shallops,
of Avhich the little creAvs burst into cheers as he passed.
He Avas fully determined not to enter Constantinople
itself, for there Avas the canon of a Council — though only
an Arian Council, held at Antioch in 341 — Avhich forbade
a bishop Avho had been deposed from entering his see until
he was absolved by another Council. He therefore stopped
in one of the suburbs named Mariana, where the Empress
had a palace, Avhich she placed at his disposal. The multi
tude Avas not, however, content with this, and being still
in a state of excitement, continued to shout invectives
against the Emperor and Empress. Eudoxia therefore sent
him a most humbly earnest entreaty to lay aside his
scruples ; and Briso represented to him that the Antio
chene canon could not in any case apply to the decision of
a trumpery and violently irregular synod of intruders like
the Synod of the Oak ; that, even if it did, a larger number
of bishops had absolved him ; and that, in any case, the
Imperial fiat Avas, under the circumstances, sufficient.
Philip indignantly took the same view. ' Condemned by
a Council, indeed ! ' he said. ' Begging your Beatitude's
pardon — rubbish ! ' Philip always addressed his master
as ' your Beatitude ' when he was in bright spirits, and
he laughed at the forefinger Avhich Chrysostom shook at
Mm in reproof.
The people settled the question bjr carrying off the

404 GATHERING CLOUDS
Patriarch almost by force. By this time it Avas evening.
They flocked out in myriads to escort him, and as every
hand carried a torch, the procession looked like a river of
fire. At their head was the Empress herself. She not
only welcomed the Patriairch with effusion, but almost
seemed to be joining in the festive damces and cries of
joy ; and, strange to say, in the sight of fill the people, she
actually flung her "arms round his neck! His return was
a splendid triumph. The Emperor was represented by
his chief secretary. Hymns were sung Avhich had been
hastily written or adaipted for the occaision. The general
feeling towards the clergy who hsid betrayed and tried
to ruin him Avas shown by the shouts of ' Bishop, purge
thy clergy ! Chase away the traitors.' No less than thirty
bishops Avere among those avIio formed his escort. He was
SAvept along by the rejoicing throng until they had entered
the vast nave of St. Sophia. There, kneeling, and actually
prostrate on the marble floor, they entreated him to give
them his episcopal blessing. At last he did so, and prom
ised to address them on the following morning. That even
ing his triumph seemed to be completed by his receipt of
another letter from the Empress, in which she Avrote in her
impassioned Avay, ' My prayer is fulfilled . I ha\-e attained
my purpose. It is to me a richer ornament than my dia
dem. I have brought back the priest. I have restored to
the body its head, the pilot to the ship, the bridegroom to
the bridal chamber.'
But, amid all this intoxication of enthusiasm, nothing
more deeply moved the tender heart of the Archbishop than
the unspeakable joy which his return caused in his own
home and among his dearest friends. Most of these had
been unable to get near him amid the dense and surging
crowds. But now, in the Thomaites, stood old Phlegon
and his dear, familiar servants, who dropped on their knees
for his blessing- ; and Serapion, and Tigrius, and Germanus,
and Proclus, and Cassian, and Bishop Palladius embraced
him in their arms ; and the youths who, like Philip, would
have died for him — Kallias and Eutyches — kneeled down,
took possession of either hand, covered them Avith kisses,
and bathed them in tears, until he raised them up, and
gave them Avith a full heart the kiss of peace.

THE EARTHQUAKE 405
On the following morning he addressed to a vast
congregation the .still-extant ' Homily after his Return.'
He spoke very sternly, yet not intemperately, of the brutal
intrusion and Adolences of Theophilus. Of his many other
enemies he took no notice, but passed them over in
complete silence. Entirely deceived in the simplicity of
his heart by the frantic simulation and dissimulation of
Eudoxia, he. spoke of her in terms of high eulogy. To his
own faithful people he poured forth his soul in warmest
gratitude. After his sermon Eutyches, avIio Avas hoav an ordained
'reader,' took off the Archbishop's pallium, and hung it,
as was the custom, round the neck of one of the statues
of the Apostles. It Avas a band Avoven of the finest
lambswool, three fingers broad, at the end of Avhich hung
thin flakes of lead, covered with black silk, on which were
woven four crosses in red. It was fastened on each
shoulder by three golden pins.
' Two days ago,' said the Patriarch, Avith a smile, ' I
little deemed that I should ever again Avear the episcopal
pallium in this place. God has been very good to me.'
' I hope that I may help many a time to robe and
disrobe your Dignity,' said the young reader.
In truth, at that moment the Emperor himself Avas
hardly so powerful in his own capital as Avas the
Patriarch. He at once resumed with all his accustomed
strenuousness his manifold episcopal duties. To purge
his clergy of scoundrels and traitors was an immediate
necessity, and he did so with a firm hand ; while at the
same time he rewarded the true and faithful. The Deacon
Tigrius Avas raised to the priesthood. Serapion Avas
elavated to the Bishopric of Heraclea, vacant by the flight
or deposition of Paul, whom, Avith a crocodile semblance
of impartiality, Theophilus had nominally appointed
president of the Synod of the Oak on the day when
Chrysostom had been deposed.

BOOK V

DEFEAT IN VICTORY
AND
VICTORY IN DEFEAT

Signor, non sotto 1' ombra in piaggia molle,
Tra fonti e fior, tra Ninfe e tra Sirene,
Ma in cima all' erto e faticoso colle
Delia virtu riposto e il nostro bene.
Tasso, Gir. Lib. 17. St. 61.

CHAPTER XLVII
EUDOXIA'S STATUE
Envie is lavender to the Court alway,
For she departeth neither night nor day
Out of the house of Caesar. Chaucer, Prologue, Good Women.
Alas ! the seeming peace was but the placidi pellacia
ponti ; it Avas but
A stroke of cruel sunshine on the cliff,
When all the vales ar-e drowned in azure gloom
Of thundershower ;
for, on the one hand, Eudoxia Avas still Eudoxia, and
between her and the Patriarch, so antipathetic to her in
character and temperament, it was impossible that there
should be long-continued amity. What lasting concord
could there be between a woman of insane and insatiable
pride, Avhose Court reeked Avith intrigue and Avorldliness,
and -an Archbishop of dauntless courage and inflexible
righteousness? And, on the other hand, Theophilus de
feated all Chrysostom's attempts to secure by a compe
tent General Council the reversal of the judgment passed
upon him by the hateful Synod of the Oak. Arcadius
summoned Theophilus to come to a General Council and
answer the charges brought against him. But the
Egyptian had not the least intention of again imperilling
his sacred Hypocrisy among a populace intoxicated by
affection for their Archbishop. He wrote back that, after
having been driven out of Constantinople by mobs which
threatened to fling him into the sea, he could not visit
the city again ; and that his own people Avere so devotedly
attached to him that his departure would cause a riot at
Alexandria ! 409

410 GATHERING CLOUDS
So for two months things went on. A multitude of
bishops to the number of sixty, as they could not be
gathered in formal Council, declared informally their
sense of Chrysostom's innocence, and of the wicked nullity
of the proceedings in the Synod of the Oak. Feeling that
he had iioav done everything in his poAver to obey the laws
of the Church and maintain its honour, Chrysostom devoted
himself simply to the duties of his office.
But in September, 403, Eudoxia, Avhose ambition
needed the burning of ever-fresh incense, procured for
herself an honour of unheard-of extravagance Avhich pre
cipitated the destined catastrophe.
A person ignorant of human nature might have imagined
that a half-barbarian lady, daughter of a Frankish soldier,
elevated by the intrigue of an eunuch to share the empire
of the world, would have been reasonably satisfied. Fur
ther than this, she was mated to an indolent weakling,
and had asserted over him an immense dominance. If she
was not content with the actual autocracy, but Avanted all
its acknowledged paraphernalia, she had hoav obtained
from her husband the highly coveted title of Augusta,
which even the stately wife of the first Augustus had not
received till late in life. She had also Avorried out of
Arcadius the privilege of being ' adored ' as well as himself.
This half-pagan adoration was in reality a survival from
the days when the emperor, as a sort of incarnation of the
people, shared the Avorship addressed to the goddess Rome.
This worship had never yet been accorded to a woman.
The wives or other nearest female relatives of emperors
Avere only supposed to gleam with a reflected lustre, and
to receive from him any sacro-sanctity Avhich they might
possess. The concession of such a distinction to a semi-
barbarous nobody like Eudoxia involved the parading of
her statue for something barely distinguishable from
Divine honours in every city of the Empire. This might
be tolerated in the sluggish and servile East, but it so
utterly offended the sensitive dignity of the Western
world that Honorius made it a subject of energetic remon
strance with his elder brother — a remonstrance Avhich
Arcadius treated Avith his usual masterly inactivity and
with sullen contempt.

EUDOXIA'S STATUE 411
But even this did not suffice Eudoxia. Working on
Simplicius, the Praefect of the City, and on the leading
senators, she induced the Senate to vote her a statue of
unsurpassed magnificence in the most prominent site of
the Avhole city.
It was in the Augusteum itself, between the Imperial
Palace and the Cathedral of St. Sophia, from Avhich it Avas
only separated by the breadth of the grandest thoroughfare
in the capital. It was reared on a platform of many-
coloured marble, Avhere stood the Rostra, from which on
great occasions the Emperor addressed the Senate, the
people, and the army.
Here, then, the statue was erected. First there was a
massive stylObate. It still exists, for it was dug up in
1848. It preserves, on one side in Latin prose, on the
other in Greek hexameters, the fulsome laudations of the
upstart and eminently undeserving Empress. On this
pedestal was reared a column of porphyry ; and on the
summit of the column stood a figure of Eudoxia in solid
silver, menacing Church and Senate, and populace and
city, Avith her gesture of command.
It was customary, as we learn from a law of Theodosius
II. , to inaugurate the statues of imperial personages on
Sundays or feast-days; and the sort of semi-idolatrous
cult bestowed upon them so deeply scandalised the Chris
tian conscience that, in the days of Eudoxia's son, it was
forbidden by edict. Further than this, we learn from the
extant discussion between a Christian and Apollonius, a
philosopher, that the abject honour paid to such statues
made the heathen ask, Avith indignant scorn, ' Why Chris
tian priests permitted this idolatry of royal images, when
they condemned the worship of Pagan statues.' ' Why,'
they scornfully demanded, ' do you give to men, and even
to women, the honour which you preach should be given
to God alone ? '
On every ground, then, both the statue and the homage
paid to it Avere inexpressibly distasteful to Chrysostom.
These honours, however, were part of the universal custom
of the Eastern Empire; and as they had been passively
condoned by the Church, he could not interfere Avith them.
But the orgiastic dances, loose mimes, and noisily lewd

412 GATHERING CLOUDS
songs and buffooneries of every kind which attended the
unveiling of this hateful memorial of a Avoman's pride
could not be left without rebuke. The principal day for
the inauguration of Eudoxia's image — the day when the
noises were most irreverently loud and most obscenely offen
sive — was the Sunday. On that day it became impossi
ble adequately to conduct the service and Holy Communion
of St. Sophia. The voices of the choir were drowned in
shrill shrieks of amusement and coarse bursts of laughter
at the comedies Avhich were going on in the vulgar fair.
When Chrysostom attempted to preach his voice was ren
dered inaudible by the indecent tumult just outside the
Cathedral doors. Profoundly irritated, Chrysostom ap
pealed to the Praefect of the city. He, however, being a
Manichee, and a foe to the Patriarch, was secretly delighted
with the chance of affronting with impunity the Catholic
party. So far from taking any step to interfere with the
worst developments of the inauguration observances, he
carried to the Empress an exaggerated account of Chrys
ostom's opposition, and falsely reported that Chrysostom
had sworn to deprive the Empress's statue of all popular
observance. Eudoxia was already vexed at the rebuke
Avhich Arcadius had received from his younger brother
of the West. With Honorius she could not deal ; but
it Avas intolerable to her that she should be constantly
thwarted and reprehended by the Patriarch in her own
capital, and that, while every other official was at her feet,
this indomitable prelate should confront her at every turn
Avith the incomparably superior majesty of the moral law.
She burst into unmeasured expressions of hatred, anger,
and bitterness against him, and, being rapidly made aware
of this, ' the fury-intoxicated phalanx ' (as Palladius calls
them) of his enemies soon closed him in on every side.
The Marsas, Castriciais and Epigraphias were soon joined
by Annas, and Caiaphas, and the priests and hypocrites,
in the persons of Severian, Cyrinus, Antiochus, and the
rest. Nothing is more probable than that, on the following
Sunday, Chrysostom, in his sermon, gave some expression
to the profound disgust Avith which his heart Avas full;
and, judging from what has happened in similar cases in

EUDOXIA'S STATUE 413
all ages, his thoughts so far coloured his expressions as to
lead him into phrases Avhich might easily be distorted into
direct personalities. But he Avas not prepared for the
frightful trick played him by his episcopal enemies.
Kallias had, as usual, taken down his master's sermon,
and Chrysostom, Avhen it Avas written out, read it, and
Avas glad to find that, though he had spoken strongly of
idolatrous profanation of the Sabbath, and of the perils of
overweening pride and ambition, he had not been hurried
by the fire of oratory into any remarks which exceeded the
bounds of duty, or of moderation. He had been the more
careful because Philip, Avhose intense love for him he
knew, had, in the modesty of fearful duty, ventured to ask
him not to shoAv too much wrath at the recent turn of
events. ' My father,' he had ventured to say, ' the Avorld
cannot be converted at one stroke ; and surely Ave cannot
be held responsible for events Avhich we could in no Avay
prevent?' But the other tachygraph, Phocas, over Avhose report
Kallias had accidentally-on-purpose spilled his inkstand
on a previous occasion, had also reported this sermon,
and subjected it to the sly manipulations suggested to
him by his patron, Severian. He took his report to the
house of Epigraphia, where, as he expected, he found
Acacius, Severian, Antiochus, and two new foes of Chrys
ostom — Leontius of Ancyra, a dark intriguer of the
Theophilus type, and Ammonius of Burnt-Phrygia, who,
as Palladius .says, had come from Burnt-up Phrygia to
burn up the Church.
Severian glanced at the manuscript, and saw his oppor
tunity to strike a fatal blow.
' Come Avith me,' he said to Leontius. ' You will, I feel
sure, agree Avith me that this Patriarch, avIio defies the
canons of the Church, and has been condemned by a
synod for crimes and misdemeanours, must be got rid of.
Until he is, there Avill be neither peace nor harmony, and
the Church of Christ will suffer.'
' I agree Avith yon,' said the Syrian metropolitan in his
gruff voice.
' Well, glance at this report of his sermon.'
Leontius glanced at it, and shrugged his shoulders.

414 GATHERING CLOUDS
' One or two strong expressions,' he said, ' but nothing to
lay hold of seriously.'
' Yes,' said the conspirator ; ' but might we not in this
matter exercise a little of " oeconomy," or management, a
little of the wisdom of the serpent, of that deceiving others
for their good and the good of the Church — in short, of
that falsitas dispensativa — the permissibility of which, as a
hallowed instrument of warfare with evil, has been gener
ally admitted by priests ? '
The Metropolitan of Ancyra was not shocked. He was
quite familiar with the laxity, as regards both untruthfulness
and degraded casuistry, which in the East prevailed even
among high ecclesiastics — as it has often prevailed also at
Rome, having found deliberate defenders among her canon
ised casuists. The Church had not yet quite arrived at the
moral views of Escobar or ' St.' Alphonso de Liguori ; yet
Leontius was far too familiar with the grossly unscrupulous
methods which over and over again were adopted, even in
episcopal circles, to have the least doubt as to the mean
ing of the Bishop of Gabala. He kneAv how many there
were who did not regard evil as evil if it were meant to be
subservient to their own ends, Avhich they always identified
Avith the good of 'the Church.' He could recall scores of
instances in which bishops had, with these views, manipu
lated truth into falsehood, and not disdained to utilise
absolute crime for the suppression of the opponents whom
they dubbed heretical or dangerous.
' If you take bits of mosaic and rearrange them,' he said,
' you can turn the image of a king into that of a reptile or
a dog. But I do not see that much can be made of this
sermon.' 'I will manage it,' said Severian, 'and John's doom is
sealed.' He went home to compose his forgery. He headed it
with the one sentence which report attributed to Chrysos
tom : — ' Again Herodias maddens, again she dances, again
she demands the head of John.' He appended a number
of loose sentences, many of Avhich, in some form or other,
Chrysostom may very likely have used on that or other
occasions ; and then, getting tired of his task, took down
a Syriac manuscript of his countryman, Ephraem Syrus,

EUDOXIA'S STATUE 415
translated half of it into Greek, and tacked it on to the end
of his miserable patchwork. Then he, had this forgery
copied out by Phocas. And this Avas the manuscript Avhich
he submitted to Eudoxia as a verbatim report of Chrysos
tom's latest sermon !
It is still extant among the spurious works of St.
Chrysostom, and, fortunately, bears on the face of it the
proof that it is an unblushing forgery.

416 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XLVHI
THE FORGED SERMON
Tu, licet extremos late dominere per Indos,
Te Medus, te mollis Arabs, te Seres adorent :
Si metuis, si prava cupis, si duceris ira,
Servitii patiere jugum , tolerabis iniquas
Interius leges. Tunc omnia jure tenebis
Cum poteris rex esse tui.
Claud. IV. Cons. Honor. 257-62.
No sooner had she read the first sentence than the haughty,
passionate woman flamed into uncontrollable rage. She
knew that Chrysostom, because his name was John, and
his life was that of an ascetic, and his moral attitude in
flexible, Avas often compared with John the Baptist. The
free street-cries of Constantinople could not leave her
unaware that she Avas often called Jezebel and Herodias.
She did not suspect the deceit which the Bishop of Gabala
had practised upon her credulity, and she had so few oppor
tunities of seeing the world, except through the medium
of contaminated minds, that she rarely arrived at the real
truth. She accepted the report as genuine ; and that such
language- should be used of her in St. Sophia, and by the
man whom she had recalled tAvo months earlier, and Avho
had then lauded her piety and beneficence, was a fact
Avhich lay on her heairt like a spark of fire. Severian, as
he observed how hate and rage and Avounded pride changed
her face from red to pale and pale to red, and how her
bosom heaved and her breath quivered and hissed as she
turned over the leaves, felt that now at last his work was
finally and effectually, done, and exulted in his abominable
heart. Leaving his lie to produce its full effect, he took his
leave; and she, knowing that the Emperor was alone, burst
unannounced into his presence.
There Avas nothing which more shook the nerves and

THE FORGED SERMON 417
worried the immobile passivity of Arcadius than these
sudden inroads from Eudoxia. Eutropius had formerly
protected him from them, but now they Avere matters of
constant occurrence. If Ave could imaigine Avhat Avould be
the feelings of an automaton which found itself mated with
a Avhirlwind we can realise what he felt.
When they Avere in public the Emperor and Empress
never neglected the most rigid conventions of imperial
etiquette. Were they not both august, and their infant
already an Augustus ? Were they not both ' aidored ' ?
Did not their courtiers cover their eyes with their hands
as they approached them, as though to shield themselves
from the too sun-like radiance ? In their public relations
nothing disturbed the quotidian ague and frozen routine
of gorgeous Byzantinism elaborated by Oriental servility.
But Avhen they Avere alone they indemnified themselves
for this ponderous parade of- functional ineptitude by
relapsing into interchanges of spleen as frankly human as
those of the meanest of their subjects. Slaves, eunuchs,
, pages, chamberlains, and courtiers heard from the inmost
recesses of the purple chambers voices raised into tones of
the shrillest vehemence, and sometimes even scraps of
objurgation Avith which they Avere not unfamiliar at the
Chalcedonian Stairs and other resorts of ordinary human
clay. Arcadius knew that he had to prepare for the Avorst
whenever Eudoxia invaded his privacy unaccompanied by
any of her children. At certain times of the day, above
all when she entered his room Avith a certain flounce of
her imperial robes, as she did on this occasion, he made up
his mind for a bad quarter of an hour.
' It is intolerable ! ' she began, flinging herself down on
a golden chair ; ' it is quite sickeningly intolerable ! I
would rather be a drudge in the bazaar than the Augusta
if I am to submit to this.'
' What is the matter now? ' asked Arcadius with an air
of Aveary and irritated displeasure.
' The matter is that you are no longer Emperor of the
East,' she said, with frigid scorn.
'Indeed!' replied Arcadius with studied indifference.
'Then Avho is Emperor?'

418 GATHERING CLOUDS
' That man ! ' she almost screamed ; ' and until you get
ricl of that man neither city, nor Church, nor Empire will
have a moment's peace ! '
' That man being  ? '
' That Patriarch, that John of Antioch, who has been
condemned by a synod of all sorts of crimes, and yet comes
back ! '
' Why, it is but tAvo months,' said Arcadius, ' since you
yourself Avere here on your knees, screeching and sobbing
that night of the earthquake, and saying that God Avas
destroying us because Ave had driven out that saint. It
was you avIio drove him out  '
' I never did ! ' said Eudoxia defiantly.
' I know you said you did not,' replied the Emperor ;
' but, if so, who did ? You wrote to Theophilus ; you Avere
daily caballing with the bishops ; you got him banished by
falsehoods  '
' This is too much,' said the Empress, as she listened with
tightened lips.
' Then you summoned him back all in a hurry ; you sent
messenger after messenger for him ; you went out to meet
him ; you kissed and hugged him  '
' Oh ! ' shrieked Eudoxia, ' is there no one to avenge
me?' 'And noAV,' said Arcadius, continuing his placid course
with no regard to these interruptions, and feeling that for
once he was, to use a vulgar expression, scoring — ' and
now you come raging and shrieking again, and want him
banished; and then, after another earthquake, I feel no
doubt youAvill rage and shriek again to have him recalled.
I hate these scenes ! '
' Very well,' she exclaimed, livid Avith Avrath ; ' so Arca
dius is such a pale-blooded phantom as to suffer the Avife
Avho has borne him four children to be publicly called a
Jezebel and an Herodias before the lewd, seditious mob
in his OAvn church, not a stone's-throw from his own
palace. Would God,' she muttered, ' I had but married a
man ! '
Arcadius was about to adopt his usual plan, of doing
nothing, and letting affairs take their course ; but after a
pause, in which Eudoxia had been indulging in inarticulate

THE FORGED SERMON 419
sobs, she started up, and flung the spurious sermon at his
feet in a perfect storm of passion.
' Read that ! ' she said.
Arcadius, in a helpless Ava}r, picked it up, glanced at it,
and let it drop, as if it did not particularly interest him.
' What are you going to do ? '
Arcadius did not answer.
' Am I to be thus grossly and daily insulted with im
punity ? '
Still the same sullen silence, more maddening to Eudoxia
than any speech.
' Are you a man, or a dastard ? '
' Are you a woman, or a fury ? '
' Would that I had never left the house of Promotus ! '
' One thing only is clear to me,' said the Emperor :
' which is, that I was quite infinitely less worried in the
days of Eutropius.'
' Then choose out some slave from the dregs of your
eunuchs, and make him lord over you,' screamed Eudoxia;
'but understand that you will be made the veiled joke of
the comedians in the theatre. The meanest cloAvn in Con
stantinople will sneer at the man avIio is more cowardly
than himself ; for even such a clown Avould hit the man
avIio insulted his wife.'
' Do what you like ; have it your own way ; only leave
me in peace,' said Arcadius in a tone of unspeakable
disgust. He sank back on the cushions of his divan,
utterly wretched, and closed his heavy eyes. He Avas
much to be pitied. Had his Avife been the sweet and
gentle Avoman that his mother had been he might have
been a better ruler and a less miserable man. But —
Look you, the grey mare
Is ill to live with when her whinny shrills
From tile to scullery, and her small goodman
Shrinks in his armchair, while the fires of hell
Mix with his hearth.

420 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER XLIX
INTRIGUE TRIUMPHANT
Of all malicious acts abhorred in heaven
The end is injury ; and all such end
Either by force or fraud works others' woe ;
But fraud, because of man's peculiar evil,
To God is more displeasing. — Dante, Inf. xi. 23.
It soon became patent to all the world that Eudoxia was
leaving no stone unturned to ruin the Patriarch, and
darkest clouds of misgiving closed over the last smile of
brief sunshine in the hearts of his friends. The Empress
had again invoked the aid of Theophilus, and though he
would not come in person, he was sending ' three miserable
Egyptians ' to act in his name. All the other bishops and
ecclesiastics to Avhom Chrysostom's very virtues were a
reproach Avere speeding like vultures to a feast. Another
Council Avas to be held, about which tAvo things were clear
— that it would not be the General Council which the
Patriarch had demanded; and that, under the terrifying
influence of the Court, it Avould be all but exclusively
composed of the Patriarch's opponents.
Those who Avere not in the secret could not understand
the rush and blare of the new thunderstorm. Chrysostom
had only shared the feeling of every sincere Christian in
the city in deploring the Pagan profanities Avhich accom
panied the Sunday inauguration of Eudoxia's statue, and
surely his disapprobation could not have created an offence
so deadly as to cause his destruction to be determined.
Philip and Kallias alone divined the secret. Kallias
knew that ere now spurious sermons, attributed to Chrys
ostom, had been handed about. He sorely suspected a
plot between the reporter Phocas and his patron, Severian ;
and Philip agreed with him. Philip determined to take
the bull by the horns, and Avalked Avith Eutyches to the

INTRIGUE TRIUMPHANT 421
lodging of Phocas. Philip never attempted a ruse. If he
carried a point, it was always by frank forthrightness.
' Phocas,' he said, ' we love the Patriarch, and have
reason to fear that the present exasperation of the Court
against him must be based on travesties of Avhat he really
said about the Augusta's statue. Would you mind lending
us your verbatim report ? '
'That you may compare it with that of your friend
Kallias,' said Phocas, Avith a touch of professional jealousy,
'and injure my reputation as a tachygraphist, to his ad
vantage.' 'Nay,' said Eutyches, with the frank smile Avhich dis
armed opposition. ' We really are not capable of such
small tricks. Philip has. told you that Ave have reasons
for suspecting that he Avhom Ave regard as a father is
being ruined by subterranean plots. It may help us and
save him if by two reports — Kallias's and yours together
— Ave can prove thait he said nothing wrong. No reporter
in Constantinople comes near you two.'
' That boy knoAvs how to flatter,' said Phocas, disarmed.
' Well, you shall see my report.'
Thej7" saw it, and found that while in a few expressions
it had been a little coloured, it agreed in the main Avith
that of their friend.
' Was this the report which, as people say, Severian
showed to the Empress? ' asked Philip.
' That I don't know,' answered Phocas ; ' but Severian
paid me for a copy.'
They thanked him, and parted good friends ; but
Philip determined to push his inquiries a little further.
He went to Amantius ; but though Amantius Avas
Eudoxia's chamberlain, she never shared her secrets Avith
him. He could give no information. Nor could Briso.
He had seen a manuscript, in a handwriting Avhich he
knew to be Severian's, lying on the table of the Empress's
room. He knew no more.
' Could you not get me a glimpse of it ? ' asked Philip.
' Any attempt to do so, my good youth, might simply
cost us our heads,' said Briso ; ' and I doubt whether an}r
good would result from it.'
Philip's plans were defeated. Unless God threw His

422 GATHERING CLOUDS
shield of protection over his beloved master he could now
see no hope.
The bishops Avho were hurrying to Constantinople were
deliberately poisoned against Chrysostom by his enemies,
or won over by the bribes and threats of Eudoxia's agents.
One honest man, Theodotus of Tyana, finding that he Avas
expected to take part, not in a trial, but in a conspiracy,
turned his back on the capital and returned to his own
diocese. Christmas Avas now close at hand, and on Christmas
Day the Emperor and Empress ahvays attended St. Sophia
in state. Noav, however, Arcadius announced that he
could not again communicate with Chrysostom until he had
cleared himself of the heavy charges against him. Chrysos
tom replied that to clear himself was what he had always
longed for, and that whenever the Emperor would sum
mon a fair and free Council he would with the utmost
pleasure appear before it. Even before the packed as
semblage, Avhich it was ridiculous to describe as a Council,
he was ready to appear as soon as they formulated their
charges and adduced their witnesses.
The boldness of his innocence alarmed his adversaries.
What if he should appear in person, and by his innocence,
his eloquence, his popularity, his array of overwhelming
refutation, should scatter their trumpery falsehoods and
trivialities to the four Avinds, and emerge from the storm
more invincible than eArer? This would not at all suit
them. They wrote to Theophilus for counsel, and he
advised them to rely exclusively on a canon of the Antio
chene Council of 341 which forbade a bishop dispossessed
by a synod to return to his see until he had been recalled
by another synod. According to that canon, said Theophi
lus, John had no right Avhatever to be in Constantinople.
The answer of Chrysostom to this pretext Avas over
whelming. The Synod of the Oak Avas wholly incom
petent ; it broke every conceivable laAv of ecclesiastical
discipline and of common equity; it was composed of
Egyptian hangers-on of Theophilus. Its assembling in
his own diocese to sit in judgment upon him was a direct
violation of rules of the Council of Nice, on Avhich nobody
had insisted more strongly than Theophilus himself.

INTRIGUE TRIUMPHANT 423
Next, even if the Synod of the Oak had been valid, its
decrees had at the time been rejected by a much larger
synod of bishops sitting with Chrysostom,* including seven
metropolitans. Thirdly, Chrysostom's return had since then been
approved and his entire innocence asserted by an agree
ment of at least sixty bishops — nearly double the number
which had voted at the Oak.
Fourthly, Chrysostom had not returned of his own
accord at all, but had been carried back, almost by violence,
by his people, and in obedience to the commands of the
Imperial Court.
Fifthly, the Council of Antioch Avhich passed the canon
now adduced aigainst him was an heretical Council, of
Avhich the authority Avas repudiated by the Church ; and
this very canon could have no better proof of its Avorth-
lessness than that it had been forged as an implement of
oppression to overthroAv the holy Athanasius.
Against these decisive considerations the episcopal con
spirators raged in vain. At last they urged the Emperor
to hear the matter pleaded by ten bishops on either side.
What Severian's party lacked in argument they compen
sated by a noise and bluster so unseemly as to threaten
scenes of violence in the Emperor's very presence. AAvait-
ing a moment's lull in the wild storm, Elpidius, Bishop of
Laodicea — an aged and blameless prelate, with white hair
and beard, and venerable aspect, who was on the side of
Chrysostom — arose. He said in his quiet voice : 'Emperor,
will you ask Severiaui and his party Avhether they are ready
to subscribe to the creed of the Council of Antioch ? If
they cannot do this the Council was heretical and its canons
are invalid.' The opponents of Chrysostom were thunder
struck by this very simple but unexpected proposal, Avhich
Arcadius, with a smile, declared to be excellent. They
stood silent; but at last, out of mere bravado, they said
they Avould subscribe to the faiith of the Council of Antioch,
and broke up the discussion. They never dared to do
what they had promised, and excused themselves by the
monstrous pretence that the promise had only been extorted
by force.
This might have seemed a triumph for the Patriarch ;

424 GATHERING CLOUDS
but it Avas fruitless. Eudoxia had decided to expel
Chrysostom, if not by semi-legal methods, then by open
tyranny. Might should be right ; and if any of the bishops
avIio were friendly to him refused to succumb either to
bribes or menaces, then the Patriarch should be expelled
in spite of them, and with complete disregard to their
remonstrances.

PROLONGED AGONY 425

CHAPTER L
PROLONGED AGONY
The history of the Byzantine Empire is a monotonous story of the in
trigues of priests, women, and eunuchs ; of poisonings, of conspiracies, of
uniform ingratitude, of perpetual patricides. Lecky, European Morals, ii. 14.
The year blossomed into Lent, and all things still re
mained in a condition of trouble and uncertainty. The
state of things at Constantinople was as when two armies
watch each other for months from opposite heights, and
neither dares to attack the other ; and there seemed no
hope of peace or of any return to normal duties.
It Avas the party of unscrupulous episcopal malcontents,
envenomed by their own jealousy and goaded forward by
the furies of Eudoxia, who were most afraid. Easter was
approaching. They dreaded lest the Emperor would on
that great festal day go to St. Sophia, and be impressed
by the passionate love and fidelity with which the multi
tude clung to their great pastor. This must be prevented
at all hazards. They Avent to Arcadius, headed as usual
by Severian, and begged that as Chrysostom was entirely
defeated, and had been condemned by two synods, he
might be expelled from the church. But had Chrysostom
been so defeated, so condemned? Arcadius, in his some
what constipated intellect, felt considerable doubts as to
the truth of either assertion, and expressed them.
' You should believe us,' said Severian ; ' we are bishops,
and a true bishop cannot lie.'
' It depends on how you define a true bishop,' thought
Arcadius ; but he was, as a rule, at the mercy of the last
speaker, and usually adopted the course which cost him
least trouble at the moment. He therefore so far yielded
as to send a message to Chrysostom that, ais he had been
condemned, he must keep at a distance from his church.

426 GATHERING CLOUDS
'I received the Church from God, my Redeemer,'
answered the Patriarch, ' for the care of His people.
Therefore I may not abandon it. If you wish to drive
me out by violence, it is, of course, in your power to do
so.' Arcadius wavered. 'It might,' he said, 'cause another
earthquake. I Avill confine him to the Patriarcheion.
Then, if God gives any sign of anger, I can send him back
to his church.'
This Avas truly to. seek after a sign ! Chrysostom
might dispute the Emperor's right to deliver such a com
mand, but it reduced him to the condition of a prisoner in
his oavii palace. Yet, even so, it was clear that the popu
lace was in an excited state, and, fearing some terrible out
break of their wrath at this treatment of the one man whom
they loved and trusted, Arcadius, in extreme misgiving,
sent for Acacius and Antiochus. He would not send for
Severian, for whom he had acquired a complete disgust,
although he continued to be to Eudoxia the trusted agent
of all scoundrelism. The Bishops of Beroea and Ptolemais
— the dotard, whose dignity had been offended, and the
adventurer, who hated a virtue so far above his oavii —
urged the wavering Emperor to depose the Patriarch.
Like Pilate, he still hesitated.
And, like Annas and Caiaphas, they cried, ' On us be
the guilt ! '
But there were still forty bishops Avho were in daily
communion with the Patriarch, and they determined to
make one more effort to save him. They are but the
feAvest whom a good cause stirs to the acti\'ity Avhich the
votaries of evil display for their bad ends. The devil, as
a rule, receives from his servants an energy of devotion
which is often lacking in the servants of Christ. Men
who have yielded themselves slaves to envy leap and
bound upon their errands like steeds at the crack of a
Avhip, while at the trumpet-call of duty men crawl like
snails. The strenuousness of malice spurred Severian
and his abettors to ardent vigour ; the wrongs outpoured
on righteousness evoked little more than murmurs of
' What a shame ! '
The ' Johannite ' bishops, as Chrysostom's friends were

PROLONGED AGONY 427
called, heard that the Emperor and Empress Avere going
to prayers at the Church of the Martyrs, and went forth
in a body to meet them. With tears they besought their
Majesties to restore the pastor to his church for the great
Easter festival. They met with a curt refusal, for by the
side of the more pliable Arcadius sat his evil genius in the
person of Eudoxia. Then Paul, Bishop of Crateia, plucked
up courage, and cried, ' Eudoxia, fear God ! have pity on
thy children ! Stain not with bloodshed the high feast of
our Lord.'
Their appeals were dashed to pieces like weak waves on
the rock of her hatred. She would not yield, but was
only the more hardened, provoking the doom Avhich so
speedily awaited her.
Easter Eve was the great season for baptisms. On that
Easter EA^e, A.D. 404, no fewer than 3,000 were to be
admitted into the Church of God. All these catechumens
were assembled in the Baptistery, and the sacred service
had begun, amid ringing hymns and holy rejoicing, as the
white-robed candidates stood ready to enter the holy font
under the light of many lamps. It was at that moment
that a rabble of Chrysostom's enemies, headed by the
Bishop of Gabala, and protected by a band of soldiers,
many of them Pagans, Arians, and unbaptised, burst in with
the purpose of seizing the Cathedral, that it might not
be occupied by the faithful on Easter Day. A fright
ful tumult arose. The brutal soldiery rushed upon the
catechumens. Many of them were women ; many of them
Avere boys or youths; most of them Avere partially un
dressed, preparatory to immersion. They were driven to
hasty flight without even having time to snatch up their
most necessary garments. The priests and deacons who
were taking part in the ceremony were seized, and their
sacred garments torn off their backs. Many were severely
wounded. The lustral water of the font blushed with the
horrid taint of blood. In the plunder the soldiers profaned
the Holy Table, and the dress of coarse legionaries Avas
incarnadined with consecrated wine scattered over them
from upturned chalices of the grapes of God.
Undismayed by so terrific a violation of all sanctities,
the faithful flock of Chrysostom, after they had been

428 GATHERING CLOUDS
scattered from the Baptistery, assembled in the Baths of
Constantine to complete the sacred ceremony of initiation.
It Avas noAv past midnight, and nothing would less serve
the purpose of Severian and Acacius than that the Em
peror should, the next morning, find the Cathedral per
fectly deserted, from the indignation of a. people deprived
of their true shepherd. They therefore determined, that
the multitude should be driven into St. Sophia by violence,
and begged Arcadius for a body of troops to carry out
their abhorrent purpose. With the fear of Eudoxia before
his eyes the helpless ruler of the world acceded to their
request. Once more the palace troops were put into
requisition. A body of Thracian shield-bearers stormed
the church Avhich the catechumens had improvised in the
Baths of Constantine. Their leader, Lucius, had been
bidden by Arcadius to abstain from extremes ; but as they
would not disperse, he was bribed by Severian and Acacius
to use force. He did so, nothing loth, and set the example
to his rude Thracians by banging about him with a trun
cheon, which, Avithout the smallest remorse, he brought
down with equal indifference on the white hair of aged
men and on the bright locks of young catechumens, and
wielded with equal impartiality against the clergy and the
laity. Scenes then took place even grosser than before.
The faithful were scattered ; wounds were dealt freely on
every side ; the clergy Avere savagely beaten ; and the
soldiers looted everything on which they could lay their
hands, not even excluding the holy vessels. Next morn
ing the public places were placarded Avith notices threaten
ing exemplary vengeance on all who would not renounce
communion with Chrysostom.
It was thus that the holy Bishops of Gabala, Beroea and
Ptolemais glutted their execrable passions in the name of
Christianity, and disgraced the Gospel of Peace Avith infa
mous barbarities.
But the faithful Avere still undaunted. They would not
desert their Patriarch ; they Avould not join the vile phalanx
of his enemies. As they might not worship God in St.
Sophia, they streamed out of the city in a body to worship
Him, under green trees and the shadoAvs of wooded hills,
on a spot set apart by Constantine! for the Circensian

PROLONGED AGONY 429
games. It happened that the Emperor had gone to a church
outside the city for his Easter service, and on his return
caught sight of a great croAvd of Avhite-robed catechumens
and other worshippers. He asked, in astonishment, avIio
they were.. ' Oh ! they are heretics,' said some of his
lying attendants ; and Avhen he returned, Severian and his
fellow-conspirators asked permission to have them scat
tered and their teachers arrested. The permission Avas
granted. Again the imperial myrmidons, rejoicing at
their task, fell upon the innocent worshippers. They tore
the valuable earrings out of the ears of the women, often
tearing a part of the ears Avith them. The clergy, the
eminent laymen, the leading members of the congrega
tion, were seized, and flung into the common prisons.
Thus the very prisons Avere turned into churches, and rang
with holy hymns. And still the great mass of the people
remained unshaken in their allegiance to their Bishop, for
whose sake multitudes were ready to brave martyrdom
itself. Such were the successive tidings which troubled to
their inmost depths the hearts of Chrysostom and of the
friendly prelates who still surrounded him. And it may
well be imagined that his three young secretaries — Philip,
Kallias, and Eutyches — - were plunged into a grief which
crushed their spirits into the dust.
'Father,' said Philip, 'this life must be unspeakably
dreary to you ; our hearts bleed for you.'
' It is not so much that it is unspeakably dreary,' said
the Patriarch, ' or even that there is a heavy trial in its
uncertainty. I am not the first of Christ's servants, nor
shall I be the last by many millions, to find that it is truly
a misery to live upon earth. Job experienced, a thousand
years ago, that " man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly
upwards." But all this personal misfortune I can endure
Avith fortitude. The grief which Avill not be healed is my
grief for the Church and for my people. They are a vine
yard Avhich Avhole troops of Avild boars are laying Avaste.
And I cannot tell — oh ! I cannot tell — Avhat the end
Avill be. But it must be near at hand.'
' Would that I had the gift of insight, as Michael had,'
said Philip. ' He warned us of calamities at hand.'

430 GATHERING CLOUDS
' We need not prophesy, my Philip. In the long run,
" Say ye to the righteous, it shall be well Avith him " ; but
Ave were Avarned that the hundredfold reward should be
" with persecutions." '
As though to emphasise their words there sounded in
the room a tumult from without. Philip ran to inquire
AAdiat it Avas. He learnt too soon. A man who pretended
to be a maniac had made his way to the porch, and was
brandishing a huge dagger, and swearing that he Avould
murder Chrysostom. He had been seized, and Avould
have been torn to pieces by the mob, but the Patriarch
despatched Philip to the City Praefect, Avho Avas close at
hand. The man Avas taken red-handed. No one doubted
either that his madness Avas simulated or that he was an
agent of the devilish Avickedness of the clerics who thirsted
for the Patriarch's blood. The Praefect ordered him to be
examined by torture ; but before it Avas applied Chrysos
tom sent some bishops to intercede for him, and to set
him free. He hoped even against hope that his enemies
might be overcome by his immense forbearance.
He hoped in vain ! Ecclesiastical malice is the bitterest
and most unscrupulous form of malice knoAvn to the
human race. It Avas very shortly after this act of mercy
that Eutyches came running into the anteroom with a
white face to tell Philip and Kallias that a murderer with
a dagger was raging at large in the Thomaites. The
youths jumped up at once, and Philip seized a club which,
in these dangerous da3's, he had thought it safe to keep
in a corner of the room. In the great hall Avas a scene of
terror and confusion. A slave Avith a dagger had forced
his way in, and, on being confronted by one of the
Patriarch's servants, had stabbed him. He had wounded
a second, who fled from him Avith loud cries. He had
stricken to the earth with his weapon a third who tried to
stop him ; and as by this time a universal tumult had
arisen, he fled, and with reckless fury dealt wounds more
or less deadly upon four others. Thus, Avhen the two
young men ran into the hall the assassin had already
killed or Avounded no less than seven persons of the house
hold of Chrysostom.
Rushing upon him, Philip brought down the club Avith

PROLONGED AGONY 431
all his might upon the Avretch's shoulder, and the Woav
was so strong and so well dealt that he was smitten to
the ground by the shock of it. At the same instant
Kallias seized him by the right hand, dealt him a blow on
the temple, and wrenched the dagger, which Avas streaming
with blood, out of his grasp. Gasping and utterly dis
comfited, he Avas bound, and dragged into the Patriarch's
presence. Conscious of his frightful guilt, the bravo, who had
shown courage enough so far as personal recklessness was
concerned, was coAved into inconceivable abjectness in the
holy presence of the Archbishop Avhom he had designed
for his victim. His knees trembled under him, his face
grew ashen with deadly pallor, his teeth chattered in such
a way as to render his words almost unintelligible.
Would the Patriarch strike him dead with a glance?
Would he curse him Avith a sign into madness and hideous
leprosy, and send him
Unhouselled, unanointed, unaneled,
No reckoning made, but sent to his account
With all his imperfections on his head,
into the horror of some inconceivable and endless hell ?
' Pardon ! pardon ! pardon ! ' he shrieked. ' It Avas not
my doing. I was sent to murder you. I received a bribe.'
' For what bribe did you sell your guilty soul ? ' asked
Chrysostom. ' For fifty gold pieces.'
' Did Judas profit by the thirty pieces of silver for which
he sold his Lord ? '
' Oh ! send me not to hell,' shrieked the wretch again,
trying to fling himself prostrate, and crawl, grovelling in
the dust, to the Patriarch's feet. ' I am not so bad as he
who sent me.'
' Who sent you ? '
' One of your own presbyters.'
' Say who it was, you foul murderer,' said Philip, clutch
ing him by the hair.
' Gently, Philip, gently,' said Chrysostom.
' Yes ; but, father, four of the villain's murdered inno
cent victims lie dead on the floor of the hall, and who can

432 GATHERING CLOUDS
tell Avhether even the three others Avho are badly wounded
will survive ? '
' I will tell you avIio bribed me to murder,' said the
wretch sullenly. ' It was the priest Elpidius. I am his
slave. If holy priests bribe slaves to murder, hoAv can
ignorant slaves resist? Curse him! Curse him! May
God curse him ! '
' His Avas the greater crime,' said Chrysostom. ' As for
your attempt upon my own life, I forgive it. May God
also forgive it ! But you have murdered four, perhaps
seven, innocent men, and it would be a sin to set you free.
Take him to the Praefect.'
' Oh ! ' said Philip to the assassin, ' I dare not trust my
own rage to drag you to justice. Tell your master, if ever
you see his face again, that he is an infinitely viler reptile
even than you. I hope that he may never cross my path,
or I know not how I could abstain from throttling him,
priest or no priest.'
' Philip ! Philip ! ' said Chrysostom to the passionately
excited youth, ' control your anger. You are a Christian,
a true Christian ; be not transported beyond yourself, even
for my sake. The wrath of man worketh not the right
eousness of God.'
' Pardon, my father,' said Philip, kneeling, ' and forgive
me. Bless me, even me also, oh my father ! '
' You need little forgiveness, my son. Your anger was
generous. Only, let it burn no more. I give you my
best blessing. God Avill reward your faithful love for me.
The world is forsaking me, but you  '
He could not finish the sentence.
' We — I, Eutyches, Kallias — yes, and some even among
the bishops and the clergy — Ave Avill never forsake you,
even to the death,' sobbed the remorseful youth.
But iioav that the people of Constantinople felt that the
life of their idol was no longer safe from the burning fury
of Eudoxia and the murderous malice of priests and
bishops, they determined to watch for him, and protect
him clay and night, as the people of Milan had defended
Ambrose. They divided themselves into relays, and
guarded every private and public gate which led into the
Bishop's palace.

PROLONGED AGONY 433
But it had been only necessary to defend for a feAV daiys
the life of Ambrose. A bishop could not be protected in
his house by his people from Court and clergy day and
night for ever ; nor could everything in the Church and
in the City remain in this state of unstable equilibrium.
The fact that neither the priest Elpidius, nor the slave
whom he had bribed to assassinate Chrysostom — Avho had
actually murdered seven perfectly innocent victims —
were punished, showed the horrible demoralisation of
imperial justice. But Chrysostom still lived, and was
still in the Patriarcheion. It became intolerable to the
conspiring prelates that they should be unable to snatch
the spoils of their victory ; nor Avas the frenzy of Eudoxia
and her Jezebels yet sated Avith vengeance. Things went
on in this dreary Avaiy from Easter till it was nearly Whit
suntide. No one felt more deeply than Chrysostom that it
could not last. He had for some time been secretly mak
ing up his mind to sate by voluntary sacrifice the episcopal
tigers Avho Avere thirsting for his blood. Since their wrath
was so fierce and their hatred so implacable, he Avould vol
untarily end the strife, and make Avay for another. He
did not object to the loss of his rank or state ; he Avas con
tent to be driven by force from his home and from his see ;
he was ready to offer his life in sacrifice ; and, if it Avere
God's will, he could lay it doAvn as lightly as a pin. One
thing he would maintain till death — it Avas his stainless
innocence ; it was that his character had been Aroid of
offence towards God and towards man.
From the execrable corruption dominant in the Church
of the East he turned to Avhat he trusted was, in some
respects, the purer Church of the West. He Avrote to
Innocent I., Bishop of Rome, to Chromatius, Bishop of
Aquileia, and to Venerius, avIio now occupied the episco
pal throne of Milan. He might hope that, through the
laAV-abiding justice of the West, the Church might be
delivered from the licentious turbulence into which the
intrigues of Theophilus and his fellow-conspirators, fos
tered by the overAveening arrogance of a semi-barbarian
Empress, had plunged the disordered East. In this letter,
after describing the scenes of riot and oppression Avhich
had dragged doAvn the Church of Constantinople, he en-

434 GATHERING CLOUDS
treated them to put an end to this condition of frightful
confusion; to declare his pretended condemnation to
have been tyrannous, irregular, null, and void; and to
censure those Avho, in committing these iniquities, had
treated him with more violent injustice than even Scyth
ians or Sarmatians would have ventured to commit.
It required a bold and trusty messenger to bear this
letter ; and as the movements of a bishop, or even of a
deacon, might be more jealously watched and impeded,
he determined to send Kallias, for Avhom he felt a warm
regard. He could take the letters secretly ; his move
ments, as he was a mere youth, would not be regarded
with suspicion ; his talents as a tachygraph might prove
useful ; his blameless and ingenuous character would be
a passport through all difficulties. Eutyches was too
young and inexperienced. Philip could not be spared/
Kallias was instructed to visit first the three great bishops
to whom the letter was addressed, and then to see any
other eminent prelate to whom he could find access, and,
if possible, to enlist the sympathies of the great Stilico
and of the Emperor Honorius himself. All details Avere
left to his faithfulness and ingenuity, and a sum of money'
was entrusted to him to meet all his probable expenses.
Kallias, before he started, had many a long and earnest
conversation with Philip, and agreed at every possible
opportunity to send news of his doings.

DRIVEN FORTH 435

CHAPTER LI
DRIVEN FORTH
' I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity ; therefore I die in exile.'
Gregory VII.
Thus miserably did things drag on till Whitsunday, while
civil oppression, animated by the burning passions of
Eudoxia and the vitriolic malignity of the bishops, per
mitted scenes of shame and brutality to violate even the
sanctuary of God. The fury of oaths, the screams of the
tortured, the whistling of scourges, were heard even in
churches, while the attempt was made to coerce the faith
ful to anathematise the holy pastor Avhom they loved.
Men recalled the language of the Gospels — ' And there
shall be signs in sun, and moon, and stars ; and upon
earth distress of nations in perplexity for the roaring of
the sea and the billows ; men's hearts failing them for
fear, and for expectation of the things which are coming
011 the world; for the powers of the heavens shall be
shaken.' Nor Avas their dread unreasonable. The defeat,
deposition, exile, and martyrdom — for martyrdom to all
intents and purposes it was — of the saintly Patriarch of
Constantinople led to age-long consequences, both in the
East and in the West. In the West, the events which
issued from it tended to establish the influence of the
Bishop of Rome at a period Avhen that influence was in
many respects for the advantage of mankind, and before it
had been distorted by forged donations and false decretals
into a cruel and pernicious tyranny. In the East, it de
graded the Church into an abject subservience, in which
she abdicated her functions as a denouncer of luxury and
oppression, and submitted to 'the Caesaro-papism ' of
Avavering despots.

436 GATHERING CLOUDS
The days of trouble and rebuke and blasphemy, in
which, to use the image of the prophet, the children Avere
brought to the birth, and there was not strength to bring
forth, dragged on amid alarms, tumults, and attempted
assassinations till Whitsuntide, June 5, 404. Eudoxia
and her priestly instigators felt that any further delay in
the consummation of their plots would be fraught Avith
peril. In the plenitude of autocracy they still felt the
terror of the guilt which trembles before unarmed
innocence. The passionate enthusiasm of the people for
their Bishop might still triumph over the conscientious
timidity of the Emperor. Their hideous plots of murder
had been frustrated ; it might happen that truth and
righteousness would still triumph, and so their dark webs
of lies and bribery be torn to shreds. Arcadius, terrified
lest the crime of his connivance in accusations which he
knew to be the perjuries of jealousy and hatred should
provoke the intervention of Heaven, had been waiting for
some admonitory eclipse and earthquake which might
once more frighten Eudoxia. This would have given him
the excuse for dismissing the episcopal intriguers to their
neglected sees and restoring Chrysostom to his Patriarchal
throne. But in those burning days of June no thunder
bolt fell, no storm disturbed the azure sleep of heaven.
Meanwhile the passionate importunities of the Empress
disturbed his abnegation of all effectual power. His
conduct was finally decided by the four worst bishops who
Avere leaders of the Empress's party. These men —
Antiochus, Acacius, Cyrinus, and Severian — urged by
Eudoxia, demanded an audience, and came into his pres
ence. Arcadius was no match for these sanctimonious
criminals, though even his obtuseness saw to the depths of
their villainy. ' Emperor ! ' they said to him — for it was
their snake-like policy to enslime their victim ere they
gorged — ' Emperor! thou hast been appointed ruler by
God that all may obey thee, and that thou mayst act
according to thy will. Be not more compassionate than
priests, more holy than bishops ! We have said before all
the world, " Let the deposition of John be on our heads."
Do not destroy us all that thou mayst spare one.'
' Well,' replied the Emperor, ' if yours is the crime, yours

DRIVEN FORTH 437
be the penalty. I hold John to be innocent and orthodox ;
if you force me to offend Heaven by wronging him, let his
blood fall on your heads.'
Then they said of Christ's servant as the priests of old
had said of Christ Himself : ' His blood be on us and our
children ' ; and Arcadius, like Pilate, practically Avashed
his hands of the matter, and said, 'I am innocent of the
blood of this just person. See ye to it! '
At noon that day Patricius, the principal notary of the
Emperor, was a bearer of a note to the Patriarch in which
Arcadius said : ' The four bishops make themselves re
sponsible for your deposition. Commend your affairs to
God, and depart hence Avithout delay.'
' Commend your affairs to God/' Even in that phrase
the Emperor betrayed the fact that his rescript was the
outcome, not of his convictions, but of his imbecility.
Clearly, however, the order Avas meant to be final ; and
it was precise. Chrysostom, anxious to put an end to
intolerable complications, Avhich threatened to have a ter
rible ending, and deeming it a duty in the last extreme to
submit to the powers that be, prepared to obey. A group
of bishops and clergy were with him in the Patriarcheion.
He read them the Emperor's letter, and told them that he
Avould be willing in a few moments to go Avith them to the
Cathedral, and thence to depart he kneAv not Avhither.
Then he went into his study, and called Philip and
Eutyches to him.
' My sons,' he said to them, controlling his deep emotion
by a strong effort, 'the destined hour has struck. The
Emperor has sent me his decree of banishment, which I
can resist no longer. I depart hence, and a voice tells me
that when in a few moments I leave this home, Avhich men
call my palace, I leave it for ever. My place shall know
me no more. I am in God's hands. His will be done, not
mine.' He paused, lest he should break into uncontrollable
Aveeping ; for the two youths had kneeled ait his feet and
had grasped his either hand, and could not speak, but
Avere kissing his hands and bathing them with their tears.
Gently he disengaged his hands, and laid them in bless
ing on the dark locks of Philip and the short, fair hair of

438 GATHERING CLOUDS
Eutyches. ' My dear, dear sons,' he said, ' I have seen day by
day your goodness, and faithfulness, and love to me. It
costs me a keener pang to part from you than from any
others. You have been utterly true to me. Dear Philip,
for years you have brightened my days, you have lightened
my labours. I always knew that whatever I trusted to you
would be done, and well done. I had but to mention it to
you, and then I could dismiss it from my mind. And you,
dear Eutyches, I have rejoiced to see you growing up in
holiness, " like the flower of roses in the spring of the year,
and like lilies by the watercourses." Farewell ! farewell,
my children ! and the God of mercy and of peace be with
you!' They had hidden their faces in their hands, and he made
over them the sign of benediction ; but then Philip sprang
up impetuously.
' Nay, my father,' he said, ' bid us not leave you. We
will go where you go, we Avill die where you die. As
your God is our God, so your trials shall be ours.'
'Not so, my sons,' he said gently. 'Your sympathy,
your service, would indeed be to me an immense consola
tion. But how can I suffer you to blight your youth for
my sake ? I am an old man ; my days are spent ; my
Avork is done ; mine enemies have triumphed. I go, like
St. Paul, knowing nothing, save that in every city bonds
and imprisonment await me. The dark days which
Michael foresaw have come ; I know not even whether
for me in this world at eventide there shall be light. But
as for you — live out your lives in God's faith and fear,
and may He give you, of His goodness, many happy
days ! '
' We cannot leave you, father,' sobbed Eutyches. ' Bet
ter trial and persecution Avith you than to know that you
Avere in trouble, and that we were far away, and could do
nothing to lighten your griefs.'
' Ah ! my dear son, Eutyches, it may not be,' said the
Patriarch. ' It would not be permitted, even if I could
desire it. But take comfort, my boy. To know that you
are well and happy will be a far deeper alleviation to me
than to see your young lives devastated for my sake with
premature anguish. And oh! cease, cease, my sons. By

DRIVEN FORTH 439
your weeping you break my heart. Believe me, even in
this hour, even in the midst of my grief, I am happy,
for I am innocent. If you grow up to suffer, may you
grow up also to know and feel that to suffer with Christ
is not to suffer.'
But Avhen he saw that neither of them could speak, he
added, very calmly, ' Nay, my sons, give not way too much
to grief. To do so were to doubt the goodness of God.
You, my Philip, stay to look after my few possessions,. and
to see that the dear old servants of my youth are con
ducted safely back to my home at Antioch. And you,
my beloved Eutyches, when I am gone, Philip and Olym
pias will see that you lack nothing till you become a
presbyter. I have left you both provided for, in the pres
ent and in the future, as this paper will show you, Philip.
Farewell ! FareAvell ! '
He lifted them from their kneeling attitude, kissed them
on both cheeks, and, Avith his face still bathed in tears,
Avent out to the bishops and presbyters in the Thomaites.
' Come,' he said to them ; ' let us go to pray for the last
time, and to bid farewell to the Angel of the Church.'
The distance was short, and they Avalked to St. Sophia
under an escort of the palace guards. They found many
assembled in the church, and an immense multitude, dimly
cognisant that some great crisis was at hand, crowded all
the streets and avenues. Chrysostom and his friends
passed up the ambo-stairs, behind the curtains of the Sacra
rium. He had scarcely entered Avhen a note from his
friend Aurelian was put into his hands. ' Hasten ! ' it said ;
' the brutal ruffian, Lucius, is posted with a company of
soldiers in the Baths of Zeuxippus. He swears that if
you linger he will drag you out of the church by force.
Leave the church secretly, or there will be a collision
between the troops and the people, and the streets will run
Avith blood.'
He read the note aloud, and added : ' Never, if I can pre
vent it. My servants have ordered my mule to be capari
soned at the western gate. I will slip out in secret through
a postern at the east. Farewell, dear friends ! '
He gave to two of the bishops his farewell kiss of peace,
but could proceed no further. ' Farewell all of you ! ' he

440 GATHERING CLOUDS
said; 'it Avould unman me too much to embrace you all.
A few moments in the Baptistery to recover my calm, and
I will set forth.'
B ut in the Baptistery four of his holiest, noblest, and
most beloved deaconesses — Olympias, Pentadia, Ampri-
ecte, and Salvina — awaited him, and there Avas another
harrowing scene of parting.
' Listen to me, my daughters,' he said to them. ' All is
over ; I have finished my course. You will see my face no
more. If my successor is duly and rightly appointed, re
spect and obey him. Let not the Church of God lose your
services — aind oh ! think of me in your prayers.'
The noble ladies flung themselves on the marble floor,
and kissed his feet and bathed them with their tears.
' Conduct them hence,' he said, with a broken voice, to
Bishop Eulysius, who had volunteered to accompany him,
' for I feel utterly unmanned, and the sight of their anguish
may haply excite the fury of the people.'
Very gently the friendly bishop took the princesses
Olympias and Salvina by the hand, and, bidding the others
follow, led them out of the Baptistery. Then Chrysostom
went out by the small eastern door, evading the throngs of
people avIio were expecting to see him mount his mule at
the western gate.
' He Avent forth,' says Bishop Pallaidius, ' and the Angel
of the Church Avent forth with him.'
A little band of soldiers, under two young and noble
officers, Anatolius and Theodosius, had been bidden to
aAvait him there. Attended by the Bishops Eulysius and
Cyriacus and some honest presbyters, who desired to accom
pany him on his journey across the Bosporus, and at least
as far as Nicaea, he placed himself in the hands of the
guards, and, avoiding the most frequented streets, they
made their Avay to the Chalcedonian Stairs. To escape
observation as far as possible Chrysostom concealed his
face in the folds of his robe ; but a few of the people, full
of alarm and suspicion, recognised and followed him.
Their numbers increased, and nothing but the draAvn
swords and firm bearing of the Praetorians overawed their
menacing attitude, and prevented them from attempting
a rescue. But there certainly Avould have been bloodshed

DRIVEN FORTH 441
if the Patriarch himself had not stepped forward and
said :
' My dear and faithful people, I am departing willingly.
Let us obey the will of God and the edict of the Emperor.
You will fill me with anguish if so much as one drop of
blood is shed on my behalf. To God's gracious mercy
and protection I commit you all. Farewell ! '
He raised his hand in benediction. The crowd knelt to
receive it, and were calmed.
But Philip and Eutyches could not be content to stay
in the Patriarcheion while their father Avas being hurried
into unknown exile. How could he even expect such
love as theirs to abandon him, Avhen they felt his loss like
the parting of the Shechinah from the temple of their
young lives? After a moment's hesitation, lest they
should cause him needless pain, they said with one'voice,
' Let us go, and, if need be, die Avith him.' Unperceived
— for they had throAvn over their ordinary dress the brown
robe of the parabolani — they followed Chrysostom to St.
Sophia, entered with others of the people, and saw him
ascend to the Sacrarium. Then Philip, familiar with the
church, and suspecting what Avould happen, Avent Avith
Eutyches to the quiet eastern door, saw the Patriarch
come out, and followed his escort of guards to the quay.
Chrysostom went on board the vessel which Avas aAvaiting
him, and both he and Philip involuntarily recalled at that
moment Avith what different feelings they had twice before
arrived at the Chalcedonian steps — once in the gilded,
dragon-prowed, imperial barge, rowed by palace servants,
when, with Amantius and Aurelian, he had been welcomed
by the shouting populace ; and once when, after his first
exile, the flower-croAvned multitude, robed in white, had
poured forth in myriads to receive him with overpoAvering
acclamations. And now he was being hurried away in
secrecy, amid the fading twilight — hurried to his ruin by
wolves in sheep's clothing, choked in a chaos of hatreds,
entangled in a network of odious chicanery and wicked
lies. Philip pressed forward out of the crowd and endeavoured
to go on board. The soldiers barred his way Avith crossed
spears, and told him, with objurgations, that no personal

442 GATHERING CLOUDS
attendant was permitted to go with the Archbishop. Then
Philip made an intense appeal to the two young officers :
' Oh, sirs ! ' he said, ' the holy Patriarch is ill and weak,
and knows not how to care for himself. I have been
accustomed to wait on him since my boyhood. I entreat
you to let me go Avith him. I will meet my own expenses.
I will give "no trouble.'
' And let me go, too,' said Eutyches, wringing his hands.
' I am one of his secretaries.'
The officers, who had none but the kindliest feelings
and intentions towards their illustrious captive, were
visibly affected ; but Anatolius, the senior of the tAvo, laid
his hand kindly on Philip's shoulder, and said, ' My good
youths, we are sorry for you. But the Emperor's orders
are stringent, and you must not come.'
They stepped on board; the oars dipped in the deep
blue Avaters ; and the youths caught their last glimpse of
their friend and father as he stood on the deck. He had
heard their voices ; he saw them stretching out to him
their appealing hands, and was weeping ; but he cried to
them, ' Oh ! my sons, why did you not spare me this fresh
pang ? '
But Philip now felt utterly beside himself. ' My father !
my father ! ' he cried, ' I cannot, I will not leave you,' and
he made a spring towards the boat.
He barely failed to reach it, but fell short into the
Avater, and one of the oars struck him on the head. He
sank under the waves, and Chrysostom and Eutyches both
gave a cry. A sailor from one of the many boats plunged
in after the drowning youth, drew him safely to shore,
and handed his fainting form to Eutyches. But the Uoav
Avhich he had received was slight. The shock of the cold
water revived him. In a few moments he had recovered
consciousness, and, leaning on the boy's arm, Avith bent
head and aching heart he Avalked back to the Patri
archeion in his dripping weeds.

CONFLAGRATION 443

CHAPTER LII
CON FLA GRA TION
-Browsing.
Meanwhile, as though things Avere not black enough
already, an event had happened Avhich avus fraught Avith
unutterable disaster to the guilty city.
As the little boat Avhich carried Chrysostom to the
Bithynian shore furrowed its way through the starlit
waves the rowers and soldiers raised a sudden exclama
tion of curiosity and amazement. Startled from his moody
grief, the Patriarch looked up, and saw a huge blaize shoot
ing up into the air, broadening in area, deepening in vivid
ness and intensity, and at last reddening the evening sky
with terrible illumination. What could it mean? What
had caused it? That the Cathedral should be in flames
seemed inconceivable ; but was it possible that there could
have been a revolution at Constantinople ? Had the
populace, in Avild grief at the loss of their Archbishop,
risen against the Emperor, and burnt to ashes the build
ings on either side of the superb oblong forum known as
the Augusteum, and the Imperial Palace itself? They
learnt too soon the fatal truth, but meanwhile they had to
repress their devouring anxiety and press forward on their
way. No sooner had the crowd outside St. Sophia begun to
suspect that treachery Avas intended, and that their beloved
Patriarch was being forced away from them, than they
endeavoured to force their way into the church, of which
they found that the western gates had now been locked
and barred. Rushing round the cloisters to find some
other entrance, they found the eastern ingress defended
by soldiers of the Court, who opposed their ingress. A

444 GATHERING CLOUDS
fight began, and though many were killed, the crowd
succeeded in bursting in. Meanwhile, the multitudes who
thronged the Avestern Galilee, ignorant of what Avas taking
place, and imagining that their bishop Avas being seized
by violence, began to batter furiously upon the principal
gates, which at last they partly burst open, and partly
shattered to fragments. Rushing in, they again found
themselves confronted by the soldiery, who, alarmed by
the fury of the mob, dreAv their swords. The Jews and
Pagans whom curiosity had attracted to the scene looked
on with sneers and bitter ridicule while the mob and the
soldiers stood face to face. Maddened by their insults,
the crowd rushed forward, another bloody fight ensued,
and the many-coloured marbles of the sacred pavement
Avere soon heaped with corpses and incarnadined Avith
blood. To add to the general horror, a storm had rolled
in from the Euxine, whirling before it so dense a mass of
clouds as to cause a blackness which, to the excited minds
of the spectators, seemed inexplicable and miraculous.
Stunned by the sudden roar of the hurricane, soldiers and
populace alike stood silent in a co-instantaneous pause of
horror which had in it something sublime. The fighting
ceased, and the multitude, haunted by supernatural awe,
began to steal out of the sacred edifice ; Avhen suddenly, as
though a thunderbolt from heaven had smitten the roof, a
crack was heard, and from the Patriarch's throne a jet of
lire leaped upwards with inconceivable fury. The cry of
' Fire ! Fire ! ' had scarcely been raised Avhen it seemed too
late to check the strangely precipitous ravages of the con
flagration. The timbers of the building were dry Avith
the scorching heat of many summers. The spout of fire
leaped ,up as high as the roof, and, spreading among beams
and rafters, presented the aspect of a colossal tree of red
flame. Then, from the boughs and the leaves of this awful
tree it seemed as if myriads of fiery serpents darted in
every direction, wreathing about pillars and architraves,
melting the iron of the roofs and the chains of the great
lamps, which fell with crash after crash and shattered
themselves to pieces on the tessellated floors. The crowd
and the soldiers alike, seized by the same panic, rushed
promiscuously into the open air, reduced to peace by

CONFLAGRATION 445
common terror. Many were crushed to death or had
their limbs broken in the wild effort to escape, and barely
had they emerged into safety Avhen the whole cathedral
seemed to be blazing like a furnace of demons, beyond all
hope of preservation. Of the metropolitan edifice, one of
the stateliest churches in the Avorld, nothing was left but
a heap of blackened ruins, half-calcined by the fierce heat,
and one little side-chapel, which had not been so much as
scathed by the flames.
But this Avas not the whole extent of the mischief.
Driven before the fierce wind great flakes of fire and of
burning material Avere swept southward to the adjacent
buildings. Strange to say, they did not light on the Patri
archeion, which stood nearest to the church. For this —
though it was not known — thanks were due to Philip,
avIio, roused by the aAvful spectacle from the stupor of his
grief, employed the servants in deluging the roof Avith
bucket after bucket of Avater, extinguishing each flake and
brand as it fell. There was no one to take similar care of
the two next buildings, the Senate-house and the Baths of
Zeuxippus. The consequence was that they too were
speedily raging like huge furnaces of inextinguishable fire.
The flames shot high into the air and, beaten along by the
Avind, they met in gigantic burning arches overhead ; while
beneath them, as between two labouring volcanoes,
streamed the myriads of the people, whose hearts were
swept by strange extremes of emotion. Every citizen
Avho had any patriotism mourned for the loss of the two
loveliest edifices in the Imperial City. If the Christians
felt inclined to taunt the Pagans with the destruction of
their idols, the Pagans could sneer at the Christians for
the reduction to ashes of the huge basilica Avhere they wor
shipped 'the pale Galilean.' But Pagans and Christians
alike felt that the Church, indeed, could be rebuilt — as
it was soon rebuilt, Avitheven greater magnificence — -but
that nothing could replace the choicest works of Greek
sculpture. The famous statues of the Nine Muses, which
Constantine had carried from Helicon to adorn his new
capital, were calcined into dust. ' What wonder ! ' ex
claimed the aesthetic Pagans. ' What did the Muses care
for the new religion, with its uncultured barbarism ? ' But

446 GATHERING CLOUDS
the Zeus of Dodona, the Athene of Lindus, the Amphi-
trite of Rhodes, the Pan which the Greeks had consecrated
in memory of the battle of Salamis — all perished indis
criminately; and the skill Avhich had produced them had
vanished from the world. They had sunk amid the lava
streams of molten metal, or had been crushed by the
masses of superincumbent ruin. The Zeus and the Athene
had been preserved, though desperately injured, by the
melted lead Avhich had streamed over and encased them ;
and the Pagan historian, Zosimus, consoles himself Avith
the inference that Zeus and Athene had determined under
no circumstances of Christian provocation to abandon
for ever the city Avhich was the New Rome. But his con
solation is soon overshadowed by the no less strong con
viction that the share of these deities in human affairs is
unaccountable ; that they do Avhatever pleases them, and
for the most part
Lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are curled
Round about their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.
And they hear a lamentation and a wail of ancient wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.
Thus all the inhabitants of the great city had cause to
mourn, and cause far deeper than any of which they were
aware ; for Avhen Chrysostom Avent forth, not only had
the Angel of the Church gone forth Avith him, but gone
forth never to return. The golden candlestick of the
Patriarchate Avas removed out of its place. There Avais,
indeed, a long succession of archbishops, but the majority
of them were nullities, who raised no voice against religious
folly and Avorldly iniquity. The Patriarcheion became for
all practical purposes a mere appanage of the Imperial
Palace ; Christians took their religion — orthodox or heret
ical as the chance might be — from the dictate of emperors,
and set before themselves no loftier ideal of morals than
they saw in the tyranny, the corruption, and the bound
less luxury of the Palace and its despicable little human
gods. Who kindled that thrice-disastrous conflagration? The

CONFLAGRATION 447
answer to that question will never be known till the great
day, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed.
Some, in their excited imagination, declared that it had
been supernatural. They said that they had heard the
crash, and seen the rush of a descending thunderbolt,
which had shattered the Archiepiscopal throne as a sign
of God's wrath and judgment, and in order that no bad or
mean successor should defile with his presence the seat
on which the holy John had sat.
Others laid the blame on the Jews and Pagans, who,
they said, had with fiendish malignity seized the moment
when the Christians were distracted with anguish to
destroy their famous church, and, if possible, to consume
some of the Avorshippers in its ashes.
Others fomented the preposterous calumny that Chrys
ostom himself was the guilty incendiary. But even the
rage of Eudoxia, even the stolidity of Arcadius, found
that charge too wickedly absurd. Every fact of the case,
as well as the testimony of hundreds of witnesses and the
holy character of the Patriarch, rendered the charge as
ridiculous as it was infamous. The brutal Pagan praefect
and magistrates, eager as they Avere to seize every weapon
of destruction against men whom they detested, abandoned
this pretence from the first. They left it to be cherished
exclusively by the venomous falsity of the hostile bishops,
who had the effrontery to assert it in their letter to Pope
Innocent as though it were an indisputable fact.
The commonest view — though there was no tittle of
evidence produced in its favour — was that it was the
work of ' the Johannites.' It may be regarded as certain
that this was not the case. Had any such plot existed,
it cannot be doubted that in the tortures and persecutions
which followed it Avould have become known.
The conflagration may have been due to accident pure
and simple, so that not one person in Constantinople Avas
aware how it arose. Or, again, it may have been the work
of some one Avild partisan of the Patriarch, driven half-
mad by despair and a sense of injustice. If so, the secret
remained locked in his own bosom. How vast a forest
that first tiny spark enkindled !
There was only one alleviation of the calamity caused

448 GATHERING CLOUDS
by the fire. A small chapel had marvellously escaped
Avhen the rest of the great cathedral had been consumed
to ashes. It Avas the Sacristy, and in it were contained
the precious gold and silver vessels and other treasures
of the church. In this circumstance the friends of Chrys
ostom saw a Divine interposition. For one of the charges
brought against him Avas that he had sold, alienated,
embezzled, and diverted to his own purposes the posses
sions of the church. Had the Sacristy and its contents
been consumed in the conflagration, it Avould not only
have been impossible to scatter this calumny to the winds,
but it would have been urged that John had consumed
the building to conceal the evidence of his own defalca
tions. As it was, all the treasures could be produced
intact. An accurate inventory of them existed ; this was
placed in the hands of the Praefect Studius and a com
mittee of high official assessors. Two friends of Chrys
ostom — the presbyters Germanus and Cassian — Avent
through it before the legal authorities, handed over the
sacred vessels, Avere furnished with a receipt in full, and
carried this receipt with them to Pope Innocent at Rome,
as a triumphant vindication of the Patriarch's integrity.
The providential preservation of the Sacristy robbed un
scrupulous slanderers of what Avould otherwise have been
their most fatal weapon.
The resultant anguish fell first, and most heavily, on
Chrysostom himself. Accompanied by the Bishops Euly
sius and Cyriacus and a few presbyters, he was making
his sad journey to Nicaea, Avhere he was to be informed of
his ultimate destination. Their hearts were full of heavi
ness at the news that St. Sophia had been reduced to heaps
of ruins, Avhen they Avere thunderstruck by the arrival of
an officer, despatched under the orders of the Court by
Studius, the praefect, to charge the two bishops with
incendiarism, to throw them and the presbyters into chains,
and to conduct them back to prison in the city. Chrys
ostom, indignant at the Avicked charge, said that they
were as innocent as himself — that he could not separate
his cause from theirs. As a matter of the barest justice,
he demanded to be heard in his own defence and that
of his friends. But not even the Empress had dared to

CONFLAGRATION 449
include the Patriarch in the odious accusation. The
emissaries could only act on their orders. They fettered
Eulysius, Cyriacus, and their companions, and they Avere
carried off to prison, first to Chalcedon, then to Constanti
nople. The trial showed that there Avas not a tittle of
evidence to inculpate them ; but even under these circum
stances they were banished from Constantinople, and for
bidden ever again to enter its precincts.
Chrysostom, almost crushed with grief, continued his
journey. He had not been alloAved to take with him a
single personal attendant. But God was merciful to him.
The hearts of the rough soldiers were touched by his
dignity and his misfortunes, and they and their officers
treated him with affectionate respect, and did what they
could to supply his needs.
They reached Nicaea, and there for a while they rested
till the will of the Emperor was known. Chrysostom
was a little refreshed by the comforts of the city and the
soft breezes of Lake Ascanius, and he ventured to hope,
in his innocence, that some tolerable place of exile like
Sebaste, in Armenia, would be appointed for him as a
residence, where he could spend in peace the rest of his
daj-.s — those annees plus pdles et rnoins couronnees, Avhich
would not seem dim to a soul which had never been
enchanted b)r the ambitions of the Avorld. But it was a
bitter blow to him to hear that he was to be banished —
thanks to Eudoxia — to the half-desert town of Cucusus,
at the end of a wild valley of the Taurus range. It was
a place of wretched climate, liable to incessant assaults
of Isaurian marauders, into which, as though he were
dead already, he was to be flung aside as into a living
tomb. In vain had his friends pleaded for a less intolera
ble place of banishment. Notorious criminals constantly
secured for themselves a comfortable abode ; but the
hate of the Empress was as an aixe whose edge could
not be turned, and the paltry Armenian hamlet, whose
only boast Avas the tomb of a former Archbishop of
Constantinople — Paulus, who had been martyred by the
Arians — Avas now to be immortalised by furnishing a rude
shelter to the last years of the best saiint and greatest
Father of the fourth century.
2g

450 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LIII
DRAGGED ON HIS WAY
Contenti nel fuoco. — Dante, Inf. i. 115.
The melancholy journey began on July 4, 404, and its
hardships nearly produced the effect so ardently desired
by the Empress and her priestly abettors — the precipi
tation of the martyrdom of him who had become their
enemy because he told them the truth.
Not that the indomitable spirit of the Patriarch suc
cumbed even for a day. With wise heroism he deter
mined — accused, banished, loaded Avith calumnies as he
was — to render every service to the Church of God which
was still in any Avay possible to him. Uncertain of his
destiny, he occupied himself with ardent efforts to further
his missionary enterprises in Phoenicia and other coun
tries. At Nicaea lived a hermit who, in the ignoble per
version of the religious ideal, had walled himself up in a
mountain cavern, where he had sworn to die. Chrysostom
visited him, bade him to cancel his immoral oath and
redeem his sterile life by taking his staff, going to the
good priest Constantius at Antioch, and offering himself
as a missionary to overthroAv the Phoenician idols. He
also occupied his leisure by Avriting letters of consolation,
Avhich breathed the undaunted spirit and holy resigna
tion of St. Paul, to alleviate the sorrows of Philip, of
Olympias, and his other friends.
Then the escort started. No sooner had they plunged
into the black district of Burnt-Phrygia than Chrysostom
was attacked with chronic fever, caused partly by fatigue,
partly by the impossibility of procuring the daily bath
Avhich Avas essential for his feeble health, partly by the
foul water and black, malodorous bread which was often

DRAGGED ON HIS WAY 451
the only nourishment which they could procure. For
their orders were to avoid the towns on their route,
perhaps because the Court was afraid of the effect of
public demonstrations in the Patriarch's favour. As long
as they Avere in the Diocese of Pessinus, of Avhich the
bishop, Demetrius, was his friend, they were not liable
to molestation ; but Avhen they entered the diocese of
Leontius of Ancyra, that bad ecclesiastic, untouched by
the misfortunes of his innocent superior, harassed him
with menaces which hinted even at murder. When they
had struggled through this region into Cappaidocia, the
population flocked out of the towns and villages in throngs
to honour him ; but here again he Avas subject to the
villainies of Pharetrius, Bishop of Caesarea, Avhose cruelty
was rendered more atrocious by his execrable hypocrisy.
This man sent a message of unctuous affection to the
Patriarch, saying how much he longed to embrace him,
and how he had assembled multitudes of monks and nuns
to do him honour. The miserable opportunist wanted to
run with the hare and hunt with the hounds ; he did not
Avish to offend his clergy, Avho honoured John, and still
less did he care to embroil himself with the Empress. A
lodging was provided at the extremity of the city ; but
Pharetrius was maddened with spite when he heard how
the inhabitants surrounded the exile with marks of pity
and of honour. He was Avorn out with forced travels
night and day. Two physicians showed him special
kindness, and, ill as he was, he greatly needed their care.
One of them even volunteered to accompany him to
Cucusus, and, if possible, to save him from dying of
sufferings Avhich, as he wrote to the deaconess Theodora,
were more severe than those of felons condemned to
chains or to the mines. An additional torture was the
absence of letters from Tigrius, or Philip, or Olympias.
Happily for him he did not know, and never fully knew
— such Avas the sacred tenderness of their reticence —
the causes Avhich had made it impossible for them to
Avrite. Meanwhile Bishop Pharetrius Avas driven into ferocity
by mingled jealousy and alarm. It was intolerable to him
to see the illustrious exile treated by the great men of the

452 GATHERING CLOUDS
city with an honour Avhich they never deigned to show to
his miserable self ; and he was afraid lest the enemies of
Chrysostom should take him to task for his hospitality,
niggard, ungracious, and uncharitable as it had been.
Like all base natures, he betook himself to plots. Chrys
ostom had still one hundred and twenty-eight miles to
travel, and was too ill to brave the perils of the mountain
roads ; but just Avhen the escort Avas on the point of start
ing the journey Avas impeded by an alarm that the Isau
rians Avere ravaging the country. All the inhabitants of
Caesarea, even the old men and the boys, Avere impressed
to defend the Avails of the city. Seizing the opportunity,
Pharetrius sent hordes of monks, armed Avith stones and
clubs, to surround the lodging of Chrysostom, with threats
that they would burn him and his escort alive unless they
instantly departed. They even Avent so far in their holy
brutality as to beat many of the Praetorian soldiers, Avho
were too few to resist them ; the praefect of the city Avas
appealed to, but his intervention failed to repress the
monkish hordes. Pharetrius would not even permit a
respite of two days. At last the officer of the escort said
to Chrysostom, ' We must at all costs start ; the Pagan
brigands are less dangerous than these monks.' It Avas
burning noon, and Chrysostom Avas hurried into his litter.
One of the weeping presbyters avIio witnessed his forced
departure came to him, and said, ' Your life here is no
longer safe. The Isaurians themselves would treat you
better than these Avretches ! '
At this crisis a lady named Seleucia offered to the sick
and suffering martyr the shelter of her villa, AA-hich was
five miles distant. He gratefully accepted the offer, and
Seleucia armed her slaves to repel the possibility of a mid
night attack. Pharetrius sent her a fierce menace if she
did not dismiss her guest ; but the brave lady persisted
in her Avork of kindness. A second and more threaten
ing mandate terrified her. Chrysostom Avas awaked at
midnight, his effects Avere hastily huddled together, he Avas
told that the Isaurians were at hand, and that the servants
of Seleucia had fled and hidden themselves. He found
his mule harnessed and the escort ready. The night Avas
wild and starless. He ordered that torches should be lit;

DRAGGED ON HIS WAY 453
but the presbyter Evethius, avIio had accompanied him
from Caesarea, bade that they should be extinguished, lest
they should attract the barbarians. The guide led them
through rocky and desert mountain paths. The mule
stumbled at eArery step. At hist it fell, and Chrysostom
was flung to the ground, terribly shaken and half-dead.
Evethius thought that he had expired ; but he revived, and
as he could ride no longer, the presbyter seized his hand,
and dragged him along over the stones in an agony of
pain. They escaped the Isaurians — if Isaurians there
were, and if the whole alarm had not been due to a scoun
drelly invention. All the next day they continued their
bleak course over torrents and rough rocks, and at last,
on the seventieth day after they had left Constantinople,
they arrived at Cucnsus. But that night of terror and
anguish remained deeply graven on the Patriarch's memory.
' Light sorrows speak ; great griefs are dumb.' He told
his miseries to no one except Olympias, and begged her
not to talk of them. From Cucusus he wrote to her, and
said, ' I am safe at present from the Isaurians ; they have
retired into their own domains. I am safer here than at
Caesarea, for, Avith few exceptions, I fear no one so much
as the bishops.'

454 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LIV
A REIGN OF TERROR
O, he is bold, and blushes not at death: —
Avaunt, thou hateful villain, get thee gone !
Shakespeare, King John, IV. 3.
Scarcely had Chrysostom been sent on his way to his
deplorable place of exile than a reign of terror began at
Constantinople. The election and consecration of his successor were ac
complished Avith startling rapidity. Apparently neither
the bishops, nor the clergy, nor the people were consulted.
Within a week of the burning of their church the inhabi
tants of Constantinople learnt, Avith stupefaction, that their
new Patriarch by the grace of Eudoxia was the presbyter
Arsacius !
He was an old man of past eighty, totally without ability
or distinction. Maddened by the independence of Chrys
ostom, Eudoxia had determined that her next Patriarch
should be a faineant in the depths of senility. Arsacius
Avas the brother of Nectarius, the predecessor of Chrys
ostom, and he was dull in intellect, timid in action, feeble
in speech ; ' muter,' says the lively Palladius, ' than a fish,
and less competent for business than a frog.' Rumour
said that Avhen his brother Nectarius had wished to make
him Bishop of Tarsus, and he had declined, the Patriarch
had accused him of coveting the See of Constantinople and
waiting for dead men's shoes; and that he had sworn on
the Gospels that he would never accept episcopal ordina
tion. But then he had one supreme merit in the eyes of
Eudoxia. The silent contrast between the energetic and
self-denying patriarchate of Chrysostom and the luxurious
indolence of his brother Nectarius had filled Arsacius with

A REIGN OF TERROR 455
jealousy, and he had disgraced his hoary hairs by coming
forward to accuse John of embezzlement of Church prop
erty at the infamous Synod of the Oak.
He Avas hurriedly consecrated by Severian and his clique
in the Church of the Apostles, which served for the time
as a pro-cathedral.
But he found himself a bishop of empty churches. The
people, devoted to Chrysostom, and accustomed to his
fiery and varied eloquence, did not choose to countenance
the ' wolf in sheep's clothing ' who had been illegally
thrust upon them, or to listen to a man whom they re
garded as feAV removes above an imbecile. The result of
his superannuated ambition was only to cause him a year
of humiliation, folloAved by a death of disgrace. His
patriarchate, undistinguished by a single merit, Avas ren
dered infamous by two diabolical persecutions, for both
of which he must bear his portion of the blame. Unable
to win even ordinary respect either by ability or kindness,
he did not interfere to alleviate the first persecution, and
by his appeal to the Court became the immediate cause of
the second.
The first persecution turned nominally on the charge
of incendiarism against ' the Johannites,' and to equal its
cruel infamy we have to come down to the darkest days
which ever brought down the Avrath of Heaven on a guilty
Church: the dark and horrible dtiys of religious persecu
tion in its most baleful guise, when devils wore the garb
of ' the Holy Office ' ; the days when ' Saint ' Pope Pius V.,
that 'perfect priest,' sent, Avith his blessing, a jeAvelled
sword to Alva, the cold-blooded butcher of the Nether
lands ; the days when Torquemada and his successors
daily filled the prisons of Spain with the shrieks of those
whom, in the name of the merciful Jesus, they tortured
with rack and thumbscrew, — blackened the blue heavens
of Spain with the Tophet-smoke of their bale-fires, and
laded the winds with the ashes of God's faithful Avor-
shippers ; the days
When persecuting zeal made royal sport
Of murdered innocence at Mary's Court ;
the days when Pope Gregory XIII. consecrated the vilest

456 GATHERING CLOUDS
form of assassination by singing Hallelujahs and striking
medals in honour of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
That such deeds of hell were possible as early as the
fourth century is alone a sufficient proof of the hideous
corruption of the Church caused by the usurpation of
priests ; of the dark and deadly superstition, half-Pagan,
half-Jewish, which had polluted with turbid influences the
pure river of the Water of Life ; of the unspeakable degen
eration from the religion of Him Whose name was Love,
and avIio placed in love the fulfilling of the law. The
early Church, in the days of her simplicity and sincerity,
Avould have revolted in unspeakable loathing from devilish
cruelties, born of ambition and intolerance, Avhich for
so many subsequent centuries were committed in her
name. Her doctrine, taught with absolute firmness by her
early saints, Avas, ' Violence is hateful to God.' Could the
Angels of the Church of the first and second centuries have
witnessed the horrors perpetrated in later days by those
who called themselves her champions, Avould they not have
appealed to her Lord, and cried:
Face, loved of little children long ago,
Head, hated of the Scribes and teachers then —
Say, was not this Thy passion — to foreknow
In thy death's hour the deeds of Christian men?

A BURNING, FIERY FURNACE 457

CHAPTER LV
.1 BURNING, FIERY FURNACE
e\avve, kIvcl, <p6viov i%Ui icd\uv. — Eur. Here. Fur. 837.
The examination of the two good bishops, Eulysius and
Cyriacus, who had gone forth Avith Chrysostom, had
fallen to Studius, the Praefect of the city. It was im
possible for the vilest of tribunals to condemn men whose
innocence was alike transparent and demonstrable ; so,
after their bonds and imprisohment, they Avere gratuitously
banished the city. Apparently their escape Avas not to
the liking of the heroes of the Synod of the Oak. They
thought that Studius was not half cruel or unscrupulous
enough in the violation of the law. Eudoxia agreed with
them. Studius was cashiered, and Optatus, a Pagan —
the Judge Jeffreys of the fourth century — was put in his
place. He Avas sufficiently brutal and tyrannous to sat
isfy even Bishops SeA'erian and Antiochus.
One of the first to be brought before this villainous
tribunal was the presbyter Tigrius. His history was a
touching one. He had been a barbarian, a slave, and a
eunuch, whose fidelity had been rewarded by manumis
sion. When he became free, piety and charity had marked
him out for the diaconate, and he had ultimately been
ordained presbyter. He had been one of Chrysostom's
most faithful friends, and had become universally known
as a man who was gentle, generous, and kind to the poor.
Charged with being one of the authors of the conflagration,
he of course declared his innocence ; but the vengeance
of his enemies Avaa not to be baulked by such a trifle. He
Avas a ' Johannite,' and that Avas enough. He Avas stripped
of his clothing, and laid face downwards. Then he was
beaten with scourges of leaded hide. Next — for every
method of 'the Holy Office' Avas anticipated Avith all the

458 GATHERING CLOUDS
ferocious barbarism of the Spanish Inquisition — his fingers
and nails were crushed by thumbscreAvs. Lastly, he Avas
stretched on the wooden horse, a sort of rack, and leaden
weights were attached to his hands and feet till his limbs
Avere dislocated and he sAvooned away under the torture.
But no inculpatory Avord could be forced from his blame
less innocence. The tortures served no other end than
the feeding of the ancient grudge Avhich bad priests owed
to his master, and the glutting of their eyes on the
anguish of the guiltless. Careless whether he lived or
died, they flung him back to his bed of straAv in the
dungeon, and, since he recovered from his injuries, they
banished him to Mesopotamia, there to end his days.
For a short time another illustrious victim eluded their
vigilance. Serapion had become Bishop of Heraclea, in
Thrace, and it was impossible to charge him Avith having
burnt the Cathedral, because he had been hundreds of
miles distant from Constantinople. But, knowing well
with what vile travesties of justice he had to deal, he fled,
and concealed himself in a monastery of orthodox Gothic
monks. His hiding-place was revealed, and he was
dragged in chains to Constantinople, for there the party
of Severian hated him Avith a specially deadly hatred.
They tore the skin off his forehead with iron nails and
steel pincers, they clashed or tore out all his teeth, and
they relegated him to Egypt, where he might experience
the tender mercies of Theophilus of Alexandria.
Another victim was the excellent Heracleides, whom
Chrysostom had appointed Bishop of Ephesus in place of
the Avorthless and simouiacal Antoninus. At the Synod
of the Oak the foul monk, Isaac, had vamped up against
him a trumpery charge of having stolen a deacon's clothes.
His enemies got possession of his person, and flung him
into a prison, Avhere he languished in misery for many
years. The valiant persecutors now tried their hands upon
women, whom they tried to force by terror to communicate
with the neAv Patriarch, Arsacius, and to anathematise
Chrysostom. But the heroism even of women despised
their threats and defeated their machinations by holy
fortitude. The shrinking modesty and delicate tender-

A BURNING, FIERY FURNACE 459
ness of faithful deaiconesses held out no less firmly than
the constancy of martyred presbyters.
All Constantinople knew that the illustrious Olympias,
who was of all but imperial rank, and the fame of whose
sanctity rang throughout the world, Avas among the
dearest friends in the intimacy of the Patriarch, and that
it Avas to her and her sister-deaconesses that his last fare
wells haid been addressed. If she could be intimidated
and coerced, it Avas certain that others Avould be unlikely
to hold out. It would constitute an irresistible force on
the side of the new Patriarch, Arsaicius, if a lady of such
lofty birth, of such royal connexions, of a fortune so
immense and a charity so illustrious, could be made to
acknowledge the neAv regime and to communicate with
John's successor. She was therefore summoned before the
tribunal of Optatus, Avhere he sat surrounded with his
episcopal, clerical, and courtly assessors. In order that
his effrontery might be more effectual the executioners
and the torturers stood ready, and the devilish enginery of
the Inquisition was paraded before her eyes. When it was
thought that the spectacle had produced its due effect,
Optatus, in a voice of thunder, asked ' how she had dared
to set fire to the great Basilica of Constantinople?'
' My whole life,' she ansAvered in calm disdain, ' is a
sufficient refutation of so preposterous a calumny. I
once was very rich, and my wealth has ever been expended
in the building and adorning of the temples of God. I
am the last person in the world who would think of
burning them.'
' Your whole life ! ' roared the unjust judge. ' Oh ! we
know all about your life.'
'If, then, you know it,' answered the indomitable lady,
' come doAvn from the tribunal Avhere you sit as judge,
and step forward as my accuser, and then another shall
decide between us.'
It was obvious that this would not do. In the presence
of all the indignant spectators Optatus was getting much
the worst of it. Murmurs of indignation began to rise,
and exclamations of disgust Avere heard in the hall of
justice. Optatus changed his tone to one of affectionate
advice. ' It is really a pity,' he said, ' that you good

460 GATHERING CLOUDS
ladies should hold out in this troublesome and factious
way. Here is your Patriarch Arsacius, appointed by the
Emperor in the place of the late John, who has been
condemned by two synods of bishops, and banished for
his crimes. Why do you provoke all these afflictions by
defying both Church and State? Pray save yourselves
these trials by communicating Avith your proper ecclesiasti
cal superior.'
And so Optatus, trying what flattery could achieve,
Snake-like, slimed his victim ere he gorged.
But the noble deaconess Avas not so to be entrapped.
'This is a complete change of indictment,' she said.
' I have been dragged here before a court of justice on the
ridiculous charge of incendiarism. It is monstrous that
the ground of accusation should be changed without a
word of notice. If you acquit me of that calumny, and
wish to try me on a new charge, permit me to consult my
advisers.' The Praefect was therefore compelled to adjourn the
case ; but when she was again brought before him she de
clared it to be alike against her duty and her conscience to
anathematise Chrysostom or communicate with Arsacius.
' Then be your obstinacy on your oavii head,' said the
infuriated judge. ' You are banished to Cyzicus, and shall
pay a fine which Avill cost you no small part of your
possessions.' 1 You cam despoil my goods,' she said, ' you can expel
me from my home ; you cannot conquer my soul.'
It Avas a miserable ending of a long career of self-sacri
fice for the sake of others, and, not long after, Aveighed
down in body and soul, she left for ever the home of her
brilliant youth and her saintly widowhood.
Optatus next tried his skill on Pentadia, the AvidoAv of
the Consul Timasius, the Master-General of the armies of
Theodosius. When her illustrious husband had been ex
pelled and secretly murdered by Eutropius, she had taken
refuge in the Church, and her life had been saved from
the eunuch's machinations by the right of asylum Avhich
Chrysostom had triumphantly maintained. Overcome
with trials, she had devoted her life as a deaconess to the

A BURNING, FIERY FURNACE 461
service of the Church and the assistance of her benefactor.
She had become a complete recluse, never leaving her
chamber, except to worship in St. Sophia, Avhence she
returned to her own privacy. It was hoped, therefore,
that she Avould show herself less resolute than Olympias,
and would be more easily intimidated. In order to leave
no effort untried, Optatus and his gang, anticipating the
abominations of the dark ages of persecution, not only
paraded before her eyes the instruments of hell, but,
having first dragged her from her chamber to the Forum,
from the Forum to the tribunal, from the tribunal to
the prison, actually submitted to torture before her eyes
persons accused of being ' Johannites.' They showed
her men of rank and distinction Avrithing under the blows
of the scourge ; they made her look at the bare bodies of
youths agonising under sword and fire ; they forced her
to gaze on gushing streams of blood, and to see lacerated
human beings breathe their last in the most hideous form
of massacre. She saw such things with her eyes, yet
could barely be said to see them ; for while her body was
present at these triumphs of the hellish human wickedness
Avhich called itself religion, her soul was soaring heaven-
Avards in sweet communings Avith Christ, as a clove covered
Avith silver wings and its feathers like gold. Nor did
she shrink when these orgies of the abyss Avere ended.
Charged with the crime of arson, in the feAvest and calm
est words she completely stopped the mouths of her
accusers, and compelled Optatus to drop the accusation
for very shame.
The name of Salvina, the daughter of a king, the near
kinswoman of Theodosius, Avho had been brought up in
childhood as the playfellow of Arcadius and Honorius
themselves, protected her from similar outrages, and she
continued in her royal palace to live her life of asceticism
and service. But the good old maid, Nicarete, was likely
to be a safer victim, though she, too, sprang from a rich
and distinguished Bithynian family. Infinitely modest,
and Avholly devoted to charity, she and her little box of
medicines Avere known to all the poor of Constantinople,
and physicians acknowledged, Avith a good-natured smile,
that she inspired such confidence in those Avhom she as-

462 GATHERING CLOUDS
sisted that her amateur remedies were often more effica
cious than their oavii. She, too, in her simplicity, had to
go through the same horrors to Avhich Pentadia had been
subjected. The loud murmurs of the poor, avIio loved her,
restrained Optatus from the severest measures ; but he
tyrannously enforced upon her a mulct of nearly all her
property. The court liked money. Arcadius was by no
means indifferent to the enjoyment of huge fines. The
extravagances of Eudoxia required unlimited supplies. So
the wealth of Nicarete, which for so mairy years had 'wan
dered, Heaven-directed, to the poor,' Avas now forfeited to
Byzantine ostentation. Yet she would not be baulked of
her charity. Reducing the expenditure of herself and of
her once large household to the barest minimum, she was
still enabled to enjoy that luxury of doing good which Avas
the only pleasure toAvards which she had the smallest incli
nation. Even so she excited the small jealousies of Arsa
cius and his ecclesiastics. They knew that in her heart
she had not the least respect for any one of them, and
remained faithful to the memory of Chrysostom. Subject
to incessant annoyances, she too left the scene of her
bountiful liberalities, and retired to end her days in her
native Bithynia.
So the reign of terror went on, and not only multitudes
of men, but of Avomen also — many a monk, and many a
virgin, and many a deaconess — were fined, scourged, im
prisoned, tortured under eyes that gloated on their suffer
ings, in order that the dumb dotage of Arsacius might
have some shadow of a congregation to listen to his inane
platitudes. It was in vain. Men like SeArerian and
Arsacius and Optatus, women like Eudoxia and her loose-
minded entourage of Avidows intriguing Avith sham monks
and bad priests, may wield all the powers of an empire,
and may arm themselves with the snakes and torches of
the Furies, but they cannot subjugate free souls by burning
and torturing frail bodies. The friends of Chrysostom
would have nothing to do with services rendered abhor
rent by guilt and congregations assembled under dread of
confiscation, anguish, and ruin. They gathered secretly
in unknown houses and distant fields, and worshipped the
God of their fathers in solitude, where the feet of Avicked
priests and more wicked bishops could not intrude.

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 463

CHAPTER LVI
EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS
O death, made proud by pure and princely beauty !
Shakespeare, King John, IV. 3.
The bishops and metropolitans — Severian, Cyrinus, Anti
ochus, Arsacius, and tons ces gargons-ld — felt a little dis
couraged. They kept on asseverating that John had set
fire to his own cathedral, but not one human being be
lieved them. They asserted in the most savage terms of
assurance that, if John had not done it, the Johannites
had at least done it at his instigation ; but though they
had gone down, as it were, to hell to find some means of
enforcing evidence, not even the enginery of that slaughter
house of eA^erlasting vivisection, as they imagined it to be,
had sufficed to wring from crushed men amd scourged
maidens one single incriminating word. Optatus and his
myrmidons enjoyed the spectacle of burning flesh, and
liked to hear the yells of sufferers whom they hated for
their very innocence ; but they could not but be sensible
that they had gained very little personally by the gratifi
cation of their spite and rage, and that the execrations
Avhich they had roused against themselves in thousands
of hearts, if not loud, Avere deep.
For a moment they were reduced to a standstill. They
might continue to Avhip, and thumbscrew, and rack, and
burn, and torture for months ; they might turn Constan
tinople into shambles, and kindle the unspeakable abhor
rence of every noble soul throughout the Avorld ; but it
Avas too pitiful to see all their charges break down, and
all their lies rebound with tenfold violence on their own
guilty heads.
Then a brilliant thought suggested itself to Elpidius,
the murderous priest, and Johannes, the adulterous deacon.

464 GATHERING CLOUDS
Why had not Optatus tried his hand on those tAVO young
fellows Avho lived in the Patriarcheion, of Avhom the exiled
John was so fond, who were so entirely devoted to him?
Surely, if there was misprision of arson anywhere, they
must have been guilty of it. In any case, it was a strange
oversight of the bishop-inquisitors to have overlooked
them. To torture, imprison, and possibly kill them would
be a malicious phase of vengeance, because it would bring
to the heart of the exile an anguish hardly second to that
which they hoped he Avould have suffered from hearing
of the treatment accorded to his beloved deaconesses.
Besides this, youths — and Eutyches was little more than
a boy — might easily prove more pliant, in the blithe morn
of a life unaccustomed to grief and anguish, even than
women over Avhose long years had passed many a Avave
and storm. So the two ecclesiastics — the murderer and
the adulterer — Avent to Severian, and gave him a hint,
which he and Cyrinus seized with rapture. Against
Philip, in particular, they had old grudges to wipe off. It
Avould be delightful to see him fainting on the rack, and
to hear him screaming under the knife and the scourge ;
and as for Eutyches, it was little likely that a delicate
and beautiful boy would be able to hold out long ; and
from the anguish of a frame so tender some inculpations
against the Patriarch might very probably be wrung.
Philip himself had often wondered why he had not been
arrested, for it had never occurred to him as possible that
the conspirators would think of arresting an innocent and
harmless lad like his loved Eutyches, so modest, so
blameless, so inoffensive, so kind to all. Philip himself
lived and moved as in a dream. Sometimes it seemed to
him — fatherless, motherless, almost friendless ; Avith David
gone, and Miriam gone, and his father driven into cruel
and calumniated banishment ; separated, perhaps for ever,
from Kallias and the two young Goths Avho had been his
companions ; and Avith none avTio dared to advise or help
him — it seemed to him as if the bitterness of death were
passed. He Avas so terribly sick at heart that he Avould
not venture into the laAV-courts, lest some sudden burst of
indignation should transport him out of himself, and
damage the cause of those he loved. But when it was

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 465
told him how Tigrius had fared, and Serapion, and Hera
cleides, and all that had been gone through by Olympias,
Pentadia, Nicarete, and the sufferings and ruin of all
Avho Avere most faithful among the monks, virgins, and
presbyters, his heart became like lead. To these sources
of misery others Avere added. For some time he had not
heard from the Desposynos Michael, and he had received
no line from David, no message from his beloved and
lo\-ely Miriam. He kneAv that communication had be
come very difficult in that uncertain and troubled epoch ;
and rumours had reached him of raids of Isaurians, avIio
had swept through Palestine itself from north to south.
Not for one moment did he doubt of the faith and love
of these dear friends ; but Avhat had happened to them ?
Were they still living? Yes; something told him that
they Avere, they must be, still living ; and if so, oh ! Avhy
did they not send him some line or letter, some words of
message and of cheer? And, beyond this incessant dis
quietude, he had heard of the anguish of Chrysostom's
soul in the long, trying journey to Cucusus, and none
but Philip could fully realise Avhat his frail frame and
delicate health must have suffered in the absence of the
barest needs of life in that terrible night at Caesarea, in
those alarmed and hurried journeys through bleak Galaitia,
in those drear journeys among the robber-haunted crags
and gorges of Armenia, and now in the cold imperilled,
dreary ugliness of the Avretched hamlet Avhich malice had
assigned as his prison-house. Yes ; surely for Philip the
bitterness of death Avas over. They might arrest him, or
not arrest him. If they killed him — so much the better.
What Avas life ? — a vapour, and a poisonous one. Already
for him every golden dream of youth had vanished with
swift wings into the midnight ; already the sun of life,
Avhich for a time had gleamed so brightly, had become red
as blood, and had plunged into a sea of despair and death.
When life has lost all its joys it, happily, has still its
duties. Philip had been sawed from succumbing utterly
to his gloomy fancies by the necessity for bestirring him
self in the cause of his beloved master. No sooner had
Chrysostom started than he set about collecting his effects,
and making arrangements for his servants to return to
2 ir

466 GATHERING CLOUDS
their old home at Antioch. Although barely ten days
had elapsed before Arsacius had entered into the Arch
bishopric, Philip had already used his time well. The
furniture and personal property Avhich had belonged to the
true Patriarch were simple, and Arsacius, pompous and
purpureal as his luxurious brother had been, was only too
glad to give every facility for removing 'all that rubbish,'
as he caljed it. He was eager to reinvest the Patriarcheion
Avith the sumptuous carpets and Tyrian hangings which
had adorned it in his brother's clays, to renew the old
aristocratic banquets, and to make all the dwelling-rooms
gleam Avith choice statuary and gold and silver plate.
As for Chrysostom's study, he Avas not going to abide in
such a hole as that. He did not feel the smallest interest
in Chrysostom's manuscripts, and could not imagine hoAv
any man of position could tolerate having such brown,
ugly, dusty things about him. The only books Arsacius
possessed, beyond the fashionable current literature, were
a few commentaries, catenae, and such ' loitering gear,' out
of which he elaborated his extremely rare and very platitu
dinous discourses.
So all had been speedily packed, and Philip had sent
to Antioch the sad-hearted servants, who had all knoAvn
him from his early boyhood. He had consoled their sorrow
by telling them that the Patriarch had assigned to him and
Eutyches the dear old house in Singon Street, and that they
would come together and live there as soon as their Avork
in Constantinople was over and circumstances permitted.
But at present he had a duty to perforin in helping to pre
pare the letters and evidence which Palladius, Germanus,
and Cassian were about to take with them to Innocent, the
Pope of Rome. From Antioch Philip hoped ere long to
make his way to Cucusus, and still to devote his young
life to the beloved service of his father and master, re
joining Eutyches when it should be possible, and in any
case paying him an occasional visit. Alas ! man proposes,
God disposes. Yet, Avhy should we say ' alas ! '
All is best, though we oft doubt
AVhat the unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about : —
And ever best found at the close.

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 467
So Philip and Eutyches hired a little lodging together
in the suburb of the city knoAvn as the Peratic deme, on
the other side of the Golden Horn. There they lived very
quietly, for they thought it best not to thrust themselves
Avilfully into a danger which Avas only too imminent ; and
they wanted to see as little as possible of Arsacius, and not
to go near the Church of the Apostles, where he held his
dismal and scantily attended services. In a feAv days they
hoped to have made all their arrangements, and to start
for Antioch.
In their little room Eutyches was the most delightful of
companions ; nor could Philip have had anyone Avith him
better adapted to dispel the breadths of ever-deepening
gloom which were beginning to settle on his own young,
ruined life. The life of Eutyches was still in its May, and
all is joyous then ;
The waves speak music, and the flowers breathe odour ;
The very breeze has mirth in it.
The trials of life had not yet touched him half so heavily
as they had fallen on Philip, and the sorrows Avhich had
befallen him Avere brightened by the invincible faith which
shone in a soul of stainless purity. He had an exquisite
voice, and had often been asked to sing in St. Sophia
Avhen a solo was required. His charm as a singer was so
great that if ever it became known that he Avas to sing
there was sure to be a crowd. He now used his skill to
soothe the unhappiness of his friend. Every night before
they retired to rest they sang a Psalm and a hymn together,
and often when they went walks in the wild, distant parts
of the lovely shore, Eutyches would raise his voice in some
fine lilt or fragment of Greek or Roman song, and charm
away the wrath which Philip nurtured against the world
of Constantinople.
And though 'the thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts,' its sorrows are soon exorcised, and its spirit of
hope is inextinguishable. Philip was looking forward to
days when even yet he might be comforted by the dawn
of brighter circumstances, when suddenly the thunder
bolt fell upon them both.
The Bishop of Gabala had obtained an order for their

468 GATHERING CLOUDS
arrest. They Avere returning from one of their seaside
strolls and a bathe in the blue waters of the Bosporus
when, as they turned the corner of . the street in which
they were domiciled, Eutyches suddenly clutched Philip
by the arm, and pointed.
Two of the Palatini, in full armour, with their tall spears
in their hands, stood before the door of their abode.
To turn and fly Avas useless. Where could they go?
Who would shelter them? Was it not certain that they
would be overtaken and arrested ? There Avas no help for
it. Clasping each other by the hand, they advanced. The
Palatini at once crossed their spears before the entrance,
forbade their ingress, and arrested them in the Emperor's
name. ' Show me the order of arrest,' said Philip. The soldiers
showed it. The charge that they Avere incendiaries and
virulent Johannites Avas countersigned with the loathly
autograph of Severian.
They gave themselves up. Fetters were placed on their
wrists, and, with a soldier on either side holding the end
of the chain, they were led off to the common prison. As
they passed along the streets they Avere repeatedly seen
and recognised. The crowd gave free expression to their
pity, and, with their usual license, uttered fierce execra
tions against Eudoxia, against Optatus, against Severian
and his tools. But they did not dare to attempt a rescue,
for there were patrols of soldiery in almost every street,
through the midst of whom Lucius, their commandant,
often strode in full armour, with a threatening scowl upon
his hard features.
Flung into prison, with its stifling atmosphere and com
fortless foulness, they were left there many days Avith the
express object of weakening their spirits and making them
look squalid and haggard, until the bright colour of youth
should have faded from their pinched cheeks and the buoy
ancy of youth from their unflinching hearts. But the base
plan did not succeed. There was a certain sense of in
spired and inspiring exaltation in the soul of Eutyches, as
though, in his innocence, he ' fed on manna dews and drank
the milk of Paradise.' And when they were led together
before the tribunal — the dark-eyed youth Avith his high and

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 469
dauntless bearing, and the fair lad Avhose face Avas the face
of an angel — not looking squalid and haggard, as their
accusers hoped they would, but only pallid, an involuntary
murmur of pity and admiration was heard among the
throng. This did not improve either the temper of the
pagan praefect, or of the Christian bishop Avhose portly
presence seemed to occupy so large a place by his side.
' That boy will be cowed easily enough,' whispered
Optatus to the Bishop.
' We will try it, at any rate,' said the pitiless prelate.
' What induced such a young ne'er-do-well as you to set
fire to our great church ? ' said Optatus, bending on Euty
ches his most savage frown.
' I would rather cut off my right hand, sir,' said Euty
ches modestly, ' than set fire to a church of God.'
' Oh ! ay, you talk, you accursed young hypocrite ! ' said
the judge, 'but we knoAV you to be a rebellious Johannite,
for all your Avhite, simpering prettiness. Come, let us
have no nonsense! ' he shouted, ' or we Avill tear the truth
out of you somehoAV. If you didn't set the church on fire
yourself, the court has no manner of doubt that you know
avIio did.'
' I do not know, sir, in the least,' said Eutyches. ' Our
hearts ached to see our beloved church in flames, and no
one who really loved the Patriarch can have committed
such a crime.'
' The Patriarch, you impudent chatterer ! Do you mean
his Beatitude the Patriarch Arsacius, or the thieving,
blaspheming, railing man whom his Eternity the Emperor
has sent off to rot at Cucusus ? '
' Shame ! ' shouted some of the auditors.
' Shame ! ' roared the Praefect. ' I'll have you canaille
arrested and flogged wholesale in batches if you speak
another Avord. Answer, prisoner ! '
' Sir,' said Eutyches, ' I meant the late Patriarch John,
whom I ever reverenced as a most holy man.'
'Oh! that is your line, is it? Noav, anathematise the
ruffian John, and. Ave Avill believe that you are innocent,
and set you free.'
' Stand firm, my Eutyches,' whispered Philip, Avho stood
beside him in the dock.

470 GATHERING CLOUDS
The boy's only answer Avas to turn towards him Avith a
radiant and half-reproving smile. Could Philip imagine
for a moment that he would quail?
Optatus did not relish this by-play. ' You other pris
oner,' he shouted, ' speak another word before you are ques
tioned, and you shall be whipped Avith leaded ropes by way
of preliminary to your examination ! Now, boy, curse the
ex-Patriarch John.'
'I cannot, sir,' said Eutyches, 'and I never Avill.
He was my benefactor, almost my father. I was an
orphan, and he gave me a home. I owe to him my very
soul.' ' Oh ! you cannot, cannot you ? Look, boy. Do you
see those things ? Jailer, show him some of those pretty
playthings.' The jailer drew, a curtain, touched the boy on the
shoulder, and pointed.
There Eutyches saw a collection of the instruments of
torture. They scarcely differed in any respect — except
that they Avere not refined by science to such entire per
fection — from the instruments Avhich the Papacy so often
Avielded Avith such frightful and long-continued malignity
in many lands to coerce the free consciences of men and
Avomen and boys who would not sell their souls for a lie.
There was a burning brasier, in which various iron instru
ments were being heated red hot ; there Avere gridirons,
like that on Avhich St. LaAvrence Avas martyred; there
were pincers and thumbscrews to crush the fingers and
tear away the nails ; there Avere racks ; there was the
wooden horse, Avith its back cut in sharp ridges, on Avhich
prisoners Avere tied with heavy Aveights attached to them ;
there were pincers to twist and rend the limbs ; there were
strips of rhinoceros-hide weighted Avith nails and lumps of
lead ; there Avere the abhorrent ungulce, with long handles
and sharp claws, with which the executioner carved the
flesh into bloody furrows.
Eutyches turned his gaze towards them, and for a
moment greAV pale.
' Do you see them ? ' said Optatus ; ' pretty, aren't they ?
Do you want to feel them, too? '
The boy only turned his eyes to heaven and murmured

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 471
an inaudible prayer; Avhile Philip again murmured,
' Courage, my Eutyches ! '
' Strike that impudent scoundrel on the mouth, soldier,'
said Optatus, in a fury ; ' say one Avord more, and your
tongue shall be torn out.' The Praetorian dealt a fierce
buffet on the face of Philip, Avhich greAv livid under the
bloAV ; Avhile Eutyches, as he saAV it, started and uttered a
cry. ' And you, you youyg clog of a prisoner ! ' shouted
the judge, ' don't think to come over us Avith pretty airs of
martyrdom. Once more, anathematise John, or  ' His
cruel finger pointed to the instruments of hell.
' I cannot,' said Eutyches in his low, sAveet voice, which
thrilled all hearts. ' I may not ! I will not ! Lord Jesus,
help me ! '
'Do not deceive yourself, boy,' said Severian, Avith unct
uous piety ; ' " though I give my body to be burned, and
have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." '
Eutyches turned on him his pure glance, Avhile over
his face passed an involuntary shade of contempt, and
through his body ran an involuntary shudder of aversion.
' We Avaste time,' said Optatus. ' Strip him bare.'
They tore off his clothes.
' Lash him with the scutica.'
The dread scourge whistled through the air, and made
horrible blue wheals as it fell on the boy's Avhite back.
But he spoke no Avord, and there Avas a lustre as of heaven
in his blue eyes.
' Once more, anathematise John.' Eutyches could not
speak, but he shook his head.
' If that is not enough to break down his stubbornness,
lay him on the rack.'
They laid his swollen and lacerated limbs 011 the sharp
points of the wooden horse.
L Noav try the ungulce on him.'
Philip's heart was full even to bursting ; he Avas sobbing
uncontrollably, convulsively, hiding his face in his hands.
The torturer drew the ungulaz down the side of Euty
ches, tearing the flesh into deep gashes.
' Philip ! Philip ! ' he moaned under the anguish, and
stretched out his hand. Philip grasped it, and pressed it,
till the executioner tore his hand away and smote it hard

4? 2 Gathering Clouds
on the knuckles. But Eutyches had been thinking more
of his friend's anguish than of his oavu, and now his soul
passed into a sort of trance of exaltation. He felt as
though white angels Avere standing by him ; as though
Christ Himself Avere hoav holding and pressing his hand.
When the executioner rasped the horrible ungulce down
the other side he was scarcely conscious of it ; a sea of
light seemed to encompass and j-oll OArer the sea of dark
ness ; agony was merged in an ecstaitic and pain-obliterat
ing rapture. He uttered not a Avord.
' Pretty creature ! ' said Optatus. ' Executioner, you
must spoil his beauty a little. Try the ungulce on the
forehead.' The man tore off the skin of the lad's forehead, tearing
off the eyebrows Avith it. The blood deluged and blinded
his eyes, and clotted the curls of his fair hair. But he
spoke no word.
' Speak you shall ! ' said Optatus.
'Hold a torch for half a minute to the wounds on his
side,' whispered Severian, mad with impotent spite ; ' he
Avill speak then.'
It was only said in a whisper, but Philip, Avhose senses
Avere strained by excitement and horror to intense acute-
ness, heard it, and was swept aAvay by a mighty storm of
passion. ' Oh, you fell dog ! ' he cried, leaping to his feet and
uplifting his hands, on which the fetters clanked. ' Oh,
monster of Avickedness and cruelty! A bishop — J'ou?
Nay, surely the very devils must blush for you ! God be
judge between you and us ! God smite thee and curse
thee, thou whited Avail, and may this mystery of iniquity
haunt thee till thou art a magor-missabib, a terror to thy
self on every side.'
The words of Philip's curse smote like hail on the ear
of the guilty Bishop. He visibly recoiled and trembled
before them, and for all his rubicund portliness seemed to
shrink into nothing, and held up his hand between himself
and Philip's avenging glance. But Optatus only turned
on the youth his lurid smile, and said, 'It will be vour turn
next, young man. But Ave have not done Avith the other yet.
Executioner, hold the torch to his side.' The fire touched

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 473
him. He half-raised himself, and then cried in a voice of
thrilling joy, ' I see Cherubim and Seraphim ! — and —
Thine oavii self — Oh, Lord Jesus ! ' He fell back. The
mail held the torch to the Avounds, but Eutyches Avinced
not, moved not, spoke no word more. They looked at him
Avith amazement. He lay there unconscious ; his torn skin
hung over his features ; his beauty Avas defaced ; his bright
hair was dabbled and clotted Avith blood ; his Avhite-skin was
covered Avith crimson stains. They unbound him. He Avas
dead !
An awful hush of horror fell on the assembly, and in
that hush many afterwards averred • — for they were intensely
excited — that they had distinctly seen the flashing of
angels' wings, that they had distinctly heard the melody
of angel-harps.
The hush was broken by the hoarse tones of Optatus.
' Take that carrion away ! Noav for the second prisoner.
He seems likely to give us sport.'
Ah ! let us drop the curtain on these deeds of hell, com
mitted by men who called themselves Christians, and in
the name of religion ! — for some of the clergy sat with
Severian, as assessors, in the interest of Arsacius, abetting,
as such men have often done, the vilest works of the devil
in the holy name of Christ.
Philip Avas stripped of his clothes ; he was beaten with
the leaded thongs ; his sides Avere torn with the ungulae.
Then he Avas laid upon the rack and his arms Avere, joint
by joint, dislocated till they left but his right hand Avhich
Avas not out of joint ; and that for the same reason as they
did it in the case of Savonarola — that he might be forced
to sign some incriminating statement later on.
But their malice wholly failed. They could not wring
from Philip one single word of any kind. It would have
been a relief and a delight to them if only he Avould have
moaned, or unpacked his heart in curses. But he spoke
neither good nor bad, and it became monotonously horrible
to hear in silence the clank of his fetters, the scraping of
the ungulce, and the grinding of the rack, while the sufferer
did not so much as emit a single groan.
They were proceeding to still worse extremities, Avhich
could not have left him with his life, when there rose

474 GATHERING CLOUDS
among the spectators so savage and Avrathful a murmur
that the very executioners trembled, and hesitated in their
task. Even the judges by this time had supped full of
horrors ; and it became manifest that the multitude, sick
ened, enraged, maddened by the fate of the innocent
Eutyches, might break at any moment into furious riot,
might slay the torturers, and the Praefect, and Avreck the
entire building. So there was an involuntary pause.
Philip still lay on the rack as one dead. He did not hear
that hoarse hum of the multitude, as of a sea murmuring
under the first rush of the cyclone ; and he said afterwards
— long afterwards, in happy days, Avhen he could bear for
once just to allude to these things — that he doubted
whether he was really sensible of the anguish. There
are states of tension in Avhich the soul has become uncon
scious of the body, just as the soldier is often unconscious
of the throbbing of his wounds, or even that he has been
wounded at all, till the battle is over. And Philip's mind
had been so excited, so maddened, and then so stupefied,
by Avatching the atrocities inflicted upon Eutyches, and
afterwards so wafted into the seventh heaven by Avhat he
himself believed that he had seen — a vision of seraphs
and a sound of their heavenly harps — that every other
sense was deadened. They might have tortured him till
he, too, sank dead ; but finding themselves hopelessly and
finally foiled, and no longer able to overlook the cries of
fierce menace which rose from every part of the hall of
justice, they adjourned the session of the court.
' Unbind him,' said Optatus, sullenly. ' Toss him back
into the prison.'
' He has long been unconscious, you vile murderer and
impure demon ! ' shouted a youth from the croAvd who had
known Philip, and had often delighted in his bright smile
of welcome and genial words of greeting.
' Who Avas that ? ' roared the Praefect. ' Bring him here ;
scourge him ; stretch him on the rack ; tear him Avith the
ungulce. What ! you can't tell Avhich of the crowd it was ?
Liars, you want scourging yourselves ! Soldiers, clear the
court ! Use your SAvords, if you like. I will be your
warrant.' But the very soldiers had by this time groAvn utterly

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 475
disgusted. They did not even pretend to use force, and
the people, as they dispersed, greeted the Praefect and
his assessors Avith yells of ' Demons ' and ' Murderers.'
Severian was the special mark of their abhorrence. They
insulted him in spite of his escort of soldiers, who, indeed.,
loathed him so much themselves that they hardly took the
trouble to defend him. They yelled at him; they hissed
at him, and spat upon him on all sides; they pelted him;
they hit him on the head Avith stones ; they aimed bloAvs at
him with staves and clubs, and the soldiers only laughed.
He began to think that, even with the Empress to protect
his iniquities, he had made Constantinople too hot to hold
him. lie slunk aAvay by night, to fill up the cup of his
iniquities at Antioch and elsewhere. But never again
thereafter was he anything but a terribly haunted man.
He seemed ever to hear footsteps behind him. It Avas to
him as though the earth Avas made of glass, as though the
very stars looked down upon him like burning and innu
merable Avitnesses. He constantly started, as at voices
prophesying Avoe. He heard the IioavIs as of bandogs
following him. The face of Eutyches looked in upon him ;
and sometimes, if he sat alone,
There came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood ;
and sometimes at night he Avoke up with a scream, and saAV
the angel pointing him out to Megaera faces, which glared
at him and shook torches before his bloodshot eyes. And
all the time the brand of Cain became more and more
visible upon him. When he slunk back to his deserted
sheep in the wilderness in the Avild gorges Avhich enclosed
the wretched Galilean village of Gabala it was as a foiled,
hated, disgraced, haunted, beaten man — a man Avho had
sold himself for futile and unfulfilled ambitions — a man
who had entangled himself in hateful and intolerable
crimes. The fate of Ananias of Bethel, the fate of Pashur
of Jerusalem fell on him, and hunted him pitilessly down
the vale of his remaining years.
When the jailers had carried the body of Eutyches out
of the court they did not feel quite sure that he was dead ;

476 GATHERING CLOUDS
but by the time they had passed into the open air it became
plain that they were only carrying the crimson spoils of
his martyrdom.
' What is to be done Avith him ? ' said one. ' We cannot
take a corpse back to the crowded prison.'
' Those fellows had better take care,' said his comrade,
pointing back with his thumb over his shoulder to the
place where the clerics sat. ' A good many in the city
knew this young lad, and if they saw him as he is now
some persons' lives would not be too safe.'
' Best let the priests know,' said the first.
A message Avas sent to the judges' bench, and several
presbyters hurried out. ' We must bury him ourselves,'
they said. ' Quick, somebody, fetch a sheet, and throAV it
over his face.'
No sheet Avas at hand, but one of them, glad to hide a
spectacle which pained even their eyes, flung his upper
robe over the boy's remains, and then they hurried Avith
the bier to a burial-place. They attempted to say some
Avords of prayer over the shallow and hasty grave. But
their tongues stuttered and stumbled, and they felt as if
angel voices rang in their ears, which said in Avords like
those of the modern poet :
How shall the funeral rite be said, the funeral song be sung
By you — by yours, the evil eye, by yours, the slanderous tongue
Which did to death the innocence which died, and died so young ?
They tried to say no more ; but they confidently affirmed
to others, when the name of Eutyches was added to the
Martyrology, that they had heard celestial music, Avhich
floated and hovered above the lowly resting-place Avhere
his beautiful body mingled with the unremembered dust.
But Philip's unconscious and cruelly mangled form Avas
hurried back into the prison — for he still lived — and was
flung down, carelessly, in the corner of the dungeon, on a
heap of rotten straAV, which formed his only bed. It was
there that the charitable wife of Aurelian found him; for
a voice seemed ever to ring in her ears : ' I was sick, and
in prison, and ye did not visit me.' Her heart ached to
see the unhappy youth, of whom in the bright days of

EUTYCHES AND PHILIP IN PROFUNDIS 477
Chrysostom's first arrival at Antioch her noble husband
had so often spoken to her as his lively and modest com
panion. There he la3r, among the crowded, despairing
prisoners — each daily expecting the same or a similar fate
— untended, though the fluttering remains of what poor
life was left to him seemed to require such careful and
loving tendance night and clay.
' Poor, poor youth ! ' exclaimed Aurelian Avith a sigh
when she had told in what condition she had found
him. ' These are dreary and terrible daj^s, my Claudia.
I remember how gay, how modest, how faithful that dark-
haired youth Avas when he almost forced Amantius and
me, against our wills, to let him accompany his master to
this evil city; and I remember with what blythe cheerful
ness, often with happy songs upon their lips, he and that
other dear lad, Eutyches, the chorister, Avhom I hear they
brutally tortured to death to-day, used to traArerse the city
streets on errands of service and of mercy.'
' Could you not plead with the Emperor for him ? '
' Dear Claudia, Arcadius, as you know, means Eudoxia,
and what Eudoxia is, when her hate is aroused, you also
know.' ' Yet, surely even she would not object to the effort to
snatch from death one cruelly tortured youth. Oh, Aure
lian ! risk something and try to save him.'
' I will go, and that instantly,' said the Praetorian Prae
fect. ' What is life, after all, but service ? '
He put on his purple mandye and Avent at once. His
high rank secured him an immediate audience, and Arca
dius, who sincerely honoured him, was glad to see him.
He briefly mentioned his request, Avhile the Emperor shifted
about uneasily in his chair.
' I Avish these days were over,' said Arcadius in a peevish
tone. ' I am naturally kind-hearted, yet one seems to be
listening all day long to the Avhistle of scourges, and the
sullen people scowl at me even on my Avay to the churches.
The very Amphitheatre is affected Avith elements of wrath
and regret.'
' Cain you not end this persecution of the Johannites,
sire?' said the Praefect, falling on one knee.
'What can I do?' answered the miserable ruler of the

478 GATHERING CLOUDS
world. ' I wish I had never listened to the plot of those
bad bishops — for they are bad bishops, and the Patriarch
Avas a holy man. And noAV the whole horizon looks black.
God will be sending us another earthquake. But Avhat
can I do ? Here is that old dotard of a Patriarch, on one
side, urging me to find congregations for him; and on the
other side is Eudoxia, goading me to fresh banishments and
fresh executions. I Avish  ' The Avish, Avhate ver it was,
died away unspoken.
' I am sure that if your Eternity would but express a
strong desire, this cruel persecution of the innocent Johan-
nites Avould cease. It is a shame to your beneficence that
.men should be daily stretched on the rack, and Avomen
scourged, and boys torn to death.'
' Express a desire ? Ah ! you little know. But this
youth's life, at any rate, shall be saved, if it can be done.
I will Avrite an order for his release, and sign it here and
now.' He sat doAvn, and, dipping the stylus into his great
golden inkstand, Avrote the order in the clear, beautiful
handwriting Avhich Avas his sole accomplishment.
Aurelian hurried home exulting; and Avhen Claudia had
ordered her easiest litter to be got ready and filled Avith the
softest cushions, Aurelian accompanied her to the prison
with the best physician in Constantinople. The body of
Philip Avas lifted Avith the utmost care and tenderness upon
a bank of cushions, and he was carried to the sedan. Then
the physician did all that skill could do to set his wrenched
arms, and he was gently conveyed to the palace of Aurelian.
There, in a large and airy room which caught the fresh
breeze of the sea and tempered the burning heat of mid
summer, he was laid on a princely couch, and tended Avith
every service Avhich skill and solicitude could render.
He lay unconscious, hovering between life and death, for
many weary days.

GLEAMS OF RETURNING DAWN 479

CHAPTER LVII
GLEAMS OF RETURNING DAWN
The grey secret lingering in the East.
Coventry Patjiore,
For many weary days — but youth triumphed, and life
won the supremacy, aided by the sound influence of a
pure and healthy frame.
Hitherto, since the cruelty to Avhich he had been sub
jected, he had never awakened to clear thought. It Avas
as if a red mist had ever been floating before his eyes,
and for some time nothing but his feeble breath and slight
movements had proved that he Avas alive. But now he
began to shoAv signs that he would recover.
One day Aurelian and his wife, Claudia, stood by his
bedside Avith the physician, who Avas a kindly Christian man.
Aurelian was looking at Philip somewhat sadly. ' Hoav
changed,' he said, 'from the bright youth of six years ago !
Will the colour ever return to that pale cheek, or the
old strength and SAviftness to those suffering limbs ? '
' Yes,' said the physician ; ' I have expended my best
skill upon him, and, with God's blessing, it has not been in
vain. But when he awakes to full consciousness there may
be a reaction of despair and mental agony, which I greatly
dread.' ' What do you advise ? '
' He would be better in the country. When he is able
to think and to remember, the tramp of soldiers in your
courtyard below Avill trouble him, Praefect ; and, assiduous
as the Lady Claudia has been in her kindnesses, he Avill
need someone to tend him day and night.'
' Olympius would gladly nurse him till his recovery,'
said Claudia. ' She came to see him, not without danger

480 GATHERING CLOUDS
to herself, a few days since. She often used to talk to him
in the house of the Patriarch.'
'Nothing could be better,' said the physician. ' In the
island-city of Cyzicus, Avhere Olympias uoav lives, he Avould
breathe the pure air of the Propontis. The Lady Olym
pias is a skilled and devoted nurse, and it will be good
for her, as Avell as for him, that he should be under her
care, and help to dispel her overwhelming melancholy by
the pressure of kindly duties to be done.'
The next day Philip Avoke sane. Claudia was sitting
by his bedside. He did not recognise her. His eye Avan-
dered round the unfamiliar chamber. He could hardly
recall who he was, or form any distinct recollection of the
past. Claudia laid her hand on his forehead. ' What
place is this ? ' he asked in a low voice. ' It does not look
like the prison.'
' You are in the house of Aurelian, the Praetorian Prae
fect.' ' And you, lady ? '
'I am Claudia, the Patrician's wife; We have been
nursing you.'
A long pause followed.
' And he ? Is he alive ? Where is he ? '
Do you mean the Consular Aurelian ? He is in the
next room.'
'No ! He — the Patriarch John.'
' He is Avell ; he is at Cucusus.'
' Oh ! I remember ; I remember all.
'And Eutych  ?' His voice Avas choked as he tried
to utter the word.
'Do not talk or think now, Philip. All you have to do
is to get well.'
'But does he live?'
'Yes, Philip — he lives in that land where God wipes all
tears from off all faces.'
'He will never Avipe them from mine,' said Philip in a
faint whisper ; and, indeed, the silent tears Avhich he Avas
too weak to wipe away were coursing each other doAvn his
hollow cheeks.
' Shall I eArer rise from this sick-bed ? '
'Yes, Philip, and be strong again, and well, and happy.'

Gleams of returning dawn 4gl
' Never happy,' he said, with a low moan.
' Yes, happy, dear youth,' said the physician, who entered
at that moment — ' if only you Avill now dismiss all trouble
from your mind, and rest.'
For a Aveek after that time he talked little ; but it was so
evident that his mind Avas working, and that he was sinking-
deep into a sea of gloom, that they thought it advisable to
remove him, with the utmost care and caution, to the villa
of Olympias. Accompanied by the physician, and proceed
ing by eaisy stages, amid every comfort, he gained rather
than suffered by the journey to Cyzicus. In the course of
a few days he could lie on his couch in the open air, amid
the gardens and groves and orchards which emboAvered the
villa of Olympias ; and before long he could walk again,
and the tide of youthful life began once more to pour
through his veins.
But, as the physician dreaded, the frightful memory of
his recent experiences weighed on him like lead. Was it
not a hopelessly unaccountable thing that Avickedness, and
lies, and mean intrigues, and sham religion, could have
triumphed, and that the reward of innocence and righteous
ness should have been defeat, humiliation, exile, torture?
Chrysostom was in a bleak and frightful Armenian village,
harassed by the raids of brigands, overwhelmed with hatred
and victorious calumny; Olympias, Pentadia, Nicarete,
exiled, fined, humiliated ; the faithful Johannites beaten,
imprisoned, tortured ; Eutyches barbarously murdered ;
Michael, David, Miriam absent and silent; he himself
racked, buffeted, all but killed, every hope frustrated, every
gleam of happiness for ever dead. No one was triumphant
but Eudoxia, and Severian, and Theophilus of Alexandria.
Had God removed into His infinite blue heaven, far away
from the AAdckedness of the hypocrites and the misery of
the good? Did Christ, after all, hear prayer? or  And
there Philip seemed to drown in a subterranean Erebus of
doubt and despondency, and did not so much as Avish to
live. Slowly but surely hope came back, and God's consola
tions increased upon his soul ' with the gentleness of a sea
that caresses the shore it covers.'
He had become very taciturn ; and Olympias herself had
2i

482 GATHERING CLOUDS
been so crushed by calamities that her mind, too, was all
darkened Avith clouds, through Avhich no star looked. But
one clay he asked her : ' Has he inquired after me ? Does
he know ? Has he written ? '
Olympias knew Avhom he meant, and said : ' Yes, the
Patriarch has again and again inquired about you. For
his oavii dear sake Ave concealed from him all Ave could ;
but a sword pierced his heart Avhen Ave could not but tell
him that Eutyches had been martyred, and that you were
lying between life and death. He might say, with David,
" All thy waves and storms have gone over me." But he
has Avritten to you, and now that you are well enough to
read his letter, I will hand it to you.'
Philip took the letter with a trembling hand, and
retired into the garden to read it by himself.
' My heart bleeds for you, my Philip,' so the letter ran.
' I have heard from Olympias Avhat shame and agony God
has called on you to endure for my poor sake — let me
say, rather, for the sake of truth and duty. When I
heard of your sufferings, and of the death of our beloved
Eutyches, I wept as if my heart would break, and I found
no comfort till I had poured out my soul before God. I
cannot weep any more for him, though it is sad to think
that Ave shall see his face and hear his sweet voice no
more. But Avhy should Ave weep for one whom the world
can never more stain or torment, and who is now a happy
spirit in the nearer presence of his God ? For you, Avhom
I have ever loved as a son, I have never ceased to grieve,
and no clay passes that you are not mentioned in my
prayers. Never, never shall I forget you, and all your
goodness and love to me — first, in those dear days
at Antioch, and then amid the troubles of Constanti
nople. ' Olympias tells me, dear Philip, that your recovery
might be complete if it Avere not retarded by the oppres
sion of sorrow. Your sorrow is most natural. NeArerthe-
less, trust thou still upon God, and hope in Him, for He
is, and Avill be, the light of thy countenance, and thy God.
You have often seen the black clouds roll up from the
Euxine and obliterate the azure ; but did you not ahvays
know that they Ave re only the clouds of earth and of our

GLEAMS OF RETURNING DAAArN 483
lower atmosphere — that they were themselves created by
the sun itself, and that, behind them, the sun Avas still
flaming, though for the time he was hidden ? My Philip !
God is that sun ; and He knows no setting ; He is for
ever in the zenith. For He is light, and with Him is no
darkness at all.
' So cheer up, my Philip ; God Avill never leave you nor
forsake you, if you put your trust in Him. Write and tell
me that your heart is not OArerwhelmed. Write to me, if
you can, in that happy mood which has helped to brighten
so many years. Of myself I Avill say nothing iioav, for
our beloved Olympias knoAvs my concerns, and she Avill
tell you how I fare in this far-distant place of exile.'
The letter comforted him, though he could not yet
embrace its deeper topics of consolation. And as the
messenger would start the next day with many letters to
the banished Patriarch from his friends in Constantinople,
Philip entrusted to him a feAV lines.
' My father,' he Avrote, ' I am still too weak, and my
right hand shaken too much, to write more than this
greeting. Oh ! Ave have gone through dark and cruel
times. Pray for me, father, that my faith fail not. By
the time that your next letter reaches me I hope to be
well again. Bid me come to you to Cucusus, and I will
fly as on the wings of the wind. It would be joy indeed
to hear your voice once more, to sit at your feet, and
serve you, and devote my life to you.'
Another comfort helped to dispel Philip's gloom. As
yet the one horror which constantly o\-ercame him Avas
the thought of Eutyches — first, the memory of so many
mirthful and innocent hours spent Avith him and David
in the dear anteroom of the Patriarcheion ; and then the
indelible spectacle of that face and figure on the blood
stained rack. It was this vision which Philip sometimes
thought would drive him mad. One day it had specially
tormented him, and had seemed to push him back into
drowning whirlpools. He was sitting on a grey, lichened
rock under the trees. The tears burst again and again
through the fingers of his hands, on which he rested his
weary head. And then, in his anguish, he cried to God
to exorcise this phantom, and enable him only to think

484 GATHERING CLOUDS
of his lost friend as he Avas before that cruel scene. As
again and again he repeated the cry a sudden conviction
caime over him that his prayer had been heard. That
night he sank to peaceful sleep; and, while he slept,
happy dreams waved their light wings over his head. He
seemed to see the golden ladder betAveen heaven and
earth, and angels ascending and descending upon it, and
over it the face of the Son of Man. He seemed to see
the midnight, sky bursting open to its depths, and bright
spirits, amid the glory, carolling as they carolled on the
first Christmas night. He seemed to see the Elders and
the Immortalities, the lucent Seraphim of knowledge, the
burning Cherubim of Love, casting their croAvns of ama
ranth before the sapphire-coloured throne. And amid
all these radiances he saw always the face of Eutyches
innocent, beautiful, happy — more innocent, more beauti
ful, more happy than he had ever seen it in his most
joyous hours. Then he thought he had raised his out
stretched hands, yearning to speak to him ; and in white
robes, a palm-branch in his hand, the boy had stood by his
bedside, and said to him, ' Philip, why should you grieve
so much for me ? I am often very near you ; and eye
hath not seen nor ear heard the blessings of heaven, our
home. Grieve no more for me, Philip, and so live that we
may all meet in this land, where there aire no more tears.'
With these words still sounding like music in his ears
Philip Avoke, and it seemed to him as if the room were still
full of light and peace. His prayer had been heard. He
never mentioned the dream to anyone but Olympias, but
he Avas iiiAvardly convinced that it was something more
than an illusion of the night. Thenceforth, whenever the
image of Eutyches recurred to his thoughts, it was as an
image, not of horror, but of beauty and of peace.
And then one more blessing exorcised the incubus of
his despair.
What, he often thought, Avas to be his future ? As to
his means of living he was spared all anxiety, for he Avas
well provided for. Chrysostom had handed over to him
and Eutyches his property in Antioch, and that alone
Avould suffice him. A friend of Chrysostom, the good
priest Constantius at Antioch, saAV that tliis heredity Avas

GLEAMS OF RETURNING DAWN 485
duly administered, and had also taken charge of the house
and money left by Hennas, Philip's faither. To these tAvo
sources of maintenance there had been a gratifying addi
tion from a very exalted quarter.
Ever since Aurelian, the Praetorian Praefect, had inter
ceded with Arcadius for Philip, the Emperor, Avhose im
pulses were far from unkindly when he Avas left to himself,
had felt an unwonted interest in the youth. He had en
couraged Aurelian to talk about him when Eudoxia was
not present, and so had learnt the story of the Avay in
Avhich the quick resource of Philip and Eutyches had
devised the masque Avhich terrified the marauding Goths
of Gainas, avIio avouIcI otherwise, beyond all doubt, have
sacked his Palace, and perhaps have sacrificed his own life
and that of his Empress, and even have changed the des
tinies of the Empire. For this service he could not but
feel intensely indebted, and he was struck Avith the nobly
modest reticence which hard never even mentioned so
memorable a proof of loyalty. With what frightful in
gratitude had the poor youth been requited, when so many
of the corrupt, the worthless, and the disloyal had been
croAvned with honours which they did but abuse ! Arcadius
sent for his Count of the Imperial Largesses, and ordered
him to see that privately ( but without fail, Philip was sup
plied Avith a yearly pension of a hundred aurei. He further
desired the Count, Avithout mentioning the fact to anyone,
to keep an eye on Philip, and to use any opportunity
which might occur to further his interests. In case of his
complete recovery the Emperor commanded that the young
man should be summoned to a private audience.
This Avas communicated to Philip, and he was now at
ease as regards his future sustenance. God, Avho tempers
the wind to the shorn lamb, Avas beginning to show mercy
upon him after such heavy strokes of calamity. But, even
now, what Avas a future without friends and without love?
Oh ! if he could but hope that one day the lot of Miriam
would be linked Avith his !
The return of perfect health Avas still retarded by these
thoughts, when one day one of the slaves of Olympias
came to tell him that a friend Avas asking for him, and
aAvaited him in the tablinum.

486 GATHERING CLOUDS
' A friend ! ' said Philip, with a sigh. ' What friend is
left me in Constantinople ? All whom I loved are dead,
or in prison, or in exile.'
' But the friend, sir, told me to tell you that he came
from Palestine.'
' From Palestine ! ' Philip's heart gave a great leap,
and he followed the slave to the room.
A tall, graceful youth was standing Avith his back to
the door, gazing on the boats which furrowed the blue
Propontis. He turned round as Philip entered.
'David!' exclaimed Philip; and in one moment their
arms Avere round each other's neck, their heads on each
other's shoulders.
Philip Avas the first Avho found voice to speak.
' Oh, David ! ' he sobbed for joy. ' Is all Avell ? Is
Miriam Avell — but your smile and your happy face have
already told me that all is well.'
'Yes, Philip, Avith us all is well, thank God! '
' Your father ? Miriam ? Oh, David ! does she love me
still ? '
' She loves you, Philip, with a love as strong, as pure, as
faithful as your oavii.'
' David ! David ! why did none of you write to me ? '
' You cannot think that Ave did not, Philip. We have
Avritten at every opportunity in our power ; but you had
left no message at the Paitriarcheion. I traced you to your
lodging by the Chrysoceras ; I traced you to the prison.
There I learnt that you had been set free by the Emperor's
order, and only from Aurelian did I learn the secret that
you were here.'
' Oh, David ! Ave have gone through awful times and
aAvful scenes. Eutyches  '
' I knoAv all,' said David, tears in his voice and in his
eyes. ' Before letting you know that I was here I had
seen the Lady Olympias. Ah ! God !  '
Philip hung his head. ' God's Avays are strange,' he
said. ' We have been scattered as Avith hot thunderbolts.
The happy days are over for ever.'
' For ever is a very long word, my Philip. But oh !
how pinched, hoAv haggard you look — in no wise less be-

GLEAMS OF RETURNING DAWN 487
loved, but more tenderly beloved — but oh ! how unlike
that old, beloved Philip.'
' I have been cruelly tortured, David ; I am but a wreck
of my former self. All mirth is quenched, all health gone.
Miriam can never Aved me now  ' And the poor
youth burst into uncontrollable weeping.
' Nay, nay, my Philip. Cheer up ! ' said David.. ' My
sister is yours, your betrothed; yours in sickness and in
health, in life and in death. Fear not ! '
But as Philip would not be comforted, he led him
gently by the hand into the garden, and sat down Avith
him under one of the great trees.
' Listen, Philip,' he said ; ' you know my father. You
know that, perhaps from the holy purity of his faith, God
sometimes vouchsafes to him to see Avhat shall be. You
will remember that he foresaw these days of anguish.
He seemed to be suffering with you in spirit while he
prayed for you. His last words to me were, " DaAdd, my
son, you will find Philip. Tell him that all Avill yet be
well with him. He will recover perfect health. Miriam,
by the traditions always kept among us, is too young to
marry, and I would fain have the blessing and the sun
light of her presence a little longer. But Philip is her
betrothed, and in two years, if he Avill come to us, he shall
wed Miriam and take her to his home." '
' God grant it ! God grant it ! ' murmured Philip ; and
hope seemed already to have rekindled a lustre in his eye
and a faint flush of colour on his wan cheek.
Olympias invited David to stay at her villa ; but duty
and work recalled him home, and he could only stay for
ten days. Those were Philip's first happy days since the
great disasters, and every day seemed to bring him more
of strength and life, as he strolled about or sailed on the
Propontis with Miriam's brother, the friend of his oavii
age whom he loved most on earth. The Avinter of his life
began to melt into the promise of a new spring.

488 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LVIII
THE RETURN OF KALLIAS
As on the sun-scorched lily's bell
The silver dew descends,
So on my weary spirit fell
The sympathy of friends.
Two letters, together with the course of circumstances,
indicated for Philip the immediate direction of his life.
If Chrysostom would allow him to come to Cucusus
he felt that he should go there as soon as it was possible
for him to travel. It might look like the obliteration of
all pleasure and of all youthful ambition to make his
home in that squalid Armenian hamlet, and in due time
to ask Miriam to share with him its dangers and priva
tions. But Chrysostom was his father, and his more than
father, and, where duty summoned him, there would God
bless his life.
But before David took his departure the Patriarch's
answer came to him.
'It was a deep pleasure to hear from you, my beloved
Philip,' he wrote, ' and to see one more proof of the
depth of your love towards me. And indeed, dear son, no
earthly pleasure Avould be greater to me than to enjojr as
in the old days the support of your youthful strength, the
cheer of your youthful brightness. But it would be
utter selfishness in me to doom you to years, perhaps, of
dreary inactivity in this chill, wild place, so dull, so pov
erty-stricken, so liable to perpetual alarms. I Avas ever so
constituted that, Avhile I could bear whatever God sent to
me, and thank Him for all things, my sorroAvs were be
yond measure intensified if I felt that through me others
were brought to suffering. And therefore, my Philip,
you must not come. My love for you Avould make it a

THE RETURN OF KALLIAS 489
torment for me to see you dragged down into my misery.
No ! your life is before you. Think of me ; Avrite very
often to me ; pray for me ; do all that you can for me,
your poor father, in other ways — but I cannot accept the
sacrifice of your young life. It is adapted for larger and
nobler ends — which in clue time God will make plain
to you — than the service of one infirm old man. And
even in my exile God has not forsaken me. I have found
unexpected alleviations here. The humble Bishop of
Cucusus has been very kind. He even wished to resign
his see in my favour. The chief burgher of this little
town has entirely given up to me the use of his own
house. My relative, the Deaconess Sabiniana, is with me,
and looks after my wants. And you must not think that
I am idle. My correspondence is large. Oh ! how I some
times long for you and David, and Eutyches and Kallias,
again! But it may not be. I am trying to establish
missioffs among the Goths, among the Phoenicians, among
the Persians. Even here and now God suffers me to be
in some sense a guide and leader of His Church.
' What, then, are you to do ? I can think of nothing
better than that you should go to Antioch, and live in our
old house. It is, as you know, a. delightful city. There
are many there who know and love you, or will soon learn
to know and love you ; and there, if it be God's will, you
can serve Him for many years in Church and State. God
bless you, and restore you to perfect health, and keep you
in His faith and fear, my own Philip, until — if we meet no
more on earth — Ave meet in His many mansions beyond
the grave ! '
Philip talked over this letter with Olympias, and she
concurred in its advice. She knew that Chrysostom had
prevented many other friends from joining him at Cucusus,
where the sight of their life, surrounded by troubles and
hardships, would only aggravate his sufferings. Antioch
was the home of Philip's early years. It would be best
for him to go there, and he would noAV be soon quite well.
'I kneAv that your health would return, Philip,' she
said, ' when some of your happiness returned. Since that
dream of which you told me, and still more since David's
visit, you have made amazing progress. You will soon

490 GATHERING CLOUDS
look like the happy Philip whom I first saw with our
saintly Patriarch, and with your young companions, six
years and more ago.'
But Philip soon found that his departure to Antioch
had better for the present be delayed.
For the good old Bishop Flavian had died, full of years
and full of honours. The Avish of all the city and of every
good man throughout the East was that the excellent
Presbyter Constantius should be elected in his place. But
this -would not at all suit the plots and purposes of Severian
of Gabala find his episcopal allies. For Constantius had
been for years the ardent friend and admirer of the true
Patriarch of Constantinople. This cabal of alien bishops
not only interfered with the election, but did so in the
most monstrous manner, which ended in intruding upon
that long-afflicted see a man no less pernicious, if possible,
than themselves.
This was an ambitious ecclesiastic named Porphyry.
He first intrigued and bribed to get Constantius banished,
and then tricked the Christians by going to the church
with a handful of bishops and people when the vast mass of
the citizens were at some Olympian games at Daphne.
The doors were locked, and Porphyry was hurriedly
ordained Avith a mutilated service by Acacius, Severian,
and Antiochus, who, knowing that their gross trick would
awaken the vengeance of the inhabitants, fled from the city
Avith precipitation. But the mischief had been done, Iioav-
ever infamously, and it Avas vain for the people to threaten
to burn Porphyry's house over his head. He obtained from
Constantinople the assistance of a body of troops, seized
the church by violence, and furnished one more instance
of the mad greed of episcopal ambition in those corrupted
days. Such being the state of things at Antioch, Philip saw
that it Avould be unwise for him to face once more, and
in vain, the horrors of sacerdotal Avickedness Avhich had
wrought such havoc at Constantinople. He must postpone
his settlement in the home of his childhood until there
had been such subsidence of the storms of persecution in
the Christian community as might promise him a reason
able safety. All was uncertain. Whither could he turn

THE RETURN OF KALLIAS 491
during the two years which must elapse before he could
make Miriam his own ?
God usually makes the way of His children plain before
their face, and Philip's plans for the present were decided
by a letter from Kallias.
Kallias, it Avill be remembered, had been sent by Chrys
ostom, before his exile, with despatches to the Bishops of
Aquileia, Milan, and Rome, informing them of the terrible
condition to Avhich the Church at Constantinople had been
reduced, and entreating their sympathy and assistance.
He had written several letters ; but in the troubled state
of Italy and Illyricum, and the recent changes and excite
ments, his letters had failed to find their destination, and
no answer had come to him in return. But iioav a feAv
lines from him reached the hands of Philip. They were
written from Rome, and briefly stated that he had de
livered the various documents entrusted to him by Chrys
ostom into the hands of Pope Innocent, and had been
sent back by him Avith letters to Aurelian, Briso, Aman
tius, Anthemius, who was now Consul, and other power
ful friends of the exiled Patriarch. He was requested to
procure further evidence and to secure their co-operation
in the endeavour to obtain the Patriarch's recall. Kallias
said that he hoped to see Philip very soon after the day
when the letter would reach him, and that he Avould then
tell him all further news.
Philip eagerly awaited his arrival, and Avas standing
to receive him with warm welcome on the little quay at
Cyzicus, from which he had reeognised him as his boat
drew near. So much had passed since they last met that
at first they could only grasp each other's hands in silence
as they walked to the villa of Olympias. After supper
Philip, in broken words, told his friend of the course of
events in Constantinople, of Avhich he had only heard the
vaguest rumours. The tears of Kallias flowed fast as
Philip told him of the banishment of the Patriarch, the
conflagration, the cruel persecution Avhich followed, the
martyrdom of Eutyches, and his own sufferings. But Kal
lias could impart the good news that the great bishops of
the West were heart and soul opposed to the lies and bru
talities of Theophilus and his myrmidons. He had been

492 GATHERING CLOUDS
most kindly received. Chromatius, the venerable Bishop
of Aquileia, the friend of Ambrose, of Rufinus, and of
Jerome, had given him a cordial Avelcome there. He had
gone to Venerius, Bishop of Milan, who had shoAvn him
the very basilica in which the people had Avatched over
Ambrose, and in which, on that occasion, Ambrose had
first introduced the antiphonal chanting of the West ;
the font in which he had baptised Augustine ; the gates
from which he had repelled Theodosius when he came
Avith his conscience burning with the guilt of the massacre
of Thessalonica ; the pulpit in which he had preached the
funeral sermons of the young murdered Emperors Gratian
and Valentinian III. Lastly, he had seen the smoke, and
wealth, and tumult of Rome ; and there the great Pope
Innocent had expressed himself in private Avith almost
passionate indignation against the Avicked, intriguing
Patriarch of Alexandria and in favour of the saintly exile.
More than this, Innocent needed a secretary for his vast
correspondence, and, struck with the tachygraphy of
Kaillias, had asked him to return to Rome after he had
delivered his missives, and to taike a permanent place in
his household.
' Did you see Alaric ? did you see my friends Thoris
mund aind Walamir? did you see Stilico? did you see the
Emperor Honorius ?' asked Philip eagerly. ' I am sick of
the East. How much I should like to see that Western
world!' ' I saAV them all,' said Kallias, ' and the beautiful, stately
Serena, Avife of Stilico ; and, if the Lady Olympias permits
me, I will give you some little account of my journey.'
' Yes, but that had better be to-morrow,' said Olympias,
' for Philip is still far from strong, and it is time for him to
go to rest.'

WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 493

CHAPTER LIX
WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS.
Ah me ! how stern and terrible he looks !
He hath a princely countenance. Philip von Artevelde.
Olympias at this time was subject to fits of overwhelm
ing depression, in Avhich the Avheels of life seemed to
stand still. She did not leave her room the next day, and
asked Philip and Kallias to excuse her absence.
'It is a lovely day,' said Philip, ' and I know, Kallias,
that you are fond of fishing. Let us take one of the boats.
While you fish I Avill lie lazily in the stern, and then Ave
can talk to our hearts' content. The fish won't matter
much,' he added, Avith one of his old smiles.
' Ah ! ' said Kallias, ' I see you still pretend to be
sceptical about my skill as a fisherman. Well, I shall
refute your chaff by bringing home a big basketful of
thunnies for the Lady Olympias, and you shall not have
one.' 'Then I shall talk loud, and drive the thunnies aAvay,'
said Philip, as he took his place at the helm, while Kallias
rowed the painted shallop over the bright blue Avaters,
which flashed in the morning sunlight.
'Did you ever see "the unnumbered laughter of the
sea " to greater perfection ? ' said Philip. ' Now, here is a
delightful spot to anchor, under this wooded hill ; so fish
aAvay, Kalliais, and talk at the same time. Where did you
make your first resting-place after you left us ? '
' I travelled as fast as I could to the Court of Alaric at
iEmona, and there I saAV  '
' Thorismund and Walamir,' said Philip. ' I want very
much to hear about them.'
'Thorismund,' said Kallias, 'but, alas! not Walamir.'

494 .GATHERING CLOUDS
'Alas? Why alas? Are there more miseries to tell?
What, a world it is ! '
'You shall hear. Thorismund's first question — for he
had seen me at the Patriarcheion in old days, and recog
nised me — Avas about you. He has ahvays loved and
admired you since that old Avrestling-bout at Antioch,
when you both were boys. As I told him the state of
things in Constantinople he fretted and fumed Avith in
dignation. He loathes the very name of Constantinople.
His eyes flash Avith anger when he speaks of it. Then he
asked after Eutyches, and I did not disguise from him the
gloomy aspect of our affairs. " But where," I asked, " is
your brother Walamir? His soul Avas knit to that of
Eutyches in one of the closest friendships I have ever
seen." He bent his eyes down, and said, " We none of us
know where my beloved brother is. We Avere both with
King Alaric when he invaded Italy, and when he retreated
from Pollentia and reached Verona. But at Verona Ave
were surprised by the forces of Stilico, and his Alan auxil
iaries fell on us so furiously that Alaric himself was nearly
taken. He escaped by the SAviftness of his warhorse, and
I Avas with him. We were not really defeated; all our
forces retreated in perfect order beyond the Alps. But,
alas ! my brother Walamir was taken captive, perhaps
slain. We have not heard of him since."
' A pang shot through my heart as I heard this, Philip,
for I thought hoAv deeply it Avould grieve Eutyches ; but
I murmured to Thorismund some Avords of hope.
' " Yes," he answered, " he may still be alive ; but if so,
it is in slavery, and that is worse than death."
' " Would he not have written to you ? " I asked.
'"No; the boy's proud spirit would prevent him from
Avriting, even if it were possible, from amid the degrada
tion of slavery."
' 1 had no more to say, but promised that, as I was on
my way to Italy, I would make every possible inquiry,
and might perhaps be able to secure the ransom of
Walamir if he still lived.
' " If not," said Thorismund, passionately, " there is still
revenge." 'Alaric had heard that there was a messenger from

WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 495
the Patriarcheion at Constantinople, and sent to ask me
to his evening banquet. He is a splendid young king,
a far finer type of Goth than Gainas. He has an air of
natural nobleness, and the Visigoths say that Avhen they
elevated him on their shields no chieftain ever looked
braver and worthier; but he keeps no state, and talked
Avith me familiarly about the Patriarch, whom he greatly
reveres, and about himself. He is convinced that he shall
live to sack the Eternal City. He told me, as he told his
long-haired chiefs, that before his first invasion of Italy he
had heard the voice, as of an Archangel, cry to him from
the depths of a grove, " Speed ! Speed, Alaric ! Thou
shalt penetrate to the City."
' I suppose that the warrior read the doubt in m}^ face,
for he smiled and said, " And I did penetrate, ad Urban;
not, indeed, this time to the Eternal Urbs, but to the river
Urbis, on which Pollentia stands ! Tell them at Con
stantinople that, in spite of the brag of Stilico's bard,
Claudian, we were not beaten at Pollentia. The dwarfish
Alan, Saulus — Avhom God destroy! — burst on us upon
Good Friday — the ugly heathen Tartar ! They seized
some plunder, and recovered the old purple robe stained
with the blood of the Emperor Valens at Adrianople ; but
we were unbroken, and Stilico made a treaity Avith us."
'I never saw anyone so swift to read thoughts as Alaric,
Philip. I suppose he read the Avord "Verona" in my
face, for he added, " No, nor Avere we beaten at Verona
either. And the prophecy to me will be fulfilled. Italy
has not yet heard the name of Rhadagais. They Avill hear
it next year ; and whether I shall help him to ravage Italy,
or not, depends on circumstances ; and," he added in a
low voice, "on Stilico and Honorius."
' Then he began to talk Avith imprudent frankness, as I
thought, of Stilico and of both the Emperors. For Stilico
he has an immense admiration, and more than half shares
his view that the best thing the Goths can do is to amal
gamate faithfully Avith the Romans as one nation, and
found a nobler race. He thinks that Stilico is a born
king among a nation of intriguers and drivellers, besotted
with a superstition Avhich is but the caricature of genuine
Christianity, and slaves to abject despots. He feels un-

496 GATHERING CLOUDS
bounded scorn for both their Sublimities, Arcadius and
Honorius. He regards them both as pale-blooded weak
lings, the puppets of their oavii eunuchs. He calls Arca
dius a devotee only fit to grovel over sham relics, and be
led by the nose ; and he regards the impotent Honorius
as a mixture of timidity, cruelty, and slyness. These
Goths rarely conceal their opinions. He actually showed
at his table — and Avith me, an unknown reporter, present
— a coin Avhich had been struck as a caricature of Honorius,
which represents, not the old Roman she-wolf suckling the
immortal twins, but a she-ass suckling a hen ! It is meant
partly, perhaps, as an insult against the Christians under
the old calumny of their being asinarii, but chiefly to
ridicule Honorius's paltry propensity to make pets of hens,
in feeding which he spends half his time. " It is the only
thing the phantom is fit for," sarid Alaric.
' I left iEmona the next day, and, amid various advent
ures, of which we may talk another time, I made my way
in the course of two or three months to Aquileia, Milan,
and Rome. I found Rome in a state of anxiety and alarm.
You know how full the air is of rumours when communi
cations are interrupted. There had been a long drought,
and the Romans, who fancied that Alaric would soon be
on his way against them, had placed their chief hope in
his inability to cross the swollen rivers of Lombardy. One
day vast clouds of dust proclaimed the approach of an
armed band. The Romans cowered behind their neAv-
built Avails, and not even a scout would venture to recon
noitre. Then, as the poet Claudian has since described
it, the people, gazing from the walls, saAV amid the dust
the good Avhite head Avhich all men knew — the noble face
of Stilico, shining like a star out of the storm. You can
imagine how they shouted. With Stilico among them
they felt that Rome was free.'
' Were you present at the great triumph one has heard
of ? ' asked Philip.
^Yes, and I never saw, or hope to see, anything so mag
nificent. Honorius came on purpose to celebrate the tri
umph, Avith Stilico, his father-in-law. They had raised a
triumphal arch for the occasion, on which they spoke of
" The Goths subjugated for ever." I am told that Alaric

AVALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 497
and his chiefs roared with laughing when this was re
ported to them. Honorius was made Consul for the sixth
time, and as Rome had only three times seen an emperor
during the century, they made the most sumptuous prep
arations.' ' What did they think of their Emperor ? '
' Stilico had given him his cue, and he laid himself out
to Avin their hearts. He Avould not allow the senators to
walk before his triumphal car. He looked unusually Avell,
for a flush was on his sallow cheek, and he Avore the diadem,
and a jeAvelled trabea, and strings of Arabian emeralds
round his neck. But there were some old Romans Avho
rather despised his jewellery. " Cincinnatus, and Marius,
and Julius Cssar did not ride in that bedizenment ; all that
pernicious rubbish came in Avith Constantine," I heard one
old officer mutter to the Senator Lampridius, Avho stood by
him ; and Lampridius murmured in reply two savage lines
of Sidonius on Constantine :
Saturni aurea ssecla quis requiret?
Sunt haec gemmea, sed Neroniana.'
' Where were you ? '
' Pope Innocent had kindly secured me a place on the
steps of the Julian Basilici, so that I saw the procession
wind all along the Sacred Way, and up the Capitoline Hill,
amid all those temples and palaces. Every roof Avas
densely crowded, and there fell a perfect snow of roses
and garlands before the horses' feet.'
' Was the Emperor alone in the chariot ? '
' No ; Stilico Avas by his side in plain armour, but look
ing every inch a hero ; and more than half the enthusiasm
of the Romans was for him. Behind them rode the young
Empress Maria, daughter of Stilico — a virgin wife, they
say — looking like a flower of perfect loveliness ; and be
side her, in a very simple attire, her noble brother, Euche
rius, who has a great future before him.'
' I say, Kallias,' said Philip ; ' you see it is high noon.
How about those thunny fish for Olympias?'
' You scamp ! ' said Kallias ; ' I should have caught tAvo
dozen at least if you had not frightened them away by
making me talk so much. We'll have some lunch now.

498 GATHERING CLOUDS
and then I Avon't tell you a word more till I've caught
enough. And, to punish you, I assure you that what
I have still in store Avill surprise and interest you im
mensely.' ' Oh ! I say, that is too bad ! ' said Philip ; ' I have a great
mind to give you no lunch at all till you have told me.'
They opened the basket Avhich the slaves of Olympias
had put into the boat, and found it full of delicious grapes
and figs, cakes, and a bottle of rich Thasian • wine — for
though she was herself abstemious to the utmost austerity,
their hostess insisted on dieting Philip in the way which
she regarded as most likely to restore his strength.
After their refreshment Kallias told Philip that he had
the orders of Olympias to make him rest awhile and take
a siesta, and Philip reluctantly obeyed. While he slept
Kallias steadily fished on, often glancing at his slumber
ing features, sometimes with soitoav to see how Avasted
they were, but with more hope, because he was gradually
returning to his normal strength and brightness.
By the time Philip awoke, Kallias had caught as many
fish as would serve the whole household of Olympias,
and triumphantly showed them to his companion, who at
first declared that he must have bought them of some
fisherman on the sly, until Kallias punished him by making
him wait for the rest of his story till he had caught half a
dozen more.
Then he laid his rod and net aside, and proposed that
they should row in, and finish his narrative at home, as
there Avere things which perhaps Olympias Avould like to
hear. They found the lady a little less dejected, and Kallias
was glad to help in diverting her melancholy thoughts.
Resuming his account of the triumph of Honorius, he
said : ' Philip, I have kept back from you what interested
me more deeply than all the imperial pageantry. I told
you that Honorius exempted the senators from pacing
before him; but immediately behind his chariot Avalked,
two-and-two, a long line of Gothic captives ; and first in
the row, showing that he was of noble birth, I saAV  -'
Philip started up and grasped the hand of Kallias.
' You saAV  Oh ! I guess it.'

WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 499
' Yes,' said Kallias, 'I. saw young Walamir, the friend
of our Eutyches. He Avas walking Avith his looks cast on
the ground, in the deepest dejection. But as he passed
the steps of the Basilica I attracted his attention. He
recognised me ; for one instant his face brightened, and
then the light faded from it, as though he Avere ashamed
to be seen in the guise of a captive and a slave. But I
determined not to lose sight of him, and threaded my way
through the croAvds which closed behind the procession.
I once more got close to him on the summit of the Capitol.
I asked Avhere I could see him, but he only shook his head;
he did not know.
'Several days passed, and I sought for him in vain. At
the close of a week of pageants, thanksgivings, paeans, and
festivities there was to be a splendid gladiatorial show, at
which Honorius himself Avas to preside, with Stilico beside
him. Constantine had discouraged gladiatorial shows, and
many of our great Christian saints and Fathers had in
dignantly denounced the butchery of human beings for
amusement in the presence of a gloating multitude. But
Rome is still a half-pagan, or more than half-pagan, city,
and the Flavian Amphitheatre has perpetuated the bad
tradition. Honorius, half-curious to see so world-famed a
spectacle, offered but a languid resistance to Avhat was
deemed a politic concession ; and, worst of all, a gladia
torial shoAv afforded the easiest means of getting rid of
many of the Gothic captives.
' Of course, Philip, you and the Lady Olympias will
believe me when I say that I had not the least intention
to be present, lest I, like the young Alypius whose story is
told by Augustine, should be brutalised and carried away
by the horrible excitement. I stood by the Arch of Titus
to watch the motley, eager crowd rolling its vast volume
into the many doors of that colossal amphitheatre. Then
a strange thing happened.
' An Eastern monk in the sheepskin of a hermit passed
me, attracting many eyes ; for hermits are a far rarer sight
in Rome than in our East. He was tall and gaunt, and
his hair was grey, and his sheepskin mantle Avas squalid
and tattered, lie saAV me standing by the Arch, not
hurrying forward with the crowd, and, fixing on me his

500 GATHERING CLOUDS
eyes, which seemed to burn Avith an inspired lustre, he
said in Syriac, "Youth, I see that thou art a Christian,
Avho wilt not follow the multitude to do evil ; yet I bid
thee come with me into yon revel of demons ; it may be
that thou shalt see strange things to-day."
' " Who art thou, Father ? " I asked.
' " Men call me Telemachus," he said. "lama hermit
from Zagba. Few in this city speak Syriac ; none know
me. If any seek to know my name hereafter, thou canst
tell them who I am and whence I came."
' I could not help accompanying him, for his words seemed
to have in them a Divine command. We entered the
Amphitheatre, Avhich Avas already so densely croAvded that
we could only get places among the slaves and the poorest
of the people at the summit. I confess it Avas a splendid
sight. The sun shone down on that vast building and
the 80,000 people whom it held. The vast silken awning
flapped against its straining cords overhead. The gala-
dress of multitudes of women variegated the scene, and
they looked like beds of flowers among the white togas of
the men. The great area of the floor was strewn with
dazzling sand. In the podium, in their richest pomp, sat
the Emperor and Empress, with Stilico, and Eucherius,
and the Princesses Serena and Thermantia, arrayed in
pearls and precious stones, which flashed as they moved.
All the senators and aristocracy of Rome were there. I
saw, and blushed to see, many even of the clergy present.
One chief element of expectation was the news that the
general contests after the single combats were to be sine
missione — that is, that they were only to be terminated by
the death of the combatants ; and that a young and beauti
ful Goth of the noble family of the Amalings would fight
among the captives. My heart was sick with fear, for I
knew that this must be no other than Walamir.'
Here Philip, in his excitement, seized the arm of Kallias,
and gazed open-mouthed on his face.
' The first part of the shoAv Avas harmlessly magnificent.
Some of the Palatini had a sham cavalry fight, and went
through manoeuvres on their paAving steeds. There were
allegorical scenes and processions. Then Avild beasts —
lions, tigers, ostriches, even camelopards — Avere exhibited,

WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 501
and I, who had never seen these strange and beautiful
creatures, was intensely interested.
' But then began the Avickedness to Avhich the huge mass
of spectators had been looking forward Avith a sort of un
spoken passion. The first of the gladiatorial fights was
proclaimed by the herald's voice :
' " Satyrus, the gladiator, Avill now be matched against
Walamir, the young Gothic Amal, each Avith savoixIs and in
full armour."
' As I heard the herald's sonorous tones my heart burned
within me with hot indignation ; for Walamir was little
more than a boy, and it was monstrous to match him, as
they had done, against the most renowned and most suc
cessful gladiator of Italy, avIio had been trained in the
schools of the laiiistae from his earliest years, and had
gained many crowns.
' I looked at the hermit, but he seemed to be lost in
prayer, and utterly oblivious to everything around him.
' The two marched round the arena. They saluted the
Emperor Avith uplifted swords. I thought that I detected
a note of defiance and despair in Walamir's voice, as he
joined in the heroic customary chant, "Ave Ccesar, morituri
te salutamus."
' Then they stood nearly in the centre, and all those
eighty thousand eyes were bent upon them, and the clash
of SAVords begain. And still Telemachus neither spoke nor
moved. ' The strength, courage, and agility displayed by Walamir
Avould have stirred the heart of Alaric himself Avith pride ;
but I saw from the first that he neither Avas nor could be
an equal antagonist to the cool, trained giant of mature
age, consummate skill, and herculean strength against
whom he had been pitted. The only marvel to me, as I
sat there sick with dread, trembling with excitement, and
thinking of you and Eutyches, Avas that he sustained so
long the unequal struggle.
'Then rose the indescribable panting shriek of " Habet"
as Satyrus inflicted his first wound, and the red stream
rushed over Walamir's armour. That shout seemed to
awaken Telemachus. He sprang up, flung one glance
around him, and then stalked with swift strides doAvn the

502 GATHERING CLOUDS
ambulatories. I did not know at first what he intended to
do ; and the spectators were far too intent on the combat
to notice him, for Satyrus had only inflicted a flesh wound,
and Walamir, Avith undaunted spirit, was renewing the
hopeless strife.
' But just as Telemachus had nearly reached the cancelli
— the gilded barriers erected to prevent any wild beast
from leaping up among the people, as had once occurred — ¦
a blow on Walamir's helmet smote him to the ground, and
instantly Satyrus was striding over him with uplifted
sword, and looked up at the spectators as he awaited the
signal to slay or save.
' Usually the thumb Avas uplifted and the life spared if
the defeated combatant had sIioavii conspicuous heroism ;
and it might have been thought that the youth, the
beauty, the bravery of the young Amal would have
pleaded for him. But no ; he was one of the dreaded, hated
Goths, and Avithout an instant's hesitation twenty thousand
thumbs were ruthlessly turned down, to demand that Saty
rus should plunge the sword into his throat or breast.
' Then it was that, to the utter amazement of everyone
present, from the Emperor to the meanest slave, Telem
achus, like one inspired, sprang over the cancelli, and,
rushing forward with a cry, strode over the prostrate
Ostrogoth, and Avith a gesture of command confronted the
victorious gladiator.
' Satyrus sprang back astonished, as though he had seen
a spirit, and lowered his SAvord-point. A nominal Chris
tian, he felt a sort of overpowering aAve in presence of
the strange figure, emaciated face, and flashing eyes of
the tall, gaunt hermit. But at the same instant the
multitude had recognised the stranger's purpose, and a
yell of rage and disappointment arose, as though all the
demons had been let loose. Satyrus had drawn back to
the wall of the arena staring, Avith wide-opened eyes,
apparently in superstitious dread. Walamir had risen
to his feet. Telemachus stood alone betAveen them.
But at once every conceivable missile on which the
people could lay hands Avas hurled at him ; and then
many, quite mad with wrath, had themselves spruno- over
the barrier and were striking at him Avith staves. They

WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 503
hurled him to the ground, they kicked and smote him,
and flung stones on him. I, too, had leaped the barrier,
but I Avas one among hundreds. What could I do?
' It soon appeared that he Avas dead ; and then a Avave
of remorse swept over the minds of the assailants, and a
hush followed. "Who was he?" was murmured from
lip to lip. The Emperor wais himself as agitated as was
possible to his lympathic temperament, fie had risen
from his seat, and beckoned the herald to bid anyone who
knew the murdered monk to say avIio he was. I was
too much excited to be afraid, and, striding under the
Emperor's box, I shouted, " Emperor, he Avas Telemachus,
the hermit of Zagba."
'It seemed, even to myself, as though I had spoken in
a voice of unnatural power, and also as if my few words
had produced an impression far more intense than seemed
proportionate to their simple purport. An aAvful con
tagious excitement seized the minds of the multitude.
They shrank back on all sides from the body of the
murdered saint. It lay in the hot sunlight, dark on the
dazzling white sand with which the arena had been strewn,
and the blood from his many wounds had dyed his robes ;
men declared that it lay encircled by an aureole. The Em
peror and his attendants rose ; but before he left the
Amphitheatre he-ordered the heralds to proclaim that the
games Avere ended, and would not be resumed, and that
the corpse of Telemachus, the hermit of Zagba, Avas to be
honoured as that of a saint and martyr.
'The aAvestruck multitude streamed out of the vomi-
toria, and went home Avith a sense of supernatural terror
in their hearts; but many re-entered the actual arena,
until it was thronged throughout its huge ellipse, to gaze
more closely on the man A\rho had died to save the lives of
men. While their feelings Avere thus absorbed to the
exclusion of every other thought I looked out for. Walamir.
He was leaning against the Avail under the podium, pale
and faint from loss of blood. I asked him about his
wound. ' " It is nothing," he said, " though I have bled so much.
But oh! Kallias, my soul is sick with horror and hatred.
Can you not help me to escape to my own people ? "

504 GATHERING CLOUDS
' The thought had occurred to me before he spoke.
Very near us Avas the door of the spoliarium, into which
the dead bodies were dragged after a fight. I Avhispered
to him to slip into it while no one was looking, and I stole
in immediately afterwards. It Avas empty. The attend
ants had been attracted to see what Avas going on ; and,
most fortunately, the farther exit was also unlocked, for
they had expected to have to deal with many corpses.
We were standing unobserved in the shadow of the mighty
pile. I knoAv not Avhat strange premonition or unformed
surmise had made me put in my Avallet the thin overdress
of a parabolanus. But I had done so, and suggested to
him to throw off his armour and put on the disguise,
folding the cowl over his head. Then he leant on my
arm, and we walked by bypaths to my lodgings, Avhich the
Bishop had assigned to me near the Late ran. Our steps
were marked with blood; but that Avas unavoidable, and
very few people Avere in the side-streets. On the Avay Ave
passed a little barber's shop, and by a sudden inspiration I
went in and bought a plain black wig, Avhich I placed on
the short, sunny curls of the Amal. He Avas thus effectu
ally concealed from notice, and I took him direct to my
own cubicle, and brought him food.
' It Avas not yet noon ; but as not a moment was to be lost,
and as escape was hopeless without aid, I decided to go
straight to the palace of Stilico and to enlist his sympathies
for Walamir.
' It would, I knew, be hard to get an audience with the
mighty Vandal, avIio Avas at once Prime Minister and
Generalissimo, the husband of the Princess Serena, the
father of the Empress Maria, and the official guardian both
of Arcadius and Honorius. But God's unseen providence
favoured me ; for in the hall of the palace I saw the noble
young Eucherius, Stilico's son. Jealousy raged on every
side of the great Vandal like a furnace, and he was therefore
most careful to bestow no great offices on his son, and to
surround him with no splendour ; although even these
precautions did not avert the rumour that he was secretly
plotting to make him an emperor. As Eucherius came
forward I held forth my hand in sign of appeal. He
stopped, and I asked him to grant a private interview of

WALAMIR AND ST. TELEMACHUS 505
five minutes. He granted it, and I briefly told him the
story of Walamir. He is not nearly so Romanised as his
father, and I knew that his sympathy with the Goths was
strong. Touched by the story, and by the bravery of the
young Ostrogoth in his combat Avith Satyrus of Avhich he
had been a witness in the Colosseum, he said: "To-morrow
the Emperor and my father are sending letters to Constan
tinople. The messengers will go by ship from Ostia to
Dyrrachium. The Bishop of Rome, in whose protection
you are, will be doubtless glad to send you back with
answers to the letters you have brought to him from the
Patriarch John. Let the young Goth be disguised, and
accompany you as a subordinate. I Avill furnish him with
a pass." I thanked him warmly and kissed his hand.
Walamir Avas overjoyed. All went Avell ; and it Avas Avorth
all the risk to observe his passionate delight Avhen the ship
was Avell out of sight of land, and he was able to strip off
the disguise. You would have laughed to see him toss the
black wig into the sea, and emerge in his own bright hair.'
' Did he get over his Avounds so soon ? '. asked Philip.
' Yes ; and he attributes it to the hardy temperance of
his training. Aware of the propensity of his nation to
excess, neither he nor Thorismund ever touch wine ;
hence their wounds heal far sooner than those of their
comrades. ' Thanks in part to what he learned from Eutyches,
Walamir has before his mind the loftiest ideal of what
the Goths should be. He thinks that if they ever come
to ruin, it can only be through their own faults and vices.
He sets them a high example, and, when opportunity
offers, he tells them his convictions. And now I have no
more to narrate, and I feel sure that the Lady Olympias
must be tired.'
' Did Walamir get safely to the Court of Alaric ? '
'Yes, and I had the happiness of seeing his meeting
with his brother. They are in truth a par nobile fratrum.'

506 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LX
THE VENGEANCE OF HEAVEN
Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede Pcena claudo. — Horace.
Before we resume the story of Philip and Chrysostom
let us pause to observe Avhether the wickedness of their
enemies ultimately prospered; for those enemies will
henceforth disappear from our pages.
The overthroAv of the saintly Patriarch was due, as we
have seen, to the combined hatred of the Empress ; of the
corrupt, worldly, frhrolous society of Constantinople; of
evil-hearted women, headed by a clique of painted and
bejewelled widoAvs ; of large multitudes of bad priests and
deacons, false monks, false nuns, false virgins, constituting
the main section of the ecclesiastical world in Constanti
nople ; of the agapetce, or ladies avIio lived in the houses of
the clergy under the thinly veiled name of spiritual sisters ;
and, most of all, of Theophilus, the wicked Patriarch of
Alexandria, and the group of ambitious, intriguing, envious,
unscrupulous, and slanderous bishops, of whom Severian
and Cyrinus were among the worst, who constituted the
execrable Synod of the Oak.
The Avays of God with men are often very difficult to
decipher. It is only when we are able to trace on a large
scale the workings of Divine Providence that Ave can
watch God's terrible and fiery finger
Shrivel the falsehood from the souls of men.
The apparent prosperity of the wicked, the apparently
crushing and miserable overthrow of the just, have been
sore problems since the earliest ages of the Avorld. The
Psalmist and other saints found comfort in the general

THE VENGEANCE OF HEAVEN 507
fact that, though the wicked seem to flourish like a green
bay-tree, it was frequently seen that they perished sud
denly, and came to a fearful end ; and that, as a rule, the
righteous were not forsaken, nor did his seed beg their
bread. But this law of averages Avas liable to tremen
dous exceptions, and hardly met the case of saints avIio
died in the midst of affliction, or even perished in the
flames of martyrdom. It remained for later ages to find
new and deeper solutions of the problem, and to view
it Avith untroubled faith, in the twofold conviction that
holiness in itself is happiness, and sin is of its own nature
retributive and penal ; and that there is a world beyond
the grave, Avhere the false weights and imperfect balances
of earth shall be redressed. It is hot possible for man
to furnish perfect theoretic explanations of the state of
things in a world so full of sin and death and avoc Job
sat in his leprosy, upon his dunghill, a bereaved, abject,
humiliated pauper, on whom the very drunkards made
their songs. The sanctimonious infallibility of his ortho
dox friends made them pour oil of vitriol upon his wounds
by assuming that his misery was the penalty of secret guilt.
Their cruel and infallible orthodoxies aAvoke the thunder
of God's disapproval, and, even if Job had never been
uplifted out of the overwhelming deeps into the sunshine
of prosperity, men Avould not have been entitled to adduce
his anguish in proof that God cares not for the souls
which He has made, and thinks no more of right and
wrong upon this atom globe than of * a trouble of ants in
a million millions of worlds.' All that we should be en
titled to say, if such cases as that of Job appeared to be
the rule, and not the exception, would be, in the wail of
the blameless king :
I saw God in the shining of His stars,
I saw Him in the flowering of His fields ;
But in His ways with men I found Him not.
But Avhen men of the stamp of Theophilus pointed to
the exile of Chrysostom, the martyrdom of Eutyches, the
affliction of Olympias, and the tortures of Tigrius and Sera
pion, in proof that God had declared Himself against John
and the Johannites, they did not deceive either themselves

508 GATHERING CLOUDS
or the world. On the one hand, men saAV Chrysostom
ruined and yet happy ; calumniated and yet happy ; exiled
and yet happy — sick, and persecuted, and suffering, and
yet happy — and they would not have exchanged his trials
for the gorgeous criminality of the Patriarch of Alexandria,
or the full-fed unctuousness of Severian, with his heart
fat as brawn, cold as ice, and hard as the nether millstone.
Nor Avas there one Avoman in Constantinople — not Epi
graphia, in her gilded boudoir, amid her clerical votaries,
nor the most voluptuous of the nuns and spiritual sisters;
not even Eudoxia herself in her imperial purple — who
would not have been glad to lay aside her unhalloAved
ease if hers might have been the heart, the life, and the
ultimate reward of good Nicarete or woe-worn Olympias.
There was enough in the outAvard colour of events to
make men sure that, amid the apparent silence and in
difference of the Eternal, they could sometimes see the
gleam of His avenging thunderbolts upon transgressors,
and the Angel of the Dew standing in the furnace to beat
back the flames from His beloved.
If there was one person to Avhom, more even than to
Theophilus, the ruin of Chrysostom was due, it Avas to the
Empress Eudoxia. She blindly abandoned herself to
the furies of hatred and ambition. Well had it been for
the daughter of Banto if she had married in her own rank ;
if Eutropius had never intrigued against Rufinus, and had
never shown her portrait to the susceptible Arcadius.
Intoxicated by her dizzy elevation, she indulged without
stint her passion for flattery and for the exercise of power.
Nothing Avould sate her pride but the burning of perpetual
incense. Half of her rage against Eutropius Avas due to
her belief that he helped to delay her investiture Avith the
title and dignities of an Augusta and her claims to statues
and universal adoration throughout the provinces, Avhich
had caused such disgust throughout the Western Avorld.
In overthroAving Chrysostom because of the real severity
of his remonstrances against her faults, and" the purely
imaginary insults against her with Avhich he Avas charged
by forgers and slanderers, the Empress was acting against
the admonitions of her own conscience. This had been
shown by the terrified insistency with which she had

THE VENGEANCE OF HEAVEN 509
demanded his recall from his first banishment, when her
superstitious fears had been aroused by the earthquake
which shook her chamber. It is not too much to say that
after his second expulsion she never enjoyed a happy hour.
She was in a perpetual tremor of alarm, and, ais she Avas
again expecting to become a mother, her condition became
truly pitiable.
The Patriarch had been banished on June 20, 404.
Then folloAved the horrible persecution of the Johannites.
On September 30 there burst over Constantinople the
unusual trouble of a furious storm of hail so terrific and
so disastrous that men were killed in the streets, and many
buildings were seriously damaged. Eudoxia saw in this
storm the wrath of God. She became more and more
pale, more and more miserable, and the anguish of remorse
decided her fate. She was but thirty-one years old, yet
on September 30 — less than three and a half months after
the departure of Chrysostom — the beautiful Augusta had
died a miserable death.
For her troubled mind brought on the pangs of a mis
carriage. The infant — sucliAvas the terrified whisper of
the multitude — - had ceased to live three months before its
birth, and the dead burden caused her an indescribable
agony. There was no strength to bring forth. Then, de-
sparing of all holy or lawf ul aid, she entreated her Avretched
husband to send secretly for a magician to the Palace.
The sorcerer came, and muttered over her his incantations,
and laid magic writing on her breast. The infant was
born dead, and the hapless mother died. It was not
strange that men should attribute to a visitation of God so
untimely and so deplorable an end.
Among the most envenomed opponents of the Patriarch,
as we have seen, had been the Egyptian Cyrinus, cousin of
Theophilus, and Bishop of Chalcedon. Chrysostom had
treated him Avith kindness and confidence, and had even
appointed him one of his three assessors in Asia Minor,
whence he had returned an unpitying foe and accuser of
his metropolitan. Very swift Avas the retribution — if
retribution it Were — which fell upon him. He never
recovered from the wounds made on his foot by the heavy
tread of Maruthas, Bishop of Mesopotamia, at the meeting

510 GATHERING CLOUDS
preliminary to the Synod of the Oak. The fierce inflam
mation and incessant agony did not prevent him from
pushing his animosities to the bitter end. He was one of
the most violent agitators. He was one of the four avIio
took on their own heads the criminal responsibility from
which Arcadius shrank. He was one of the bishops avIio
signed the letter to Pope Innocent containing the lying
charge that Chrysostom had set fire to his own church,
which letter they had thought fit to send by the dAvarfish, de
formed, and half -inarticulate presbyter, Paternus. But dur
ing the rest of his short life the body of Cyrinus became
as inflamed and gangrened as his mind. His foot was am
putated, and still the gangrene spread ; his leg was ampu
tated, and it still spread. In the folloAving year he died
in agonies so indescribable as to be an object of pity even
to his enemies.
What happened to Severian of Gabala, and hoAv the
lurid sun of his ambition set while it yet Avas day, leaving
him a foiled and haunted man, Ave have already seen.
Nor did others of the leading conspirators long escape
to vaunt their nefarious victory. Though Palladius,
Bishop of Helenopolis, drops the veil of oblivion over
their names, they Avere perfectly Avell known to him and
his contemporaries.
One of these, .a notorious calumniator of Chrysostom,
died of a quinsy, in Avhich his tongue became so swollen
that he could no longer speak. In this condition he made
a sign that he Avanted his tablets, and Avhen they Avere
handed to him he Avrote on them a confession of his evil
deeds. Another, seized shortly after Avith a sort of virulent
pyaemia, was eaten of worms, and died a loathsome death.
Another fell violently doAvn a staircase, and Avas killed
by the fall.
Another, seized with chronic gout, found the Avorst
aggravation of his malady in the supernatural terrors
Avhich haunted his miserable soul.
Antiochus, Bishop of Ptolemais, after amassing great
wealth by the neglect of his duties and his see, employed
himself in 'writing a treatise aigainst avarice, and died
despised in his hypocritical worldliness.

THE VENGEANCE OF HEAVEN 5H
Arsacius, the intruded Patriarch of Constantinople,
after a year of miserable and disputed poAver, embittered
by contemptuous opposition, repudiated by all that was
best and holiest in Constantinople and in the whole West
ern world, terminated an easy life by but a single year
of dishonoured age, and died on November 11, 405.
And Theophilus of Antioch, the arch-criminal, the
arch-conspirator, the arch-apostate ?
He lived — for a continued life is sometimes a chief
element in God's punishments. He lived to feel that his
jealous fury against a saint of God Avould overwhelm his
name Avith infamy, and, in causing his many other crimes
to glare under the full light of publicity, would hand him
down to an immortality of execration.
He lived to hear the Alexandrians, over whom he
tyrannised Avith a rod of iron, heap their reproaches on
him in the streets for his base intrigues.
He lived to know that the fulsome adulation of the
pitiable bishops whom he had consecrated to serve his own
ends could not droAvn one hoAvl of the conscience which
he had transformed into a bandog Avithin him.
He lived to revile the name of Chrysostom in a Avritten
invective as a frantic tyrant of hardened forehead ; the
sacrilegious patron of sacrilege; not only not a Christian,
but Avorse than a Belshazzar ; a hypocrite Avhose guilt
transcended all possible penalties, but would incur ever
lasting damnation hereafter, and be cast out by Christ
into outer darkness.
He lived to imbue his nepheAv and like-minded succes
sor, Cyril, with the hatred which made him say that to
enter the name of John on the episcopal records of Con
stantinople would be as bad as entering the name of
Judas. He lived to vilify the name of the saintly Olym
pias, before whom, when he hoped to get something from
her, he had gone on his knees and kissed her hand. He
lived to besmirch the holy name of Origen, for whom all
the Avhile he had a secret admiration.
He lived in perpetual dread of death. ' What fear, and
trouble, and anguish Ave have to see,' he said, 'when the
souk is parted from the body ! ' He lived, in splendour and
despotism, to express his envy of the desert hermit, Arse-

512 GATHERING CLOUDS
nius, avIio had ever been mindful of the hour Avhen he
should meet his God.
He Avas found dead on his bed on October 15, 412.
He had retired to rest from the midst of his episcopal
pomp, but had hardly laid down to sleep before a dark and
hideous figure took its seat by the bedside.
' Who art thou, that darest intrude into my chamber ? '
he cried in fury.
' That tone avails your Holiness no more,' said the figure,
mockingly. ' Wicked man ! thine hour has come. From
this bed thou risest, from this chamber thou steppest forth,
no more.'
' Avaunt thee, horrible fiend ! ' cried the Patriarch, and
he made the sign of the cross.
The figure laughed. ' Art thou, then, so foolish, O wise
theologian ! ' it cried, ' as to think that a mechanical motion
Avith the fingers can avert the retribution due to a life of
pride and crime ? '
' Who art thou ? ' gasped Theophilus.
' What ! dost thou not know me ? ' said the fiend. ' Not
knoAv thine oavii familiar friend? Not know him Avho has
lived so long Avith thee, who has whispered all thy master
ful lies into thine ear, who has sat on thy shoulder, who
has clutched thee by the hair for these many years ? '
' I knoAv thee not,' he moaned ; ' I never yet saAV anyone
so hideous as thou.'
The fiend laughed long and loud. ' Not knoAv me ?
Whom, then, shouldest thou know? Thou hast created
me. I am thyself! and Avouldst thou now disown me?
Nay, for the present moment I am thine, and thou art
mine. Look at all the scenes in which Ave have acted,
all the things that we have done.'
He Avaved his hand, and Theophilus saw before him
heaps of gold got by chicanery, by falsehood, by flattery,
and by oppression. 'Does it not content thee?' he said.
'See, how rich Ave are ! How useful we found it, you and
I. How Ave bribed the Alexandrian officials Avith it. How
effectual it was in getting the votes of priests and bishops
at Constantinople. How it enabled us to suborn a throng
of useful perjurers. Perhaps Ave shall be able to take ft
with us. Perhaps the angels may be open to a bribe.

THE VENGEANCE OF HEAVEN 51§
' Look again.'
Before the miserable eyes of the dying man rose the
figure of a youth, bribed with fifteen pounds of gold to
bring an infamous charge against a priest, but himself
recoiling with horror from his own perjury. Yet the priest,
in his innocence, was overwhelmed with agony, and driven
to death in squalor and in ruin.
'Do you recognise the good Isidore, the Hospitaller?'
said the ruthless voice. ' We tried once, you know, to
make him Patriarch of Constantinople. That failed.
Nevertheless, in due time Ave wreaked our grudge on him,
and ruined him effectually.
' Look again.
' I need not tell you who those four Taill Brothers are.
See, the face of one of them is bleeding from your cruel
blow ! What a delicious thing is vengeance ! Hoav }rou
imprisoned them, slandered them, scourged them, robbed
them, hunted them from city to city, starved them, ruined
them, ultimately all but demoralised them, Avhen their best
force was beaten down by age and misery ; and then you
shed crocodile tears over those of them whom you had not
already done to death. It is a pleasing sight for your
deathbed, is it not?
' Look again.
' Who is that old man in a frightful Armenian village,
liable to the depreciations of Isaurian brigands, driven
from his see, his body tormented, his name blackened,
himself killed so slowly that no man might call it
murder? An! I see that you recognise the saintly
Patriarch of Constantinople. You branded him as an
impure demon, doomed to an endless hell. How com
pletely you and your Egyptian bishops ' — and here the
figure laughed again — 'triumphed over him. Ah! but
would you not exchange a thousand times your victory
for his defeat?
' There is plenty more to show you of our doings —
much more than the world knows, for by. good luck we
managed to get the memorial suppressed which the Tall
Brothers presented to Arcadius about our past doings.
But do you enjoy even thus much of the picture of your
life? Farewell!'

514 GATHERING CLOUDS
The figure and the pictures seemed to fade away.
' Ugh ! ' said Theophilus, ' it was an ugly dream.'
But then another dark and veiled figure entered. 'The
ophilus,' it said, ' thy last hour is come ! Prepare to meet
thy God!' The figure touched him. He fell back upon
his pilloAv. Next morning they found him lying dead,
with a horrid stare in his wide-open eyes.

BOOK VI

DEATH AND LIFE

tIs olSev el rb fij» /xiv ka-rl KarBavetv,
ri> KarBavelv Be ffiv; Euripides.

CHAPTER LXI
PHILIP AND THE EMPEROR
Seest thou a man diligent in his business ? he shall stand before kings ;
he shall not stand before mean men. — Prov. xxii. 29.
Kallias stayed a fortnight under the hospitable roof of
Olympias, and during those days he had the pleasure of
seeing hoAv greatly his honest and genial simplicity
brightened the thoughts both of his hostess and of his
friend. The general outline of his OAvn future seemed now
to be approximately settled. Like Philip, he had acquired
an incurable disgust for Constantinople, Avith its turmoils,
its luxury, its unreal Christianity, its cruel, persecuting,
and deeply corrupted Church. He would have to learn
in time that in these respects the West Avas as bad as the
East, and that any peace and satisfaction which life can
bring must depend far more upon ourselves than upon the
place of our abode or the circumstance of our position.
But in the West he found an opening for earning his
living. His skill as a reporter was unusual, amd the great
Pope of Rome gladly offered him a liberal salary.
Philip's ultimate future seemed also to be assured ; for
as soon as the recrudescence of episcopal trouble at Anti
och had been composed he could live in his native city,
not only in comfort, but in comparative affluence, and he
looked forward, as to a paradise, to the enjoyment of
happy years with the maiden of his love. But as his
union with her was inevitably postponed, he was uncertain
how to occupy the next two years. He would not avail
himself any longer of the goodness of Olympias. He was
now able to work, and she had so many faithful secretaries,
agents, and dependents, that she had no need of such
services as he could render, gladly as she would have
retained them. Under these circumstances Kallias urged
517

518 GATHERING CLOUDS
Philip to employ the time at his disposal by travelling in
the West until he could go to claim his bride ; and he
promised him a Avarm welcome if he Avould visit Rome.
A message from no less a personage than the Emperor
Arcadius decided his uncertainties. The Praefect Aure
lian had written to Olympias to ask whether Philip had
recovered his health; and on hearing from her that he
Avas noAV completely restored, Aurelian told the Emperor.
Arcadius summoned Philip to a private audience. Philip
Avas beyond measure astonished by the receipt of this
mandate, for it was the characteristic of Byzantine im
perialism to surround itself with an awful isolation.
He might well have been terrified by the summons, if the
kind-hearted Praefect had not assured him that the visit
was to be kept entirely private, but that good, and not
harm, was intended towards him.
Three days afterwards he made his way to Chalcedon.
He Avas conveyed in an imperial galley to the Stairs, was
driven in a covered chariot to the palace-gate, and saw
once more, with long and irrepressible shudders, the
Patriarcheion, and the burnt area where once had towered
the stately architecture of the Senate-house and of St.
Sophia. Aurelian conducted him into the presence, and the
Emperor intimated that he Avished to talk to the young
man alone. Arcadius had been much softened since the
loss of his passionate and domineering Empress. With
his habitual indolence, he still permitted the continuance
of a persecution at once ignoble, cruel, and unjust against
the innocent Johannites ; but this Avas mainly because he
had become somewhat shy of meddling with ecclesiastical
dignitaries, and had not the energy to interfere Avith the
new Patriarch, Arsacius, and his successor, Atticus. The
conviction greAV ever stronger in his mind that, though he
was too weak to throw off the tyranny of his bishops and
their partisans, yet Chrysostom was Avorth all the rest of
the corrupted clergy of the capital. In spite of the
haughty letter of Theophilus and the decrees of the Synod
of the Oak, Pope Innocent and the bishops of the West had
declared Chrysostom innocent, had treated the calumnies
against him as monstrous perjuries, and had refused to

PHILIP AND THE EMPEROR 519
renounce communion with him. Even in his exile and
humiliation he remained an acknowledged leader of the
Church, and took a larger share than his enemies in her
holiest efforts. It is true that Arcadius had not only
rejected the bishops and presbyters Avhom Innocent sent
to him to request the recall of the Patriarch — among
Avhom Avas Palladius of Helenopolis — but had even allowed
them to be treated Avith a rudeness and cruelty which
disgraced his rule ; but this was more the work of his
agents than of himself, and he might have roused himself
to interfere but for the fierce and indignant jealousy which
he felt towards his younger brother, Honorius, who, though
several years his junior, had taken upon himself more
than once to rebuke Arcadius sharply, and thereby to
kindle the most intense resentment of Avhichhis mind was
capable. The presumption of Honorius seemed so intoler
able to his elder brother that it helped to smother all his
better feelings under the smouldering fumes of sullen
wrath. But meanwhile things had not gone Avell with him. He
was still living in constant dread of the Avrath of Heaven
— a miserable man. The deaths of Eudoxia, Arsacius,
Cyrinus, and others, had terrified him. Besides the terrible
hailstorm, another violent earthquake had shaken Constan
tinople. Pestilence and famine had appeared in the
Eastern Empire, and its peace Avas constantly disturbed by
the armed menace of Alaric and Stilico — for both of whom
Arcadius felt an intense aversion — and also by the rumours
and the actual devastating advance of SAvarms of barbarians
under Rhadagais. He thought that by showing well-
deserved gratitude and kindness to Philip, Avho Avas so dear
a friend of Chrysostom, he might avert impending ruin.
He looked on this as a tardy and partial reparation ; and he
Avanted to talk to Philip about many things.
Arcadius often felt very weary of the stereotyped official
ism of his Court and the intriguing slyness of his kotow
ing slaves. He longed to converse Avith a fellow-man on
more natural and simple terms. He had seen Philip Avith
Chrysostom in former days, and had been struck by. his air
of bright and honest manliness. He began at once by
thanking him for the loyal resourcefulness with which he

520 GATHERING CLOUDS
had averted a double peril from the designs of Gainas, and,
assuring him of future favour, told him of the pension
which he had set apart to reward his services.
Philip bowed low, and Arcadius was not slow to catch
the tone of sincerity Avhich rang through the expression of
his gratitude. ' And now,' he said, 'lay aside all ceremony,
for I Avish to talk freely to you. Call me simply "sir."
You knoAv the Patriarch well?'
' I lived under his roof,' said Philip, ' as a son for many
years. Oh, sire!' he added passionately, 'Avould that
your Imperial mind had never been abused by false tales
about him. NeArer was there a more innocent or a holier
man.' Arcadius was quite unaccustomed to hear himself ad
dressed in language of such frank simplicity ; but it was
a pleasant experience, though he hardly knew what to say
in reply. After a little pause, he said, ' You are quite
right to speak to me without reserve.' Then he added, ' I
fear you have suffered for your faithfulness to him.'
'I have suffered fearfully, sir,' said Philip, the tears
rushing to his eyes ; ' but it would all be nothing if your
Sublimity Avould recall him from his cruel exile.'
' Emperors cannot always do Avhat they Avill, any more
than other men,' said Arcadius, with a sigh. 'If I had
better bishops near me, it might be so. But power is much
more a semblance than a reality. I speak to you unre
servedly, and I know that you Avill respect my confidence.
But though it is impossible for me to recall the Patriarch
John, I can at least do something for you, who are his
friend. Shall you still live here ? '
' Oh ! sir, I could not live here,' said Philip. ' Every
street teems for me Avith terrible memories. When things
are a little settled at Antioch, God will suffer me, I trust,
to return to the city of my birth.'
' Are you married ? '
' No,' said Philip, with a blush ; ' but  '
'I see,' said Arcadius, Avith a smile. 'Is she a lady of
Constantinople ? '
' She was the daughter, sir, of Michael, of Avhom your
Majesty has heard, in the Chalkoprateia ; but they are now
living near the holy Nazareth.'

PHILIP AND THE EMPEROR 521
' Then listen,' said the Emperor. ' These are dangerous
days. The barbarian Rhadagais is marching Avith hosts of
Alans and Ostrogoths to ravage Italy. The Isaurians
make fierce incursions into Palestine. Amid these troubles
I Avant to consult the holy Nilus. I am sending a letter
to him by the Chamberlain Briso, Avho Avill travel with an
escort. But I want some man of resource to travel with
him. You shall go, if you will ; and then you can go on
to Nazareth.'
Philip eagerly thanked him, and embraced the offer.
' I will not forget you Avhen you return with your bride
to Antioch ; you shall be under my protection,' said Arca
dius, kindly. ' But now tell me about your Patriarch. Is
he very wretched at Cucusus? '
' No, sire,' said Philip. ' The place is bleak and frightful
and dangerous ; but he has found many friends, and is still
engaged in holy works, and all Avho are best in the Church
of Christ still look up to him.'
Arcadius sighed again. ' Oh that I could recall what has
happened ! ' he said. 'But the bishops, and clergy, and all
society united against him; and I Avas helpless. It was
not my fault. Severian and the others took the guilt on
their oavii heads. Does the Patriarch hate me? Does he
curse me? Is that why these calamities befall me?'
'Nay, sire,' said Philip, 'you know him not; so far from
cursing you, he daily prajrs for you. There is no word of
Christ that he quotes more often than " Forgive your ene
mies ; love them that hate you ; pray for them that despite-
fully use you and persecute you." '
' I thank you for those words,' said Arcadius ; ' they are
a comfort to me. Do you ever write to him ? '
'Yes, sir,' said Philip; 'as often as opportunity occurs.'
'Then tell him — but privately, you understand — that
the Emperor asks both his pardon and his prayers. Oh
that Eudoxia could but have been reconciled to him before
her sad death ! '
The eyes of the Emperor filled with tears. ' I have
spoken to you very openly, Philip,' he cried ; ' but I can
always recognise one whom I may trust. I have been glad
to talk with you. I will not forget you.' He held out his
hand, and Philip, sinking on his knee, kissed it. Arcadius

522 GATHERING CLOUDS
seemed unAvilling to part with him. It was very long since
he had ever held any frank, human intercourse with any
one, and he enjoyed it.
' Is it quite impossible to retain you in my service ? ' he
asked. ' Oh, sir, it is your right to command, and gladly would
I do my very utmost to serve you. But may it not be else
where, not in this terrible city, and among the clergy who
have tortured me, my father, and my friends?'
' Be it so, then ; though I am sorry. Yet, is there noth
ing more I can do for you now ? '
'Sir, Antioch is throAvn into confusion under the new
bishop whom Severian has thrust upon her. He hates the
Patriarch John, and would persecute me. One line from
you to Anthemius, .the Patrician, the Praefect of the East,
would secure my peace and safety.'
' You shall have it,' said the Emperor, and, dipping his
stylus in the huge golden inkstand on the table, inlaid
with lapis lazuli, which stood beside his gorgeous chair, he
wrote on a strip of vellum, in the delicate calligraphy for
which his little son also afterwards became famous :
' On pain of our displeasure we forbid all to molest our
servant, Philip. He may communicate with whom he
will. — Signed, Arcadius.'
' There ! ' said the Emperor ; ' and now kiss my hand
once more. But do not let this be the last time I see you.'
The autograph was in the famous purple ink which none
but emperors might use on pain of death.
Philip poured forth his thanks, bent his knee, kissed
once more the sallow hand of the Emperor, and retired.

PHILIP VISITS ST. NILUS 523

CHAPTER LXII
PHILIP VISITS. ST. NILUS
Let Sinai tell, for she beheld His might,
And God's own darkness veiled her awful height. — Heber.
Briso and the escort were to start Avith the letter to St.
Nilus in ten days. Philip wrote to Chrysostom, cheered
his heart with the confidential account of his interview
with the Emperor, and said that he would Avrite ais often
as Avas possible. Then he bade an affectionate and deeply
grateful farewell to Olympias. ' To you, lady,' he said, ' I
OAve jny very life. Never shall I kneel to. God in prayer
without remembering your name. May He lighten your
burden of sorrow, and brighten the clouds around your
heart with His eternal rainbow ! '
' FareAvell, Philip,' said Olympias ; ' our Patriarch has
taught me not to find a fatal stumbling-block in my adver
sities ; and my parting present to you shall be his treatise
to me on the truth — which may well be a guide to you
throughout your life — that "No one is injured save by
himself.' "
Philip's keen interest in seeing the world, and the near
prospect of meeting Miriam once more, made the voyage
full of delight to him. Briso Avas a kind, pleasant com
panion. Sailing down the Propontis, and past the blue
Symplegades, and then along the coast of the Troad and
Lesbos, they touched first at the port of Ephesus, and saAV
the scene of the labours of St. Paul. Then they sailed
among the isles of Greece, and across the Mediterranean
to Alexandria. It Avas Avell for them that they were bear
ers of letters from the Emperor, and had an escort, for this
secured them from the deadly machinations of Theophilus.
After catching a rapid glimpse of the marvels of Egypt,
they crossed the desert, and Philip gazed up with unde-

524 GATHERING CLOUDS
scribable awe on the bare crags of Sinai from under its
purple shadows. The cell Avhich Nilus had built for him
self was on the little plateau in which is the cleft in the
rock where tradition says that Elijah hid himself when he
heard the voice of the Lord. It is a IioUoav enclosed by
granite cliffs, and with one tall cypress in the centre, point
ing, as it Avere, heavenwards with funereal finger.
The story of Nilus singularly illustrates the strange
vicissitudes and intense religious emotions of the fourth
century. He Avas a man of tall stature, stately presence,
and masculine beauty, who had entered into the career of
official life, had Avon great successes at Constantinople,
and had even reached the lofty position of Praefect of the
East. He had married, and Avas the father of two sons,
and there seemed no doubt that he would die a statesman,
wealthy, full of years, and crowned with civic honours.
Suddenly, hoAvever, the convictions of religious life took
hold of him, and in the overpowering contemplation of
the three last things — death, judgment, and eternity — all
that the world could offer seemed to slip into dust and
ashes. In 390, Avithout a Avord of public warning, he
renounced the world, and, taking Avith him his son The-
odulus, retired to the desert of Mount Sinai. Like the
great Arsenius, the tutor of Arcadius and Honorius, Avho
followed his example four years later, he had up to that
time lived amid the splendour of a luxurious Court, at
tended by ' slaves in silken garments with golden girths.'
Now he abandoned wealth and place, amd retired to Mount
Sinai, there to acquire a new and far more extraordinary
power as the fearless oracle of the Christian Avorld. But
he had not escaped from severe trials. He found that
even on Mount Sinai he had to wrestle Avith the demons
of temptation no less than in the Avorld. Barbarous
marauders invaded the desert, and carried off many of
the hermits, and among them Nilus and his son. They
dismissed .Nilus, but reserved the young Theodulus to
sacrifice him to the Morning Star. But after the carouse
of the night the barbarians overslept themselves, and the
propitious hour of morning twilight was lost. To save
themselves trouble they sold Theodulus into slavery, and
in time he fell into the hands of a bishop, with whom Nilus

PHILIP VISITS ST. NILUS 525
found him. Struck Avith admiration for their goodness,
the bishop compelled them both to accept ordination.
Briso and Philip, with the escort, climbed the steep
ascent of Sinai, and Philip had often to lend his arm
laughingly to the panting eunuch, who, accustomed to
the luxurious ease of the palace, grumbled at the uiiAvonted
hardships to which he was exposed. When they reached
the plateau where the cell of Nilus stood, beside a single
almond-tree of which the pink blossoms Avere shining in
the daAvn of spring, the far-famed hermit and his son came
out, and gave them a courteous Avelcome. Briso presented
the Emperor's letter, and Nilus said that he would write
and seal his answer that evening. During the day he
talked long and earnestly Avith Philip about Chrysostom,
for whom he had the highest admiration, Avhich the danger
ous vicinity of Theophilus did not prevent him from ex
pressing. ' Surely,' he said, ' if, by giving up the world,
a hermit has not learnt fearlessness in the cause of God,
he has gained nothing.' He did not hesitate to express
extreme disapproval of the conduct of Arcadius. 'And
why does he send to me ? ' he asked indignantly. ' Arse-
nius is near us, in the Sketic desert. That truly great
and holy man Avas his tutor and godfather, and is far
worthier than I to advise and to pray for him.'
' His Eternity the Emperor  ' said Briso.
' Tush ! you are not in the Palace, but in the cell of
Nilus, on Mount Sinai.'
' Well, his Clemency Arcadius never liked the great
Arsenius.' : Because he did his duty to him, and chastised him,'
said Nilus, 'which Arcadius Avas too little-minded to
forgive.' Briso shuddered, and raised up a deprecating hand.
Was it not high treason to listen to such remarks?
' But Avhat could one expect of a training in which mere
children like Arcadius and Honorius sat, while their tutor
stood ? '
' But,' said Briso, ' his Eternity Theodosius  '
' His Eternity is dead,' said Nilus, smiling.
' Pardon me,' said Briso ; ' it is only a phrase Avhich I
repeat from habit. Theodosius came in, and seeing his

526 GATHERING CLOUDS
boys seated while their tutor stood, Avas so angry that he
indignantly deprived them both of their imperial orna
ments.' ' Well done ! ' said the hermit.
' Do you think I might see the great Arsenius ? ' asked
Philip. ' I Avould Avillingly introduce you to him,' said Nilus,
kindly ; ' but his temper is stern, his love of silence and
solitude is a passion. He says, " I am often sorry for
having spoken, never for having held my tongue." He
Avould scarcely even allow the Patriarch Theophilus to
visit him, and did not so much as offer him a seat. If the
mood was on him, he might drive you aAvay Avith stones,
as he once did another visitor ; or treat you as John the
Dwarf treated him, Avho, though he knew how great Arse
nius had been, merely flung him a biscuit, and let him eat
it on his knees. No, you had better not vdsit him.'
They left the next morning, and Nilus gave to Briso his
answer to the Emperor. Had Briso known the contents of
the missive he would have trembled to give it to Arcadius.
For Nilus wrote bitter reproaches against the Emperor for
having exiled Chrysostom. ' When I heard of his banish
ment,' said Nilus, ' I Avas lightning-struck with the fire of
grief. You have quenched the lamp of truth and silenced
the trumpet of God.'
If the earthquakes at Constantinople had continued
Arcadius would doubtless have been more deeply im
pressed by the rebukes of St. Nilus : but as they had ceased
to shake the foundations of the Palace, he relapsed into
his usual masterly inactivity, and let matters take their
course.

PHILIP AND ST. JEROME 527

CHAPTER LXIII
PHILIP AND ST. JEROME
Augustior urbe Romana — Bethleem. — Jer. Eq. liv. 13.
At this point Briso and Philip parted, for the Chamber
lain was eager to return to the ease of the capital, and
Philip no less eager to make his way to Nazareth. The
odulus, who was about his own age, kindly undertook to
be his guide as far as Gaza, and on the way he caught a
glimpse of not a feAv monasteries, and saw something of
the lives of hermits. If Nilus and Theodulus had won his
admiration, he was entirely disenchanted by the narrowness,
dirt, ignorance, and ferocious bigotry which were rampant
among some of those who, in virtue of a self-denial which
cost them far less than holiness would have done, passed
for exalted saints.
At Gaza he was welcomed by the dear old Bishop
Porphyrius, with whose simple and unsophisticated piety
he was greatly charmed. Porphyrius sped him on his Avay
rejoicing to Jerusalem, where he received the genial hos
pitality of the excellent Bishop John. His visit was ren
dered more delightful by the admiration which John both
felt and expressed for his beloved father and master,
Chrysostom. The Bishop, entering into the youth's
enthusiasm, went Avith him to many of the sacred places
round the city. The Holy Land became to Philip a fifth
Gospel. He had seen for many years an utter perversion
of the true Christian ideal, a staining of the crystal river
of the Water of Life by turbid influxes of Pagan super
stition and half-Pagan, half-Jewish ritual. He had been
alienated by a combination of excited babble about in
comprehensible formulae, with a savage intolerance which
looked with more fury on a barely intelligible diver-

528 GATHERING CLOUDS
gence of opinion than on the most flagrant violation of the
moral law. He had seen the whiteness of leprosy hypo
critically parading itself as the Avhiteness of innocence.
He had seen priests and bishops combining the attitude of
professional sanctity Avith the abjectness of intriguing
hatred, and posing as saints while they aicted like ruffians.
He had seen the most ostentatious Pharisaism devoid of
the elementary Christian graces, and had heard men prate
of an ideal which, in their practice, was indistinguishable
from the most reprobate Avorldliness. Nothing could have
repressed the disgust which often crept over him had it
not been for the influence of Chrysostom, the happy inno
cence of his friends David and Eutyches, the gentle self-
sacrifice of Olympias and Nicarete, and the large-hearted
simplicity of Michael, the Desposynos. ' If this be Christian
ity,' he had often said to himself amid the seething ecclesi
astical vileness of Constantinople — ' if this be Christianity,
it is a failure ; and if this be the Church, then the gates of
hell have largely prevailed against it.'
While his mind wais thus troubled the storm of ruin had
burst upon him, and, if his faith had been but a house
built upon the sand, it would have been swept into indis
tinguishable collapse. But God had spoken to him in his
anguish, and a star had shone doAvn upon him out of the
midnight. He had learnt to see that the true Church
Avas neither one particular organisation nor one sacerdotal
caste, but that it was the congregation of all true Christian
men throughout the Avorld, the mystical body of Christ,
which is the blessed company of all ftiithful people.
In Palestine, it seemed to him as if he could better
apprehend the eternail teachings of the very Christ, and
that he could see Avhat the Gospel was Avithout having
to catch mere glimpses of it through the lurid mists of
priestly usurpation, worldly corruption, and clanging con
troversies. The feAv days he spent at Jerusalem were to
him daiys of memorable happiness, as he gazed on the city
from the spot where Christ had wept over it on the Mount
of Olives ; as he Avandered to the ruins of the house of
the two sisters, and saw the grave of Lazarus at Bethany ;
as he stood awestruck on the traditional site of Golgotha ;
as he knelt to worship in the Church of the Holy

PHILIP AND ST. JEROME 529
Sepulchre, and trod on the platform-site of that ruined
temple where Jesus had so often taught. He Avould
wander for hours by himself doAvn the valleys of Hinnom
and of Jehoshaphat, and round the hills which stand about
Jerusalem. He mused for many solemn moments under
the ragged and wind-sAvept tree on Aceldama, the scene
of the suicide of Judas ; and one night, never to be for
gotten — it Avas the eve of Holy Thursday — he Avent
through the Golden Gate, wandered under the huge
gnarled olives in the Wady of the Kedron, and stood
under the flood of moonlight, alone, beneath the olive-tree
of the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, amid
Solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain.
To move alone Avith his thoughts amid such scenes was
to leave the stained river, and to bathe himself afresh in
the fountains of the dawn. He was, naturally, anxious to
visit the cavern of the Nativity, and the Bishop gave him
a letter to St. Jerome, Avhose name was famous through
out the Avorld. Philip shrank from meeting him, for he
knew that Jerome had translated into Latin the shameful
letter of Theophilus, and had thus given it vogue through
out the Western Empire. But he overcame this repug
nance, and compelled himself to forgive an outrage Avhich
could, he felt, have been due to ignorance alone.
The old scholar, who ahvays had a kindly feeling for
the young, received him graciously — and he could be
very gracious Avhen he chose. Philip would have liked to
ask him some questions about the saintly Origen, and his
larger hopes for the future of ruined man; but he was
aware how easily the jeailous suspicion of Jerome took the
ailarm, and how he was terrified out of himself by the
faintest supposition that he could entertain any sympathy
for a man whom the current religious ignorance denounced
as heretical. But when he talked of the birth of Christ,
and asked Jerome to lead him into the Chapel of the
Nativity, the old man's eye greAV bright. ' Ah ! ' he said,
'let me go Avith you. Never can I be weary of that most
sacred spot. This cavern Avas the magnet which drew me
2 m

530 GATHERING CLOUDS
hither from Rome. It makes Bethlehem the most august
spot in the world, because there, as the Psalmist sings,
Veritas orta est. Here I become little with the Little
One. Here I offer to Him my sins for His forgiveness.'
He took Philip by the hand, and led him from the
cavern in Avhich he lived, and in which he had made the
great Latin version of the Bible, into the adjoining cavern,
once the stable of the village inn at Bethlehem where
Avas born The Child
Whose tender, winning arts,
Have to His little arms beguiled
So many wounded hearts.
With indescribable emotion the youth and the old man
knelt down by the little silver star round which ran the
inscription, Sic de Virgine Maria Christus natus est.
Philip left Bethlehem with a courteous and respectful
farewell to the world-famous eremite. Jerome had pre
pared for him a little collation, at which he had the
honour of seeing the saintly Roman ladies, Paula and
Eustochium. They had left their gilded palaces on the
Aventine to accompany the great man, who, when he was
secretary to Pope Damasus, had initiated them, and so
many of the noblest ladies of Rome, into the mysteries of
Hebrew and the principles of Scriptural interpretation,
and whom in those days everyone had expected to be
elected to the Bishopric of Rome wheneArer it should fall
vacant. But Jerome had incurred the fate of all those
who are intolerant of vice and imposture, and, exactly as
Chrysostom had done, he had made a deadly enemy of
every dandy monk and vicious priest — and there were
not a few of both classes — in the great city. In spite of
the moral blamelessness of his life, he found himself
enwrapped in such a sulphurous storm of slander that
he had left the capital of Christendom denouncing her as
Babylon, and a ' purple-clad harlot,' and, almost with a
curse, shaking her dust from off his feet.
' You must be very happy here, Father ? ' said Philip,
' aAvay from the storm and stress of Rome.'
'Happy!' answered Jerome. 'Who is happy? Yes,
I am happy in the sense that, with many imperfections, I

PHILIP AND ST. JEROME 531
still strive to serve God, and devote myself to the service
of His Son. I am happy in the sense that my sins are
forgiven for Christ's sake, and I have that peace, deep
within, Avhich the surface hurricanes cannot shake. And
I am happy in this holy cave, and in the shady Avalks of
Bethlehem, and when I see the flowers bloom and hear
the song of birds in spring. But as for Avhat the world
calls happiness, it is not here. If there be any sunshine
within myself, there is little or none in my surroundings.
God has not seen fit to preserve me from the strife of
tongues, and doubtless the fault lies largely in myself. Ah !
young man, if you seek for what this world calls happiness,
craAvl along the hedge-bottoms ; lie low ; never unmask an
imposture, never rebuke a vice, never embrace an un
popular cause, never propound a distasteful truth ; join the
multitude, swim with the stream, answer the Church ac
cording to her idols. Then you will be popular, and all
men will praise your moderation, and, if you take orders,
you may even become Patriarch of your native Antioch'.'
' And then  ? ' said Philip.
' I see,' said Jerome, ' I need say no more. God has
taught you to estimate things aright. Farewell ! and take
with you an old man's blessing.'

532 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LXIV
PHILIP AND THE DESPOSYNI
Those holy fields,
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet
Which . . . were nail'd
For our advantage on the bitter cross.
Shakespeare, Henry IV., Part I., I. 1.
Thus far the journey of Philip had been a very happy
one ; and it became even happier. God, who had caused
all His waves and storms to roll over the young man's
head, was noAv leading him through sunshine in ' green
pastures and beside still Avaters.'
Leaving the kindly hospitality of the Bishop of Jeru
salem, he rode northwards, stopping with an interest which
can be imagined at Bethel and Shiloh, and resting for
an hour by Jacob's well to read from his manuscript of St.
John's Gospel the discourse of Christ to the Avoman of
Samaria. Thence he made his way to En Gannin, the tur
bulent Samaritan village on which the Sons of Thunder
had desired to call down fire from heaven ; and so into the
great plain of Jezreel. At Jezreel he rested for a night,
wandering all the evening over the hills of Gilboa, and
visiting the fountains Avhich Avere the traditional scene of
Gibeon's test of his followers, and of David's encounter
Avith the giant. Thence, with Tabor in sight, and snowy
Hermon, he crossed one of the streams of that ancient
river, the river Kishon, and approached the hills of Galilee.
Here, at the entrance of the narrow ascent in the lime
stone rocks which leads to Nazareth, he had the immense
delight of seeing his friend David, Avho had come to meet
him with mules and refreshments. They spread a carpet
on the abundant green grass among the vernal floAvers
under the pomegranates, and in their happy talk, which

PHILIP AND THE DESPOSYNI 533
blossomed with a thousand memories, David noticed with
delight that though a shadow sometimes seemed to brood
over the horizon of his friend's mind, he was again the
bright and genial Philip of former days. In answer to
eager questions, he told Philip that they could reach
Lubiyeh, which was the ancient home of the Desposyni,
in two days, and that there he Avould find Miriam well and
happy, and looking forward to his visit with an anticipa
tion which was too intense for her expression.
The sweet, green valley, with its palms and white houses
opened beneath them as they rode up the mountain-path ;
and here and there — for it happened to be a day of festival
— they met little laughing groups of the bright children
of Nazareth in their many-coloured tunics and kaftans.
Then they passed the fountain by the side of which the
maidens of Nazareth, so famed for the heritage of beauty
Avith which the Virgin is said to have endowed them, were
already assembled, carrying their earthen pitchers grace
fully on their heads or on their shoulders. One of these,
the loveliest of the band, glanced up shyly at David with
laughter in her eyes. The radiant smile with which he
met her glance seemed to transfigure his whole face.
Philip looked inquiringly at him. 'We will MIoav that
maiden at a little distance,' said David, demurely ; ' we are
to rest at her father's house to-night.'
' Is that all, David ? ' said Philip. ' Why did j^ou not
tell me before ? It would have added so much to my
happiness.' ' You have guessed my secret,' said David, blushing
like a boy. ' Yes, Philip, I am engaged to Ruth, daughter
of Andrew of Nazareth. He is a merchant. As Ave are
to be his guests, you will see my betrothed, avIio is more
beautiful even than your Miriam.'
' That I deny,' said Philip.
' And as good.'
' That is impossible. But I congratulate you, David,
Avith all my heart.'
They found a delightful meal outspread for them in
the cool court, beside a plashing fountain, and Philip was
delighted at the tameness of the white doves, which would
nestle on their shoulders, Avaiting to be fed. Everything

534 GATHERING CLOUDS
about the house was beautiful, yet simple, and Avhen
David went out with him to see Nazareth, Philip was
gracious enough to acknowledge that, though the young
Ruth could not, indeed, be compared with Miriam, she
was full of grace; and he grasped his friend's hand with
hearty congratulation.
They went to the shop where He had toiled whom men
called ' the carpenter of Nazareth.' They saw the scenes
of that sinless childhood which had groAvn up 'in wis
dom, and stature, and favour, Avith God and man.' David
shoAved the green mound where, as legend said, the boys
of Nazareth had chosen the boy Jesus for their King,
and croAvned Him with a wreath of flowers, and made
every passer-by come and kneel to Plim with homage.
Then they climbed the hill of Nazareth, Avhere He must
have stood so often Avith the wind in His bright hair and
on His cheek, as He gazed towards the blue Mediter
ranean, beyond the purple heights of Carmel, or north-
wairds to snowy Hermon, or to the plain below the hills
on Avhich His village stood, which has ever been the battle
field of Palestine.
Enchanted with all that he had seen, Philip Avas still
eager to press on, and early the next morning, when they
had breakfasted in the open courtyard, under its sheltering
vine, the mules stood ready for them, and they made their
Avay past Cana of Galilee — Avhere were still shown the six
Avater-pots of stone — to Lubiyeh. On its low hills stood
the humble farm and hamlet Avhich for four centuries had
been handed on from father to son in the family of Jude,
the Lord's brother. Michael stood at the door to meet
them, and half-hidden behind him stood Miriam. It
would require greater skill than mine to describe the
rapture' with which the long-parted lovers met ; but as
they were betrothed, and betrothal was little less sacred
than marriage, Philip was allowed to raise the girl's veil,
kiss her cheek, and fold her in his arms in one long
embrace. Then he gently pushed her back to gaze on her
face, to Avhich the dawn of womanhood had added a more
perfect loveliness. Not less earnest was her gaze on him.
Seas of bitter ainguish had flowed between them, and
though the laughter of youth still lingered on the lips and

PHILIP AND THE DESPOSYNI 535
in the eyes of Philip, an indefinable shadow, as of death,
had passed over them ; and it saddened her.
' Am I so changed, Miriam ? ' he asked, reading every
thought which expressed itself on her guileless features ;
and as she was silent for a moment, he cried, ' Oh, Miriam !
am I not the Philip whom you kneAv in those happy days?
Have illness and grief and torture made me different from
him whom once you loved ? '
Her only answer was to hide her face on his shoulder.
'You are changed, my Philip,' she murmured; 'but the
change has left you no less beautiful, no less dear. An
guish has passed over that happy face, but has not left it
less full of love. Perhaps, Philip,' she added, looking up
— ' perhaps, if God grant it, I may help to bring the old
sunlight into it again in years to come.'
He could not speak. He could only fold her to his
heart. The rigid etiquette of Eastern life Avas a little relaxed
in the simple home at Lubiyeh. The Gospel had elevated
women. From being the slaves amd playthings of men,
thrust into dull and unintellectual seclusion, they had been
uplifted into equals and helpmeets. They could move
about far more freely than of old ; and Miriam had never
been a mere silent, soulless, muffled shadow in her father's
house, but the light of her home, and the constant sharer
in her father's and her brother's thoughts. Hence, in these
days she had many opportunities to talk long and earnestly
Avith Philip over the future and the past, and they found
more and more that, not only were their hearts knit
together in the bonds of perfect love, but also that they
thought alike on many subjects of the deepest import.
For the thoughts of Miriam about the most sacred and
solemn things were of that large and simple character
which, since the days of Christ, had remained unaltered in
the family of His earthly kin.
Those were delightful days ! David showed Philip Iioav
their shepherds knew the sheep, and called them by name,
and Avalked in front of them, followed by the flocks, and
sought the lost lambs among the hills. It was spring-time.
The branches of the palms were green ; the vines gave
a sweet smell ; the voice of the turtle Avas heard in the

536 GATHERING CLOUDS
land. Seated with Miriam and David by some fountain-
side, and often outstretched on the soft green turf, Philip
was never tired of watching the eagles soaring overhead in
the deep blue, and the white pelicans winging their Avay to
the lake beneath, and the playful, crested hoopoes, and the
bright flash of the roller-bird, which looked like a living
sapphire. He would pluck the lilies-of-the-field, the .scar
let tulips, the purple arum, the golden amaryllis, and bid
Miriam weave a garland from them for her dark hair. He
Avould watch the doves settle upon some dusty heap of the
village potsherds, and then 'reflect the sunshine from
every varying plume ' as they soared upwards ; and he
thought of his own present happiness, and of the verse,
' Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as
the wings of a dove, which is covered with silver wings
and her feathers like gold.'
' But are you not afraid of the Isaurians ? ' he once
asked suddenly, as though it was impossible that such
peaceful happiness should continue on this earth.
' Not to any terrible extent,' said David. ' They have
made one great raid, but their object is not to devastate
hamlets. They have a notion that vast treasures are hid
den in Jerusalem, and specially in the tombs of the kings ;
so they sweep downwards like a torrent, and though they
do mischief and cause anxiety, we have not suffered much
from them. Lubiyeh lies out of their main routes, of
which one leads to Tyre and down the coast, and the other
the way of Genesareth, by Galilee of the Gentiles.'
' But Ave have been attacked by chance bands of the
marauders,' said Miriam.
' Don't look so alarmed, Philip,' said David, laughing.
' We have scouts as far away as Lebanon, anil whenever
the Isaurians are on the march fires flash from the top of
Hermon, and from hill to hill, in a moment, so that Ave
have the amplest notice of danger.'
'Besides Avhich we have a secret way of escape,' said
Miriam ; ' show it him, David, for he looks as frightened
as if he saw the Isaurians now.'
' What ! show our secret to this worst of Isaurian marau
ders, Avho is going to take you from us, Miriam ? '
' Yes, do,' said Philip, ' and then you will not be tempted

PHILIP AND THE DESPOSYNI 537
to hide Miriam when I come with an army to demand her,
as I shall do if you don't take care. You forget,' he said,
laughing, ' that his Eternity of Constantinople is now my
warm friend, and I am his ambassador ; so look out ! '
' We can't escape this terrible personage and tremendous
courtier, Miriam,' said David. ' Come along, then.'
He led him a little way down the hill on which they
were sitting, and showed him more than one unsus
pected cavern of large dimensions, of which the entrances
were so much hidden by tangled masses of creepers and
foliage as to be only observable when you came close to
them. ' These are our fortresses,' he said. ' Into one of these
caverns we drive some of our choicest cattle. It winds
under the hill, and has an opening out of sight on the
farther side. We leave out some of our sheep, and some
of our corn and wine and oil, for the brigands to seize if
they like. Then we carry all that Ave possess which is of
any real value into other caverns more hidden than this,
in which also our women and children are sheltered under
an armed guard. They could defend its entrance against
hundreds of men, and it also has a secret exit if the worst
came to the worst. But the robbers have never found
their Avay to the cavern, and have been content merely to
take toll as they passed — like you, you worse Isaurian ! '
' And who is going to act the Isaurian in a certain home
of Nazareth ? ' said Philip.
' Oh ! that is quite different. Nazareth is near. For
instance, AndreAV and his household are coming to visit
us to-day, for Ruth is a dear friend of Miriam's. But you
aire going to take off your booty -to the ends of the earth.'
' Only to Antioch,' said Philip. '¦ If you are very good,
you shall come and visit us there.'
Michael was rich, and pitying from his heart the heavy
trials which his young future son-in-law had suffered, he
did his utmost to make him happy. He planned a delight
ful excursion of a week to the Sea of Galilee, with mules
and tents and attendants, in which not only Miriam was
to accompany them, but also the merchant Andrew and
his daughter.
They stopped first at Kuril Hattin, the Mountain of

538 GATHERING CLOUDS
Beatitudes, and on its summit read aloud the sermon on
the Mount. Then they made their way past the little
hamlet of Hattin, where Christ had healed the leper;
doAvn the Vale of Doves, with the aromatic herbs scenting
the air beneath their feet ; under the caverns of the robbers
whom Herod had driven out. Then they passed the vil
lage of Magdala, of which the ruins and the mud huts
were covered with masses of purple convolvulus; and so
doAvn to the shining level of the silver inland sea. It Avas
an intense joy to Philip to wander over the rich and sunny
plains of Genesareth, to ride under the pink bowers of
flowering oleander, which reminded him of the banks of the
Orontes ; to watch the black-and-white kingfishers seated
patiently on the plumed reeds, and every now and then
darting down on a fish which passed through the crystal
waves with a gleam of silver or of gold. He and David
bathed on the lovely strip of silver sand beside Bethsaida,
Avhere the fishermen Peter and Andrew and the sons of
Zebedee had so often mended their nets. They listened
to the twittering of the numberless little brown birds
in the watercourses, of which, as Philip recalled, not one
falleth to the ground unmarked of God. They visited
the ruined marble synagogue, with the pot of manna
carved over its lintel, in which Christ had preached at
Capernaum. They stood astonished amid the maze of
confused debris which were once the ' Chorazin ' on which
Christ had pronounced His ' woe.' They took boats, and
rowed and sailed across to the Wady Kerza, the scene of
the healing of the Gergesene demoniac, and to the grassy,
floAvery little plain at the north of the Lake where Christ
had fed the five thousand ; and they climbed the hill to
the summit of which He had fled to find calm and solitude
for prayer.
As he moved among these scenes an indescribable peace
and brightness flowed over the soul of Philip. He seemed
to recover the simplicity and sincerity which were in Christ
Jesus, the exultation and unrippled surface of that pure,
SAveet faith which was the heritage of the early Christians.
The corrupted Christianity of Constantinople, with its
sanctimonious hypocrisies and deeply seated worldliness,
seemed to slip off from him, like some cope whose heavy

PHILIP AND THE DESPOSYNI - 539
golden broideries were stiff with pomp, but stained through
and through with defacing stains. He saw the Church of
Christ in her white robe and bridal flower, clad in her
maiden purity, with the words of simple faith and simple
hope upon her lips, and Christ's banner over her of love.
He found it infinitely less difficult to realise the true teach
ing of Christ on the shore's of Galilee than in the churches
of Severian and Arsacius.
To Philip these scenes and memories had been as a
fountain in the wilderness, but now they were coming to
an end. He shrank from another year of separation from
Miriam amid the trials and tumults of the world. They
were all sitting together outside their tents one lovely
evening, while before them the Lake gleamed in the sun
set: Clear silver water in a cup of gold
Under the sunlit steeps of Gadara.
It gleamed — His lake — the Sea of Chinnereth —
The waves He loved, the waves that kissed His feet
So many blessed days. Oh, happy waves !
O little silver, happy sea, far-famed,
Under the sunlit steeps of Gadara!
He was holding Miriam's hand, and David Avas sitting
on the grass at the feet of Ruth. With a sudden burst of
feeling he turned to Michael and said, ' Oh, sir ! Oh, father !
why should you postpone our marriage for another year ?
Life is short and uncertain; the times are troubled. If
I am to go wandering about for tAvelve long months,
who can tell what may happen? The cup of innocent
happiness has been at our lips ; why should we put it
down ? '
Michael mused a little. ' Philip,' he said at last, ' it
may be that it would be an error to postpone your union
with Miriam, and David's with Ruth. But ought you not
at least to visit Antioch first, and to see that you really
have a home ready for your Avedded life, which, in God's
will, may last for years to come ? '
' I will fly to Antioch on wings, and make all things
ready.' ' Will not Bishop Porphyry have something to say to
you? Will Antioch be horrible Constantinople over
again ? '

540 GATHERING CLOUDS
Philip smiled. Loyally respecting the Emperor's con
fidence, he had only told them in general terms of his visit
to Arcadius, and of the pension bestoAved upon him. Now
he mysteriously opened a little embroidered bag which
hung round his neck, and which Miriam had given him.
It contained the carcanet of coins Avhich Avas so precious
a relic, and the pledge of their betrothal, and a strip of
folded vellum. Unspreading this on the palm of his hand,
he displayed before their astonished eyes the protective
autograph which Arcadius had given him.
' Why, Philip,' said David, ' we shall yet see you Count
of the East ! Who ever heard of such condescension on
the part of " his Eternity " as to give his edict in auto
graph to  ? '
' To a mere clerk, you meant to say, David,' said Philip
Avith a hearty laugh. ' But though the poor clerk is now
comparatively a rich man, he Avon't quite be Count of the
East. Yet, though he is not the rose, he is near it; for
Anthemius, the new Count of the East, loves our father,
John, and Avill be kind to Miriam and me for his sake.'
' Philip,' said Michael, ' it shall be as you say. You
know that though we live here so simply, I still have some
interest in commerce  '
' Nearly all his gains are given to the poor,' Avhispered
David. ' — and one of my vessels will sail in a day or tAvo for
Asia. It can stop at Seleucia, and you can land there for
Antioch. If you find your home in readiness, come back
at once. You shall be wedded to Miriam, and David to
Ruth, on the same day, God Avilling, in the Church at
Nazareth.'

TWO HAPPY BRIDALS 541

CHAPTER LXV
TWO HAPPY BRIDALS
The vested priest before the altar stands ;
Approach, come gladly, ye prepared, in sight
Of God and chosen friends your troth to plight
With the symbolic ring, and willing hands
Solemnly joined. — Wordsworth.
Philip Avas not slow to carry out the suggestions of the
Desposynos. The ship bore him to Seleucia with soft and
favouring gales. Again, as in his boyhood, he saw Mount
Casius, crowned by the now ruinous Temple of Zeus,
flinging its huge dark purple shaidow over the iEgean.
Again he passed the enchanting grove of Daphne, with its
Avilderness of roses, its shrine of St. Babylas, and its scathed
Temple of the Sun-God. Again he saw the Orontes glim
mering under its blossoming groves. Again he traversed
the road over which he had followed the chariot which
bore Chrysostom away; he passed through the Golden
Gate ; gazed up at the huge Charonium ; saw the lovely
statue of ' the Fortune of the City ' ; shuddered as he rode
by the Praetorium and the Court of Justice, Avhich had
Avitnessed his boyish agony ; looked up at the stately build
ing with which Rufinus had bribed into silence the mur
murs of Antioch at the brutal murder of Count Lucian ;
saw the wild gorge of the Parthenius, up which he had
gone in the early morning Avith Anthusa to the cave of
Macedonius ; and, thrilling through and through with
commingling memories of shadow and sunshine, entered
Singon Street, and stood before the old familiar door from
which he had stepped forth less than eight years aigo.
Less than eight years ! Yet what unfathomable seas
seemed to separate him from the light-hearted boy whom
Chrysostom and Anthusa had snatched from misery and

542 GATHERING CLOUDS
death to share their home Avith him, and to treat him as
a much-loved son.
Old Phlegon opened the door at his summons, started
to see him, trembled, and then, in the sudden rush of emo
tion, fell back and almost fainted.
' Master Philip ! ' he murmured.
' Ah ! Phlegon,' said Philip, gaily. ' Cheer up, dear old
friend. To you, I see, I am still the little boy. But,
Phlegon, please God ! I am coming here to live with you
all always, and to bring back with me a blooming bride.'
' Miriam ? ' said the old man, Avith a faint smile.
'Yes, Miriam, about whom our Eutyches used so often
to chaff me.'
' Tell me about my dear, dear master, the Patriarch.'
' He is, as you knoAv, at Cucusus, in Armenia ; but he
is very active in God's cause, and, in spite of exile, and
trouble, and cold, and sickness, many are kind to him, and
he is happy because he trusts in God.'
' Oh, master Philip ! ' said the old slave, ' why do you
not go to him ? I would myself go in a moment, but I
am old, and, even if I survived the journey, I should be
useless to him.'
' Do you think I Avould not have shared his exile had
it been possible ? ' said Philip, reproachfully. ' But for
many weeks and months after his banishment I lay in
helpless sickness, from Avhich, but for Olympias, I could
never have recovered ; and when I got better he would
not allow me join him at Cucusus. I implored him to let
me come ; but he said — and I knoAv that he said truly —
that the thought of making lfle unhappy — though I should
not have been unhappy Avith him — would weigh him doAvn,
and add to the soreness of his trial. I could not join him
contrary to his express command and Avish. You know
all that happened at Constantinople?'
'I heard that they had tortured you, master Philip.
Oh ! how often I have wept for you, and for my master.
Weeping and prayer — that has been my life for many
a long day ! And — that clear young boy, Eutyches —
Avill he come Avith you?'
'Don't you know, Phlegon? Alas! alas! Iioav happy
would he have been to be here with me to-day ! and what

TWO HAPPY BRIDALS 543
lovely sunshine his presence would have made ! Phlegon,
that fair face will never be seen on earth again.'
'Did they kill him?'
'Do not ask me now, Phlegon. I cannot bear it.
But I knoAv — I know that his beautiful spirit is now in
bliss.' All was in exquisite order in the old home. Until
Porphyry had been intruded into the see Constantius,
the chosen candidate of all the people, aided by his good
sister Epiphania, had managed the property both of
Chrysostom and of Philip. When Porphyry had driven
him out of the city, he gladly shared the exile of
Chrysostom at Cucusus, but by the ceaseless machinations
of the bad usurper at Antioch had at last been driven to
take refuge in Cyprus. Alexander, who ultimately suc
ceeded Porphyry, and united the distracted see, had at his
departure undertaken the same charge. Philip found the
dear old home, of which every eorner Avas so familiar to
him, in perfect readiness to receive him, and his affairs
were safe and flourishing.
After a day or two devoted to making arrangements
and visiting all whom he knew and loved in Antioch, he
flew back to Seleucia. He soon found a ship bound for
Berytus, whence he made his way at his best speed to
Nazareth and Lubiyeh.
Michael no longer desired to postpone the double
marriage. It was to be celebrated at Nazareth, and
Bishop John of Jerusalem undertook to come in person
and perform it. The bright scene was long remembered.
Michael was the chief person in the neighbourhood, and
everyone in the little town knew and loved him. The
church could not contain half the number of those who
flocked to it, but they assembled outside, scattering roses
of Sharon and lilies-of-the-valley before the brides and
their maidens. Every boy in Nazareth avIio had any
voice at all was trained to join in the marriage hymns, and
rarely had such a volume of sound rung through the little
basilica, and rarely had it witnessed so gay and bright a
scene.

544 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LXVI
PHILIP AT ANTIOCH
Que' fu al mondo persona orgogliosa. — Dante, Inf. viii. 40.
In the evening Michael ordered tables to be spread on
the green turf round the fountain for the children of
Nazareth, and gave them a happy meal. The scene — the
gay dresses, the flowers, the balmy air, the pealing hymns,
the assembled children, the beautiful maidens of Nazareth,
of Avhom none were so beautiful as Miriam and Ruth —
was one never to be forgotten ; nor did the wedded pair
ever forget the fervent and touching description of Chris
tian homes given by Bishop John in his address to
them. ' Whence,' he' said, ' are Ave to find words enough fully to
set forth the happiness of that marriage Avhich the Church
cements, and the -oblation confirms, and the Benediction
signs and seals — of~"Which angels carry the news to
heaven, which God approves ? Hoav blessed is the mar
riage-bond of two believers, sharers in one hope, in one
desire, in one discipline, in one and the same service !
Both are brothers, both fellow-servants ; the two are one
flesh and one spirit. Together they pray, together they
-prostrate themselves before the throne of grace. Mutually
they teach, mutually they exhort, mutually they sustain
each other. They are alike in the Church of God, at
^the banquet of God, in straits, in persecutions, in refresh
ments. Neither conceals aught from the other ; neither
shuns the other; neither is troublesome to the other.
With freedom they visit the sick, they relieve the^^nffiggirt.
Their alms, their sacrifices, their daily diligence^findiio
impediment. They join in " psalms and hymns and spir
itual songs," in happy emulation of heart and voice.

PHILIP AT ANTIOCH 545
When Christ sees and hears such things, He rejoices.
To them He sends His peace. Where the two are there
is He, and where He is the Evil One is not.' 1 )
David and Ruth were still to live in the house of their
father, for David was needed to relieve Michael of the
cares of business and agriculture combined ; but after a
blissful week spent largely in the open air and under the
Avoods beside the Sea of Galilee, Philip and his bride
started on their journey to Antioch. They went by land,
for Philip did not like to expose Miriam to the possible
storms of the Mediterranean. They therefore travelled
leisurely, and visited Tyre, and Sidon, and Damascus, and
Berytus, on the way.
The household at Antioch was assembled to meet and
greet them, scattering roses and lilies. Miriam entered
with joy upon the modest duties of her home, while Philip
Avatched for an opportunity to occupy his talents as best
he could in the service of God and man.
He had scarcely been a month in Antioch when they
were troubled by the imperious threats of Bishop
Porphyry. He was well aAvare that Philip was living in the house
which belonged to Chrysostom, and had been regarded by
him in the light of an adopted son. He hated Chrysostom
with the concentrated hatred of a base nature ; and he
hated Philip for his sake, and was determined to use every
means to crush him.
He therefore sent a priest to summon Philip into his
presence, in order to coerce him into submission, and if he
had not been under the immediate protection of the
Emperor, Philip must either have fled from Antioch or
suffered fresh experiences of priestly dungeons and priestly
tortures. But as it was he knew that he was perfectly
secure, and that Porphyry would never have dared to
molest him had he been aware that he was under the
sacrosanct shadow of Imperial kindness.
Philip dismissed the priest, whom he astonished by the
message that he denied the right of Bishop Porphyry to
summon him, but that as a matter of courtesy he would go.
1See Tertullian's Ad Uxorem ad fin.
2n

546 GATHERING CLOUDS
Before he went, however, he thought it well to pay his
respects to Anthemius, the Count of the East. The Count
gave him a cordial welcome, and had the Emperor's com
mands to protect him. He had often seen him at the
Patriarcheion, and knew in what high esteem he had been
held by Chrysostom, Avhom he himself regarded with affec
tionate reverence. For the intruding Bishop of Antioch
he felt a scarcely disguised contempt, and, on hearing that
he meant to interfere Avith Philip's rights, he determined
to surprise him by a visit at the very time at Avhich he had
ordered the young man to come.
So Philip Avent to the Bishop's palace, where he found
himself received in the hall with the shrugs and sneers of
Porphyry's clergy. He strode through the midst of them
Avith indifference, only informing the attendant that he
had come by the Bishop's appointment.
The attendant announced him, and came out, but Philip
Avas not bidden to enter. He was left standing, and not
being even asked to take a seat, he at last went and sat
down on a bench at a distance, waiting for some message ;
but not a word was spoken to him, and there was a silence
as of night, while the priests glowered on him Avith tragic
countenances. Luncheon was going on, but he was os
tentatiously ignored, as though he were not present at
all. Patience had never ranked among Philip's most con
spicuous virtues, and as the attendants came in and out,
summoning others Avho arrived later, but not admitting
him into ' the shrine ' where Porphyry sat, he at last started
up, and said in a voice indignant enough to be heard not
only through the hall but behind Porphyry's curtain :
' Tell Bishop Porphyry that he summoned me ait this
hour. If he does not wish to see me, I shall go. I have
no time to Avaste.'
The priests, accustomed to the awful deference which
their bishop demanded, were thunderstruck at the message.
'Insolent!' exclaimed one of them, advancing with a
threatening gesture.
' Touch me with one of your fingers,' said Philip, ' and I
will bring you before the Court of the Praefect.'
He turned round, and Avas striding out of the hall, when

PHILIP AT ANTIOCH 547
the attendant hurried up, saying that he could now be
admitted. He entered the Bishop's presence in angry mood, and as
he was received Avithout even the semblance of courtesy,
he did not choose to go on his knees and kiss the Bishop's
hands, but contented himself with a slight boAV.
' Hoav dare you ! ' asked Porphyry, purple in the lace
with rage.
' How dare I — what ? '
' How dare you come into my presence Avithout an obei
sance ? '
' I did not know that they were regarded as compulsory.'
' Am I not a bishop ? '
Philip was silent. ' You are no true bishop of Antioch,'
he thought. ' You were intruded into the see, against the
wishes of the people, by a conspiracy and a trick.'
Porphyry read his thoughts, and angrily exclaimed :
' I have sent to order you to communicate publicly Avith
me, or to take the consequences.'
' I am unable to do so,' said Philip.
' I know your fanatical devotion to that impure demon,
the expelled Patriarch of Constantinople ; nevertheless,
the Emperor's decree bids all men to communicate with
me, and you shall do it.'
' He whom you call an impure demon,' said Philip, Avith
flashing eyes, ' is a saint of God, whom I revere with all
my heart.'
' Then you refuse to communicate with me ? '
Philip remained silent.
' Ah ! ' said the Bishop. ' We will soon tame this con
tumacy. You have felt the rack before, I think ? Was
it pleasant ? '
' I have felt the rack, and doubtless it might be your will
to inflict it again,' said Philip, swept away with uncontrol
lable passion ; ' but it will not be in your power.'
' His Excellency, the Count of the East is here with his
lictors,' announced the attendant priest.
' Admit his Excellency,' said Porphyry, ' and take this
young man out. I have not done Avith him.' 1
1 See Greg, of Nyssa, Ep. 1. He was treated exactly in this way by the
haughty Helladius, Bishop of Caesarea.

548 GATHERING CLOUDS
' No ! ' said Philip, with a smile.
As Philip went out the Count Avas entering, and said to
him, ' Come back with me ; my visit concerns you.'
Anthemius greeted the Bishop with cold dignity, and
said, 'I observe that my secretary, Philip, has been with
you. I have come to tell your Religiosity that he is not
to be molested by ecclesiastical squabbles.'
' Ecclesiastical squabbles ! ' exclaimed Porphyry. ' The
Emperor's authority is, I should hope, loftier than that of
your Excellency, and he has expressly ordered everyone in
his dominions to hold the faith held by me, Theophilus
of Antioch, and Acacius of Beroea.'
' Do you question my orders ? ' asked Anthemius.
' I shall consult the Emperor on the subject, Count.'
'Be it so. Has your Religiosity ever seen the Emperor's
autograph? '
'No.'
' Then you shall see it now. I haAre just received this
order from him to take Philip into the public official ser
vice ; ' and Anthemius shoAved him an order written by
the Emperor's own hand.
' That cannot cancel the previous edict,' said Porphyry,
still resolute to coerce.
' But this exempts me from it,' said Philip. ' Your Re
ligiosity will now be able to recognise both the purple ink
and the Imperial signature.'
He laid on the table the protective order which the
Emperor had given him. ' The Count of the East,' he
added, ' is aAvare of Avhat this order says. After this your
Beatitude will perhaps think it safer to persecute the un
protected, and to leave me alone.'
Bishop Porphyry stared at the document, and grew pale.
He greatly feared that Anthemius and Philip might make
an unfavourable report of him to the Emperor. As he
remained silent they boAved and withdrew. The priests,
who came in expecting to receive an order from Porphyry
to throw Philip into prison and confiscate his goods, were
received by the discomfited Bishop with a burst of fury,
and bidden never again to allude to the subject.

THE EXILE AT CUCUSUS 549

CHAPTER LXVII
THE EXILE AT CUCUSUS
' Dirotti brevemente ' — mi rispose,
Perch' io non temo di venir qua entro ;
Temer si dee di sole quelle cose
Ch' hanno potenza di fare altrui male :
Dell' altre no, che non son paurose. Dante, Inf. ii. 86-90.
And now a prospect of the utmost peace and happiness
seemed to open itself before the path of Philip. There
Avas something about him Avhich conciliated the regard of
honest men, and Count Anthemius was attracted by his
character, as the Praefect Aurelian had been, and so many
others, including the Emperor himself. To be able to
recognise capable and trustworthy men is one of the most
valuable gifts which rulers can possess, and Anthemius
possessed it in an eminent degree. He appointed Philip
to a responsible and lucrative office in the Praetorium which
placed him near his own person, gave him great influence,
and offered opportunities for winning still higher distinc
tion. To this public good fortune was added the singular
happiness of Philip's home. He was surrounded by the
household of Chrysostom, who were all Christians, and
were of tried fidelity. Miriam, trained in refined simplic-
ity which wealth had never tempted into luxury, not only
proved herself an excellent manager of his domestic affairs,
but also undertook with ardour those kindly offices among
the poor Avhich enabled her throughout life to realise how
true it is that The high desire that others may be bless'd
Savours of heaven.
In due time a little son Avas born to them. Plaunted by
the memories of the past, and unwilling that prosperity

550 GATHERING CLOUDS
should make him forget them, Philip called his boy
Eutyches, and the health and beauty of the infant seemed
of good promise for the years to come. When the child
was born Philip made his way to the cavern in Avhich
Macedonius, the barley-eater, still held his dim and dreary
abode. Worn and ill, and often weighed down by un
speakable fits of sadness, the white-haired old man wel
comed him with eagerness, and gladly assented to his
request that he would come doAvn and stand as godfather
at the baptismal font for the firstborn of the young man
whose life in his early boyhood he had made a brave effort
to save. The kind consent of Macedonius was fertile of
further consequences, for, now that years and infirmities
were increasing upon him like a flood, he was persuaded
to leave his cavern, only visiting it occasionally, and to
make his home in a cell Avhich they built for him in the
valley hard by. Here he was close beside their home, and
here Miriam could provide for him some of the alleAdations
necessitated by his state of health.
But never for a single day was Chrysostom absent from
the thought of his foster-son. In one of the letters which
they interchanged on every opportunity Philip had asked
him always to be with him in spirit at five o'clock on
every afternoon, that their mutual prayers might mingle,
like incense in the golden censer of the great High
Priest. Letters were often lost en route, .for the brigands
avIio infested every mountain-path frequently robbed
the messengers, and made all communication precarious.
Still, Chrysostom had been kept informed by Philip of
his recovery, his travels, his marriage, his settlement in
Antioch, his domestic felicity ; and had again and again,
with firm consideration, forbidden Philip to sacrifice his
own young life — as he had been eager to do — by coming
to Cucusus. Even this loving prohibition might have been
unavailing if Philip had not been convinced that the dif
ficulties of the Patriarch's situation Avere in some respects
enhanced by the presence of every new visitor Avho came
to see him in that far-aAvay and afflicted toAvn. Tavo
devoted friends performed for him e\'ery office Avhich a
Avatchful love could suggest. One Avas his aunt, the
Deaconess Sabiniana, his father's sister, a lady of exalted

THE EXILE AT CUCUSUS 551
saintliness ; the other Avas the good presbyter Evethius,
who had accompanied him on his journey. A rich citizen
of Cucusus, named Dioscorus, had given up to his use
his own house, which was the best in the town, and had
himself retired to a neighbouring villa. Adelphius, the
excellent bishop of this out-of-the-Avay retreat, thought
no kindness burdensome Avhich he could extend to the
illustrious exile. Sopater, the governor, waited on him
like a son. At first it seemed as if the tranquillity of his
new home and the absence of tumults and enemies Avould
be better for his health and happiness than Constantinople,
with its measureless insults ancl cruel persecutions. But
when the snows began to cover the peaks of Mount
Taurus, and winter clutched the whole region in its icy
grasp, the Patriarch's sufferings Avere cruel. He was
shaken by a severe cough. If he kept up large fires, the
smoke nearly suffocated him ; if he let the fire sink Ioav,
he was perishing with cold. Accustomed to the soft cli
mate of Antioch and Constantinople, he was compelled to
take to his bed, Avhere, tormented with insomnia, and filled
Avith disgust for every kind of food, he lay covered with
blankets and only just enough alive to feel life's miseries.
His woes were alleviated when spring returned. He
could enjoy the beauty of the opening flowers and the
balmy vernal breeze ; above all, communication Avith the
outer world became possible once more, and he could
receive the letters despatched by Olympias and Philip.
Yet all the while death was at his door. The Isaurians
Avere a constant terror. They plundered the villas, they
harried the cattle, they burnt the farmhouses on every
side, they slew all who offered resistance. To take a walk
outside the walls was to run the risk of being captured
and carried off to the mountains, only to be redeemed, if
at all, by an exorbitant ransom. At times the alarm was
so acute that numbers fled for refuge to the dense Avoods
which clothed the mountain-sides, and took shelter in
what dens or caves they could find. On one occaision
even Chrysostom and his little household were driven to
this miserable resource.
This state of things became so intolerable that it was
necessary to fly for shelter to Arabissus, a lonely fortress

552 GATHERING CLOUDS
on the hills twenty leagues distant, built on the summit
of almost inaccessible rocks. There, too, Chrysostom met
with kindness from the governor, and from Otreius, the
bishop, or, as Ave should call him, the vicar of the hamlet ;
but the place Avas worse than a prison. He was now
unable to take the daily exercise which Avas essential for
his health, and could only gaze Avith indescribable sadness
on the dreary prospect of icy mountain-peaks and leagues
of unbroken snow. Soon, too, the fortress was overcroAvded
by the numbers of hapless fugitives avIio fled to it for
safety, and famine and pestilence added to the accumu
lated forms of anguish. Nor even here Avere they safe
from the hungry and ruthless bandits. Some of the more
active — especially the young men — in sheer despair
wandered into the forests, and tried to make their escape
into more hospitable regions ; but they paid the forfeit
with their lives, and their bodies were found frozen to
death. One night three hundred Isaurians attacked
Arabissus itself, and Avere only repelled after a desperate
fight. Of this peril Chrysostom was, happily, unconscious.
He Avas asleep, and as they did not aAvake him, he did not
hear of the averted peril till the morning had brought
safety. It can easily be understood that, under circumstances
so deplorable, it was undesirable for Chrysostom's own
sake that he should be burdened with the anxiety of extra
visitors, whose difficulties would deepen his distress. A
young reader named Theodotus came to him from Antioch.
His father was a man of noble birth, from whom the youth
had wrung a reluctant consent to visit the exile. He
made his way to Arabissus in spite of many dangers, and
brought with him splendid presents from his father.
These Chrysostom returned Avith a courteous letter, and
sent back Avith it the young Theodotus. How could he
be of any real use in training the young man in a scene
so harassed with massacre and tumult, brigandage and
conflagration ?
In spite of these difficulties, and the Patriarch's obvious
reluctance to entangle others in his own calamities, so
many flocked to him, and he occupied so exalted a position
in the eyes of the Christian world, that he at last re-

THE EXILE AT CUCUSUS 553
kindled the undying embers of jealousy and hatred in
the mind of Atticus, the Patriarch who had succeeded
Arsacius at Constantinople, and still more in the cankered
hearts of Severian and Porphyry. 'All Antioch is at
Cucusus,' wrote Porphyry in savage ill-temper to Severian.
' This man, disgraced, banished, condemned, is directing
missions to Persia and Phoenicia; preventing me from
acquiring my just authority at Antioch ; uniting the Pope
of Rome and all the bishops of the West in a conspiracy
against the Patriarch of Alexandria, the Patriarch of
Constantinople, and myself. This dead man continues to
be a hindrance and a terror to the living ; this conquered
heretic is getting the upper hand of us victorious Catho
lics. You must leave no stone unturned to frighten or
cajole the Emperor to remove him to some still more dis
tant and desolate spot of the Empire — the farther, the
better; and if he dies, or disappears on the way, or falls
into the hands of Huns or Isaurians, so much the better
for the Christian world.'
Armed Avith this precious missive, Severian paid a visit
to Atticus, and, Avith soft murmurs of regret and ready
tears of crocodilian magnanimity, implored him, for the
sake of that peace Avhich is so dear to all Christian hearts,
to procure from Arcadius an edict for the farther banish
ment of the ex-Patriarch John. When the bishops had
taken on their own heads the responsibility of Chrysos
tom's expulsion, Arcadius Avould fain have been rid of
the matter, and the deaths, miseries, and earthquakes which
had ensued made him still more desirous to meddle with
it no further. But Atticus knew on which string to harp.
He persuaded the Emperor that the name of John was
being used as a nucleus of conspiracy of the Western
against the Eastern Church, and that Honorius and Stilico
— these were the two names which would most surely
rouse the Emperor to sullen wrath — would make these
ecclesiastical matters an excuse for the most dangerous
political interference. With little difficulty, by the use of
this Aveapon, he procured an edict for the removal of Chrys
ostom to the remotest corner of the entire Empire. Seve
rian's malignity had already hit upon the place. It was
the desperately repellent and ruined town of Pityus, on the

554 GATHERING CLOUDS
Euxine. There he Avould find no Christians at all, and in
the midst of Heniochs, Lazes and Huns, might eat away
his heart in vain.
The management of the affair was entrusted to Atticus
and Severian. The tAvo officers who had accompanied
Chrysostom to his exile at Cucusus — young Anatolius
and Theodotus — had by accident been kind-hearted men,
who had treated the sufferer with consideration, and
availed themselves of every alleviation of his journey
which circumstances allowed. The bishops took care
that this mistake should not be made a second time. The
two officers selected were men in whom no capability for
compassion was to be suspected. They had been given
secretly to understand that the bishops would give them
a handsome recompense and secure their early promotion
if they acquitted themselves satisfactorily of their task.
By still darker innuendoes it was made plain, even to their
obtuseness, that it Avas of no great consequence whether
Chrysostom e\ren arrived at Pityus or no. If he ' happened '
to die by the Avay, then reward and promotion would be
equally, and perhaps even more, secure, Avhile at the same
time much annoyance and difficulty would be prevented.
— The naimes of these two officers were Secundus and
Cythegius. ' Pretty plain that ! ' said Cythegius to his comrade as
he left the Thomaites, where the bishops had given them
instructions. 'Yes,' said Secundus, with a broad grin on his hard
features. ' It is only the roundabout way Avhich their
Religiosities have, and it means " murder him," only do it
so sloAvly that people won't call it by the ugly name of
murder.' 'He is worth the Avhole lot of them put together,' said
Cythegius. ' That is no affair of ours,' replied the other, shrugging
his shoulders. ' It isn't we avIio will have to so to hell
for it.'

THE MARTYRDOM 555

CHAPTER LXVIII
THE MARTYRDOM
Fateberis non ilium martyrio, sed martyrium illi defuisse.
Edd. Benedict. Vit. S. Ambrosii.
Philip received early intelligence of the desolating news
that even Cucusus was not regarded as remote enough to
destroy the influence and starve out the life of his beloved
father, and that in the frightful ruins of Pityus he was
doomed to end his days. The news decided him to action.
He thought at first of flying to Constantinople and exert
ing his whole influence with Aurelian and the Emperor to
secure a recall of the edict. But this would have been a
desperate task, and it was already too late. When the news
reached Philip the escort Avhich was to remove Chrysostom
had set out upon its way.
The only course which remained was to start for Ara
bissus at all costs, and do everything which could be
done to render the exile's journey more tolerable, and to
gain for him every possible comfort in his last retreat.
Great as was the sacrifice involved, neither Philip nor
Miriam felt a moment's hesitation, in the belief that this
was the call of duty. So Philip entrusted Miriam to the
watchful care of his friends at Antioch, Anthemius him
self giving ready leave of absence, and promising to see
that Miriam should not be molested by any subterranean
plots of vengeance concocted by Bishop Porphyry and his
priests. Philip left her with the less anxiety because
the holy Macedonius was close at hand to counsel and
protect her.
Then he sped over the bleak hills and burning plains,
amid numberless dangers, which in the. absorbing eager
ness of his purpose he scarcely noticed. Nobody who saw

556 GATHERING CLOUDS
him Avith hardly any luggage, stained with incessant travel,
and forced to content himself daily Avith fare much worse
than coarse, Avould have conjectured that he bore on his
person a considerable amount of gold. From any danger
Avhich might arise from provincial bishops or jacks-in-office
he Avas sufficiently guarded by a letter which he carried
Avith him, and by the Emperor's autograph, Avhich he con
cealed in his clothes, to be produced only as a last resource.
He reached Arabissus without serious mishap, and Chrys
ostom enjoyed one last gleam of earthly happiness as he
pressed to his heart his loving and faithful son.
Philip fretted Avith vain indignation at the prison-like
squalor of the Patriarch's surroundings, which Avere nearly
as bare as, and far less wholesome than, the hermit's cavern
on Mount Silpius ; but he Avas filled with admiration at
the noble fortitude with which the Saint bore every hard
ship, and the beautiful serenity of his untroubled faith.
In two days Secundus and Cythegius, Avith their quater
nion of soldiers, arrived, and issued the surly order that
next morning the journey to Pityus must be begun.
Neither Evethius nor any servant Avas to be permitted to
accompany the Patriarch or attend to his needs ; and when
the officers looked at his frail and shrunken figure, and ob
served how weak and ill he Avas, they felt quite certain that
without an overt act of murder they Avould not miss the
reward and promotion which the bishops had promised them.
Come Avhat Avould Philip was determined to be with
Chrysostom, nor was he ever far from him during the last
three harassed months of his friend's misery. The orders
of the officers were to avoid all tOAvns, lest the sight of
their illustrious prisoner should awaken the populations
to indignant pity. They were only to stop at wretched
country villages, where none of the conveniences of life
were to be had, where the dirt and vermin were an intoler
able annoyance, and where even the rudest necessaries
Avere barely to be procured. Philip soon divined their
ruthless purpose when, following close upon their tracks,
he observed, on the first day of their journey, that the
escort resented the slightest exhibition of pity toAvards
their prisoner, and pelted amcl insulted everyone Avho
showed him any compassion.

THE MARTYRDOM 557
He would not start with them, for he was afraid that
they might invoke authority to prevent this ; but when
they were on their way he followed them at no great
distance, and stopped at the village where they rested for
the night. Here he sought an interview Avith the tAvo
officers. He found that Secundus Avas a man of impracti
cably brutal character, who Avas determined to carry out
his instructions to the letter. Philip saw that he had
made up his mind that Chrysostom should never reach
Pityus alive, and that on this consummation, regardless
of conscience or compassion, he intended to btise his claim
to advancement and reAvard. In Cythegius, on the other
hand, all sparks of humanity were not wholly quenched ;
but, unfortunately, Secundus was the senior officer.
Philip asked them to allow him to accompany the expe
dition, and to do Avhat he could to save the Patriarch from
needless sufferings, which to one at his age and in his state
of health could not but be terrible. He pointed out that,
in endeavouring to procure little comforts for Chrysostom,
lie would be able at the same time to make the hardships
of the Avay a little less intolerable to the officers them
selves and their quaternion. Secundus Avas not only un
willing to make this small concession, but declared, with
an oath, that he would not alloAV Philip to accompany
them at all. He had been promised gold and a step in
military rank ' if he did Avhat was expected ; ' and ' I mean,'
he said, ' to stick to my instructions.'
' There is nothing in your instructions to forbid my
coming with you,' said Philip. ' I do not wish to traverse
your orders ; I only plead Avith you for a little ordinary
humanity.' ' A fig for your humanity ! ' said Secundus.
' There is no harm in letting him come Avith us, and
attend on the Patriarch,' said Cythegius.
Secundus glared at him. ' I aim senior here,' he said ;
' and as for you, young man, clear out of this, or you may
yet taste the rhinoceros-hide on your back.'
Philip was in a blaze of indignation, but he felt that
the bully Avas a coAvard. He had meant to offer the
wretch a bribe, but now he determined rather to appeal
to his fears.

558 GATHERING CLOUDS
' Man ! ' he said, ' you do not know to whom you are
talking. I see that you have been bribed by Atticus and
Severian practically to murder your prisoner, and that
you expect great advantages from doing so. Take care !
Exercise the least violence to me, and your reward shall
be a gibbet. Did you ever hear of Anthemius, Count of
the East? Yes? Then read that, and don't attempt to
hector and swagger to me.'
He flung on ""the table the safeguard of Anthemius,
Avhich Secundus read Avith some alarm.
'And perhaps you have heard of a certain Count
Aurelian, Consular and Praetorian Praefect, avIio will
make very short work Avith common men like you. Then
read that' — and he showed him a mandate Avhich he had
obtained from Aurelian, that all soldiers should treat him
with civility.
' Once more, it is hardly likely that a man of your
stamp should ever have seen the purple ink and the
Imperial signature; but do you think your bishops can
save you against the sacred majesty of the Emperor? '
He displayed before the officer's astonished eyes the
autograph of Arcadius, and said, ' Your fellow-officer is a
witness ; and it is perfectly Avell known to many great
personages that I am here, and that I mean to go all the
Avay with you ; and perhaps you will learn henceforth
that it is as much as your head is worth to talk to me of
the rhinoceros-hide again.'
Secundus was hoav thoroughly crestfallen, but he re
tained his dogged sullenness. Philip took occasion that
night to see Cythegius alone, promised him a sum of
money if he would meet his Avishes, and pointed out that
he might be even more likely to gain advancement from
men like Anthemius and Aurelian than from the Bishops
Atticus and Severian. Cythegius promised to offer no
molestation either to the Patriarch or to Philip, and
to do all he could ; but he said that he could not prevent
any arrangements made by his senior officer.
So Philip day by day went with Chrysostom, and
exerted himself to the utmost to cheer and comfort him.
They had many a long and delightful conversation about
the days which Avere no more ; and the sweetness, courtesy,

THE MARTYRDOM 559
and resignation of the afflicted victim so deeply touched
the hearts of Cythegius and one of the soldiers that,
whenever a secret opportunity offered, they testified to
him their pity and goodwill, and did their best to lighten
his sorrows. The old man, as he toiled along, nearly
always on foot, used to lean on Philip's arm ; and Philip
was deeply thankful that he was able to do much in many
Avays to maike life a little less cruelly intolerable to his
father and benefactor. But he was powerless to interfere
with the fell purpose and dogged malignity of Secundus.
Even for a young and hale traveller, with all appliances
and aids to boot, a journey over such rude paths, and
byways Avhich forced them to climb rocky passes and
traverse torrent-beds and mountain-streams, would have
been severely trying, especially since its pitiless fatigue
was so tediously prolonged, and no opportunities for rest
were given. It took them no less than three months to
make their miserable way from Arabissus to Comana.
Determined to kill his victim, but without actual violence,
the brutal soldier availed himself of every change of
Aveather to hasten his purpose. During their journey the
roads and the country were daily burned to dust by the
broiling heats of the summer and early autumn ; but,
hoAVever scorching the heat, Secundus would give the
pitiless order to advance, and exulted to watch Chrys
ostom's fainting and stumbling footsteps as, supported by
Philip's arm, he barely crawled along, red all over with
prickly heat, and with the hot sun blazing on his bald,
uncovered head. If violent thunderstorms came on a
new opportunity offered itself; and he relied on the
chance of the Patriarch's being smitten down with some
deadly fever, as he forced him to trudge along with all his
clothes wet through, and with streams of water trickling
down his back and breast. It was a matter of daily
astonishment to all the party that Chrysostom so long
bore up against this frightful ill-usage ; and it really
seemed possible that under Philip's watchful care the
murderous purpose of Secundus aind his abettors might
be defeated after all, and Chrysostom might reach Pityus
alive. There Avere many altercations between Philip
and the officer on the way. Philip remonstrated with

560 GATHERING CLOUDS
the utmost impetuosity of his nature, and even ventured
to threaten the Avretch that he should rue his cruelty.
Secundus would certainly have killed him if he had
dared; but he trembled at the thought of the vengeance
which would befall him from the Emperor himself. For
Cythegius often took Philip's part ; and even the soldiers,
Avon by his geniality and by his secret but liberal gifts,
shoAved him their sympathy as much as they dared.
Philip on one occasion denounced Secundus to his face,
and told him that even if he succeeded in getting rid
of the Patriarch bjr over-fatigue and cruelty, many who
were in high authority should certainly hear of it, and
they Avere men by whom his future chances of promotion
were more likely to be influenced than by two bad eccle
siastics. At last the unhappy cortege arrived at Comana Pontica,
in Cappadocia. There it would have been possible for
Chrysostom to obtain some of those resources for health
and refreshment of which he stood so sorely in need.
But Secundus had no intention that they should rest
there. He hurried surreptitiously through the most
distant outskirts of the toAvn, and did not stop till they
had reached a little martyry some six miles beyond it.
There they had to stop for the night, more because the
officers and soldiers themselves needed rest and sleep
than from any consideration for the sufferer.
The little chapel of the martyry was dedicated to St.
Basiliscus, a Bishop of Comana who, in the third century,
had suffered martyrdom with Lucian at Antioch, at the
hands of the Pagan emperor, Maximus Daza. Here the
good provincial priest regarded it as an honour to be
allowed to do his utmost for the Saint avIio was obviously
not far from death. He gave up to him his own bed, and,
to the disgust of Secundus, lavished on him every comfort
in his poAArer. For the last time on earth Chrysostom
had a refreshing sleep, and in his dream the martyred
bishop, St. Basiliscus, appeared to him Avith his palm-
branch in his hand, and said, ' Be of good cheer, brother
John ; to-morrow Ave shall be together.' The priest, too,
had a vision of St. Basiliscus that same night, avIio said
to him, ' Prepare a place for our brother John, for he is

THE MARTYRDOM 561
coming to join me ! ' Convinced of the reality of his
vision, the priest entreated Secundus to postpone the hour
of starting at least till noon. The Praetorian's only answer
Avas to give the order for instant departure.
With an aching heart, Philip, in spite of Secundus,
took his place beside his father, supporting him, and
pouring into his ear the Avorcls of hope and tender conso
lation. In the extremity of his Aveakness and feverish
unrest Chrysostom still shoAved a serene and indomitable
courage. ' You will not be burdened with the care of me much
longer, my Philip,' he said, '- 1 feel that my sands of life
are running low.'
' Oh, my father ! ' he said, ' you do not mean it when
you talk of burdening me. To you I owe everything —
my life, all the happiness I have ever had — yes, my very
soul.' Chrysostom smiled on him with a look of affection.
' I know your love for me, my boy,' he said ; ' but I saw
St. Basiliscus last night in my sleep, and I shall not out
live the day.'
' If we could but get you safely to Pityus,' said Philip,
' you might find friends there, and still have blessed and
tranquil years.'
' As God will, Philip ; but if to me to live is Christ,
assuredly to die is gain. I will not ask, with Euripides,
" Who knows if death be life, and life be death ? " for we
knoAv that to those Avho love God death is life. Nor Avill
I say, as Socrates did to his judges, " I go to death, and
you to life, but Avhich is the better God alone knows,"
for to us Christ has revealed which is the better, and
St. Paul has told us that to depart and be with Christ is
not only better, but " far, far the better." :
'But Iioav ill can you be spared in this corrupted and
distracted Church of Christ ! '
'No man is necessary, Philip. The work goes on
though the workman passes away. Dark times are
coming on the world; but Christ has many a servant to
labour for Him, not more sincere, I trust, by God's grace,
than I am, but much more wise and great.'
The words were spoken slowly and with difficulty.
2o

562 GATHERING CLOUDS
Chrysostom gasped for breath, and a few moments later
sank fainting into Philip's arms. They had advanced
about thirty furlongs from the martyry, and were com
pelled to halt.
' Fling a little water over him,' said Secundus, ' and
press on. It is only a device to gain time.'
' He is dying,' said Philip. ' Surely you will not have
the brutal barbarity to drag him farther? If you do, you
will have to carry back a corpse on your shoulders to the
martyry.' Philip, supporting the head of Chrysostom on his arm,
had sprinkled a feAv drops of water over his burning face
and poured a few drops of wine through his parched lips,
and the Patriarch revived a little.
' March on ! ' snarled Secundus.
' March on then by yourself,' said Philip ; ' not one step
farther shall the Patriarch go.'
' We will see to that,' said the officer, lifting the flat
of his sword to strike Philip in his rage.
' At your peril ! ' said Philip, looking at him, and the
wretch cowered under his glance, while Cythegius and
the soldiers strode forward for his protection.
' It is useless to advance,' said Cythegius. ' The Patri
arch will never outlive to-day.'
The assenting murmur of the four soldiers showed that
they agreed with their junior officer.
' This is mutiny,' said Secundus savagely ; ' you shall
ansAver for it.'
Cythegius took him by the arm and led him aside.
' Comrade,' he said, ' do not be an utter fool. Your only
chance of getting either your reward or your promotion
is by not driving that young man to desperation. Each
of these soldiers — yes, and I too, if you drive me too far
— would be a Avitness against you. It is as much as your
head is worth not to let Avell alone.'
' March on ! ' he roared in a frenzy of rage.
' Not one step farther Avill Ave march with a dying man,'
said the soldiers.
' If you persist,' said Cythegius to Secundus, ' we will
disarm you, and put you under arrest/
Secundus cursed and swore, and stamped his feet on

THE MARTYRDOM 563
the ground in fury ; but seeing that it Avas useless, and
might be dangerous, to persevere, he sullenly gave the
order to return to the martyry.
Chrysostom could no longer walk, but, aided by Cythe
gius and the soldiers, Philip, noAv contemptuously disre-
gardful of the orders of Secundus, cut down some straight
branches of the wood through which they were passing,
improvised a rude litter, heaped clothes upon it, and,
gently lifting the half- unconscious exile, helped to carry
him back to the chapel. When they arrived, the priest,
who had foreseen their return, had food and cordials ready,
and once more laid Chrysostom on his own bed.
' I am dying, presbyter,' he said ; ' I Avould fain die
clad in white robes, to remind me of the chrisom garment
of my baptism.'
The priest brought out some white vestments, and
Philip helped to robe the dying Patriarch. As he took
off his own garments, even to the shoes, he distributed
them to those present, for Avhom in after-days' they acquired
the value of priceless relics. To Cythegius and the sol
diers avIio had shoAvn him any kindness he gave what
little money he possessed and other trifling souvenirs. To
the kind priest he left his pallium and a little golden altar-
vessel. And then he asked to be left alone with Philip.
' Dear son,' he said, ' you, whose love and loyalty have
brightened many happy years and solaced many troubled
ones, you, who have been a son, and almost more than a
son to me, the childless old man — may God bless you a
thousand times for all your goodness ! You have passed
through terrible trials for my sake ; may He requite you
with His hundredfold blessings ! May the light of His
countenance shine upon you in a happy home bright with
children's faces ! May your little Eutyches grow up to
fill your cup with earthly happiness, and your Miriam be
your joy and comfort even unto death ! '
Philip was kneeling by the bed, his face hidden in his
hands, and he could not speak.
' Why should you weep so much for me, dear Philip ? '
said Chrysostom. ' There is no cause for sorrow here.
The most troubled days of a troubled life, thank God ! are
ending. " I have fought the good fight. I have finished

564 GATHERING CLOUDS
my course. I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is
laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord,
the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day."
' Nay, nay, Philip, you must not Aveep like this. Oil
the contrary, be glad for my sake ; and I want you to tell
Olympias, and all my old friends at Constantinople, and
my old servants in Antioch, that I die in the faith and
fear of God and of His Christ, and in the communion of
the Spirit, perfectly happy. Take this gold chain off my
neck, which I have ahvays Avorn under my robe because
it was left me by my mother, Anthusa. A golden medal
hangs from it with a figure of the Good Shepherd on it.
Wear it always, Philip, for my sake. And now, farewell,
and receive my blessing.'
He laid his weak hands on the head of his kneeling son,
and fervently blessed him. Then he asked to be carried
to the Holy Table and to receive for the last time the
blessed mysteries of the Eucharist. He followed the brief
supplications, and repeated slowly and with difficulty the
Lord's Prayer. Then a great glory seemed to come over
his face. He half raised himself from the bed, gazed before
him Avith a look of rapture, as though he saw the heavens
opened, exclaimed in a clear voice, ' Glory to God for all
things ! Amen ! ' and fell back dead into Philip's arms.
'He has laid aside the dust of mortality,' murmured
the good priest. ' He is gathered to his fathers. Be
comforted, dear youth. Which of his friends could Avish
him back again in such a world as this ? '
The next morning they laid him in his humble grave by
the side of -St. Basiliscus. The two martyrs slept together
in peace.
It was September 17, 407. Chrysostom Avas sixty years
of age. For nearly seven years he had been Patriarch of
Constantinople ; for three years and three months he had
been a deposed, calumniated, and banished man. He did
not live to see the clearing of his name, the scattering to
the winds of the lies which had been heaped upon his in
nocence, the deep repentance of the children of his mur
derers. Fools counted his life madness, and his end to be
Avithout honour. Hoav is he counted among the children
of God, and his lot among the Saints !

A LAST VISIT TO ARCADIUS 565

CHAPTER LXIX
A LAST VISIT TO ARCADIUS
This Falernian is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some
sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish. — Marcus Aurelius.
It only remains to bid fareAvell to some of those Avhom
we have learnt to know in these pages.
When Philip returned to Miriam at Antioch he found
her and his little Eutyches safe and Avell ; and, sad as had
been the last days of his friend and father, Chrysostom,
his name soon became a happy and tender memory among
his friends. When all is over, and a man has died in the
defeat of misery and persecution, jealousy dies, and rancour
has nothing left on which to feed. The Theophiluses and
Severians were sated with successful malignity, and their
own retribution, as we have seen, failed not to fall upon
them. MeaiiAvhile, in the unanimous admiration of the
West the name of the Patriarch John began to shine with
brighter and brighter lustre. Pope Innocent and all the
great Italian bishops vindicated his innocence, denounced
the vile plots of which he had been the victim, and, treat
ing with indignant contempt the libels of Theophilus,
translated by Jerome, they honoured his character and
cherished his example as that of a saint and martyr. All
that could iioav be done for his memory was to induce the
Patriarch Atticus to restore his name to the diptychs
which recorded the succession of the Patriarchs of Con
stantinople. In this, in spite of the angry opposition of
Cyril, the nephew of Theophilus, and now Patriarch of
Alexandria — Avho said that it would be as bad to record
the name of Judas as that of John — they eventually
succeeded. Meanwhile the fate of Chrysostom produced age-long

566 GATHERING CLOUDS
consequences, both in the Eastern and Western Empires.
Henceforth the Eastern Patriarchate produced no cham
pion of the people against oppression, robbery, and wrong ;
no ' God-gifted organ-voice ' of prophecy to denounce the
ostentation of selfish luxury and the guilt of sensual cor
ruption ; no mighty Church leader to confront the banded
unions of civil tyranny. The succeeding Patriarchs of
Constantinople Aver.e most frequently commonplace nul
lities like the worldly Nectarius, or narrow bigots like
John the Faster, or sticklers for the niceties of theological
shibboleths, or at the best amiable scholars like Proclus.
In the long lapse of the ages not one great saint or orator
like Chrysostom swayed the diminished powers of the
Church in the great Eastern metropolis.
Further, the dispute about Chrysostom widened the
breach between the East and the West. The ever-dwin
dling authority of the Western Emperor — till the Empire
was extinguished in the feeble person of the poor boy
Avho, in the singular irony of history, was known by the
double name of Romulus Augustulus — tended to increase
the ever-deepening influence of the Popes of Rome. A
distracted age yearned for guidance, and, finding none
from its civil rulers, looked up to the chief Bishop of the
West, who, in the persons of men like Leo I. and Gregory
the Great, became, almost by the natural force of circum
stances, the oracle of a world face to face with the diffi
cult task of reconstructing a civilisation which was being
submerged under flood after flood of barbarian invaders.
To Philip the memory of Chrysostom remained through
life an ideal and an inspiration. He had passed through
the deep water-floods in youth, but his manhood was peace
ful and very prosperous. For, with his experience of life,
his natural shrewdness, his ready tact, his knoAvledge of
business, his conscientious diligence and unswerving in
tegrity, he soon made himself indispensable to Anthemius
and to his chief officials. An Antiochene by birth, he
understood the temperament and knew the susceptibilities
of the Syrian people among whom he worked ; a Pagan by
birth, he was quick to recognise the best and kindest
method of winning the confidence of sincere Pagans ; a
Christian of broad sympathies, he did not carry into the

A LAST VISIT TO ARCADIUS 567
civil government the furious spirit with which the ' theo
logical insects ' of the day were constantly endeavouring
to sting one another to death. Favoured by Arcadius,
who not infrequently inquired about him, and even conde
scended to send him messages, he rose with extraordinary
rapidity in the political world, and before he had reached
the prime of manhood became one of the leading personages
in his native city. The brightness of the sunshine came
to him all the more delightfully from its contrast with the
blackness of the preceding storms.
About six months after the death of Chrysostom the
Count Anthemius sent Philip with important despatches
to Constantinople. Accompanied by an imperial escort,
he traversed the same ground over which he had ridden
Avith the soldiers of Aurelian, when he was an unknown
youth accompanying Chrysostom to the fulfilment of his
mysterious destiny. It was natural that, in his altered
circumstances, he should revive many memories ; but noAv
the happy peace of his home and the success of an honour
able career helped to soften all thoughts of bitterness.
He stayed for a few days at the little farm now contentedly
cultivated by Palladius, the former Bishop of Helenopolis,
who had been driven from his see as a Johannite. It Avas
from Philip that Palladius mainly derived the vivid picture
of the exile and last clays of Chrysostom which he has em
bodied in his lively and famous dialogue. Pie also visited
the ruined area of the church of the orthodox Goths, where
he had been a witness of the dreadful massacre ; and he
Avatched the now nearly completed restorations of St. Sophia
and the Senate-house. He received a cordial welcome
from his friend Aurelian, now for the second time Prae
torian Praefect, and from the chamberlains Amantius and
Briso. He Avent, naturally, to the house in the Chalko
prateia, where he had first seen Miriam, the wife of his
heart, and David, the friend of his life. He even ventured
to visit the Patriarcheion, Avith which he had been so famil
iar. He would not visit the Patriarch Atticus ; but an
attendant showed him the Thomaites, and his old bedroom,
and the antechamber where he and his friends had spent
so many happy hours. Then, Avith bowed head and folded
hands, he went into the room which had been Chrysostom's

568 GATHERING CLOUDS
study. It looked very different from Avhat it had done in
old days. It was noAV a subordinate guest-chamber, richly
adorned with tapestries and hangings, and showing all the
magnificence with which the Palace had arrayed itself in
the days of the Patriarch Nectarius. Philip closed the
book of his old memories as with a golden clasp as he knelt
long in silent prayer beside the obscure grave of the be
loved young martyr, Eutyches.
He paid his respects to Nicarete in the humble home to
which confiscation had reduced her, and he found the dear
old lady as bright and cheerful in her poverty as she had
been in her wealth. She still went among the poor with
her little medicine-box ; and Philip, Avhom she pronounced
to be as saucy as ever, chaffingly declared himself to be the
victim of all sorts of unheard-of maladies, and demanded
pills and simples for the certain cure of premature
elephantiasis, and other disasters, of Avhich he felt sure
that Nicarete read the traces in his features, though they
now shone with contumacious health.
He never saw her again. He visited Olympias in her
villa at Cyzicus, and she listened Avith eager interest to
all the details of the death of him of whom she now always
spoke as ' God's martyred saint.' She never recovered
from the deeply seated melancholy which had over
mastered her spirit amid the tremendous outburst of
calamities which had accompained and followed the over-
throAv of the Patriarch. She died in Nicomedia, whither
she had removed from Cyzicus. The legends which grew
up around her name related that on her deathbed she Avas
bidden by a vision to order that her coffin should be cast
into the sea. It Avas carried from the Propontis into the
Bosporus by winds and waves, a current swept it away
from the evil city of Constantinople, and it was cast on
the opposite shore at Brocthi, where she Avas buried, and
many miracles attested the sanctity of her tomb.
Before he left Constantinople Philip Avas again sum
moned to a private intervieAV Avith the Emperor. Arcadius
greeted him Avith unusual Avarmth, and again begged him
to lay aside all ceremonious formalities, and speak to him
with perfect freedom as man to man.
'I am somewhat lonely since Eudoxia died,' he said,

A LAST VISIT TO ARCADIUS 569
' and though I am cheered by the prattle of my children,
I do not often find anyone to talk to as a man talketh with
his friend. I hope you are happy at Antioch, Philip. I
told Anthemius to look after you well, and I hope that his
Sublimity has done so.'
' He has been most kind,' said Philip, ' and I humbly
thank your Imperial goodness.'
'You know I am indebted to you, Philip, and I mean to
sIioav myself grateful. You have seen my haiKhvriting
before. I am rather vain of it. Here is another specimen
of it. Read it.'
It was what we should call a patent of nobility. Philip
read with astonishment that hereby the Emperor raised
him to the rank of an Illustris. Arcadius Avatched him
with a smile. He knelt on one knee, kissed the Emperor's
extended hand, and, humbly thanking him for this signal
mark of his favour, said that he would make it his utmost
effort to promote the Emperor's best desires in Syria.
'You have done so already, Philip,' said Arcadius
kindly. ' Antioch was never in a more quiet and satisfac
tory state than now ; and Anthemius writes to me that
this is due in great measure, not only to your capacity and
faithfulness, but also to your great popularity among your
fellow-citizens. They Avill be pleased as well as you by
the rank I have conferred upon you. But now I want
you to tell me all about the death of the poor Patriarch
John.' Arcadius felt a little astonished by the flow of his own
conversation ; ' but then,' as he said to himself, ' I have so
many intriguers, sycophants, place-hunters, and hypocrites
about me. It is not once a year that I get the chance of
talking to a sincere and true man.'
Philip recounted to him the last scenes, of which he had
been a witness, and Arcadius sighed deeply. 'I never
intended all this,' he said ; ' I gave no orders for it. It
was all the doing of the bishops. I will order Aurelian to
cashier that wretch Secundus, and to raise Cythegius a
step.' ' You graciously accord me great freedom in speaking
to your Clemency,' said Philip. ' I trust I do not abuse it
if I venture to urge that you should order the Patriarch

570 GATHERING CLOUDS
Atticus to restore John's name to the diptychs, and to
bring back his remains from Comana, and have them
buried in St. Sophia.'
Arcadius opened his eyes wider than usual. ' Ah ! ' he
said, sighing again, ' you little know Avhat tumults and
troubles that would cause. I dare not. Perhaps it may
be done hereafter by my son. Have you ever seen my
little Porphyrogenete ? '
' I only saw him as an infant, sire,' said Philip, ' Avhen
he Avas baptised in the Cathedral, and when the little
hand of the Augustus held the petition which, for his
sake, you granted to my kind friend, the Bishop of Gaza.'
' You shall see him,' said Arcadius ; and, summoning a
gorgeously dressed slave by the tinkle of a golden bell,
he ordered him to lead in the young Augustus.
The little Prince — a child of six — was led in by the
Count of the Chamber. He was dressed in purple silk
embroidered Avith gold, and was a splendid little boy, in
whom Avas reproduced the fine beauty of his Frankish
mother rather than the poor physique of his father.
Arcadius, who was intensely fond and proud of him, took
him in his arms, and pressed him to his heart.
' Who is you ? ' said the child, when Philip had given
him his respectful homage.
' That,' said the Emperor, ' is Philip, an Illu'stris of
Antioch. When you sit on your father's throne, my
Theodosius, you must knoAv him and love him, and he
will be your good servant and adviser.'
' I likes you,' said the ungrammatical child, looking at
Philip with large eyes. 'I wants to kiss you.'
Philip was alarmed by the suggestion of such an
unwonted honour as a kiss from the lips of the august
infant; but Arcadius said, 'Kiss him, my child, and
remember him.'
Philip thought of his own little Eutyches, and frankly
returned his kiss. Then the Emperor sent the boy back
to the Purple Chamber, and said to Philip, 'I used to
think, after the hailstorm, and the earthquake which
shook down the golden cross on the Capitol, and the
famine and plague, and rumours of troubles from the
East and from the West, that God Avas angry Avith me ;

A LAST VISIT TO ARCADIUS 571
but when I look at my little Pulcheria, Arcadia, Marina,
and Theodosius, I feel sure that I am forgiven, though
Nilus gave me no encouragement. HaAre you heard the
signal mark of His mercy which God gave me a few days
ago?' ' I only heard a vague rumour,' said Philip.
' I had been to worship in the Karya, the large martyry
by the nut-tree on which the martyr Acacius was hanged.
I had barely left the place, and all the crowd of specta
tors with me, when the whole building suddenly collapsed.
Had it happened a moment or tAvo earlier hundreds might
have been crushed to death. The people regard it as a
miracle, for not one was hurt. It made me feel very
happy.' ' It was assuredly a marvellous deliverance, sire, and a
clear mark of God's protection.'
' Farewell, my good lllustris,' said the Emperor. ' I am
not well. I do not think that my life will be prolonged.
Before you go take this, and Avear it for my sake, and as
a mark of my favour — I had almost said, of my affection.'
He took off a gold ring set with immense emeralds,
and slipped it on Philip's finger. ' An " Illustrious "
should have ornaments suitable to his rank,' he said.
' I know not how sufficiently to thank your Imperial
Dignity for so many and such great favours,' said Philip,
as he again kissed the Emperor's hand. ' I Avill endeavour
to be worthy of them, and I will daily pray to God for your
happiness.' They never met again. Arcadius died on May 1, 408,
seven months after the death of Chrysostom. He was
only thirty-one, and was succeeded by the little Theodosius
IL, for Avhom his sister Pulcheria acted at first as regent.

572 GATHERING CLOUDS

CHAPTER LXX
AFFAIRS IN THE WEST
She saw her glories star by star expire,
And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride
Where the car climbed the Capitol.
Byron, Childe Harold, viii.
So Philip returned to Antioch a great man, Avearing the
emerald ring of the Emperor, and elevated to a rank which
placed him among the first men of the city. And to crown
his felicity Miriam presented him with another fine little
son, whom he baptised by the name of ' John.'
Macedonius gently warned him against the peril of
being intoxicated by such sudden and immense success.
' You are still young, Philip,' he said, ' and you are now
rich and ennobled, and high in the favour of the Count of
the East, and of the Emperor himself. You have a fair
wife and two beautiful little boys, and your future seems
to be assured. But, my son, " What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? "
' My father,' said Philip, ' Misfortune has been a blessed,
if a stern, teacher. She has taught me to estimate things
at their true value. I know that riches make to them
selves wings, and fly away ; I know that earthly fortune is
more brittle than glass ; I know that life is uncertain, and
at the best but short. It is my daily prayer that no treas
ure on earth shall make me forget the treasure in heaven.'
'I believe it, my son,' said Macedonius; 'and may God
ever keep you in this mind ! '
Philip received from Kallias a letter of congratulation.
Kallias was neither so old nor so dear a friend as David
was, or Eutyches had been; but Philip Avas attached to
him, and kneAv him to be honest and true.
Kallias in his letter, and in subsequent letters, told him
some of the news of the West. He told him first the

AFFAIRS IN THE WEST 573
thrilling intelligence of the murder of Stilico, and the
extinction of all the hopes and ambitions of his family ;
and this was of the deepest interest to Philip, because lie
had been taught by the poems of Claudian to admire the
brave and magnificent Vandal.
Stilico fell a victim to the vile Court intrigues of palace-
cliques, and to the fact that he was the object of fierce
jealousy as an alien. Men of narrow hearts and limited
insight could not understand his large and far-sighted
policy. That act of dastardly assassination was chiefly
due to the hypocritic Olympius, whom he himself had first
raised from the dust, who had insinuated himself into the
confidence of Honorius, and who hid his craftiness under a
Pharisaism which deceived men like St. Augustine. The
base intrigues to overthrow the great Vandal warrior came
to a head at Pavia, where the troops were secretly insti
gated to rise and massacre his partisans. He might have
marched from Bologna, where he then was, might have
crushed the conspiracy, and made himself master of the
fleet. But he kept his loyalty, and thereby so deeply dis
gusted the strong and savage Gothic chieftain, Sams, that
he surprised Stilico's camp, killed his bodyguard of Huns,
and compelled the Vandal to fly to Ravenna for his life.
As troubles thickened around him he fled into the church
for asylum. There his tragic end was brought about by
one of those hideous pieces of chicanery, the prevalence of
which shows that a nation is ripe for destruction. Hera-
clian came with a body of troops to seize him. He agreed
to leave the sanctuary if he received the Emperor's oath
that his life should be spared. He was shown a letter
from Honorius to that effect, and went forth. No sooner
had he stepped out of the church than a second letter of
Honorius was produced, ordering that he should be slain
as a public enemy. Even at that supreme moment his
friends and soldiers Avould have rescued him at all costs ;
but he forbade and repressed their efforts, and, kneel
ing on the ground, offered his neck to the blow of the
miserable Heraclius, who struck off his head with his
SAVord, and for this brutal assassination was elevated to the
rank of Count of Africa. He Avent forth to meet his own
just doom thereafter.

574 GATHERING CLOUDS
Stilico's ruin involved that of his family. His daughter
Thermantia Avas divorced by Honorius — who had already
divorced her elder sister, Maria — and was sent under an
escort to her mother, Serena, at Rome, with her brother
Eucherius. Eucherius Avas murdered by the Emperor's
orders as soon as he reached Rome. The jealousy of the
Romans, and their groundless dread that Serena would
betray the city to Alaric, caused them to order her execu
tion ; and rumour said that she was strangled in prison,
wearing on her neck the pearl necklace which she had
taken from the statue of Vesta. Thermantia and Maria
died not long afterwards ; and Avith them the family of
Stilico, the father-in-laAV of the Emperor, and for so long
a period the chief man in the Western world, came to a
disastrous end.
Swift retribution fell on all concerned in this vile plot.
The removal of the only great general who could have
checked his career made the path of Alaric more easy.
Thrice he had Rome in his grasp. On one of these
occasions he held the memorable interview with the
Roman ambassadors — at which Kallias was present as a
reporter on behalf of Pope Innocent — which has been
immortalised in history from the notes which he took.
The ambassadors first assumed a grandiloquent tone,
which did not for a moment deceive Alaric, and Avhich
(as Kallias told Philip) made Thorismund and Walamir
break into broad smiles as they stood beside the royal Visi
goth. They spoke boastfully of the immense multitudes
of inhabitants in the Eternal City, and of its boundless
resources. ' The thicker the hay, the more easily it is mown,' replied
Alaric. ' What, then, will you leave us ? '
' Your lives ! ' he answered, with a grim laugh.
The miserable Romans, crippled by Alaric's possession
of Ostia and by imminent starvation, were barely able to
pay the ransom which Alaric demanded, and in order to do
it were compelled — a terrible omen ! — to melt down the
statue of Virtus. It was as though they abnegated all
right to claim the ' manliness ' for Avhich Rome Avas so
famed of old. Kallias Avas the eyewitness of many other

AFFAIRS IN THE WEST 575
memorable scenes during that time of terror. He saAV the
investiture of the rhetorician puppet, Attalus — Avho was
little more than a frivolous aesthete — Avith the imperial
insignia, when Alaric thought to reduce Honorius to
reason by setting up a rival emperor. In the dire stress
of famine caused by Heraclian's closing of the grain stores
of Africa, Kallias heard the multitude yelling to Attalus
in the amphitheatre, ' Pone pretium carni humance ' (' Set
a price on human flesh!'). He stood by the side of
Walamir — who entertained towards him an intense grati
tude for the aid which he had given to his escape from
slavery — when Alaric contemptuously stripped Attalus of
his purple and diadem, and sent them as a present to con
ciliate Honorius.
Alaric had felt a tremendous sense that he Avas but an
instrument in the hands of destiny when, for the third
time, he besieged the Eternal City, which had never been
captured for seven hundred years. A hermit had warned
him not to be guilty of an outrage so tremendous upon
the capital which, for a thousand years, had overwhelmed
and dominated the world. The reply of the young Visi-
gothic king Avas that, so far from challenging the wrath of
Heaven by a deed which shook the hearts of the nations,
he Avas only obeying a Divine behest, since a voice rang
perpetually in his ears which bade him capture the city.
And so on August 24, 410, Alaric, with Thorismund and
Walamir in full armour by his side, burst at midnight
through the Salarian Gate of Rome, and delivered over the
city to three days of pillage.
Although most of the Goths were Christians, and al
though they respected the asylum of sanctuaries, it Avas
not possible that a vast horde of Gothic soldiers should
for many days remain master of such a city as Rome, Avith
its long-accumulated treasures, without the occurrence of
many sad and cruel scenes. The two young Ostrogoths,
Thorismund and Walamir, had hearts which burned with
the sense of wrongs which their almost extirpated nation
had suffered at the hands of a corrupt civilisation ; but
they had a deep respect for religion, and while they freely
availed themselves of the plunder of patrician houses, they
used their utmost exertions to prevent cruelty and mas-

576 GATHERING CLOUDS
sacre. Walamir knew the home assigned to Kallias by
Pope Innocent, in the precincts of the Lateran, and it had
been his early care to get from Alaric a safeguard which
Avould secure the immunity of his friend. The Pope
himself Avas, providentially, absent, for he had gone to
Honorius at Ravenna, to induce that poor sluggard to
arouse himself to defend the interests of his capital.
Kallias, bearing letters to Innocent, accompanied the mes
senger who was despatched from Rome Avith the tidings —
which made men's hearts stand still as though the end of
the world had come — that
She who was named Eternal, and arrayed
Her warriors to conquer ; she who veiled
Earth with her haughty shadow, and displayed
E'en till the o'er-canopied horizon faded,
Her rushing wings ; oh! she who was Almighty, hailed
was iioav the helpless prey of barbarians ! He Avent with
the messenger into the imperial palace, and a deeply
agitated eunuch, Avith uiiAvonted obliteration of etiquette,
in the supreme excitement of the moment, pushed aside
the purple curtains unbidden, and abruptly announced to
the Emperor :
' Sire, Rome has perished ! '
' Has she ? ' said Honorius, quite startled. ' Hoav can
that be ? Why, she was quite well an hour aigo, and was
feeding out of my hand ! '
' I do not mean Rome, your hen,' said the Chamberlain,
'but the city Rome.'
' Oh ! ' said Honorius, much relieved. ' I Avas afraid, my
friend, you meant Rome, my favourite hen.'
The eunuch came out with his lips tightened into a
grim, sardonic smile. ' What a master,' he said, ' even
for eunuchs to serve ! '
But when Alaric had withdrawn his forces and advanced
to the south of Italy the condition of Rome became so
wretched and uncertain — it presented such an aspect of
squalor and desolation, and suffered so constantly from the
pressure of famine — that Kallias longed to leave it. He
did so the more because a beautiful Roman maiden had
promised to be his bride. Her family had suffered severely

AFFAIRS IN THE WEST 577
in the Gothic pillage, and as there Avas no security that
other barbarian raids might not be imminent, he was
anxious to find for her a more secure and happy home.
He mentioned this in a letter to Philip.
Philip was now in the full tide of success and prosperity.
He had Anthemius as a friend at Court, and a claim for
real services, Avhich was all the more prominent because
officials of perfect loyalty and incorruptible integrity Avere
far from common. Theodosius II. had raised him with
unusual rapidity from the rank of an Illustris to that of a
Spectabilis. A third son, whom he named David, had
been born to him, and a daughter, whom he christened
Anthusa. The house at Singon Street was iioav neither
large enough for his requirements nor suitable to his high
rank as one of the leading senators of Antioch. He there
fore built himself a residence not far from the Orontes,
Avith a garden, and a vineyard, and a grove, and more than
one fountain tinkling musically into its marble basin. He
Avas never tempted to plunge into luxury. The furniture
and adornments of his house were refined and beautiful,
but with no trace of vulgar ostentation. He was mindful
of the duties of generous hospitality, and he, as Avell as
Miriam, exercising a Avise and watchful charity, were sur
rounded by the benedictions of the poor.
He knew the ability of his old friend, and wrote to Kal
lias, offering to him the house in Singon Street for his
abode, and the certainty of ample and honourable employ
ment in the offices of the Praefect of the East. Kallias
gratefully accepted the offer. He Avas wedded to his
Marcia, by Pope Innocent himself, in the Lateran basilica.
The Pope was sorry to lose his services, and gave him
a handsome token of his regard in the form of a gilt
ampulla, at the bottom of which Avas painted the picture
of the ' Three Children in the Furnace.' But the Pope
himself had been greatly impoverished by the sack of
Rome, and was little able to bear the expense of a skilled
secretary. He saw that far better prospects opened before
Kallias in Antioch, and sent him to his new home with his
patriarchal blessing. Philip and Miriam gladly welcomed
him and his bride, and he found the house in Singon Street
all that he could have desired.
2p

578 GATHERING CLOUDS
From the two young Gothic Amalings Philip was
separated by the wide diversity of their destinies, but he
occasionally heard of them, and even from them. They
followed the fortunes of Alaric, and it Avas ever their
delight to temper with mercy the inevitable cruelties
Avhich attended the victorious raids of their countrymen.
When the Goths" were devastating Campania, they came
to Nola, and seized' the good Bishop Paulinus. The
decorations which he had lavished on the church and
monastic buildings of St. Felix made the Goths suspect
that he was the lord of vast hidden treasures ; but, as St.
Augustine says of him, ' he had long ago placed his
treasures in the bosom of the poor.' Of this, however, it
was difficult to persuade his Gothic captors, and while he
was in their hands he offered the prayer, 'Lord, let me not
suffer torture for the sake of silver and gold, for whither
all my goods are gone Thou knowest.' It Avas OAving to
the energetic remonstrance and interference of Walamir
that he Avas set free by the rude soldiers and saved
from further molestation, though he lost what little he
had left, and was reduced from comparative opulence
to extreme poverty. He was grateful to Walamir for
that efficient act of protection, gave him his episcopal
blessing, and said that he would pray to St. Felix for
him. ' I thank you, Father,' said Walamir ; ' but would you
mind offering your prayer for me to God instead ? '
The brothers marched with Alaric to the town of
Rhegium, Avitnessed his Avild grief at the loss in the
stormy straits of the fleet with which he had intended to
sail and conquer Africa, and stood by his cleath-bed at
Consentia in 410, when he passed aAvay, at the early age
of thirty-one, leaving so many of his vast designs still
unaccomplished. Alaric had learnt to love and trust
them more than almost any of his comrades. They
closed his eyes ; they received the last faint pressure of
his dying hands. The Goths diverted the course of the
little river Busentinus, raised a mound over his remains
heaped it high Avith precious spoils and trophies of Rome,
and then turned the rushing torrent into its course again.
They slew the captives who had performed the task, that

AFFAIRS IN THE WEST 579
none might know Avhere their hero lay, or disturb or
plunder his tumultuous resting-place.
Thorismund and Walamir had not approved this last
act of barbarity. Savage deeds like that made them
despair of the Goths acquiring enough of civilisation and
self-control to make them the permanent lords of the
Kingdom of the West.
The Goths chose Ataulph, the brave and beautiful
brother-in-law of Alaric, as their new king, elevating him
on their shields immediately after the burial of his kins
man. But there was one man against whom Thorismund
cherished an intense feeling of wrath, and on whom he
desired to inflict the vengeance Avhich he regarded ais his
due. It was Sarus, whom Thorismund regarded as a trai
tor to his countrymen, the practical murderer of Stilico,
the insulter and hereditary foe of Alaric. Sarus Avas a
warrior of gigantic size and of herculean strength, and
had been made Magister Militum for his treacherous
services. But the same levity of spirit which had made
him turn against Stilico caused him to desert Honorius
for the usurper Jovinus. Ataulph heard that he was
scouring the country with only a handful of followers.
He sent a large detachment under Thorismund to seize
him ; but the chivalrous young Ostrogoth rushed upon
Sarus in person at the head of a small contingent. Sarus
and his bodyguard performed prodigies of valour. Thoris
mund spurred his horse against him, and Avounded him
with his spear, but was struck down dead by the chieftain's
mighty arm. Seizing the opportunity of the personal en
counter, a Goth flung some sacking over the head of Sarus ;
he was entangled in it, flung to the ground, overpowered,
and dragged alive into the presence of Ataulph, who, after
bitter reproaches, ordered him to be executed.
Walamir mourned long over the dead body of his
brother. He was now the last Amal of his race, and
nothing but the higher lessons of his boyhood, learnt with
Eutyches in the Patriarcheion, prevented him from sink
ing into sullen melancholy and despair. Ataulph loved
and honoured him no less than Alaric had done, and he
exercised over the Visigoth a strong influence for good.

580 GATHERING CLOUDS
He Avas present at the famous marriage of Ataulph Avith
the Roiuan princess, Placidia, at Narbonne, when the
Gothic king presented his beautiful bride with fifty youths,
clad in silver robes, to be her slaves, and when each youth
knelt and presented her a golden bowl full of rubies and
other priceless gems, the spoils of Rome. He became
Ataulph's constant companion, and Avas by his side at
Barcelona when he fell a victim to the murderous stab in
the back by which the deformed slave, Wernulf, avenged
the wrongs of his former master, Sarus. Walamir smote
the murderous villain to the earth with his own sword.
Contrary to all his wishes and to his strongest entreaties,
the Goths chose as their new king Sigeric, the brother of
Sarus. Sigeric cherished a fierce grudge against him.
When the new king, avIio Avas even a Avorse savage than
his brother Sarus, heaped insults on the daughter of the
great Theodosius by forcing Placidia to walk twelve miles
on foot before his chariot, Walamir so openly and hotly
expressed his indignation, that a quarrel arose, and Sigeric
in a fit of fury stabbed him Avith his own hands.
Thus ended the race of Ostrogothic Amalings of the
House of Gainas. Their lives were brief and tragic.
They had taken the sword, and, like so many chieftains
of those days, they perished by the sword.

HAPPY CHILDREN AND PROSPEROUS DAYS 581

CHAPTER LXXI
HAPPY CHILDREN AND PROSPEROUS DAYS
Like the flower of roses in the spring of the year, and like lilies by the
watercourses. — Ecclesiasiicus.
We need not chronicle the peaceful years of Philip's man
hood. Michael passed away, and was buried in the church
at Nazareth. David became more and more influential
and respected in Northern Palestine. At the request of
the Governor of Jerusalem he Avas made a deputy-governor
of the province, and, as he was universally beloved and
trusted, the revenues of Galilee flowed regularly and with
out disturbance into the imperial exchequer. The aid
rendered by the Desposynos was so marked that he too
received the rank of an Illustris, and was assured of the
Emperor's approval. He paid several visits to Antioch,
and Philip and Miriam also visited him at Lubiyeh.
As their elder boys were of the same age, it was agreed
that Philip's Eutyches and John should be confirmed in
the Church of St. Babylas, at Antioch, at the same time
with David's Philip and Andrew, by Bishop Eustathius,
who, after the death of Porphyry, and after eighty-five
years of schism, had at last united the distracted see under
one episcopal head. On that occasion David and his
family paid a long visit to their friends and kinsfolk at
Antioch. On the fourteenth birthday of Philip's heir there was a
little festival in their neAV house on the banks of the
Orontes. Kallias and his son Innocent, and his little
daughters Galla and Pulcheria, were invited; and the
groves and gardens round Philip's house, and the vineyard
by the side of the river, laden at that time with its rich
purple clusters, rang that evening Avith shouts of young
laughter as all the children played together. The boys

582 GATHERING CLOUDS
had got up a gymnastic contest — a complete Pentathlon —
in which they Avere to contend with some kinsmen in the
second generation of Philip's oavii boyish friends Achillas
and Eros, who had been executed in the terrible sedition
of Antioch. The little girls of Kallias Avreathed garlands
of laurel and parsley, entwined Avith roses, with which
they were to crown the victors. Philip had given his boys
the Avholesonie physical training of young Greeks, so that
they had the advantage in skill over David's lads. Of the
five contests, they Avon the crown in quoit-throAving and
javelin-hurling ; but David's sturdy sons, accustomed to
the free shepherd life on the hills of Galilee, beat them in
leaping and in the race, and Avere their equals in the wres
tling bout.
Sitting by the fountain in the hall, Philip, David, and
Kallias, Avith the mothers of the children, watched them
with happy hearts. Philip thought of the day when he
had wrestled with Thorismuncl in the garden of his adopted
father, and as he recalled all that had happened since
then, a wave of sadness passed over his mind.
' Ah, David ! ' he said, ' these are happy days ! But
Avhen I remember the scenes through Avhich Ave have
passed, I almost shrink from the certainty of the trials
which must befall these bright lads and little maidens.'
' Let us treasure the happiness of the present,' said
David ; ' Ave will not darken it Avith the forecast of days
to come.'
But Philip murmured half to himself the lines of
Homer : Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground ;
Another race the following spring supplies :
They fall successive, and successive rise ;
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these as those have passed away.
' Yes, that is as it should be,' said David. ' We may
thank God that we are not immortal. We may thank
Him that the good man's life, however it may end, is
crowned by the blessed birthright of death.'
' What do you say, my silent Kallias ? ' asked Philip.
' I say,' said Kallias, ' that if we may, by God's grace,

HAPPY CHILDREN AND PROSPEROUS DAYS 583
leave to our children the priceless heritage of character
and good example, we leave them the best of treasures,
and may be much more than content.'
At this moment Philip's happy sop. burst in, the picture
of health and gladness. ' Spectabilis, and Illustris,' he
said, with bows of mock gravity to his father and David,
'and you, Mr. Secretary, and you, ladies, you are all
bidden by the voice of the herald to come and see the
victors crowned.'
' And Avho are the great Pentathlic victors ? ' asked
Philip. ' Your eldest son, great Senator, who is fourteen years
old to-day, and ought to be arrayed in the manly toga ;
and yours, illustrious sir,' he said, his eyes full of laughter,
as he bowed to David.
They all rose and went to the vineyard, where, in a
green, open space by the river, they had got up a little
masquerade of heralds and Asiarchs, and where, amid
loud applause from the circle of comrades and school
fellows, the little maidens of Kallias placed the garlands
on the dark hair of the tAvo boys, avIio were then clad in
festal robes, and ceremoniously conducted in procession to
the festal banquet which Miriam had prepared for them.
And, seated not far off, under the dense foliage of the
trees, old Macedonius himself watched them, and smiled
as he lifted up his hands and blessed them in their happy
youth.

584 gathering clouds

CHAPTER LXXII
THE GREAT REPARATION
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust. — Shirley.
There was one event in the years to come which
brought a great flood of joy and gratitude into the hearts
of the three friends who had been secretaries in the
Patriarcheion. It came in the year 437, when they were
all three well advanced in years. It was the triumph of
innocence, the ultimate reward of justice to the wronged
memory of their friend and patron, the Patriarch John
of Constantinople. By that time he had already begun
to be spoken of by the admiring title of Chrysostom,
the Golden-mouthed, Avhich posterity substituted for his
actual name.
He had had two successors — Arsacius, who died in 405,
and Atticus, who died in 425. Atticus, in spite of the
angry opposition of Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, had
been compelled by the unanimous opinion of the West, as
well as of all the best and holiest men of the Eastern
Church, to restore the name of John to the diptychs of the
Church of Constantinople. Succeeding Patriarchs were
no longer fierce anti-Johannites ; and in 434 Proclus, who
had been a reader and secretary of Chrysostom himself,
was elevated to the Patriarchal throne. One day in the
year 437, on the festival of Chrysostom, he was pro
nouncing a panegyric upon him to the people in the
great cathedral, when he was interrupted, not only by
the loud applause of the assembled multitude, but also by
cries, ' Restore to us our exiled Patriarch ! Restore to us
the body of our father John ! ' Proclus made knoAvn to
the Emperor the wishes of his subjects, and Theodosius II. ,

THE GREAT REPARATION 585
who had read with delight the writings of the great
orator, and used to speak of him as ' the teacher of the
universe, and the mouth of gold,' granted the request
with alacrity. For thirty years the embalmed body of
the martyr had been lying in its humble tomb in the
Chapel of St. Basiliscus. Theodosius ordered it to be
now removed to the capital. In every city through
which the coffin was carried it was received by the
rejoicing homaige of multitudes of ecclesiastics, as well as
of the people. At Chalcedon Theodosius had sent an
Imperial tribune to receive it ; and he himself aAvaited its
arrival in the midst of his senators and high officials and
soldiers. It was now January 27, 438. So vast was the
concourse of vessels of all sizes that, in the rhetorical
figure of the contemporary historian, ' the Propontis was
transformed into a continent.' It was night, and the
surface of the sea reflected the blaze of innumerable
torches, as the citizens poured out in their myriads to
welcome back the mortal remains of the Saint who had
been expelled from their midst with ignominy and tor
ments. The bier was accompanied in magnificent pro
cession to the Church of the Apostles, where lay buried
the former Patriarchs of Constantinople and the Christian
emperors, and Arcadius and Eudoxia. No sooner was
the coffin laid down than Theodosius knelt before it with
his beautiful sister Pulcheria. Then he stripped off his
purple mantle and placed it over the saintly relics, and,
casting his eyes to the ground and leaning his forehead
against the edge of the coffin, prayed aloud for his father
and his mother, and that the sins of deadly ignorance
which they had committed against God's holy servant
might be forgiven them. Before finally enclosing the
corpse in the golden shell which had been prepared for
it, Proclus had it seated upon the episcopal chair, and
a shout arose and reverberated along the gilded roofs,
' Receive thy throne once more, O Father ! ' Then, not
far from the graves of Arcadius and Eudoxia, the body
Avas reinterred, and in that ' great temple of silence and
reconciliation ' the mortal remains of the martyr and of
his murderer mingled in the common dust.
Philip and David and Kallias were all present in

586 GATHERING CLOUDS
honoured places at this superb ceremony of reparation;
for the Patriarch Proclus knew them in old days, and
remembered them, and they had been expressly invited
to be witnesses of the splendid scenes because they were
among Chrysostom's oldest and dearest friends.
When the service was over, Proclus received orders to
conduct them to the palace, that they might be presented
to the Emperor. He received them separately, and
addressed them in words of the most gracious kindness;
for he said that he could not better evince his remorseful
reverence for the dead Saint than by showing favour to
those whom he had loved.
To Kallias, whose name had been faArourably men
tioned in a letter from Pope Innocent, and also by the
Count of the East, he presented a golden inkstand which
had once been used by Arcadius himself — the very one,
as Philip remembered, into Avhich he had seen the late
Emperor dip his stylus at his first memorable intervieAv
with him. And he further conferred upon him the title
and rank of Protonotary.
He bade David mention any guerdon he desired, and
thanked him for his able administration of Northern
Palestine. David asked for, and immediately obtained,
some enrichment of the humble Church at Nazareth,
and a small largess for a festal day among its citizens.
Then Philip entered, and Theodosius received him
with yet Avarmer cordiality. He had heard from his
oldest and most honoured officials of the services which
Philip had rendered in the days of the Gothic peril; and
Arcadius, among his private memoranda, had left a note
requesting that Philip might always be regarded as one
whom he loved and honoured. Further, the interview at
which Arcadius had bidden him kiss Philip, when he was
a little boy not seven years old, had been impressed on
the memory of Theodosius IL, because it had happened
shortly before his father's death. It is true that in
the thirty years which had elapsed since thei the dark
locks of Philip had become plentifully sprinkled with
silver ; but the Emperor still remembered his fine presence,
and recognised the Imperial ring, Avith its shining emer
alds, Avhich Arcadius had placed upon his finger.

THE GREAT REPARATION 587
' Hail, my Clarissimus ! ' said the Emperor, smiling.
' Only a Spectabilis, by your Clemency's distinguished
favour,' said Philip, bowing low.
' No ! ' said the Emperor ; ' henceforth, after this
auspicious day, no less than a Clarissimus. Receive the
patent of your promotion ; there you will find something
more than this recognition of your services by your
elevation to the highest rank of nobility ; but you must
not open it till you leave my presence.'
Philip knelt and kissed the hand of his benefactor.
' But that is not all. We owe you a very deep debt of
gratitude, both at Constantinople and Antioch, and I bid
you to ask of me any boon that you desire.'
' Your Imperial munificence has loaded me Avith so many
favours,' said Philip, ' and has elevated me to a rank so
far above my humble birth, that I have nothing to ask.'
' Nevertheless, you must ask some favour for my sake,
if not for your oavii.'
' Sire,' said Philip, . after a moment's pause, ' there is a
boon which would, I think, be most appropriate to this day
of reconciliation. When the Patriarch John was banished,
DaAdd, Kallias, and I had a very young fellow-secretary,
named Eutyches, deeply loved by the Patriarch, as by all
Avho ever knew or ever saAV him.'
' I have heard of him,' said Theodosius. ' All Avho talk
to me of tliose days say that he was beautiful as an angel
of God.'
'And as innocent as he was beautiful, sire. He was
most cruelly tortured to death by the Praefect Optatus, at
the instigation of bad bishops and priests. The boon which
at your Imperial command I ask is, that a little martyry
should be built above his grave.' ,
' It is but just, Philip. It shall be done at once.'
So over the humble grave of Eutyches rose in due time
a little chapel radiant within Avith lustrous mosaics.
Over its small apse was Christ as the Good Shepherd,
folding a lamb in His bosom, Avhile others of the feeding
sheep looked up at Him. In the ornaments that ran round
the Avails were the Christian symbols of the Fish, and the
Dove with the evergreen leaf, and the ship and palm-branch,
and winged genii playing among green leaves and purple

588 GATHERING CLOUDS
vine-bunches. On one wall was Daniel standing naked
but unharmed between two lions, like the soul between
the lions of Sin and Death. On the other the Three
Children trod the flames of the furnace with bright faces
and unscarred feet. Underneath the apse was a mosaic
of the head of Eutyches, and under it, in Greek, the
inscription : In Peace,
In Christ,
Eutyches, Martyr.
He lives.

L' ENVOI

CHAPTER LXXIII
THE GOOD COUNT OF THE EAST
Nor did he change, but kept in lofty place
The virtues which adversity had bred. — Wordsworth.
Philip had left the Imperial presence with his heart
so tremblingly full of gratitude to God that he did not
at once open the document by Avhich the Emperor had
promoted him to the highest rank of the nobility. He
was too much absorbed in other thoughts to attend to it.
How good had God been! In Avhat unsearchable ways
had He manifested His eternal purposes ! The Patriarch
John had suffered, as so many of God's best saints have
been called upon to suffer, and to be purged like fine gold
in the furnace, by God's mysterious plan. But how had
the Eternal Mercy vindicated itself in the slow develop
ment of circumstances ! Were the brief sufferings of the
Patriarch's life to be compared to the exceeding and
eternal weight of glory into Avhich he noAV had entered ?
Were they not the conditions of his luminous and world
wide example ? In spite of the all but universal corruption
of the Eastern Church, his rectitude and his innocence
had been conspicuously vindicated. His name had been
restored to its honoured place in the diptychs of the
cathedral. Philip had seen him lowered into his lowly
grave in the far-off, humble martyry ; now he had seen
his golden coffin inhumed beside the Imperial tombs.
John had been exiled and martyred by an Emperor and
an Empress ; now their son and successor, accompanied
by his sister, had knelt over his remains with tears of
penitence and prayers for pardon. Philip's mind was full
of the confession extorted from the malevolent wickedness
of the persecutors of God's saints in the Book of Wisdom :
' We fools counted his life madness, and his end to be
591

592 GATHERING CLOUDS
without honour. How is he set among the children of
God, and his lot among the saints ! '
It was not strange that Philip should lose himself in
these thoughts, for where was he ? He was enjoying the
hospitality of the Patriarcheion, now the palace of Proclus,
who not only loved Chrysostom, but whom Philip could
well remember as a young reader in the service of his
master. Nay, more, Philip had asked to be accommodated
in the dear old anteroom, next to the Patriarch's study,
and close by the bedroom in which Eutyches had nursed
the wounded Walamir. Memories crowded upon him,
and he sank into a dreaming reverie. As he lay there,
with closed eyes, he saw, or seemed to see, first Chrys
ostom, and then Eutyches, each in the glory of their
immortality, come on either side, and take his hand, and
look upon him with blessings and with smiles.
He awoke and saw the Emperor's missive lying before
him. He opened it, and there read, with a start of intense
surprise, that Theodosius II. had not only made him a
Clarissimus, but had actually appointed him Count of the
East! It was a position of almost royal dignity. But Philip
did not shrink from it. He had not sought it. It had
been bestoAved upon him in the Providence of God. He
sought Count Anthemius, who was now a Patrician, and
chief Minister of the Empire. Anthemius was already in
the secret. He rose, Avith a broad smile on his handsome
face, and bowing low, said, 'All happiness to the most
illustrious, Count Philip ! '
' What am I to do ? ' asked Philip.
' You are to start for Antioch in two days. You will
be sent thither in an Imperial chariot, with an escort of
Palatini, and you must remember that your position now
requires every adjunct of state dignity which must sur
round the chief ruler in the East.'
So Philip returned in magnificent state along the old
well-known road which he had first traversed riding on
the horse of a praetorian, beside the chariot which was
conveying Chrysostom to his glory and his doom.
He was received at Antioch with the rapturous accla-

THE GOOD COUNT OF THE EAST 593
mations of the assembled multitude, and he — the son of
the humble tradesman — took official possession of the
palace of the mighty and luxurious Seleucid kings. He
gave up the house and grounds on the bank of the
Orontes for a leper-hospital as a thank-offering to God.
He ruled Antioch and the Prefecture of the East in
honour, with inflexible integrity, in merciful justice, with
wise tact and universal acceptance. He held his high
office for many years. His children grew to manhood
in the stately palace, and were a source of blessing and
happiness to him. He was universally known as The Good
Count of the East. He did not attain a great age, but died
in the unbroken fulness of his powers. The admiring
people would fain have honoured him with gorgeous ob
sequies, but he desired a simple funeral, and was more
than happy in the thought that he was ' descending to the
grave amid- the benedictions of the poor.'
They wanted to erect to his memory a splendid mau
soleum, but he had ordered that his tombstone should
only be a simple alabaster slab in "the Church of St.
Babylas. At each corner was a small mosaic. At the
top the three fishes in circle, which typified at once the
Lord Jesus and the Trinity : and the famous monogram
of Christ from the Labarum of Constantine. Below were
carved ungulae and a leaden scourge — for had not Philip,
too, been a confessor, almost a martyr, for the truth ? —
and a dove bearing in her beak a green leaf as from the
Tree of Life. And the inscription was :
In Peace,
In Christ,
Phillipus,
Count of the East.
In Christ he died,
In Christ he lives.

THE END

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