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If the strength and joy of believing are proportioned to the weight of the crosses borne for it, — and such a rule as that does appear to have place in the spiritual economy, then it is in some such post of perplexity as a Cæsar's household, some age of persecution or close corner of peril, that we must look for the bravest witnesses to truth. So keenly has this been felt by some adventurous souls, that they have positively longed for fiercer onsets of trial than our common and easy fortunes bring, giving their religious constancy a chance to prove itself in vincible. Sir Thomas Browne, with his unbounded veneration, had an appetite so hungry for this stimulus to trust, that he says, in one of the passages of his Treatise on the Religion of a Physician, "I bless myself and am thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles, and that I never saw Christ nor his disciples; for then my faith would have been thrust upon me, and I could not have enjoyed that greater blessing promised to all that see not and yet believe." He envies the old Hebrews their title to the only bold and noble faith, since they lived before the Saviour's coming, and gathered their confidence out of mystical types and obscure prophecies. Modern society does not abound in instances of such enthusiasm for believing. More persons seem to be asking what is the minimum of faith that can be made to serve for safety, how much knowledge will release them from here, and divine indulgence there, than how affluent a measure they may be privileged to keep in reserve. We eulogize virtues that flourish only in a favoring soil and climate. We palliate and excuse the deficiency, when honesty is missing in the household of Cæsar, in seats of power or wealth or folly, in office or at court, in Washington or in Paris. We forget that the current piety of the Church, of society, and of the market sinks and dwindles inevitably, unless it is replenished by the energy of those valiant examples who will dare to bear testimony and be true in the very palaces of power and fashion and mammom. Of the line of Roman Cæsars, that race standing apart, of whom it has been well said, by a scholar competent to speak, that there met in them "all the heights and depths which belong to man, all the contrasts of glory and meanness, the extremities of what is highest and lowest in human possibility," the personage whom Paul speaks of here as having saints in his household was the sixth from the founder. Nero was a prince that as far surpassed others in infamy as Augustus did in royalty; a man who, if every soul beside himself in his household had been a saint, concentrated inhumanity and pollution enough in his person to have darkened all their virtue by the blackness of his unnatural crimes ; a man that expended more ingenuity in contriving new modes of dishonoring humanity than most Christians have in serving it, and who earned the reputation of introducing into history, as facts, crimes so enormous, and combinations of wickedness so revolting, that but for him they would have been held too fabulous for the wildest fancy; a man that hunted up and down his vast domains to find some fresh species of murder, with exquisite and aggravated accompaniments enough to season it to his monstrous appetite, with the same eagerness that gluttons search out a fresh delicacy for a sated palate; a man that tried three different ways of butchering his own mother, and at last despatched her by a vulgar execution, in a petulant rage at being baffled so often; and who added the tyrant's caprice to the incendiary's, by undertaking at once to throw off the suspicion of his own agency in the diabolic conflagration of his capital, and to comfort his bloodthirsty temper, by imputing the fire to the innocent Christians; who tortured his Christian subjects by unheard-of torments, dressing them in the skins of wild animals to provoke dogs to tear them to pieces, or wrapping their bodies in clothing smeared with pitch, and then setting them on fire to light up the Roman night with their burning; a man, in short, that wrought so awful an impression of his attributes of superhuman atrocity on the minds of the believers of that age, that a common rumor went abroad among them, after his horrible death, that he would return again alive to vex the world anew, and to be the Antichrist of prophecy. In the household of such a man and such a Cæsar it was that the Apostle, himself now a voluntary prisoner at Rome, awaiting his trial and probably his martyrdom, found "saints,” — saints that he mentions with special honor, when he sends their message in his letter to the friends at Philippi. There, and then, if nowhere else or since, we can all feel that it was something heroic to be a saint. By con trast with so dark a depravity, and in the teeth of so relentless a spite, "professing Christ" had a meaning; to be called a Christian cost sacrifices that deserved the name. Saintship shone, then, with a palpable glory; and no man could fail of seeing whence the light came. The followers of the Crucified, and the lovers of the world, were separate companies of souls; the sword and the lions pronounced the distinction between them with emphasis. No wonder Paul thanks God that even then the faith of the Roman Christians was spoken of in all the world. Across the chasm of almost eighteen hundred years, beyond an ocean that is narrowed now by the Christian civilization which those saints installed, we are speaking of it, thanking God, too, I hope, for his own wondrous providence in his Church, — thanking Paul's pen that has left us this bright trace of a precious martyrology,— thanking these saints of Cæsar's household themselves, for the mighty arms of faith which they reach over to us, to encourage our confidence, to quicken our unbelief, to reinspire our too sluggish zeal. Possibly it may be found that there is just as real and deep a distinction now as then, between him who serveth God and loveth the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, and him who serveth and loveth not. Possibly it may appear, that the glory of an actual saintship, the veritably faithful spirit, is just as pure and lustrous now as then. Possibly we may see that yet there are saints in Cæsars' households, and that there is as good cause to venerate and to multiply them, as when the gladiators waited in the ring, and beasts licked up their blood from the sand. For, the substance of all sainthood that has vitality enough to survive in households of Cæsar is this, that its virtue is so built on interior foundations, and its religious faith so rooted in the spiritual Source and Divine Master of its life, that no outward opposition avails to break it down, or even to interrupt its worship. You see, at once, how this carries the spirit of it out of the first age, and beyond Nero's |