But, in the meantime, there are surely signs of the approaching ruin of Popery, more certain than any speculations on the mystic numbers of the Revelation. We should point to recent books--not to books which merely expose Rome, that has been done long ago, usque ad nauseam--but to books which do her justice: to Mr. Maitland"s "Dark Ages;" Lord Lindsay"s "Christian Art;" and last, but not least, to the very charming work of Mrs. Jameson, whose t.i.tle heads this review. In them, and in a host of similar works in Germany, which Dr. Wiseman"s party hail as signs of coming triumph, we fancy we see the death-warrant of Romanism; because they prove that Rome has nearly done her work--that the Protestants are learning the lesson for the sake of which Providence has so long borne with that monstrous system. When Popery has no more truth to teach us, but not till then, will it vanish away into its native night.
We entreat Protestant readers not to be alarmed at us. We have not the slightest tendency toward the stimulants of Popery, either in their Roman unmixed state, or in their diluted Oxford form. We are, with all humility, more Protestant than Protestantism itself; our fastidious nostril, more sensitive of Jesuits than even those of the author of "Hawkstone," has led us at moments to fancy that we scent indulgences in Conduit-street Chapel, and discern inquisitors in Exeter Hall itself. Seriously, none believe more firmly than ourselves that the cause of Protestantism is the cause of liberty, of civilisation, of truth; the cause of man and G.o.d. And because we think Mrs. Jameson"s book especially Protestant, both in manner and intention, and likely to do service to the good cause, we are setting to work herein to praise and recommend it. For the time, we think, for calling Popery ill names is past; though to abstain is certainly sometimes a sore restraint for English spirits, as Mrs. Jameson herself, we suspect, has found; but Romanism has been exposed and refuted triumphantly, every month for centuries, and yet the Romish nations are not converted; and too many English families of late have found, by sad experience, that such arguments as are in vogue are powerless to dissuade the young from rushing headlong into the very superst.i.tions which they have been taught from their childhood to deride. The truth is, Protestantism may well cry: "Save me from my friends!" We have attacked Rome too often on shallow grounds, and finding our arguments weak, have found it necessary to overstate them. We have got angry, and caught up the first weapon which came to hand, and have only cut our own fingers. We have very nearly burnt the Church of England over our heads, in our hurry to make a bonfire of the Pope. We have been too proud to make ourselves acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of reading no Popish books but such as we were sure would give us a handle for attack, and not even them without the precaution of getting into a safe pa.s.sion beforehand. We have dealt in exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have outraged the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of n.o.ble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in Italy as well as in England. We have talked as if G.o.d had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and reprobation in the next millions of Christian people, simply because they were born of Romish and not of Protestant fathers. And we have our reward; we have fared like the old woman who would not tell the children what a well was for fear they should fall into one. We see educated and pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance of Rome, and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. Our medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is, like quacks, to increase the dose. Of course, if ten boxes of Morison"s pills have killed a man, it only proves that--he ought to have taken twelve of them. We are jesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman would say, "it is in good Protestant earnest."
In the meantime some of the deepest cravings of the human heart have been left utterly unsatisfied. And be it remembered, that such universal cravings are more than fancies; they are indications of deep spiritual wants, which, unless we supply them with the good food which G.o.d has made for them, will supply themselves with poison-- indications of spiritual faculties, which it is as wicked to stunt or distort by mis-education as it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy our understanding. Our humanity is an awful and divine gift; our business is to educate it throughout--G.o.d alone must judge which part of it shall preponderate over the rest. But in the last generation-- and, alas! in this also--little or no proper care has been taken of the love for all which is romantic, marvellous, heroic, which exists in every ingenuous child. Schoolboys, indeed, might, if they chose, in play-hours, gloat over the "Seven Champions of Christendom," or Lempriere"s G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses; girls might, perhaps, be allowed to devour by stealth a few fairy tales, or the "Arabian Nights;" but it was only by connivance that their longings were satisfied from the sc.r.a.ps of Moslemism, Paganism--anywhere but from Christianity.
Protestantism had nothing to do with the imagination--in fact, it was a question whether reasonable people had any; whether the devil was not the original maker of that troublesome faculty in man, woman, and child. Poetry itself was, with most parents, a dram, to be given, like Dalby"s Carminative, as a pis-aller, when children could not possibly be kept quiet by Miss Edgeworth or Mrs. Mangnall. Then, as the children grew up, and began to know something of history and art, two still higher cravings began to seize on many of them, if they were at all of deep and earnest character: a desire to a.s.sociate with religion their new love for the beautiful, and a reverence for antiquity; a wish to find some bond of union between themselves and the fifteen centuries of Christianity which elapsed before the Reformation. They applied to Protestant teachers and Protestant books, and received too often the answer that the Gospel had nothing to do with art--art was either Pagan or Popish; and as for the centuries before the Reformation, they and all in them belonged utterly to darkness and the pit. As for the heroes of early Christianity, they were madmen or humbugs; their legends, devilish and filthy puerilities. They went to the artists and literary men, and received the same answer. The medieval writers were fools.
Cla.s.sical art was the only art; all painters before the age of Raphael superst.i.tious bunglers. To be sure, as Fuseli said, Christianity had helped art a little; but then it was the Christianity of Julio and Leone--in short, of the worst age of Popery.
These falsehoods have worked out their own punishment. The young are examining for themselves, and finding that we have deceived them, a revulsion in their feelings has taken place, similar to that which took place in Germany some half-century ago. They are reading the histories of the Middle Ages, and if we call them barbarous--they will grant it, and then quote instances of individual heroism and piety, which they defy us or any honest man not to admire. They are reading the old legends, and when we call them superst.i.tious--they grant it, and then produce pa.s.sages in which the highest doctrines of Christianity are embodied in the most pathetic and n.o.ble stories.
They are looking for themselves at the ante-Raphaellic artists, and when we tell them that Fra Angelico"s pictures are weak, affected, ill-drawn, ill-coloured--they grant it, and then ask us if we can deny the sweetness, the purity, the rapt devotion, the saintly virtue, which shines forth from his faces. They ask us how beautiful and holy words or figures can be inspired by an evil spirit. They ask us why they are to deny the excellence of tales and pictures which make men more pure and humble, more earnest and n.o.ble. They tell us truly that all beauty is G.o.d"s stamp, and that all beauty ought to be consecrated to his service. And then they ask us: "If Protestantism denies that she can consecrate the beautiful, how can you wonder if we love the Romanism which can? You say that Popery created these glorious schools of art; how can you wonder if, like Overbeck, "we take the faith for the sake of the art which it inspired?"
To all which, be it true or false (and it is both), are we to answer merely by shutting our eyes and ears tight, and yelling "No Popery!"
or are we to say boldly to them: "We confess ourselves in fault; we sympathise with your longings; we confess that Protestantism has not satisfied them; but we a.s.sert that the only cause is, that Protestantism has not been true to herself; that Art, like every other product of the free human spirit, is her domain and not Popery"s; that these legends, these pictures, are beautiful just in as far as they contain in them the germs of those eternal truths about man, nature, and G.o.d, which the Reformation delivered from bondage; that you can admire them, and yet remain thorough Protestants; and more, that unless you do remain Protestants, you will never enter into their full beauty and significance, because you will lose sight of those very facts and ideas from which they derive all their healthy power over you"?
These thoughts are not our own; they are uttered all over England, thank G.o.d! just now, by many voices and in many forms; if they had been boldly spoken during the last fifteen years, many a n.o.ble spirit, we believe, might have remained in the Church of its fathers which has now taken refuge in Romanism from the fruits of mis- education. One great reason why Romanism has been suffered to drag on its existence is, we humbly think, that it might force us at last to say this: We have been long learning the lesson; till we have learnt it thoroughly Romanism will exist, and we shall never be safe from its allurements.
These thoughts may help to explain our opening sentences, as well as the extreme pleasure with which we hail the appearance of Mrs.
Jameson"s work.
The auth.o.r.ess has been struck, during her examination of the works of Christian artists, with the extreme ignorance which prevails in England on the subjects which they portray.
We have had (she says, in an introduction, every word of which we recommend as replete with the truest Christian philosophy)--
Inquiries into the Principles of Taste, treatises on the Sublime and Beautiful, Anecdotes of Painting, and we abound in antiquarian essays on disputed pictures and mutilated statues; but up to a late period any inquiry into the true spirit and significance of works of art, as connected with the history of religion and civilisation, would have appeared ridiculous or, perhaps, dangerous. We should have had another cry of "No Popery!" and Acts of Parliament prohibiting the importation of saints and Madonnas.--P. xxi.
And what should we have gained by it, but more ignorance of the excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of its real dangers? If Protestantism be the truth, knowledge of whatsoever kind can only further it. We have found it so in the case of cla.s.sical literature.
Why should we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel? Our boys have not taken to worshipping Jupiter and Juno by reading about them. We never feared that they would. We knew that we should not make them pagans by teaching them justly to admire the poetry, the philosophy, the personal virtues of pagans. And, in fact, the few who since the revival of letters have deserted Christianity for what they called philosophic heathenism, have in almost every case sympathised, not with the excellences, but with the worst vices of the Greek and Roman. They have been men like Leo X. or the Medici, who, ready to be profligates under any religion, found in heathenism only an excuse for their darling sins. The same will be the fruits of a real understanding of the medieval religion. It will only endanger those who carried already the danger in themselves, and would have fallen into some other snare if this had been away. Why should we fancy that Protestantism, like the Romanism which it opposes, is a plant that will not bear the light, and can only be protected at the expense of the knowledge of facts? Why will we forgot the great spiritual law which Mrs. Jameson and others in these days are fully recognising, that "we cannot safely combat the errors of any man or system without first giving them full credit for whatever excellences they may retain"? Such a course is the true fruit of that free spirit of Protestantism which ought to delight in recognising good to whatever party it may belong; which a.s.serts that every good gift and perfect gift comes directly from above, and not through the channel of particular formularies or priesthoods; which, because it loves faith and virtue, for their own sakes, and not as mere parts of a "Catholic system," can recognise them and delight in them wherever it finds them.
Upon these creations of ancient art (as Mrs. Jameson says) we cannot look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work through a reverentially excited fancy. We are critical, not credulous. We no longer accept this polytheistic form of Christianity; and there is little danger, I suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses of superst.i.tion to which it led. But if I have not much sympathy with modern imitations of medieval art, still less can I sympathise with that narrow puritanical jealousy which holds the monuments of a real and earnest faith in contempt: all that G.o.d has permitted to exist once in the past should be considered as the possession of the present; sacred for example or warning, and held as the foundation on which to build up what is better and purer.--Introd. p. xx.
Mrs. Jameson here speaks in the name of a large and rapidly- increasing cla.s.s. The craving for religious art, of which we spoke above, is spreading far and wide; even in dissenting chapels we see occasional attempts at architectural splendour, which would have been considered twenty years ago heretical or idolatrous. And yet with all this there is, as Mrs. Jameson says, a curious ignorance with regard to the subject of medieval art, even though it has now become a reigning fashion among us.
We have learned, perhaps, after running through half the galleries and churches in Europe, to distinguish a few of the attributes and characteristic figures which meet us at every turn, yet without any clear idea of their meaning, derivation, or relative propriety. The palm of victory, we know, designates the martyr, triumphant in death.
We so far emulate the critical sagacity of the gardener in "Zeluco,"
that we have learned to distinguish St. Laurence by his gridiron, and St. Catherine by her wheel. We are not at a loss to recognise the Magdalene"s "loose hair and lifted eye," even when without her skull and her vase of ointment. We learn to know St. Francis by his brown habit, and shaven crown, and wasted ardent features; but how do we distinguish him from St. Anthony, or St. Dominick? As for St. George and the Dragon--from the St. George of the Louvre--Raphael"s--who sits his horse with the elegant tranquillity of one a.s.sured of celestial aid, down to him "who swings on a sign-post at mine hostess"s door"--he is our familiar acquaintance. But who is that lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished dragon? "That is a copy after Raphael." And who is that majestic creature holding her palm-branch, while the unicorn crouches at her feet? "That is the famous Moretto at Vienna." Are we satisfied? Not in the least!
but we try to look wiser and pa.s.s on.
In the old times, the painters of these legendary scenes and subjects could always reckon securely on certain a.s.sociations and certain sympathies in the minds of the spectators. We have outgrown these a.s.sociations, we repudiate these sympathies. We have taken these works from their consecrated localities, in which they once held each their dedicated place, and we have hung them in our drawing-rooms and our dressing-rooms, over our pianos and our sideboards, and now what do they say to us? That Magdalene weeping amid her hair, who once spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner,--that Sebastian, arrow-pierced, whose upward ardent glance, spoke of courage and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf--that poor tortured slave to whose aid St.
Mark comes sweeping down from above--can they speak to us of nothing save flowing lines, and correct drawing, and gorgeous colour? Must we be told that one is a t.i.tian, the other a Guido, the third a Tintoret, before we dare to melt into compa.s.sion or admiration? or the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and influence, must it be with disdain or with pity? This, as it appears to me, is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational, as well as a most irreverent, view of the question: it is to confine the pleasure and improvement to be derived from works of art within very narrow bounds; it is to seal up a fountain of the richest poetry, and to shut out a thousand enn.o.bling and inspiring thoughts.
Happily there is a growing appreciation of these larger principles of criticism as applied to the study of art. People look at the pictures which hang round their walls, and have an awakening suspicion that there is more in them than meets the eye--more than mere connoisseurship can interpret; and that they have another, a deeper significance than has been dreamed of by picture dealers and picture collectors, or even picture critics.--Introd. xxiii.
On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art. Her first volume contains a general sketch of the legends connected with angels, with the scriptural personages, and the primitive fathers. Her second, the histories of most of "those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disfigured by poetical embroidery that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings." Each story is followed by a series of short but brilliant criticisms on those pictures in which the story has been embodied by painters of various schools and periods, and ill.u.s.trated by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts, which add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work. A future volume is promised which shall contain the "legends of the monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, considered merely in their connection with the revival and the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries"--a work which, if it equal the one before us, will doubtless be hailed by those conversant with that wonderful phase of human history as a valuable addition to our psychologic and aesthetic literature.
We ought to pet.i.tion, also, for a volume which should contain the life of the Saviour, and the legends of the Virgin Mary; though this latter subject, we are afraid, will be too difficult for even Mrs.
Jameson"s tact and delicacy to make tolerable to English readers, so thoroughly has the Virgin Mary, as especial patroness of purity, been intermixed in her legends with every form of prudish and prurient foulmindedness. {199}
The auth.o.r.ess has wisely abstained from all controversial matters.
In her preface she begs that it may be clearly understood, "that she has taken throughout the aesthetic and not the religious view of these productions of art; which, in as far as they are informed with a true and earnest feeling, and steeped in that beauty which emanates from Genius inspired by Faith, may cease to be religion, but cannot cease to be poetry; and as poetry only," she says, "I have considered them." In a word, Mrs. Jameson has done for them what schoolmasters and schoolboys, bishops and Royal Academicians, have been doing for centuries, by Greek plays and Greek statues, without having incurred, as we said above, the slightest suspicion of wanting to worship heathen G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses.
Not that she views these stories with the cold unbelieving eye of a Goethe, merely as studies of "artistic effect;" she often transgresses her rule of impartiality, and just where we should wish her to do so. Her geniality cannot avoid an occasional burst of feeling, such as concludes her notice of the stories about the Magdalene and the other "beatified penitents."
Poets have sung, and moralists and sages have taught, that for the frail woman there was nothing left but to die; or if more remained for her to suffer, there was at least nothing left for her to be or do--no choice between sackcloth and ashes and the livery of sin. The beatified penitents of the early Christian Church spoke another lesson--spoke divinely of hope for the fallen, hope without self- abas.e.m.e.nt or defiance. We, in these days, acknowledge no such saints; we have even done our best to dethrone Mary Magdalene; but we have martyrs--"by the pang without the palm"--and one, at least, among these who has not died without lifting up a voice of eloquent and solemn warning; who has borne her palm on earth, and whose starry crown may be seen on high even now amid the constellations of Genius.--Vol. ii. p. 386.
To whom the auth.o.r.ess may allude in this touching pa.s.sage our simplicity cannot guess in the least. We may, therefore, without the suspicion of partiality, say to the n.o.ble spirit of purity, compa.s.sion, and true liberality which breathes throughout this whole chapter, "Go on and conquer."
Nor again can Mrs. Jameson"s English honesty avoid an occasional slip of delicate sarcasm; for instance, in the story of St. Filomena, a brand-new saint, whose discovery at Rome, in 1802, produced there an excitement which we should suspect was very much wanted, which we recommend to all our readers as an instance of the state into which the virtues of honesty and common sense seem to have fallen in the Eternal City--of humbugs.
No doubt there are many such cases of imposture among the list of saints and martyrs; yet, granting all which have been exposed, and more, there still remains a list of authentic stories, sadder and stranger than any romance of man"s invention, to read which without deep sympathy and admiration our hearts must be callous or bigoted indeed. As Mrs. Jameson herself well says (vol. ii. p. 137):
When in the daily service of our Church we repeat these words of the sublime hymn ("The n.o.ble army of martyrs praise Thee!"), I wonder sometimes whether it be with a full appreciation of their meaning?
whether we do really reflect on all that this n.o.ble army of martyrs has conquered for us? Did they indeed glorify G.o.d through their courage, and seal their faith in their Redeemer with their blood?
And if it be so, how is it that we Christians have learned to look coldly upon the effigies of those who sowed the seed of the harvest which we have reaped?--Sanguis martyrum s.e.m.e.n Christianorum! We may admit that the reverence paid to them in former days was unreasonable and excessive; that credulity and ignorance have in many instances falsified the actions imputed to them; that enthusiasm has magnified their numbers beyond all belief; that when the communion with martyrs was a.s.sociated with the presence of their material remains, the pa.s.sion for relics led to a thousand abuses, and the belief in their intercession to a thousand superst.i.tions. But why, in uprooting the false, uproot also the beautiful and the true?
Thoroughly and practically convinced as we are of the truth of these words, it gave us some pain when, in the work of a very worthy person, "The Church in the Catacombs," by Dr. Maitland (not the author of "The Dark Ages"), we found, as far as we could perceive, a wish "to advance the Protestant cause," by throwing general doubt on the old martyrologies and their monuments in the Roman catacombs. If we shall have judged hastily, we shall be ready to apologise. None, as we have said before, more firmly believe that the Protestant cause is the good cause; none are more reverentially inclined toward all honest critical investigations, more anxious to see all truth, the Bible itself, sifted and tested in every possible method; but we must protest against what certainly seems too contemptuous a rejection of a ma.s.s of historic evidence hitherto undoubted, except by the school of Voltaire; and of the hasty denial of the meaning of Christian and martyrologic symbols, as well known to antiquaries as Stonehenge or Magna Charta.
At the same time, Dr. Maitland"s book seems the work of a righteous and earnest man, and it is not its object, but its method, of which we complain. The whole question of martyrology, a far more important one than historians generally fancy, requires a thorough investigation, critical and historical; it has to be done, and especially just now. The Germans, the civil engineers of the intellectual world, ought to do it for us, and no doubt will. But those who undertake it must bring to the work, not only impartiality, but enthusiasm; it is the spirit only, after all, which can quicken the eye, which can free the understanding from the idols of laziness, prejudice, and hasty induction. To talk philosophically of such matters a man must love them; he must set to work with a Christian sympathy, and a manly admiration for those old spiritual heroes to whose virtue and endurance Europe owes it that she is not now a den of heathen savages. He must be ready to a.s.sume everything about them to be true which is neither absurd, immoral, nor unsupported by the same amount of evidence which he would require for any other historic fact. And, just because this very tone of mind--enthusiastic but not idolatrous, discriminating but not captious--runs through Mrs.
Jameson"s work, we hail it with especial pleasure, as a fresh move in a truly philosophic and Christian direction. Indeed, for that branch of the subject which she has taken in hand, not the history, but the poetry of legends and of the art which they awakened, she derives a peculiar fitness, not merely from her own literary talents and acquaintance with continental art, but also from the very fact of her being an English wife and mother. Women ought, perhaps, always to make the best critics--at once more quicksighted, more tasteful, more sympathetic than ourselves, whose proper business is creation.
Perhaps in Utopia they will take the reviewer"s business entirely off our hands, as they are said to be doing already, by-the-bye, in one leading periodical. But of all critics an English matron ought to be the best--open as she should be, by her womanhood, to all tender and admiring sympathies, accustomed by her Protestant education to unsullied purity of thought, and inheriting from her race, not only freedom of mind and reverence for antiquity, but the far higher birthright of English honesty.
And such a genial and honest spirit, we think, runs through this book.
Another difficult task, perhaps the most difficult of all, the auth.o.r.ess has well performed. We mean the handling of stories whose facts she partly or wholly disbelieves, while she admires and loves their spirit and moral; or doctrines, to p.r.o.nounce on whose truth or falsehood is beyond her subject. This difficulty Mr. Newman, in the "Lives of the English Saints," edited and partly written by him, turned with wonderful astuteness to the advantage of Romanism; but others, more honest, have not been so victorious. Witness the painfully uncertain impression left by some parts of one or two of those masterly articles on Romish heroes which appeared in the "Quarterly Review;" an uncertainty which we have the fullest reason to believe was most foreign to the reviewer"s mind and conscience.
Even Mr. Macaulay"s brilliant history here and there falls into the same snare. No one but those who have tried it can be aware of the extreme difficulty of preventing the dramatic historian from degenerating into an apologist or heating into a sneerer; or understand the ease with which an earnest author, in a case like the present, becomes frantically reckless, under the certainty that, say what he will, he will be called a Jesuit by the Protestants, an Infidel by the Papists, a Pantheist by the Ultra-High-Church, and a Rogue by all three.
Now, we certainly shall not say that Mrs. Jameson is greater than the writers just mentioned; but we must say, that female tact and deep devotional feeling cut the Gordian knot which has puzzled more cunning heads. Not that Mrs. Jameson is faultless; we want something yet, in the telling of a Christian fairy-tale, and know not what we want: but never were legends narrated with more discernment and simplicity than these.
As an instance, take the legend of St. Dorothea (vol. ii. p. 184), which is especially one of those stories of "sainted personages who,"
as Mrs. Jameson says, "lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity: and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical embroidery, that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings;" and which may, therefore, be taken as a complete test of the auth.o.r.ess"s tact and honesty:
In the province of Cappadocia and in the city of Caesarea, dwelt a n.o.ble virgin, whose name was Dorothea. In the whole city there was none to be compared to her in beauty and grace of person. She was a Christian, and served G.o.d day and night with prayers, with fasting, and with alms.
The governor of the city, by name Sapritius (or Fabricius), was a very terrible persecutor of the Christians, and hearing of the maiden, and of her great beauty, he ordered her to be brought before him. She came, with her mantle folded on her bosom, and her eyes meekly cast down. The governor asked "Who art thou?" and she replied: "I am Dorothea, a virgin, and a servant of Jesus Christ."
He said: "Thou must serve our G.o.ds, or die." She answered mildly: "Be it so; the sooner shall I stand in the presence of Him whom I most desire to behold." Then the governor asked her: "Whom meanest thou?" She replied: "I mean the Son of G.o.d, Christ, mine espoused!
his dwelling is paradise; by his side are joys eternal; and in his garden grow celestial fruits and roses that never fade." Then Sapritius, overcome by her eloquence and beauty, ordered her to be carried back to her dungeon. And he sent to her two sisters, whose names were Calista and Christeta, who had once been Christians, but who, from terror of the torments with which they were threatened, had renounced their faith in Christ. To these women the governor promised large rewards if they would induce Dorothea to follow their evil example; and they, nothing doubting of success, boldly undertook the task. The result, however, was far different; for Dorothea, full of courage and constancy, reproved them, as one having authority, and drew such a picture of the joys they had forfeited through their falsehood and cowardice, that they fell at her feet, saying: "O blessed Dorothea, pray for us, that, through thy intercession, our sins may be forgiven and our penitence accepted!" And she did so.
And when they had left the dungeon they proclaimed aloud that they were servants of Christ.
Then the governor, furious, commanded that they should be burned, and that Dorothea should witness their torments. And she stood by, bravely encouraging them, and saying: "O my sisters, fear not!
suffer to the end! for these transient pangs shall be followed by the joys of eternal life!" Thus they died: and Dorothea herself was condemned to be tortured cruelly, and then beheaded. The first part of her sentence she endured with invincible fort.i.tude. She was then led forth to death; and, as she went, a young man, a lawyer of the city named Theophilus, who had been present when she was first brought before the governor, called to her mockingly: "Ha! fair maiden, goest thou to join thy bridegroom? Send me, I pray thee, of the fruits and flowers of that same garden of which thou hast spoken: I would fain taste of them!" And Dorothea looking on him inclined her head with a gentle smile, and said: "Thy request, O Theophilus, is granted!" Whereat he laughed aloud with his companions; but she went on cheerfully to death.