The Narrow Ways
And Openings Hither And Thither, Coupled With The Dead And Heavy
Air, Soon Blotted Out, In All Of Us, Any Recollection Of The Track
By Which We Had Come:
And I could not help thinking 'Good Heaven,
if, in a sudden fit of madness, he should dash the torches out, or
if he should be seized with a fit, what would become of us!' On we
wandered, among martyrs' graves:
Passing great subterranean
vaulted roads, diverging in all directions, and choked up with
heaps of stones, that thieves and murderers may not take refuge
there, and form a population under Rome, even worse than that which
lives between it and the sun. Graves, graves, graves; Graves of
men, of women, of their little children, who ran crying to the
persecutors, 'We are Christians! We are Christians!' that they
might be murdered with their parents; Graves with the palm of
martyrdom roughly cut into their stone boundaries, and little
niches, made to hold a vessel of the martyrs' blood; Graves of some
who lived down here, for years together, ministering to the rest,
and preaching truth, and hope, and comfort, from the rude altars,
that bear witness to their fortitude at this hour; more roomy
graves, but far more terrible, where hundreds, being surprised,
were hemmed in and walled up: buried before Death, and killed by
slow starvation.
'The Triumphs of the Faith are not above ground in our splendid
churches,' said the friar, looking round upon us, as we stopped to
rest in one of the low passages, with bones and dust surrounding us
on every side. 'They are here! Among the Martyrs' Graves!' He
was a gentle, earnest man, and said it from his heart; but when I
thought how Christian men have dealt with one another; how,
perverting our most merciful religion, they have hunted down and
tortured, burnt and beheaded, strangled, slaughtered, and oppressed
each other; I pictured to myself an agony surpassing any that this
Dust had suffered with the breath of life yet lingering in it, and
how these great and constant hearts would have been shaken--how
they would have quailed and drooped--if a foreknowledge of the
deeds that professing Christians would commit in the Great Name for
which they died, could have rent them with its own unutterable
anguish, on the cruel wheel, and bitter cross, and in the fearful
fire.
Such are the spots and patches in my dream of churches, that remain
apart, and keep their separate identity. I have a fainter
recollection, sometimes of the relics; of the fragments of the
pillar of the Temple that was rent in twain; of the portion of the
table that was spread for the Last Supper; of the well at which the
woman of Samaria gave water to Our Saviour; of two columns from the
house of Pontius Pilate; of the stone to which the Sacred hands
were bound, when the scourging was performed; of the grid-iron of
Saint Lawrence, and the stone below it, marked with the frying of
his fat and blood; these set a shadowy mark on some cathedrals, as
an old story, or a fable might, and stop them for an instant, as
they flit before me. The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated
buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of
battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground, and
forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian
churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and
ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells,
and sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ: of Madonne,
with their breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle
like a modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously
attired in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold:
their withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with
chaplets of crushed flowers; sometimes of people gathered round the
pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and
preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming down through some high
window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the church,
to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the echoes of
the roof. Then my tired memory comes out upon a flight of steps,
where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; and
strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and hovels,
of an old Italian street.
On one Saturday morning (the eighth of March), a man was beheaded
here. Nine or ten months before, he had waylaid a Bavarian
countess, travelling as a pilgrim to Rome--alone and on foot, of
course--and performing, it is said, that act of piety for the
fourth time. He saw her change a piece of gold at Viterbo, where
he lived; followed her; bore her company on her journey for some
forty miles or more, on the treacherous pretext of protecting her;
attacked her, in the fulfilment of his unrelenting purpose, on the
Campagna, within a very short distance of Rome, near to what is
called (but what is not) the Tomb of Nero; robbed her; and beat her
to death with her own pilgrim's staff. He was newly married, and
gave some of her apparel to his wife: saying that he had bought it
at a fair. She, however, who had seen the pilgrim-countess passing
through their town, recognised some trifle as having belonged to
her. Her husband then told her what he had done. She, in
confession, told a priest; and the man was taken, within four days
after the commission of the murder.
There are no fixed times for the administration of justice, or its
execution, in this unaccountable country; and he had been in prison
ever since. On the Friday, as he was dining with the other
prisoners, they came and told him he was to be beheaded next
morning, and took him away.
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