sermons on occasions of great public distress; its charity-children
in long file, in memory of the elder empress Faustina; its prototype,
under patronage of Aesculapius, of the modern hospital for the sick
on the island of Saint Bartholomew. But what pagan charity was doing
tardily, and as if with the painful calculation of old age, the
church was doing, almost without thinking about it, with all the
liberal [113] enterprise of youth, because it was her very being thus
to do. "You fail to realise your own good intentions," she seems to
say, to pagan virtue, pagan kindness. She identified herself with
those intentions and advanced them with an unparalleled freedom and
largeness. The gentle Seneca would have reverent burial provided
even for the dead body of a criminal. Yet when a certain woman
collected for interment the insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world
surmised that she must be a Christian: only a Christian would have
been likely to conceive so chivalrous a devotion towards mere
wretchedness. "We refuse to be witnesses even of a homicide
commanded by the law," boasts the dainty conscience of a Christian
apologist, "we take no part in your cruel sports nor in the
spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we hold that to witness a murder
is the same thing as to commit one." And there was another duty
almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau brought back to the
degenerate society of a later age. In an impassioned discourse the
sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle their own infants; and
there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers, which gratefully record
this proof of natural affection as a thing then unusual. In this
matter too, what a sanction, what a provocative to natural duty, lay
in that image discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine Sibyl, amid the
aurora of a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and the [114]
Child, just then rising upon the world like the dawn!