In its early days, fresh from the fountain‐head, the Christian’s was, indeed, essentially and emphatically, a religion of love. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to stretch a hand to the fallen, to think no evil, to judge not, nor to condemn, in short, to love “the brother whom he _had_ seen,” were the direct commands of that Great Example who had so recently been here on earth. His first disciples strove, hard as fallible humanity can, to imitate Him, and in so striving, failed not to attain a certain peaceful composure and contentment of mind, that no other code of morality, no other system of philosophy, had ever yet produced. Perhaps this was the quality that, in his dealings with his victim, the Roman executioner found most mysterious and inexplicable. Fortitude, resolution, defiance, these he could understand: but the childlike simplicity that accepted good and evil with equal confidence; that was thankful and cheerful under both, and that entertained neither care for to‐day nor anxiety for to‐morrow, was a moral elevation, at which, with all their pretensions, his own countrymen had never yet been able to arrive. Neither Stoic nor Epicurean, Sophist nor Philosopher, could look upon life, and death also, with the calm assurance of these unlearned men, leaning on a hand the Roman could not see, convinced of an immortality the Roman was unable to conceive.
With this happy conviction beaming in her face, Mariamne inculcated on Esca the tenets of her noble faith; explaining, not logically, indeed, but with woman’s persuasive reasonings of the heart, how fair was the prospect thus open to him, how glorious the reward, which, though mortal eye could not behold it, mortal hand could not take away. Promises of future happiness are none the less glowing that they fall on a man’s ear from the lips he loves. Conviction goes the straighter to his heart when it pervades another’s that beats in unison with his own. Under that moonlit sky, reddened in the horizon with the glare of a distant quarter of the city already set on fire by the insurgents; in that dreary waste of the Esquiline, with its blasted trees, its shrieking night‐birds, and its scattered grave‐stones, the Briton imbibed the first principles of Christianity from the daughter of Judah, whom he loved; and the girl’s face beamed with a holy tenderness more than mortal, while she showed the way of everlasting happiness, and life, and light, to him whose soul was dearer to her than her own.