The Blue Flower [50]
transfiguring the sky. The curtain of darkness had lifted
along the edge of the horizon. The ragged crests of Mount
Silpius were outlined with pale saffron light. In the central
vault of heaven a few large stars twinkled drowsily. The
great city, still chiefly pagan, lay more than half-asleep.
But multitudes of the Christians, dressed in white and carrying
lighted torches in their hands, were hurrying toward the
Basilica of Constantine to keep the new holy-day of the
church, the festival of the birthday of their Master.
The vast, bare building was soon crowded, and the younger
converts, who were not yet permitted to stand among the
baptised, found it difficult to come to their appointed place
between the first two pillars of the house, just within the
threshold. There was some good-humoured pressing and jostling
about the door; but the candidates pushed steadily forward.
"By your leave, friends, our station is beyond you. Will
you let us pass? Many thanks."
A touch here, a courteous nod there, a little patience, a
little persistence, and at last they stood in their place.
Hermas was taller than his companions; he could look easily
over their heads and survey the sea of people stretching away
through the columns, under the shadows of the high roof, as
the tide spreads on a calm day into the pillared cavern of
Staffa, quiet as if the ocean hardly dared to breathe. The
light of many flambeaux fell, in flickering, uncertain rays,
over the assembly. At the end of the vista there was a circle
of clearer, steadier radiance. Hermas could see the bishop in
his great chair, surrounded by the presbyters, the lofty desks
on either side for the readers of the Scripture, the
communion-table and the table of offerings in the middle of
the church.
The call to prayer sounded down the long aisle. Thousands
of hands were joyously lifted in the air, as if the sea had
blossomed into waving lilies, and the "Amen" was like the
murmur of countless ripples in an echoing place.
Then the singing began, led by the choir of a hundred
trained voices which the Bishop Paul had founded in Antioch.
Timidly, at first, the music felt its way, as the people
joined with a broken and uncertain cadence: the mingling of
many little waves not yet gathered into rhythm and harmony.
Soon the longer, stronger billows of song rolled in, sweeping
from side to side as the men and the women answered in the
clear antiphony.
Hermas had often been carried on those
Tides of music's golden sea
Selling toward eternity.
But to-day his heart was a rock that stood motionless. The
flood passed by and left him unmoved.
Looking out from his place at the foot of the pillar, he
saw a man standing far off in the lofty bema. Short and
slender, wasted by sickness, gray before his time, with pale
cheeks and wrinkled brow, he seemed at first like a person of
no significance--a reed shaken in the wind. But there was a
look in his deep-set, poignant eyes, as he gathered all the
glances of the multitude to himself, that belied his mean
appearance and prophesied power. Hermas knew very well who it
was: the man who had drawn him from his father's house, the
teacher who was instructing him as a son in the Christian faith,
the guide and trainer of his soul--John of Antioch, whose fame
filled the city and began to overflow Asia, and who was called
already Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed preacher.
Hermas had felt the magic of his eloquence many a time;
and to-day, as the tense voice vibrated through the stillness,
and the sentences moved onward, growing fuller and stronger,
bearing argosies of costly rhetoric and treasures of homely
speech in their bosom, and drawing the hearts of men with a
resistless magic, Hermas knew that the preacher had never been
more potent, more inspired.
He played on that immense congregation as a master on an
instrument. He rebuked their sins, and they trembled. He
touched their sorrows, and they wept. He spoke of the
conflicts, the triumphs, the glories