David Francis Bacon

“ The Savior of all, afar from the abodes of men, from the sound and sight of human cares and sins, alone with his chosen three, on the vast mountains, with the world as far beneath their eyes as its thoughts were below their minds;――in the silence of the night, with the lights of the city and villages faintly gleaming in the distance on the lower hills and the plain,――with no sound near them but the murmuring of the night wind about the rocks,――with the dark canopy of gathering clouds above them,――Jesus prayed. ”

“ Wherever, through all ages, the high heroic energy of Peter, the ready faith of Andrew, the martyr-fire of James Boanerges, the soul-absorbing love of John, the willing obedience of Philip, the guileless purity of Nathanael, the recorded truth of Matthew, the slow but deep devotion of Thomas, the blameless righteousness of James the Just, the appellative zeal of Simon, and the earnest warning eloquence of Jude, are all commemorated in honor and bright renown,――the murderous, sordid spite of Iscariot, will insure him an equally lasting proverbial shame. ”

“ On the top of the lofty rampart of Castle Antonia,――with the dark iron forms of the Roman soldiery around him, guarding the staircase from top to bottom, against the raging mob,――and with the enormous mass of the congregated thousands of Jerusalem, and of the strangers who had come up to the festival, all straining their fierce eyes in wrath and hate upon him, as a convicted renegade,――one feeble, slender man, now stood, the object of the most painful attention to all,――yet, less moved with passion and anxiety than any one present. ”

“ The great Babylon of the seven hills, falls under a doom of far darker, and of irrevocable desolation,――like the dashing roar of the sinking rock thrown into the sea, she is thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. And such too, is the doom of the fierce scarlet rider of the beast,――“Rejoice over her, O heaven! and ye holy apostles and prophets! for God has avenged you on her.” But beyond all this awful ruin appears a vision of contrasting, splendid beauty. ”

“ The mighty force of Roman genius had overcome the thousand barriers which nature and art had reared between the different nations of the three continents in which it ruled, and the passage from one end of that vast empire to the other, was without any hindrance to those who traveled on errands of peace. The bloody strife which once distracted the tribes of Gaul, Germany and Britain, had rendered those grand sections of Europe impassable, and shut up each paltry tribe within a narrow boundary, which could never be crossed but with fire and sword. ”

“ At this spectacle, so degrading to such a dignity as they considered most becoming in one who aspired to be a teacher of morals and religion, the scribes and Pharisees sneeringly asked the disciples of Jesus,――“Why eateth your Master with tax-gatherers and sinners?” Jesus, hearing the malicious inquiry, answered it in such a tone of irony as best suited its impertinence. “They that are whole, need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what this means,――‘I will have mercy, rather than sacrifice;’ for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” ”

“ This was the spirit which raised him from the humble task of a fisherman, to that of drawing men and nations within the compass of the gospel, and to a glory which not all the gods of ancient superstition ever attained.
Most empty honors! Why hew down the marble mountains, and rear them into walls as massive and as lasting? Why raise the solemn arches and the lofty towers to overtop the everlasting hills with their heavenward heads? ”

“ These splendid but mournful testimonies of the misplaced energies of that inborn spirit of devotion, which, all over the world in all times, moves the heart of man to the worship of that Eternal power of whose existence he is ever conscious, touched the spirit of Paul with other emotions than those of delight and admiration. The eye of the citizen of classical and splendid Tarsus, was not indeed blind to the beauties of these works of art, whose fame was spread throughout the civilized world, and with whose historic and poetic glories his eye and ear had long been made familiar ”

“ Never did Rome wear the aspect of a truly majestic city, till the imperial pride of her long line of Caesars had filled her with the temples, amphitheaters, circuses, aqueducts, baths, triumphal columns and arches, which to this day perpetuate the solid glory of the founders, and make her the wonder of the world, while not one surviving great work of art claims a republican for its author. ”

“ It was now probably about morning; the storm was passed,――the clouds had vanished,――the thunder was hushed, and the cheerful sun now shone on mountain and plain, illuminating their downward path towards the city, and inspiring their hearts with the joyous emotions suited to their enlarged views of their Lord’s kingdom, and their own duties. As they went down, Jesus charged them to tell no man what things they had seen, till he, the son of man, rose from the dead. And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen. ”

“ Thus and therefore it was, that wherever Roman conquest spread, and secured the lasting triumphs of civilization, thither Christianity followed, and flourished, as on a congenial soil, till at last not one land was left in the whole empire, where the eagle and the dove did not spread their wings in harmonious triumph. In all these lands, where Roman civilization prepared the way, Christian churches rose, and gathered within them the noble and the refined, as well as the humble and the poor. ”

“ After eight days, the disciples were again assembled, and on this occasion Thomas was with them. While they were sitting, as usual, with doors closed for fear of the Jews, Jesus again, in the same sudden and mysterious manner as before, appeared all at once in the midst, with his solemn salutation, “Peace be with you!” Turning at once to the unbelieving disciple, whose amazed eyes now for the first time fell on the body of his risen Lord, he said to him, “Thomas! Put thy finger here, and see my hands; and put thy hand here, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.” ”

“ Even the Fathers are silent as to any other important circumstances of his life, and it is only in the noble record which he has left of the life of Christ, in the gospel which bears his name, that any monument of his actions and character can now be found. Yet this solitary remaining effort of his genius is of such importance in the history of revealed religion, that hardly the most eminent of the apostles is so often brought to mind, as the evangelist, whose clear, simple, but impressive testimony to the words and deeds of his Lord, now stands at the head of the sacred canon. ”

“ Here longest tarried the taste, art and refinement, which so eminently marked the first glories of Greece, and when the triumphs of that ancient excellence were beginning to grow dim in its brighter early seats in Attica and in Ionian Asia, they flashed out with a most dazzling beauty in the splendid city of the Isthmus,――but alas!――in a splendor that was indeed only a passing flash,――a last brilliant gleam from this glorious spot, before the lamp of Hellenic glory in art, went out forever. ”

“ The fierce Gaul forsook his savage hut and dress together, robing himself in the graceful toga of the Roman citizen, or the light tunic of the colonial cultivator, and reared his solid and lofty dwelling in clustering cities or villages, whose deep laid foundations yet endure, in lasting testimony of the nature of Roman conquest and civilization. Under his Roman rulers and patrons, he raised piles of art, unequaled in grandeur, beauty and durability, by any similar works in the world. ”

“ Second, the Apocalypse is poetry, in the highest and justest sense of the word. All prophecy is poetry. The sublimity of such thoughts can not be expressed in the plain unbroken detail of a prose narrative; and even when the events of past history are combined in one harmonious series with wide views of the future, they too rise from the dull unpictured record of a mere narrator, and share in the elevation of the mighty whole. The spirit of the writer, replete, not with mere particulars, but with vivid images, seeks language that paints, “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn;” ”

“ Yet what avails the bright array of happily conspiring circumstances, to prince or people, against the awful majesty of divine truth, or the pure, simple energy of human devotion? Within the obscurer corners of his vast territories, creeping for room under the outermost colonnades of that mighty temple whose glories he had pledged himself to renew,――wandering like outcasts from place to place,――seeking supporters only among the unintellectual mass of the people,――were a set of men of whom he probably had not heard until he entered his own dominions. ”

“ Their blood pouring out on the earth, rises to heaven, but not sooner than their spirits,――whence their loud witness calls down woful ruin on the blood-defiled city of the temple. And when that ruin falls, no regret checks the exulting tone of the thanksgiving. All that made those places holy and dear, is gone;――God dwells there no more; “the temple of God is opened in heaven, and there is seen in his temple the ark of his covenant,” and all heaven swells the jubilee over the destruction of Jerusalem. ”

“ That is, “To your forbearance towards an erring and returning Christian brother, there should be no limit but his own obstinate adhesion to his error. In coming out from the world to follow me, you have given up your natural rights to avenge, either legally or personally, those injuries which pass the bounds of common forbearance. The preservation of perfect harmony in the new community to which you have joined yourself, is of so much importance to the triumphant advancement of our cause, as to require justly all these sacrifices of personal ill-will.” ”

“ At the same moment, fell from his inward sense, the obscuring film of prejudice and bigotry. Renewed in mental vision, he saw with the clear eye of confiding faith and eternal hope, that Jesus, who in the full revelation of his vindictive majesty having dazzled and blinded him in his murderous career, now appeared to his purified sense, in the tempered rays and mild effulgence of redeeming grace. ”

“ But, with the polished and truly learned philosophers of Athens, or the majestic lords of Rome, they would have felt the want of that minute knowledge of the characters and manners of both Greeks and Romans, with which Paul was so familiar, by the circumstances of his birth and education, in a city highly favored by Roman laws and Grecian philosophy. Thus was it wisely ordained, for the complete foundation and rapid extension of the gospel cause, that for each great field of labor there should be a distinct set of men, each peculiarly well fitted for their own department of the mighty work. ”

“ In this splendid seat of knowledge, Saul was born of purely Jewish parents. “A Hebrew of the Hebrews,” he enjoyed from his earliest infancy that minute religious instruction, which every Israelite was in conscience bound to give his children; and with a minuteness and attention so much the more careful, as a residence in a foreign land, far away from the consecrated soil of Palestine and the Holy city of his faith, might increase the liabilities of his children to forget or neglect a religion of which they saw so few visible tokens around them, to keep alive their devotion. ”

“ So far did that all-subduing genius spread its work, and so deeply did it make its marks, beyond the most distant and impervious boundary of modern civilization, that the latest march of discovery has found far older adventurers before it, even in the great desert; and within a dozen years, European travelers have brought to our knowledge walls and inscriptions, which, after mouldering unknown in the dry, lonely waste, for ages, at last met the astonished eyes of these gazers, with the still striking witness of Roman power. ”

“ At length the great feast arrived, on which the Jews, according to the special command of Moses, commemorated the day, on which of old God gave the law to their fathers, on Mount Sinai, amid thunder and lightning. On this festal occasion, great numbers of Jews who had settled in different remote parts of the world, were in the habit of coming back to their father-land, and their holy city, to renew their devotion in the one great temple of their ancient faith, there to offer up the sacrifices of gratitude to their fathers’ God, who had prospered them even in strange lands among the heathen. ”

“ Rising upon them, like life from the dead, the Son of God should burst forth in the might of his Father,――he should be revealed from heaven with ten thousand angels, and recalling his scattered friends, who might have been for a moment borne down before the iron hosts of Rome, he should sweep every foreign master, and every domestic religious tyrant, from Israel’s heritage, setting up a throne, whose sway should spread to the uttermost parts of the earth, displacing even the deep-rooted hold of Roman power. ”

“ As the amazed apostle turned to see the person from whom came such portentous words, there met his eye a vision so dazzling, yet appalling in its beauty and splendor, amid the bare, dark rocks around, that he fell to the earth without life, and lay motionless until the heavenly being, whose awful glories had so overwhelmed him, recalled him to his most vivid energies, by the touch of his life-giving hand. ”