Shall it be said that
its kingdom is not of this world? In one sense, and that the highest, it
certainly is not; but just as certainly Christ never intended those words
to be used as a subterfuge by which to escape our responsibilities in the
life of business and politics. Let the cross, the sword, and the arena
answer, whether the world, that then was, so understood its first
preachers and apostles. Caesar and Flamen both instinctively dreaded it,
not because it aimed at riches or power, but because it strove to conquer
that other world in the moral nature of mankind, where it could establish
a throne against which wealth and force would be weak and contemptible. No
human device has ever prevailed against it, no array of majorities or
respectabilities; but neither Caesar nor Flamen ever conceived a scheme so
cunningly adapted to neutralize its power as that graceful compromise
which accepts it with the lip and denies it in the life, which marries it
at the altar and divorces it at the church-door.
NOTE TO THE CATACOMBS OF ROME.
In our first article on the Roman Catacombs we expressed the belief that
"a year was now hardly likely to pass without the discovery" of new
burial-places of the early Christians,--the fresh interest in Christian
archaeology leading to fresh explorations in the hollow soil of the
Campagna.
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