scarcely held together, he continued to read his beloved authors, sacred and profane, and it was not the sacred books that pleased him most." "Unhappy wretch that I was," he cries out, "I fasted and I read Cicero. After having passed the nights without sleep and shed bitter tears at the memory of my faults, I took Plautus in my hand." He then relates his famous dream, in which he seemed to be transported before the Celestial Judge and cruelly scourged by the angels. When he tried to defend himself by saying that he was a Christian; "No, no," replied the angels, "you are a Ciceronian; where your treasure is there is also your heart." And he promised God to read no longer any profane book. And yet many times after this the memory of the profane authors obtruded themselves upon his mind, and he could not help quoting them. When he visited the cata combs, the impression made upon him by the religious silence of these long galleries and the frightful alternation of light and darkness, straightway brought to his mind the verse of Vergil, which he kept repeating over and over again: Horror ubique animo, simul ipsa silentia terrent.' One phase of this love for the pagan poets, was a feeling of sadness at the thought of their souls being lost forever. Legend tells how St. Paul, standing at the tomb of Vergil exclaimed: Quem te reddidissem Si te vivum invenissem, Once when Evodius asked St. Augustine who there could be to whom, according to St. Paul, Christ went and preached after 1On all sides, horror and the very silence itself terrify the soul. 2 What a man I could have made of you, if I had only found you alive, Oh, greatest of poets! whom he learned to know when in scho and whose eloquence and genius he s admired. "There are among them orat and poets, who have given up to the laught of the crowd the divinities of mythology, a who have proclaimed the one God. A even among those who were deceived as the worship of God, and who rendered h mage to the creature more than to the cre tor, there are some to be found who ha lived honorably, who have given fair exa ples of simplicity, chastity, sobriety; wh knew how to brave death for the safety their country, kept their word not on towards their fellow citizens, but even the enemies, and who deserve to be set up models." And he ends, saying he wou indeed be glad if he were sure that they we Long after the time of Jerome and St. Augustine this love for the classics endured in union with struggles of conscience. We are told in an Irish legend how Saint Cadoc and his disciple Gildas were walking along the sea-shore one day. Cadoc carried a volume of Vergil under his arm. All at once he burst out crying, and when Gildas demanded the reason therefor, said, "I weep, because I think that the author of this book, so sweet, finds himself perhaps in the pains of Hell." Just then a gust of wind carried the volume 1 Epit. 164. Bossier says: "This letter makes us think of the end of the Gospel of Nicodemus, where Christ reascends to Heaven taking old Adam by the hand, and with him, the patriarchs and prophets of the ancient law. To this sacred cortège which traverses space St. Augustine would like to join Plato, Cicero, Vergil and the great pagans who caught a glimpse of God." The reader of Dante's Divina Commedia will remember the beautiful scene in the Fourth Canto of the Inferno, where the poet sees, in Limbo, the souls of the great pagan poets, who lived virtuously, and hence are not punished in hell proper, but not having been baptized cannot dwell in paradise; E sol di tanto offesi, Che senza speme vivemo in disio. for those pagans, who while on earth as the angels in heaven. Soon after, asleep and seemed to hear a voice s "Pray for me, pray for me. Be not v for I shall sing forever, in heaven abov mercies of the Lord." The day afterw fisherman brought him a fish, which, on opened, was found to contain the co Vergil he had lost. |