The Lost Word | Page 5

street.
Overhead the mystery of daybreak was silently transfiguring the sky.
The curtain of darkness had lifted softly upward along the edge of the
horizon. The ragged crests of Mount Silpius were outlined with pale
rosy 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 latest holy day of the church, the new 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 baptized, 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 white
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
Setting 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 of their

faith, and they broke out in thunders of applause. He hushed them into
reverent silence, and led them tenderly, with the wise men of the East,
to the lowly birthplace of Jesus.
"Do thou, therefore, likewise leave the Jewish people, the troubled city,
the bloodthirsty tyrant, the pomp of the world, and hasten to Bethlehem,
the sweet house of spiritual bread. For though thou be but a shepherd,
and come hither, thou shalt behold the young Child in an inn. Though
thou be a king, and come not hither, thy purple robe shall profit