Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/198

 obtain his release. Failing in that, they ministered to him in prison. From early dawn widows and orphans might be seen waiting at the prison-doors. (In the widows here mentioned commentators recognise deaconesses.) The rulers of the Christian community made interest with the jailors that they might pass the night within the prison. They brought choice meals in to him. (This has been taken, somewhat rashly perhaps, as an allusion to the "love-feasts" of the Church.) They read their sacred books with him. Christians came from some of the cities in Asia, as delegates from the community, to aid and encourage him. There is much in this account which brings to mind the imprisonment of St Paul, and the "prayer that was made of the Church" for him—when Philemon and Onesiphorus "ministered to him in his bonds," and some of the chief men of Asia "were his friends." As to this episode, at least, Lucian seems to have been well-informed. But more criticism has been provoked by his account of the man's death at Olympia, which he professes to have witnessed. One night, at the end of the Olympic festival, Peregrinus—or, as he then called himself, Proteus—moved, with an escort of friends, towards a great pyre which had been erected near the Hippodrome. Laying aside the coarse cloak, wallet, and staff of the Cynic—for such he had lately been—he mounted the pile clothed only in a squalid linen tunic. He threw some frankincense on the flames; then turned his face to the