Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/396

 360 Readings in European History stations. By us, while ye still lack the first down upon your cheeks, ye are established in your early years and bear the tonsure on your heads, while the dread sentence of the Church is heard, " Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm;" and he who has rashly touched them let him forthwith, by his own blow, be smitten violently with the wound of an anathema. At length, yielding your lives to wickedness, reaching the two paths of Pythagoras, ye choose the left branch and, going backward, ye let go the lot of God which ye had first assumed, becoming companions of thieves. And thus, ever going from bad to worse, blackened by theft and murder and manifold impurities, your fame and conscience stained by sin, at the bidding of justice ye are confined in manacles and fetters, and are kept to be punished by a most shameful death. Then your friend is put far away, nor is there any to mourn your lot. Peter swears that he knows not the man; the people cry to the judge: "Crucify, crucify him! If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend." Now all refuge is gone, for ye must stand before the judgment seat, and there is no appeal, but only the gallows is in store for you. While the wretched man's heart is thus filled with woe, and only the sorrowing Muses bedew their cheeks with tears, in his strait is heard on every side the wailing appeal to us, and to avoid the danger of impending death he shows the slight sign of the ancient tonsure which he received through us, begging that we may be called to his aid and bear witness to the privilege bestowed upon him. Then straightway, touched with pity, we run to meet the prodigal son and snatch the fugitive slave from the gates of death. The book he has not forgotten is handed to him to be read, and when, with lips stammering with fear, he reads a few words, the power of the judge is loosed, the accuser is withdrawn, and death is put to flight. O marvelous virtue of an empiric verse ! O saving antidote of dreadful ruin ! O precious reading of the psalter, which for this alone deserves to be called the book of life ! Let the laity under- go the judgment of the secular arm, that, either sewn up in