Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/229

216 looking men and women met together. Three or four are talking gibberish, foaming at the month. The room is full of jabber. One is interpreting, in Greek, the noise another is making, in no language at all. They seem half-crazy. "What is all this?" I ask. "O" says an intellectual-looking man, sitting there as chairman of the meeting, "it is religion. These men are miraculously inspired. They speak with tongues which no man can understand except he be inspired. Sister Eunice, who lies there struck down by God, has just made a revelation in an unknown tongue, and brother Bartholomeus, with the foam on his beard, is now explaining what it means. That the world will end in a few days, and we shall be caught up to the third heavens, and shall judge angels. It is the latter days, and is the fulfilment of Joel's prophecy, that young men should see visions and old men dream dreams, and God put his spirit on all. The blood of the crucified will wash all our sins away." After he has made this explanation, the chairman reads a letter to the little company of men and women, from a remote city, asking for new missionaries, and telling that those who went a year before have been put to most excruciating tortures and to death; and he asks, "Who will go?" And there stand up twenty men and women, who say, "Send us! Let us go! for we count it all joy to suffer where our Lord and Master suffered before." So, in spite of the fanaticism and violence that is in them, I see there is in those rude and humble people such a spirit of religion and self-sacrifice as the world had almost never seen.

I come down a little further, a hundred and twenty years later, to a town in southern France, and I find a Roman magistrate has just beheaded a whole family of Christians—sons, daughters, father, mother. Friends are just removing the dead bodies, while the edile slaves shovel up the saw-dust, saturated with blood, and wash the foul spots clean from the pavement. "What have these people done?" I ask. And the Praetor answers, "O, they are some of the new sect of Atheists, called Christians. They would not worship Mars, nor offer sacrifices to Jupiter. They worshipped one Christ, who was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and who, they declare, is