CHAPTER LIV

A REIGN OF TERROR

Shakespeare, King John, IV. 3.

Scarcely had Chrysostom been sent on his way to his deplorable place of exile than a reign of terror began at Constantinople.

The election and consecration of his successor were accomplished with startling rapidity. Apparently neither the bishops, nor the clergy, nor the people were consulted. Within a week of the burning of their church the inhabitants of Constantinople learnt, with stupefaction, that their new Patriarch by the grace of Eudoxia was the presbyter Arsacius!

He was an old man of past eighty, totally without ability or distinction. Maddened by the independence of Chrysostom, Eudoxia had determined that her next Patriarch should be a fainéant in the depths of senility. Arsacius was the brother of Nectarius, the predecessor of Chrysostom, and he was dull in intellect, timid in action, feeble in speech; ‘muter,’ says the lively Palladius, ‘than a fish, and less competent for business than a frog.’ Rumour said that when his brother Nectarius had wished to make him Bishop of Tarsus, and he had declined, the Patriarch had accused him of coveting the See of Constantinople and waiting for dead men’s shoes; and that he had sworn on the Gospels that he would never accept episcopal ordination. But then he had one supreme merit in the eyes of Eudoxia. The silent contrast between the energetic and self-denying patriarchate of Chrysostom and the luxurious indolence of his brother Nectarius had filled Arsacius with 455 jealousy, and he had disgraced his hoary hairs by coming forward to accuse John of embezzlement of Church property at the infamous Synod of the Oak.

He was hurriedly consecrated by Severian and his clique in the Church of the Apostles, which served for the time as a pro-cathedral.

But he found himself a bishop of empty churches. The people, devoted to Chrysostom, and accustomed to his fiery and varied eloquence, did not choose to countenance the ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ who had been illegally thrust upon them, or to listen to a man whom they regarded as few removes above an imbecile. The result of his superannuated ambition was only to cause him a year of humiliation, followed by a death of disgrace. His patriarchate, undistinguished by a single merit, was rendered infamous by two diabolical persecutions, for both of which he must bear his portion of the blame. Unable to win even ordinary respect either by ability or kindness, he did not interfere to alleviate the first persecution, and by his appeal to the Court became the immediate cause of the second.

The first persecution turned nominally on the charge of incendiarism against ‘the Johannites,’ and to equal its cruel infamy we have to come down to the darkest days which ever brought down the wrath of Heaven on a guilty Church: the dark and horrible days of religious persecution in its most baleful guise, when devils wore the garb of ‘the Holy Office’; the days when ’Saint’ Pope Pius V., that ‘perfect priest,’ sent, with his blessing, a jewelled sword to Alva, the cold-blooded butcher of the Netherlands; the days when Torquemada and his successors daily filled the prisons of Spain with the shrieks of those whom, in the name of the merciful Jesus, they tortured with rack and thumbscrew,—blackened the blue heavens of Spain with the Tophet-smoke of their bale-fires, and laded the winds with the ashes of God’s faithful worshippers; the days

the days when Pope Gregory XIII. consecrated the vilest 456 form of assassination by singing Hallelujahs and striking medals in honour of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. That such deeds of hell were possible as early as the fourth century is alone a sufficient proof of the hideous corruption of the Church caused by the usurpation of priests; of the dark and deadly superstition, half-Pagan, half-Jewish, which had polluted with turbid influences the pure river of the Water of Life; of the unspeakable degeneration from the religion of Him Whose name was Love, and who placed in love the fulfilling simplicity the law. The early Church, in the days of her simplicity and sincerity, would have revolted in unspeakable loathing from devilish cruelties, born of ambition and intolerance, which for so many subsequent centuries were committed in her name. Her doctrine, taught with absolute firmness by her early saints, was, ‘Violence is hateful to God.’ Could the Angels of the Church of the first and second centuries have witnessed the horrors perpetrated in later days by those who called themselves her champions, would they not have appealed to her Lord, and cried: