than that an icon, which should profess to be an image of the Divine Nature, as such, would be a blasphemous falsehood. This is a truism to us; but, where it stands, it is an interesting relic of an age that recognized the dangers of Anthropomorphism, and feared still the sensuous Pagan fancies of the descendants of the ancient Greeks.* 3. In the earliest ages of the Church it seems to be admitted that devotion to the Passion of Christ was not prominent. We cannot read the Orations for Holy Images, without being convinced that, by the eighth century at least, there was a great change here. In S. John Damascene the effigy of the cross is the object of worship, and the "salutary sufferings" of Christ are ever before the Christian's eyes. Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre are reverenced; the lance, the reed, the sponge, "with which the deicide Jews effected the ignominy of my Lord," are touchingly commemorated; and the very object of the devils in stirring up the war against images is said to be to prevent the faithful from having before their eyes the triumphant combats and sufferings of Christ and His Saints. 4. The Blessed Virgin, as might have been expected, holds a place apart in the thoughts of S. John Damascene. The usual title that he gives her, besides that of Theotocos, is "Queen," or "Sovereign Lady," (Aεoπoívn). Some of his most striking examples relate to her images. He invariably places her on quite a different footing from the rest of the Saints; first, in making her, as it were, a "class" apart, occupying a place between our Lord and the other Saints; secondly, in applying to her epithets denoting sovereignty; and, thirdly, in joining her with her Divine Son in a peculiarly significant way; as, for instance, when he relates the advice of a holy man to a monk, who was troubled with temptations, "Better to expose yourself to any occasion of that sin, than give up the worship of Jesus Christ and His Mother." And it is a very noteworthy fact that a certain party of the Iconoclasts, whilst rejecting images of the Saints, admitted those of our Blessed Lord and His Mother. But we shall have more to say of S. John's relations, with devotion to the B. Virgin, when we come to his Homilies. 5. Some of the keenest and best things in the Apology for Images are the sentences that refer to the imperial patron of Iconoclasm. "It is not for princes to give law to the Church "Dei Patris simulacrum nefas est Christiano in templo collocare" is now a condemned proposition. See Denzinger, n. 1,182. (οὐ βασιλέων ἐστι νομοθετεῖν τῇ Ἐκκλησία).” Emperors do not appear in S. Paul's lists of teachers and doctors. "To the Emperor belongs the administration of the commonwealth; the ruling of the Church, to the pastors and teachers, and the invasion of their right is a latrocinium" (a sort of moral burglary; an allusion to the Latrocinium of Ephesus). A meddling prince should remember the fate of Saul, of Jezabel, of Herod. "We obey thee, O Emperor, in the things of this world—in tributes, in taxes, in subsidies, in all things in which we are committed to thy care; but in the government of the Church, we have pastors, who have spoken the word to us, and laid down for us the Church's law. We cannot take up the ancient boundaries that our fathers have set for us; and the tradition which we receive, that we hold fast." There can be little doubt that the doings of S. John at Damascus would soon be known to Leo at Constantinople. It was to the latter city, indeed, that his letters were addressed. Leo was a determined man, not a mere crowned grammarian, like some of his predecessors and successors. The story of his revenge on S. John Damascene, though not confirmed by sufficient evidence, is quite possible, and perhaps would be admitted by all to be quite probable, except in one or two of the details. Damascus was out of the Emperor's power, and the Caliph's first Minister was not likely to have much to fear from a Court that could only with difficulty hold its own on the Bosphorus. Under these circumstances, we are told, Leo had recourse to a perfectly Greek piece of perfidy. His agents, "putting on the mask of piety," mixed with the faithful, among whom S. John's letters were passing from hand to hand, and by dint of great exertion, got hold of an autograph of the writer. The manuscript was given to the Emperor's notaries, who studied it until they could perfectly imitate, not merely the characters, but the thought and the style. He then ordered them ("for," says the Life, "he did find persons to obey him in this ") to indite a letter to himself from S. John. It was an invitation to the Emperor to come and occupy Damascus, which, he assured him, a rapid and secret movement of a sufficient number of troops would effect with the greatest ease; "and I myself will help you to good purpose, for the whole place is in my own hand." This epistle was despatched to the Saracen Caliph, with another in Leo's own name. "Anxious to preserve the inestimable blessings of peace and friendship," he says, "I have ever striven to the best of my power to observe the treaties I have made with your Serenity; notwithstanding that I am continually urged by a certain Christian among your subjects, who is always sending me letters, to march on Damascus, and possess myself of it. Wherefore, to show you what man I am, how truthful and how faithful, and also to let you know what he is, I send you a sample of these letters, written in his own hand." Both these documents reached the Saracen prince in safety. S. John was summoned before him, and, to his wonder, read the treason under what seemed even to himself to be his own handwriting. He saw the plot; its diabolical ingenuity struck him; but he stoutly and earnestly protested his innocence. But the "enemy of Christ," the Caliph, at once believed it all. He would not listen to a defence ("like the ass and the lyre," as the Life remarks), would not give him a moment to disprove the accusation, but instantly ordered him to lose his right hand, "being out of himself and mad with rage." The sentence was executed, "and the hand that had reproved the enemies of God was stained, no longer with ink, as when writing for holy images, but with its own blood." And the hand was hung up in one of the principal squares of Damascus. The sequel of the narrative is the part which critics regard with the greatest suspicion. But it shall be given. On the evening of the same day, when it was to be expected that the wrath of the Caliph would have cooled down, S. John sent messengers to him to beg that his hand might be restored to him; and the reason they were instructed to give was, that as long as the hand remained unburied, he suffered intolerable pain. The Saracen prince acceded "at once" to his prayer. On receiving the severed member, he retired to the oratory of his own house, and, "prostrating his whole body before an image of the Mother of God, he joined the hand to the part from which it had been divided, and, with sighs and tears, prayed thus from the very bottom of his heart ": Lady! Queen! All-holy Mother! In thy cause and for thy image Why the Lion raged and ravened Thou in heaven above dost know; Wonders oft at thy sweet pleading Of His Faith and of thy honour Christ my God was born of thee! Praying thus, sleep overcame him, and in his sleep he saw the holy image turn its eyes upon him, full of compassion, and he heard it say, "Behold, thy hand is whole; henceforward continue to do as thou hast promised." He awoke healed, and, rising up, he sang one of his hymns in thanksgiving. Then, calling his family around him, he spent with them the remainder of the night in thanking God. The rejoicings were heard by those who dwelt near, and the news, spreading through the city, soon reached the Caliph. S. John was summoned and questioned. He showed his right hand; it bore no trace of the knife, save that a thin red line ran round the wrist. The Caliph was astonished and convinced. He asked his pardon, confirmed him in his office, even giving him, it would seem, a higher rank, and proclaimed that he would never do anything without consulting him. But the Saint had done with Damascus and with worldly matters. He used his new-found favour with his prince to bid adieu to him for ever. The Caliph, with great difficulty, allowed him to go. He stripped himself of the whole of his great wealth, and made it over to the poor and the captive. Then, turning his back on the beautiful city of his birth, he travelled the road that S. Paul had come, over the low barren hills through Galilee, along the valley of the Jordan, and so over the Samaritan mountains to Jerusalem. After adoring our Lord in the holy places of His passion, he entered the great laura of S. Sabas. About midway between Jerusalem and the northern end of the Dead Sea, that is about 12 miles from each, the traveller comes upon one of the most curious scenes in the Holy Land. The region is wild and rocky. The eye, ranging southward and eastward from the Mount of Olives, sees what seems at a distance to be a tossed sea of barren hills, what the Bible calls "a horrible desert, a dry and howling wilderness." The traveller who tries to make his way to the banks of the sea that bounds this land of desolation, finds it "pathless and waterless," as David described it, and climbs out of one wady to cross a ridge, and descend into another. Perhaps he tries to follow the valley of the Kedron, which is the largest and the easiest to travel. Towards evening his guides will stop at the gateway of a house in the wilderness-or rather of an irregular collection of square turrets, clinging walls, buttresses, little windows, and domes, that seem to have been sprinkled by a freak of VOL. XII.—NO. XXIV. [New Series.] 2 A nature on the face of the frowning rocks, rather than to have been built up there by human art. It is the convent of Mar Saba, the oldest in Palestine. There S. Sabas lived, and thence he ruled all the lauras of the valley of the Kedron. In a gallery of the rock they still show you the cave which he took from a lion, and the spring that he obtained by his prayers. All round about, for miles and miles, the hills are honeycombed with rocky chambers, the deserted dwellings of the thousands of monks that peopled the wilderness, where David hid himself, and where a greater than David was tempted by the Devil. Two, three, sometimes four stories of cells pierce the sides of the valleys, overhang the precipices, or bury themselves below the level of the ground. The buildings that now stand, the fine church with its dome and its tombs of saints, the hospice of pilgrims, the libraries, and the rest, are of various dates and styles. In appearance, as well as in its associations, Mar Saba is to Palestine what Mount Athos is to Greece, or Monte Cassino to Italy. Twenty or thirty monks still inhabit it, to open their gates to pilgrims, and to keep a pious guard over a region that has been sanctified by the lives of thousands of saints, and consecrated by the blood of innumerable martyrs, from the days of the Saracens down to the last outrages of the Arabs in 1832. It was hither that S. John Damascene retired, to fast, to labour, to repeat the Psalms, to read Holy Scripture, to obey, and to save his soul, like one of the many hundreds that filled those mournful solitudes with silent life. The cell he inhabited is still shown— an ordinary rocky chamber, high up on the brow of the ridge; pious devotion has turned it into a chapel, and adorned its walls with pictures, whose style of art is said to be below what would have seemed due to the great defender of holy images. Here he lived and wrote. In this cloister he received priest's orders, and it is not certain that he ever left it again. The rest of his life has hardly any events but his writings. We read how he was given to a novice-master to be trained, how he was sent to Damascus to sell baskets on the very scene of his former greatness, how he wrote poetry and was reproved for it, how by miraculous admonition he was ordered to use his gifts for the service of the Church, and how he wrote and preached. Little more remains, therefore, now that his active work in the world has been somewhat amply described, than to form an estimate of those literary labours by which he is best known to posterity. After his fame as a defender of images, S. John's memory chiefly lives by his celebrated work, De Fide Orthodoxâ. He is mentioned in manuals and compendiums as the Father of |