9. The Miracle upon the African Confessors in the Arian persecution mutilated by Hunneric.

Arianism, though speedily exterminated from the Roman Empire, had taken refuge among the Barbarians of the North, who were then hanging over it and soon to overwhelm it. Among these nations were the Vandals, who in the early part of the fifth century took possession of the Roman provinces on the African coast. Genseric forthwith commenced, and his successors continued, a terrible persecution of the Catholic Church which they found there. Hunneric his son, to whose reign the miracle which is to be related belongs, began his series of cruelties by stationing officers violently to assault and drag off all Vandals they found attending the Churches, and by sending off the dependents of his court who were Catholics to work in the country as agricultural labourers. Others he deprived of their civil functions, stripped of their property, and banished to Sicily and Sardinia. Next he summoned the nuns out of their convents, accused them of the vilest crimes, and submitted them to the most distressing indignities. Further, he caused them to be hung up without clothes with weights to their feet, and to be tortured with red-hot iron in various parts of the body, to make them admit the charges he brought against them. His next measure was the wholesale cruelty of banishing a number of bishops, priests, deacons, and others, as many as four thousand nine hundred and sixtyone, to the desert. He began by assembling them in the two towns of Sicca and Laribum, and in one or other of these places Victor, who has preserved the history of the transac

The number is given differently; Gibbon says four thousand and ninetysix, Fleury four thousand nine hun

dred and sixty-six; that in the text is as it stands in the Bibl. Patr. Par. 1624.

tion, saw them. His account is too horrible to be translated. They had been shut up, how long does not appear, in a small prison, and when Victor entered he sank up to his knees in the filth of the place. At length they set forth for the desert, with their faces and clothes in this defiled condition, chaunting the words "Such glory have all His saints." They journeyed chiefly by night on account of the heat of the days; when they flagged, their conductors goaded and pelted them, or if this did not quicken them, they tied them by the feet and dragged them after them along the rocky roads. Those who survived the journey, found themselves in places abounding in venomous reptiles, and the food given them was the barley provided for the beasts of burden.

In the beginning of 484 Hunneric convened four hundred and sixty-six Catholic Bishops at Carthage, for the purpose of holding a disputation on the faith of Nicæa, and to intimidate them he began by burning Lætus alive, who was one of their most learned members. This not succeeding he dismissed them again to their homes, allowing them neither the beasts of burden on which they had come, nor their servants, nor their clothes, and forbidding all persons to lodge or feed them; when they remonstrated, he set his cavalry to charge them. Jealous of their orthodoxy as a bond of union with the Catholic world, he next proposed to them an oath of allegiance to his son and successor, and that they would abstain from all correspondence beyond seas. Forty-six refused it on the plea of our Lord's prohibition in the Sermon on the Mount; three hundred and two, on the promise that their flocks and themselves should be restored to their Churches, took it. The latter he distributed as serfs up and down the country as having broken the Gospel precept against swearing; the former he transported to Corsica to cut timber for his navy. Of the rest, twenty-eight had succeeded in escaping from Carthage; and eighty-eight conformed. A general per

secution followed, in which neither sex nor age was pitied, nor torture, mutilation, nor death was spared.

These particulars, which form but a portion of the atrocities which this savage was permitted to perpetrate, have here been mentioned, because they form a suitable antecedent, and, (if the word may be used,) a justification of the miracle which followed. It was no common occasion that called forth what was no common manifestation of the wonderful power of God. The facts as stated by one who in such a case cannot be called a too favourable witness, were as follows; "Tipasa," says Gibbon, "a maritime colony of Mauritania, sixteen "miles to the east of Cæsarea, had been distinguished in every age by the orthodox zeal of its inhabitants. They "had braved the fury of the Donatists; they resisted, or eluded, the tyranny of the Arians. The town was deserted on the approach of an heretical bishop; most of the inha"bitants who could procure ships passed over to the coast of "Spain; and the unhappy remnant, refusing all communion "with the usurper, still presumed to hold their pious, but

illegal, assemblies. Their disobedience exasperated the "cruelty of Hunneric. A military Count was despatched "from Carthage to Tipasa; he collected the Catholics in the "Forum, and, in the presence of the whole province, deprived "the guilty of their right hands and their tongues. But "the holy Confessors continued to speak without tongues." The gift continued through their lives. Their number is not mentioned by any of the original witnesses; but is fixed by an old Menology at sixtye. Such was the miracle; the evidence on which it rests shall next be stated.

Victor, Bishop of Vite, who has been already mentioned, published in Africa his history of the persecution only two years after it took place. He says; "The King in wrath "sent a certain Count with directions to hold a meeting in

d Hist. ch. xxxvii.

• Ibid.

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"the forum of the whole province, and there to cut out their tongues by the root, and right hands. When this was done, 'by the gift of the Holy Ghost, they so spoke and speak, "as they used to speak before. If however any one will be "incredulous, let him now go to Constantinople, and there "he will find one of them, a sub-deacon, by name Reparatus,

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speaking like an educated man without any impediment. “On which account he is regarded with exceeding veneration "in the court of the Emperor Zeno, and especially by the "Empress." It has been asked why Victor refers his readers to Constantinople, instead of pointing out instances of the miracle in the country in which it is said to have taken places. But persecution scattered the Catholics far and wide, as St. Gregory observes in a passage which is to follow; many fled the country; others concealed themselves. Under such circumstances a writer would not know even where his nearest friends were to be found; and in this case Victor specified one of the Confessors who had been welcomed by an orthodox capital and court, and had the opportunity of exhibiting in security the miraculous gift wrought in him.

Æneas of Gaza was the contemporary of Victor. When a Gentile he had been a philosopher and rhetorician, and did not altogether throw off his profession of Platonism when he became a Christian. He wrote a Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul and the Resurrection of the Body; and in it, after giving various instances of miracles, he proceeds, in the character of Axitheus, to speak of the miracle of the African Confessors; "Other such things have been, and will "be; but what took place the other day, I suppose you have seen yourself. A bitter tyranny is oppressing the greater

f Hist. Pers. Vand. iii. p. 613.

This is suggested in the article on Apollonius Tyaneus in the Encycl. Metrop., in which I could wish some change in opinion, but more in tone, when speaking of the primitive mira

cles. The Essay aims, indeed, at bringing out the characteristics of the evidence for the Scripture miracles; but Middleton and Douglas are unsafe guides, and it is no exaltation of Christ to lower His Saints.

"Africa; and humanity and orthodoxy have no influence

over tyranny. Accordingly this tyrant takes offence at the piety of his subjects, and commands the priests to deny "their glorious dogma. When they refuse, O the impiety! "he cuts out that religious tongue, as Tereus in the fable. "But the damsel wove the deed upon the robe, and divulged "it by her skill, when nature no more gave her

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power to

speak; they on the other hand, needing neither robe nor I skill, call upon nature's Maker, who vouchsafes to them a new nature on the third day, not giving them another "tongue, but the faculty to discourse without a tongue more plainly than before. I had thought it was impossible "for a piper to shew his skill without his pipes, or harper to

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play his music without his harp; but now this novel sight "forces me to change my mind, and to account nothing "fixed that is seen, if it be God's will to alter it. I myself "saw the men, and heard them speak; and wondering at "the articulateness of the sound, I began to inquire what its "organ was; and distrusting my ears, I committed the de"cision to my eyes. And opening their mouth, I perceived "the tongue entirely gone from the roots. And astounded "I fell to wonder, not how they could talk, but how they "had not died." He saw them at Constantinople.

Procopius of Cæsarea was secretary to Belisarius, whom he accompanied into Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and to Constantinople, in the years between 527 and 542. By Belisarius he was employed in various political matters of great moment, and was at one time at the head of the commissariat and the fleet. He seems to have conformed to Christianity, but Cave observes, from his tone of writing, that he was no real believer in it, nay, preferred the old Paganism, though he despised its rites and fables". He wrote the History of the

h Cave, Hist. Liter. Procop.