l as elsewhere. For himself, old and ignorant as he was, the
persecution had proved to him an education. He had been brought near great
men, and some who, he was confident, would be martyrs in the event. He had
learned a great deal about his religion which he did not know before, and
had drunk in the spirit of Christianity, with a fulness which he trusted
would not turn to his ultimate condemnation. He now too had a
consciousness of the size and populousness of the Church, of her
diffusion, of the promises made to her, of the essential necessity of what
seemed to be misfortune, of the episcopal regimen, and of the power and
solidity of the see of Peter afar off in Rome, all which knowledge had
made him quite another being. We have put all this into finer language
than the good old man used himself, and we have grouped it more exactly,
but this is what his words would come to, when explained.

Coming down to sublunary matters, Aspar said the cave was well
provisioned; they had bread, oil, figs, dried grapes, and wine. They had
vessels and vestments for the Holy Sacrifice. Their serious want was a
dearth of water at that season, but they relied on Divine Providence to
give them by miracle, if in no other way, a supply. The place was
piercingly cold too in the winter.

By this time they had gained the end of the long gallery, and passed
through a second apartment, when suddenly the sounds of the ecclesiastical
chant burst on the ear of Agellius. How strange, how transporting to him!
he was almost for the first time coming home to his father's house, though
he had been a Christian from a child, and never, as he trusted, to leave
it, now that it was found. He did not know how to behave himself, nor
indeed where to go. Aspar conducted him into the seats set apart for the
faithful; he knelt down and burst into tears.

It was approaching the third hour, the hour at which the Paraclete
originally descended upon the Apostles, and which, when times of
persecution were passed, was appointed in the West for the solemn mass of
the day. In that early age, indeed, the time of the solemnity was
generally midnight, in order to elude observation; but even then such an
hour was considered of but temporary arrangement. Pope Telesphorus is said
to have prescribed the hour, afterwards in use, as early even as the
second century; and in a place of such quiet and security as the cavern in
which we just now find ourselves, there was no reason w