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'You speak of the growing sect of the Christians in Rome. Sallust, to you I may confide my secret; I have pondered much over that faith I have adopted it. After the destruction of Pompeii, I met once more with Olinthus saved, alas! only for a day, and falling afterwards a martyr to the indomitable energy of his zeal.
Olinthus caught him by the hand the pulse had ceased to beat! The last words of the father were the words of truth Death had been more kind! Meanwhile Glaucus and Nydia were pacing swiftly up the perilous and fearful streets. The Athenian had learned from his preserver that Ione was yet in the house of Arbaces. Thither he fled, to release to save her!
'Peace! echoed the priest, in so hollow a tone that it went at once to the heart of the Nazarene. 'In that wish, continued Olinthus, 'all good things are combined without virtue thou canst not have peace. Like the rainbow, Peace rests upon the earth, but its arch is lost in heaven.
'Be sure, it is I whom he seeks, thought he; 'he is horror struck at the condemnation of Olinthus he more than ever esteems the arena criminal and hateful he comes again to dissuade me from the contest. I must shun him I cannot brook his prayers his tears. These thoughts, so long to recite, flashed across the young man like lightning. He turned abruptly and fled swiftly in an opposite direction.
'Tell me, then, thy doctrines, and expound to me thy hopes, said Glaucus, earnestly. Olinthus was not slow to obey that prayer; and there as oftentimes in the early ages of the Christian creed it was in the darkness of the dungeon, and over the approach of death, that the dawning Gospel shed its soft and consecrating rays.
'O backward of heart! said Olinthus, with bitter fervor; and art thou sad and weary, and wilt thou turn from the very springs that refresh and heal? 'O earth! cried the young priest, striking his breast passionately, 'from what regions shall my eyes open to the true Olympus, where thy gods really dwell?
IT was now late on the third and last day of the trial of Glaucus and Olinthus. A few hours after the court had broken up and judgment been given, a small party of the fashionable youth at Pompeii were assembled round the fastidious board of Lepidus. 'So Glaucus denies his crime to the last? said Clodius.
No answer came forth; and turning round, Olinthus beheld, by the light of the lamp, an old grey-headed man sitting on the floor, and supporting in his lap the head of one of the dead. The features of the dead man were firmly and rigidly locked in the last sleep; but over the lip there played a fierce smile not the Christian's smile of hope, but the dark sneer of hatred and defiance.
They regarded the Christian as the enemy of mankind; the epithets they lavished upon him, of which 'Atheist' was the most favored and frequent, may serve, perhaps, to warn us, believers of that same creed now triumphant, how we indulge the persecution of opinion Olinthus then underwent, and how we apply to those whose notions differ from our own the terms at that day lavished on the fathers of our faith.
With that, Olinthus proceeded to inform Glaucus of those details which the reader already knows, the conversion of Apaecides, the plan they had proposed for the detection of the impostures of the Egyptian upon the youthful weakness of the proselyte.
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