Weekly expositor. (Brockway Centre, Mich.) 1882-1894, 1893-02-17

cense and balsam and myrrh and SAT-
from, so that Lucan, the poet, says of
il:
Atonce ten thousand saffron currents how
And rain their odors on the crowd below.
But where was the sport to come
from? Well, l went into the cellars
opening of from the arena. and saw
the places where they kept the hyenas
and lions and panthers and wild boars
and beastly violences of all sorts, with
out food or water until made fiery
enough for the arena, and l saw the
underground rooms where tie gladi-
ators were accustomed to wait until
the clapping of the people outside de-
manded that they come forth armed to
murder or to be murdered. All the ar
rangements were complete, as enough
of the cellars and galleries still remain
to indicate. What fun they must have
had turning lions without food or
drink for "a week upon an unarmed dis
ciple of Jesus Christ! At the dedica-
tion of this Colosseum o, 600 wild beasts
and 10, 900 immortal men were
slain; SO that the blood of
men and beast was not a
brook, but a river; not a
pool, but a lake. Having been in that
way dedicated, be not surprised when
/ tell you that Emperor Probus on one
occasion threw into that arena of the
Colosseum a thousand stays, thou
sand boars and thousand ostriches.
What fun it must have been! the sound
of the trumpets, the roar of the wild
beasts and the groans of the dying
men! while in the gallery the wives
and children of those down under the
lions paw wrung their hands and
shrieked out in widowhood and or
phanage, while one hundred thousand
people clapped their hands and there
was "Hal Hap' wide as Rome and
deep as perdition. The corpses of
that arena were put on a cart or
dragged by hook out through what
was called the Gate of Death. What
an excitement it must have been
when two combatants entered the
arena, the one with sword and
shield and the other with net and
spear. The swordsman strikes at the
man with a net and spear; he lodges
the sword, and then filings the net over
the head of the swordsman and jerks
him to the floor of the arena, and the
man who flung the net puts his foot
on the neck of the fallen swordsman,
and, spear in hand, looks up to the
galleries, as much as to say: "Shall
let him up, or shall plunge this spear
into his body until he is dead?" The
audience had two signs, either of which
they might give. II they waved their
flags, it meant spare the fallen con-
testant If they turned their thumbs
down 1T meant Stay HIM. Occasionally
the audience would wave their flags
and the fallen would be let up, but
that was too tame sport for most
occasions, and generally the thumbs
from the galleries were turned
down, and with that sign would
be heard the accompanying shout
of "Killl Kill! KILL KILL"
Yet it was far from being a mono
tone of sport for there was a change
of program in that wondrous Colos-
scum. Under n strange and powerful
machinery, beyond anything of modern
invention, the floor of the arena would
begin to rock and roll and then give
away, and there would appear a lake
of bright water, and on its banks trees
would spring up rustling with foliage,
and tigers appeared among the jungles,
and armed men would come forth, and
there would be tiger hunt. Then,
on the lake in the Colosseum, armed
ships would float, and there would be
a sea fight. What funl What lots of
fun! When pestilence came, in order
to appease the gods, in this Colosseum
a sacrifice would be made, and the
people would throng that great amphi-
theater, shouting: THE Christians to
the wild beasts" and there would be
a cracking of human bones in the
jaws of leonine ferocity.
But all this was to be stopped BY
the outraged sense of public decency?
No. There is only one thing that has
ever stopped cruelty and sin, and that
is Christianity, and it was Christianity,
whether you like it's form or not, that
stopped this massacre of centuries.
One day while, in the Colosseum, a
Roman victory was being celebrated,
and one hundred thousand enraptured
spectators were looking down upon
two gladiators in the arena stabbing
and slicing each other to death, an
Asiatic monk by the name of Tele-
machus was so overcome by the cruelty
that he leaped from the gallery into
the arena and ran in between the two
swordsmen, and pushed first one back
and then the other back and broke up
the contest. OF course, the audience
was affronted at having their sport
stopped, and they hurled stones at the
head of Telemachus until ne fell dead
in the arena. But when the day was
passed and the passions of the people
had cooled off, they deplored the
martyrdom of the brave and Christian
Telemachus, and as result of the
overdone cruelty, the human sacrifices
of the Colosseum were forever abol-
ished.
What good thing, say you, that
such cruelties have ceased. Ny friends,
the same spirit of ruinous amuse-
ments and of moral sacrifice is abroad
in the world to-day although il takes
other shapes. Last summer in our
Southwest there occurred scene of
pugilism on which all Christendom
looked down, for saw the papers on
the other side of the Atlantic Ocean
giving whole columns of it. Will
some one tell me in what respect that
brutality of last summer was superior
to the brutality of the Roman Colos-
scum? In some respects it was worse,
by so much as the nineteenth century
pretends to be more merciful and
more decent than the fifth century.
That pugilism is winning admiration
in this country is positively proved by
the fact that wears ago such collision