220. 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 whom 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 miserable indignities. Further, he caused them to be hung up without clothes, with weights to their feet, and to be tortured with red-hot irons in various parts of the body, in order 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 sixty-one 1, to the desert. He began by assembling them in the two towns of Sicca and Laribus; and in one or other of these places Victor, who has preserved the history of the transaction, 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 them 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.
221. 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 to swear allegiance to his son and successor, and abstention from all ecclesiastical correspondence beyond sea. Forty-six refused it on the plea of our Lord’s prohibition in the Sermon on the Mount; three hundred and two, on the stipulation 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 persecution followed, in which neither sex nor age was pitied, nor torture, mutilation, nor death was spared.
222. 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 inhabitants 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.” 2 “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 sixty.” 3 Such was the miracle; the evidence on which it rests shall next be stated.