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Page 30
Then the Christian Lions are, first, the Lion of the Tribe of
Judah--Christ Himself as Captain and Judge: "He shall rule the
nations with a rod of iron," (the opposite power of His adversary,
is rarely intended in sculpture unless in association with the
serpent--"inculcabis supra leonem et aspidem"); secondly, the Lion
of St. Mark, the power of the Gospel going out to conquest; thirdly,
the Lion of St. Jerome, the wrath of the brute creation changed into
love by the kindness of man; and, fourthly, the Lion of the Zodiac,
which is the Lion of Egypt and of the Lombardic pillar-supports in
Italy; these four, if you remember, with the Nemean Greek one, five
altogether, will give you, broadly, interpretation of nearly all
Lion symbolism in great art. How they degenerate into the British
door knocker, I leave you to determine for yourselves, with such
assistances as I may be able to suggest to you in my next lecture;
but, as the grotesqueness of human history plans it, there is actually
a connection between that last degradation of the Leonine symbol, and
its first and noblest significance.
You see there are letters round this golden Lion of Alfred's
spelling-book, which his princess friend was likely enough to spell
for him. They are two Latin hexameters:--
Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni
Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in �vum.
(This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death:
This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)
Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death
into Christ's Resurrection. Samson's bearing away the gates of Gaza
is another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by
the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of
Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all
the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last,
Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,--
"I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore,
and _have the keys_ of Hell and of Death." And in His servant St.
John's description of Him--
"Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten of the dead, and
the Prince of the kings of the earth."
All this assuredly, so far as the young child, consecrated like David,
the youngest of his brethren, conceived his own new life in Earth and
Heaven,--he understood already in the Lion symbol. But of all this I
had no thought[31] when I chose the prayer of Alfred as the type of
the Religion of his era, in its dwelling, not on the deliverance from
the punishment of sin, but from the poisonous sleep and death of it.
Will you ever learn that prayer again,--youths who are to be priests,
and knights, and kings of England, in these the latter days? when
the gospel of Eternal Death is preached here in Oxford to you for the
Pride of Truth? and "the mountain of the Lord's House" has become a
Golgotha, and the "new song before the throne" sunk into the rolling
thunder of the death rattle of the Nations, crying, "O Christ, where
is Thy Victory!"
[Footnote 31: The reference to the Bible of Charles le Chauve was
added to my second lecture (page 54), in correcting the press,
mistakenly put into the text instead of the notes.]
NOTES.
1. _The Five Christmas Days_. (These were drawn out on a large and
conspicuous diagram.)
These days, as it happens, sum up the History of their Five Centuries.
Christmas Day, 496. Clovis baptized.
" " 800. Charlemagne crowned.
" " 1041. Vow of the Count of Aversa (Page 80).
" " 1066. The Conqueror crowned.
" " 1130. Roger II. crowned King of the Two Sicilies.
2. For conclusion of the whole matter two pictures were shown and
commented on--the two most perfect pictures in the world.
(1) A small piece from Tintoret's Paradiso in the Ducal Palace,
representing the group of St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St.
Augustine, and behind St. Augustine his mother watching him, her chief
joy even in Paradise.
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