The Roman Sentinel by Dr. Guthrie

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 6, 1870

The Roman Sentinel.

By Dr. Guthrie

THERE was nothing in Pompeii that invested it with a deeper interest to me than the spot where a soldier of old Rome displayed a most heroic fidelity. That fatal day on which Vesuvius, at whose feet the city stood, burst out into an eruption that shook the earth, poured torrents of lava from its riven sides, and discharged, amidst the noise of a hundred thunders, such clouds of ashes as filled the air, produced a darkness deeper than midnight, and struck such terror into all hearts that men thought not only that the end of the world had come, and all must die, but that the gods themselves were expiring—on that night a sentinel kept watch by the gate which looked to the burning mountain. Amid unimaginable confusion and shrieks of terror, mingled with the roar of the volcano, and cries of mothers who had lost their children in the darkness, the inhabitants fled the fatal town, while falling ashes, loading the darkened air, and penetrating every place, rose in the streets till they covered the house-roofs, nor left a vestige of the city, but a vast, silent mound, beneath which it lay unknown, dead, and buried, for nearly one thousand seven hundred years.

Amid this fearful disorder, the sentinel at the gate had been forgotten; and as Rome required her sentinels, happen what might, to hold their posts till relieved by the guard or set at liberty by their officers, he had to choose between death and dishonor. A pattern of fidelity, he stood by his post. Slowly, but surely, the ashes rise on his manly form; now they reach his breast; and now covering his lips they choke his breathing. He also was “faithful unto death.” After seventeen centuries, they found his skeleton standing erect in a marble niche, clad in its rusty armor—the helmet on his empty skull, and his bony fingers still closed upon his spear. And next almost to the interest I felt in placing myself on the spot where Paul, true to his colors, when all men deserted him, plead before the Roman tyrant, was the interest I felt in the niche by the city gate where they found the skeleton of one who, in his fidelity to the cause of Caesar, sets us an example of faithfulness to the cause of Christ—an example it were for the honor of their Master that all his servants followed.—Dr. Guthrie.