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"No," said Cecily. "God did not protect them. Christians got sick at exactly the same rate as anybody else. But they didn't die at the same rate."
"So they were healed," said Mark, demanding confirmation of his faith.
"In a way," said Cecily, "but it wasn't miraculou
s. Not like you're thinking. When people are sick, their bodies are doing all they can to fight the infection. But they need food and water to keep up the fight. When everybody runs away, there's no one to provide that food and water. No one to wash them or bathe them to try to keep the fever down. No one to put blankets on them when they're cold. No one to take away their bodily wastes. So even if their body might have fought off the infection, they died because they got too weak to keep fighting, or they caught a secondary disease from the filth around them, or they were weakened by exposure to the cold. You see?"
"So the Christians' nursing people helped them live?" asked Mark.
"Exactly. It seems that with good nursing, only about ten percent of the people who were afflicted died. So a perfectly understandable kind of miracle happened. Because Christian love triumphed over their fear of this terrible disease, only one out of ten Christians who got sick died of the disease, instead of three out of ten. And even though the Christians doing the nursing usually got sick, they knew someone else would nurse them, and so they, too, had a much better chance of survival."
"And the pagans they helped," said Mark, "I bet they became Christians."
"I don't know if you can become a true believer out of gratitude, but maybe you listen to the gospel more receptively if the people teaching you about Jesus had already proven to you that they had a Christlike love for you. Maybe, out of gratitude, you give God a chance to touch your heart."
Mark was already leaping ahead of the discussion to the conclusion that mattered to him. "So that's why Christianity took over the Roman Empire," he said. "More of the pagans died because nobody nursed them. More of the Christians lived, and the pagans they helped became Christian—"
"And after two such terrible plagues, a century or so apart, Christians were no longer a tiny minority, they were a very large minority, and they had a powerful reputation for sincerely living up to their beliefs."
Chinma turned away and walked angrily to the kitchen door, as if he were leaving. Then he turned back, and his face bore a terrible expression of grief and rage, and tears were flowing down his cheeks. He had shown almost no emotion till now, and now he was showing more emotion than Cecily had ever seen one face contain.
"Where were the Christians!" he shouted. "My mother and brothers were Christian but they blamed me and shut me out the door. I was all alone to be sick! Where were the Christians!"
Then Chinma shoved open the glass storm door and ran out into the back yard and scampered back up the tree.
"Wow," said Mark.
"That poor boy," said Cecily. "Nobody told me that his own family didn't nurse him when he was sick."
"Aren't there any Christians in Nigeria?" asked Mark.
"Millions of them," said Cecily. "And for all we know, they're mostly doing what they should, caring for one another. It's just a tragedy that his own family didn't live up to the standard of faith set by the Christians in the early Church."
"I would never leave you or any of the family," said Mark fervently. "I'd take care of you until I caught the sickness myself, and I'd keep taking care of you until I died."
"I know you would," said Cecily. "And I would do the same for you."
"You can't tell me that people in the Roman Empire didn't love one another!" said Mark. "I don't believe it."
"There are people today who don't love one another, Mark. And in a society where no value is placed on family loyalty of that kind, there would be a lot more people who would feel no obligation to put their own lives at risk for the sake of their family. And besides, what if the whole family was sick all at once? Who takes care of one another then? The Christians sought one another out, took care of people who weren't in their family. But the pagan religion didn't have that kind of loyalty. I'm not making this up, Mark. Even the emperor Julian, when he made a last-ditch effort to stamp out Christianity and restore paganism, demanded that pagan priests do what Christians were doing—take care of other people. The pagan writers of the time all affirmed that the Christians acted just the way I'm describing."
"Yeah, well, this is proof then," said Mark.
"Proof of what?"
"That America is definitely not a Christian nation, or we wouldn't be blockading Africa, we'd be helping."
"The President is trying to keep the disease from spreading throughout the world. He's trying to save lives."
"And all those people who ran away from the plague in Rome, they were just trying to save lives, too, right? Their own!"
"Mark," Cecily began.
"Where did you get all this stuff?" asked Mark.
"A book," said Cecily. "I read it several years ago." She got up from the kitchen table and went to the shelves in the living room. It was hard to remember where it was—it's not as if the house was on the Dewey decimal system, so books often got put wherever there was an empty space on the shelves.
But there it was, Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity. She slid it off the shelf and handed it to Mark, who had followed her into the room. He looked at the cover. "How do I know this isn't just crap?" asked Mark.
