Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 Part 6

Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe-the cannon, the powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered the Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough.

It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be done, someone must come and do it-do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by some single rash act-like that first fatal shot fired at Fort Sumter-which makes, as by an electric spark, a whole nation flash into enduring flame.

But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.

I know not whether the _Cyropaedia_ is much read in your schools and universities. But it is one of the books which I should like to see, either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's _Arcadia_ or Spenser's _Fairy Queen_-the ideal self-education of an ideal hero. And the moral of the book-ponder it well, all young men who have the chance or the hope of exercising authority among your fellow-men, the n.o.ble and most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid and beneficent influence over our fellow-men lies, not through brute force, not through cupidity, but through the highest morality; through justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, modesty, courtesy, and all which makes man or woman lovely in the eyes of mortals or of G.o.d.

Yes, the _Cyropaedia_ is a n.o.ble book, about a n.o.ble personage. But I cannot forget that there are n.o.bler words by far concerning that same n.o.ble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, which begins, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord'-in which the inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the coming deliverance of his own countrymen, speaks of the Persian hero in words so grand that they have been often enough applied, and with all fitness, to one greater than Cyrus, and than all men:-

Who raised up the righteous man from the East, And called him to attend his steps?

Who subdued nations at his presence, And gave him dominion over kings?

And made them like the dust before his sword, And the driven stubble before his bow?

He pursueth them, he pa.s.seth in safety, By a way never trodden before by his feet.

Who hath performed and made these things, Calling the generations from the beginning?

I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same.

Behold my servant, whom I will uphold; My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth; I will make my spirit rest upon him, And he shall publish judgment to the nations.

He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour, Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets.

The bruised reed he shall not break, And the smoking flax he shall not quench.

He shall publish justice, and establish it.

His force shall not be abated, nor broken, Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth, And the distant nations shall wait for his Law.

Thus saith the G.o.d, even Jehovah, Who created the heavens, and stretched them out; Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce, I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end, And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee, And I will give thee for a covenant to the people, And for a light to the nations; To open the eyes of the blind, To bring the captives out of prison, And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.

I am Jehovah-that is my name; And my glory will I not give to another, Nor my praise to the graven idols.

Who saith to Cyrus-Thou art my shepherd, And he shall fulfil all my pleasure: Who saith to Jerusalem-Thou shalt be built; And to the Temple-Thou shalt be founded.

Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed, To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand, That I may subdue nations under him, And loose the loins of kings; That I may open before him the two-leaved doors, And the gates shall not be shut; I will go before thee And bring the mountains low.

The gates of bra.s.s will I break in sunder, And the bars of iron hew down.

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, And the h.o.a.rds hid deep in secret places, That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah.

I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me.

I am Jehovah and none else: Beside me there is no G.o.d.

I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me, That they may know from the rising of the sun, And from the west, that there is none beside me; I am Jehovah, and none else; Forming light, and creating darkness; Forming peace, and creating evil.

I, Jehovah, make all these.

This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the great Puritan of the Old World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy the idols of the East, while

The isles saw that, and feared, And the ends of the earth were afraid; They drew near, they came together; Everyone helped his neighbour, And said to his brother, Be of good courage.

The carver encouraged the smith, He that smoothed with the hammer Him that smote on the anvil; Saying of the solder, It is good; And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved;

But all in vain; for as the poet goes on-

Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped; Their idols were upon the cattle, A burden to the weary beast.

They stoop, they bow down together; They could not deliver their own charge; Themselves are gone into captivity.

And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his empire?

Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the beginning.

We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made one war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling before the arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood down the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, 'Glut thyself with the gore for which thou hast thirsted.' But it may be true-for Xenophon states it expressly, and with detail-that Cyrus, from the very time of his triumph, became an Eastern despot, a sultan or a shah, living apart from his people in mysterious splendour, in the vast fortified palace which he built for himself; and imitating and causing his n.o.bles and satraps to imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom he had conquered. And of this there is no doubt-that his sons and their empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to which all despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children no longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more shamefully than they had conquered the East.

This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending alas! as all human epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.

But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these Persians we owe that we are here to-night?

I do not say that without them we should not have been here. G.o.d, I presume, when He is minded to do anything has more than one way of doing it.

But that we are to-night the last link in a chain of causes and effects which reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward from the plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.

For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from their captivity-large numbers of them at least-and sent home to their own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, to do that deed?

Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say if they will, that Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to wors.h.i.+p the rising sun, and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to talk of things n.o.ble, pure, lovely and of good report, would rather point you once more to the magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say-There, upon the very face of the doc.u.ment, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful Persian and the faithful Jew-the two Puritans of the Old World, the two haters of lies, idolatries, superst.i.tions-was actually as intense as it ought to have been, as it must have been.

Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been scattered abroad as colonies of captives.

Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued: Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left inaccessible to the ma.s.s of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but world-wide h.e.l.lenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French is to the modern.

Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And under the wide domination of that later Roman Empire-which had subdued and organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of those old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers, in their German forests and on their Scandinavian sh.o.r.es-that Divine book was carried far and wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to the mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.

And that book-so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier Persians-that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which sent to these trans-Atlantic sh.o.r.es the founders of your great nation.

That book gave them their instinct of freedom, tempered by reverence for Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldst not; then said we, Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is written of us, that we come to do thy will, O G.o.d. Yes, long and fantastic is the chain of causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold, that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.

And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if the legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole north of Asia be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea further and further to the northward, and placing between it and the Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and the sun?

What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions, reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown. Why not? For so are all human destinies

Bound with gold chains unto the throne of G.o.d.

LECTURE V.

ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of the human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological facts to support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or impossible; and that is, that man's mortal body and brain were derived from some animal and ape-like creature. Of that I am not going to speak now. My subject is-How this creature called man, from whatever source derived, became civilised, rational, and moral. And I am sorry to say there is tacked on by many to the first theory, another which does not follow from it, and which has really nothing to do with it, and it is this-that man, with all his wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet always precious, at once his torment and his joy, his very hope of everlasting life-that man, I say, developed himself, una.s.sisted, out of a state of primaeval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and pain, by observing what actions would pay in the long run and what would not; and so learnt to conquer his selfishness by a more refined and extended selfishness, and exchanged his brutality for worldliness, and then, in a few instances, his worldliness for next-worldliness. I hope I need not say that I do not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be a Christian, I think, nor a philosopher either. At least, if I thought that human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I should, in honour to my race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere.

Why talk of the shame of our ancestors? I want to talk of their honour and glory. I want to talk, if I talk at all, about great times, about n.o.ble epochs, n.o.ble movements, n.o.ble deeds, and n.o.ble folk; about times in which the human race-it may be through many mistakes, alas! and sin, and sorrow and bloodshed-struggled up one step higher on those great stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards the far-off city of G.o.d; the perfect polity, the perfect civilisation, the perfect religion, which is eternal in the heavens.

Of great men, then, and n.o.ble deeds I want to speak. I am bound to do so first, in courtesy to my hearers. For in choosing such a subject I took for granted a n.o.bleness and greatness of mind in them which can appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of that which is lofty and heroic, and that which is useful indeed, though not to the purses merely or the mouths of men, but to their intellects and spirits; that highest philosophy which, though she can (as has been sneeringly said of her) bake no bread, can at least do this-and she alone-make men worthy to eat the bread which G.o.d has given them.

I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met, or read of, the human company who did not require, now and then at least, being reminded of such times and such personages-of whatsoever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report, if there be any manhood and any praise to think, as St. Paul bids us all, of such things, that we may keep up in our minds as much as possible a lofty standard, a pure ideal, instead of sinking to the mere selfish standard which judges all things, even those of the world to come, by profit and by loss, and into that sordid frame of mind in which a man grows to believe that the world is constructed of bricks and timber, and kept going by the price of stocks.

We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the more we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of mind.

Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward luxuries most refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when priding itself most on its knowledge of human nature, and of the secret springs which, so it dreams, move the actions and make the history of nations and of men. All are tempted that way, even the n.o.blest-hearted. _Adhaesit pavimento venter_, says the old psalmist. I am growing like the snake, crawling in the dust, and eating the dust in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes to the heavens, to the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal n.o.bleness which was before all time, and shall be still when time has past away. But to lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help me?

Who will quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give me life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I did _not_ inherit from the primaeval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for ever trying to stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could so easily become-a cunninger and more dainty-featured brute? Death itself, which seems at times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me up and deliver me from the burden of this animal and mortal body-

'Tis life, not death, for which I pant; 'Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant; More life, and fuller, that I want.

Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and brain, which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses. I am a man-thou art a man or woman-not because we have a flesh-G.o.d forbid! but because there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray, which nature did not give, and which nature cannot take away. And therefore, while I live on earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be, indeed, a _man_; and this same gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me, shall be the very element in me which I will renounce, defy, despise; at least, if I am minded to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly higher civilised man. Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth, more finery, more self-indulgence-even more aesthetic and artistic luxury; but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I earn scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of the _Thebaid_, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit, and not the Caesar, is the civilised man.