Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 61

And the Scribe was shaken, for lo! it was the face of the Christ.

IV

Did he haunt the Wailing Wall, then, sharing the woe of his brethren?

For in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the Scribe found him not.

V

The Scribe had slipt in half disguised: no Jew being allowed even in the courtyard or the precincts of the sacred place. His first open attempt had been frustrated by the Turkish soldiers who kept the narrow approach to the courtyard. "_Ruh! Ems.h.i.+!_" they had shouted fiercely, and the Scribe recklessly refusing to turn back had been expelled by violence. A blessing in disguise, his friends had told him, for should the Greek-Church fanatics have become aware of him, he might have perished in a miniature Holy War. And as he fought his way through the crowd to gain the shelter of a balcony, he felt indeed that one ugly rush would suffice to crush him.

VI

In the sepulchral incense-laden dusk of the uncouth Church, in the religious gloom punctuated by the pervasive twinkle of a thousand hanging lamps of silver, was wedged and blent a suffocating ma.s.s of palm-bearing humanity of all nations and races, the sumptuously clothed and the ragged, the hale and the unsightly; the rainbow colors of the East relieved by the white of the shrouded females, toned down by the sombre shabbiness of the Russian _moujiks_ and peasant-women, and pierced by a vivid circular line of red fezzes on the unbared, unreverential heads of the Turkish regiment keeping order among the jostling jealousies of Christendom, whose rival churches swarm around the strange, glittering, candle-illumined Rotunda that covers the tomb of Christ. Not an inch of free s.p.a.ce anywhere under this shadow of Golgotha: a perpetual sway to and fro of the human tides, seething with sobs and quarrels; flowing into the planless maze of chapels and churches of all ages and architectures, that, perched on rocks or hewn into their mouldy darkness, magnificent with untold church-treasure--Armenian, Syrian, Coptic, Latin, Greek, Abyssinian--add the resonance of their special sanct.i.ties and the oppression of their individual glories of vestment and ceremonial to the surcharged atmosphere palpitant with exaltation and prayer and mystic bell-tinklings; overspreading the thirty-seven sacred spots, and oozing into the holy of holies itself, towards that impa.s.sive marble stone, goal of the world's desire in the blaze of the ever burning lamps; and overflowing into the screaming courtyard, amid the flagstone stalls of chaplets and crosses and carven-sh.e.l.ls, and the rapacious rabble of cripples and vendors.

And amid the frenzied squeezing and squabbling, way was miraculously made for a dazzling procession of the Only Orthodox Church, moving statelily round and round, to the melting strains of unseen singing boys and preceded by an upborne olive-tree; seventy priests in flowering damask, carrying palms or swinging censers, boys in green, uplifting silken banners richly broidered with sacred scenes, archimandrites attended by deacons, and bearing symbolic trinitarian candlesticks, bishops with mitres, and last and most gorgeous of all, the sceptred Patriarch bowing to the tiny Coptic Church in the corner, as his priests wheel and swing their censers towards it--all the elaborately jewelled ritual evolved by alien races from the simple life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

"O Jesus, brother in Israel, perhaps only those excluded from this sanctuary of thine can understand thee!"

VII

So thought the Scribe, as from the comparative safety of an upper monastery where no Jewish foot had ever trod, he looked down upon the glowing, heaving ma.s.s. The right emotion did not come to him. He was irritated; the thought of entering so historic and so Jewish a shrine only at peril of his life, recalled the long intolerance of mediaeval Christendom, the Dark Ages of the Ghettos. His imagination conjured up an ironic vision of himself as the sport of that seething mob, saw himself seeking a last refuge in the Sepulchre, and falling dead across the holy tomb. And then the close air charged with all those breaths and candles and censers, the jewelled pageantry flaunted in that city of squalor and starvation, the military line of contemptuous Mussulmen complicating the mutual contempt of the Christian sects, and reminding him of the obligation on a new Jewish State, if it ever came, to safeguard these divine curios; the grotesque incongruity of all this around the tomb of the Prince of Peace, the tomb itself of very dubious authenticity, to say nothing of the thirty-six parasitical sanct.i.ties!...

He thought of the even more tumultuous scene about to be enacted here on the day of the Greek fire: when in the awful darkness of extinguished lamps, through a rift in the Holy Sepulchre within which the Patriarch prayed in solitude and darkness, a tongue of heavenly flame would shoot, G.o.d's annual witness to the exclusive rightness of the Greek Church, and the poor foot-sore pilgrims, mad with ecstasy, would leap over one another to kindle their candles and torches at it, while a vessel now riding at anchor would haste with its freight of sacred flame to kindle the church-lamps of Holy Russia.

And then the long historic tragi-comedy of warring sects swept before him, the Greek Church regarding the Roman as astray in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; at one with the Protestant only in not praying to the Virgin; every new misreading of human texts sufficing to start a new heresy.

VIII

He hated Palestine: the Jordan, the Mount of Olives, the holy bazaars, the geographical sanct.i.ty of shrines and soils, the long torture of prophetic texts and apocalyptic interpretations, all the devotional maunderings of the fool and the Philistine. He would have had the Bible prohibited for a century or two, till mankind should be able to read it with fresh vision and true profit. He wished that Christ had crucified the Jews and defeated the plan for the world's salvation. O happy Christ, to have died without foresight of the Crusades or the Inquisition!

IX

Irritation pa.s.sed into an immense pity for humanity, crucified upon the cross whose limbs are Time and s.p.a.ce. Those poor Russian pilgrims faring foot-sore across the great frozen plains, lured on by this mirage of blessedness, sleeping by the wayside, and sometimes never waking again! Poor humanity, like a blind Oriental beggar on the deserted roadway crying _Bakhs.h.i.+sh_ to vain skies, from whose hollow and futile s.p.a.ces floats the lone word, _Mafish_--"there is nothing."

At least let it be ours to cover the poorest life with that human love and pity which is G.o.d's vicegerent on earth, and to pa.s.s it gently into the unknown.

X

But since Christianity already covered these poor lives with love and pity, let them live in the beautiful illusion, so long as the ugly facts did not break through! What mattered if these sites were true or false--the believing soul had made them true. All these stones were holy, if only with the tears of the generations. The Greek fire might be a shameless fraud, but the true heavenly flame was the faith in it.

The Christ story might be false, but it had idealized the basal things--love, pity, self-sacrifice, purity, motherhood. And if any divine force worked through history, then must the great common illusions of mankind also be divine. And in a world--itself an illusion--what truths could there be save working truths, established by natural selection in the spiritual world, varying for different races, and maintaining themselves by correspondence with the changing needs of the spirit?

XI

Absolute religious truth? How could there be such a thing? As well say German was truer than French, or that Greek was more final than Arabic. Its religion like its speech was the way the deepest instincts of a race found expression, and like a language a religion was dead when it ceased to change. Each religion gave the human soul something great to love, to live by, and to die for. And whosoever lived in joyous surrender to some greatness outside himself had religion, even though the world called him atheist. The finest souls too easily abandoned the best words to the stupidest people.

The time had come for a new religious expression, a new language for the old everlasting emotions, in terms of the modern cosmos; a religion that should contradict no fact and check no inquiry; so that children should grow up again with no distracting divorce from their parents and their past, with no break in the sweet sanct.i.ties of childhood, which carry on to old age something of the freshness of early sensation, and are a fount of tears in the desert of life.

The ever-living, darkly-laboring Hebraic spirit of love and righteous aspiration, the Holy Ghost that had inspired Judaism and Christianity, and moved equally in Mohammedanism and Protestantism, must now quicken and inform the new learning, which still lay dead and foreign, outside humanity.

XII

If Evolution was a truth, what mystic force working in life! From the devil-fish skulking towards his prey to the Christian laying down his life for his fellow, refusing the reward of the stronger; from the palpitating sac--all stomach--of embryonic life to the poet, the musician, the great thinker. The animality of average humanity made for hope rather than for despair, when one remembered from what it had developed. It was for man in this laboring cosmos to unite himself with the stream that made for goodness and beauty.

XIII

A song came to him of the true G.o.d, whose name is one with Past, Present, and Future.

YAHWEH

I sing the uplift and the upwelling, I sing the yearning towards the sun, And the blind sea that lifts white hands of prayer.

I sing the wild battle-cry of warriors and the sweet whispers of lovers, The dear word of the hearth and the altar, Aspiration, Inspiration, Compensation, G.o.d!

The hint of beauty behind the turbid cities, The eternal laws that cleanse and cancel, The pity through the savagery of nature, The love atoning for the brothels, The Master-Artist behind his tragedies, Creator, Destroyer, Purifier, Avenger, G.o.d!

Come into the circle of Love and Justice, Come into the brotherhood of Pity, Of Holiness and Health!

Strike out glad limbs upon the sunny waters, Or be dragged down amid the rotting weeds, The festering bodies.

Save thy soul from sandy barrenness, Let it blossom with roses and gleam with the living waters.

Blame not, nor reason of, your Past, Nor explain to Him your congenital weakness, But come, for He is remorseless, Call Him unjust, but come, Do not mock or defy Him, for he will prevail.

He regardeth not you, He hath swallowed the worlds and the nations, He hath humor, too: disease and death for the smugly prosperous.

For such is the Law, stern, unchangeable, s.h.i.+ning; Making dung from souls and souls from dung; Thrilling the dust to holy, beautiful spirit, And returning the spirit to dust.

Come and ye shall know Peace and Joy.

Let what ye desire of the Universe penetrate you, Let Loving-kindness and Mercy pa.s.s through you, And Truth be the Law of your mouth.

For so ye are channels of the divine sea, Which may not flood the earth but only steal in Through rifts in your souls.

THE END