Brann the Iconoclast Volume 1 Part 17

Trilby, the child of a b.u.mmy preacher and a b.a.s.t.a.r.d bar- maid, was born and bred in the slum of the wickedest city in the world. Little was to be expected of such birth and breeding. We are not surprised that she regards fornication as but a venial fault--like cigarette smoking--and sins "capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else." Girls so reared are apt to be a trifle frolicsome. We are not shocked to see her stripped stark naked in Carrel's atelier in the presence of half a hundred hoodlums of the Latin quarter--seeming as unconcerned as a society belle at opera or ball with half her back exposed, her bust ready to spill itself out of her corsage if she chance to stoop. We even feel that it is in perfect accord with the eternal fitness of things when these wild sprouts of Bohemia, "with kindly solicitude, help her on with her clothes." We can even pause to admire the experienced skill with which they put each garment in its proper place--and deftly b.u.t.ton it. That she should have the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her tongue's end and be dest.i.tute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected; but we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so unutterably stupid as not to know when her companions are "guying" her.

Trilby croaking "Ben Bolt" for the edification of les trois Angliches were a sight worthy of a lunatic asylum. It was even more ridiculous than the social performance of that other half-wit, Little Billee, in Carrel's atelier. Stupidity covers even more sins than charity, hence we should not judge Du Maurier's heroine too harshly. As weak intellects yield readily to hypnotic power, Svengali had an easy victim. I have no word of criticism for the poor creature. I do not blame Du Maurier for drawing her as he found--or imagined--her, nor can I blame popular preachers, "able editors" and half-wit women for wors.h.i.+ping the freckled and faulty grisette as a G.o.ddess; for does not Carlyle truly tell us that "what we see, and can not see over, is good as Infinity?" Still I cannot entertain an exalted opinion of either the intelligence or morals of a people who will place such a character on a pedestal and prostrate themselves before it.

I confess my surprise at the phenomenal popularity of the book among people familiar with d.i.c.kens, Scott and Thackeray, triune transcendent of fiction. I had hoped when "Ben Hur" made its great hit that the golden age of flash fiction was past--that it could henceforth count among its patrons only stable boys and scullions; but the same nation that received "Ben Hur" with tears of thankfulness-- thankfulness for a priceless jewel of spotless purity ablaze with the immortal fire of genius--has gone mad with joy over a dirty tale of bawdry that might have been better told by a cheap reporter bordering on the jimjams. Has the American nation suddenly declined into intellectual dotage-- reached the bald-head and dizzy soubrette finale in the mighty drama of life?

I can account for the success of Du Maurier's book only on the hypothesis that "like takes to like"--that the world is full of frail Trilbys and half-baked duffers like Little Billee, who, Narcissuslike, wors.h.i.+p their own image. They don't mind the contradictions and absurdities with which the book abounds; in fact, those who read up-to-date French novels are seldom gifted with sufficient continuity of thought to detect contradictions if they appear two pages apart. The book is ultra-bizarre, a thin intellectual soup served in grotesque, even impossible dishes and highly flavored with vulgar animalism--just the mental pabulum craved by those whose culture is artificial, mentality weak and morals mere matter of form. The plot was evidently loaded to scatter. It is about as probable as Jack and the Beanstalk, and is worked out with the skill of a country editor trying to "cover" a national convention. The story affords about as much food for thought as one of Talmage's plate- matter sermons--is fully as "fillin' " as drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle, and equally as exhilarating. Like other sots, the more the literary baccha.n.a.l drinks the more he thirsts-- appet.i.te increased by what it feeds upon. We can forgive Byron and Boccaccio the lax morals of their productions because of their literary excellence, just as we wink at the little social lapses of Sarah Bernhardt because of her unapproachable genius; but Du Maurier's book is wholly bad. It could only have been made worse by being made bigger. It is a moral crime, a literary abortion. The style is faulty and the narrative marred--if a bad egg can be spoiled--by slang lugged in from the slums of two continents with evident labor. Employed naturally, slang may serve--in a pinch--for Attic salt; but slang for its own sake is s.m.u.t on the nose instead of a "beauty-spot" on the cheek of Venus--sure evidence of a paucity of ideas. A trite proverb, a non-translatable phrase from a foreign tongue may be permissible; but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscriminately is but a pedantic prig.

It were bad enough if Du Maurier mixed good English with better French; but he employs in his bilingual book the very worst of both--obsolete American provincialisms and the patois of the quartier latin side by side. To the cultured American who knows only the English of Lindley Murray and scholastic French, the book is about as intelligible as Greek to Casca or the "dog-latin" of the American schoolboy to Julius Caesar.

His characters resemble the distorted freaks of nature in a dime museum. They may all be possible, but not one of them probable. Taffy and Gecko are the best of the lot.

The first is a big, good-natured Englishman who wants to see his sweetheart married to his friend, weds another and supports her quite handsomely by painting pictures he cannot sell; the latter a Pole with an Italian's temperament, yet who sees the woman he loves in the power of a demon--by whom she is presumably debauched--and makes no effort to rescue her, is not even jealous. Svengali is the greatest musician in the world, yet cannot make a living in Paris, the modern home of art. He is altogether and irretrievably bad--despite the harmony in which his soul is steeped! Think of a hawk outwarbling a nightingale--of a demon flooding the world with melody most divine! We may now expect Mephistopheles to warble "Nearer My G.o.d to Thee" between the acts! Trilby can sing no more than a burro. Like the useful animal, she has plenty of voice, and, like him, she can knock the horns off the moon with it or send it on a hot chase after the receding ghost of Hamlet's sire; but she is "tone-deaf"-- can't tell Ophelia's plaint from the performance of Thomas'

orchestra. Svengali hypnotizes her, and, beneath his magic spell she becomes the greatest cantatrice in Europe.

Hypnotism is a power but little understood; so we must permit Du Maurier to make such Jules Verne's excursions into that unknown realm as may please him. Had Svengali made a contortionist of the stiff old Devons.h.i.+re vicar we could not cry "impossible." The Laird of c.o.c.kpen is a good-natured fellow to whom Trilby tells her troubles instead of pouring them into the capacious ear of a policeman. He is a kind of bewhiskered Sir Galahad who goes in quest of Trilby instead of the Holy Grail, and having found her, sits down on her bed and cheers her up while she kisses and caresses him. As she is in love with his friend, the performance is eminently proper, quite platonic.

The Laird advises Trilby to give up sitting for "the altogether"; yet Du Maurier a.s.sures us that "nothing is so chaste as nudity"--that "Venus herself, as she drops her garments and steps on to the model-throne, leaves behind her on the floor every weapon by which she can pierce to the grosser pa.s.sions of men."

Then he informs us that a naked woman is such a fright "that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." How thankful Cupid must be that he was born blind! Still the most of us are willing to risk one eye on the average "altogether"

model. Du Maurier--who is a somewhat better artist than author--ill.u.s.trates his own book. He gives us several portraits of Trilby, all open-mouthed, with a vacant stare.

Strange that he did not draw his heroine nude as she sat on the bed hugging and kissing the Laird--that he did not hang up "on the floor every weapon" by which Venus herself "can pierce to the grosser pa.s.sions of men." But perchance he was afraid the Laird would "hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." He could not be spared just yet. Despite his plea for the nude, I think he exercised excellent judgment in leaving Trilby "clothed and in her right mind"--such as it was--while the Laird roosted on her couch in that attic bedroom and was-- to us a Tennysonianism--mouthed and mumbled. Even New York's "four hundred" might have felt a little squeamish at seeing this pair of platonic turtle doves hid away in an obscure corner of naughty Paris in puris naturalibus even if "there is nothing so chaste as nudity."

Du Maurier says that Trilby never sat to him for "the altogether," and adds: "I would as soon have asked the Queen of Spain to let me paint her legs." If nudity be so chaste, and Trilby didn't mind the exposure even a little bit, why should he hesitate? And why should he not paint the legs of the Queen of Spain--or even the underpinning of the Queen of Hawaii--as well as her arms? But if we pause to point out all the absurd contradictions in this flake of ultra-French froth we shall wear out more than one pencil.

Little Billee is a very nice young man who has been kept too close to his mother's ap.r.o.n-strings for his own good--a girlish, hysterical kind of boy, who should be given spoon- victuals and put to bed early. Of course he wants to marry Trilby, for he is of that age when the swish of a petticoat makes us seasick. She is perfectly willing to become his mistress--although she had "repented" of her sins and been "forgiven" but a few days before. She has sense enough--despite Du Maurier's portraits of her--to know that she is unworthy to become a gentleman's wife, to be mated with a he-virgin like Little Billee. But she is overpersuaded-- as usual--and consents. Then the young calf's mother comes on the scene and asks her to spare her little pansy blossom--not to blight his life with the frost of her follies.

And of course she consents again. She's the great consenter--always in the hands of friends, like an American politician. "The difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading"

prevents a mesalliance. Trilby skips the trala and Little Billee--who has no chance to secure a reconsideration cries himself sick, but recovers,--comes up smiling like a cotton- patch after a spring shower. He is taken to England, but fails to find that "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

He gets wedded to his art quite prettily, and even thinks of turning Mormon and taking the vicar's daughter for a second bride, but slips up on an atheistical orange peel, something has gone wrong with his head. Where his b.u.mp of amativeness should stick out like a walnut there is a discouraging depression which alarms him greatly, and worries the reader not a little. But finally he sees Trilby again, and, the wheel in his head, which has stuck fast for five years, begins to whizz around like the internal economy of an alarm clock--or a sky terrier with a clothespin on his tail.

Of course there is now nothing for Trilby to do but to die.

They could be paired off in a kind of morganatic marriage; but it is customary in novels where the heroine has been too frolicsome, for her to get comfortably buried instead of happily married,--and perhaps it is just as well. Even a French novelist must make some little mock concession to the orthodox belief that the wage of sin is death. So Trilby sinks into the grave with a song like the dying swan, and Little Billee follows suit--upsets the entire Christian religion by dying very peaceably as an Atheist, without so much as a shudder on the brink of that outer darkness where there's supposed to be weeping and wailing and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth.

Svengali has also fallen by the wayside, a number of characters have been very happily forgotten, so the story drags along to the close on three not very attractive legs, Taffy, the Laird and Gecko. It is a bad drama worse staged, with an ignorant bawd for heroine, a weak little thing for leading man, an impossible Caliban for heavy villain and Atheism for moral. Such is the wonderful work that has given this alleged land of intelligence a case of literary mania a potu, set it to singing the praises of a grimy grisette more melodiously than she warbled, "mironton, mirontaine" at the bidding of the villainous Svengali. Such is this new lion of literature who has set American maids and matrons to paddling about home barefoot and posing in public with open mouths--flattering themselves that they resemble a female whom they would scald if she ventured into their back yard.

BALAAM'S a.s.s.

AND OTHER BURROS.

"Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law; Till Superst.i.tion taught the tyrant awe, Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid, And G.o.ds of conquerors, slaves of subjects made.

She, from the rending earth and bursting skies, Saw G.o.ds descend and fiends infernal rise; Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes; Fear made her devils and weak hope her G.o.ds; G.o.ds partial, changeful, pa.s.sionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge and l.u.s.t; Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.

Zeal then, not charity, became the guide; And h.e.l.l was built on spite, and heaven on pride."

--POPE.

Kind reader, have a care! For aught I know this article may be the rankest blasphemy, and reading it may wreck your immortal soul--granting of course, that you are in possession of such perishable property. I submitted it to several of my brother ministers and sought their opinion as to the propriety of publis.h.i.+ng it; but while some a.s.sured me that it was calculated to purify the moral atmosphere somewhat and foster respect for true religion, others were equally certain that Satan had inspired it--that it was, in fact, a choice bit of immigration literature for the lower regions. Finding even the elders unable to decide what should be done with Balaam's a.s.s--whether it should be turned loose upon the land like another evangelist, or consigned to the flames as a hopeless heretic--I determined to give it the benefit of the doubt. The animal may break into the preserves of some unctuous hypocrites and trample a few choice flowers of sacerdotal folly; but I opine that no honest man of average intellect will find herein occasion for complaint. I would not wantonly wound the sensibilities of those earnest but ignorant souls who believe the very chapter headings of the Bible to have been inspired; who interpret literally every foolish fable preserved therein--"like flies in amber"; but the Car of Progress cannot roll forward without crus.h.i.+ng an occasional pismire.

We cannot bid it stand forever in the same old rut, like an abandoned road-cart or "Jeffersonian Democrat," because across its s.h.i.+ning pathway lie the honest prejudices of zealous stupidity.

The Bible is a great gold-mine, in which inexhaustible store of yellow metal is mixed with much worthless rubbish that must be purged away by honest criticism before the book becomes really profitable even fit for general circulation. I would rather place in the hands of an innocent girl a copy of the Police Gazette or Sunday Sun than an unexpurgated Bible. It is a book I value much, yet keep under lock and key with "Don Juan" and the "Decameron."

It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There are pa.s.sages whose beauty and power might cause the heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy, others that would call a blush of shame to the bra.s.sy front of the foulest fiend that ever howled and shrieked through the sulphurous valleys of h.e.l.l.

The man who rejects the Bible altogether because it is honey-combed with barbarous traditions, rank with revolting stories and darkened by the shadow of a savage superst.i.tion, is cousin-german to him that casts aside a priceless pearl because it is coated with ocean slime. He that accepts it in its entirety--gulps it down like an anaconda absorbing an unwashed goat; who makes no attempt to separate the essential from the accidental--the utterance of inspiration from the garrulity of hopeless nescience; who forgets that it is half an epic poem filled with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, may, like the a.s.s which Balaam rode, open its mouth and speak; but he never saw the Angel of the Lord; he utters the words of emptiness and ignorance.

Had the Bible been taught intelligently and truthfully the entire world would have accepted it centuries ago. Its very worst enemies are those who insist upon its inerrancy--who strive by some esoteric alchemy of logic to trans.m.u.te its every fragment of base metal into bars of yellow gold, the folly of the creature into the wisdom of the Creator. During the Dark Ages hide-bound orthodoxy prevailed and practically every man was a church communicant; it is paramount to-day only in those countries that have failed to keep pace with the Car of Progress. It is a sad commentary upon all religious faiths that they flourish best where ignorance prevails--that Atheism is rapidly becoming the recognized correlative of education. By presuming to know too much of G.o.d's great plan; by decrying intelligent criticism and attempting to seal the lips of living students with the dicta of dead scholastics; by standing ever ready to brand as blasphemers those who presume to question or dare to differ, the dogmatists are driving millions of G.o.d- fearing men into pa.s.sive indifference or overt opposition.

Ignorance is not a crime per se; but it is the mother of Superst.i.tion and Intolerance, those twin demons that have time and again deluged the world with blood and tears; that for forty centuries have stood like ravenous wolves in the path of human progress; that with their empoisoned fangs have torn a thousand times the snowy breast of Liberty--that have done more to inspire Doubt and foster Infidelity than all the French philosophes that ever wielded pen. The logical, well-informed man who to-day becomes a church communicant does not so because of the doctrine promulgated by the average pulpiteer, but despite of it.

The long night of intellectual slavery has not altogether pa.s.sed, but on the higher hills already flame the harbingers of Reason's glorious morn. Gone is the Inquisition with its sacred infamies--the Christian rack is broken and the thumb-screw rusted in twain. The persuasive wheel no longer whisks the non-conformist into full communion, the Iron Virgin has ceased to press the writhing heretic to her orthodox heart. The f.a.ggot has fallen from the hand of the saintly fanatic and the branding iron from the loving grasp of the benevolent bigot, while Superst.i.tion, that once did rule the world with autocratic sway, can only shriek her impotent curses forth and flourish her foolish boycott at Reason's growing flame.

If I can but enable sectarians to understand that all so- called sacred books are essentially the same--that Brahma and Baal, Jupiter and Jehovah are really identical; if I can but make them cognizant of the crime they commit in decrying honest criticism; if I can but convince them that the man who is

"Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through nature up to nature's G.o.d,"

is not necessarily an active emissary of evil whom it is their duty to denounce; if I can but create a suspicion in the minds of the clergy that perhaps they know no more of the Omnipotent than do other men--are possibly mistaking bile for benevolence, gall for G.o.dliness and chronic laziness for "a call to preach"--I will feel that these few hours expended grooming Balaam's burro have not been cast away.

Our information concerning the Rev. Mr. Balaam and his burro is very limited. Although the latter was endowed with the gift of gab it appears to have spoken but once and then at the especial bidding of an angel, which fact leads us to suspect that the voluble jacka.s.ses now extant have deteriorated at both ends since the days of their distinguished ancestor--have parted with all their brain as well as with half their legs. Brother Balaam does not appear to have "syndicated" his sermons or made any special bid for notoriety. If he ever hired half-starved courtesans a la Parkhurst--to dance the can-can, then hastened into court to file complaint against the very bawds he had filled with booze and dandled naked on his knee; if he called the ladies of his congregation "old sows" after the manner of Sam Jones; if he got himself tried on a charge of heresy or became entangled with some half-wit sister whose religious fervor led her to mistake Levite for the Lord, no record of the shameful circ.u.mstance has been preserved. He appears to have attended pretty strictly to the prophet business, and we may presume, from such stray bits of his biography as have come down to us, that he prospered.

The Israelites, who had gotten out of Egypt between two days with considerable of the portable property of other people concealed about their persons, had gone into the Bill Dalton business under the direct guidance--as they claimed--of their Deity, and were for some time eminently successful. Wholesale murder and robbery became their only industry, arson and oppression their recognized amus.e.m.e.nt. They had swiped up several cities--"leaving not a soul alive"--and were now grinding the snickersnee for Moab and Midian. The people of the petty nations of Palestine--whom G.o.d's anointed received an imperative command to "utterly destroy"--had builded them happy homes and acc.u.mulated considerable property by patient industry. They appear to have been peacefully disposed and devout wors.h.i.+pers of those deities from whom the better attributes of Jehovah were subsequently borrowed. The Israelites had not struck a lick of honest labor for forty years. They had drifted about like Cosey's "Commonwealers" and developed into the most fiendish mob of G.o.d-fearing guerrillas and marauding cut-throats of which history makes mention. Compared with Joshua's murderous Jews, the Huns who followed Attila were avatars of mercy and the Sioux of Sitting Bull were Good Samaritans. A careful comparison of the crimes committed by the Kurds in Armenia with those perpetrated by "G.o.d's chosen people" in Palestine will prove that the followers of Allah are but amateurs in the art of outrage. Doubtless any other people, brutalized by centuries of bondage, then turned loose without king or country, with only ignorant prophets for guides and avaricious priests for law-givers, would have become equally cruel--would have adopted a divinity devoid of mercy and a stranger to justice. The G.o.d of a people is, and must of necessity ever be a reflection of themselves, an idealization of their own virtues and vices--a magic mirror in which, Narcissuslike, man wors.h.i.+ps his own image.

The Jews are one of the grandest people that ever dwelt upon the earth. A more intellectual and progressive race is unknown to human history; but, like all others, it had its age of savagery and its epoch of barbarism before it reached the golden era of civilization. I am not criticizing the Jews for their treatment of the Canaanites during that century when cra.s.s ignorance made them credulous and bondage rendered them brutal; but to a.s.sume that the excesses of semi-savages were Heaven-inspired were a d.a.m.ning libel of the Deity. I rather enjoy being lied about by malicious lollipops; but did I sit secure in some celestial citadel, holding the thunderbolts of Heaven within my hand, it were hardly safe to a.s.sert that I instigated such unparalleled atrocities as were perpetrated by the emanc.i.p.ated Israelites in Palestine. I would certainly be tempted to take a potshot at an occasional preacher who persisted in defaming me with his foolish dogmatism.

Balak, the king of Moab and Midian, saw that he was not strong enough to withstand the sacred marauders, and well knew that surrender meant a wholesale ma.s.sacre--that those who had dared to defend their homes would be placed under harrows of iron--that the silvery head of the aged grandsire would sink beneath a sword wielded in the name of G.o.d; that unborn babes would be ripped from the wombs of Moabite women and the maidens of Midian coerced into concubinage by their heaven-led captors. In this dire extremity Balak bethought him of Brother Balaam, who was not "a prophet of G.o.d," as popularly supposed, but a priest of Baal, the deity devoutly wors.h.i.+ped in Moab and Midian. It were ridiculous to suppose that the king, princes and elders of Moab and Midian would appeal for aid to the G.o.d of their enemies instead of to their own divinity, for in those days the princ.i.p.al business of a deity was to wage war in behalf of his wors.h.i.+pers. Balaam was a Midianite, and Balak sent messengers to him "with the reward of divination in their hand," and begged that he would kindly come over and knock the Israelites off the Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore, muzzle-loading maledictions; "for," said he, with a pious fervor that proves he was addressing a priest of his own faith, "I wot that he whom thou blesseth is blessed, and whom thou curseth is cursed." He evidently believed that Balaam carried the celestial thunderbolts concealed about his person--that when he turned them loose those on whom they alighted frizzled up like a fat angleworm on a sea-coal fire. The good man said he would see what could be done to help Balak out of the hole.

"And G.o.d came unto Balaam and said, 'What men are these with thee?' "

As Balaam was evidently expecting the visit we may conclude that the caller was Baal, as Jehovah was not at that time on visiting terms with the Gentile priests--was busily engaged pulling down their altars and putting them to the sword. Balaam gratified the very natural curiosity of his celestial visitor, and the latter, after learning all the particulars, cautioned his diviner or priest not to make any bad breaks. Balaam sent the amba.s.sadors back with word that Baal was a trifle shy of curses at that particular time.

Balak evidently understood the situation, for he sent other agents with larger offerings. Balaam still insisted that he had received no permission to wipe up the Plain of Moab with the ex-brick builders, but saddled his a.s.s and went along, promising to do the best he could for his bleeding country. He evidently desired to size up the situation and be quite sure that none of his curses would come home to roost. Doubtless he also desired to see if Balak was bidding all he could afford for celestial aid, for we have no reason to believe that Brother Balaam was in the prophet business for his health or peddling curses for recreation.

While en route his companions probably informed him that the Jews were as frequent as jugs in a Prohibition precinct--that they had slaughtered the people of Ai, driven Og into the earth, overcome Ammon and were making the rest of the Canaanitish nations hard to catch, for the good man was seized with a sudden desire to take the back track. His burro balked and Balaam told his fellow travelers that an angel was interfering with his transportation facilities. Perhaps the princes of Moab made ribald remarks anent the celestial obstruction--even hinted that Balaam had best get a Maud S. move on him or he might contract a vigorous case of unavailing regret. Then the burro began to blab. Like many of the old pagan priests, Balaam was doubtless an adept in the art of ventriloquism. That may have convinced the amba.s.sadors and bulled the price of curses; for then, as now, it was no uncommon thing for the utterance of an a.s.s to be mistaken for that of an oracle. Or some Doubting Thomas may have twisted the burro's tail. For some reason not set forth by the sacred chronicler, the angel withdrew his objections and the prophet proceeded on his way, but still protesting that no permit had been accorded him to put a kibosh on Joshua's free-booters.

Balaam was entirely too smart to pray for rain when the wind was in the wrong quarter--altogether too smooth to launch his anathemas at an army he knew could take Moab by the back-hair and rub her nose in the sawdust. He counted the campfires of Israel and concluded that Balak's promises of high honors were worth no more than a camp- meeting certificate of conversion--that he would soon be hoofing it over the hills with his coat-tails full of arrows; so, after working his patrons for all the spare cash in sight, he made a sneak, leaving his sovereign to wage war without the aid of supernatural weapons. Like many of his sacerdotal successors, Balaam took precious good care to get on the winning side.

Ever since the days of Brother Balaam there has been considerable trading of curses for cold cash. The industry has been patiently built up from humble beginnings to a magnificent business. From an itinerant curse peddler, trotting about on a spavined burro and resorting to the methods of the mountebank to create a market for his merchandise, it has become a vast commercial concern with costly establishments in every country. The first curses, as might have been expected, were very crude affairs--little more than hoodoos, intended to promote the material welfare of the purchaser at the expense of other people. A king of ye olden times bought a curse and turned it loose upon his enemies--"played the G.o.d an engine on his foe"--much as a modern prince might a gatling-gun; but it seems to have slowly dawned upon the royal ignorami that the Lord is usually on the side of the heaviest battalions--a fact which Napoleon emphasized.

The practice of fencing in a nation with a few wild-eyed prophets, or sending a single soldier forth with a hair-trigger hoodoo and the jawbone of a defunct jacka.s.s to drive great armies into the earth, gradually fell into disuse--curses and blessings became a drug in the market.

About this time the Jewish priesthood began to take kindly to the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. This theological thesis--promulgated before the age of Abraham--had influenced to some extent the religious thought of the entire eastern hemisphere. That the Jews were among the last to admit the immortality of the soul was doubtless due to the fact that, because of their long enslavement, they did not emerge from semi-savagery so soon as did the other divisions of the great semitic family.

Furthermore, for a long period after their emanc.i.p.ation the Jews seem to have received the rewards of their peculiar virtues here on earth and were little inclined to defer their happiness to the hereafter--were amply able to punish their enemies and had no occasion to delegate that pleasant duty to a Superior Power. Finally, however, the fortunes of war began to go against them. They were no longer able to make on earth a heaven for themselves and a h.e.l.l for other people. Instead of despoiling others they discovered an occasional hiatus in their own smoke-house. Instead of burning the cities of their inoffensive neighbors their own began to blaze. The priests and prophets insisted that these evils befell them because they had neglected their Deity; but the more devout they became--the more fat kids, fine meal and first fruits they referred to the Levite larder as "offerings to the Lord"--the more deplorable became their condition. The people began to drift to the more reasonable religion of their neighbors and even the wisest of their kings could not be held to the faith of their fathers. The Jewish priesthood gradually adopted the old Parsi doctrine of Heaven and h.e.l.l--a doctrine unrecognized by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and having no place in the theology of Moses.

The Jews eventually discovered that robbery was wrong and a.s.sa.s.sination a crime--that the practice of ripping open pregnant women and putting prisoners of war under harrows of iron was displeasing to the Lord. It was a forcible ill.u.s.tration of the ancient axiom that it makes a great difference whose ox is gored. Instead of founding a mighty nation as predicted by their prophets, the Jews were conquered, scattered, enslaved.

Palestine was filled with foreigners; had become a religious Babel, a theological chaos. The time was ripe for a religious revolution such as had been inaugurated in India six centuries before. It was accomplished and, as might have been expected, the result was a curious composition; a religious olla-podrida in which the profound wisdom of Zoroaster and the childish superst.i.tion of western barbarians, grand morality and monumental absurdity elbow each other like specters in a delirium--in which is heard both "the still small voice" of Omnipotent G.o.d and the megalophanous bray of Balaam's a.s.s.

Jehovah, the national G.o.d of the Jews, supplanted Jove and Baal, Ashtaroth and Oromasdes, and with their thrones took many of their attributes. The doctrine of future rewards and punishments became the cornerstone of the new theology, while further concessions were made to ethnic creeds in various stages of decay by the adoption of the Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. The Jewish prophets were accepted by the composite cult--which Christ may have originated, but certainly did not develop--but their every utterance was given a new interpretation of which the Hebrew hierarchy had never dreamed. The great kingdom which they had predicted was to be spiritual instead of temporal; the Jerusalem predestined to become the capitol of a powerful prince, to whom all nations should acknowledge allegiance--and pay tribute--was not the leprosy-eaten old town among the Judean hills, but a city not made with hands, existing eternal in the heavens.

Christianity does not contain a single original idea. It borrowed liberally on every hand, but chiefly of Pa.r.s.eeism in which faith, as taught by Zoroaster--Aristotle says six thousand years before Plato--may be found its most important features. It owes absolutely nothing to Judaism but the name of its G.o.d and an idle string of misinterpreted prophecies--is, from first to last, essentially a "Gentile"

faith. There never was a religion inst.i.tuted upon the earth that the priesthood failed to transform into arrant folly, to debase until it finally fell into disrepute. Such was the fate of that established by Zoroaster, and upon the ruins of the grandest theology this world has known, Siddartha Gautama erected the Buddhist credo, which is really a revolt to first principles--a search for happiness here on earth, the attainment of Nirvana. So, too, the priesthood has corrupted the teachings of Christ until the logical mind revolts from the jumble of self-evident absurdities, rejects Revelations as a nursery tale and seeks by the dim light of science to find the cause of all Existence.

The new cult was not regarded kindly by the old priesthoods, and the methods adopted for its suppression were almost as rigorous as those it in turn employed some centuries later for the discouragement of other "blasphemers" and "heretics"; hence it is not surprising that the old Hebrew doctrine that whom the Lord loves he makes mighty, gives wealth in plenty and concubines galore, power over his enemies and privilege to despoil his neighbors, should have been early transformed into "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." The doctrine of temporal rewards and punishments revived somewhat as Christianity became powerful, but has remained a subordinate feature. As not a sparrow falls to the earth without a special permit from the Almighty, it follows, as a natural sequence, that every brutal crime is gracefully permitted--if not ordained--by that dear Lord whose protection we daily pray, and whose apostles we support.

If we inquire why this is so we are cautioned not to commit blasphemy--some worthy brother of Balaam's a.s.s bids us beware the Angel of the Lord.

The claim of the ancient priesthoods to support was based on the presumption that they promoted the national welfare of the people by keeping the national deity in good humor.