Imaginary Conversations and Poems Part 46

_Lucian._ You touch me on a vital part if you call an absurdity the religion or philosophy in which I was educated. Anaxalides, and Clearagus, and Speusippus, his own nephew, a.s.sert it. Who should know better than they?

_Timotheus._ Where are their proofs?

_Lucian._ I would not be so indelicate as to require them on such an occasion. A short time ago I conversed with an old centurion, who was in service by the side of Vespasian, when t.i.tus, and many officers and soldiers of the army, and many captives, were present, and who saw one Eleazar put a ring to the nostril of a demoniac (as the patient was called) and draw the demon out of it.

_Timotheus._ And do you pretend to believe this nonsense?

_Lucian._ I only believe that Vespasian and t.i.tus had nothing to gain or accomplish by the miracle; and that Eleazar, if he had been detected in a trick by two acute men and several thousand enemies, had nothing to look forward to but a cross--the only piece of upholstery for which Judea seems to have either wood or workmen, and which are as common in that country as direction-posts are in any other.

_Timotheus._ The Jews are a stiff-necked people.

_Lucian._ On such occasions, no doubt.

_Timotheus._ Would you, O Lucian, be cla.s.sed among the atheists, like Epicurus?

_Lucian._ It lies not at my discretion what name shall be given me at present or hereafter, any more than it did at my birth. But I wonder at the ignorance and precipitancy of those who call Epicurus an atheist. He saw on the same earth with himself a great variety of inferior creatures, some possessing more sensibility and more thoughtfulness than others. a.n.a.logy would lead so contemplative a reasoner to the conclusion that if many were inferior and in sight, others might be superior and out of sight. He never disbelieved in the existence of the G.o.ds; he only disbelieved that they troubled their heads with our concerns. Have they none of their own? If they are happy, does their happiness depend on us, comparatively so imbecile and vile? He believed, as nearly all nations do, in different ranks and orders of superhuman beings; and perhaps he thought (but I never was in his confidence or counsels) that the higher were rather in communication with the next to them in intellectual faculties, than with the most remote. To me the suggestion appears by no means irrational, that if we are managed or cared for at all by beings wiser than ourselves (which in truth would be no sign of any great wisdom in them), it can only be by such as are very far from perfection, and who indulge us in the commission of innumerable faults and follies, for their own speculation or amus.e.m.e.nt.

_Timotheus._ There is only one such; and he is the devil.

_Lucian._ If he delights in our wickedness, which you believe, he must be incomparably the happiest of beings, which you do not believe. No G.o.d of Epicurus rests his elbow on his armchair with less energetic exertion or discomposure.

_Timotheus._ We lead holier and purer lives than such ignorant mortals as are not living under Grace.

_Lucian._ I also live under Grace, O Timotheus! and I venerate her for the pleasures I have received at her hands. I do not believe she has quite deserted me. If my grey hairs are unattractive to her, and if the trace of her fingers is lost in the wrinkles of my forehead, still I sometimes am told it is discernible even on the latest and coldest of my writings.

_Timotheus._ You are wilful in misapprehension. The Grace of which I speak is adverse to pleasure and impurity.

_Lucian._ Rightly do you separate impurity and pleasure, which indeed soon fly asunder when the improvident would unite them. But never believe that tenderness of heart signifies corruption of morals, if you happen to find it (which indeed is unlikely) in the direction you have taken; on the contrary, no two qualities are oftener found together, on mind as on matter, than hardness and lubricity.

Believe me, Cousin Timotheus, when we come to eighty years of age we are all Essenes. In our kingdom of heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage; and austerity in ourselves, when Nature holds over us the sharp instrument with which Jupiter operated on Saturn, makes us austere to others. But how happens it that you, both old and young, break every bond which connected you anciently with the Essenes? Not only do you marry (a height of wisdom to which I never have attained, although in others I commend it), but you never share your substance with the poorest of your community, as they did, nor live simply and frugally, nor purchase nor employ slaves, nor refuse rank and offices in the State, nor abstain from litigation, nor abominate and execrate the wounds and cruelties of war. The Essenes did all this, and greatly more, if Josephus and Philo, whose political and religious tenets are opposite to theirs, are credible and trustworthy.

_Timotheus._ Doubtless you would also wish us to retire into the desert, and eschew the conversation of mankind.

_Lucian._ No, indeed; but I would wish the greater part of your people to eschew mine, for they bring all the worst of the desert with them whenever they enter; its smothering heats, its blinding sands, its sweeping suffocation. Return to the pure spirit of the Essenes, without their asceticism; cease from controversy, and drop party designations. If you will not do this, do less, and be merely what you profess to be, which is quite enough for an honest, a virtuous, and a religious man.

_Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I did not come hither to receive a lecture from you.

_Lucian._ I have often given a dinner to a friend who did not come to dine with me.

_Timotheus._ Then, I trust, you gave him something better for dinner than bay-salt and dandelions. If you will not a.s.sist us in nettling our enemies a little for their absurdities and impositions, let me entreat you, however, to let us alone, and to make no remarks on us.

I myself run into no extravagances, like the Essenes, was.h.i.+ng and fasting, and retiring into solitude. I am not called to them; when I am, I go.

_Lucian._ I am apprehensive the Lord may afflict you with deafness in that ear.

_Timotheus._ Nevertheless, I am indifferent to the world, and all things in it. This, I trust, you will acknowledge to be true religion and true philosophy.

_Lucian._ That is not philosophy which betrays an indifference to those for whose benefit philosophy was designed; and those are the whole human race. But I hold it to be the most unphilosophical thing in the world to call away men from useful occupations and mutual help, to profitless speculations and acrid controversies. Censurable enough, and contemptible, too, is that supercilious philosopher, sneeringly sedate, who narrates in full and flowing periods the persecutions and tortures of a fellow-man, led astray by his credulity, and ready to die in the a.s.sertion of what in his soul he believes to be the truth.

But hardly less censurable, hardly less contemptible, is the tranquilly arrogant sectarian, who denies that wisdom or honesty can exist beyond the limits of his own ill-lighted chamber.

_Timotheus._ What! is he sanguinary?

_Lucian._ Whenever he can be, he is; and he always has it in his power to be even worse than that, for he refuses his custom to the industrious and honest shopkeeper who has been taught to think differently from himself in matters which he has had no leisure to study, and by which, if he had enjoyed that leisure, he would have been a less industrious and a less expert artificer.

_Timotheus._ We cannot countenance those hard-hearted men who refuse to hear the word of the Lord.

_Lucian._ The hard-hearted knowing this of the tender-hearted, and receiving the declaration from their own lips, will refuse to hear the word of the Lord all their lives.

_Timotheus._ Well, well; it cannot be helped. I see, cousin, my hopes of obtaining a little of your a.s.sistance in your own pleasant way are disappointed; but it is something to have conceived a better hope of saving your soul, from your readiness to acknowledge your belief in miracles.

_Lucian._ Miracles have existed in all ages and in all religions.

Witnesses to some of them have been numerous; to others of them fewer.

Occasionally, the witnesses have been disinterested in the result.

_Timotheus._ Now indeed you speak truly and wisely.

_Lucian._ But sometimes the most honest and the most quiescent have either been unable or unwilling to push themselves so forward as to see clearly and distinctly the whole of the operation; and have listened to some knave who felt a pleasure in deluding their credulity, or some other who himself was either an enthusiast or a dupe. It also may have happened in the ancient religions, of Egypt for instance, or of India, or even of Greece, that narratives have been attributed to authors who never heard of them; and have been circulated by honest men who firmly believed them; by half-honest, who indulged their vanity in becoming members of a novel and bustling society; and by utterly dishonest, who, having no other means of rising above the shoulders of the vulgar, threw dust into their eyes and made them stoop.

_Timotheus._ Ha! the rogues! It is nearly all over with them.

_Lucian._ Let us hope so. Parthenius and the Roman poet Ovidius Naso, have related the transformations of sundry men, women, and G.o.ds.

_Timotheus._ Idleness! Idleness! I never read such lying authors.

_Lucian._ I myself have seen enough to incline me toward a belief in them.

_Timotheus._ You? Why! you have always been thought an utter infidel; and now you are running, hot and heedless as any mad dog, to the opposite extreme!

_Lucian._ I have lived to see, not indeed one man, but certainly one animal turned into another; nay, great numbers. I have seen sheep with the most placid faces in the morning, one nibbling the tender herb with all its dew upon it; another, negligent of its own sustenance, and giving it copiously to the tottering lamb aside it.

_Timotheus._ How pretty! half poetical!

_Lucian._ In the heat of the day I saw the very same sheep tearing off each other's fleeces with long teeth and longer claws, and imitating so admirably the howl of wolves, that at last the wolves came down on them in a body, and lent their best a.s.sistance at the general devouring. What is more remarkable, the people of the villages seemed to enjoy the sport; and, instead of attacking the wolves, waited until they had filled their stomachs, ate the little that was left, said piously and from the bottom of their hearts what you call _grace_, and went home singing and piping.

BISHOP s.h.i.+PLEY AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

_s.h.i.+pley._ There are very few men, even in the bushes and the wilderness, who delight in the commission of cruelty; but nearly all, throughout the earth, are censurable for the admission. When we see a blow struck, we go on and think no more about it: yet every blow aimed at the most distant of our fellow-creatures, is sure to come back, some time or other, to our families and descendants. He who lights a fire in one quarter is ignorant to what other the winds may carry it, and whether what is kindled in the wood may not break out again in the cornfield.

_Franklin._ If we could restrain but one generation from deeds of violence, the foundation for a new and a more graceful edifice of society would not only have been laid, but would have been consolidated.

_s.h.i.+pley._ We already are horrified at the bare mention of religious wars; we should then be horrified at the mention of political. Why should they who, when they are affronted or offended, abstain from inflicting blows, some from a sense of decorousness and others from a sense of religion, be forward to instigate the infliction of ten thousand, all irremediable, all murderous? Every chief magistrate should be arbitrator and umpire in all differences between any two, forbidding war. Much would be added to the dignity of the most powerful king by rendering him an efficient member of such a grand Amphictyonic council. Unhappily they are persuaded in childhood that a reign is made glorious by a successful war. What schoolmaster ever taught a boy to question it? or indeed any point of political morality, or any incredible thing in history? Caesar and Alexander are uniformly clement: Themistocles died by a draught of bull's blood: Portia by swallowing red-hot pieces of charcoal.

_Franklin._ Certainly no woman or man could perform either of these feats. In my opinion it lies beyond a doubt that Portia suffocated herself by the fumes of charcoal; and that the Athenian, whose stomach must have been formed on the model of other stomachs, and must therefore have rejected a much less quant.i.ty of blood than would have poisoned him, died by some chemical preparation, of which a bull's blood might, or might not, have been part. Schoolmasters who thus betray their trust, ought to be scourged by their scholars, like him of their profession who underwent the just indignation of the Roman Consul. You shut up those who are infected with the plague; why do you lay no coercion on those who are incurably possessed by the legion devil of carnage? When a creature is of intellect so perverted that he can discern no difference between a review and a battle, between the animating bugle and the dying groan, it were expedient to remove him, as quietly as may be, from his devastation of G.o.d's earth and his usurpation of G.o.d's authority. Compa.s.sion points out the cell for him at the bottom of the hospital, and listens to hear the key turned in the ward: until then the house is insecure.

_s.h.i.+pley._ G.o.d grant our rulers wisdom, and our brethren peace!