Or witnessed any direct and conscious
blasphemy or irreverence; but of indirect and habitual, enough.
Where is the man who is guilty of direct and personal insolence
to Him that made him?
One memorable addition to the old mythology is due to this
era, - the Christian fable. With what pains, and tears, and blood
these centuries have woven this and added it to the mythology of
mankind. The new Prometheus. With what miraculous consent, and
patience, and persistency has this mythus been stamped on the
memory of the race! It would seem as if it were in the progress
of our mythology to dethrone Jehovah, and crown Christ in his
stead.
If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to
call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ, - the history of
Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History. The
naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its
desolate hills, - think of it. In Tasso's poem I trust some
things are sweetly buried. Consider the snappish tenacity with
which they preach Christianity still. What are time and space to
Christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world? - that the
humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to make a New
York bishop so bigoted. Forty-four lamps, the gift of kings, now
burning in a place called the Holy Sepulchre; - a church-bell
ringing; - some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on Mount
Calvary within the week. -
"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, when I forget thee, may my right hand
forget her cunning."
"By the waters of Babylon there we sat down, and we wept when we
remembered Zion."
I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ,
or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches. It is
necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and
significance of the life of Christ. I know that some will have
hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my
Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their
Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I
like him too. "God is the letter Ku, as well as Khu." Why need
Christians be still intolerant and superstitious? The
simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard Jonah at
his own request. -
"Where is this love become in later age?
Alas! 'tis gone in endless pilgrimage
From hence, and never to return, I doubt,
Till revolution wheel those times about."
One man says, -
"The world's a popular disease, that reigns
Within the froward heart and frantic brains
Of poor distempered mortals."
Another, that
"all the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players."
The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.
Old Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and would be a
poet, for instance, should have in him certain "brave,
translunary things," and a "fine madness" should possess his
brain.
