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[Illustration: “Tarry thou till I come!”
[_see page 3._
COPYRIGHT 1901 BY FUNK & WAGNALLS CO.]
[Illustration]
THULSTRUP ILLUSTRATED EDITION
TARRY THOU
TILL I COME
OR
SALATHIEL, THE WANDERING JEW
_By_
GEORGE CROLY
_Introductory Letter by_
Gen. LEWIS WALLACE
_With Twenty Full-Page Drawings
by_
T. DE THULSTRUP
NEW YORK & LONDON
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
·M·C·M·I·
COPYRIGHT, 1901
By FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
Published May, 1901
[Registered at Stationers’ Hall, London]
_Printed in the United States of America_
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE
This remarkable historical romance is closely associated by the author in
his brief Preface with the early Second Coming of Christ, a belief that
is held to-day by a rapidly increasing number of people in all parts of
Christendom.
The story was first published in 1827, and was issued at different times
under different titles, as “Salathiel, a Story of the Past, the Present,
and the Future”; and “Salathiel, the Immortal, or the Wandering Jew.”
It had wide popularity for a generation or more, the leading critical
journals in England and America giving it great praise.
In the present revival of the story, many typographical, and some other
errors, that crept into the various editions, have been carefully
corrected, chapter and marginal headings have been added, and the dialogs
have been generally broken up into paragraphs in harmony with the fashion
of to-day, and the whole book has been carefully annotated.
We are glad in the belief that we have carried out successfully General
Lewis Wallace’s wish, that the story be worthily illustrated. We were
fortunate in securing a masterful artist who shared the great enthusiasm
of the author of “Ben Hur” for this story of Croly’s, and in his drawings
Mr. de Thulstrup has spared neither time nor labor, spending many months,
both here and in Europe, in the study of the details necessary to perfect
the pictures. We feel assured that General Wallace will now wish to
recast the closing sentence of his Introductory Letter.
The words that doomed Salathiel to immortality on earth, “Tarry Thou Till
I Come,” so fit the story that we have ventured to make them the chief
title, and have so combined the new with the old that no one will be
misled. The colored frontispiece by Mr. de Thulstrup happily illustrates
the new title.
In the Appendix will be found a series of letters written for this
publication by thirty or more representative Jewish scholars, on “_Jesus
of Nazareth from the Present Jewish Point of View_.” The Appendix
contains other matter suggested by the legend of “The Wandering Jew,”
prepared by D. S. Gregory, LL.D., and by Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. The
general INTRODUCTION is self-explanatory.
It is believed that no book now before the public can be made nearly so
helpful as this one in interesting the minds of readers, young and old,
in the events that closely followed in Palestine the Crucifixion, and
marked the conflict between early Judaism and Christianity, and ended in
the final destruction of Jerusalem.
The reader will now and then be reminded of some of the more striking
passages in two or three of the popular religious novels published in the
past decade. But, as it is not given even to great geniuses to remember
_forward_, our author will scarcely be exposed to the accusation of
having borrowed from these later writers.
All existing rights in this book, held in this country or England, have
been purchased by us.
FUNK AND WAGNALLS COMPANY.
NEW YORK and LONDON.
INTRODUCTORY LETTER
_From General Lewis Wallace_
(Author of “Ben Hur”)
CRAWFORDSVILLE, IND., _September 1, 1900_.
GENTLEMEN: I have learned that you have in mind the issuance of a new
edition of Croly’s story of “The Wandering Jew.” Perhaps you will lend a
willing ear to a suggestion or two, so much is the book in my love.
In my judgment, the six greatest English novels are “Ivanhoe,” “The Last
of the Barons,” “The Tale of Two Cities,” “Jane Eyre,” “Hypatia,” and
this romance of Croly’s. If Shakespeare had never been born; if Milton,
Byron, and Tennyson were singers to be, and Bacon, Darwin, and Ruskin
unknown; if there had been no British dramatists, no British historians,
no works in British libraries significant of British science and
philosophy, no alcoves glutted with bookish remains of British moralists
and preachers, still the six works named would of themselves suffice to
constitute a British literature.
This is bold, I know: bold in assertion, and even bolder in the lift
of Croly’s story from the ground to a place in the upper sky. Can I
justify the classification? Certainly, if only your patience and my time
permitted.
Here, to begin, is a broad adverse generality,—the very worst of possible
arguments against the book is, that of the five great classics with which
I have thrust it into association, it is the least known to-day by the
general public. Yet the admission is not in the least decisive of merits;
in inquisitorial phrase it serves merely to put objections to question.
It is a religious novel, says one, sneering. That used to be urged
against the “Pilgrim’s Progress”; yet the Pilgrim goes marching on, and
I fancy his progress will stop only when the world stops. And how is
it that of late years, at least, several novels religious in tone and
spirit have been more than well received? Indeed, is it not a fact that
some of them have attained extraordinary popularity, thus gainsaying the
narrow Puritanism which less than a century ago put the novel under ban,
regardless of kind and excellence?
Another objection. The style is somewhat too exalted; and then the critic
makes haste to stretch the alleged defect to the author’s want of art.
Now, I would not like to be dogmatic or unkind, but such points certainly
disclose a lamentable comprehension. Why, coiled up in that objection
lie the very excellencies of the book. How, pray, could exaltation be
avoided? Who does not know that in description the sublime always imposes
its own laws? Imagine, if you can, the commonplace used by a narrator
struggling to convey an idea of the tremendous in a hurricane at sea.
And as to a want of art, I would like to say mildly that the absence
of art in the book is its main charm. Any, the slightest show of
premeditation or design would have been gross treason to nature. Does a
woman, struck to the heart, utter her grief by measure as a singer sings
or a poet writes? And how is it with a man in rage or pain? Yet, verily,
there was never a woman or a man in speech so impelled by a sting of soul
as Salathiel.
Passing, now, the matter of criticism and mere negative dealing, I choose
to be affirmative. Salathiel, the subject of the book, was a Jew, and in
rank a Prince of the Tribe of Naphtali. In the persecution of Christ, his
arrest, his trial, his scourging, Salathiel was the leading insatiate;
and such, doubtless, he would have continued down to the last minute of
the third hour of the Crucifixion but that the victim stopped him. At
what stage of the awful crime the stoppage took place, the author leaves
to inference; but how the incident befell and its almost inconceivable
effect upon Salathiel, no man should again try to describe. This is from
Croly, his words:
“But in the moment of exultation I was stricken. He who
had refused an hour of life to the victim was, in terrible
retribution, condemned to know the misery of life interminable.
I heard through all the voices of Jerusalem—I should have heard
through all the thunders of heaven—the calm, low voice, ‘Tarry
thou till I come!’”
Such the retribution; now the effect.
“I felt my fate at once! I sprang away through the shouting
hosts as if the avenging angel waved his sword above my head.
Wild songs, furious execrations, the uproar of myriads stirred
to the heights of passion, filled the air; still, through all,
I heard the pursuing sentence, ‘Tarry thou till I come,’ and
felt it to be the sentence of incurable agony! I was never to
know the shelter of the grave!”
And then follow five paragraphs, each beginning with the same words
uttered, as I imagine, in the tone of a shriek of anguish, “Immortality
on earth!” And of those paragraphs, regarded as a dissection of the moral
part of a man by virtue of which he is susceptible of infinite happiness
or infinite misery, I say that for completeness and eloquence they are
without parallel in the language. Nor is that all. In those paragraphs,
one reading will find the definition of a punishment which in subtlety,
in torture, and in duration is as far out of range of human origin as in
execution it is out of range of human power. Yet more. Instantly with
the comprehension of the punishment defined, the immeasurable difference
between the agonies of death on a cross, though of days in duration, and
the agonies of immortal life under curse on earth, becomes discernible.
In that difference there is a divine thought in anger, an avenging
impulse. The superiority in misery of the punishment of Salathiel, its
term of sentence, its depth of suffering, its superhuman passion of
vengeance, seem impossible to the all-patient Christ; and while we are
considering its possibility, the book carries us to the question, Is
there a wandering Jew?
I think so. Let smile now who will; yet, as I see, a whole race is the
multiple of the man, just as the man is the incarnation of the race.
Israel, the plural, merges in Salathiel, the singular, insomuch that to
think of the one is to think of the other. In this instance, also, the
similitudes become creative, and life, nature, history, and doom, sinking
the race, make room for the wandering Jew.
Not only do I think there is a wandering Jew, but I know him intimately.
To Croly he was a young man, a warrior; to me, he came an old man, a
philosopher. Croly beheld him irate, passionate, vengeful. I saw him
wiser by many hundreds of years, and repentant, and trying vainly to
bring about a brotherhood of man by preaching the unity of God. With
Croly, he was the Prince of Naphtali; with me, he was the Prince of India.
Returning now—with such a subject, dealt with so magnificently, I can not
see how the great reading public in America can be indifferent to a new
edition of Croly’s romance. Only take us into your faith, gentlemen, and
see to it that the issue be worthy the theme. Be even luxurious with it;
give it fine paper, wide margins, large type, and choice binding; and,
if Gustave Doré were living, I would further beg you to have the edition
illustrated by him.
Very respectfully,
[Illustration: Lewis Wallace]
_To Funk & Wagnalls Company._
INTRODUCTION
“Tarry thou till I come.” These words smote Salathiel like successive
thunder-claps, tho uttered without the noise of speech. At once a doom
and a prophecy—this Jesus, now climbing Calvary to His death, would come
again, and the Jew could not perish from the earth until His coming!
Our author, Dr. Croly, has based his story on this old, pathetic legend.
He believed that “The Wandering Jew”—typical of the Jewish race—is about
to end his wearisome journeyings, as Christ is soon to come.[A]
That the Christ is coming, and that this coming is near at hand, is
believed to-day by millions.
He is coming—but how?
Hear Him:
The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman hid in
three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened—the life
and nature of the leaven reappearing in the quickened mass.
Again: The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed,
the least of all seeds, so little that it is likely to be lost
sight of in the count of forces; but it has life in it, and
the power to grow and multiply, and it spreads its branches
in every direction, each laden with seeds—the life and nature
of the first grain reappearing in every one of the myriads of
grains.
And again: The kingdom of heaven is as if a man should cast
seed into the ground; and it should spring and grow up, he
knoweth not how; first the blade, then the ear, after that the
full corn in the ear. It is all natural: the earth does its
work; the sun, the air, the water do their work, and the life
and nature of the seed grow and multiply, reappearing in each
grain in exact accordance with the nature of the seed. It is
natural, but marvelous: the man “knoweth not how” it is done;
but no one says, therefore, that that growth is supernatural,
miraculous.
Whence the germ of life in the seed? Whence the germ of life in the
kingdom of heaven? Who can tell? The wind bloweth where it listeth. Thou
seest the effect of it, but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither
it goeth. So is life wherever you find it, whether at the birth of a
yeast-plant, of grains of mustard-seed and of corn, or of the natural
and spiritual man. But the leaven, and the grains of mustard-seed and
of corn, and the kingdoms of the natural and the spiritual man grow and
reach perfection by natural processes—that is, in harmony with cause and
effect—each process subject to critical and scientific analysis, if that
analysis goes deep enough, and wide enough, and far enough.
Life reappears in new life. The leaven and the seed and the Christ-life
all reincarnate themselves in more leaven, more seed, more of the Christ
life. “In that day,” said Jesus, “ye shall know that I am _in_ you.”
Those who study the New Testament can not but be impressed with how
often, and under how many forms, is there uttered the thought, _Christ
formed in you_.
* * * * *
This is _the_ coming of Christ. Not that it is the _only_ coming; many
millions of earnest men and women believe that in the near future He will
come in a way palpable to our physical senses as He came nineteen hundred
years ago. “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This
same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like
manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven” (Acts i. 11).
Yet experiences on the physical plane are of little comparative
value—_comparative_. Jesus bade the doubting Thomas to reach forth his
hand and touch Him, that he might have tangible evidence: Now, Thomas,
you believe because you have seen and felt; but blessed is he who
believes on the higher plane of spiritual knowing. It is “an evil and
adulterous generation” that seeketh after proofs of spiritual things
on the sensuous level. Men saw and touched Jesus in Palestine who were
millions of miles from Him. Were Christ to appear in visible form, it
might easily be of no value whatever to come into physical contact with
Him, to meet Him on Broadway or on the Strand; but who can measure the
value of having Christ recreated in himself, as the leaven is recreated
in the meal, and as a seed is recreated in new seed, so that men, when
they see that man, and talk to him, and deal with him, shall feel that
they have been with Christ?
One day I saw in a neighbor’s flower-bed a little plant, that, as it
pushed its way above the ground, had brought with it the mother seed from
which it grew. That was a literal reappearance of the planted seed; but
it was not _the_ reappearance, not _the_ resurrection of the seed, for
which a seed grows.
Christ came the first time into men’s vision by coming on the plane of
their senses; He comes the second time into men’s vision by lifting them
up to His plane of spiritual comprehension.
* * * * *
This coming of Christ involves a new birth, a new creation, a new
kingdom. It means a new step in the evolution of man. As man has stepped
from the mineral kingdom to the vegetable kingdom, and from the vegetable
kingdom to the animal kingdom, and from the animal kingdom to the kingdom
of the natural man,[B] so now he steps from the kingdom of the natural
man to the kingdom of the spiritual man, every portion of this step a
natural process subject to critical scientific analysis, if that analysis
goes deep enough, wide enough, far enough. It is the continuance of
evolution without a break, without a leap (“Nature never makes leaps,”
says Leibnitz; the leaps are only seeming), lifting the race by a new
birth through Christ the type-life up to the plane of spiritual being and
knowing.
* * * * *
Is the visible second coming of Jesus fancy or truth? Our author believed
it true, and increasing multitudes to-day believe it true. Among these
are many of the foremost Christian teachers of this generation, as that
trio of great preachers recently dead, Charles H. Spurgeon, A. J. Gordon,
and Dwight L. Moody; Newman Hall, Theodore Monod, Arthur T. Pierson, F.
B. Meyer, J. H. Brookes, C. Cuthbert Hall. There is evidently near at
hand an extraordinary revival of this belief.
* * * * *
In the republication of this remarkable story about the Jew who is “to
wander on earth until Christ comes again,” it has seemed to me that it
would not be inappropriate to give, by way of Introduction, and in the
Appendix, several lines of thought bearing upon the coming of Christ.
THE ESSENTIAL COMING OF CHRIST
I
This coming is in harmony with the laws of sequence and continuity.
In each preceding step in the evolution of man the unfolding of the
_physical basis_ of life was from below, but the _life_ itself was from
above, never from below. Scientists are now practically unanimous in
saying that, “There is not a scintilla of evidence that the inorganic
or mineral world has ever evolved a plant life.” “To the scientist,”
says Darwin, “it is a hopeless inquiry as to how life originated.” “Life
from an egg,” is still the latest dictum of science; that is, life only
from life.[C] Each of the successive steps or kingdoms has had its
type-life. The plant—that is, the physical basis of the plant life—came
from the inorganic matter; the animal—that is, the physical basis of the
animal life—came from the plant and through the plant from the mineral
kingdom; the natural man—that is, the physical basis of the life of the
natural man—came from the animal and the kingdoms below it; the spiritual
man—that is, the physical basis of the life of the spiritual man—comes
from the natural man and the kingdoms below him.
The development from kingdom to kingdom was a natural unfolding; yet the
new creature of the next higher order always came through a new birth—a
double birth: (1) the birth of the new type-life of the next higher
kingdom into the evolutionary order of nature, through the hereditary
chain; and (2) the birth of each individual into this type-life.
* * * * *
None of the previous transitions from a lower to a higher kingdom has
taken place within historic times. The cradle at Bethlehem flashes
a searchlight down the spiral stairway up which man has come from
platform to platform, kingdom to kingdom. Here at last we see that the
type-life of the kingdom of the spiritual man is born from above into the
hereditary chain of evolution. Many times, and in many ways, He declares
I am “from above.” He is born a natural man, and yet possesses the life
of the kingdom next higher, and proceeds to lift the natural man by a new
birth into the kingdom of the spiritual man. He is born the son of man
and the son of God, bridging the chasm with His own being.
Again and again He says, “I am the _life_”; “I have come that ye may have
_life_”; except ye partake of Me “ye have no _life_ in you.” He calls
Himself the “bread of _life_,” “the water of _life_.” This would all be
meaningless were Christ talking about the life of the kingdom of the
natural man which all now have and have had.
As the spiritual type-life lifts the natural man into the spiritual
kingdom, so the type-life of the natural man lifted the animal into
the kingdom of the natural man, and the animal type-life lifted the
vegetable, and the vegetable type-life lifted the mineral.
There is no break in the golden thread that runs through all this series
of development from the mineral world up to the new creature in Christ
Jesus. There is nothing in this last development contrary to nature; it
follows along exactly the same laws of natural unfoldment as did the
other kingdoms. The law of continuity holds.[D] Christ is born really
into the kingdom of the natural man, and the natural man is born into
the spiritual kingdom, through Christ, the type-life. In this last stage
of man’s ascent, as in the previous ones, nature makes “no leap.” Think
not, says Christ, “that I have come to destroy the law; I have not come
to destroy, but to fulfil”; I have come to carry on My work in harmony
with the processes of the universe. What is law but the method that
the immanent God, everywhere and forever, pursues in His work? True,
segments of the circle He follows are easily out of the reach of our
vision. Huxley tells us that he has no doubt that even on the physical
plane, most important work is being done far beyond the reach of the most
powerful microscope. He might have said, and kept easily within bounds,
_the_ most important work.
The crystal is matter plus the principle of crystallization; so the
plant, the animal, the natural man—always the creature of the kingdom
below with the plus sign, for a birth is an unfoldment and _something
more_. And so, the Christ life takes the character, the soul, the spirit
of the natural man, which have developed through the ages—takes them
through a new birth, this time with man’s consent. “Marvel not that I
say unto you, ye must be born again.” “Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
except a man be born from above he can not see the kingdom of God” (John
iii. 3). Ye are “babes in Christ,” “Ye are new creatures.” We become
heirs “of God through Christ,” crying “Abba, Father.” “In love’s hour
Eternal Love conceives in us the child of God” through the spiritual
type-life Christ Jesus.
* * * * *
Christ could not have been more explicit or more scientifically exact in
declaring Himself the type-life of the spiritual man. “I am the door,”
“the way,” “the life”; “no man can come to the Father but by Me.” “He
that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath
not life”; he may be a Cæsar leading armies against Pompey, or a Cicero
declaiming his matchless orations against Cataline, and yet be _dead_.
In the inspired picture-history of creation, an Adam is the type-life
of the kingdom of the natural man; in the New Testament, Christ is
presented in every way as the type-life of the kingdom of the spiritual
man. “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made
a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but
that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual” (1 Cor. xv.
45, 46).
* * * * *
Here, also, the law of conformity to type is manifest. Each type-life
is perfect, but those who are born through the type-life begin at the
bottom; the “fall” is great from the type-life to the beginning of growth
in the next higher kingdom. But from that onward the battle of evolution
is to secure likeness to the type. “We all, with open face beholding as
in a glass the glory of the Lord, _are changed into the same image_ from
glory to glory” (2 Cor. iii. 18). We shall be “conformed to the _image of
His Son_” (Rom. viii. 29). “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we
shall also bear the _image of the heavenly_” (1 Cor. xv. 49). After the
night is over we shall awake in His likeness.
Newton said that he made a splendid guess at the universal law of
gravitation when he saw the apple fall. Why may it not be permissible
for us to guess, from the law of conformity to type, that in every
kingdom the new creature carries with it the pattern of its type-life,
and that after this pattern, in the lower kingdoms, the accompanying
cells strive to weave a nature corresponding with its kingdom, and in the
kingdom of the spiritual man the Holy Spirit strives to weave the nature
of the spiritual man?[E]
In the lower kingdoms it is a survival of the _fightest_, in the highest
a survival of the fittest, the struggle for life for ourselves merging
into a _struggle for life for others_. Even among men in the earlier
days, to discover the greatest man, the measuring-string was placed
around the muscle. That was the age of Hercules. Then the time came
when the measuring-string was placed around the head. That was the age
of Bacon and Shakespeare. But the time comes in the rapidly advancing
future when the measuring-string will be placed around the heart, and he
who measures most there will be most conformed to the Master, for he is
greatest who most fully gives himself for others.
* * * * *
Evolution goes on, hereafter, in the inner and upper world, outside and
beyond our vision, making many and many variations doubtless, as in the
lower realms. In the Father’s spiritual house also are many mansions.
We are stepping from the physiological to the psychological, from body
and mind to spirit. As in all previous growth, the latest type-life is
reappearing in His generation—in the “new creatures” of His kingdom.
II
The outward evolution—that of the physical—marvelous beyond thought, is
comparatively insignificant. The chief evolution has been and is within.
The scientist is unscientific who ignores the greater evolution and
builds his explanatory system on the lesser—on the least. Psychology is
also a science. Has nature one method for the development of the physical
part of man’s being, and another for the development of the non-material
and spiritual? Nature is not divided. What means the hereditary likeness,
mental and spiritual—not less marked than the physical? These marks often
skip many generations and then reappear again in full. They can not,
therefore, be the result of education or imitation. Nor is it easy to
believe that they were placed within us by a direct act of creation, as
the old-fashioned theological professor taught that God mixed the fossils
with the plastic stones at creation, somewhat as a cook mixes raisins and
other fruits in the dough for her plum-pudding.
What means the gradual development in the brain of the cerebrum and
cerebellum, the organs of the soul powers, enlarging from generation to
generation? These are scarcely visible in the lowest animals. They become
larger as we advance up the animal scale of intelligence, or psychic
power; large in the ape, who came far along the same line that man came;
four times as large in the lowest Zulu as in the ape, but far larger in
the European and American civilized man—thus slowly made perfect through
awful struggles and sufferings, painfully growing a million years or
more. Is it not then reasonable to believe that there is a corresponding
psychic or soul development from generation to generation in the unseen
individuality, the ego, which uses the cerebrum and cerebellum as organs;
that up the spiral stairway of evolution the whole man has come,—his
personality, with its soul powers, and the physical organs of these
powers in the brain, and the entire physical man?
To-day, in the unfolding embryo of every child, nature marvelously and
clearly retells the history of the evolution of the physical nature of
the human race from the one-celled moneron to the billion-celled man. For
the embryo of the child is a historic map, done in flesh and blood, of
the evolution of man, of the forms he has assumed, broadly speaking, as
he climbed nature’s stairway.[F]
Is it hard to believe that our individuality has been born and reborn
through the line of ancestry back to the type-lives, and through them
back to the “beginning,” when God took of His own life to develop,
through ages of conflict, personalities other than His own who would, of
their own free will, choose goodness? Is it hard to believe that at every
successive birth each parent has placed his stamp upon the individuality,
but that the individuality has perdured being reborn again and again into
successive higher kingdoms? Does it seem hard to believe that we should
be born many times? Is it then harder to believe that we should be born
_after_ we have lived than that we should be born when we have not lived?
The profoundest mystery is in the first birth, in which we all believe.
And why should it be thought by us incredible that, with the mingling of
the parental cells, the individuality exactly fitted should be reborn in
the line of heredity, receiving the parental stamp, being attracted by
the law which answers to that law which guides the atom unerringly to
its place in the crystal—that same law wonderfully exalted? Whatever and
wherever character is, it must be obedient to the law that draws it, for
the law of attraction is even more irresistible in the inner world than
is the law of gravitation in the outer world. Every man as he comes to
his birth comes to his own place; in a profound sense he _chooses_ his
parents and his surroundings. As he was, he is, plus his birth-gain and
his growth through consent and volition; his past leads him.
And in this last transition each man is conscious that his individuality
continues, altho he passes from one kingdom into the next. The dictum
of science is “no leap, no break”—continuity. Then it is reasonable
to believe that the individuality will continue through succeeding
future changes, as it has continued these millions of years through the
successive past changes. It would require much credulity to believe that
nature has travailed in pain these untold ages to develop a personality
that would of its own free will choose goodness, only to destroy
that personality as soon as made. John Fiske has well said:[G] “The
materialistic assumption that the life of the soul ends with the life of
the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of assumption that is
known in the history of philosophy.”
That was a provincial notion about the universe which was held before
Copernicus’s time—the belief that the sun, planets, stars, all revolved
around the earth. Copernicus was called the destroyer of faith and
bitterly denounced. His idea made the earth but a speck, and the Milky
Way—billions of miles long—the mere yard-stick of the universe. All
this has immensely enlarged faith—did not destroy it. Darwin, too, was
called the destroyer of faith; but now we begin to see that evolution, in
giving man countless eons of growth, instead of keeping him a creature of
yesterday, bounded by the cradle and grave, has immensely enlarged faith,
and beyond thought has added to the dignity of man.
III
At each succeeding birth the individuality, to thrive, must be in
harmony with its changed surroundings, and the cells that swarm in every
organized body struggle to bring this to pass. It is the business of the
cell to obey the pushings of the governing force in the organization
to which it belongs. The plant needs water, minerals, air, sunshine.
Its attendant cells hear the cry of their master and build roots into
the ground and branches into the air, and weave leaves into lungs and
laboratories. Note a vine in some cave—how it works its way toward the
hole through which sunshine is streaming, and how it causes some roots
to build out toward a vein of water; others toward a skeleton many
feet away and along the bones of that skeleton—hungering and thirsting
for minerals, water, light, heat. Hungering and thirsting—asking,
knocking—the plant receives. Seek and ye shall find; strive and it shall
be yours. This is the law in the plant life, the law in the animal life,
in the life of the natural man, in the life of the spiritual man.
In a deep sense, as a man thinketh so he is. The universe of cells
within each man calls him “master.” Ye are gods; kings upon thrones;
your slightest wish is heard; your earnest, persistent desire compels
obedience. Answer to prayer is a growth, a building up or down to what
you wish. Wishing is asking. Ask what you will, and from that instant
receiving, you receive.
Christ can never _fully_ come into a man until the man has grown up to
the level of spiritual things. It is a sensuous generation that seeks to
be satisfied with consolation through the physical senses.
* * * * *
All of our faculties carry their own demonstrations of truth up to the
level of their development. To the pure and loving, purity and love need
no witnesses. Every man has had placed in his hand a latch-key to the
beauty and wisdom—to all of the excellences of the universe; but there
is only one way of using that latch-key effectively. We must grow to a
level with the latch. I must have an eye fitted for the landscape, and
must have a poetic soul before the landscape can read its poetry to
me. I may believe that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is music because a
master of music has told me so; that is belief based on authority; or,
I may measure the waves of sound and scientifically demonstrate that
it is music; but such evidences are beggarly, and praise based on them
would drive a composer mad. But let me hunger and thirst after music;
seek, pray for musical sight and soul until I develop up to the level of
Beethoven’s Symphony; then as quickly as I hear it I exclaim: “That is
music!” Do you ask: “Who told you?” I answer: “No one; I _know_ it!” My
latch-key enters, for I am on a level with the latch. I asked, I sought,
I knocked, until I grew up into the musical world. I must grow up to God
before I can know Him; I must grow up to Christ before I can see Him. The
pure in heart shall see and hear spiritual things. I must be on God’s
level before even the lowly flower can tell me the thought that was in
His mind when He created it.
Seek is the law of growth in all kingdoms; and it is the law of
development and of the adjustment of the feeders through which each
kingdom asserts itself to its creatures and gives them their food
and consolation. Who has not smiled many times at the serio-humorous
reflection of Robert Louis Stevenson on hearing of the death of Matthew
Arnold: “So, Arnold is dead! I am sorry; he won’t like God.” There is a
profoundly solemn truth under this witticism.
There is health for the plant in sun-rays; the plant had the need of
light, and its cells heard the cry and groped toward the light. That
capacity for light and that groping of the cells proved the existence of
the sun. The conscious feeling after God among people everywhere proves
the existence of God and of the spiritual world.
* * * * *
The new-born child must adjust its lungs to the atmosphere into which it
comes or it must die. It hereafter must eat and drink with its mouth,
breathe with its lungs; it must have new feeders. The bird, as it chips
its way out of the egg, adjusts itself to its new surroundings. It is a
hard trial often for a child to be weaned, yet it is love that does it.
It is done to give it more abundant life, not less.
This is the meaning of self-denial, fasting, repentance, suffering—the
weaning of the feeders from the old to the new environment—the feeders
that give food and consolation. We enter into the kingdom of the
spiritual man as the babe enters into the kingdom of the natural man.
Every new creature grows up from the grave of the old. Up the stairs
of holy patience we climb the heights of the inner kingdom. Our will
henceforth is to yield our will, but the sensuous man contests every inch
with the spiritual. The perishing of the old man day by day is painful,
and so is the renewal of the inner, for birth also is painful. We learn
to love love, hate hate, and fear only fear; but every move upward has in
it birth-pangs. We are in the soul’s gymnasium—on its battle-field. The
creature was made subject to vanity for a cause.[H] Says Ruskin: “I do
not wonder often at what men suffer, but I wonder at what they lose.”
How strange it is to look into a human face, and to look into human eyes,
and to think that a son of the living God is veiled there—to think of the
greatness of that creature, for the accomplishment of which all creation
on earth has been in travail for these untold ages!
Often not anything extraordinary impresses us as we see the Christ-nature
in a comrade; but wait; we see this kingdom of the soul only in its germ.
The bulb of the tiger-lily is not over-pretty, but to the eyes that
see the possibilities of the tiger-lily that bulb is a poem. The step
from the highest morality of the natural man to the lowest round in the
kingdom of the spiritual man is a stupendous one. John the Baptist was
the greatest of those born of women; but the least in the new kingdom of
the spiritual man is greater than he.
* * * * *
Do not say that you can not be born again. You can and must. It is
natural to step into this kingdom, as natural as growth is. The natural
response of the heart is Christian, says Tertullian. Our experience
supports and justifies this necessity.
The great original sculptors of Greece, whom all the world now studies,
stayed at home to study as Emerson would say, and did not bother much
with going to Egypt or Mesopotamia. God is a rewarder of those that
diligently seek Him, not by imitation, not outwardly, not with the noise
of words that men may hear, but in the closet, in the silence of the
inner chamber of the soul. Every man must find himself, and be himself;
the new birth and growth in Christ make perfect each man’s individuality.
But there must be another conception of God than that against which the
Buddhists warn us, that He is a “cow to be milked.”
God hid Himself behind the world of our physical senses that we, free of
all compulsion, might develop the spiritual man. When that is developed,
God can safely reveal His infinite power and wisdom and goodness. Who
could make free choice in the conscious presence of an infinite One?
Evolution is a sword that cuts both ways. It chooses, it condemns.
The fittest survive. There are many called, but few chosen. The most
pathetic and pitiful thing in all the world is to see the multitudes
striving to get out of the kingdom of the natural man what is not in it.
Punishment comes—it, too, is natural; and it is largely within.
Degeneracy, through persistent wrong-choosing, is the law of
nature—fixed, inevitable. If a man will not choose to ascend, he loses
his power to choose.
IV
The scientist is short-sighted and narrow-sighted who walls science in at
the boundary of his senses—a mole accounting for phenomena, and leaving
out the eye; a Laura Bridgeman accounting for whatever came into her life
by her two or three physical senses.
Foolish wise men, not to know that the surest of all proofs is to be
looked for in inner experience; that the most real things in the world
are made clear not by physical proof, but by life! Darwin reached the
point where poetry and music were little to him; yet the world of music
and of beauty are more certain than is Mont Blanc or Mount Washington;
but there is only one way to know them, and that is to grow the faculties
of music and beauty. To the Roman soldiers who may have heard it,
how unsubstantial was the Sermon on the Mount; yet its truths of the
brotherhood of man, of the fatherhood of God, of meekness, of loving, of
justice, of faith in the inner things, outlasted the Roman armies, saw
the empire ground to dust, and their speaker, one thousand nine hundred
years afterward, by far the most potent personality that ever lived. The
mother’s love will outpull gravity, and yet what scientist has chemically
analyzed it, or what dissecting-knife has revealed its whereabouts? There
are brute women to whom this love is “unthinkable,” “unknowable,” but let
them grow the mother-heart, and then they can think it, know it.
Foolish wise men, ye can discern the shadow of things; look up and behold
the substance! Rochefort said to Gambetta: “Deafness is not politics.”
When will scientists learn that true science must have eyes and ears open
to all experience within as well as without.
Once scientists among moles held a congress, and learnedly resolved that
they would believe in nothing that could not be submitted for proof to
their four senses. One learned mole with bated breath said: “There must
be something above our four senses. I one day broke through the crust
of the earth and felt strange sensations, and had a glimmering in the
rudiments called eyes by our older philosophers.” “Nonsense!” said a
grayhead among them. “Let us have no transcendentalism; everything that
is must be explained by sound, or by touch, or by smell, or by the taste.
All this talk of a great central sun with light, making landscapes and
from which all things come, we have no way of proving; and hence to
believe it, or to admit it as an element in accounting for things, is
unscientific. The scientific method, let us never forget, is to account
for all things by the elements which come within the range of our four
senses and the reasoning based upon these perceptions.”
So it happens that to this day in the cosmic science accepted among moles
the sun has nothing to do with the growth of plants, the formation of
coal-beds, and the rotation of the seasons.
* * * * *
How imperfect that history that would content itself with writing a
biography of the acorn, and never take into account the oak that comes
from the acorn and for which the acorn exists! The oak reveals the acorn;
without the oak the acorn is not explicable. How can any one understand
the evolution of man and not consider the vastly greater segment of his
nature, which is the non-material and spiritual? The scientist believes
in the indestructibility of matter. The step is a short one to the belief
in the indestructibility of spirit. He believes in substance infinitely
extended; the step is not a long one to belief in the personality that
is infinitely extended. He believes that in all matter is a “thinking
substance.” Is it harder to believe that over and in all things is a
thinking spirit?[I] The scientist endows matter with the powers it needs
to do all these things, and then says it does all these things.
Yet science, when it comes to know, when it comes to take in all the
facts, to go deep enough, and wide enough, and far enough, will be the
arbiter. Creed, dogma, authority, must give way to it. Magellan said:
“The Church declares the world is flat, but I have seen its shadow on
the moon, and I had rather believe a shadow than the Church.” That is
true only when the Church makes provision for but a part of the truth,
and when science is true to itself. The assumptions of science and the
assumptions of the Church will have to be corrected by _experience_, the
experience of the _whole_ man.
V
Christ is not an idealism, but a living, throbbing, visible, audible
Being—the real Christ; the body in Galilee was the shadow, the outward
shell that could be crushed. The One now coming is the Mighty One who
is out of the reach of stones and spears, the type-life and potent King
of the kingdom of the spiritual man. And he who hath Him also hath
power. “Ye shall receive _power_” (Acts i. 8). “Stephen, full of faith
and _power_” (Acts vi. 8). “The kingdom of God is not in word, but in
_power_” (1 Cor. iv. 20). Says Paul of those at Corinth who found fault
with him: I will not know their speech, but their _power_ (1 Cor. iv.
19). He who has not _power_ is not of the kingdom of the spiritual man,
for “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.” This Christ is a
present force in the world, producing changes, quickening and directing
energies, and must be reckoned with. Christian civilization also proves
itself by its _power_.
* * * * *
But to see Him this time we must have eyes and ears fitted to recognize
the manifestations of the inner kingdom—the kingdom of all first causes
and real forces. He is not coming with the noise of trumpets, nor with
whirlwinds, nor with earthquakes; but with the silence of the growth of
the mustard-seed, of the leaven, of the grain of corn reaching up to the
blade and full corn in the ear.
There can be nothing more manifest to-day to the optic nerve of the
spiritual man than is this coming. The lightning flashing from the east
to the west is not nearly so manifest.
Every event is alive with His appearing. His presence is the most evident
thing in the world, the very splendor of the light hides Him. “Lo, I am
with you alway!” is now known by millions to be a vital, stupendous fact.
He is nearer to such a heart than the mother to the babe.
This coming is in harmony with recognizable law; belief in it is logic,
is common sense. It would be extraordinary, miraculous, if He did not now
come. When it is our will to do His will, we become the reincarnation
of Christ, for “Christ is formed in us.” When the dominating ones in a
community, in a church, in a nation, in the world, are of this sort,
you see Christ reincarnated in all these. Moses, David, John, Plato,
Augustine, Savonarola, Bunyan, were great ideal dreamers, but they were
also geniuses of common sense. These men were primarily men of faith and
great good sense, not of credulity. They had the power and common sense
to know that there were voices within, and to withdraw their attention
from the voices without and give the real world a chance to be heard.
They knew that the universe would fall into chaos and that stars would be
ground to dust if these worlds were disobedient to law. They knew that
there was an inner universe, and that there were inner laws infinitely
more important. They knew it to be the A B C of common sense to conform
to these inner laws. Christ was and is the embodiment of common sense;
and so His followers become as they grow into the new creatures of the
kingdom of the spiritual man.
* * * * *
There are voices within distinct and clear to those who have ears to
hear; clearer than silver bells ringing up in air at midnight. One who
has grown this spiritual nature ceases to talk about the inward world
being silent or hid—yet there are clouds and doubts. These things must
needs be—these assailed Christ to the last. And if angels do not also
follow, ministering to us, it is because we have not reached the plane
of spiritual seeing. Help is always near, and it should not be necessary
for a prophet’s hand to touch our eyes to enable us to see the mountains
covered with heavenly allies, or to enable us to know the signs of the
times. There is no room for fear. Bismarck spoke with the accents of a
prophet when he said: “Germany fears nothing but God.” The cry is gone
out to the ends of the earth: “Great is the soul of man; make way, make
way!”
These signs of a mighty change are deepening and multiplying as we swing
into the new century. The Jewish people were to be trodden underfoot
until the inner kingdom of love should be established; that barbarism of
hate is now rapidly dying.
Were we wise enough, events all around us would be to us prophecies of
the coming of the triumphant God, of the kingdom of the spiritual man.
Watch! By watching we develop the ability to discern things beyond the
senses.
Above every cloud the light is now breaking; the earth is rolling into
the dawn of a marvelous day.
* * * * *
The yoke of ecclesiasticism is giving way to the yoke of Christ.
Creed is the memory of the Church. The real yoke of Christ is not a
burden; it has wings. He is sweetness and light. Let criticism have
its way. The testing-time has come, give it welcome. A man must now
stand a vital Christian, or a hypocrite, or an open enemy—that will
be a great gain. Creeds to-day are trying to understand one another.
Christianity is being reduced to its least common denominator, a living
Christ. The church is finding it harder and harder to think of itself
as a great-great-grandchild. It is coming to believe in its present
experiences, and to write its own creeds for to-day, and not for
to-morrow. Since God is, the Church and the world will not necessarily
fall to pieces if they let go their props and scaffoldings. If there be
no God, creeds and forms and ceremonies are necessities. A living God is
efficient and sufficient.
* * * * *
There is no more unfailing sign of the nearness of Christ than the
growth of loving beyond the provincialism of the family, the clan, the
class, the nation. “Ye are brethren.” All things in common, was not
an impracticable dream, but a fundamental law of the kingdom of the
spiritual Man. We must organize sooner or later on that basis. We are
speeding onward toward that sun. We feel its growing heat. If we do not
love our brethren whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not
seen? What do ye mean by the communion of saints, ye who pray it Sunday
by Sunday? Spell it out. Brotherhood is not a fiction of the imagination.
Communion is not a Pentecostal fantasy. A living Christ is to-day more
than ever on earth an aggressively unifying force. Immensely human was
Christ’s message to man—Brotherhood and Fatherhood, and by those tokens
we recognize His present footsteps.
Judge these things as you would the motions of the hands of the clock.
Look back a half dozen centuries and make comparisons. War is recognized
more and more as a barbarism, and its end is over yonder hill. The court
of nations to settle wrongs is looming above the horizon. The nation that
loves its fellow nations is also born of God.
* * * * *
The humanities are in order. Over one hundred and ten million dollars
were contributed in the United States for educational and other charities
within the last two years.[J] Nearly two million dollars were given to
suffering Galveston; and Carnegie’s immense benefactions are but one of
the many indications of the full dawning of the day of living for others.
A single individual the other day, a member of an unpopular race, is
wronged in France, and all the world is aroused, and flashes thunderbolts
of wrath under oceans and across continents until there is a beginning to
right the wrong. Mankind is rapidly becoming
“… One in spirit, and in instinct bears along
Around the earth’s electric circle the swift flash of right and wrong.”
The marvelous sowing about the Sea of Galilee is reaching its ripening.
The leaven is leavening the whole lump. The mustard-seed reappears in
hundreds and hundreds of millions of seed. Cuba is helped to freedom for
its own sake; the Russian Czar—he at least—in sincerity says: “War should
end.” In business it is ceasing to be a maxim that the benefit of the
one is ever opposed to the benefit of the many. We are learning that the
Golden Rule and the law of self-preservation run parallel. Applied to
commercialism, the Golden Rule is so to make money as to give a benefit
also to him from whom you make it; and that, too, is common sense. The
children of the inner kingdom never crowd: the more, the more room.
In all these things we see just the beginnings of the results of His
coming: all men of one family, God the Father, and Christ the eldest
Brother; the sacredness of truth, of the soul, of all life; the reality
of the inner world.
* * * * *
Man has climbed up in countless ages by the slow processes of evolution
to where he can use the powers of nature through his brain—becoming a
coworker with God in guiding the processes of evolution. Now, being
reborn into the inner kingdom, he starts on a new and infinitely higher
destiny. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things that are laid up
for those thus born.
With a boundless universe within and without, and an infinite God, and
with an eternity to live and work in, many, many things can take place,
and it is God’s good pleasure that they shall never take place to our
hurt. The creature of the kingdom of the spiritual man is injury-proof.
And the command is: “Be ye perfect as your Father is perfect”; ever
approaching Him in countless ages and reaching Him at the end of
eternity, had eternity an end; but since it has no end, in whatever
distant period and however great the distance between us, God is still
the Infinite One and we the finite ones.
Ah, how men err! The Roman Emperor, after his awful massacre of
Christians, set up a column in memory of the extinction of the last
Christian. But the Roman empire is in dust, and now the world is rapidly
becoming wholly Christian; and were that Emperor alive, he, quite likely,
would applaud the result. God’s steppings are from star to star. Who
knoweth His counsel?
We look back over the conflict of the ages of evolution; we now see,
in the changing of the dunghill into shrubs and roses and into food,
the prophecy of all, and we marvel at our blindness in not knowing that
the most manifest thing in all the world, and at all times, was God the
Father working for good, whom again and again we have compelled to cry
out in pain (for God can suffer pain): The reproaches of men have broken
my heart. Looking backward, we begin to see the good in everything, that
there has not been a fall of a sparrow without accompanying provision
for the sparrow, and we grow enthusiastic and shout with the martyr of
old: “Glory be to God for everything that happens!” Hand-in-hand we walk
with the great Father over the ages of history, riding victorious over
mountain-tops.
We see, modifying the words of John Fiske, that in the roaring loom of
time, out of the endless web of events, strand by strand, was woven more
and more clearly the living garment of God.
* * * * *
When Christ had passed beyond the grave, He said “Mary,” and Mary
said “Master”; they spake, they understood, tho death and the grave
intervened. The world of the physical senses has no barrier that hinders
knowing in the kingdom of the spiritual man.
* * * * *
“The Wandering Jew” is near the end of his wanderings.
As reasoned the Apostle:[K] If the Gentiles were cut out of the
olive-tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature
into a good olive-tree, how much more shall the Jews, which be the
natural branches, be grafted into their own olive-tree? For God is able
to graft them in again. For I would not, brethren, that you should be
ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits:
that blindness in part has happened to Israel, _until the fulness of the
Gentiles be come in_. AND SO ALL ISRAEL SHALL BE SAVED.
I. K. F.
NEW YORK, April 15, 1901.
FOOTNOTES
[A] It has been believed by many from the early ages of the Christian
era that among the signs of Christ’s coming would be the recognition
of Him by the Jews, as “one sent of the Father,” and that they would
then be restored to the Father’s favor; that this recognition would be
accompanied by a recolonization of the Jews in Palestine; that from this
vantage-ground, they, as a nation among nations—the “inherent genius of
the Jews for things religious” again reasserting itself—would lead the
nations of earth in final triumph into the kingdom of the spiritual man.
Prof. R. Gottheil, of Columbia University, and president of the
Federation of American Zionists, said, before the Zionist Congress, in
the summer of 1900, in London: “It is time the nations understood our
motives. Our purpose is gradually to colonize Palestine. We political
Zionists desire a charter from the Sultan authorizing us to settle in our
Holy Land, and we ask the powers to approve and protect this charter.”
[B] This is simply a name: both kingdoms, that of the natural man and
that of the spiritual man, are in harmony with the laws of sequence.
[C] “There is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that
abiogenesis [spontaneous generation] does take place or has taken place
within the period during which the existence of life on the globe is
recorded.”—Huxley, under “Biology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. iii.,
page 689. “These are the generations of every plant of the field _before_
it was in the earth.”—Gen. ii. 4, 5.
“That it [human consciousness] can not possibly be the product of
any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond
peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical
forces.”—Fiske, “The Destiny of Man,” page 42. “By no possibility can
thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter.”—_Idem._,
page 109.
[D] Alfred Russel Wallace, who was joint discoverer with Darwin of
evolution, and is its greatest living exponent, in his book “Darwinism,”
page 474, shows the fallacy as to new causes involving any breach of
continuity—these new causes embracing vegetable life, animal life, and
the higher powers of man. He says, page 476: “Still more surely can
we refer to it [the spiritual world] those progressive manifestations
of life in the vegetable, the animal, and man.” Also, in “Natural
Selection,” page 185: “The higher powers in man are surest proof that
there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these
qualities may have been derived, and toward whom we may be ever tending.”
[E] After watching the process hour by hour (in the semi-fluid globule
of protoplasm of the embryo), one is almost involuntarily possessed by
the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would
show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful
manipulation to perfect his work.—Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” page 261.
[F] Romanes, in “Darwin and After Darwin,” chapter iv., says that the
embryo is a résumé or recapitulation of the successive phases through
which the being has been developed, with explainable omissions. On page
102 he tells of the young salamander that is so complete in its gills
shortly before birth that if it is removed from the womb and placed in
water it will be able to live, breathing like a fish through its gills.
[G] “The Destiny of Man,” page 110.
[H] “It is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that
races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no
other conditions [than those of pains and pleasures].”—“Data of Ethics,”
Herbert Spencer, section 33.
[I] “We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter,
or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive
and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal
properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the
universal substance.”—“The Riddle of the Universe,” Ernst Haeckel, p. 21.
[J] From advance sheets of “Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia” for 1901.
[K] Rom. xi.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
There has appeared from time to time in Europe, during the past thousand
years, a mysterious individual—a sojourner in all lands, yet a citizen
of none; professing the profoundest secrets of opulence, yet generally
living in a state of poverty; astonishing every one by the vigor of his
recollections, and the evidence of his intercourse with the eminent
characters and events of every age, yet connected with none—without
lineage, possession, or pursuit on earth—a wanderer and unhappy!
A number of histories have been written about him; some purely
fictitious, others founded on ill-understood records. Germany, the land
of mysticism, has toiled the most in this idle perversion of truth. Yet
those narratives have been in general but a few pages, feebly founded
on the fatal sentence of his punishment for an indignity offered to the
Author of the Christian faith.
That exile lives! that most afflicted of the people of affliction yet
walks this earth, bearing the sorrows of eighteen centuries on his
brow—withering in soul for the guilt of an hour of madness. He has
long borne the scoff of man in silence; he has heard his princely rank
degraded to that of a menial, and heard without a murmur; he has heard
his unhappy offense charged to deliberate malice, when it was but the
misfortune of a zeal inflamed by the passions of his people; and he has
bowed to the calumny as a portion of his punishment. But the time for
this forbearance is no more. He feels himself at last wearing away; and
feels, with a sensation like that of returning to the common fates of
mankind, a desire to stand clear with his fellow men. In their presence
he will never move again; to their justice, or their mercy, he will
never again appeal. The wound of his soul rests, never again to be
disclosed, until that day when all beings shall be summoned and all
secrets be known.
In his final retreat he has collected these memorials. He has concealed
nothing; he has dissembled nothing; the picture of his hopes and fears,
his weaknesses and his sorrows, is stamped here with sacred sincerity.
Other narratives may be more specious or eloquent, but this narrative has
the supreme merit of reality. It may be doubted; it may even be denied.
But this he must endure. He has been long trained to the severity of the
world!
THE AUTHOR.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY LETTER FROM GENERAL LEWIS WALLACE, v
INTRODUCTION, ix
AUTHOR’S PREFACE, xxxi
BOOK I
CHAPTER
I.—Salathiel Doomed to Immortality, 3
II.—An Awakening and a Summons, 10
III.—Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple, 15
IV.—Salathiel Journeys Far from Jerusalem, 22
V.—Eleazar Learns of Salathiel’s Renunciation, 28
VI.—Salathiel and His People, 35
VII.—The Loss of a Life, 41
VIII.—Salathiel Confronts the Shade of Antiochus, 47
IX.—The Romans Driven from the Holy City, 56
X.—The Fall of Onias, 62
XI.—The Strength of Judea, 69
XII.—The Prince of Naphtali Confronts Desolation, 78
XIII.—The Wandering of a Mind Diseased, 84
XIV.—The Fury of a Tempest, 92
XV.—The Appeal of Miriam, 101
XVI.—The Heart of Salome, 112
XVII.—A Declaration of Love, 121
XVIII.—Salathiel Faces a Roman, 132
XIX.—On Board a Trireme, 138
XX.—The Burning of Rome, 145
XXI.—The Death of a Martyr, 157
BOOK II
XXII.—The Year of Jubilee, 173
XXIII.—Preparing for an Attack, 181
XXIV.—The Departure of Constantius, 189
XXV.—Salathiel in Strange Company, 197
XXVI.—In the Lions’ Lair, 205
XXVII.—The Escape of Salathiel the Magician, 215
XXVIII.—The Power of a Beggar, 221
XXIX.—Prisoners in a Labyrinth, 232
XXX.—The Revenge of a Victor, 242
XXXI.—The Difficulties of a Leader, 251
XXXII.—“Never Shalt Thou Enter Jerusalem,” 258
XXXIII.—Jubal’s Warning, 265
XXXIV.—The Pursuit of an Enemy, 272
XXXV.—The Lapse of Years, 276
XXXVI.—Death in a Cavern, 284
XXXVII.—A Pirate Band, 291
XXXVIII.—Salathiel and the Pirate Captain, 300
XXXIX.—A Sea Fight, 310
XL.—A Burning Trireme, 317
XLI.—The Granddaughter of Ananus, 323
BOOK III
XLII.—Naomi’s Story, 333
XLIII.—Before Masada, 339
XLIV.—Among Roman Soldiers, 346
XLV.—The Reign of the Sword, 353
XLVI.—A Cry of Wo, 358
XLVII.—The Struggle for Supremacy, 362
XLVIII.—The Sting of a Story, 372
XLIX.—Salathiel’s Strange Quarters, 377
L.—After the Struggle, 383
LI.—A Man of Mystery, 389
LII.—The Prophecy of Evil, 396
LIII.—A Fatal Sign, 401
LIV.—Concerning Septimius, 411
LV.—Salathiel a Prisoner, 417
LVI.—A Narrow Escape, 425
LVII.—Onias, the Enemy of Salathiel, 435
LVIII.—Eleazar the Convert, 445
LIX.—The Clemency of Titus, 455
LX.—The Treatment of a Prisoner, 466
LXI.—A Steward’s Narrative, 474
LXII.—A Prisoner in the Tower, 487
LXIII.—A Minstrel’s Power of Speech, 496
LXIV.—The Destruction of Jerusalem, 512
APPENDIX
Annotations, 537
Jesus of Nazareth from the Present Jewish Point of View—Letters
from over Thirty Representative Jewish Scholars, 551
Other Testimony to Jesus, 570
The Second Coming of Christ—A Succinct History, by D. S.
Gregory, D.D., LL.D., 574
Reasons for the Belief that Christ may Come Within the Next
Twenty Years, by Arthur T. Pierson, D.D., 582
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“Tarry thou till I come!” _Frontispiece_
“All in the Temple was confusion,” 20
“The archer dropped dead, with the arrow still on his bow,” 64
“‘Read the Scriptures. I have prayed for you. Read—’” 104
“‘Let your guard come,’ cried I,” 136
“I heard the gnashing of his white fangs above me,” 168
“The lions, made more furious by wounds, sprang upon the
powerful horses,” 208
“I gave the word—fell upon the guard at the gate, and cast it
open!” 240
“‘Now for glory!’ they cried,” 268
“The solitary voyager of the burning trireme,” 318
“I had rescued Constantius!” 356
“The Roman rushed at him with his drawn falchion,” 396
“‘Esther is gone!’ was her answer,” 424
“‘Now, my beloved brothers, beloved in the Lord, go forth,’
said Eleazar,” 452
“Titus rode at the head of his stately company, himself the
most stately of them all,” 488
“Judea must fall,” 508
“I heard the shouts of the conquerors, and the fall of the
pillars of the Temple,” 532
[Illustration: BOOK I]
TARRY THOU TILL I COME
The superior numbers appearing throughout the text refer to
“Explanatory Notes” in the first pages of the Appendix.
CHAPTER I
_Salathiel Doomed to Immortality_
[Sidenote: Salathiel Feels Remorse]
“Tarry thou till I come.”[1] The words shot through me—I felt them like
an arrow in my heart—my brain whirled—my eyes grew dim. The troops, the
priests, the populace, the world, passed away from before my senses like
phantoms.
But my mind had a horrible clearness. As if the veil that separates the
visible and invisible worlds had been rent in sunder, I saw shapes and
signs for which mortal language has no name. The whole expanse of the
future spread under my mental gaze. A preternatural light, a new power of
mind, seemed to have been poured into my being; I saw at once the full
guilt of my crime—the fierce folly—the mad ingratitude—the desperate
profanation. I lived over again in frightful distinctness every act and
instant of the night of my unspeakable sacrilege. I saw, as if written
with a sunbeam, the countless injuries that in the rage of bigotry I had
accumulated upon the victim; the bitter mockeries that I had devised;
the cruel tauntings that my lips had taught the rabble; the pitiless
malignity that had forbidden them to discover a trace of virtue where all
virtue was. The blows of the scourge still sounded in my ears. Every drop
of the innocent blood rose up in judgment against me.
[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Former Triumph]
Accursed be the night in which I fell before the tempter! Blotted
out from time and eternity be the hour in which I took part with the
torturers! Every fiber of my frame quivers, every drop of my blood
curdles, as I still hear the echo of the anathema, that on the night
of wo sprang first from my lips, “HIS BLOOD BE UPON US, AND UPON OUR
CHILDREN!”
I had headed the multitude; where others shrank, I urged; where others
pitied, I reviled; I scoffed at the feeble malice of the priesthood; I
scoffed at the tardy cruelty of the Roman; I swept away by menace and by
scorn the human reluctance of the few who dreaded to dip their hands in
blood. Thinking to do God service, and substituting my passions for my
God, I threw firebrands on the hearts of a rash, jealous, and bigoted
people—I triumphed!
In a deed which ought to have covered earth with lamentation, which was
to make angels weep, which might have shaken the universe into dust,
I triumphed! The decree was passed; but my frenzy was not so to be
satiated. I loathed the light while the victim lived. Under the charge of
“treason to Cæsar,” I demanded instant execution of the sentence.—“Not
a day of life must be given,” I exclaimed, “not an hour;—death, on the
instant; death!” My clamor was echoed by the roar of millions.
But in the moment of my exultation I was stricken. He who had refused
an hour of life to the victim was, in terrible retribution, condemned
to know the misery of life interminable. I heard through all the voices
of Jerusalem—I should have heard through all the thunders of heaven—the
calm, low voice, “Tarry thou till I come!”
I felt my fate at once! I sprang away through the shouting hosts as if
the avenging angel waved his sword above my head. Wild songs, furious
execrations, the uproar of myriads stirred to the heights of passion,
filled the air; still, through all, I heard the pursuing sentence, “Tarry
thou till I come,” and felt it to be the sentence of incurable agony! I
was never to know the shelter of the grave!
[Sidenote: A Ceaseless Wanderer]
Immortality on Earth!—The compulsion of perpetual existence in a world
made for change; to feel thousands of years bowing down my wretched
head; alienated from all the hopes, enjoyments, and pursuits of man,
to bear the heaviness of that existence which palls even with all the
stimulants of the most vivid career of man; life passionless, exhausted,
melancholy, old. I was to be a wild beast; and a wild beast condemned to
pace the same eternal cage! A criminal bound to the floor of his dungeon
forever! I would rather have been blown about on the storms of every
region of the universe.
Immortality on Earth!—I was still in the vigor of life; but must it be
always so? Must not pain, feebleness, the loss of mind, the sad decay
of all the resources of the human being, be the natural result of time?
Might I not sink into the perpetual sick-bed, hopeless decrepitude, pain
without cure or relaxation, the extremities of famine, of disease, of
madness?—yet this was to be borne for ages of ages!
Immortality on Earth!—Separation from all that cheers and ennobles life.
I was to survive my country; to see the soil dear to my heart violated by
the feet of barbarians yet unborn, her sacred monuments, her trophies,
her tombs, a scoff and a spoil. Without a resting-spot for the soles of
my feet, I was to witness the slave, the man of blood, the savage of the
desert, the furious infidel, rioting in my inheritance, digging up the
bones of my fathers, trampling on the holy ruins of Jerusalem!
Immortality on Earth!—I was to feel the still keener misery of surviving
all whom I loved; wife, child, friend, even to the last being with whom
my heart could imagine a human bond; all that bore a drop of my blood in
their veins were to perish in my sight, and I was to stand on the verge
of the perpetual grave, without the power to sink into its refuge. If new
affections could ever wind their way into my frozen bosom, it must be
only to fill it with new sorrows; for those I loved must still be torn
from me.—In the world I must remain, and remain alone!
Immortality on Earth!—The grave that closes on the sinner, closes on
his sin. His weight of offense is fixed. No new guilt can gather on him
there. But I was to know no limit to the weight that was already crushing
me. The guilt of life upon life, the surges of an unfathomable ocean of
crime, were to roll in eternal progress over my head. If the judgment of
the great day was terrible to him who had passed but through the common
measure of existence, what must be its terrors to the wretch who was to
appear loaded with the accumulated guilt of a thousand lives!
[Sidenote: He Passes through Jerusalem]
Overwhelmed with despair, I rushed through Jerusalem, with scarcely a
consciousness of whither I was going. It was the time of the Passover,
when the city was crowded with the multitude come to the great festival
of the year. I felt an instinctive horror of the human countenance, and
shunned every avenue by which the tribes came in. I at last found myself
at the Gate of Zion, that leads southward into the open country. I had
then no eyes for that wondrous portal which had exhausted the skill of
the most famous Ionian sculptors, the master-work of Herod the Great.
But I vainly tried to force my way through the crowds that lingered on
their march to gaze upon its matchless beauty; portal alone worthy of the
wonders to which it led, like the glory of an evening cloud opening to
lead the eye upward to the stars.
On those days the Roman guard was withdrawn from the battlements,
which I ascended to seek another escape; but the concourse, gathered
there to look upon the entrance of the tribes, fixed me to the spot.
Of all the strange and magnificent sights of earth, this entrance was
the most fitted to swell the national pride of country and religion.
The dispersion, ordained by Heaven for judgment on the crimes of our
idolatrous kings, had, through that wonder-working power by which good is
brought out of evil, planted our law in the remotest extremities of the
world. Among its proselytes were the mighty of all regions, the military
leaders, the sages, the kings; all, at least once in their lives, coming
to pay homage to the great central city of the faith; and all coming
with the pomp and attendance of their rank. The procession amounted to a
number which threw after-times into the shade. Three millions of people
have been counted at the Passover.
The diversities of the multitude were not less striking. Every race of
mankind, in its most marked peculiarities, there passed beneath the eye.
There came the long train of swarthy slaves and menials round the chariot
of the Indian prince, clothed in the silks and jewels of regions beyond
the Ganges. Upon them pressed the troop of African lion-hunters, half
naked, but with their black limbs wreathed with pearl and fragments
of unwrought gold. Behind them, on camels, moved patriarchal groups,
the Arab sheik, a venerable figure with his white locks flowing from
beneath his turban, leading his sons, like our father Abraham, from the
wilderness to the Mount of Vision. Then rolled on the glittering chariot
of the Assyrian chieftain, a regal show of purple and gems, convoyed by
horsemen covered with steel. The Scythian Jews, wrapped in the furs of
wolf and bear, iron men of the North; the noble Greek, the perfection
of the human form, with his countenance beaming the genius and beauty
of his country; the broad and yellow features of the Chinese rabbins;
the fair skins and gigantic forms of the German tribes; strange clusters
of men unknown to the limits of Europe or Asia, with their black locks,
complexions of the color of gold, and slight yet sinewy limbs, marked
with figures of suns and stars struck into the flesh; all marched crowd
on crowd; and in strong contrast with them, the Italian on the charger
or in the chariot, urging the living stream to the right and left, with
the haughtiness of the acknowledged master of mankind. The representative
world was before me. But all those distinctive marks of country and
condition, though palpably ineradicable by human means, were overpowered
and mingled by the one grand impression of the place and the time. In
their presence was the City of Holiness; the Hill of Zion lifted up its
palaces; above them ascended, like another city in a higher region of the
air, that TEMPLE to whose majesty the world could show no equal, to which
the eyes of the believer were turned from the uttermost parts of the
earth, in whose courts Solomon, the king of earthly kings for wisdom, had
called down the blessing of the Most High, and it had descended on the
altar in fire; in whose sanctuary the King whom heaven and the heaven of
heavens can not contain was to make His future throne, and give glory to
His people.
[Sidenote: And Comes upon a Scene Magnificent]
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! when I think of what I saw thee then, and of what
I have since seen thee—the spoiled, the desolate, the utterly put to
shame; when I have seen the Roman plow driven through the soil on which
stood the Holy of Holies; the Saracen destroying even its ruins; the
last, worst devastator, the barbarian of the Tatar desert, sitting in
grim scorn upon the ramparts of the city of David; violating the tombs of
the prophet and the king; turning up for plunder the soil, every blade of
whose grass, every atom of whose dust, was sacred to the broken heart of
Israel; trampling with savage cruelty my countrymen that lingered among
its walls only that they might seek a grave in the ashes of the mighty,—I
have felt my spirit maddened within me. I have made impious wishes; I
have longed for the lightning to blast the tyrant. I still start from my
bed when I hear the whirlwind, and send forth fierce prayers that its
rage may be poured on the tents of the oppressor. I unconsciously tear
away my white locks, and scatter them in bitterness of soul toward the
East. In the wildness of the moment I have imagined every cloud that
sailed along the night a minister of the descending vengeance. I have
seen it a throne of terrible shapes flying on the wings of the wind,
majestic spirits and kings of wrath hurrying through the heavens to pour
down sulfurous hail and fire, as upon the cities of the Dead Sea. I have
cried out with our prophet, as the vision swept along, “Who is he that
cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozra? he that is glorious in
his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength! Wherefore art
thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth the
winepress?” and I have thought that I heard the answer: “I, that speak
in righteousness, mighty to save! I will tread them in mine anger, and
trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my
garments, and I will stain all my raiment; for the day of vengeance is in
mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come!”
[Sidenote: Salathiel Bemoans Jerusalem’s Desecration]
Then, when the impulse passed away, my eyes have turned into fountains of
tears, and I have wept until morning came, and the sounds of the world
called back its recollections; and for the sacred hills and valleys that
I had imagined in the darkness I saw only the roofs of some melancholy
city, in which I was a forlorn fugitive; or a wilderness, with but the
burning sands and the robber before me; or found myself tossing on the
ocean, not more fruitless than my heart, nor more restless than my life,
nor more unfathomable than my we. Yet to the last will I hope and love. O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem! even in my mirth, if I forget thee!
[Sidenote: Beyond the City’s Gate]
But those were the thoughts of after-times. On that memorable and
dreadful day I had no perception but of some undefinable fate which was
to banish me from mankind. I at length forced my way through the pressure
at the gate, turned to none of the kinsmen who called to me as I passed
their chariots and horses, overthrew with desperate and sudden strength
all who impeded my progress, and scarcely felt the ground till I had left
the city behind, and had climbed, through rocks and ruins, the mountain
that rose drearily before me, like a barrier shutting out the living
world.