THE “LIGHT OF THE HAREM” IN “THE TEMPLE OF ALLEGORY.”
“Would I had fallen upon those happier days,
And those Arcadian scenes....
Vain wish! Those days were never! airy dreams
Sat for the picture, and the poet’s hand
Imposed a gay delirium for a truth.
Grant it; I still must envy them an age
That favored such a dream; in days like these
Impossible when virtue is so scarce,
That to suppose a scene where she presides
Is tramontane, and stumbles all belief.”—YOUNG.
“The glory of the Lord came from the way of the east, ... and
the earth shined with His glory. Thou son of man show the house
to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their
iniquities, and let them measure the pattern.”—EZEKIEL, xliii.
“My Cornelius once said I might expend the fortune coming from my
grandfather, Harrimai, as I chose.”
“Why, that’s so without my saying. I did not court your grandfather, nor
his ownings, and have gotten affluence beyond the wildest dreams of a
lover in Miriamne’s self.”
“I think the old church on the hill is smiling day by day, more and more.”
“I’ve noted the improvement, and it assures me our hearers are growing.
A meanly kept sanctuary, witnesses of starved worshipers. Some churches
might be called stables for all-devouring, nothing-giving, lean kine.”
“I’d like to be brought to confession; question me!”
“Question? I can not doubt either Miriamne or her doings; to question,
one must doubt.”
“Sir Courtly! But I’ll flank your courtesy; I’ve purchased and furbished
up the old ecclesiastical pile.”
“I might have guessed it was Miriamne’s work! Now, good Bishop of
Bethany, appoint me Rector.”
“Churchman forever! We’ll have no Rector.”
“No Rector? No sermons? No congregation?”
“We’ll have a multitude, if we can get into the place the God-shine; that
brightens and draws ever.”
“Allurement by light! A new device. Are we to have a tryst where
lotus-dreamers may take sun-baths?”
“Curiosity, too proud to question directly, travels around with
banterings.”
“Incisive Miriamne, my ægis, thin as paper, is shredded: I confess!”
“Confession compels pardon and counsel. I’ll give both. The restored
sanctuary is to be the capitol of our fraternity, the ‘_Sisters of
Bethany_.’”
“Capitol? Are you inviting the Sultan to take your homes and your heads?
A capitol sounds like politics, revolution and things governmental.”
“There is to be war and a revolution; our munitions are to be solely
moral agencies; our aim, to revolve the world around toward Paradisiacal
days. I’d have parting streams flow out from Bethany to water the
earth, and sing anew the jubilant strains of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and
Euphrates.”
“Arcadia! Alas, how sad such dreams, because so impossible to realize.
The Arcadians, so charming in the poet’s pictures, were, in fact, very
warlike, very loutish, very human.”
“Say not that what has been must always be. Moses, at a time when Israel
was at its lowest dip, received of God a pattern of the Tabernacle. The
God of Moses is unchangeable. I’ve gotten from Him a pattern, also.”
“And now I question, as you wish!”
“The old sanctuary is to be a ‘_Temple of Allegory_.’ We shall attempt
therein to picture the finest truths by symbols that shall make them
tangible and irresistible.”
“A splendid ambition! Possess me of your intricacies of canon and
catechism. I’d accept them.”
“You overlook our simplicity by expecting complexity. We shall not walk
like ghosts, hampered by the grave-clothes of the dead, though august
forms. Seven words, enough for each day of the round week, are our whole
profession: ‘_Humanity toward humanity, with godliness toward God._’”
As they conversed, they walked toward the old sanctuary at the suburbs of
Bethany, and now were drawing near it.
“Behold, Miriamne, the Hospitaler; yonder.”
“Yes, I’ve called the knights hither; the Hospitaler will dedicate our
temple to-day.”
“But has he ecclesiastical authority so to do?”
“The same authority that these growing shrubs and vines have to make the
place beautiful. See, I’ve pierced the walls of the grim pile, wherever I
could, to make a window. The Hospitaler is to take them for a theme.”
“Windows for themes?”
“He is able; and understands by them that we’d have let into musty
beliefs floods of sweet light.”
“The knights are singing!”
“Yes, the Grail song, ‘_Faint though pursuing_;’ the dedication has
commenced.”
The words sung recited the grail quest; but its chorus, a simple one,
was much the same as that sung at the May-day festivities on a former
occasion. The people gathered, heartily joined in the chorus. When the
singing ceased, the Knight, in his usual abrupt manner, began addressing
the assembly:
“The beloved young missioners have undertaken, by means of
their handiwork here, to strikingly present the noblest truths,
and they have taken a step in the right direction. Love for the
pictorial, manifest especially in children, grows with growth;
those adult needing and seeking, as they grow, finer, grander
symbols. Our Divine Lord, who ‘_knew men_’ and ‘_knew_ what
was in man,’ did not rebuke, but rather utilized this taste
of man, by teaching the profoundest things of His Kingdom by
means of it. He came as close as close could be to the very
core of human life, as it was or to all time will be. While
He might have navigated Galilee in a palatial barge, borne
over be-flowered waves by perfumed breezes and golden wings,
with the aureoled spirits, ‘_who do excel in strength_,’ by
thousands, to escort Him, He chose rather to journey in an
all-winning humility, borrowing, as He had need, the old
boat of some poor Tiberian fisherman. He might have entered
Jerusalem, that last time, in an Elijah-like chariot, dazzling
the city with splendors surpassing those that the rapt John
beheld on Patmos; but the King of Glory, seeking to be the
King of all men, elected in that supreme moment to get near to
men by approaching the august courts of Herod and Caiphas, and
the commons as well, on an ass—an humble beast, and borrowed
at that. All this allegorized the condescension and sympathy
of Jehovah. The universe is full of patterns! The books of
Nature, Revelation, and Providence, having a common authority,
are constant in the use of pictured truth. Nature gives us the
dawning of light and the marshaling of order out of darkness
and chaos. There is the low earth, the high firmament, ripe
summer going down into the winding sheets of winter and up
to the resurrections of spring. Twig, flower, seed, forest;
insect that creeps, and bird that flies; the speck-life moved,
and the behemoth; the atom and the planet-system—waning and
growing, dying and living, from formlessness to beauty, from
time to eternity! Then take the inspired picture-history:
Eden’s fall, Egyptian captivity, the Red Sea passage, the
wilderness, the manna by the way, the rest by the Mount of the
Law, the entrance to the Promised Land. Lastly, the Incarnate
One, an eternal symbol, the realization and fulfillment of all
preceding. ‘Which things are an allegory,’ exclaimed Paul, with
a sweeping back-look. The three books present to the thoughtful
pictured banners innumerable, to wave him onward. This temple
is dedicated to the purpose of pointing to these pictures.
Fitly the ‘angels of the mount’ have determined to make
prominent the beautiful, patient, modest Mary, Mother of Jesus.
And to study her intelligently or profitably, it is necessary
to know her not only as an historical personage, but as one
in the cavalcade of symbolism unfolded by Sacred Writ and by
Nature. She passes by, herself every way unique, the exemplar
of God to those aspiring after gentle, devout girlhood,
pure and wise maiden-life, constant wifehood, and patient,
consecrated, and influential motherhood. Turn again to the
Divine Word, the beacon of the ages, the history of Providence,
the solver of life’s problems. It is made up of an entrancing
array of symbols, types, prophetic dramas, and gorgeously
constructed visions, constantly representing or dextrously
pointing, by countless trophies and allegories, to its Ideal
and Darling, Mary’s Son, _who ‘spoke as man never spake, yet
who without a parable spake nothing.’_ Though the literary ages
are strewn with long winrows of dead books, no work of man long
surviving the mutations of time, God’s picturesque handiwork,
the inspired volume, as potently molds the thoughts, charms
the affections and quickens the hopes of our race with its
tokens, types, idyls and illustration as it did when the earth
was younger by far than it is now. It is a living fountain,
not only giving, but retaining its immortality! It abides
because it masterfully deals with the things that pertain to
the wonderland of the soul. How necessary its methods is at
once apparent to any one who considers, discerningly, man as
a complex union of spirit and matter; wonderful forever, but
‘_very good_,’ since the All Holy, Great High Priest performed
the nuptial ceremony of that union. If there could be found a
being able to reason, as a man, who had not within himself this
unity, and who had never experienced its phenomena, such would
at once combat the possibility of its existence. Even those
so organized, and momentarily realizing the jointure of the
God-like spirit with the earthly body, the higher condescending
to and communing with the inferior, the inferior at times
over-persuading, dominating and utterly shipwrecking its great
spiritual co-partner, are compelled to admit the whole as being
a fact without parallel, alike inscrutable and bewildering. A
life-time of profoundest introspection can carry the greatest
mind, herein, only to the confines of new wonders. But the
interest in the study of the unwritten, unvoiced language of
symbolisms by which the wonderfully united twain, soul and
body, confer and commune with each other deepens with the
study. What a fine, expressive, rapid, exact, exalted language
that must be! To each well understood; without their arcana
unknown, unheard, incomprehensible. And it is of necessity
all symbol, natural, intuitive, without a single arbitrary
sign! This sign-language acts by _symbol_ in the royal temple
of memory and imagination. And so again we perceive the
representative, picturesque or typical is the medium of the
fine, the deep and the lofty in expressing truth. This is the
soul’s language, by which it communes with whatever else there
is in man, through which it receives the songs of Heaven,
and the august or tender messages of the Spirit, out of the
deathless land.
“When this sphere of ours was rolling swiftly onward through
the shadows of night, as well as swiftly downward through
darker shadows of sin, Divine love said ‘Let there be light.’
Then the hosts of heaven saw at Bethlehem a mother and babe
marking the place of world-dawn, unfolding the design of
Deity to effect redemption by touching the race of man at
infancy; the most effective because the most plastic point;
through motherhood the most influential because the tenderest
instrumentality. The never-to-be-forgotten spectacle thrilled,
with a new ecstasy, the beings of glory whose every throb
of life is joy. They tracked the heavens about with light as
they sped out to keep abreast the fleeing earth and shout over
Bethlehem, ‘Glad tidings! Glad tidings!’ They saw Eden restored
through the advent of a new, pure home; they saw a mystic
covenant between God and man typified in the child begotten of
a human mother in conjunction with the Eternal Father. By this
there seemed to be an attesting that humanity was to be raised
to Divine favor; there also was a symbol showing the value of
law; for through the incarnation, Deity, in the form of a babe,
became submissive to law administered by a mortal mother.
“He is blind who can not see in all these things God’s purpose
to elect some of His creatures to be His co-laborers in the
choicest co-operations, and also to be exemplars of what He
does and would do. These things being so, we do well to learn
the alphabet of His goodness from His elect heroes, heroines
and saints; and I proclaim to-day my innermost belief in Christ
as the argument, logic and fruit of God’s love; but, at the
same time, I praise, as one enravished, the character of her
who was God’s poem, God’s peroration! We now proclaim this
temple dedicated to the purposes of showing forth the things I
have spoken.”
The Hospitaler abruptly ceased his address, as he began it. There were
other services consisting of psalm-singing and prayers, and the service
was ended.
As the congregation dispersed, the young missioner, Cornelius, exclaimed:
“Miriamne, the Hospitaler has awakened me as from sleep by God’s truth.
Oh, the heavens are not as full of shining stars as God’s truth is full
of beauty! It seems strange that men like myself, and wiser, are so long
in bringing these things to their minds. You, my dear little mystic, are
my interpreter.
“It’s just as I told you, wife. We must go in pairs. In the Egyptian
mythologies, Osiris had his Isis, Amen-Ra his Maut, and Kneph his Sate.
Thank God I have my adolescent other self!”
“I, a woman, help you? My sex is honored by the praise. Are they worthy
of all they need? Is it madness to seek to gather all women having gifts
and needs into a helped and helping fraternity whose creed is a fine
example? If I help Cornelius, cannot a peerless one like Mary help all?”
“Pardon the thought, but one word haunts me—idolatry!”
“Impossible! We all need soul company, and have room within for such. We
must have an inner population of real heroines and heroes or be filled
with ghosts and myths. The empty soul, eaten up with self-worship, goes
mad; the myth-possessed becomes an idolater. If we harbor the God-like,
keeping the highest place for Deity, our inner selves will be no hideous
chambers of imagery, but a counterpart of heaven.”
“But some have fallen into putting Mary before Jesus, and so we’ve seen
the advent of Mariolatry.”
“But this only, and surely, here I know, no friend of the Divine Son
can dethrone Him by honoring her, aright; indeed, as He, Himself, did.
It was of Him she spoke when exclaiming: ‘_My soul doth rejoice in God
my Savior!_’ Can one truly honor Him and despise and ignore the woman
who gave Him human birth? Can one have His mind and forget her for whom
love was uppermost to Him in His supreme last hours? Can one honor her
aright, and yet dethrone the Son whom she enthroned? She bore Him, then
lived for Him. She honored herself in bearing Him, and was His mother,
His teacher and His disciple. He revered her, she worshiped Him. Awed by
His augustness, she was yet conscious of an ownership of His greatness;
believing in His divinity, she yet enjoyed the nearness to Him of a
mother.”
“I can not but believe that she is a queen, indeed, high among the
glorified who reign with God! I question again: Who ever did, or could,
become heretic or carnal by sincerely revering the peerless woman whom
Christ enthroned on His heart?”
“I know at least that the fathers at imperial and pagan Rome placed a
representation of Mary in their Pantheon when public policy made it an
imperative necessity to overthrow the influence of the lewd, fanciful and
ungodly ideals that had been set up therein,” responded Cornelius.
“The world is a Pantheon full of corrupt ideas. Let us raise high the
choice ones God has sent us—But see, yonder is the wife of a poor old
Druse camel-driver. She was once a sinner in the streets of Jerusalem.
Now she is a Sister of Bethany, allured to goodness by our Temple’s
allegories!”
“A woman that was a sinner, a scarlet woman?”
“Only such. No; all of that! One woman; a lost one? How little to man;
how much to God! Had nothing else been done, heaven would have been set
singing, as ever, over a sinner’s return. That’s reward enough for all
we’ve attempted.”
“Now I’m interested, indeed!”
“Well you may be, when you hear all. We’ve here one once a harem beauty,
who, having lost her power to fascinate, was committing her life to that
hag-cunning belonging to old women who supplement their decaying power by
wickedness, fox-like and serpentine.”
“The old, old story; yet I thank God if her life be sweetened.”
“Hers is a strange story.”
“May I know it?”
“Yes; it is, as I’ve gathered it in scraps, a sad romance. She was born
of Georgian parents, among the mountains of Armenia, and gifted, in her
youth, as are most of those of her sex in that country, with unusual
personal beauty. She early attracted the attention of the monsters
who dealt in human flesh, and a Georgian noble unrighteously claiming
her family as his serfs, bartered away Nourahmal to merchants seeking
recruits for Mameluke harems. She became, in time, part of the retinue of
a sheik by the name of Azrael, a desperate adventurer, who, on account
of his blood-deeds, was called by his followers the ‘Angel of Death,’
His luxurious and desperate way of living justified his claim to Turkish
extraction; his adroitness and avidity for intrigue stamped him as a
Mameluke.”
“Nourahmal? Azrael? Why, these must be the same of whom I’ve heard Sir
Charleroy speak?” queried Cornelius.
“The same!”
“She comes out of the past as one from the dead!”
“And her story is a series of strange events. It is as follows: Azrael
suspected her of having abetted the escape of my father and Ichabod,
therefore determined to kill her. She gained a temporary respite through
having saved her master’s life from an assassin plotting to supplant him;
though she periled her own in so doing.
“As Azrael awaited her recovery from the wounds she had suffered in
his behalf, he devised another scheme which he hoped would compass his
favorite’s destruction and his own elevation. He was ambitious to be
Sherif of Mecca. To attain that honor he saw he must needs do something
to enhance his popularity greatly with his Mohammedan followers, and so
conceived the plan of getting into his power, Harrimai of the Jews and
Adolphus of the Christians. His purpose was to rack those two leaders
into apostasy and the betrayal of their followers. Had he succeeded, the
event would have been crushing to Jews and Christians east of Jordan.
He promised Nourahmal her freedom and restoration to her Georgian home
if she aided him in his design; though he did not disclose his purpose
to her beyond that of securing the presence of Von Gombard and Harrimai
in his camp. She felt that there was some malign, hidden purpose in her
master’s breast, but deemed it expedient, at the outset, to seem to
co-operate in his plan.”
“But how was the sheik using his strategy against Nourahmal?”
“As a fiend! He, having no conception of a friendship between a man and
a woman that was pure and free from intrigue, suspected the relations
between his favorite and Ichabod. He thought the two only needed the
opportunity to precipitate into perfidy. He laid his plan darkly, and,
leaving a trusty follower to carry it out, hastened forward to Mecca.”
“But surely, Nourahmal was not what he thought her!”
“No; though training her as a plastic child, he judged she was what he
had tried to make her; at her worst she was. But let me continue. The
assault on my parents and Ichabod, on the road between Gerash and Bozrah,
was the opening of the drama. The plan then was to seize Rizpah, and
under pretense of negotiating for her ransom, inveigle Harrimai into the
hands of Azrael’s followers. Nourahmal was to aid in this by affecting
tears, pleading for pity and suggesting the sending for the girl’s
father.”
“What besetments perilous we pass through, all unknown to us! Harrimai
and your parents, to their death, never suspected the devices worked
against them!”
“Nor dreamed that a harem favorite, a mere girl, and an utter stranger to
them, was their good angel!”
“Good angel! How?”
“She witnessed the assault from behind a sequestering wall, in company
with a follower of the sheik, commissioned to kill her instantly if she
faltered in the part appointed her. This infernal guard was also charged
to insinuate into her mind the feasibility of elopement with Ichabod. If
she could be compromised, Azrael knew he could justify her death to those
who remembered her heroic defense of himself. That was to follow as soon
as she had done her part in inveigling Harrimai to Azrael’s camp.”
“A demonstration of a personal devil, Miriamne.”
“I’d say rather of an overruling God.”
“How fared Nourahmal after Azrael’s chagrin?”
“Cornelius anticipates me. When she saw Ichabod fall, a sudden desire
for liberty for herself and to help the imperiled Rizpah, prompted her
to drive a dagger into the heart of her guard and cry, ‘Rescuers come!’
That cry drove the remnants of the assailers of Sir Charleroy to sudden
flight. She asserted to the fugitives that Laconic, the new runner, just
passing, had slain her guard, and so allayed suspicion until opportunity
of escape came. She soon made her way to Bozrah, where she found among
the Christians a temporary home. From thence she drifted into Jerusalem.”
“’Twas strange she did not turn toward Gerash.”
“I said as much to her, but desire to get as far as possible from
Azrael, and as near as possible to the Holy City, of which Ichabod had
so glowingly spoken to her, determined her course; besides that, Ichabod
being dead, Gerash was a strange place to her—Jerusalem seemed to her,
she said, near heaven.”
“Had she only known it, she was near heaven in Bozrah, being near Von
Gombard.”
“Her story weaves a chaplet for his tomb to-day; for now it appears that
from Nourahmal the old priest foreknew the intention of those Saracens,
who assailed the city that day I was with him. Though they designed
capturing him to put him on the rack, he rushed into the conflict,
crying, ‘Kill the foe with kindness!’ The assault would have been fatal
to Bozrah, too, had not the leader of one of the invading bands ordered
a retreat, just at the point of victory. This was indirectly Nourahmal’s
work; for that leader had been won by her to esteem Christians far enough
to be unwilling to murder them, though not adverse to plundering them.
That was a great improvement in a Mohammedan.”
“And Nourahmal knows from you that you are Sir Charleroy’s daughter?”
“Yes, by that I won her confidence. Indeed, she began this confidence at
first, by saying, ‘I love you, because you so remind me, angel of the
mount, of a Christian knight, who was the dear friend of the only pure
and unselfish man I knew in all my youth! Such words led to questions
and explanations. The rest you know.”
“And you have allured, comforted and enlightened her?”
“By God’s help, I have. I have told her of the universal sisterhood, of
all women, who take as their exemplar the worthy mother of the One who
proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man. This knowledge is her joy
and inspiration. When I am with her, she never tires of hearing of the
‘Queen of David’s House,’ the mother of mothers.”
“But how have you allured her hither, Miriamne?”
“You have questioned curiously with your eyes, at least, concerning those
gated alcoves and curtained balconies in our Temple of Allegory. They
helped her!”
“Since you say they are not ‘Confessionals,’ as I call them, tell me what
they are?”
“‘Rock clefts’ our sisterhood calls them; some are doors to little
adjacent chapels; some are quiet resting places, where, in impressive
solitude, souls in prayer may find the mountain manna, for which the
Savior sought in many a lone night-watching; and some are places where
are presented, under entrancing symbols, exalting truths.”
“Words have failed to turn the world to faith: may signs do better.”
“I’ve put truth into visible form, that they who get it here may learn
that truth thus is only up to its full might. I’d have my followers
believe in visible, not phantom, truth; so believing, truth will not be a
ghostly proclamation, the toy of the mind, but a force moving hands and
hearts!”
“And you have met Nourahmal’s case?”
“Yes; fully in what we call the ‘Lover’s Bower,’ yonder. Remember she has
been the victim of mock love, from first to last.”
“The ‘Lover’s Bower’?”
“Behold the trophy and the bower! There is Nourahmal, now rapturously
contemplating the picture of Joseph putting the ring of espousal on the
hand of the Virgin Mary.”
“Nourahmal? That gray-haired, hard-faced woman, holding the hand of a
charming girl?”
“That is Nourahmal; the younger woman is Beulah, her grand-daughter; they
two are almost inseparable now.”
“An oleander by a limestone cliff! And so she takes her station by a
scene of betrothal, forgetting that hymen’s altars can be fired by youth
alone!”
“The world says so; but yet a disappointed life may sometimes learn why
it has been a failure, by studying the ashes of time gone in the light of
quickened memories.”
“What finds Nourahmal there?”
“Golden lessons. First for her grand-daughter, her idol. She never tires
of saying before yon picture to that maiden now her charge: ‘My flower,
my lamb, be always as pure as the espoused of Joseph, and you will be a
jewel which your husband, if he be a true man, will ever proudly wear on
as his heart. My flower, my lamb, no woman should leave all for any man,
unless she is certain of finding in him father, mother, brother, sister,
companion, as Mary found in Joseph!’”
“But how did these things bless Nourahmal herself?”
“Love counterfeited, blasted her life. She believed that it was only
gross passion masquerading in attractive, delusive colors. So believing,
it was difficult to tell her of the Love of God so she could realize
its wealth. Love was only great selfishness, excited and persistent, to
her mind. It was something to teach her that the genuine affection was
utterly otherwise; in fact the foundation and crown of all the noblest
sentiments implanted by God in His choicest creations.
“I have sought to allegorize here, true affection in all its perfection.
It seems to be fitting to do so, for my ideal queen was ruled by it. She
never could have loved to the depths she did, as a mother, if she had
not had within her being all the possibilities of woman’s love. And in
a rightly balanced woman love is all-impressive, all-controlling; with
her worship is loving and loving is worship. Here I shall seek to refine
that sentiment in the hearts of my sisters until each becomes an evangel
in its behalf. Then mankind will understand the wealth a woman bestows
on the man that wins her. There is nothing in her career that surpasses
it, except that sovereign act wherein she lays herself a convert on God’s
altar. I am seeking to exalt this sacred act, the loving of the gentler
sex, until all men, brought to revere it as they ought, shall become true
knights; until society shall be of one mind in crying traitor to every
man that contemns it in wedlock, and ready to lash naked around the world
every betrayer who awakens it in innocency to lead it astray.”
“I can only again exclaim, oh! how full of flowers and honey is my
Miriamne’s creed and gospel!”
“And the churchman so exclaims because I’ve put love where God put it, at
the front of religion’s cohorts! Can there be a religion worth the name
that does not masterfully meet the requirements of the relations most
sacred between human beings?”
As she spoke she led her husband under the splendid painting of Joseph
espousing Mary, toward the entrance of the bower, remarking: “This
vestibule, from the Roman word Vesta, Goddess of Purity, is suggestive.
Rome placed Vesta among the household gods, and was wont to have an altar
at every outer door. If Purity guard the door, Light and Love will dwell
within. See the laurel, emblem of victory, as the ancients put it by
Purity’s altar; so do I. Love, when pure, is all-victorious!”
“Miriamne, these old truths seem to me very charming as you now present
them; but can Nourahmal and others like her enter into their meaning?”
“A pious saint of our church says that the star which guided to Bethlehem
finally sank into a spring, where it may be yet seen by women if they be
pure.”
As they thus communed he passed through an arched doorway, and was
admitted to a grand court, three sides of which were inclosed by
the temple and two of its wings, the fourth side hedged by palms,
vine-interlaced. The sky was the roof, the carpet the floor of that
country. Just in front of the palm-hedge, on a grassy hillock,
conspicuous beyond all else, was a colossal stone face. It seemed as if
it had emerged from the earth, bald of all life—desolation expressed in
mute stone.
“Astarte here!” exclaimed Cornelius.
“Yes; that’s part of my Bashan inheritance, from Kunawat, the land of
Job.”
“A woman and a devil beset him; (the two are in this face, methinks).
Its hideousness, as its import, seems inappropriate in Love’s Bower.”
“Yes, ’tis hideous now, though once the face had beauty. It is not futile
for young-love to remember that time gouges deformity into beautifulness,
nor for all to remember how the Kings of the East in Moses’ time
overthrew the Rephaim, the fallen giant followers of the goddess. The
East is the home of light, and light is fateful to evil lives. Where are
the Astarte-devotees now?”
As the man listened his eyes wandered to the place where the palm grove
came up against the temple wing, and there he observed a purling ribband
of water.
“Cornelius sees my poem of silver. It comes from a grove of cedars and
sharon roses, out of a spring in the bosom of a hill. Look the other way.
It passes under the alcove, under the temple wall; a short, dark passage
brings it to liberty, ending in the Virgin’s Pool of Kidron. The sun
allures it up to the clouds at last. But listen; it sings as it runs!”
“I hear many blending melodies.”
“Do you see that canopied dais? There the instructor, or preacher if you
will, stands. The stream passes near it, getting impulse by a fall; true
love is speeded when it runs by truth. That’s my lesson. Then there are
Æolian harps this side and that of the dark alcove, the latter the type
of the tomb.”
“But why?”
“True love has music both sides of the grave.”
“Mystic!”
“Interpreter, say.”
“But I hear the songs of birds?”
“There they are, this side the dark exit: but in a cage, supported above
the current by an hour-glass and sickle.”
“Grim emblems.”
“Yes; but it’s a grim truth that love’s joy notes here are caged,
hampered and transitory. The hour-glass and sickle are, when those notes
are sung, ever.
“Look to the West.”
“I look, and see nothing but the picture of a sunset.”
“Yes, and that curtains the ‘Rest of the Aged’ in our temple.”
“But whither am I led by these words?”
“Led to look toward sunset, for morning, by faith. You remember the
Christ was never old; neither are they who draw their life from Him. The
‘Ancient of Days’ not only has, but gives, eternal youth. Oh, there were
young men at His sepulcher; yet those angels could count their years
by centuries! Let the hour-glass make record and the sickle reap; the
passion flower recalls a vernal life, where the oldest saints are the
youngest, where all existence is growth, refreshment, glory, exultation!
There, love is law and law is love, and to love is to live and to live is
to love. We get a breath of this life here as we enter the vicinage of
the immortal pair, Jesus and Mary; and we get a distant view of the whole
from the mountains of the gospel.”
“I believe, and yet sometimes start back at the question, ‘What if, after
all, at the end almost of eternities there come monotony, decadence,
satiety—death?’ Next after hell, and nigh as horrible, is annihilation;
and worst of all, eternal existence with nothing for which to strive—a
living death!”
“They say, that in Egypt, a palm bowed to give shade to the mother, Mary;
while the aspen refused to her any comfort. Then Christ blessed the palm
and it became the fruitful evergreen, while the aspen leaf is fated to
the end of time by constant tremblings to betoken the agues of a cursed
life. But, under the sun in submission, our aspen lives are turned to
palms! We, having His life, need never tremble at death, for we shall
ever throb with a loving like His.”
“But there are many conditions and needs to womankind. Let us speak of
these, since the present is hers, the future God’s.”
“The knights vainly tried swords; my King promised to draw all men to
Himself. You told me how Sir Galahad, the pure knight, had made, about
the Holy Grail, when he found it, a chest of precious stones and gold.
Now, I’ve found the virgin pattern of perfection, representative of the
human-like beating heart of God. Here I’ve set her, exalted her. This
shall be her golden precious palace. Though dead, here shall be presented
in the grandeur of her character, the sweetness of her power. By and by,
it may come about that all mankind akin, shall make it the chief duty of
Church and State, to care, with a loyal tenderness, for all women, all
children, from first and last; that not one such shall be left miserable.
That will be the world obeying the Crucified’s, ‘Behold thy mother.’”