I
Centuries seemed like seconds that day: they dwindled down to nothing.
It was a beautiful September morning: I was only a little boy: and, as a
great treat, my father and mother had taken me to London to witness the
erection of Cleopatra's Needle. The happenings of that eventful day live
in my memory as vividly as though they had occurred but yesterday. I
seem even now to be watching the great granite column, smothered with
its maze of hieroglyphics, as it slowly ascends from the horizontal to
the perpendicular, like a giant waking and standing erect after his
long, long sleep. All the way up in the train we had been talking about
the wonderful thing I was so soon to see. My father had told me that it
once stood in front of the great temple at Heliopolis; that the Pharaohs
drove past it repeatedly on their way to and from the palace; and that,
very possibly, Moses, as a boy of my own age, sat on the steps at its
base learning the lessons that his tutor had prescribed. It seemed to
bring Moses and me very near together. To think that he, too, had stood
beside this self-same obelisk and had puzzled over the weird
inscriptions that looked so bewildering to me! And now Heliopolis, the
City of the Sun, has vanished! A single column tells the traveler where
it stood! London is the world's metropolis to-day. And the monument,
that stood among the splendors of the _old_ world, is being re-erected
amidst the glories of the _new_!
Will a time ever come, I wondered, when London will be as Heliopolis is?
Will the Needle, in some future age, be erected in some new capital--in
the metropolis of To-morrow? Had you stood, three thousand years ago,
where St. Paul's now stands, the only sound that you would have heard
coming up from the forests around would have been the baying of the
wolves. Wild swine ranged undisturbed along the site of the Strand. But
Egypt was in her glory, and the Needle stood in front of the temple!
Where, I wonder, will it stand in three thousand years' time? Some such
thought must have occurred to the authorities who are presiding over its
erection. For see, in the base of the obelisk a huge cavity yawns! What
is to be placed within it? What greeting shall we send from the
_Civilization-that-is_ to the _Civilization-that-is-to-be_? It is a
strange list upon which the officials have decided. It includes a set of
coins, some specimens of weights and measures, some children's toys, a
London directory, a bundle of newspapers, the photographs of the twelve
most beautiful women of the period, a box of hairpins and other articles
of feminine adornment, a razor, a parchment containing a translation of
the hieroglyphics on the obelisk itself--the hieroglyphics that so
puzzled Moses and me--and last, but not least, _a text!_ Yes, a text;
and a text, not in one language, but in every language known! The men
who tear down the obelisk from among the crumbling ruins of London may
not be able to decipher this language, or that, or the other. But surely
one of these ten score of tongues will have a meaning for them! And so,
in the speech of these two hundred and fifteen peoples, these words are
written out: FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN
SON THAT WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH IN HIM SHOULD NOT PERISH BUT HAVE
EVERLASTING LIFE. _That_ is the greeting which the Twentieth Century
sends to the Fiftieth! I do not know what those men--the men who rummage
among the ruins of London--will make of the newspapers, the parchments,
the photographs and the hairpins. I suspect that the children's toys
will seem strangely familiar to them: a little girl's doll was found by
the archæologists among the ruins of Babylon: childhood keeps pretty
much the same all through the ages. But the text! The text will seem to
those far-off people as fresh as the latest fiftieth-century sensation.
Those stately cadences belong to no particular time and to no particular
clime. Ages may come and go; empires may rise and fall; they will still
speak with fadeless charm to the hungry hearts of men. They are for the
Nations-that-were, for the Nations-that-are, and for the
Nations-yet-to-be. That Text is _EVERYBODY'S TEXT_.