I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires
which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I
minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt
and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay--as
did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire--and, after raising a
laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what a superior people
you are now--how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is
anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before
the Revolution of 1793. Well, that would be on the whole true, thank
God; but what need is there to say it?
Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins,
certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement,
by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its
evil. I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could
find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose
name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your
minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that
it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant
of the Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the
Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons--First, because the
Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved himself to be
such by his actions and their consequences--at least in the eyes of those
who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by
which all human history is
Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.
His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done,
in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is now as
unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work
was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it: and to do it,
as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done
before or since.
True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after
tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be
replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free
self-governed peoples:
The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than
once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have more than once
fulfilled His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in
Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some
2400 years ago. For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least
that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage
tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other,
speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing
utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people
who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to
their own fiends at home. Among such as these, empires did introduce
order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and
humanity. They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human
race till they had moulded them into one. They did it cruelly, clumsily,
ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was
not--alas, alas!--done somewhat ill?
Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his hardy
Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them first does
our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them first did
our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the
future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus--so strangely are all great
times and great movements of the human family linked to each other--to
his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and
I am speaking to you at this moment.
It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for
you, however clumsily, once more.
In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now
call Persia, the dwelling-place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the
sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest
blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek,
and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They had wandered
thither, say their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some
lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which
left them but two mouths of summer to ten of winter.
They despised at first--would that they had despised always!--the
luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs
of the Medes--a branch of their own race who had conquered and
intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of
their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but short-
lived Median Empire. "Soft countries," said Cyrus himself--so runs the
tale--"gave birth to small men. No region produced at once delightful
fruits and men of a war-like spirit." Letters were to them, probably,
then unknown. They borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their
art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they
conquered. From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads were
instructed but in two things--to speak the truth and to shoot with the
bow. To ride was the third necessary art, introduced, according to
Xenophon, after they had descended from their mountain fastnessess to
conquer the whole East.
Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda--Ormuzd, as he has been
called since--was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light and
life and good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of
heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the
tree, before the fire, before man the truthful, before the Devas and
beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good
thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth.
He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only with
prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown herb
Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was
not he, but the symbol--as was light and the sun--of the good spirit--of
Ahura Mazda. They had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no
temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a
sign of folly. They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of
the old world. When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, they
became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the
depths of national shame, captivity, and exile, saw in them
brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was
holding by His right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul
effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt
itself, should be crushed, though, alas! only for awhile, by men who felt
that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to
sweep out all that with the besom of destruction.
But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be happier,
times the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, disorder,
uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms. "He therefore is a
holy man," says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, "who has built a dwelling on
the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children,
and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who
cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law
of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices."
To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth
better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's
world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the
spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order
and of Good.
For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was not
for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense of the
difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful;
to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them
at last impersonate and a person.
Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their
great prophet, Zoroaster--splendour of gold, as I am told his name
signifies--who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who
lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. He, too, tried to
solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who
has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman,
Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned
being. He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd
alike in nature and in man. He was the cause of the fall of man, the
tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as
Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older
Zoroastrian creed. With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he
would not be eternal in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the
day when three prophets--the increasing light, the increasing truth, and
the existing truth--should arise and give to mankind the last three books
of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil
should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish
for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for
Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.
Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what
might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They were not a
_big_ nation. No; but they were a _great_ nation, even while they were
eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in
the sterile valleys of Farsistan.
And at last the hour and the man came. The story is half
legendary--differently told by different authors. Herodotus has one
tale, Xenophon another. The first, at least, had ample means of
information. Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the
height of its seeming might and splendour and effeminacy. He has married
his daughter, the Princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal-king
or prince of the pure Persian blood. One night the old man is troubled
with a dream. He sees a vine spring from his daughter, which overshadows
all Asia. He sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him that
Mandane will have a son who will reign in his stead. Having sons of his
own, and fearing for the succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her
child is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain.
The courtier relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on
the mountains. The herdsman relents in turn, and bring the babe up as
his own child.
When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at play
with the other herdboys, and they choose him for a mimic king. Some he
makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his messages. The
son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him seized by his guards
and chastised with the whip. The ancestral instincts of command and
discipline are showing early in the lad.
The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old king,
who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy. The boy answers in a
tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus would have answered,
that I must believe that both Xenophon's Cyrus and Herodotus's Cyrus
(like Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's Socrates) are real pictures of a
real character; and that Herodotus's story, though Xenophon says nothing
of it, is true.
He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. He had been
chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit. The boy whom
he had chastised was one of those who chose him. All the rest obeyed:
but he would not, till at last he got his due reward. "If I deserve
punishment for that," says the boy, "I am ready to submit."
The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose
features seem somewhat like his own. Likely enough in those days, when
an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of
complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A suspicion crosses
him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling
herdsman.
To the poor wretch's rapture the old king lets him go unharmed. He has a
more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise
confessed the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words. It
is best as it is. He has been very sorry himself for the child, and
Mandane's reproaches had gone to his heart. "Let Harpagus go home and
send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince. To-night there
will be great sacrifices in honour of the child's safety, and Harpagus is
to be a guest at the banquet."
Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the
king's meat? He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put
before him, out of which he is to take--in Median fashion--what he likes.
He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son. Like a true
Eastern he shows no signs of horror. The king asks him if he knew what
flesh he had been eating. He answers that he knew perfectly. That
whatever the king did pleased him.
Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive,
and bided his time. The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his
dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus--as we must now call the foundling
prince--had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let
to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life. But Harpagus does
not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. He has wrongs to
avenge on his grandfather. And it seems not altogether impossible to the
young mountaineer.
He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge
in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his
eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all
his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.
He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an
Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to
avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the Persians had no
cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king,
keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a
single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.
And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer and
his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward
towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian
cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to
them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe
whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and
affection by that righteousness--that truthfulness and justice--for which
Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all
time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book
of his--the "Cyropaedia." The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus--Asia
Minor as we call it now--goes down before them. Babylon itself goes
down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and
when Cyrus died--still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say--he
left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the
Mediterranean to Hindostan.
So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational
enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.
They are inclined to "relegate it into the region of myth;" in plain
English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe. What means
those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of
knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years
of Cyrus, I for myself cannot discover. And I say this without the least
wish to disparage these hypercritical persons. For there are--and more
there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this
earth--a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which
savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. They know
the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have
been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the
consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so much from
experience the abuse of that formula, that "a thing is so beautiful it
must be true," that they are inclined to reply: "Rather let us say
boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or
even refuse to believe _a priori_, and at first sight, all startling,
sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is
not as dull as the ledger of a dry-goods' store." But I think that
experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water
philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be
equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.
The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and
normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics,
startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial
crime and folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without
having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too
fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take
care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? Let the ditch-water
philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and
roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many
a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it
is true, usually by most common-place motives; but, for that reason,
ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and
baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that
demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all
nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-
water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the
consequences be what they may.
How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades? Were
they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other? Certainly not for
lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is not the history of your
own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most
startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of
the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man? Believe me,
man's passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled
down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human
movement. And a truer law of social science than any that political
economists are wont to lay down, is that old _Dov' e la donna_? of the
Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or
criminal, which was brought before him, _Dov' e la donna_? "Where is the
lady?" certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably
at the bottom of the matter.
Strangeness? Romance? Did any of you ever read--if you have not you
should read--Archbishop Whately's "Historic Doubts about the Emperor
Napoleon the First"? Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved, as
early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic
School, that the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be treated
by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no evidence
of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes
and strange defeats was probably invented by our Government in order to
pander to the vanity of the English nation.
I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition,
foreshadows, wittily enough--that if one or two thousand years hence,
when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and
fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future
Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by
them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous--and that all the
more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative
brains. What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at
Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still,
but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of
Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his
fellow-slaves?
But enough of this. To me these bits of romance often seem the truest,
as well as the most important portions of history.
When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the
frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare,
telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter,
telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That
must be true. It is so beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and
unexpected, that it is all the more likely _not_ to have been invented.
So with that other story--How young Cyrus, giving out that his
grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each
man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade
them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had
finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them into a great
meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father's
farm would yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when
they answered as was to be expected, how he opened his parable and told
them, "Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or to be free
with me."
Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the parables of
the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with
which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of
Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?
Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be
true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history
is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great historic
changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable
event. They have been preparing, perhaps for centuries. They are the
result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have
been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more
perfectly understood.
For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a
single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next,
if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by
long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.
Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe--the cannon, the
powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered the
Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers
seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire
itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough.
It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that
spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a
cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I
believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be
done, someone must come and do it--do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by
some single rash act--like that first fatal shot fired by an electric
spark.
But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.
I know not whether the "Cyropaedia" is much read in your schools and
universities. But it is one of the books which I should like to see,
either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every
young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is
better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's "Arcadia" or
Spenser's "Fairy Queen"--the ideal self-education of an ideal hero. And
the moral of the book--ponder it well, all young men who have the chance
or the hope of exercising authority among your follow-men--the noble and
most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid
and beneficent influence over our fellow-men lies, not through brute
force, not through cupidity, but through the highest morality; through
justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, modesty, courtesy, and all
which makes man or woman lovely in the eyes of mortals or of God.
Yes, the "Cyropaedia" is a noble book, about a noble personage. But I
cannot forget that there are nobler words by far concerning that same
noble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, which begins
"Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord"--in which the
inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall
of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the coming deliverance of
his own countrymen, speaks of the Persian hero in words so grand that
they have been often enough applied, and with all fitness, to one greater
than Cyrus, and than all men:
Who raised up the righteous man from the East,
And called him to attend his steps?
Who subdued nations at his presence,
And gave him dominion over kings?
And made them like the dust before his sword,
And the driven stubble before his bow?
He pursueth them, he passeth in safety,
By a way never trodden before by his feet.
Who hath performed and made these things,
Calling the generations from the beginning?
I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same.
Behold my servant, whom I will uphold;
My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth;
I will make my spirit rest upon him,
And he shall publish judgment to the nations.
He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour,
Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets.
The bruised reed he shall not break,
And the smoking flax he shall not quench.
He shall publish justice, and establish it.
His force shall not be abated, nor broken,
Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth,
And the distant nations shall wait for his Law.
Thus saith the God, even Jehovah,
Who created the heavens, and stretched them out;
Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce:
I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end,
And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee,
And I will give thee for a covenant to the people,
And for a light to the nations;
To open the eyes of the blind,
To bring the captives out of prison,
And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.
I am Jehovah--that is my name;
And my glory will I not give to another,
Nor my praise to the graven idols.
Who saith to Cyrus--Thou art my shepherd,
And he shall fulfil all my pleasure:
Who saith to Jerusalem--Thou shalt be built;
And to the Temple--Thou shalt be founded.
Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed,
To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand,
That I may subdue nations under him,
And loose the loins of kings;
That I may open before him the two-leaved doors,
And the gates shall not be shut;
I will go before thee
And bring the mountains low.
The gates of brass will I break in sunder,
And the bars of iron hew down.
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
And the hoards hid deep in secret places,
That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah.
I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me.
I am Jehovah, and none else;
Beside me there is no God.
I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me,
That they may know from the rising of the sun,
And from the west, that there is none beside me;
I am Jehovah, and none else;
Forming light and creating darkness;
Forming peace, and creating evil.
I, Jehovah, make all these.
This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the great Puritan of the Old
World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy the idols
of the East, while
The isles saw that, and feared,
And the ends of the earth were afraid;
They drew near, they came together;
Everyone helped his neighbour,
And said to his brother, Be of good courage.
The carver encouraged the smith,
He that smoothed with the hammer
Him that smote on the anvil;
Saying of the solder, It is good;
And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved;
But all in vain; for as the poet goes on:
Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped;
Their idols were upon the cattle,
A burden to the weary beast.
They stoop, they bow down together;
They could not deliver their own charge;
Themselves are gone into captivity.
And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his
empire?
Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the beginning.
We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made one
war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling before the
arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood down
the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, "Glut thyself with the
gore for which thou hast thirsted." But it may be true--for Xenophon
states it expressly, and with detail--that Cyrus, from the very time of
his triumph, became an Eastern despot, a sultan or a shah, living apart
from his people in mysterious splendour, in the vast fortified palace
which he built for himself; and imitating and causing his nobles and
satraps to imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom
he had conquered. And of this there is no doubt--that his sons and their
empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to
which all despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the
Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children no
longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to
be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more
shamefully than they had conquered the East.
This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, alas! as all human
epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.
But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these
Persians we owe that we are here to-night?
I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I
presume, when He is minded to do anything, has more than one way of doing
it.
But that we are now the last link in a chain of causes and effects which
reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward from the
plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.
For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from
their captivity--large numbers of them at least--and sent home to their
own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, to do
that deed?
Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say, if they will, that
Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the rising sun,
and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn
were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress
between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to talk of things noble,
pure, lovely, and of good report, would rather point you once more to the
magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th
chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say--There, upon the very face of the
document, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful
Persian and the faithful Jew--the two puritans of the Old World, the two
haters of lies, idolatries, superstitions, was actually as intense as it
ought to have been, as it must have been.
Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us
the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred
city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the
Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the
more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been scattered abroad as
colonies of captives.
Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued:
Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became
Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of
Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left
inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of
the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic
tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but
world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French is
to the modern.
Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And under
the wide domination of that later Roman Empire--which had subdued and
organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of those
old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers in their German forests
and on their Scandinavian shores--that Divine book was carried far and
wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to the
mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain
itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.
And that book--so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier
Persians--that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and
overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which
sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of your great nation.
That book gave them their instinct of Freedom, tempered by reverence for
Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not
only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with
the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt offering thou wouldst not;
Then said we, Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is written of
us, that we come to do thy will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the
chain of causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who
came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold,
that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply
after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they
wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.
And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have
we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if the
legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous
physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole
north of Asia, be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and age-
long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea
farther and farther to the northward, and placing between it and the
Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying
animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and
the sun?
What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be
the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled
the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth
and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions,
reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown? Why
not? For so are all human destinies
Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God.