I plainly see, you will never shut the temple of Janus. The Roman
Empire will never lose its pugnacious character while your sect
exists. The only danger is, lest the fever rage internally and consume
the vitals. If you sincerely wish your religion to be long-lived,
maintain in it the spirit of its constitution, and keep it patient,
humble, abstemious, domestic, and zealous only in the services of
humanity. Whenever the higher of your priesthood shall attain the
riches they are aiming at, the people will envy their possessions and
revolt from their impostures. Do not let them seize upon the palace,
and shove their God again into the manger.
_Timotheus._ Lucian! Lucian! I call this impiety.
_Lucian._ So do I, and shudder at its consequences. Caverns which at
first look inviting, the roof at the aperture green with overhanging
ferns and clinging mosses, then glittering with native gems and with
water as sparkling and pellucid, freshening the air all around; these
caverns grow darker and closer, until you find yourself among animals
that shun the daylight, adhering to the walls, hissing along the
bottom, flapping, screeching, gaping, glaring, making you shrink at
the sounds, and sicken at the smells, and afraid to advance or
retreat.
_Timotheus._ To what can this refer? Our caverns open on verdure, and
terminate in veins of gold.
_Lucian._ Veins of gold, my good Timotheus, such as your excavations
have opened and are opening, in the spirit of avarice and ambition,
will be washed (or as you would say, _purified_) in streams of blood.
Arrogance, intolerance, resistance to authority and contempt of law,
distinguish your aspiring sectarians from the other subjects of the
empire.
_Timotheus._ Blindness hath often a calm and composed countenance;
but, my Cousin Lucian! it usually hath also the advantage of a
cautious and a measured step. It hath pleased God to blind you, like
all the other adversaries of our faith; but He has given you no staff
to lean upon. You object against us the very vices from which we are
peculiarly exempt.
_Lucian._ Then it is all a story, a fable, a fabrication, about one of
your earlier leaders cutting off with his sword a servant's ear? If
the accusation is true, the offence is heavy. For not only was the
wounded man innocent of any provocation, but he is represented as
being in the service of the high priest at Jerusalem. Moreover, from
the direction and violence of the blow, it is evident that his life
was aimed at. According to law, you know, my dear cousin, all the
party might have been condemned to death, as accessories to an attempt
at murder. I am unwilling to think so unfavourably of your sect; nor
indeed do I see the possibility that, in such an outrage, the
principal could be pardoned. For any man but a soldier to go about
armed is against the Roman law, which, on that head, as on many
others, is borrowed from the Athenian; and it is incredible that in
any civilized country so barbarous a practice can be tolerated.
Travellers do indeed relate that, in certain parts of India, there are
princes at whose courts even civilians are armed. But _traveller_ has
occasionally the same signification as _liar_, and _India_ as _fable_.
However, if the practice really does exist in that remote and rarely
visited country, it must be in some region of it very far beyond the
Indus or the Ganges: for the nations situated between those rivers
are, and were in the reign of Alexander, and some thousand years
before his birth, as civilized as the Europeans; nay, incomparably
more courteous, more industrious, and more pacific; the three grand
criterions.
But answer my question: is there any foundation for so mischievous a
report?
_Timotheus._ There was indeed, so to say, an ear, or something of the
kind, abscinded; probably by mistake. But high priests' servants are
propense to follow the swaggering gait of their masters, and to carry
things with a high hand, in such wise as to excite the choler of the
most quiet. If you knew the character of the eminently holy man who
punished the atrocious insolence of that bloody-minded wretch, you
would be sparing of your animadversions. We take him for our model.
_Lucian._ I see you do.
_Timotheus._ We proclaim him Prince of the Apostles.
_Lucian._ I am the last in the world to question his princely
qualifications; but, if I might advise you, it should be to follow in
preference Him whom you acknowledge to be an unerring guide; who
delivered to you His ordinances with His own hand, equitable, plain,
explicit, compendious, and complete; who committed no violence, who
countenanced no injustice, whose compassion was without weakness,
whose love was without frailty, whose life was led in humility, in
purity, in beneficence, and, at the end, laid down in obedience to His
Father's will.
_Timotheus._ Ah, Lucian! what strangely imperfect notions! all that is
little.
_Lucian._ Enough to follow.
_Timotheus._ Not enough to compel others. I did indeed hope, O Lucian!
that you would again come forward with the irresistible arrows of your
wit, and unite with us against our adversaries. By what you have just
spoken, I doubt no longer that you approve of the doctrines inculcated
by the blessed Founder of our religion.
_Lucian._ To the best of my understanding.
_Timotheus._ So ardent is my desire for the salvation of your precious
soul, O my cousin! that I would devote many hours of every day to
disputation with you on the principal points of our Christian
controversy.
_Lucian._ Many thanks, my kind Timotheus! But I think the blessed
Founder of your religion very strictly forbade that there should be
_any_ points of controversy. Not only has He prohibited them on the
doctrines He delivered, but on everything else. Some of the most
obstinate might never have doubted of His Divinity, if the conduct of
His followers had not repelled them from the belief of it. How can
they imagine you sincere when they see you disobedient? It is in vain
for you to protest that you worship the God of Peace, when you are
found daily in the courts and market-places with clenched fists and
bloody noses. I acknowledge the full value of your offer; but really I
am as anxious for the salvation of your precious time as you appear to
be for the salvation of my precious soul, particularly since I am
come to the conclusion that souls cannot be lost, and that time can.
_Timotheus._ We mean by _salvation_ exemption from eternal torments.
_Lucian._ Among all my old gods and their children, morose as some of
the senior are, and mischievous as are some of the junior, I have
never represented the worst of them as capable of inflicting such
atrocity. Passionate and capricious and unjust are several of them;
but a skin stripped off the shoulder, and a liver tossed to a vulture,
are among the worst of their inflictions.
_Timotheus._ This is scoffing.
_Lucian._ Nobody but an honest man has a right to scoff at anything.
_Timotheus._ And yet people of a very different cast are usually those
who scoff the most.
_Lucian._ We are apt to push forward at that which we are without: the
low-born at titles and distinctions, the silly at wit, the knave at
the semblance of probity. But I was about to remark, that an honest
man may fairly scoff at all philosophies and religions which are
proud, ambitious, intemperate, and contradictory. The thing most
adverse to the spirit and essence of them all is falsehood. It is the
business of the philosophical to seek truth: it is the office of the
religious to worship her; under what name is unimportant. The
falsehood that the tongue commits is slight in comparison with what is
conceived by the heart, and executed by the whole man, throughout
life. If, professing love and charity to the human race at large, I
quarrel day after day with my next neighbour; if, professing that the
rich can never see God, I spend in the luxuries of my household a
talent monthly; if, professing to place so much confidence in His
word, that, in regard to wordly weal, I need take no care for
to-morrow, I accumulate stores even beyond what would be necessary,
though I quite distrusted both His providence and His veracity; if,
professing that 'he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord', I
question the Lord's security, and haggle with Him about the amount of
the loan; if, professing that I am their steward, I keep ninety-nine
parts in the hundred as the emolument of my stewardship; how, when God
hates liars and punishes defrauders, shall I, and other such thieves
and hypocrites, fare hereafter?
_Timotheus._ Let us hope there are few of them.
_Lucian._ We cannot hope against what is: we may, however, hope that
in future these will be fewer; but never while the overseers of a
priesthood look for offices out of it, taking the lead in politics, in
debate, and strife. Such men bring to ruin all religion, but their own
first, and raise unbelievers not only in Divine Providence, but in
human faith.
_Timotheus._ If they leave the altar for the market-place, the
sanctuary for the senate-house, and agitate party questions instead of
Christian verities, everlasting punishments await them.
_Lucian._ Everlasting?
_Timotheus._ Certainly: at the very least. I rank it next to heresy in
the catalogue of sins; and the Church supports my opinion.
_Lucian._ I have no measure for ascertaining the distance between the
opinions and practices of men; I only know that they stand widely
apart in all countries on the most important occasions; but this
newly-hatched word _heresy_, alighting on my ear, makes me rub it. A
beneficent God descends on earth in the human form, to redeem us from
the slavery of sin, from the penalty of our passions: can you imagine
He will punish an error in opinion, or even an obstinacy in unbelief,
with everlasting torments? Supposing it highly criminal to refuse to
weigh a string of arguments, or to cross-question a herd of witnesses,
on a subject which no experience has warranted and no sagacity can
comprehend; supposing it highly criminal to be contented with the
religion which our parents taught us, which they bequeathed to us as
the most precious of possessions, and which it would have broken their
hearts if they had foreseen we should cast aside; yet are eternal
pains the just retribution of what at worst is but indifference and
supineness?
_Timotheus._ Our religion has clearly this advantage over yours: it
teaches us to regulate our passions.
_Lucian._ Rather say it _tells_ us. I believe all religions do the
same; some indeed more emphatically and primarily than others; but
_that_ indeed would be incontestably of Divine origin, and
acknowledged at once by the most sceptical, which should thoroughly
teach it. Now, my friend Timotheus, I think you are about seventy-five
years of age.
_Timotheus._ Nigh upon it.
_Lucian._ Seventy-five years, according to my calculation, are
equivalent to seventy-five gods and goddesses in regulating our
passions for us, if we speak of the amatory, which are always thought
in every stage of life the least to be pardoned.
_Timotheus._ Execrable!
_Lucian._ I am afraid the sourest hang longest on the tree. Mimnermus
says:
In early youth we often sigh
Because our pulses beat so high;
All this we conquer, and at last
We sigh that we are grown so chaste.
_Timotheus._ Swine!
_Lucian._ No animal sighs oftener or louder. But, my dear cousin, the
quiet swine is less troublesome and less odious than the grumbling and
growling and fierce hyena, which will not let the dead rest in their
graves. We may be merry with the follies and even the vices of men,
without doing or wishing them harm; punishment should come from the
magistrate, not from us. If we are to give pain to any one because he
thinks differently from us, we ought to begin by inflicting a few
smart stripes on ourselves; for both upon light and upon grave
occasions, if we have thought much and often, our opinions must have
varied. We are always fond of seizing and managing what appertains to
others. In the savage state all belongs to all. Our neighbours the
Arabs, who stand between barbarism and civilization, waylay
travellers, and plunder their equipage and their gold. The wilier
marauders in Alexandria start up from under the shadow of temples,
force us to change our habiliments for theirs, and strangle us with
fingers dipped in holy water if we say they sit uneasily.
_Timotheus._ This is not the right view of things.
_Lucian._ That is never the right view which lets in too much light.
About two centuries have elapsed since your religion was founded. Show
me the pride it has humbled; show me the cruelty it has mitigated;
show me the lust it has extinguished or repressed. I have now been
living ten years in Alexandria; and you never will accuse me, I think,
of any undue partiality for the system in which I was educated; yet,
from all my observation, I find no priest or elder, in your community,
wise, tranquil, firm, and sedate as Epicurus, and Carneades, and Zeno,
and Epictetus; or indeed in the same degree as some who were often
called forth into political and military life; Epaminondas, for
instance, and Phocion.
_Timotheus._ I pity them from my soul: they were ignorant of the
truth: they are lost, my cousin! take my word for it, they are lost
men.
_Lucian._ Unhappily, they are. I wish we had them back again; or
that, since we have lost them, we could at least find among us the
virtues they left for our example.
_Timotheus._ Alas, my poor cousin! you too are blind; you do not
understand the plainest words, nor comprehend those verities which are
the most evident and palpable. Virtues! if the poor wretches had any,
they were false ones.
_Lucian._ Scarcely ever has there been a politician, in any free
state, without much falsehood and duplicity. I have named the most
illustrious exceptions. Slender and irregular lines of a darker colour
run along the bright blade that decides the fate of nations, and may
indeed be necessary to the perfection of its temper. The great warrior
has usually his darker lines of character, necessary (it may be) to
constitute his greatness. No two men possess the same quantity of the
same virtues, if they have many or much. We want some which do not far
outstep us, and which we may follow with the hope of reaching; we want
others to elevate, and others to defend us. The order of things would
be less beautiful without this variety. Without the ebb and flow of
our passions, but guided and moderated by a beneficent light above,
the ocean of life would stagnate; and zeal, devotion, eloquence, would
become dead carcasses, collapsing and wasting on unprofitable sands.
The vices of some men cause the virtues of others, as corruption is
the parent of fertility.
_Timotheus._ O my cousin! this doctrine is diabolical.
_Lucian._ What is it?
_Timotheus._ Diabolical; a strong expression in daily use among us. We
turn it a little from its origin.
_Lucian._ Timotheus, I love to sit by the side of a clear water,
although there is nothing in it but naked stones. Do not take the
trouble to muddy the stream of language for my benefit; I am not about
to fish in it.
_Timotheus._ Well, we will speak about things which come nearer to
your apprehension. I only wish you were somewhat less indifferent in
your choice between the true and the false.
_Lucian._ We take it for granted that what is not true must be false.
_Timotheus._ Surely we do.
_Lucian._ This is erroneous.
_Timotheus._ Are you grown captious? Pray explain.
_Lucian._ What is not true, I need not say, must be untrue; but that
alone is false which is intended to deceive. A witness may be
mistaken, yet would not you call him a false witness unless he
asserted what he knew to be false.
_Timotheus._ Quibbles upon words!
_Lucian._ On words, on quibbles, if you please to call distinctions
so, rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck
ineradicably in a million hearts, and envenomed every hour throughout
their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath hung the destiny of
nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the
immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness.
It is because a word is unsusceptible of explanation, or because they
who employed it were impatient of any, that enormous evils have
prevailed, not only against our common sense, but against our common
humanity. Hence the most pernicious of absurdities, far exceeding in
folly and mischief the worship of threescore gods; namely, that an
implicit faith in what outrages our reason, which we know is God's
gift, and bestowed on us for our guidance, that this weak, blind,
stupid faith is surer of His favour than the constant practice of
every human virtue. They at whose hands one prodigious lie, such as
this, hath been accepted, may reckon on their influence in the
dissemination of many smaller, and may turn them easily to their own
account. Be sure they will do it sooner or later. The fly floats on
the surface for a while, but up springs the fish at last and swallows
it.
_Timotheus._ Was ever man so unjust as you are? The abominable old
priesthoods are avaricious and luxurious: ours is willing to stand or
fall by maintaining its ordinances of fellowship and frugality. Point
out to me a priest of our religion whom you could, by any temptation
or entreaty, so far mislead, that he shall reserve for his own
consumption one loaf, one plate of lentils, while another poor
Christian hungers. In the meanwhile the priests of Isis are proud and
wealthy, and admit none of the indigent to their tables. And now, to
tell you the whole truth, my Cousin Lucian, I come to you this morning
to propose that we should lay our heads together and compose a merry
dialogue on these said priests of Isis. What say you?
_Lucian._ These said priests of Isis have already been with me,
several times, on a similar business in regard to yours.
_Timotheus._ Malicious wretches!
_Lucian._ Beside, they have attempted to persuade me that your
religion is borrowed from theirs, altering a name a little and laying
the scene of action in a corner, in the midst of obscurity and ruins.
_Timotheus._ The wicked dogs! the hellish liars! We have nothing in
common with such vile impostors. Are they not ashamed of taking such
unfair means of lowering us in the estimation of our fellow-citizens?
And so, they artfully came to you, craving any spare jibe to throw
against us! They lie open to these weapons; we do not: we stand above
the malignity, above the strength, of man. You would do justly in
turning their own devices against them: it would be amusing to see how
they would look. If you refuse me, I am resolved to write a Dialogue
of the Dead, myself, and to introduce these hypocrites in it.
_Lucian._ Consider well first, my good Timotheus, whether you can do
any such thing with propriety; I mean to say judiciously in regard to
composition.
_Timotheus._ I always thought you generous and open-hearted, and quite
inaccessible to jealousy.
_Lucian._ Let nobody ever profess himself so much as that: for,
although he may be insensible of the disease, it lurks within him, and
only waits its season to break out. But really, my cousin, at present
I feel no symptoms: and, to prove that I am ingenuous and sincere with
you, these are my reasons for dissuasion. We believers in the Homeric
family of gods and goddesses, believe also in the locality of Tartarus
and Elysium. We entertain no doubt whatever that the passions of men
and demigods and gods are nearly the same above ground and below; and
that Achilles would dispatch his spear through the body of any shade
who would lead Briseis too far among the myrtles, or attempt to throw
the halter over the ears of any chariot horse belonging to him in the
meads of asphodel. We admit no doubt of these verities, delivered down
to us from the ages when Theseus and Hercules had descended into Hades
itself. Instead of a few stadions in a cavern, with a bank and a bower
at the end of it, under a very small portion of our diminutive Hellas,
you Christians possess the whole cavity of the earth for punishment,
and the whole convex of the sky for felicity.
_Timotheus._ Our passions are burnt out amid the fires of
purification, and our intellects are elevated to the enjoyment of
perfect intelligence.
_Lucian._ How silly then and incongruous would it be, not to say how
impious, to represent your people as no better and no wiser than they
were before, and discoursing on subjects which no longer can or ought
to concern them. Christians must think your Dialogue of the Dead no
less irreligious than their opponents think mine, and infinitely more
absurd. If indeed you are resolved on this form of composition, there
is no topic which may not, with equal facility, be discussed on
earth; and you may intersperse as much ridicule as you please, without
any fear of censure for inconsistency or irreverence. Hitherto such
writers have confined their view mostly to speculative points,
sophistic reasonings, and sarcastic interpellations.
_Timotheus._ Ha! you are always fond of throwing a little pebble at
the lofty Plato, whom we, on the contrary, are ready to receive (in a
manner) as one of ourselves.
_Lucian._ To throw pebbles is a very uncertain way of showing where
lie defects. Whenever I have mentioned him seriously, I have brought
forward, not accusations, but passages from his writings, such as no
philosopher or scholar or moralist can defend.
_Timotheus._ His doctrines are too abstruse and too sublime for you.
_Lucian._ Solon, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, are more sublime, if truth
is sublimity.
_Timotheus._ Truth is, indeed; for God is truth.
_Lucian._ We are upon earth to learn what can be learnt upon earth,
and not to speculate on what never can be. This you, O Timotheus, may
call philosophy: to me it appears the idlest of curiosity; for every
other kind may teach us something, and may lead to more beyond. Let
men learn what benefits men; above all things, to contract their
wishes, to calm their passions, and, more especially, to dispel their
fears. Now these are to be dispelled, not by collecting clouds, but by
piercing and scattering them. In the dark we may imagine depths and
heights immeasurable, which, if a torch be carried right before us, we
find it easy to leap across. Much of what we call sublime is only the
residue of infancy, and the worst of it.
The philosophers I quoted are too capacious for schools and systems.
Without noise, without ostentation, without mystery, not quarrelsome,
not captious, not frivolous, their lives were commentaries on their
doctrine. Never evaporating into mist, never stagnating into mire,
their limpid and broad morality runs parallel with the lofty summits
of their genius.
_Timotheus._ Genius! was ever genius like Plato's?
_Lucian._ The most admired of his Dialogues, his _Banquet_, is beset
with such puerilities, deformed with such pedantry, and disgraced with
such impurity, that none but the thickest beards, and chiefly of the
philosophers and the satyrs, should bend over it. On a former occasion
he has given us a specimen of history, than which nothing in our
language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love,
for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his
taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this
dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so
little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been
originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be
joking: who knows?
_Timotheus._ Forbear! forbear! do not call this notion a silly one:
he took it from our Holy Scriptures, but perverted it somewhat. Woman
was made from man's rib, and did not require to be cut asunder all
the way down: this is no proof of bad reasoning, but merely of
misinterpretation.
_Lucian._ If you would rather have bad reasoning, I will adduce a
little of it. Farther on, he wishes to extol the wisdom of Agathon by
attributing to him such a sentence as this:
'It is evident that Love is the most beautiful of the gods, _because_
he is the youngest of them.'