munificence. Soon was the valise well filled and rammed down. Plenty
of boys were in readiness to carry it to the boat. Aulus waved them
off, looking at some angrily, at others suspiciously. Boarding the
skiff, he lowered his treasure with care and caution, staggering a
little at the weight, and shaking it gently on deck, with his ear
against it: and then, finding all safe and compact, he sat on it; but
as tenderly as a pullet on her first eggs. When he was landed, his
care was even greater, and whoever came near him was warned off with
loud vociferations. Anxiously as the other passengers were invited by
the innkeepers to give their houses the preference, Aulus was
importuned most: the others were only beset; he was borne off in
triumphant captivity. He ordered a bedroom, and carried his valise
with him; he ordered a bath, and carried with him his valise. He
started up from the company at dinner, struck his forehead, and cried
out, 'Where is my valise?' 'We are honest men here,' replied the host.
'You have left it, sir, in your chamber: where else indeed should you
leave it?'
'Honesty is seated on your brow,' exclaimed Aulus; 'but there are few
to be trusted in the world we live in. I now believe I can eat.' And
he gave a sure token of the belief that was in him, not without a
start now and then and a finger at his ear, as if he heard somebody
walking in the direction of his bedchamber. Now began his first
miracle: for now he contrived to pick up, from time to time, a little
money. In the presence of his host and fellow-lodgers, he threw a few
obols, negligently and indifferently, among the beggars. 'These poor
creatures,' said he, 'know a new-comer as well as the gnats do: in one
half-hour I am half ruined by them; and this daily.'
Nearly a month had elapsed since his arrival, and no account of board
and lodging had been delivered or called for. Suspicion at length
arose in the host whether he really was rich. When another man's
honesty is doubted, the doubter's is sometimes in jeopardy. The host
was tempted to unsew the valise. To his amazement and horror he found
only shreds within it. However, he was determined to be cautious, and
to consult his wife, who, although a Christian like Aulus, and much
edified by his discourses, might dissent from him in regard to a
community of goods, at least in her own household, and might defy him
to prove by any authority that the doctrine was meant for innkeepers.
Aulus, on his return in the evening, found out that his valise had
been opened. He hurried back, threw its contents into the canal, and,
borrowing an old cloak, he tucked it up under his dress, and returned.
Nobody had seen him enter or come back again, nor was it immediately
that his host or hostess were willing to appear. But, after he had
called them loudly for some time, they entered his apartment: and he
thus addressed the woman:
'O Eucharis! no words are requisite to convince you (firm as you are
in the faith) of eternal verities, however mysterious. But your
unhappy husband has betrayed his incredulity in regard to the most
awful. If my prayers, offered up in our holy temples all day long,
have been heard, and that they have been heard I feel within me the
blessed certainty, something miraculous has been vouchsafed for the
conversion of this miserable sinner. Until the present hour, the
valise before you was filled with precious relics from the apparel of
saints and martyrs, fresh as when on them.' 'True, by Jove!' said the
husband to himself. 'Within the present hour,' continued Aulus, 'they
are united into one raiment, signifying our own union, our own
restoration.'
He drew forth the cloak, and fell on his face. Eucharis fell also, and
kissed the saintly head prostrate before her. The host's eyes were
opened, and he bewailed his hardness of heart. Aulus is now occupied
in strengthening his faith, not without an occasional support to the
wife's: all three live together in unity.
_Timotheus._ And do you make a joke even of this? Will you never cease
from the habitude?
_Lucian._ Too soon. The farther we descend into the vale of years, the
fewer illusions accompany us: we have little inclination, little time,
for jocularity and laughter. Light things are easily detached from us,
and we shake off heavier as we can. Instead of levity, we are liable
to moroseness: for always near the grave there are more briers than
flowers, unless we plant them ourselves, or our friends supply them.
_Timotheus._ Thinking thus, do you continue to dissemble or to distort
the truth? The shreds are become a cable for the faithful. That they
were miraculously turned into one entire garment who shall gainsay?
How many hath it already clothed with righteousness? Happy men,
casting their doubts away before it! Who knows, O Cousin Lucian, but
on some future day you yourself will invoke the merciful interposition
of Aulus!
_Lucian._ Possibly: for if ever I fall among thieves, nobody is
likelier to be at the head of them.
_Timotheus._ Uncharitable man! how suspicious! how ungenerous! how
hardened in unbelief! Reason is a bladder on which you may paddle like
a child as you swim in summer waters: but, when the winds rise and the
waves roughen, it slips from under you, and you sink; yes, O Lucian,
you sink into a gulf whence you never can emerge.
_Lucian._ I deem those the wisest who exert the soonest their own
manly strength, now with the stream and now against it, enjoying the
exercise in fine weather, venturing out in foul, if need be, yet
avoiding not only rocks and whirlpools, but also shallows. In such a
light, my cousin, I look on your dispensations. I shut them out as we
shut out winds blowing from the desert; hot, debilitating, oppressive,
laden with impalpable sands and pungent salts, and inflicting an
incurable blindness.
_Timotheus._ Well, Cousin Lucian! I can bear all you say while you are
not witty. Let me bid you farewell in this happy interval.
_Lucian._ Is it not serious and sad, O my cousin, that what the Deity
hath willed to lie incomprehensible in His mysteries, we should fall
upon with tooth and nail, and ferociously growl over, or ignorantly
dissect?
_Timotheus._ Ho! now you come to be serious and sad, there are hopes
of you. Truth always begins or ends so.
_Lucian._ Undoubtedly. But I think it more reverential to abstain from
that which, with whatever effort, I should never understand.
_Timotheus._ You are lukewarm, my cousin, you are lukewarm. A most
dangerous state.
_Lucian._ For milk to continue in, not for men. I would not fain be
frozen or scalded.
_Timotheus._ Alas! you are blind, my sweet cousin!
_Lucian._ Well; do not open my eyes with pincers, nor compose for them
a collyrium of spurge.
May not men eat and drink and talk together, and perform in relation
one to another all the duties of social life, whose opinions are
different on things immediately under their eyes? If they can and do,
surely they may as easily on things equally above the comprehension of
each party. The wisest and most virtuous man in the whole extent of
the Roman Empire is Plutarch of Cheronaea: yet Plutarch holds a firm
belief in the existence of I know not how many gods, every one of whom
has committed notorious misdemeanours. The nearest to the Cheronaean
in virtue and wisdom is Trajan, who holds all the gods dog-cheap.
These two men are friends. If either of them were influenced by your
religion, as inculcated and practised by the priesthood, he would be
the enemy of the other, and wisdom and virtue would plead for the
delinquent in vain. When your religion had existed, as you tell us,
about a century, Caius Caecilius, of Novum Comum, was proconsul in
Bithynia. Trajan, the mildest and most equitable of mankind, desirous
to remove from them, as far as might be, the hatred and invectives of
those whose old religion was assailed by them, applied to Caecilius
for information on their behaviour as good citizens. The reply of
Caecilius was favourable. Had Trajan applied to the most eminent and
authoritative of the sect, they would certainly have brought into
jeopardy all who differed in one tittle from any point of their
doctrine or discipline. For the thorny and bitter aloe of dissension
required less than a century to flower on the steps of your temple.
_Timotheus._ You are already half a Christian, in exposing to the
world the vanities both of philosophy and of power.
_Lucian._ I have done no such thing: I have exposed the vanities of
the philosophizing and the powerful. Philosophy is admirable; and
Power may be glorious: the one conduces to truth, the other has nearly
all the means of conferring peace and happiness, but it usually, and
indeed almost always, takes a contrary direction. I have ridiculed the
futility of speculative minds, only when they would pave the clouds
instead of the streets. To see distant things better than near is a
certain proof of a defective sight. The people I have held in derision
never turn their eyes to what they can see, but direct them
continually where nothing is to be seen. And this, by their disciples,
is called the sublimity of speculation! There is little merit
acquired, or force exhibited, in blowing off a feather that would
settle on my nose: and this is all I have done in regard to the
philosophers: but I claim for myself the approbation of humanity, in
having shown the true dimensions of the great. The highest of them are
no higher than my tunic; but they are high enough to trample on the
necks of those wretches who throw themselves on the ground before
them.
_Timotheus._ Was Alexander of Macedon no higher?
_Lucian._ What region of the earth, what city, what theatre, what
library, what private study, hath he enlightened? If you are silent, I
may well be. It is neither my philosophy nor your religion which casts
the blood and bones of men in their faces, and insists on the most
reverence for those who have made the most unhappy. If the Romans
scourged by the hands of children the schoolmaster who would have
betrayed them, how greatly more deserving of flagellation, from the
same quarter, are those hundreds of pedagogues who deliver up the
intellects of youth to such immoral revellers and mad murderers! They
would punish a thirsty child for purloining a bunch of grapes from a
vineyard, and the same men on the same day would insist on his
reverence for the subverter of Tyre, the plunderer of Babylon, and the
incendiary of Persepolis. And are these men teachers? are these men
philosophers? are these men priests? Of all the curses that ever
afflicted the earth, I think Alexander was the worst. Never was he in
so little mischief as when he was murdering his friends.
_Timotheus._ Yet he built this very city; a noble and opulent one when
Rome was of hurdles and rushes.
_Lucian._ He built it! I wish, O Timotheus! he had been as well
employed as the stone-cutters or the plasterers. No, no: the wisest of
architects planned the most beautiful and commodious of cities, by
which, under a rational government and equitable laws, Africa might
have been civilized to the centre, and the palm have extended her
conquests through the remotest desert. Instead of which, a dozen of
Macedonian thieves rifled a dying drunkard and murdered his children.
In process of time, another drunkard reeled hitherward from Rome, made
an easy mistake in mistaking a palace for a brothel, permitted a
stripling boy to beat him soundly, and a serpent to receive the last
caresses of his paramour.
Shame upon historians and pedagogues for exciting the worst passions
of youth by the display of such false glories! If your religion hath
any truth or influence, her professors will extinguish the promontory
lights, which only allure to breakers. They will be assiduous in
teaching the young and ardent that great abilities do not constitute
great men, without the right and unremitting application of them; and
that, in the sight of Humanity and Wisdom, it is better to erect one
cottage than to demolish a hundred cities. Down to the present day we
have been taught little else than falsehood. We have been told to do
this thing and that: we have been told we shall be punished unless we
do: but at the same time we are shown by the finger that prosperity
and glory, and the esteem of all about us, rest upon other and very
different foundations. Now, do the ears or the eyes seduce the most
easily and lead the most directly to the heart? But both eyes and ears
are won over, and alike are persuaded to corrupt us.
_Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I was leaving you with the strangest of
all notions in my head. I began to think for a moment that you doubted
my sincerity in the religion I profess; and that a man of your
admirable good sense, and at your advanced age, could reject that only
sustenance which supports us through the grave into eternal life.
_Lucian._ I am the most docile and practicable of men, and never
reject what people set before me: for if it is bread, it is good for
my own use; if bone or bran, it will do for my dog or mule. But,
although you know my weakness and facility, it is unfair to expect I
should have admitted at once what the followers and personal friends
of your Master for a long time hesitated to receive. I remember to
have read in one of the early commentators, that His disciples
themselves could not swallow the miracle of the loaves; and one who
wrote more recently says, that even His brethren did not believe in
Him.
_Timotheus._ Yet, finally, when they have looked over each other's
accounts, they cast them up, and make them all tally in the main sum;
and if one omits an article, the next supplies its place with a
commodity of the same value. What would you have? But it is of little
use to argue on religion with a man who, professing his readiness to
believe, and even his credulity, yet disbelieves in miracles.
_Lucian._ I should be obstinate and perverse if I disbelieved in the
existence of a thing for no better reason than because I never saw it,
and cannot understand its operations. Do you believe, O Timotheus,
that Perictione, the mother of Plato, became his mother by the sole
agency of Apollo's divine spirit, under the phantasm of that god?
_Timotheus._ I indeed believe such absurdities?
_Lucian._ You touch me on a vital part if you call an absurdity the
religion or philosophy in which I was educated. Anaxalides, and
Clearagus, and Speusippus, his own nephew, assert it. Who should know
better than they?
_Timotheus._ Where are their proofs?
_Lucian._ I would not be so indelicate as to require them on such an
occasion. A short time ago I conversed with an old centurion, who was
in service by the side of Vespasian, when Titus, and many officers and
soldiers of the army, and many captives, were present, and who saw one
Eleazar put a ring to the nostril of a demoniac (as the patient was
called) and draw the demon out of it.
_Timotheus._ And do you pretend to believe this nonsense?
_Lucian._ I only believe that Vespasian and Titus had nothing to gain
or accomplish by the miracle; and that Eleazar, if he had been
detected in a trick by two acute men and several thousand enemies, had
nothing to look forward to but a cross--the only piece of upholstery
for which Judea seems to have either wood or workmen, and which are
as common in that country as direction-posts are in any other.
_Timotheus._ The Jews are a stiff-necked people.
_Lucian._ On such occasions, no doubt.
_Timotheus._ Would you, O Lucian, be classed among the atheists, like
Epicurus?
_Lucian._ It lies not at my discretion what name shall be given me at
present or hereafter, any more than it did at my birth. But I wonder
at the ignorance and precipitancy of those who call Epicurus an
atheist. He saw on the same earth with himself a great variety of
inferior creatures, some possessing more sensibility and more
thoughtfulness than others. Analogy would lead so contemplative a
reasoner to the conclusion that if many were inferior and in sight,
others might be superior and out of sight. He never disbelieved in the
existence of the gods; he only disbelieved that they troubled their
heads with our concerns. Have they none of their own? If they are
happy, does their happiness depend on us, comparatively so imbecile
and vile? He believed, as nearly all nations do, in different ranks
and orders of superhuman beings; and perhaps he thought (but I never
was in his confidence or counsels) that the higher were rather in
communication with the next to them in intellectual faculties, than
with the most remote. To me the suggestion appears by no means
irrational, that if we are managed or cared for at all by beings wiser
than ourselves (which in truth would be no sign of any great wisdom in
them), it can only be by such as are very far from perfection, and who
indulge us in the commission of innumerable faults and follies, for
their own speculation or amusement.
_Timotheus._ There is only one such; and he is the devil.
_Lucian._ If he delights in our wickedness, which you believe, he must
be incomparably the happiest of beings, which you do not believe. No
god of Epicurus rests his elbow on his armchair with less energetic
exertion or discomposure.
_Timotheus._ We lead holier and purer lives than such ignorant mortals
as are not living under Grace.
_Lucian._ I also live under Grace, O Timotheus! and I venerate her for
the pleasures I have received at her hands. I do not believe she has
quite deserted me. If my grey hairs are unattractive to her, and if
the trace of her fingers is lost in the wrinkles of my forehead, still
I sometimes am told it is discernible even on the latest and coldest
of my writings.
_Timotheus._ You are wilful in misapprehension. The Grace of which I
speak is adverse to pleasure and impurity.
_Lucian._ Rightly do you separate impurity and pleasure, which indeed
soon fly asunder when the improvident would unite them. But never
believe that tenderness of heart signifies corruption of morals, if
you happen to find it (which indeed is unlikely) in the direction you
have taken; on the contrary, no two qualities are oftener found
together, on mind as on matter, than hardness and lubricity.
Believe me, Cousin Timotheus, when we come to eighty years of age we
are all Essenes. In our kingdom of heaven there is no marrying or
giving in marriage; and austerity in ourselves, when Nature holds over
us the sharp instrument with which Jupiter operated on Saturn, makes
us austere to others. But how happens it that you, both old and young,
break every bond which connected you anciently with the Essenes? Not
only do you marry (a height of wisdom to which I never have attained,
although in others I commend it), but you never share your substance
with the poorest of your community, as they did, nor live simply and
frugally, nor purchase nor employ slaves, nor refuse rank and offices
in the State, nor abstain from litigation, nor abominate and execrate
the wounds and cruelties of war. The Essenes did all this, and greatly
more, if Josephus and Philo, whose political and religious tenets are
opposite to theirs, are credible and trustworthy.
_Timotheus._ Doubtless you would also wish us to retire into the
desert, and eschew the conversation of mankind.
_Lucian._ No, indeed; but I would wish the greater part of your people
to eschew mine, for they bring all the worst of the desert with them
whenever they enter; its smothering heats, its blinding sands, its
sweeping suffocation. Return to the pure spirit of the Essenes,
without their asceticism; cease from controversy, and drop party
designations. If you will not do this, do less, and be merely what you
profess to be, which is quite enough for an honest, a virtuous, and a
religious man.
_Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I did not come hither to receive a lecture
from you.
_Lucian._ I have often given a dinner to a friend who did not come to
dine with me.
_Timotheus._ Then, I trust, you gave him something better for dinner
than bay-salt and dandelions. If you will not assist us in nettling
our enemies a little for their absurdities and impositions, let me
entreat you, however, to let us alone, and to make no remarks on us.
I myself run into no extravagances, like the Essenes, washing and
fasting, and retiring into solitude. I am not called to them; when I
am, I go.
_Lucian._ I am apprehensive the Lord may afflict you with deafness in
that ear.
_Timotheus._ Nevertheless, I am indifferent to the world, and all
things in it. This, I trust, you will acknowledge to be true religion
and true philosophy.
_Lucian._ That is not philosophy which betrays an indifference to
those for whose benefit philosophy was designed; and those are the
whole human race. But I hold it to be the most unphilosophical thing
in the world to call away men from useful occupations and mutual help,
to profitless speculations and acrid controversies. Censurable enough,
and contemptible, too, is that supercilious philosopher, sneeringly
sedate, who narrates in full and flowing periods the persecutions and
tortures of a fellow-man, led astray by his credulity, and ready to
die in the assertion of what in his soul he believes to be the truth.
But hardly less censurable, hardly less contemptible, is the
tranquilly arrogant sectarian, who denies that wisdom or honesty can
exist beyond the limits of his own ill-lighted chamber.
_Timotheus._ What! is he sanguinary?
_Lucian._ Whenever he can be, he is; and he always has it in his power
to be even worse than that, for he refuses his custom to the
industrious and honest shopkeeper who has been taught to think
differently from himself in matters which he has had no leisure to
study, and by which, if he had enjoyed that leisure, he would have
been a less industrious and a less expert artificer.
_Timotheus._ We cannot countenance those hard-hearted men who refuse
to hear the word of the Lord.
_Lucian._ The hard-hearted knowing this of the tender-hearted, and
receiving the declaration from their own lips, will refuse to hear the
word of the Lord all their lives.
_Timotheus._ Well, well; it cannot be helped. I see, cousin, my hopes
of obtaining a little of your assistance in your own pleasant way are
disappointed; but it is something to have conceived a better hope of
saving your soul, from your readiness to acknowledge your belief in
miracles.
_Lucian._ Miracles have existed in all ages and in all religions.
Witnesses to some of them have been numerous; to others of them fewer.
Occasionally, the witnesses have been disinterested in the result.
_Timotheus._ Now indeed you speak truly and wisely.
_Lucian._ But sometimes the most honest and the most quiescent have
either been unable or unwilling to push themselves so forward as to
see clearly and distinctly the whole of the operation; and have
listened to some knave who felt a pleasure in deluding their
credulity, or some other who himself was either an enthusiast or a
dupe. It also may have happened in the ancient religions, of Egypt for
instance, or of India, or even of Greece, that narratives have been
attributed to authors who never heard of them; and have been
circulated by honest men who firmly believed them; by half-honest, who
indulged their vanity in becoming members of a novel and bustling
society; and by utterly dishonest, who, having no other means of
rising above the shoulders of the vulgar, threw dust into their eyes
and made them stoop.
_Timotheus._ Ha! the rogues! It is nearly all over with them.
_Lucian._ Let us hope so. Parthenius and the Roman poet Ovidius Naso,
have related the transformations of sundry men, women, and gods.
_Timotheus._ Idleness! Idleness! I never read such lying authors.
_Lucian._ I myself have seen enough to incline me toward a belief in
them.
_Timotheus._ You? Why! you have always been thought an utter infidel;
and now you are running, hot and heedless as any mad dog, to the
opposite extreme!
_Lucian._ I have lived to see, not indeed one man, but certainly one
animal turned into another; nay, great numbers. I have seen sheep with
the most placid faces in the morning, one nibbling the tender herb
with all its dew upon it; another, negligent of its own sustenance,
and giving it copiously to the tottering lamb aside it.
_Timotheus._ How pretty! half poetical!
_Lucian._ In the heat of the day I saw the very same sheep tearing off
each other's fleeces with long teeth and longer claws, and imitating
so admirably the howl of wolves, that at last the wolves came down on
them in a body, and lent their best assistance at the general
devouring. What is more remarkable, the people of the villages seemed
to enjoy the sport; and, instead of attacking the wolves, waited until
they had filled their stomachs, ate the little that was left, said
piously and from the bottom of their hearts what you call _grace_, and
went home singing and piping.
BISHOP SHIPLEY AND BENJAMIN FRANKLIN