Rome had fallen. Her senate-house had become a polluted den of thieves
and liars; her solemn temples, the arena of theological disputants, who
made fire and sword the missionaries of their inconceivable beliefs.
The city of the monster Constantine, symbolising, in the consequences
of its foundation, the wickedness and weakness of his successors,
feebly imaged with declining power the substantial eminence of the
Roman name. Pilgrims of a new and mightier faith crowded to visit the
lonely ruins of Jerusalem, and weep and pray before the sepulchre of
the Eternal God. The earth was filled with discord, tumult, and ruin.
The spirit of disinterested virtue had armed one-half of the civilised
world against the other. Monstrous and detestable creeds poisoned and
blighted the domestic charities. There was no appeal to natural love,
or ancient faith, from pride, superstition, and revenge.
Four centuries had passed thus terribly characterised by the most
calamitous revolutions. The Assassins, meanwhile, undisturbed by the
surrounding tumult, possessed and cultivated their fertile valley. The
gradual operation of their peculiar condition had matured and perfected
the singularity and excellence of their character. That cause, which
had ceased to act as an immediate and overpowering excitement, became
the unperceived law of their lives, and sustenance of their natures.
Their religious tenets had also undergone a change, corresponding with
the exalted condition of their moral being. The gratitude which they
owed to the benignant Spirit by which their limited intelligences had
not only been created but redeemed, was less frequently adverted to,
became less the topic of comment or contemplation; not, therefore, did
it cease to be their presiding guardian, the guide of their inmost
thoughts, the tribunal of appeal for the minutest particulars of their
conduct. They learned to identify this mysterious benefactor with the
delight that is bred among the solitary rocks, and has its dwelling
alike in the changing colours of the clouds and the inmost recesses of
the caverns. Their future also no longer existed, but in the blissful
tranquillity of the present. Time was measured and created by the
vices and the miseries of men, between whom and the happy nation of
the Assassins there was no analogy nor comparison. Already had their
eternal peace commenced. The darkness had passed away from the open
gates of death.
The practical results produced by their faith and condition upon
their external conduct were singular and memorable. Excluded from the
great and various community of mankind, these solitudes became to
them a sacred hermitage, in which all formed, as it were, one being,
divided against itself by no contending will or factious passions.
Every impulse conspired to one end, and tended to a single object.
Each devoted his powers to the happiness of the other. Their republic
was the scene of the perpetual contentions of benevolence; not the
heartless and assumed kindness of commercial man, but the genuine
virtue that has a legible superscription in every feature of the
countenance, and every motion of the frame. The perverseness and
calamities of those who dwelt beyond the mountains that encircled
their undisturbed possessions, were unknown and unimagined. Little
embarrassed by the complexities of civilised society, they knew not
to conceive any happiness that can be satiated without participation,
or that thirsts not to reproduce and perpetually generate itself. The
path of virtue and felicity was plain and unimpeded. They clearly
acknowledged, in every case, that conduct to be entitled to preference
which would obviously produce the greatest pleasure. They could not
conceive an instance in which it would be their duty to hesitate, in
causing, at whatever expense, the greatest and most unmixed delight.
Hence arose a peculiarity which only failed to germinate in uncommon
and momentous consequences, because the Assassins had retired from
the intercourse of mankind, over whom other motives and principles of
conduct than justice and benevolence prevail. It would be a difficult
matter for men of such a sincere and simple faith, to estimate the
final results of their intentions, among the corrupt and slavish
multitude. They would be perplexed also in their choice of the means,
whereby their intentions might be fulfilled. To produce immediate pain
or disorder for the sake of future benefit, is consonant, indeed,
with the purest religion and philosophy, but never fails to excite
invincible repugnance in the feelings of the many. Against their
predilections and distastes an Assassin, accidentally the inhabitant of
a civilised community, would wage unremitting hostility from principle.
He would find himself compelled to adopt means which they would abhor,
for the sake of an object which they could not conceive that he should
propose to himself. Secure and self-enshrined in the magnificence and
pre-eminence of his conceptions, spotless as the light of heaven, he
would be the victim among men of calumny and persecution. Incapable
of distinguishing his motives, they would rank him among the vilest
and most atrocious criminals. Great, beyond all comparison with them,
they would despise him in the presumption of their ignorance. Because
his spirit burned with an unquenchable passion for their welfare,
they would lead him, like his illustrious master, amidst scoffs, and
mockery, and insult, to the remuneration of an ignominious death.
Who hesitates to destroy a venomous serpent that has crept near his
sleeping friend, except the man who selfishly dreads lest the malignant
reptile should turn its fury on himself? And if the poisoner has
assumed a human shape, if the bane be distinguished only from the
viper’s venom by the excess and extent of its devastation, will the
saviour and avenger here retract and pause, entrenched behind the
superstition of the indefeasible divinity of man? Is the human form,
then, the mere badge of a prerogative for unlicensed wickedness and
mischief? Can the power derived from the weakness of the oppressed,
or the ignorance of the deceived, confer the right in security to
tyrannise and defraud?
The subject of regular governments, and the disciple of established
superstition, dares not to ask this question. For the sake of the
eventual benefit, he endures what he esteems a transitory evil, and
the moral degradation of man disquiets not his patience. But the
religion of an Assassin imposes other virtues than endurance, when his
fellow-men groan under tyranny, or have become so bestial and abject
that they cannot feel their chains. An Assassin believes that man is
eminently man, and only then enjoys the prerogatives of his privileged
condition, when his affections and his judgment pay tribute to the
God of Nature. The perverse, and vile, and vicious--what were they?
Shapes of some unholy vision, moulded by the spirit of Evil, which
the sword of the merciful destroyer should sweep from this beautiful
world. Dreamy nothings; phantasms of misery and mischief, that hold
their death-like state on glittering thrones, and in the loathsome
dens of poverty. No Assassin would submissively temporise with vice,
and in cold charity become a pander to falsehood and desolation. His
path through the wilderness of civilized society would be marked with
the blood of the oppressor and the ruiner. The wretch, whom nations
tremblingly adore, would expiate in his throttling grasp a thousand
licensed and venerable crimes.
How many holy liars and parasites, in solemn guise, would his saviour
arm drag from their luxurious couches, and plunge in the cold charnel,
that the green and many-legged monsters of the slimy grave might eat
off at their leisure the lineaments of rooted malignity and detested
cunning. The respectable man--the smooth, smiling, polished villain,
whom all the city honours; whose very trade is lies and murder; who
buys his daily bread with the blood and tears of men, would feed the
ravens with his limbs. The Assassin would cater nobly for the eyeless
worms of earth, and the carrion fowls of heaven.
Yet here, religion and human love had imbued the manners of those
solitary people with inexpressible gentleness and benignity. Courage
and active virtue, and the indignation against vice, which becomes
a hurrying and irresistible passion, slept like the imprisoned
earthquake, or the lightning shafts that hang in the golden clouds
of evening. They were innocent, but they were capable of more than
innocence; for the great principles of their faith were perpetually
acknowledged and adverted to; nor had they forgotten, in this
uninterrupted quiet, the author of their felicity.
Four centuries had thus worn away without producing an event. Men had
died, and natural tears had been shed upon their graves, in sorrow that
improves the heart. Those who had been united by love had gone to death
together, leaving to their friends the bequest of a most sacred grief,
and of a sadness that is allied to pleasure. Babes that hung upon
their mothers’ breasts had become men; men had died; and many a wild
luxuriant weed that overtopped the habitations of the vale, had twined
its roots around their disregarded bones. Their tranquil state was like
a summer sea, whose gentle undulations disturb not the reflected stars,
and break not the long still line of the rainbow hues of sunrise.