many meanings have been assigned. The Christian Initiate reverentially
sees in it the initials of the inscription upon the cross on which
Christ suffered--_Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudæorum_. The sages of Antiquity
connected it with one of the greatest secrets of Nature, that of
universal regeneration. They interpreted it thus, _Igne Natura renovatur
Integra_; [entire nature is renovated by fire]: The Alchemical or
Hermetic Masons framed for it this aphorism, _Igne nitrum roris
invenitur_. And the Jesuits are charged with having applied to it this
odious axiom, _Justum necare reges impios_. The four letters are the
initials of the Hebrew words that represent the four elements--_Iammim_,
the seas or water; _Hour_, fire; _Rouach_, the air, and _Iebeschah_, the
dry earth. How we read it, I need not repeat to you.
The CROSS, [Illustration: Glyph] was the Sign of the Creative Wisdom or
Logos, the Son of God. Plato says, "He expressed him upon the Universe
in the figure of the letter X. The next Power to the Supreme God Was
decussated or figured in the shape of a Cross on Universe." Mithras
signed his soldiers on the forehead with a Cross. [Glyph] is the mark
of 600, the mysterious cycle of the Incarnations.
We constantly see the Tau and the Resh united thus [Glyph]. These two
letters, in the old Samaritan, as found in Arius, stand, the first for
400, the second for 200-600. This is the Staff of Osiris, also, and his
monogram, and was adopted by the Christians as a Sign. On a medal of
Constantius is this inscription, "_In hoc signo victor cris_ [Glyph]."
An inscription in the Duomo at Milan reads, "[Glyph] et [Glyph].
_Christi-Nomina-Sancta-Teneï_."
The Egyptians used as a Sign of their God Canobus, a [Glyph] or a
[Glyph] indifferently. The Vaishnavas of India have also the same Sacred
Tau, which they also mark with Crosses, thus [Glyph], and with
triangles, thus, [Glyph]. The vestments of the priests of Horus were
covered with these Crosses [Glyph]. So was the dress of the Lama of
Thibet. The Sectarian marks of the Jains are [Glyph]. The distinctive
badge of the Sect of Xac Japonicus is [Glyph]. It is the Sign of Fo,
identical with the Cross of Christ.
On the ruins of Mandore, in India, among other mystic emblems, are the
mystic triangle, and the interlaced triangle, [Glyph]. This is also
found on ancient coins and medals, excavated from the ruins of Oojein
and other ancient cities of India.
You entered here amid gloom and into shadow, and are clad in the apparel
of sorrow. Lament, with us, the sad condition of the Human race, in this
vale of tears! the calamities of men and the agonies of nations! the
darkness of the bewildered soul, oppressed by doubt and apprehension!
There is no human soul that is not sad at times. There is no thoughtful
soul that does not at times despair. There is perhaps none, of all that
think at all of anything beyond the needs and interests of the body,
that is not at times startled and terrified by the awful questions
which, feeling as though it were a guilty thing for doing so, it
whispers to itself in its inmost depths. Some Demon seems to torture it
with doubts, and to crush it with despair, asking whether, after all, it
is certain that its convictions are true and its faith well founded:
whether it is indeed sure that a God of Infinite Love and Beneficence
rules the Universe, or only some great remorseless Fate and iron
Necessity, hid in impenetrable gloom, and to which men and their
sufferings and sorrows, their hopes and joys, their ambitions and deeds,
are of no more interest or importance than the motes that dance in the
sunshine; or a Being that amuses Himself with the incredible vanity and
folly, the writhings and contortions of the insignificant insects that
compose Humanity, and idly imagine that they resemble the Omnipotent.
"What are we," the Tempter asks, "but puppets in a show-box? O
Omnipotent destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our
miserable little stage!"
"Is it not," the Demon whispers, "merely the inordinate vanity of man
that causes him now to pretend to himself that he is like unto God in
intellect, sympathies and passions, as it was that which, at the
beginning, made him believe that he was, in his bodily shape and organs,
the very image of the Deity? Is not his God merely his own shadow,
projected in gigantic outlines upon the clouds? Does he not create for
himself a God out of himself, by merely adding indefinite extension to
his own faculties, powers, and passions?"
"Who," the Voice that will not be always silent whispers, "has ever
thoroughly satisfied himself with his own arguments in respect to his
own nature? Who ever demonstrated to himself, with a conclusiveness that
elevated the belief to certainty, that he was an immortal spirit,
dwelling only temporarily in the house and envelope of the body, and to
live on forever after that shall have decayed? Who ever has demonstrated
or ever can demonstrate that the intellect of Man differs from that of
the wiser animals, otherwise than in degree? Who has ever done more than
to utter nonsense and incoherencies in regard to the difference between
the instincts of the dog and the reason of Man? The horse, the dog, the
elephant, are as conscious of their identity as we are. They think,
dream, remember, argue with themselves, devise, plan, and _reason_. What
is the intellect and intelligence of the man but the intellect of the
animal in a higher degree or larger quantity?" In the _real_ explanation
of a single thought of a dog, all metaphysics will be condensed.
And with still more terrible significance, the Voice asks, in what
Respect the masses of men, the vast swarms of the human race, have
proven themselves either wiser or better than the animals in whose eyes
a higher intelligence shines than in _their_ dull, unintellectual orbs;
in what respect they have proven themselves worthy of or suited for an
immortal life. Would that be a prize of any value to the vast majority?
Do they show, here upon earth, any capacity to improve, any fitness for
a state of existence in which they could not crouch to power, like
hounds dreading the lash or tyrannize over defenceless weakness; in
which they could not hate and persecute, and torture, and exterminate;
in which they could not trade, and speculate, and over-reach, and entrap
the unwary and cheat the confiding and gamble and thrive, and sniff with
self-righteousness at the short-comings of others, and thank God that
they were not like other men? What, to immense numbers of men, would be
the value of a Heaven where they could not lie and libel, and ply base
avocations for profitable returns?
Sadly we look around us, and read the gloomy and dreary records of the
old dead and rotten ages. More than eighteen centuries have staggered
away into the spectral realm of the Past, since Christ, teaching the
Religion of Love, was crucified, that it might become a Religion of
Hate; and His Doctrines are not yet even nominally accepted as true by a
fourth of mankind. Since His death, what incalculable swarms of human
beings have lived and died in total unbelief of all that we deem
essential to Salvation! What multitudinous myriads of souls, since the
darkness of idolatrous superstition settled down, thick and
impenetrable, upon the earth, have flocked up toward the eternal Throne
of God, to receive His judgment?
The Religion of Love proved to be, for seventeen long centuries, as much
the Religion of Hate, and infinitely more the Religion of Persecution,
than Mahometanism, its unconquerable rival. Heresies grew up before the
Apostles died; and God hated the Nicolaītans, while John, at Patmos,
proclaimed His coming wrath. Sects wrangled, and each, as it gained the
power, persecuted the other, until the soil of the whole Christian world
was watered with the blood, and fattened on the flesh, and whitened with
the bones, of martyrs, and human ingenuity was taxed to its utmost to
invent new modes by which tortures and agonies could be prolonged and
made more exquisite.
"By what right" whispers the Voice, "does this savage, merciless,
persecuting animal, to which the sufferings and writhings of others of
its wretched kind furnish the most pleasurable sensations, and the mass
of which care only to eat, sleep, be clothed, and wallow in sensual
pleasures, and the best of which wrangle, hate, envy, and, with few
exceptions, regard their own interests alone,--with what right does it
endeavor to delude itself into the conviction that it is _not_ an
animal, as the wolf, the hyena, and the tiger are, but a somewhat
nobler, a spirit destined to be immortal, a spark of the essential
Light, Fire and Reason, which are God? What other immortality than one
of selfishness could this creature enjoy? Of what other is it capable?
Must not immortality commence _here_ and is not _life_ a part of it? How
shall death change the base nature of the base soul? Why have not those
other animals that only faintly imitate the wanton, savage, human
cruelty and thirst for blood, the same right as man has, to expect a
resurrection and an Eternity of existence, or a Heaven of Love?"
_The world improves_. Man ceases to persecute,--when the persecuted
become too numerous and strong, longer to submit to it. That source of
pleasure closed, men exercise the ingenuities of their cruelty on the
animals and other living things below them. To deprive other creatures
of the life which God gave them, and this not only that we may eat their
flesh for food, but out of mere savage wantonness, is the agreeable
employment and amusement of man, who prides himself on being the Lord of
Creation, and a little lower than the Angels. If he can no longer use
the rack, the gibbet, the pincers, and the stake, he can hate, and
slander, and delight in the thought that he will, hereafter, luxuriously
enjoying the sensual beatitudes of Heaven, see with pleasure the
writhing agonies of those justly damned for daring to hold opinions
contrary to his own, upon subjects totally beyond the comprehension both
of them and him.
Where the armies of the despots cease to slay and ravage, the armies of
"Freedom" take their place, and, the black and white commingled,
slaughter and burn and ravish. Each age re-enacts the crimes as well as
the follies of its predecessors, and still war licenses outrage and
turns fruitful lands into deserts, and God is thanked in the Churches
for bloody butcheries, and the remorseless devastators, even when
swollen by plunder, are crowned with laurels and receive ovations.
Of the whole of mankind, not one in ten thousand has any aspirations
beyond the daily needs of the gross animal life. In this age and in all
others, all men except a few, in most countries, are born to be mere
beasts of burden, co-laborers with the horse and the ox. Profoundly
ignorant, even in "civilized" lands, they think and reason like the
animals by the side of which they toil. For them, God, Soul, Spirit,
Immortality, are mere words, without any real meaning. The God of
nineteen-twentieths of the Christian world is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus,
or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adonaï, under another name, worshipped
with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic formulas. It is the Statue
of Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the Christian Church that
was a Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become the Virgin Mary.
For the most part, men do not in their hearts believe that God is either
just or merciful. They fear and shrink from His lightnings and dread His
wrath. For the most part, they only _think_ they believe that there is
another life, a judgment, and a punishment for sin. Yet they will none
the less persecute as Infidels and Atheists those who do not believe
what they themselves imagine they believe, and which yet they do _not_
believe, because it is incomprehensible to them in their ignorance and
want of intellect. To the vast majority of mankind, God is but the
reflected image, in infinite space, of the earthly Tyrant on his Throne,
only more powerful, more inscrutable, and more implacable. To curse
Humanity, the Despot need only _be_, what the popular mind has, in every
age, imagined God.
In the great cities, the lower strata of the populace are equally
without faith and without hope. The others have, for the most part, a
mere blind faith, imposed by education and circumstances, and not as
productive of moral excellence or even common honesty as Mohammedanism.
"_Your property will be safe here_," said the Moslem; "_There are no
Christians here_." The philosophical and scientific world becomes daily
more and more unbelieving. Faith and Reason are not opposites, in
equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile to each other; the result
being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed, or half-veiled as
rationalism.
Over more than three-fourths of the habitable globe, humanity still
kneels, like the camels, to take upon itself the burthens to be tamely
borne for its tyrants. If a Republic occasionally rises like a Star, it
hastens with all speed to set in blood. The kings need not make war upon
it, to crush it out of their way. It is only necessary to let it alone,
and it soon lays violent hands upon itself. And when a people long
enslaved shake off its fetters, it may well be incredulously asked,
Shall the braggart shout
For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself,
Through madness, hated by the wise, to law,
System and Empire?
Everywhere in the world labor is, in some shape, the slave of capital;
generally, a slave to be fed only so long as he can work; or, rather,
only so long as his work is profitable to the owner of the human
chattel. There are famines in Ireland, strikes and starvation in
England, pauperism and tenement-dens in New York, misery, squalor,
ignorance, destitution, the brutality of vice and the insensibility to
shame, of despairing beggary, in all the human cesspools and sewers
everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman famishes and freezes; there, mothers
murder their children, that those spared may live upon the bread
purchased with the burial allowances of the dead starveling; and at the
next door young girls prostitute themselves for food.
Moreover, the Voice says, this besotted race is not satisfied with
seeing its multitudes swept away by the great epidemics whose causes are
unknown, and of the justice or wisdom of which the human mind cannot
conceive. It must also be ever at war. There has not been a moment since
men divided into Tribes, when all the world was at peace. Always men
have been engaged in murdering each other somewhere. Always the armies
have lived by the toil of the husbandman, and war has exhausted the
resources, wasted the energies, and ended the prosperity of Nations. Now
it loads unborn posterity with crushing debt, mortgages all estates, and
brings upon States the shame and infamy of dishonest repudiation.
At times, the baleful fires of war light up half a Continent at once; as
when all the Thrones unite to compel a people to receive again a hated
and detestable dynasty, or States deny States the right to dissolve an
irksome union and create for themselves a separate government. Then
again the flames flicker and die away, and the fire smoulders in its
ashes, to break out again, after a time, with renewed and a more
concentrated fury. At times, the storm, revolving, howls over small
areas only; at times its lights are seen, like the old beacon-fires on
the hills, belting the whole globe. No sea, but hears the roar of
cannon; no river, but runs red with blood; no plain, but shakes,
trampled by the hoofs of charging squadrons; no field, but is fertilized
by the blood of the dead; and everywhere man slays, the vulture gorges,
and the wolf howls in the ear of the dying soldier. No city is not
tortured by shot and shell; and no people fail to enact the horrid
blasphemy of thanking a God of Love for victories and carnage. Te Deums
are still sung for the Eve of St. Bartholomew and the Sicilian Vespers.
Man's ingenuity is racked, and all his inventive powers are tasked, to
fabricate the infernal enginery of destruction, by which human bodies
may be the more expeditiously and effectually crushed, shattered, torn,
and mangled; and yet hypocritical[1] Humanity, drunk with blood and
drenched with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to
gratify a revenge not more unchristian, or to satisfy a cupidity not
more ignoble, than those which are the promptings of the Devil in the
souls of Nations.
When we have fondly dreamed of Utopia and the Millennium, when we have
begun almost to believe that man is _not_, after all, a tiger half
tamed, and that the smell of blood will not wake the savage within him,
we are of a sudden startled from the delusive dream, to find the thin
mask of civilization rent in twain and thrown contemptuously away. We
lie down to sleep, like the peasant on the lava-slopes of Vesuvius. The
mountain has been so long inert, that we believe its fires extinguished.
Round us hang the clustering grapes, and the green leaves of the olive
tremble in the soft night-air over us. Above us shine the peaceful,
patient stars. The crash of a new eruption wakes us, the roar of the
subterranean thunders, the stabs of the volcanic lightning into the
shrouded bosom of the sky; and we see, aghast, the tortured Titan
hurling up its fires among the pale stars, its great tree of smoke and
cloud, the red torrents pouring down its sides. The roar and the
shriekings of Civil War are all around us: the land is a pandemonium:
man is again a Savage. The great armies roll along their hideous waves,
and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is
in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the
starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood
shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions,
Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and
Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at
universal murder, and urge the extermination of the Conquered, by the
sword and the flaming torch; and to plunder and murder entitles the
human beasts of prey to the thanks of Christian Senates.
Commercial greed deadens the nerves of sympathy of Nations, and makes
them deaf to the demands of honor, the impulses of generosity, the
appeals of those who suffer under injustice. Elsewhere, the universal
pursuit of wealth dethrones God and pays divine honors to Mammon and
Baalzebub. Selfishness rules supreme: to win wealth becomes the whole
business of life. The villanies of legalized gaming and speculation
become epidemic; treachery is but evidence of shrewdness; office becomes
the prey of successful faction; the Country, like Actæon, is torn by its
own hounds, and the villains it has carefully educated to their trade,
most greedily plunder it, when it is _in extremis_.
By what right, the Voice demands, does a creature always engaged in the
work of mutual robbery and slaughter, and who makes his own interest his
God, claim to be of a nature superior to the savage beasts of which he
is the prototype?
Then the shadows of a horrible doubt fall upon the soul that would fain
love, trust and believe; a darkness, of which this that surrounded you
was a symbol. It doubts the truth of Revelation, its own spirituality,
the very existence of a beneficent God. It asks itself if it is not idle
to hope for any great progress of Humanity toward perfection, and
whether, when it advances in one respect, it does not retrogress in some
other, by way of compensation: whether advance in civilization is not
increase of selfishness: whether freedom does not necessarily lead to
license and anarchy: whether the destitution and debasement of the
masses does not inevitably follow increase of population and commercial
and manufacturing prosperity. It asks itself whether man is not the
sport of a blind, merciless Fate: whether all philosophies are not
delusions, and all religions the fantastic creations of human vanity and
self-conceit; and, above all, whether, when Reason is abandoned as a
guide, the faith of Buddhist and Brahmin has not the same claims to
sovereignty and implicit, unreasoning credence, as any other.
He asks himself whether it is not, after all, the evident and palpable
injustices of this life, the success and prosperity of the Bad, the
calamities, oppressions, and miseries of the Good, that are the bases of
all beliefs in a future state of existence? Doubting man's capacity for
indefinite progress here, he doubts the possibility of it anywhere; and
if he does not doubt whether God exists, and is just and beneficent, he
at least cannot silence the constantly recurring whisper, that the
miseries and calamities of men, their lives and deaths, their pains and
sorrows, their extermination by war and epidemics, are phenomena of no
higher dignity, significance, and importance, in the eye of God, than
what things of the same nature occur to other organisms of matter; and
that the fish of the ancient seas, destroyed by myriads to make room
for other species, the contorted shapes in which they are found as
fossils testifying to their agonies; the coral insects, the animals and
birds and vermin slain by man, have as much right as he to clamor at the
injustice of the dispensations of God, and to demand an immortality of
life in a new universe, as compensation for their pains and sufferings
and untimely death in this world.
This is not a picture painted by the imagination. Many a thoughtful mind
has so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our own faith
is so well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful
whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt,
who ruminate in patient contenment like the kine, or doze under the
opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow
which is the absence of the Divine Light.
To explain to themselves the existence of Evil and Suffering, the
Ancient Persians imagined that there were two Principles or Deities in
the Universe, the one of Good and the other of Evil, constantly in
conflict with each other in struggle for the mastery, and alternately
overcoming and overcome. Over both, for the SAGES, was the One Supreme;
and for _them_ Light was in the end to prevail over Darkness, the Good
over the Evil, and even Ahriman and his Demons to part with their wicked
and vicious natures and share the universal Salvation. It did not occur
to them that the existence of the Evil Principle, by the consent of the
Omnipotent Supreme, presented the same difficulty, and left the
existence of Evil as unexplained as before. The human mind is always
content, if it can remove a difficulty a step further off. It cannot
believe that the world rests on nothing, but is devoutly content when
taught that it is borne on the back of an immense elephant, who himself
stands on the back of a tortoise. Given the tortoise, Faith is always
satisfied; and it has been a great source of happiness to multitudes
that they could believe in a Devil who could relieve God of the odium of
being the Author of Sin.
But not to all is Faith sufficient to overcome this great difficulty.
They say, with the Suppliant,_"Lord! I believe!"_--but like him they are
constrained to add,_"Help Thou my unbelief!"_--Reason must, for these,
co-operate and coincide with Faith, or they remain still in the darkness
of doubt,--most miserable of all conditions of the human mind.
Those, only, who care for nothing beyond the interests and pursuits of
this life, are uninterested in these great Problems. The animals, also,
do not consider them. It is the characteristic of an immortal Soul, that
it should seek to satisfy itself of its immortality, and to understand
this great enigma, the Universe, If the Hottentot and the Papuan are not
troubled and tortured by these doubts and speculations, they are not,
for that, to be regarded as either wise or fortunate. The swine, also,
are indifferent to the great riddles of the Universe, and are happy in
being wholly unaware that it is the vast Revelation and Manifestation,
in Time and Space, of a Single Thought of the Infinite God.