"'But your religion?' said the townsman. 'You spoke of your religion.
What do you mean by religion?'
"'Religion is to have charity: never to condemn, never to despair,
never to believe that the finite can ever quite cover up the infinite,
never to believe that anything is wholly explained, to see the
inexplicable in all things, and to remember that words are idols and
judgments are blasphemies. For words are the naming of things that are
without name, and judgments are the limiting of the wonder of God.
And what we call God is the inexplicable, the indefinable, the great
Unknown to whom in the midst of the idolatry of Athens an altar was
once erected.'
"'As a child I learnt that God was He who made the world in six days,'
said the townsman. 'God was He who delivered unto Moses the ten
commandments. Is not this the same which you profess?'
"'The same,' I answered. 'But you worship Him idolatrously. You limit
the wonder of God by words. You limit God's fruitfulness to six days:
and you say the world is finished and made. But for us the world is
never finished; every spring is a new creation, every day God adds or
takes away. And you limit God's laws to ten: you limit the Everlasting
Wisdom to ten words. Words are your idols, the bricks out of which
your idols and oracles are built. Listen, I will tell you what I have
always found in towns. I have found words worshipped as something holy
in themselves. Words were used to limit God, debase man. So is it in
your town. Once man thought words; now words are beginning to think
man. Once man conceived future progress; now your idol Progress is
beginning to conceive future man. It is the same as with money; once
man made money, but now in your idolatry money makes the man. Once man
entered commerce that he might have more life; now he enters life that
he may have more commerce. Of women, the very vessels and temples of
human life, you have made clerks; of priestesses unto the Living God
you have made vestals of the dead gold calf. You have insulted the
dignity of man.'
"I waited, but the townsman was silent.
"'Is that not so?' I urged.
"'You have your point of view; we have ours. You have your religion
and we ours,' said the townsman obstinately. 'And _you_ use words, do
you not? You have your terminology; you have your idols, just as we
have. If not, then how do you use your words?'
"Then I answered him: 'When I found myself upon the world I soon came
under the sway of your words. Progress tempted me; commerce promised
me happiness. I obeyed commandments and moral precepts, and eagerly
swallowed rules of life. I prostrated myself before the great high
public idols, I bowed to the little household gods, and cherished
dearly your little proverb-idols and maxim-idols. The advice of
Polonius to his son and such literature was to me the ancient wisdom.
I became an idolater, and my body a temple of idolatry.'
"'How then did you escape?' asked my companion.
"'In this wise,' I answered. 'In my temple, as in ancient Athens, in
the midst of the idols was an altar to the Unknown God, which altar
from the first was present. That altar was to the mystery and beauty
of life.
"'By virtue of this altar I discovered my idolatry, and I recognised
the forces of death to which I had bound myself. I broke away and
escaped, and in place of all my idols I substituted my aspiring human
heart, and it beat like a sacred presence in the clear temple of my
being.
"'Then words I degraded from their fame, and trampling them under my
feet, I sang triumphantly to the limitless sky.'
"'But still you use words,' said the townsman, 'you irreconcilables.'
"'Yes. When we had degraded their fame and humbled them so that they
came to us fawningly, asking to be used, we exalted them to be our
servants. Now we are masters over them, and not they over us. They are
content to be used, if but for a moment, and then forgotten for ever.
We use them to reproduce in other minds the thoughts that are in our
own. Woe if they ever get out of hand and become our masters again!
They are our exchange metals. Woe if ever again we melt down those
metals and recast them as idols!
"'Come with me into the country,' I urged; and the townsman, as if
foreseeing release from the bondage of his soul, allowed my flowing
life to float him away from the haunts of his idolatry. Then as we
passed from under the canopy of smoke and entered into the bright
outside universe, I went on:
"'Words are become but a small part of our language. We converse in
more ways and with more people than of yore. All nature speaks to us;
mountain and sea, river and plain, valley and forest; and we reveal
our hearts to them, our longing, our hope, our happiness. And yet
never entirely reveal. Not with words only do we converse, but with
pictures, with music, with scent, with ... but words cannot name the
sacred nameless mediums. And man speaks to man without words; with his
eyes, with his hands, with his love...."
"With that we walked some way together silently till at last the
townsman put his arm in mine and said: 'In my temple also is an altar
with an effaced inscription, methinks to the Ever-Living God. By your
words you have revealed it to me. Let me accompany you into the beauty
of the world, and interpret thou to me the mystery of its beauty.'
"As if I could interpret!
"'Behold,' I said, 'forest and mountain, the little copse and the
grass under it, and delicate little flowers among the grass. List to
the lark's song in the heavens, the wind soughing in the trees, the
whispering of the leaves. In the air there is a mysterious incense
spread from God's censers, the very language of mystery. Now you see
far into the beauty of the world and hear tidings from afar. All the
horizons of your senses have been extended. Are you not glad for
all these impressions, these pictures and songs and perfumes? Every
impression is a shrine, where you may kneel to God.'
"'It is a beautiful world,' said he.
"'It is beautiful in all its parts and beautiful every moment,' I
replied. 'My soul constantly says "_Yes_" to it. Its beauty is the
reminder of our immortal essence. The town is dangerous in that it has
little beauty. It causes us to forget. It is exploring the illusion
of trade, and its whole song is of trade. If you understand this, you
have a criterion for Life--
"'_The sacred is that which reminds us; the secular is that which bids
us forget_.
"'When you have impressions of sight, noise, and smell, and these
impressions have no shrine where one may kneel to God, it is a sure
sign that you have forgotten Him, that you are dwelling in the courts
of idols.'
"'But it is painful to remember,' said my companion, 'and even now I
have great pain. It is hard to leave the old, and painful to receive
the new. My heart begins to ache for loneliness, and I long for the
gaiety of the town and its diversions. I should like once more to
drown my remembrances.'
"I bade him have courage, for he was in the pains of birth. The old
never lets out the new without pain and struggle, but when the new
is born it is infinitely worthy. And my new friend was comforted. We
spent many days upon the road, looking at beauty, conversing with one
another, worshipping and marvelling. Along the country paths flowers
looked up, and beautiful suns looked out of strange skies. Often
it seemed we had been together upon the same road a thousand years
before. Was it a remembrance of the time before my entering into the
coach? The flowers by the roadside tried to whisper a word of the
answer to my question. It seemed that we were surrounded by mysteries
just about to reveal themselves. Or, anon, it seemed as if we had
missed our chance, as if an unseen procession had just filed by and we
had not distinguished it.
"My friend was leaving behind all his idols. We sat upon a ridge
together, and looked back upon the valley and the city which we had
left. There was what my soul abhorred, and what I feared his soul
might be too weak to face--the kaleidoscope of mean colours turning
in the city, tickling our senses, striving to bind our souls and to
mesmerise. Some colours would have drawn our tears, some would have
persuaded smiles over our lips. Combinations of colours, groupings,
subtle movements and shapings sought to interest and absorb our
intellects.
"'Behold,' said I. 'In the city which calls itself the world, the
townsmen are casting up dice! Is it possible we shall be stricken with
woe, or immensely uplifted in joy because of the falling of a die? Oh
world too sordid to be opposed to us! Oh world too poor to be used by
us! Is not the world's place under our feet, for it is of earth and we
of spirit?'
"But my friend was not with me. He wavered as if intoxicated, and
wished to return to the city. 'Oh glorious world,' said he, and sighed
himself towards the gates we had left.
"Then seeing the brightness of my face, which just then reflected a
great brightness in the sky, and remembering that his pain was only a
bridge into the new, he gained possession of himself and turned his
eyes away from the town.
"'More than my old self and its weak flesh do I value the new young
life that is to be,' said he. 'Though I am a man and a creature of
pleasure, I am become as a woman that bears children. For the time is
coming when I shall give birth to one younger than myself, later than
myself....'
"'Your old self will reappear more beautiful, new-souled,
transfigured,' I replied.
"Then my companion looked at me with eyes that were full both of
yearning and of pain, and he said, 'Though I would fain stay with you,
yet must I go apart. For I have one battle yet to fight, and that I
can only fight alone. Farewell, dear friend, husband of the woman that
is in me!'
"Then said I farewell and we embraced and parted, for I saw that it
was meet for him to commune alone with God and gain strength to win
his victory.
"The town lay in the west; he went into the north and I into the east.
Once more I was alone."
"Come, let us devise new means of happiness," said my companion. "Let
us wander up-stream to the silent cradle of the river. For all day
long I hear the river calling my name."
And we journeyed a three days' tramp into the mountains, following the
silver river upward and upward to the pure fountain of its birth. And
on the way, moved by the glow of intercourse, I told my companion the
story of Zenobia, and also that of the old pilgrim whom I met at New
Athos. It was strange to us that the peasants in the country should
live and die so much more worthily than the educated folk who live in
the towns. God made the country, man made the town, and the devil made
the country town, was not for us an idle platitude but a burning fact,
though we agreed that man was often a much more evil creator than the
devil, and that the great capitals of Europe and America were the
worst places for Man's heavenly spirit that Time had ever known.
Imagine our three days' journeying, the joy of the lonely one who has
found a companion, the sharing of happiness that is doubling it; the
beauty to live in, the little daintinesses and prettinesses of Nature
to point out; the morning, sun-decked and dewy, the wide happiness of
noon, the shadows of the great rocks where we rested, and the flash of
the green and silver river tumbling outside in the sunshine; quiescent
evening and the old age of the day, sunset and the remembrance of the
day's glory, the pathos of looking back to the golden morning.
The first night we made our bed where the plover has her nest, in a
grassy hollow on the shelf of a mountain.
"The day is done," said my companion. "A little space of time has
died. Now see the vision of the Eternal, which comes after death;" and
he pointed to the night sky, in which one by one little lamps were
lighting.
The bright world passed away, faded away in my eyes and became at last
a dark night sky in which shone countless stars. During the day, my
soul expressed itself to itself in the beauty which is for an hour,
but at night it re-expressed itself in terms of the Infinite. I looked
to my companion, and his eyes and lips shone in the darkness so
that he seemed dressed in cloth cut from the night sky itself, and
interwoven with stars. We lay together and looked up into the far high
sky, we breathed lightly: it seemed we exhaled the scent of flowers
that we had inbreathed in the morning--we slept.
And then the morning! The quiet, quiet hours, the flitting of moths in
the dawn twilight, the mysterious business of mice among the stones
about us, the cold fleeting air just before sunrise, full of ghosts,
our own awakening and the majestic sunrise, the exaggeration of all
shapes, the birth of shadows, the beaming heralds, glorious rose-red
summits and effulgent silvered crags, ten thousand trumpets raised to
the zenith, and ten thousand promises outspoken!
We arose, my companion and I--he only seemed to come to life when the
first beam touched me. I greeted the sun with my voice, and turning
round, there at my feet was my friend, familiar, dear, so ready for
living that one would have said the sun himself was his father.
"I was dead," said he, "and behold I am alive again. The world passed
away, and behold, at the voice of a trumpet, it hath come back. Beauty
faded yestreen from colour into darkness, from life to death, and
to-day it hath out-blossomed once again; the Sun was its father, dear
gentle Night its mother...."
And running with me, he clambered upon a rock and outstretched his
arms to the sun as if he were a woman looking to a strong man.
"Greater is the glory of sunrise than the glory of sunset, for the
sunrise promises what shall be, whereas the sunset only tells the
glory of the past. The sunrise promises beautiful days, the sunset
looks back upon beauty as if there were nothing in the future to
compare with what has just departed."
Thus sang my friend, and we scampered along to the newly wakened
river. Cold and fresh was the water, as if it also had slept in the
night. It was full of the night, but the morning which was in us
strove with it, and at a stroke conquered it. The sun laughed to see
us playing in the water, and we greeted him with handfuls of sparkles.
The river was lusty and strong; it wrestled with us, grasped, pushed,
pulled, buffeted, threw stones, charged forward in waves, laboriously
rolled boulders against us....
We made our morning fire; its blue smoke rose slowly and crookedly,
and the brittle wood burning crackled like little dogs barking; the
kettle hissed on the hot, black stones where we had balanced it over
the fire, it puffed, it growled, blew out its steam and boiled, boiled
over; tea, bread and cheese, bright yellow plums from a tree hard
by, and then away once more we sped on our journey, not walking, but
running, scarcely running but flying, leaping, clambering ... and my
companion performed the most astonishing feats, for he was ever more
lively than I was.
The sun strengthened. First it had empowered us to go forward, but
after some hours it bid us rest. Seven o'clock ran to eight, eight to
nine; nine to ten was hot, ten was scorching, and by eleven we were
conquered. We rested and let the glorious husband of the earth look
down upon us, and into us.
"How pathetic it is that men are even now at this moment sweating,
and grinding, and cursing in a town," said my companion to me. He was
lying outstretched before me on a slope of the sheep-cropped downs.
"They altogether miss life, life, the inestimable boon. And they get
nothing in return. Even what they hope to gain is but dust and ashes.
They waited perhaps a whole eternity to be born, and when they die it
may be that for a whole eternity they must wait again. God allotted
them each year eighty days of summer and eighty summers in their
lives, and they are content to sell them for a small price, content to
earn wages.... And their share in all this beauty, they hardly know of
it, their share in the sun.
"Have you not realised that we have more than our share of the sun?
The sun is fuller and more glorious than we could have expected. That
is because millions of people have lived without taking their share.
We feel in ourselves all _their_ need of it, all their want of it.
That is why we are ready to take to ourselves such immense quantities
of it. We can rob no one, but, on the contrary, we can save a little
to give to those who have none--when we meet them. You must pull down
the very sun from heaven and put it in your writings. You must give
samples of the sun to all those who live in towns. Perhaps some of
those attracted by the samples will give up the smoke and grind of
cities and live in this superfluity of sunshine."
Then I said to my joyous comrade: "Many live their lives of toil and
gloom and ugliness in the belief that in another life after this they
will be rewarded. They think that God wills them to live this life of
work."
"Then perhaps in the next life they will again live in toil and gloom,
postponing their happiness once more," said my companion. "Or on the
Day of Judgment they will line up before God and say with a melancholy
countenance, 'Oh Lord we want our wages for having lived!' ...
An insult to God and to our glorious life, but how terrible, how
unutterably sad! And the reply of the angel sadder still, 'Did you not
know that life itself was a reward, a glory?'"
V