“AND THERE SHALL BE NO MORE DEATH”
The Bishop of Ephesus sat dreaming in the garden between his church and
his house.
It was the glad season now known as Easter, some fifty years after the
death and ascension of our Lord. The sunshine of the Ægean Sea was a
luminous glory that clothed all the world of spring in garments of pure
light. The city square swam in a transparent gold that dazzled the eye.
Across the square, the aërial arches between the columns of the Great
Temple to Diana gave glimpses of a sea that was by turns turquoise blue
and emerald green, with a fret of snowy waves whose mermaid hair danced
rainbows in the sunlight. Between the arcades of the Temple columns, the
Bishop could catch hints of the surrounding circle of snowy mountains;
and they, too, swam opal jewels in a mirage of morning light. The years
had touched Onesimus lightly. He was stouter, stronger, more robust; but
few silver hairs intermingled with his gold curls, though an austere
strength now stamped face and figure, as of a man, whose shoulders had
grown the broader for their load. But the gladness of the day brought
back memories of his youth, this morning.
What wonder—he mused—the Greeks’ frieze across the top of the Temple
columns represented their huntress Deity as driving the wild horses of
the waves with the wind in their tossing manes out to the pasture
grounds of the ocean deeps? The Bishop dreaming in the garden between
his little Christian church and his house smiled; for though he was
Christian, he was also Greek; and never the sun came over the snowy
mountains in spring but he felt the wild lure of the huntress, Diana,
with her silver horn winding through the woods and caves, leading youth
captive in pursuit of the fleet-foot rainbow hours.
Something there was in the glad spring day of the beginning of time,
“when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted
for joy.”
So sitting in the garden across the city square from the vast marble
Temple to Diana, he could not but smile gently to himself. Spite of
statue in silver like a spire to sky, and domes that vied in beauty the
opals of the snowy peaks, and friezes that were the glory of Grecian art
for two hundred years—not so many worshipers came from the seas and
hills to the Great Diana’s Temple. Especially, not so many worshipers
came to the Temple now that the Roman conqueror persisted in setting up
images of the Emperors to be worshiped equal with Diana. That very year,
vestal virgins had suffered death for refusing to offer incense to the
figure of the Roman Emperor—“Beast worship” it was now called among the
Greeks; and after the martyrdom of these vestals, the young Christian
Bishop reflected, his own little church had been crowded with new
adherents to the new faith.
The three vestal virgins had been accused of breaking their girdle vows;
but Onesimus knew the real cause of their death had been—they had
laughed at the Goddess Roma set up beside the Great Diana; and when the
Great Diana had failed to protect them, faith in her power had fallen
off. The people knew the Temple was a cheat to barter gain for sacrifice
and hold allegiance to Rome.
Books of Black Magic to the value of more than £2,000 had been burned at
Ephesus after Paul’s labors there; and what Paul had preached, Apollos
had confirmed, speaking from the very shrine of Diana, herself. Truly
what Paul “had planted, Apollos had watered, and God had given the
increase.” He thought of Ephesus, the third greatest city in the known
world, with its theater holding fifty thousand pleasure seekers, where
his little old half-blind, deformed Master, Paul, with the lion heart
and sword of the spirit had conquered the Prince of the Powers of the
Air—whether Black or White Magic, Onesimus did not know. He only knew
the Invisible King had conquered.
Aquila and Priscilla had won Apollos, the Gnostic, to Christ, and had
accompanied Paul to Ephesus; and when Paul had left Ephesus to go on to
Rome, it was Apollos who had driven the Christ message home; so that now
Ephesus, rather than Antioch, was the rallying point for the followers
in Asia. The fall of Jerusalem had dispersed all followers there to the
deserts of Asia and Egypt. The incursions of the victorious Roman Army
had driven the Jews from Antioch. At Ephesus must be the final stand of
the followers for the Christ against pagan god and Jewish legalism and
the Black Magic of the sorcerers, now a scourge over all the world.
Was Apollos an Apostate, “a wandering star,” as Peter and the others had
feared? Certainly, he had failed to come to the rescue of Paul, in
Corinth and Rome, when Paul’s need had been sore; but then, he had
defied the pagan gods in their own temples, while Paul always spoke from
Jewish synagogue, or from market place; and John had reported the
Master’s words—that those not against Him, were for Him; and Apollos
had one message and Paul another; and both led like Jacob’s ladder to
God.
Fewer and fewer animals from the mountain herds went to the Temple as
sacrifices; and the trade in little silver images of Diana had fallen
away so that the silversmiths had removed their booths from the Temple
columns. The space, where the silversmiths’ booths used to stand, now
was taken up with aged and infant ragged beggars, imploring alms from
the worshipers by day and by night, huddling to sleep behind the shelter
of the columns. He could see these poor shipwrecks of port life this
morning, shaking off their drowsiness and tatters to begin another dull
round of another dull day; and yet—and yet—the legend of Diana’s
silver hunting horn winding divine music through the mountain passes to
the sea was in the young Greek Bishop’s very soul.
The perfume of the morning flowers had no drugged night bloom. It was
clean, dew-washed, elusive as light. Dewdrops still lay on the lips of
the purple iris, the white narcissus, the voluptuous flaunting tulips.
Spider webs spun with diamonds of light and dew hung in the acacia and
oleander hedges. The great Easter lilies lifted royal spears of gold and
cups of nectar to greet the rising sun—easterly always pointed the
spears and cups to the sun god; and on the stone edge of the garden
fountain, a bird with a dash of sapphire blue and ruby red on his throat
was caroling love notes to burst his little palpitating heart.
The Bishop closed his eyes in a prayer that was an inarticulate gloria
to the gladness of Life, and it was to the Glad Kingdom of Life in
Newness that he had dedicated his life long ago, when he had rushed as a
boy from pursuit of the kidnappers of Rome right into the prison hut of
Paul, the Apostle of Christ, who had opened the doors of that Glad
Kingdom. A bird’s wing almost brushed the Bishop’s face. He opened his
eyes to one of those common tragedies of garden life, seen every day if
we have eyes that see. Some insect of an early butterfly sort had come
out of winter chrysalis pale, faint, trembling with the effect of
casting off the dead body of its winter shell of skin, and was fanning
moist wings dry in the morning sun, when the little feathered songster
with a dart past the Bishop’s face, snatched away the dead shell body,
while the pale nymph rose in giddy circles in the dazzling light.
The Bishop Onesimus gave a start. The nymph didn’t seem to realize that
it had died to one form of life and risen to another. It had thrown
aside what the Greeks called its “coat of skin” just as the beggars
yonder under the Temple arches were folding up their night rags and
coming out in the sun on the city square.
The little drama of the garden had enacted his very prayer; for what was
the bird singing but a gloria to glad new life? And what was the nymph
doing but casting off the body of death for rebirth to new life? And was
not this the very thought that had been puzzling him this morning of the
ascension of his Lord on what we to-day call Easter?
He had been reading John, the Beloved’s, last message to the Christian
Churches of the Great Roman Road with warnings against the Beast Worship
and foreflashes of things to come down the long ages. Of all the first
messengers of the Glad News, John only, the disciple of Christ, and
Apollos, the disciple of John the Baptist, remained on earth. Paul,
beheaded in Rome! Peter, crucified in Rome! Matthew, Mark, Luke lost to
history in Egypt! James martyred in Jerusalem! Thomas buried in the Far
East! Philip disappeared in Ethiopia!
All were what the world called—Dead!
Almost twenty years had passed since the Fall of the Holy City, when he
and Apollos coming from Jordan Ford had passed through Antioch and
rescued Thecla in the mountain caves.
Yet here was John’s letter from banishment on Patmos Island, his last
message to the Seven Christian Churches of the Great Roman Road,
declaring “there shall be no more death,” and here was Paul’s letter to
the Corinthians sent forward to be read to his own flock in Ephesus,
declaring death was but a change of garment, an awakening from shadowy
dreaming sleep to an effulgent intensest reality of life!
The Bishop strode back to his cloister. As he passed from his garden, he
noticed the ragged horde of beggars coming out from the night shelter of
Diana’s Temple to range themselves in posture of mendicants whining for
alms across the city square. There was a child—a little ragged Greek
with no clothing but a torn belted shirt, with tousled head, bare of
feet, not more than eight years old, with a baby in a sling on his back.
The baby’s eyes had been blinded and one arm broken—to arouse pity
among passers-by. Onesimus had noticed these children before; and it
made his mountain blood boil, for had not his Lord said—“Let little
children come unto me?” And had not the prophets predicted: “A little
child shall lead them?” And did this look as if the Shepherd of little
children were protecting them; as if the spirit of the child were
leading men back to God? It was as if a cloud of doubt suddenly obscured
the gladness of the Easter morning. For a moment, he watched the byplay
on the city square—the little Greek had stolen a flower from some city
hedge. A tall angular spare woman clad all in black had come out of the
Diana Temple from an all-night vigil. The child beggar was running along
with the blind baby on his back wobbling its head from side to side,
trying to sell her the stolen flower for a farthing. He made a clutch at
the tall woman’s skirts to try and force her attention. She turned on
him with imperious gesture and snatched her skirt from his hand so
roughly that the little beggar with the baby on his back fell face down
on the Temple steps; then something seemed to clutch at the heart
strings of the woman’s own memories; for she paused, turned back and
from the wallet in her pocket girdle, threw the child a handful of coins
that flashed bronze and gold in the sun. It was as if the cloud of
sadness that had obscured the gladness of the Easter morning had
vanished like mist in sun.
* * * * *
Onesimus entered the cloister off the side of his little Christian
church. He was tall, thin and athletic from his active life and
inheritance of mountain blood. Religion was to him not the old-age
anodyne to jaded physical sensations dying of the fungus that kills a
fly in frost. It was the essence compounded of more Life and more Light.
“Growing old in the Kingdom is growing young,” he smiled. “What have we
to fear from old wives’ fables of the dark?” and he flung himself in a
stone chair below the cloister window and took up the letter of John to
the Seven Churches of the Great Roman Road.
Progress had been rapid since he was a slave lad in Rome and Paul wrote
on clay and wax tablets. Progress is always swift when we look back, but
slow as a snail when we look forward; for John’s letters were on skin
parchment.
The light came from the side of his church across from his cloister. He
had to bend and strain his vision to decipher the penmanship of the aged
disciple and it stabbed him to the quick, that message to his own little
church at Ephesus—an oasis of faith in a pagan desert of whirling
doubts—a message from his Unseen Lord through the hand of John: “I know
your works, your toil, your patience . . . you have never grown weary
. . . yet you no longer love Me as you did at first.”
Could that be true?
Did the Church no longer love Her Lord as at first?
Had she grown cold with habit? Or was it fear of death being the end-all
that had chilled the fire of their first zeal? They had expected the
King to return in a blaze of glory; and here was John’s message pointing
to the glory as Kingdom Unseen, where spirits must clothe them in
garments of light, where the building stones of the many mansions would
be precious jewels of beautiful deeds, where the leaves from the Tree of
Life would be for the healing of all nations—all nations, not just Jew
and Greek—and where forgiveness would be a cup of forgetfulness to
begin Life afresh in the Kingdom of Gladness.
Was it Doubt that had chilled love in Ephesus? For when he had come to
that line—“And there shall be no more Death”—hadn’t he paused,
staggered in belief, because he knew that all the apostles but Apollos
and John were dead? At that very line had he not heard in memory the
winding music of the huntress’ horn, when Diana’s horses came champing
down the mountains to plunge in the pastures of the sea? If Death were
end-all, better ride the wild horses of joy down to the eternal sea!
Was it Doubt that had chilled Love?
Onesimus sprang from his stone chair.
He would settle it once and for all. John, the Beloved, was on Patmos
Isle; Apollos of John Baptist’s band on Crete—but a few hours’ sail in
a spanking breeze from Ephesus. He would go and ask them if Death itself
were slain, robbed of its victory, deadened of its pain.
Was it true “there was to be no more Death?” If true, Onesimus wanted to
shout the glad news from the housetops. The very stones should cry out
in joy, the leaves clap hands in rhythmic dance, and all the feathered
songsters give voice in a gloria chant. Joy would be the voice of God in
many laughing waters; and the human body would no longer be dogged by
shadow, when Death, the spy, with skeleton face in the dark, was slain!
But as the young Bishop sprang up, a shadow fell athwart the morning
light streaming in beams of gold across his church into his cloister. It
was the shadow of the woman clad all in black; the woman he had noticed
coming out from all-night vigil in the Temple of Diana and tossing the
gold and bronze coins to the beggar child, whom her rough jerk had
thrown down the marble steps. She stood in the shadow of the gold light
gazing at him. She was not young. He knew by her hair and fair skin that
like himself, she was Greek; but there was something almost sibylline in
her tense silence. Her skin was pale as white wax. Her lips were parted
and painted, showing teeth white as pearls; and in her great dark eyes
were both the insolence and unfathomable sadness of a woman fleeing in
vain from the skeleton clutch of age and catching in vain at the rainbow
hours of youth. She was measuring the strength of an almost feline
cunning against the strength of his clarity before she spoke; and there
was that in her, which could bait cunning with flesh and set a man
guessing of her past. She was richly clad and decked in jewels, from the
pearls in her hair to the jade in the clasp of her sandals.
She smiled a slow smile with her lips, which had no reflex of joy in her
eyes, than which is no sadder smile on earth—’twas like a mask on a
death face.
“I wish you good morrow, Sirrah,” she said.
“Not—‘Sirrah,’” quietly answered the Bishop Onesimus in a silent rebuke
to familiar approach, “nor much need to wish good morning when God gives
free such day as this.”
She winced but did not retreat.
“How should I address you?” she asked smiling faintly.
“In sincerity and truth, as I shall answer you, Lady. If you speak truth
to a liar, it conceals you best, for he takes all truth for lie. If you
speak lie to a liar, it accomplishes nothing; for he regards all words
as lies.”
She winced this time and glanced away.
“I wait for you to invite me to be seated,” she said.
“The empty chair has already invited you, Lady.” He waited.
She seated herself, but had lost her air of insolence and no longer
baited her dark eyes with a flicker of dare to a man’s guess of her
past. Into them had come the terrible pleading of a dumb brute for
respite from unseen foe.
“What can I do for you, Lady?” asked the young Bishop.
Into her face came the wan wistful smile of a gambler’s last cast of the
dice. Her glance fell. She leaned forward across the table.
“I am not mad. Do not think me mad. You ask what can you do for me? I
have both heard and seen your miracles from faith. Years ago, when I was
a widow in Iconium, I saw your leader, Paul, work such miracles, but
when I sent a magician out to bribe him to tell the secret of his
tricks, I could learn nothing. Then he bewitched my only daughter, and
she deserted her affianced husband, and joined the Christian sect and
has kept house for what she calls her holy women in the hills on the
Roman Road for over twenty years. I am an old woman, but she is”—the
woman stammered—“she is eternally young. She wears a youth and radiance
that grow with growing years, while I—I flee a skeleton called age that
clutches me as I run; but she sits quiet while the death’s head of age
slips past, leaving her all untouched. You ask me what can you do for
me? I prayed all night in Diana’s Temple. I offered incense enough to
redeem ten slaves. I am not mad. Do not think me mad. I would pay any
price. Here is the gold. I gave a ragged beggar child gold enough to
make his parents rich, but to be told which way you lived. I would buy
from you your secret of eternal youth. How do you cheat age and death?
Why are you happier as you grow older?”
The astounded Bishop fell back with a gasp. It was as if a dark shadow
made of self in withered flesh had cast itself athwart the translucent
gladness of the spring morning, and would hold the rainbow in its dead
and greedy hands.
“Are you the Mother who cast her daughter out to the dogs of the
midnight streets in Iconium years ago, because she would not marry the
man to whom you sold her? Are you the Mother of Thecla, whom Paul
converted?” he demanded.
The woman did not answer. She cowered like a dumb brute from a blow.
“God’s mercy is long enough to reach down and pardon the meanest,” he
went on. “God wills not that anything He has created should perish, but
even now, you think only of self; and self is the demon that locks you
in your dungeon. When I saw you fling the beggar child down the stone
steps and then relent and throw the coins after him, I thought it was
repentance of your own hard heart; but now I know ’twas but another
offering made to the god of self to find another temple where your
prayer might be answered when you had failed with Diana. Even now, you
think not of the fate that your cruelty brought on your daughter! You
think only of saving yourself from skeleton age and death! Self is the
vampire that sucks life and youth and radiance to dry shell. Cast self
out and let the waters of life in. When you have pondered that, come
back for admission to the Kingdom of Gladness; and your own daughter
Thecla can open the door and give you the secret.”
He strode from the cloister in the towering rage of a man who has seen a
daughter thrown to the wild beasts by the selfishness of a mother. The
woman’s body rocked with paroxysm of self-pity in the stone chair of the
cloister.
* * * * *
The woman and her selfish request that would have made out of miracles a
slave to self passed from the Bishop’s mind like a cloud that darkens
our path for a moment, then vanishes, leaving not the shadow of a
substance. His quest was a shining light that eclipsed every other
impression from his being. Before they could pass beyond his reach, he
would go to his aged master, Apollos in Crete, and to John, the Beloved,
in Patmos, and ask them in verity if that message in the letter to the
Seven Churches of the Roman Road was to be taken in spiritual parable,
or in letter truth—that there was to be no more Death. If the Kingdom
were here and now, then like the insect nymph on the fountain stone,
Death was but the change of a worn out fleshy garment for a vesture of
light. Being still in his prime, Onesimus, the Bishop, did not realize
that his quest was the self-same search as that of the aged woman, bent
and broken under sin at the end of the road where there is no turning.
All he realized was that if the Christ’s ascension meant no more Death,
then this springtime anniversary marked a gladness of earth and air and
sea, that created a New Heaven and a New Earth.
As the Bishop stood at the prow watching the carved eagle’s head
noiselessly cut the calm seas between Ephesus and Crete, his soul was
wrapped in the deep calm of the beauty of the night. The silver moon
above hung silver in the water below. Only a cat’s-paw of wind was in
the canvas. The rowers below plied their oars as one man, keeping time
to some old rhythmic chant that was like the croon of the wind. The
Christian Bishop was Greek and the hypnotic rune carried his racial
memories back—back—back to the minstrelsy of hill clan and seaman, to
myths of the Isles of Greece—Minotaur—Bull-God—to whom the maidens
were offered; Mammon—God of Gold—to whom the youths were offered; and
raids over the mountain and sea to steal the victims.
To Onesimus, standing musing, the real world had become a dream world,
when a sailor at the prowl spoke to him in Greek:
“Know you this coin, Master? Is it gold or bronze?”
The seaman was clad only in trunks and loose shirt, with bare feet and
bare head. He had a capstan bar over his left shoulder, but between the
forefinger and thumb of his right hand he held a rudely minted coin with
roughly stamped insignia, which glittered yellow in the moonlight.
“It is gold. It is a very old coin. How did you come by it?”
Onesimus had taken the coin and was turning it over and over in his
hand.
The seaman’s apple cheeks and gray beard curled in a smile. “My son, he
sleeps under the steps of the Temple. Some rich merchant wife from the
Roman Road spends the night, night after night, praying to Diana in the
Temple. Diana does not give her what she asks; so then she comes out
angry in the morning and asks the way to the Temple of your new God, and
my son, he show her the way, and she throw him a handful of coin. I
think, my master, she make mistake. All the rest was bronze. My son, he
said she had a hard stiff face—you know its value, Master?”
Onesimus had handed back the coin. He was hardly hearing the seaman’s
words. He was thinking of the scene in the morning, when he had doubted
the value of a child to the Kingdom; and now he knew that the beggar
child with the maimed baby on its back had led Thecla’s mother to the
door of the Kingdom, and he had clashed the door in her face because of
past sin.
“Know you its value, Master?” repeated the seaman. “Will it buy my
freedom and my daughter’s, too? She is a slave girl in the Temples of
Crete and is wasting of a consumption. I would take her back to a good
woman in the hills off the Roman Road—a Grecian woman called Thecla.
Know you her?”
Onesimus came awake to pressing duties, like a dreamer out of selfish
trance.
“Yes, its value is three times the value of a slave; and I will now give
you six times its value in Roman coin to countervail my sin of this very
morning.” He had opened the leather wallet in his sash and was counting
six coins out for the seaman’s one, when a thought arrested him.
“Who mutilated the infant on your beggar-boy’s back? Is this girl child
also yours?”
“Nay, my Master,” the Greek seaman’s countenance saddened. “I sink not
so low. The little child is daughter of the Roman guard at Patmos; but I
am slave seaman for debt; and the witch, the fortune teller, at the
Temple steps, who keeps my son and forces him to beg, she it was who
maimed the infant. She feeds the children who are leased, and forces
them to earn bread. The infant was only a female and will be knocked on
the head; so the witch blinded her and broke her arm—”
Gone were the Bishop’s dreams of a world of Light and Life and Love!
Gone were his memories of Diana and her hunting horn winding divine
music through the caves and grottoes of the Isles of Greece. He was down
to earth with his feet on the ground, a warrior again for righteousness
in a world of crime. What mattered the coward fear of Death? His duty as
a soldier of His Lord was to fight for right in Life, and let Death take
care of itself, as the nymph insect that morning had discarded its coat
of skin to the winds.
He added another coin to the six he was counting out to the seaman.
“See you redeem the infant as well, and take them all to the hospice of
the woman Thecla in the mountains,” he commanded. “I will stand bail for
your good citizenship when you get your pass of freedom from the Roman
Governor.”
When the cusps of the mountains of Crete were sighted, and the great
canvas came clattering down, and the ship warped up to the quay, the
burly seaman—no longer slave but free—came to Onesimus with a capstan
bar over his shoulder.
“You will need me, Master,” he said. “There are riots in Crete. One
Apollos proclaims the downfall of the old Temples. They threaten to kill
him to-night if he break in on the service. For me, I see not why they
should kill him. He is old—they say he is a hundred years—he will die
anyway; and he preaches— ‘There is no Death.’” The big seaman exploded
in a bluff laugh through his beard that was like the burst of a squall
through a mountain pass; and the two went shouldering up through the
dock rabble towards the temple.
“They say,” went on the seaman with the new-found tongue of a slave
suddenly free, “this Apollos kept silent for five whole years in the
Lodges of India. Silent—not a word—only signs; but he learned their
magic and can fight the demons of air. ’Twas he gave my girl in the
Temple a cup of forgetfulness and bade her seek healing with the Greek
woman, Thecla, in the mountain caves off the Roman Road. He preaches
Gladness like you, Master, and always Light—Light—Light—a path up to
the dwellings of the gods,” the seaman laughed again. He was not sure
whether his garrulous babble were passing through the Bishop’s outer
ear.
“What does he teach?” asked Onesimus, curious to learn a slave’s views
of the Glad News.
“If we have no wants, we’ll seek few possessions,” continued the seaman.
“The winds are spirits—light is a garment—prayers are the smell of
flowers—incense is their seed—and he speaks only in the Temple at
night because he says men will remember his words in their sleep—”
“Why, then, should the Temple priests threaten to kill him?” asked the
Bishop.
The seaman paused in his march, shouldering through the crowds. He
evidently could not do two things at once—walk and talk.
“How do I know, my Master?” The burly fellow thought. “He is rich. He
needs no money. He tells the people to give no money to the priests—”
“Go on,” ordered the Bishop.
The seaman lowered the capstan bar from his shoulder and began poking a
pass through the throngs. So great was the press at the main entrance to
the Temple that the seaman turned aside and wedged a way through the
flanking crowd into the darkened cloisters down each side of the vast
edifice to the Sun. The Temple was roofless. On the main central floor
knelt thousands in worship. Censer lights hung on chains across the
front of the altar and beneath the lights chanted the priests in
full-chested chorus, old as time, to the moon and sun deities, while the
voice of the vestal virgins and the boy choristers rose shrill and clear
from the galleries above the cloisters.
“Go redeem your daughter in the galleries from the priests while I find
the Apostle Apollos,” directed Onesimus, “then meet me at the ship!”
But to find the Apostle Apollos was no easy matter in this dim light
clouded with incense and mist blowing in from the sea. The sailor went
clambering the stone stairs to the upper galleries, while Onesimus
picked his way past the prostrate worshipers towards the altar, where
Apollos would be likely to appear if he dared to try to speak after the
singing. Then, he caught sight of the venerable Apostle.
There was no mistaking that aged and beautiful figure—dressed in pure
white, with cork sandals, with hair and beard as white as washed silk,
and brow as lineless and radiant as the snowy mountain peaks—standing
calmly against one of the Temple pillars to the side of the high
smoke-clouded altar; but when Onesimus would have pressed forward to
him, he found the way through the last cloister stopped by a half-dozen
bloodhounds tied to the Temple columns to prevent the rescue of Apollos
by his followers; and one glance told Onesimus that Apollos stood so
motionless because he was bound by ankles and wrists to the upright
column.
“Bah,” said a bearded Roman guard clad in armor to his eyes, who was
standing behind the leashed bloodhounds, “he saved others; let him save
himself! He raised others from death by his magic tricks. Now he’s dead
man himself under this wolf pack if he budge a hair, where he stands.
Give me the leashes. I’ll let the line out to close on him, when the
singing stops,” and suiting the act to the word, the Roman took the
leash ends of the bloodhounds and gave them line to creep up within
touch of the bound man if he but stirred a hair’s breadth.
Onesimus moved up cautiously behind the Roman. He had the short dirk in
his belt that all Greeks wore, and from the gold cord round his neck
hung the usual traveler’s sword.
He was of two minds—whether to trip the Roman guard and snatch the
bloodhounds’ leash, or jump forward in the gathering cloud of mist and
incense, cut Apollos’ bonds and himself divert the attack of the
bloodhounds—when he noticed something with his keen mountaineer eye
that the Roman guard did not see. Apollos’ wrists and ankles had been
bound to the pillar by deer thongs. The hounds had sniffed forward and
were licking at the deer thongs; and through the dark, Apollos’ gleaming
black eyes were boring to Onesimus’ very soul with unspoken message.
They forbade word or move for his rescue. They seemed to redirect the
younger man’s glance back to the bloodhounds. The blood hounds were
licking the deer thongs and the raw hide was stretching as it always
stretches when wet, and Apollos had let it slip down over his hands from
his wrists to the floor, where the dogs, in growling and snarling to
snatch at it, had bitten through the thongs binding his ankles.
The Apostle did not move by a hair’s breadth. His brow was radiant with
a glowing light and his hair shone like fuller’s white.
The cymbals clashed. The silver trumpets blew. The lines of chanting
priests had seized bells to ring in rhythm and fans to send up the
clouds of incense. And there was heard the hunting horn of Diana coming
down from the fleecy meadows of mid-heaven to pasture her stallions and
mares in the ocean deeps—the vestal virgins’ high clear soprano gave
back refrain to the chant of the priests—when a blast of wind from the
tidal waves of Diana’s stallions and mares champing out to sea, blew
through the Temple pillars, sending the clouds of incense and mist back
over the worshipers.
Onesimus saw Apollos leap from the pillar to the altar stairs; and when
the Roman guard would have unleashed the hounds to tear him down, an
unseen foot tripped the soldier to his face on the tessellated floor of
the Temple, and the hounds were upon the fellow in a savage attack that
called the attention of the priests. Taking quick advantage of the
diversion and the back-blown cloud of sea mist and incense smoke,
Onesimus with a bound followed his Master, who had passed swiftly to the
stairs behind the altar, that led both to the vestal virgins’ galleries
above and to the famous underground labyrinths of Crete.
“Follow me not, beloved! Farewell,” Apollos had turned. “Escape back to
the ship with your seaman and his daughter! Take them to Thecla in the
caves! Seek me not! Farewell for a little time—”
Again the cymbals clashed. Again the silver trumpets blew. Again the
bells rang in rhythm to the chant of the priests and refrain of vestals.
Again the fans sent back the cloud of incense above the altar. Again was
heard Diana’s hunting horn coming down from the fleecy meadows of
mid-heaven to pasture her stallions and mares in the ocean deeps; but of
Apollos was nought to be seen.
“Bah,” said a Roman guard standing near the astounded Bishop of Ephesus,
“’twas but a trick of levitation, which all these Eastern magic fellows
play. The fellow has lifted himself up by his sandal straps and
disappeared through the clouds of smoke, as he did when he was tried
before our Emperor Domitian for tearing a boy’s entrails out. Wasn’t I
there? Didn’t I see him? Didn’t he defy our Emperor to his face? They
could prove nothing against the scoundrel—he wraps himself in his cloak
like this”—the guard imitated a man hiding his face in his cape— “I
see him plain as I see you, we all see him, the Emperor was about to
have him seized and burned as all these Greeks and Jewish sorcerers
ought to be burned—and there, as we look, the knave disappears from our
very eyes and reappears down in a cave among his followers by the sea,
where he takes ship and flees for Asia again. If I’d been Emperor, I’d
have had him seized where found and burned on the spot. ’Tis only a
trick of levitation—holding the breath, mumbling a hocus-pocus, and up
they go—”
“Simpler than that, Friend Roman,” responded a Greek priest of the
Temple, whose head was shaved like a billiard ball and whose face wore
the baffled look of one stunned by anger and fear. “There are thirty
thousand secret chambers in the old Minos Temples ’neath the Island
here, where all the Black Magic books of old have been hidden for a
thousand years. The knave must have known the secret passage to these
hidden underground caves, where ’tis like he hides now with all his
followers and rocks this Isle. ’Tis known the Isle always rocks in the
spring and autumn storms—and the old Greeks say ’tis from the Black
Magic of the Masters in the Caves. The man wrought Black Magic against
our Goddess. He ought to have been burned.”
“I notice,” said another, “that he had no shadow. These demons have no
shadow—’tis how we Greeks know demons in human form; and he always wore
a ring with a mystic stone got from the Magicians of India to protect
him.”
“A plague on these cursed Gnostics and Essenes and Nazarenes,” gritted a
Jew, joining the amazed group. “They are turning the whole world upside
down. Feed them to the beasts, I say, as they did in the mad Nero’s
day.”
* * * * *
Onesimus came out to the star-silvered night, dazed and dumb. Was there
“no more Death”? He could not answer. He stood by the rocky coast of the
calm painted sea with the Greek freed seaman and his daughter rescued
from the Temple service. Snow was falling in a white mantle on the upper
peaks of the opaline mountains. Was it “the Angel of the Snows” of which
Apollos and Enoch taught? Hoar frost seemed to be lining the upper
forested evergreens in the glint of jewels. Was it the Angel of the Hoar
Frost? Mist was rising from the sea to meet the mist from the mountains
in ghostly curtains. Was it the Spirit of the Mist wrapping its vesture
around the departed Apostle? And the winds began to chant a mystic rune
where the sea and rock met in the white fret of the night tide. Was it
the Angel of the Winds, which, Apollos had taught, come out to gather
earth thoughts for the weal or woe of earth?
The Bishop of Ephesus fell to his knees and spent the rest of the night
on the shore in prayer.
And so the Bishop on his way home to Ephesus, accompanied by the slave
seaman freed and the daughter redeemed from Temple service in Crete on
their voyage to Thecla’s hospice on the Roman Road—paused at Patmos,
the rocky desert isle, where John, the Beloved, lived in banishment and
dreamed.
The vessel beached at dawn and while the sailors took on a fresh cargo
of fish, Onesimus asked the way to the hut of John, the exile.
The Roman guard was father of the infant girl, whom the Greek sorceress
at Ephesus had leased and maimed to beg; and when the soldier heard from
the seaman of the coin which would ransom six slaves redeeming his
little daughter, the guard told Onesimus how John’s banishment had been
revoked and the aged Disciple had gone to Ephesus by the previous day’s
boat.
“Yonder,” said the Roman guard, “is his prison hut; and yonder, where
you hear the roaring seas, is his Vision Cave—there is the voice of
many waters there—go not too far in—the maids of spray and rainbow
hair”—and the man laughed awkwardly at his own superstition.
The little white stone hut stood on the wave-fretted rocks facing the
burst of sunrise over the green isles of Greece in the blue morning sea.
While the sailors loaded freight, the Bishop wandered up to the prison
hut of the last of the Disciples. It was such a prison hut as Paul had
occupied at Rome—but in a quieter cleaner haven, where the dawn came
over sea and peak in a Jacob’s Ladder to sleeping and waking dreams, up
and down which the Angels might pass from Heaven to men’s souls. Blue
and primrose were the skies above. Emerald and white were the seas
below. Yellow and gold were the spears of the sun, and opal were the
peaks of far mountains swimming between heaven and earth.
The cave was a haven for a seer to dream or commune with God for the
wind played the harp in the gaunt trees growing from the bare rocks; and
the voice of many waters sounded day and night without ceasing, where
wave fret beat in the hollow resounding caverns of rock and landlocked
inlet; and the trickle of receding tides through the fine sands was as
the tinkling of myriad little bells.
Onesimus drew from his traveler’s case a parchment; and here is what he
read, as in a trance between life and death:
“And the sea gave up the dead, which were in it . . . and death and the
grave delivered up the dead, which were in them; and they were judged
every man according to their works . . . and I saw a new heaven and a
new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away
. . . and I heard a great voice out of the heavens saying— Behold, the
tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them and be their
God . . . and shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall
be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any
more pain; for the former things are passed away. . . . Behold I make
all things new. . . . Write; for these words are true and faithful . . .
I will give to him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life
freely . . . and there shall be no night . . . for the Lord God giveth
light . . . and the Spirit and the bride say—come; And let him that
heareth say come! And let him that is athirst come! And whosoever will,
let him take the water of life freely. . . .” When he had finished
reading, the Bishop was no longer in trance. He was in ecstasy. It was
as if the golden light of day dawn had photographed the last message of
the Last Disciple in letters of celestial fire across the firmament of
heaven and earth to all time in a rainbow of eternal hope.
What matter whether his resurrection were a physical body, a soul body,
a spiritual body? Paul, himself, had said, when wrapped away in vision
to a Third Heaven not made of hands, that he knew not whether he was in
“terrestrial” or “celestial” body. Onesimus now knew that neither matter
nor spirit could perish—but only change, and He who had created both
would govern what form they must take in the New Heaven and the New
Earth; and Christ would give that cup of forgetfulness of sin from the
Book of Remembrance, which the pagan Greeks promised from drink of their
sacred spring. Then suddenly, as if in a glimpse of cosmic
consciousness, he knew the veil was very thin—thinner in every cycle of
ages—as the Old crashed down, the New grew up in its place—till the
New became a New Heaven and a New Earth, a New Heaven on Earth; and he
heard the voice of many waters, “not only as the rite of baptism for the
turning from sin,” but as a river of living waters flowing from the
throne of God, to carry mankind to the destiny of the Sons of God. He
knew the crucifixion of his Master had marked the end of a cycle, and
all His followers were the Torch Bearers of the Glad News to future
ages.
The ship anchored at Ephesus too late for the Bishop to get carriage up
from the water front to the city square. As far as one can judge from
the configuration of sands and ruins, the distance was six or seven
miles. Accompanied by the Greek seaman, and the redeemed Temple vestal,
he walked the distance from tide water to city square, where his own
little church and dwelling stood across from the Great Temple to Diana
Artemis. Opposite the pagan Temple, the three left him to rouse the
little beggar boy, who commonly slept under the marble steps. The
Bishop’s intention was to prepare a cloister for these travelers on the
way to Thecla’s hospice to sleep; then snatch a few moments of sleep,
himself, before presenting himself at his own home where the aged John
would be housed and resting.
The silver colossus of the Goddess stood an unearthly wraith in the pale
dawn of the city square. The morning mist came in a long ghostly beam
across his own church into the cloisters on the garden side. Some bird
awakened in the garden and stabbed the morning silence with a threnody
of unutterable beauty. The fountain in the garden fell with the tinkle
of tiny bells as though the flowers rang out their morning hymn, besides
which was no sound but the padded footfall of his own sandals across the
misty church.
He stooped, steadying his hand on a stone bench and loosed the sandals
from his own feet, nor quite knew why he had done it, when a spear of
sunlight struck through the beam of mist aslant his church; and there on
the cot in his own prayer cell lay the figure of the aged Disciple,
John, in a deep sleep motionless and peaceful as death.
Then Onesimus started back in an amaze that was neither fear nor horror.
It was as if his own doubts lay before him slain; for the figure of the
woman, clad all in black, was on her knees, bent over the feet of the
Disciple, sobbing. The air was heavy with the spring hyacinth odor for
the dead, and the weeping woman was breaking and pouring an alabaster
jar of perfumed ointment over the feet of the Beloved and wiping them
with her fallen hair. As she caught glimpse of the Bishop standing in
the half dark of the cell arch, she rose and whispered—
“He is not dead. He only sleeps. There is no Death.”
It was Thecla’s mother.
“He hath but changed his vesture of flesh for vesture of Light,” said
the Bishop softly. “He hath gone to the New Heaven and the New Earth of
his Vision. He is not far away. He has fallen asleep to awaken in the
Garden of God.”
So “fell asleep” John, the last of the Disciples.
When the Bishop and the woman rose from prayer, the freed Greek seaman,
and the redeemed Temple maid and the two beggar children stood in the
cloister arch, waiting to be directed to the Thecla hospice of the Roman
Road.
The Bishop placed his hands on the heads of the beggar children.
“Suffer little children to come unto Him and forbid them not,” he said,
“for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven, for our youth shall lead the
whole redeemed world.”
FOREWORD TO APPENDIX
As a child and later a student, I recall intensely disliking Paul. I
wasn’t quite sure he was a “crazy fanatic and self-hypnotized epileptic
and self-deceived, unconscious fakir,” which I have heard teachers of
youth in our colleges call him; terrible views for a child to hold about
a saintly character—I only set them down to show how wrong teaching can
color our version of the Bible—but I regarded him as fanatical, narrow,
crabbed, sour, domineering, eager to dragoon men into believing as he
did, whether by fear of Hell-fire, which seemed to me a cowardly
fire-insurance policy against retribution or by sheer force of will, I
had not decided. I distinctly disliked saints, whose milk of human
kindness had turned sour. Later, years later, when I came back to read
his life in the sacred records, as I would read with unprejudiced eyes
in the search for facts which we carry to the reading of an ordinary
life, I was amazed and staggered to find he was a small man, frail of
body, short-sighted, suffering some physical ailment from the
persecutions to which he had been subjected, fearless as a lion where
the faith was concerned, humble and simple as a child in other matters,
generous in money matters—see the loan to Philemon—so independent that
while he collected funds for famine in Jerusalem, he would never touch
those funds himself, but supported himself by the making of tents, for
which there was great demand owing to caravan travel being universal,
and so great of heart that his tenderness extended to a little slave
boy, who came to him in Rome and who ultimately became the youngest
bishop in the Christian Church in the third largest city of the Roman
Empire.
About this time I began reading the Bible as I would any other book, or
a newspaper editorial, critically but shorn of early beliefs and
prejudices. I read ignoring chapter divisions and verse divisions, which
too often have provided controversialists with bullets for
sharp-shooting in ambush by wresting sentences from context and meaning,
and using them as “the Devil quotes Scripture” for his own purposes; and
I can conceive of nothing that will restore belief quicker than to read
the Bible as a historical record of the birth and growth of a great
redemptive force for humanity—using redemption as a force in
present-day life, not in a far-away, vague shadowy Kingdom of the
Hereafter.
About this time, too, I realized what one of the greatest American
theologians has frankly admitted—that the worst foes of Christianity
are not its enemies but “the friends in its own house,” and those foes
are sometimes medieval inheritances of superstitious interpretations, of
which we are unconscious; scraps of misapplied, ignorant Sunday-School
teaching. In fact, I have often wondered, if secular teaching were given
with as colossal ignorance of historic data as sacred teaching is given,
how many pupils could pass even a primary examination? How much would be
known of applied science, or even our own secular historic development?
For instance, how many Bible teachers know that Christ and John and Paul
all quote from the Book of Enoch, which is variously dated as from 200
to 120 B.C.? How many know that “the camel and the eye of a needle” was
an Arab expression used to this day? How many know that many of the
expressions precious to the whole world were quoted by the writers from
ancient masters sacred and secular—such as the reference to
“principalities and powers” separating us from the love of God? How many
realize that “oil out of the flinty rock” was not a metaphor, but a
fact—such a fact, that modern drillers for petroleum have found oil in
that very spot? How many know that the fiery furnace recorded in the
book of Daniel to destroy the three young Hebrews is corroborated by
references in the Maccabees and other ancient books to naphtha waters
which burned with a flame to consume all towards whom the wind blew, but
which had a funneling air center inside, which left the furnace harmless
in the middle? How many know that tiles and statuary dug out of the
ruins of Babylon show a man lying unharmed under a lion in the lion’s
den of the king’s royal gardens? We ridicule the story of Jonah and the
whale; yet from the belly of a stuffed sacred alligator in Egypt amid
scraps of waste paper were taken precious lost records of the sayings of
Christ.
The Bible is not much longer than seven short novels. The most of people
read seven novels in a year. The ordinary modern magazine has the same
number of words as a short novel. A great many people read a magazine
from cover to cover once a week. If the Bible were read in the same free
spirit, unclouded by inherited prejudice or taint of “creeds,” the
return to belief among youth would be a thing to astound the world.
Why isn’t it so read?
To quote the theologian—because “the literalists” insist that in the
reading, youth shall read into the context what they dictate rather than
what youth finds of everyday usable livable truths; and to-day, youth
will not be dragooned. He is going to follow the light of truth as he
finds the light of truth and proves the truth. He isn’t going to accept
one set of opinions on Sunday, which he finds won’t work out in everyday
life on Monday. Christianity has to be a workable scheme for every day
in the week, or youth is going to leave the church pews empty and crowd
to “the movies,” to the theater, to the anarchist lectures, to the wild
abandon of joy in the rhythmic emotional dance; and—youth is right.
With unfettered feet and wings of dawn to its soul, it faces always the
new day. It never looks backwards. It rejoices in Life; and Christianity
must be put in terms of youth, or preach to emptier and emptier pews.
Paul never ceased reiterating “Rejoice—rejoice and again I
say—rejoice.” Too often we have clothed a glad and glorious message in
habiliments of age and woe, which are really the consciousness of past
sins and failures. The Communion is not a Doleful Supper commemorating a
death. It is a Loving Cup commemorating a wonderful and glad new birth.
The Kingdom of Heaven is not to-morrow. It is now; or else it is never.
And yet, let us not blame the Middle Age interpretations shadowy with
crime and sorrow. In a carnival of lust and crime and rapine and sword,
the Middle Age Church preserved and conserved for humanity, like an
oasis of the spirit in a desert of materialism, all that has helped
humanity most, and this in spite of the fact it foolishly punished
astronomers, who proved the earth round and burned men who differed by a
hair’s breadth from its “credo.” While it was guilty of these tragical
mistakes of obeying the letter rather than the spirit—as the Pharisees
who crucified Christ, had done before it—the Middle Age Church kept the
faith for us, inspired and conserved art, science, letters, in a
wilderness of barbarism. Who encouraged almost sublime architecture? Who
produced paintings that have never been equaled to this day? Where did
Roger Bacon work out his great, though concealed, truths of science? In
the safety, though it was the imprisonment, of a friar’s cell. Roger
Bacon (1214-1294), the friar at Oxford, wrote these words. Were they
clairvoyant foresight, or the superior knowledge of a scientist from
facts? “Ships will go without rowers and with only a single man to guide
them. Carriages without horses will travel with incredible speed.
Machines for flying can be made in which a man sits. Machines will raise
infinitely great weights. Bridges will span rivers without supports.”
His superior knowledge was ascribed by his superiors to Black Magic; but
Pope Clement IV supported him and ordered his knowledge set forth in
books, of which he wrote three in eighteen months without secretary; but
his own immediate superiors ascribed his marvelous knowledge to
communications from the Devil, and had him imprisoned for fourteen
years. After seven hundred years, the light of that cell comes out to
the world: yet, the men who suppressed him thought they were protecting
God’s word from assault. It can only be added that the history of
ignorance repeats itself with surprising persistence. The good men of
his day were simply trying to tie truth down to the dead line of their
own ignorance. With a charity and a clarity infinite as the love of God,
let us be careful we do not do the same thing.
Rather than condemn the mistakes of the Middle Age Church from whose
darkened and superstitious interpretations we yet suffer, let us beware
we do not repeat their mistakes by shutting out the new light of history
and archæology and science, where we should welcome it.
Christianity does not need to apologize for itself, or beg the question.
When it does that, he who excuses accuses. When it does that, it is off
the carpet in the modern world. It can stand on the solid foundation of
its own truth. If that foundation cracks, it will fall as the Holy City
fell before a New Order. Rather than repel attack, we should welcome it.
Attack is the storm wind that strengthens the hold of the roots on the
eternal rocks. It is the wind that causes the corn stalk to put out guy
ropes above its roots to hold fast to sure foundation. I love to read
attacks on Christian truth if they are sincere and not cheap, cynical,
ignorant sneers, which never get anywhere. They force examination of the
certainty of the facts beneath our faith.
To take but one example of what muddy thinking has done to stir up
shallow waters to make them look deep—consider the furious and foolish
controversy in the modern church over “miracles.” “We believe in
miracles,” shouts one section of the Church, “and if you don’t, we’ll
see that you are put out of the church and prove that you are damned.”
“We don’t believe in miracles and we defy you to put us out of the
church; or we’ll pull down the pillars of youth like Samson as we go
out,” shouts back the other section; and neither stops to ask in simple
clarity:
What is a miracle?
Is it God breaking, or intervening to prevent, the effect of His own
laws?
We have no such phenomena in natural life, and shy back from answering
that question in as bold terms as it is asked.
Or is it the working of a higher law overruling and annulling a lower
law? There are cases of that in nature, as when the effect of a warm and
constant ocean current is annulled by a cold wind from the north; but in
this case, neither law is abrogated. We are getting the effects of each;
but the effect of one is stronger than the other. That might be the
meaning of “a miracle”; but the explanation is so obscure and the
workings so complex and in the unknown, that if that be the conception
of “miracle” we had better not split the church over it. We are dealing
with too many unknown quantities to postulate with mathematical
certainty what we do know and what we don’t of fact, or to exclude from
fellowship on the grounds of what is unknown.
Or is a miracle a superior knowledge of all laws and the use of that
knowledge to get certain effects, such as the knowledge of Roger Bacon,
who was seven hundred years in advance of his time? If that be
“miracle,” the controversy vanishes in thin air.
A century ago, if any man had told us we could see through a man’s flesh
and count his ribs and the joints in his backbone, we would have called
him an unconscious fakir, or a conscious liar. Yet X-rays have worked
that “miracle.”
Fifty years ago, if any one had told us we could go round the world
under the sea like Jonah in the whale’s belly, we would have answered
him in the language of Missouri, “Show me.” Yet the submarine has worked
that “miracle.”
Twenty-five years ago, if any one had predicted we would course the
skies in winged chariots of which you can read a description in the
First Chapter of Ezekiel, we would have told him a comic legend about
Darius Green and his flying machine. Yet the aeroplane has worked that
“miracle.”
Ten years ago, if some one had told us soberly and expecting belief that
he could talk without wire or letter from New York with a friend in
Honolulu, we would have had him examined for his sanity. Yet wireless
has worked that “miracle.”
The impossibility of yesterday is the wonder of to-day and the
commonplace of to-morrow. The laws of the X-ray, of under-sea navigation
in submarine, of air travel in aeroplane, of wireless communication,
existed just as much and the same in the days of Christ as they exist
to-day; but men did not know those laws and did not know how to use
them. “Greater works than these shall ye do,” said the Master. We didn’t
believe Him, though we thought we did; and we witness the fulfillment of
the prophecy. We are heirs to the fulfillment of the prophecy by the
greatest Master in foresight the world has ever known, by One who did
more to set the human soul free of the shackles of ignorance and
prejudice than any other leader of all humanity.
He, who postulates to-day on what is, or is not, miraculous, simply
writes himself down an ignorant muddy-brained thinker, stirring up
shallow waters to make them look deep. The “literalist” in this case
simply tries to bind youth down to “old wives’ fables” and to nursery
beliefs. He tries to level Christian truth down to the dead line of the
most ignorant.
And so of nearly all the disputes in the Christian Church—“the
resurrection,” “the descent into Hell,” “the Immaculate Conception,”
“the letter inerrancy of the Scriptures.” Ask definitely what the
controversialist means by his own terms, and whether agnostic or
fundamentalist, instead of answering you, he backs against the wall of
his “rightness” and hurls thunder bolts of damnation and excommunication
from fellowship at you; and Youth still goes on its way in laughter and
gladness; and I thank God that it does. It would be terrible if
Christianity ever became as static and dead as the faith of the
Pharisee, who crucified Christ because He would not conform to the
letter of the law instead of the spirit.
We should remember the simple words, “He will not wrangle.” All
Christianity asks is—“prove all things.” If they don’t prove up, don’t
take them.
Not long ago, a friend had an experience that illustrates this. For
twenty years, she had practically never read the Bible. She had been
taught the Bible wrong and when the Bob Ingersoll era came on,
ridiculing these vulnerable teachings, she had quit reading the Bible.
As a professor, who teaches teachers in the largest teachers’
institution in America, once said to me: “Really I envy you your naïve
beliefs! I envy any one who can believe that old stuff”; she had
discarded the Bible as a book of myths and fairy tales. She said once “I
can’t read it. I simply can’t read it. I read into it the old impossible
prejudices and creeds I was taught when I was a girl; and now I know
they are not true.” To overcome that mental habit of reading into the
Bible what isn’t in it, I suggested Weymouth’s translation in modern
phraseology with strictest adherence to linguistic scholarship. We miss
some of the old and beautiful phrases in this translation, but we get a
translation free of the old controversial doubtful implied
interpretations. She began re-reading the Bible as she would any other
authentic historic record. In her enthusiasm, she carried her new
treasure to a devout elderly saintly friend of the old school. The
friend sat up in horror. How dare any one suggest there could be any
improvement in the translation of the Bible. The good friend was
evidently in devout and blissful self-righteous ignorance of the sources
of the Bible. She evidently did not know that the Tindale Bible of 1555
was improved in the King James Version of 1611, and the King James
Version was improved in the 1888 version; and there are still phrases
and words which linguistic research is improving. And recall that, in
old texts from which the Bible is taken, some of the old manuscripts did
not use the vowel but left the vowel to be guessed. The good friend—and
she was sincere—mistook the pebbles and the small rocks of the trail up
the slopes of light for the main foundation and the light ahead; and
promptly began hurling those rocks and pebbles at a true seeker after
light.
It was a case of a saint’s shadow darkening a seeker’s trail.
APPENDIX A
CONCERNING PAUL’S MISSIONARY TOURS
AND DISPUTED POINTS
“The Christian religion takes its stand upon the ground of history,”
says Malden in his _Problems of the New Testament_; “but there is now a
feeling abroad that the authority of the New Testament has been severely
shaken by recent studies, if it is not in danger of being destroyed
outright.”
Fifteen years ago, such a statement would have been acknowledged as
voicing general sentiment, not to be denied; and the liberal wing of
scholars would have regarded the statement as grounds for relegating the
New Testament in history to the junk heap of picturesque myths, in which
there was, of course, some dim reflex of events that had happened, but
so embroidered by superstition as to be utterly untrustworthy as a basis
for belief founded on facts; while the literalists would have regarded
the same general sentiment as grounds for blind belief, for dogmas to
embody their blind belief, to which all Christians must subscribe, or be
cast out. Indeed, the most excited and least informed of the literalists
would have gone even farther as late as 1922—they would have passed
laws prohibiting free speech, free thought, the teaching of any brand of
belief but their own. The panic reiteration of dogma was a sad evidence
of lack of faith in the truth beneath their own beliefs.
Truth needs no bludgeon of civil law or religious threat of exclusion.
All it needs is to be put forth with its proofs. He who seeks to
establish his own beliefs by disproving some one else’s—is wasting
precious time. Truth needs only that its torch be held high aloft
lighting the way, and humanity will follow; and the dark illusion called
error will vanish as darkness always disperses before light.
But with the War has come a subtle change. The change of front is
something deeper than a complete collapse of the scheme on which our
civilization seemed founded. It is a something deeper than the fear of
death that took such awful toll in the War. It is deeper than a panic
stampede from the impasse of our own former conclusions.
It is a determination to get at basic truths and with them rebuild a
better civilization. Even if we have to proceed slowly step by step as
up a steep trail of rolling stones to higher outlook, we are determined
to eliminate error and get at truth, on which we’ll found our faith for
the morrow.
The War only hastened a tendency that had been ripening for half a
century. It opened doors long closed in the East to linguistic scholars,
to archæologist’s spade, to such purely secular scientific expeditions
as the American expedition to the deserts of Tartary and Mongolia to
find if the original home of mankind and prehistoric life were really in
Asia.
Men and women back from the horrors of War somehow vaguely realized that
dogmatic religion had not prevented a hideous throwback of civilization
to the practices of barbarism. They discovered with horror civilization
was only skin deep; and while some came back with hopeless fears that
science, in submarine and aeroplane and poisonous gases and armaments of
long-range devilish powers undreamed as possible, seemed to have created
a monster that would devour civilization, like the destruction of the
fabled Atlantis, others came back with a deeper insight. While science
had created the monsters of destruction, it had also discovered the
angels of mercy in surgery, in aeroplane, in wireless, that seemed
almost to rend the veil into the unseen.
So humanity came back from the War seeking foundations for belief in
truth facts—sifting error from truth, proving all things, and holding
fast only to what it could prove and use; and neither science nor
religion asks any other criterion—“Try it; if it works, take it: if it
doesn’t, don’t”; and the latest scholarship declares bluntly
Christianity takes its stand on the ground of history.
The story of Onesimus will be found in outline in the letter to
Philemon. Though Rome had neither Titus’ Triumphant Arch, nor
Vespasian’s magnificent colosseum, when Paul was prisoner in the hut
near the Three Taverns, one can reconstruct from Josephus and from the
Roman historians of the period the character of the Rome in which the
young Phrygian slave found himself enmeshed, and how Paul lived with the
radiance of a quenchless diamond amid the cesspool slime of a great
imperial city in the first stages of its moral decay. How great and
hideous was that moral decay could not be told in a book going through
the mails. Hints of it can be found in Philostratus’ _Apollonius_
(Oxford, 1912). The references to Nero need no proof. They are
well-known history; and if space permitted, the letters, true or false,
of Paul and Seneca could be given. These letters can be found in the
Apocryphal Books of the New Testament, on which Malden (Oxford), Turner
(Oxford), Sir William Ramsay and Bishop Lightfoot have given the latest
best views. At first, my impression was Onesimus might have been a
colored slave like the Apostle later known as “Niger,” but on looking up
the past history of the Phrygian mountain clans, it was easy to see how
the constant raids of robber bands from upper Galilee to kidnap the
mountain boys and girls and sell them as slaves in the cities of the
Roman Road, might have produced a character like Onesimus, and that he
was pure Greek. To this day, the Druse descendants of these mountain
clans have resisted all enslavement. If captured and reduced to
servitude, they become fanatic demons of crime. If left free, they
preserve a peculiarly pure form of Christian belief, though primitive
and superstitious. Felix’s part in clearing out the robber bands of
Galilee is also history and can be found fully given in Josephus though
too often when he rescued the kidnapped victims, it was to resell them
to enrich himself. The jealousy between the sisters—Drusilla and
Bernice—is also given in Josephus. The fact that Felix, who had once
been slave himself, rose to marry the royal and proud line of the Herods
attests a character of peculiar force. The scene in the Cæsarean
Judgment Hall will be found given in the _Acts_, and still more fully in
Josephus. Of later authorities on Paul, besides Malden and Lightfoot,
are Robinson of Cambridge, Rendell Harris in his volumes of 1893 and
1911, Parry of Cambridge, 1920, Smith, 1919, and Kersopp Lake in 1916.
Students wishing to trace back these modern authorities to the ancients
and nearer contemporaries of Paul will find the references in these
volumes leading them back to Clement and Ignatius and Iræneus and hosts
of others. The name of Paul’s custodian on the ship wrecked en route to
Rome is variously spelled, but I have followed the spelling of the
_Acts_. The same name is again found in the fall of the Holy City.
Church historians have been very severe on Bernice, who became a
character famous or infamous—as you will—in Titus’ day in Rome. Her
angling to ensnare the Emperor, who was a young general at the time,
became a joke in the Roman theaters, but would judgments be so severe, I
wonder, if censors looked up the age at which this child was married to
her first husband, and then to silence evil gossip about the affection
between herself and her brother, was married to a second aged husband
whom she at once left? She could not have been more than seventeen or
eighteen, when married to the second husband. All the Herods notoriously
married off their daughters and sisters to strengthen their own insecure
thrones. Women were a pawn for empire; and I, for one, would hate to
cast a stone at a girl of eighteen, who when she found herself a pawn
between lust and power, if she had to pawn herself, aimed at the highest
bidder. The name of Bernice’s second husband from whom she fled—Polemo
or Polemon—should be noted carefully; for it comes again in the story
of Thecla. The royal Roman lady, a relative of the Emperor, was either
wife or daughter of this ancient satyr, and her sympathy for Thecla may
have arisen from her own similar experiences. _Apollonius’ Life_ gives
the brand of the man’s vices. Young Agrippa, the last of the Herod line,
while too weak to master circumstances and rule with the iron ruthless
hand of Herod the Great, was undoubtedly the most decent of all the evil
Herods, and his character as portrayed by Josephus, hardly bears out the
evil insinuations of the Jews, who mobbed and would have murdered both
him and his sister. Paul’s opinion of the young man, we get in the
_Acts_, and Agrippa’s reaction to that appeal does not bear out proof of
a degenerate youth. “Almost,” says the boyish prince, he could not have
been much over twenty, “you would make me a Christian.” All that is
merely hinted here of the Daphne Gardens is mild compared to the truth
that can be found in any Roman record of the day. The lure of the Daphne
Gardens drew many Romans to spend the winter at Antioch, with fatal
results to the morale of officers and governors; and after the fall of
Jerusalem compelled the change of the headquarters of the Christian
church from Antioch to Ephesus. The best testimony to the influence of
the new faith in counteracting the evil of those Gardens is found in the
charges and countercharges when the temples were destroyed, that the
Christians had burned them. It was not with earthly fires they had
burned them but with the divine fires of the faith.
In one secular account of the return of the Roman troops after the sack
of Jerusalem will be found mention of a shipwreck almost similar to that
which overtook Paul on his journey to Rome; and in early Grecian
statuary and pottery will be found ships “trussed” or “frapped” by ropes
to keep the timbers from going to pieces just as recorded in the _Acts_.
Lucian’s history describes the corn ships of the period; and Josephus’
account of a wreck is an exact parallel of Paul’s experiences, except
that Josephus’ ship carried six hundred passengers. “Corn,” it need
hardly be told here, was not our modern corn but such grains as wheat
and barley. Palestine is now known to have been the original area of the
first wheat cultivated in the world.
One very pointed question occurs here. Where Josephus refers to Christ,
his words are: “_Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it
is lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works . . .
he was the Christ . . . and when Pilate . . . had condemned him to the
cross . . . he appeared alive again the third day. . . ._”[3]
[3] By some scholars, this paragraph is regarded as a forgery.
And he hints that the destruction of Jerusalem was divine chastisement
for the murder of James, the disciple. His words are: “The brother of
Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James . . . he (Herod)
delivered to be stoned.” Luke’s account of this in the _Acts_ is: “Herod
the king stretched forth his hand to vex certain of the church; and
killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.” The two accounts do
not seem to agree, but recall all men wore swords in these days, even
the disciples—see the cutting of Malchus’ servant’s ear—and in a
rabble stoning a man to death both accounts may be true. That being
Josephus’ belief, why did he not refer more frankly to Christ as the
Messiah of Jewish expectation? That has been a puzzling question that
has cast discredit on Josephus as historian of the Roman era. Yet it
would not cast discredit on him if one paused to examine the
circumstances under which his history was written. He had been a
Pharisee of the Pharisees, in the best sense, and a Zealot of the
Zealots for the defence of Hebrew rights; but when he saw that Judea had
not a chance on earth against Roman power—that Rome could give order
and law where the Hebrews, themselves, could not, like Isaiah before
him, he counseled coöperation with the strong power rather than the
opposition that would inevitably end in national extinction. In the
siege of Jerusalem, like Agrippa, he went over to the Roman side against
the lawless robber bands, who held and plundered the Holy City. He did
everything in his power to save the city from total destruction by
imploring its surrender till he was stoned away by the fighters on the
walls. When the Holy City was conquered and totally destroyed but for
the Herod Towers on the west, he was taken to Rome and given quarters in
the royal palace, and wrote his record of the Roman era in Palestine for
Titus and Vespasian, as their guest and pensioner. As historian in an
era when emperor worship was being set up by Rome throughout the Empire,
he could hardly issue an official history under Roman approval that
acknowledged Pilate, the Roman governor, had crucified, at the behest of
the Jews, the unacknowledged Messiah. We wish for his own sake he had
frankly given record of the Christ, whose career he must have known in
detail in a land not much larger than Vermont, or say, about a hundred
and seventy-five miles long by sixty broad, which was the area of the
Jewish Palestine in his day. He gives full record of all the High
Priests and the Sanhedrim to the cutting of their throats in the
Aqueduct twenty-five years after Christ’s death. He was in and about
Jerusalem during the most of Christ’s life. Familiar with every foot of
Palestine, that life he must have known; but he is silent because he was
the pensioner of the government that had consented to Christ’s death.
That Paul and Josephus and Apollos must have known one another is
self-evident. Each was a great student of the law and of philosophy.
Each was familiar with the studies of the great philosophies of
Alexandria. Paul quotes from them continually. Paul and Josephus had
both studied in Jerusalem. Paul and Apollos had both spent their boyhood
in Tarsus. Apollos seems to have been the richest of the three, and a
traveled gnostic. Josephus was soldier till he laid down arms in
Jerusalem to become historian in Rome, and he was a liberal Pharisee.
Paul was fanatical student of the Hebrew law till he became follower of
Christ. That Paul was tentmaker did not place a social chasm between him
and the other two; for every Hebrew boy had to learn a trade to forefend
against want in perilous times.
Solely because it would require a library of books to give the
corroborative data of Paul’s life in Rome and in Cæsarea, the data
bearing on Onesimus’s story must here be condensed to notes for
reference.
The Spring Festival in the Roman Empire occurred at almost the same
period of the year as the Jewish Passover and the Christian crucifixion;
so that the tortures inflicted on Christ and the later Christian martyrs
at this period were really to glut the lust for blood that was part of
the old pagan worship. Free gifts for charity to the mob had degenerated
into a bribe to the populace in place of justice. Rome was no longer
Roman. It was a composite of the known world. Though Rome gave her
Empire good laws and stable government, as Apollonius, the sage, pointed
out to the General, Vespasian, she could not ensure the execution of
those laws for two reasons: if she appointed local governors or kings,
like the Herods, to hold loyalty, she could not prevent them exacting
extortionate taxes for their own wealth; if she appointed Roman
governors like Pilate, they could not speak the languages of the
far-flung provinces and had to depend on underlings of native birth, who
perverted Roman justice. The Roman Empire was falling to pieces from
over-extension. Democracy was degenerating to mobocracy and mobocracy to
the tyranny of the Army.
Would the old Idumean guard have been executed for the loss of his
prisoner in the shipwreck? He most certainly would; for Rome was as
ruthless to her own, as to her provincials.
The object in kidnapping a beautiful slave can be found in the four
lives that have been written of Apollonius. We sometimes despair of the
world because religion seems to have done so little to change men. The
despair is the voice of unbelief. Read the old records. The tortures of
Thecla were mild compared to the martyrdom of many a Christian in the
pleasure gardens of Nero, where the victims were dipped in oil and then
tied to stakes, as torches, in ridicule of the claim that they were the
torch bearers of light and glad news.
Rome standing for irresistible brute power, was ever jealous of the
cultured Greeks; and the Greeks returned scorn for scorn—which would
explain why Onesimus, a Greek runaway, was friendless in Rome.
By the time of Paul’s first imprisonment, 63-64 A.D., Nero’s madness was
acknowledged in Rome. The great fire, of which Paul and Seneca
corresponded, took place in 64 A.D., but Rome, rolling in wealth and
luxury, did not want to upset prosperity by destroying good times; and
only after Nero’s suicide and three years of turbulence, when the Army
loomed as a terrible menace, was Vespasian, the strong general, called
to become Emperor.
Regarding the Three Taverns, all through the Empire at this time, the
keepers of the wine shops were women; and in the East, they were called
Rahabs—a name with evil import to us to-day; but all the Rahabs were
not harpies—as witness the Rahab of Jericho in Joshua’s day.
Fuller details of the equinoctial gales at Crete will be given on the
chapter on Apollos and John.
In Malta, or Melita, is St. Paul’s Bay, to this day commemorating the
site of his landing and shipwreck, just as Lud gave London its name, and
the myth of Lud points back to a personality behind the myth.
The songs of the Arabs are the same to-day as in Paul’s time and can be
found in Newman’s _Babylon and Nineveh_.
The whole story of the gladiatorial combat in Cæsarea, to which old
Julius refers, will be found in Josephus. Both sides fought till the
arena swam in blood to the ankles, and of one side not a man was left
alive. Other victor slaves were given their freedom.
Felix, like Herod the Great, tried to clean out the robber bands from
the caves of Galilee; but Felix was charged with selling the rescued
victims as slaves to accumulate a fortune for himself, though he had,
himself, been slave. This can all be found in Josephus with the full
story of the Herod family and their perplexing intermarriages and
repudiations of marriages. Bernice’s flight from her old husband was by
pretense a religious vow, but openly in the theater of Rome, she was
twitted with taking the vow to escape her spouse.
THE FAMILY OF HEROD THE GREAT
Herod the Great
|
| d. 4 B.C. (married five times,
| had ten children, including)
+------------+-----------+-----+-----------+----------+-------+-----
| | | | | |
Aristobulus Alexander Herod Philip Archelaus | Philip
| m. (1) Herodias King of Judaea | Tetrach of
| banished to Spain 4 B.C. | Ituræa
| who divorced him deposed A.D. 6 | m. Salome
| |
| (2) Salome |
| Herod Antipas
| Tetrarch of Galilee
| m. (2) Herodias
+-----------------------+----------------------+
| | |
Herod Agrippa I Herodias Herod
d. A.D. 44 m. (1) Herod Philip King of Chalcis
(Acts 12) (2) Herod Antipas
m. Bernice 1st
+-------------------+-------------------+
| | |
Herod Agrippa II Bernice Drusilla
(Acts 26) m. Polemon 2nd m. Felix (Acts 24)
Titus, Vespasian’s son, not yet thirty, will be more fully described in
the chapter on the fall of Jerusalem. Keep him distinct in your mind
from Titus, the Greek evangelist of Crete, who became Bishop.
Philemon, the merchant of Colossé, Paul’s friend, was converted to the
new faith in Corinth or Athens.
Who were “the friends in Cæsar’s household” of whom Paul wrote? Bishop
Lightfoot shows of the forty-three Christianized Jews and Greeks, who
met Paul when he reached Rome, and whose names may be found in the
letter to the Romans; many were in Roman governmental positions of
trust. Their names can be found scattered through the _Acts_ and the
apostolic letters to Rome and Asia.