THE GODS OF THE HEATHEN
Hastening from the queen's palace towards his stolen interview with
Ishtar, Sarchedon had not failed to observe the white robe of a priest
in the neighbourhood of the Israelitish exiles, though his
preoccupation forbade his identifying the person to whom it belonged.
Sethos, on the contrary, whose wits were more at their master's service,
had no difficulty in recognising Assarac, and marvelled in his own mind
what interests could exist in common between the haughty servant of the
Assyrian god, and this fettered prisoner, a captive even amongst the
captives of the Great King's bow and spear. Could he have overheard
their conversation, his curiosity would indeed have been sharpened, but
any ideas he might have previously conceived regarding supernatural
influences must have sustained a shock very confusing to his
understanding and his faith.
His interests, however, were of the earth, earthy, and he left to such
aspiring spirits as the high priest of Baal those abstruse speculations
which would fain penetrate the mysteries of another world.
Assarac only waited till the last of the revellers had departed, the
last of the thousand torches flaring in the palace court had been
extinguished, to glide through the band of captives and lay his hand on
the shoulder of him who seemed chief amongst the Israelites.
"Arise," said he, "my brother. Comfort your heart, I pray you, with a
morsel of bread and a draught of wine, while your servant spreads his
mantle for your ease, and loosens the fetters on your limbs."
He took the cloak from his own shoulders while he spoke, and folded it
round the prisoner, releasing him at the same time from the chain that
clanked and rung with every movement of wrist or ankle.
The Israelite accepted these good offices with the imperturbable
demeanour he had preserved through all the incidents of his captivity.
Standing erect by the priest of Baal, he seemed to look on his liberator
with a mild and condescending pity not far removed from contempt.
Scanning him warily and closely in the dubious starlight, Assarac could
not but admire the lofty bearing and personal dignity of this chief
amongst a nation of bondsmen. His marked features, dark piercing eyes,
ample beard, and venerable aspect denoted the sage and counsellor, while
his well-proportioned figure, with its shapely limbs, inferred an
amount of physical strength and activity not always accompanying the
nobler qualities of the mind.
There was a strange contrast between the eunuch's shifting restless
glances, his looks of eager curiosity, half doubtful, half scornful,
altogether suspicious and dissatisfied, with the expression of quiet
superiority and contented confidence that glorified the Israelite's
face, imparting to it a calm majesty like the light of sunset on a
mountain.
"You offer bread," said he, "and pour out wine unto him who hath neither
cornland nor vineyard. Therefore shall your harvest and your grapes
return you an hundredfold."
"Baal will not suffer me to want," replied the other. "Shall I, then,
see my brother hunger and thirst, while I have enough and to spare? Are
you not of our race and kindred? Are not your oppressors our ancient
enemies? Do we not come of one lineage and worship the same God?"
The Israelite pointed upward to the stars, and shook his head.
"Our fathers have taught us otherwise," said he solemnly; "and I, Sadoc
the son of Azael, standing here in the bonds of my captivity, protest
against your idols, your temples and your worship, your gashes and
drink-offerings, your winged monsters, your sacred tree, and all the
thousand unworthy forms to which you degrade the majesty of the
Omnipotent and the Infinite!"
Assarac smiled with the frank liberality of a disputant who in admitting
his adversary's premises narrows, as it were, the field in which to do
battle.
"Symbols," he answered, "symbols; the mere outward efforts of that inner
spirit of worship which must find vent, like the mind of man, through
the senses. He can see but with the eye, he can hear but with the ear,
he can impart his thoughts only in those forms of speech that his tongue
has learned to frame, and his fellows have skill to comprehend. How
shall you express the principle of heat but by fire? How shall you
comprehend the majesty of light but through the sun? How can you form a
nobler ideal of spirits, gods, and departed heroes than in those serene
and silent witnesses who never weary of their endless watches in the
unfathomable night?"
"So you send a thousand labourers to the mountain," replied Sadoc,
pointing scornfully at the sculptures on the palace wall, "and bid them
rend the granite from its unyielding sides till they have hewn out a
creature such as was never seen in earth or sea or sky--a creature of
make and qualities in direct defiance to that nature you profess to
reverence--winged like a bird, headed like a man, limbed like a bull--a
monster, grotesque, impossible, imposing only from its gigantic size and
truthful outline. You rear it up at a prince's doorway, and call on men
to fall down and worship before the hoofs of that which is lower than
the lowest of the brutes in the system of creation!"
"Are you a priest among your people?" asked Assarac quickly.
"Every head of a family is the priest of his own household," was the
dignified reply. "There need no mysteries for a worship sublime as the
eternal heavens, and clear as the light of day."
"Yet surely you cannot move the multitude without extraneous influences
stronger and more tangible than those truths of the inner shrine which
we the initiated know and accept at their real value," argued Assarac.
"That very figure which you scorn speaks to the senses of the Assyrian
nation far more forcibly than all the promptings from within that ever
moved a prophet to leap and howl and gash himself with knives before an
altar, while he foretold great actions and mighty events that should
never come to pass. Not a spearman in the Great King's host but, when he
looks on these carven blocks of granite, walks with a prouder step and
shakes his weapon in a stronger hand. He sees in that mighty frame the
over-powering forces that have made his race conquerors of the world; in
that majestic face, calm and indomitable, the true spirit of victory
marching unmoved over the ruins of an empire as over the ashes of a
peasant's hearth; in those unfurled wings, the ubiquity of a dominion
that can command ships for the sea, camels for the desert, and horsemen
swarming like locusts to overrun the fertile plain. It is no
representation of mere nature evoked by the toil, skill, and indeed the
sufferings of countless labourers, but of that spirit which dominates
and subdues nature for its own aggrandisement and fame. Where is the
type of godlike dominion to be found, if not here, in this impersonation
of conquest: strength, intellect, and audacity combined?"
Sadoc pointed to an Egyptian child sleeping a few paces off with a
wild-flower grasped in its little hand.
"Is there less of the godlike power," said he, "in the skill that put
together leaf and blossom for the delight of that poor infant, who has
no other joy nor comfort?"
Assarac pondered.
"There must be gods," he replied, "as there are stars, differing in
magnitude and glory. Dagon hath dominion on the waters, Anu and Abitur
in the mountain, Merodach raging in battle is yet subject to Ashur, and
even that monarch of the mighty circle yields to his irresistible
superior, and bows before the sentence of Nisroch, with the eagle's
head."
"And your Nisroch," continued the Israelite; "hath he not also a master
at whose word he spreads his wings and flies to the uttermost parts of
the desert? Whence comes he? Who gave him his eagles head and his
feathered shoulders? If he is substantial, he must be perishable; and
when he has passed away, who will make another god for the land of
Shinar, and what shall he be called?"
"You speak with reason," replied the priest of Baal, "and you speak to
one who has watched many a long night from the summit of the tower above
us, and pored on those starwritten scrolls till his brain reeled, to
learn that mystery which rules the heavens, and apply it to the
government of men below. You speak wisely indeed. Who shall make a god
for the land of Shinar? He it is who shall bring the whole Eastern world
beneath his feet."
"I speak not of gods made by men's hands," answered Sadoc. "The time
must surely come ere long when there will be one worship of the true God
through all the earth, as there is one sun that shines over the whole
heaven. Clouds may obscure it for a season, but no less doth it exist in
its warmth and splendour, giving vitality to creation and light to day."
"When there is but one worship, there will be but one dominion," argued
Assarac. "The altar and the temple will then become the judgment-seat
and throne, while the high-priest will be the true monarch and ruler
over all. Listen, my brother; for indeed here in the house of your
captivity you have found a friend. I am a priest of Baal, as you behold;
but in truth I am no hot-brained votary who mistakes his own intoxicated
frenzy for the inspiration of a god. My subordinates may gird their
loins to leap and run and gesticulate, shedding their own blood the
while in crimson streams. Such extravagances are foreign to my nature,
and below the dignity of my worship. I am a priest of Baal, but I am
also an Assyrian descended from a line of warriors, and to me the
greatness of my country is the paramount object and interest of life.
What else have such as I, who are severed, without being alienated, from
their kind? To extend an empire founded by our father Nimrod from the
Bactrian mountains to the Southern sea, to behold the standards of
Merodach waving on the confines of Armenia and over the gates of
Memphis, while conscious that I, Assarac the priest, had set in motion
the armies of victory and guided the march of triumph, were worth all
the fire-worshipper's dreams of luminous immortality, all the starry
thrones of the gods who are supposed to be looking down in judgment on
us even now."
"And when your wishes have been fulfilled," said Sadoc quietly--"wishes
only to be accomplished through much bloodshed, cruelty, and sin--you
will not be one whit happier than now."
The other laughed in scorn.
"Is fame nothing?" he asked. "Is power nothing? Is it nothing to cast
down the mighty from their golden thrones, and to raise the lowly, as I
have raised you to-night, from fetters of iron and a bed on the cold
earth? Teach me the lore of your worship, as I will impart to you my own
secrets of priestcraft, and hereafter--ay, sooner than you may think--I
will set you in judgment over a score of nations, in a purpled robe,
with a sceptre in your hand."
"_My_ lore!" repeated Sadoc, with a sad smile. "You would deem it
beneath your understanding, as it would be above your practice. It is
but to do justice, and to love mercy, dealing with man as before the
face of God."
"But surely you have learned important secrets amongst the Egyptians?"
urged Assarac, somewhat disappointed with this exposition of the
Israelite's simple creed. "Surely they have taught you mysteries of
magic and the art of divination, in which they boast their proficiency,
handed down, as they profess, through scores of dynasties and hundreds
of successive generations. Or is it true that your nation have been the
teachers, and Egypt, with all her pride, is but the pupil of a people
who took with them from this very land the art that we, its present
inhabitants, have lost, the spells that compel gigantic spirits to work
out their behests--rearing colossal buildings, causing wide tracts of
desert to blossom like the rose, bidding the very waters of the great
deep to subside and overflow at their will?"
"You know not our nation," answered Sadoc, "nor have you felt the iron
hand of our oppressors, who practice the forbidden arts of which you
speak, but with no result that hath ever spared groan or stripe to a
single captive. The Israelite must toil under the scourge for his scanty
morsel of bread. The great river indeed rises and falls at the command
of one who is mightier than our task-masters, and who will not surely
forget his people for ever in their bonds; but for the huge shapeless
structures--the gigantic monster idols of the South--they are reared by
a magic of which blood, sweat, and hunger constitute the spells, under
the fierce eye that never sleeps, the cruel hand that is never raised
but to urge, and smite and destroy. Yet when our fathers were driven by
famine into Egypt they found there one of their own people, reigning
wisely over a prosperous nation, and second only to Pharaoh on the
throne; they found themselves honoured guests where now they are
degraded prisoners, friends and allies where now they are hated and
despised, masters, in truth, where they are slaves! And slaves to those
who are themselves sunk in the degradation of a vile and brutal
idolatry."
His eye blazed, and his very beard seemed to bristle with anger, while
he spoke. It was in such flashes of indignation or excitement that the
likeness of kindred races was to be noted on the features of Israelite
and Assyrian.
"You scorn the gods of Nimrod," replied Assarac, with a sneer; "but the
fathers from whom we claim a common descent have taught _us_, at least,
a nobler impersonation of our worship than the goose, the serpent, the
stork, the locust, and the cat! If we choose the lotus, the fir-cone, or
the beetle to convey an idea of that reproductive power in nature,
always existing even when dormant, as the flower in the bud, or the
blade in the seed, at least we do not hang our temples with carvings of
the humblest animals, the most loathsome reptiles, and the meanest
utensils of our daily life! It is baser, I grant you, to adore the stars
than the principle which gives them light, baser to kneel before the
sculptured image than the god it represents; but basest surely of all
worship is that practised by the cruel Egyptian, the enemy whom _we_
have humbled, the master who is grinding _your_ people into dust!"
"Our God will surely free us," said Sadoc, in a low mournful tone. "It
cannot be that we, the lineal descendants of his favoured servant, are
to remain for ever in the house of bondage, eating the bitter morsel of
slavery, weeping tears of blood under the task-master's lash! But we
have neither arms nor leaders; there is no proven harness in our
dwellings, nor sword, nor shield, nor spear. How are we to go out from
our enemies in the garb of peace, with our wives and children in our
hands? And yet, I pray that it may come to this--I, for one, would march
out fearlessly to die in the wilderness rather than gather another
armful of straw, bake one more brick for the useless structures that
only bear witness to our sorrows and our shame."
The pride of race, the intense consciousness of a peculiar destiny, in
all ages an inheritance of the sons of Abraham, gave to the words of
Sadoc a truth and bitterness, marked with no slight satisfaction by the
scheming priest of Baal.
"Hands that have toiled so skilfully for their task-masters," said he,
"can surely strike a blow in their own behalf. Courage that has borne
long years of suffering and privation will not fail at the moment of
liberation and revenge. You and yours are of our blood and lineage. You
shall be no captives in Babylon, as you have been in Egypt. This very
night I will take order for your food and lodging--nay, fear not, they
shall be found you without the temple, if indeed you entertain any
scruples as to entering the abode of Baal--and you shall return to your
own people in safety and honour, as a son returns to the dwelling of his
father with a gift in his hand. You will tell them that here, in the
great city, our warlike Assyrians look on the Israelites as their
kinsmen and friends; that when the oppressed rises against the
oppressor, and the children of Terah resolve once for all to throw off
the Egyptian yoke, they will see a cloud rising out of the desert from
the trampling of horses, countless as locusts in a west wind--they will
hear a thousand trumpets sounding far and wide from the hosts of the
Great King!"
The Israelite's eye sparkled and his cheek glowed but he answered
solemnly,
"It must be a mightier king than yours, who leads us forth into the
wilderness out of the house of our captivity."