And now for a story of idolatry. It seems an absurdity, an insanity; it
is one--both. But think it out. Is it quite impossible, quite
incredible? Let me sketch the outline of so strange infatuation. Our
prior was once a good man--an easy, kind, and amiable: he takes the cowl
in early youth, partly because he is the younger son of an unfighting
family, and must, partly because he is melancholy, and will. And
wherefore melancholy? There was brought up with him, from the very
nursery, a fair girl, the weeping orphan of a neighbouring squire, who
had buckled on his harness, and fallen in the wars: they loved, of
course, and the deeper, because secretly and without permission: they
were too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter;
still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needful
to each other, or more united. But--a hacking cough--a hectic cheek--a
wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of
death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower:
henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was--so thought he, as
many do--his best refuge, to dream upon the past, to soothe his present
sorrows, and earn for a future world the pleasures lost in this. Time,
the best anodyne short of what Eustace could not buy at
Rome--true-healing godliness--alleviates his grief, and makes him less
sad, but not wiser; years pass, the desire of preeminence in his own
small world has hitherto furnished incentives to existence, and he find
himself a prior too soon; for he has nothing more to live for. Yes:
there is an object; the turmoil of small ambition with its petty cares
is past, and the now motiveless man lingers in yearning thought on the
only white spot in his gloomy journey, the green oasis of his desert
life, that dream of early love. He has long loved the fair, quiet image
of our Lady of Marrick, unwittingly, for another Mary's sake;
half-oblivious of the past in scheming for the present, he has knelt at
midnight before that figure of the Virgin-mother, and knew not why he
trembled; he thought it the ecstacy of devotion, the warm-gushing flood
of calmness, which prayer confers upon care confessed. But now, he sees
it, he knows it; there is, indeed, good cause: how miraculously the
white marble face grows into resemblance with _hers!_ the same sainted
look of delicate unearthly beauty, the same white cheek, so still and
unruffled even by a smile, the same turn of heavenly triumph on the lip,
the same wild compassion in the eye! Great God--he loves again!--that
staid, grave, melancholy man, loves with more than youthful fondness;
the image is now dearer than the most sacred; there is a halo round it,
like light from heaven: he adores its placid, eternal, changeless
aspect; if it could move, the charm would half dissolve; he loves it--as
an image! And then how rapturously joins he with the wondering choir of
more stagnant worshippers, while they yield to this substantial form,
this stone-transmigration of his love, this tangible, unpassionate,
abiding, present deity, the holy hymns of praise, due only to the unseen
God! How gladly he sings her titles, ascribing all excellence to her!
How tenderly falls he at her feet, with eyes lighted as in youth! How
earnestly he prays to his fixed image--_to_ it, not _through_ it, for
his heart is _there_! How zealously he longs for her honour, her worship
among men--hers, the presiding idol of that Gothic pile, the hallowed
Lady, the goddess-queen of Marrick! Stop--can he do nothing for her, can
he venture nothing in her service? Other shrines are rich, other images
decked in gold and jewels; there is yet an object for his useless life,
there are yet ends to be attained, ends--that can justify the means. He
longs for wealth, he plots for it, he dares for it: he plans lying
miracles, and thousands flock to the shrine; he waylays dying men, and,
by threatened dread of torments of the damned, extortionizes conscience
into unjust riches for himself; he accuses the innocent, and reaps the
fine; he connives at the guilty, and fingers the bribe. So wealth flows
in, and the altar of his idol is hung with cloth of gold, her diadem is
alight with gems, costly offerings deck her temple, bending crowds kneel
to her divinity. Is he not happy? Is he not content? Oh, no: an
insatiate demon has possessed him; with more than Pygmalion's insanity,
he loves that image; he dreams, he thinks of that one unchanging form.
The marvelling brotherhood, credulous witnesses of such deep devotion,
hold him for a saint; and Rome, at the wish of the world, sends him, as
to a living St. Eustatius, the patent of canonization: they praise him,
honour him, pray to him; but he contemptuously (and they take it for
humility) spurns a gift which speaks of any other heaven than the
presence of that one fair, beautiful, beloved statue. A thought fills
him, and that with joy: he has heard of sacrifices in old time,
immolations, offerings up of self, as the highest act of a devout
worshipper; he cares not for earth nor for heaven; and one night, in his
enthusiastic vigils, the phrensy of idolatry arms that old man's own
weak hand against himself, and he falls at the statue's feet,
self-murdered, _its_ martyr.
Here were scope for psychology; here were subtle unwindings of motive,
trackings of reason, intricate anatomizations of the heart. All ages,
before these last in which we live, have been worshippers, even to
excess, of "unknown gods," "too superstitious:" we, upon whom the ends
of the world are fallen, may be thought to be beyond a danger into which
the wisest of old time were entrapped: we scarcely allow that the
Brahmin may, notwithstanding, be a learned man and a shrewd, when we see
him fall before his monster; we have not wits to understand how the
Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman dynasties could be so besotted.
For this superior illumination of mind, let us thank not ourselves, but
the Light of the world; and, warned by the history of ages, let us
beware how we place created things to mediate between us and the most
High; let us be shy of symbolic emblems--of pictures, images,
observances--lest they grow into forms that engross the mind, and fill
it with a swarm of substantial idols.
Now, this tale of the '_Prior of Marrick_' would, but for the present
premature abortion, have seen daylight in the form of an
auto-biography--the catastrophe, of course, being added by some
brother-monk, who winds up all with his moral: and to get at this
auto-biographical sketch--a thing of fragments and wild soliloquies,
incidentally laying bare the heart's disease, and the poisonous
breathings of idolatrous influence--I could easily, and after the true
novelist fashion, fabricate a scheme, somewhat as follows: Let me go
gayly to the Moors by rail, coach, or cart, say for a sportsman's
pastime, a truant vicar's week, or an audit-clerk's holiday: I drop upon
the ruined abbey, now indeed with scarcely a vestige of its former
beauty remaining, but still used as a burial-place; being a bit of an
antiquary, I rout up the sexton, (sexton, cobbler, and general
huckster,) resolved to lionize the old desecrated precinct: I find the
sexton a character, a humourist; he, cobbler-like, looks inquisitively
at my caoutchouc shooting-shoes, and hints that he too is an artist in
the water-proof line; then follows question as how, and rejoinder as
thus. Our sexton has got a name among his neighbours for his capital
double-leather brogues, warranted to carry you dry-shod through a river;
and, warmed by my brandy-flask and _bonhomie_, considering me moreover
little likely to set up a rival shop, cunningly communicates his secret:
he puts parchment between the leathers--Parchment, my good man? where
can you get your parchment hereabouts? I spoke innocently, for I thought
only of ticketing some grouse for my friends southward: but the question
staggered my sexton so sensibly, that I came to the uncharitable
conclusion--he had stolen it. And then follows confession: how, among
the rubbish in a vault, he had found a small oak chest--broke it
open--no coins, no trinkets, "no nothing,"--except parchment; a lot of
leaves tidily written, and--warranted to keep out the wet. A few
shillings and a tankard make the treasure mine, I promising as extra to
send a huge bundle of ancient indentures in place of the precious
manuscript. Thus, in the way of Mackenzie's '_Man of Feeling_,' we
become fragmentary where we fear to be tedious; and so, in a good
historic epoch, among the wars of the Roses, surrounded by friars and
nuns, outlaws and border-riders, chivalrous knights and sturdy bowyers,
consign I to the oblivescent firm of Capulet and Co. my happily
destroyed '_Prior of Marrick_.'
* * * * *
A crank boat needs ballast; and of happy fortune is it for a disposition
towards natural levity, when educational gravity has helped to steady
it. Upon the vivacious, let the reflective supervene: to the gay, suffer
in its season the addition of the serious. Amongst other wholesome
topics of of meditation--for wholesome it is to the healthy spirit,
although of some little danger to the presumptuous and inflated--the
study of the sure word of Prophecy has more than once excited the
writing propensity of your author's mind. On most matters it has been my
fate, rather from habits of incurable revery than from any want of
opportunities, to think more than to read; and therefore it is, with
very due diffidence, that as far as others and their judgments are
concerned, I can ever hope to claim originality or novelty. To my own
conscience, however, these things are reversed; for contemplation has
produced that as new to my own mind, which may be old to others deeper
read, and has thought those ideas original, which are only so to its own
fancy. Very little, then, must such as I reasonably hope to add on
Prophetical Interpretation; the Universal Wisdom of two millenaries
cannot be expected to gain any thing from the passing thought of a
hodiernal unit: if any fancies in my brain are really new, and hitherto
unbroached upon the subject, it can scarcely be doubted but that they
are false; so very little reliance do principles of catholicity allow to
be placed upon "private interpretations."
With thus much of apology to those alike who will find, and those who
will not find, any thing of novelty in my notions, I still do not
withhold them. By here a little and there a little, is the general mind
instructed: it would be better for the world if every mighty tome really
contributed its grain.
The prophecies of Holy Writ appear to me to have one great peculiarity,
distinguishing them from all other prophecies, if any, real or
pretended; and that peculiarity I deferentially conceive to be this:
that, whereas all human prophecies profess to have but one fulfilment,
the divine have avowedly many true fulfilments. The former may indeed
light upon some one coincidence, and may exult in the accident as a
proof of truth; the latter bounds as it were (like George Herbert's
sabbaths) from one to another, and another, through some forty
centuries, equally fulfilled in each case, but still looking forward
with hope to some grander catastrophe: it is not that they are loosely
suited, like the Delphic oracles, to whatever may turn up, but that
they, by a felicitous adaptation, sit closely into each era which the
Architect of Ages has arranged. Pythonic divination may be likened to a
loose bag, which would hold and involve with equal ease almost any
circumstance; biblical prophecy to an exact mould, into which alone,
though not all similar in perfection, its own true casts will fit: or
again, in another view of the matter, accept this similitude: let the
All-seeing Eye be the centre of many concentric circles, beholding
equally in perspective the circumference of each, and for accordance
with human periods of time measuring off segments by converging radii:
separately marked on each segment of the wheel within wheel, in the way
of actual fulfilment, as well as type and antitype, will appear its
satisfied word of prophecy, shining onward yet as it becomes more and
more final, until time is melted in eternity. Thus, it is perhaps not
impossible that every interpretation of wise and pious men may alike be
right, and hold together; for different minds travel on the different
peripheries. So our Lord (to take a familiar instance) speaks of his
second advent in terms equally applicable to the destruction of one
city, of the accumulated hosts at Armageddon, and of this material
earth: Antiochus and Antichrist occur prospectively within the same pair
of radii at differing distances; and, in like manner and varying
degrees, may, for aught we can tell, such incarnations of the evil
principle as papal Rome, or revolutionary Europe, or infidel
Cosmopolitism; or, again, such heads of parties, such indexes of the
general mind, as a Caesar, an Attila, a Cromwell, a Napoleon, a--whoever
be the next. So also of hours, days, years, eras; all may and do coeexist
in harmonious and mutual relations. Good men, those who combine prayer
with study, need not fear necessary difference of result, from holding
different views; the grand error is too loosely generalizing; a little
circle suits our finite ken; we cannot, as yet, mentally span the
universe. These crude and cursory remarks may serve to introduce a
likely-looking idea to which my thoughts have given entertainment, and
which, with others of a similar sort, were once to have come forth in an
essay-form, headed