“Love, and do what thou wilt.”
The next day another great meeting was convened.
Their deliverance and the manner of it had wrought a great change in
many, especially in the less educated of the community, who experienced
at that time a _conversion_—that reversal of the natural selfish state
which makes self come last instead of first in the thoughts of a man,
and which leads him also to realize a Presence in the Unseen. I mention
this because it very much changed the nature of their deliberations. I
do not say that these conversions would have had a lasting effect but
for certain events which followed.
All desired a settled order in the Island. Those who were not truly in
principle Anarchists, but rather Democrats, proposed some form of social
contract by which they might “confer all their power and strength upon
one man, or upon one assembly of men, that might reduce all their wills,
by plurality of voices, unto one will; which is as much as to say, to
appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their Person: and every one
to owne, and acknowledge himself to be Author of whatsoever he that so
beareth their person shall Act, or cause to be acted in those things
which concerne the common Peace and Safetie; and therein to submit their
Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgments to his Judgment. This
is more than consent or concord; it is a real Unitie of them all, in one
and the same Person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in
such manner, as if every man should say to every man, ‘I authorize and
give up my right of governing myself to this Man or to this assembly of
men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him and authorize
all his actions in like manner.’”
These words are originally those of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, and
these, or something like these, were spoken on this occasion by a young
Englishman of gentle birth and manners, but of very ungentle notions
when first he came to the Island. He was not one of those who came of
their own free will, but as a branded man, having continued, after many
warnings, to gather large companies of men in the London squares, and to
exhort them to Revolution.
He was now, notwithstanding, as we have seen, rather old-fashioned in
his ideas, and his proposal was met by not a little opposition. Who, it
was asked, should be the governing body? How chosen? Who should make,
and who enforce, the laws? All the old well-worn, yet not worn-out
difficulty about elections, and minorities, and oligarchies, seemed to
appear in forecast on the Island, which at least had never known these
evils; and the young man, as the argument proceeded, felt himself to
have been in the wrong.
But the voice which on this day made itself heard with the most
clearness and decision was that of a Russian Prince, who was persuaded
as firmly as he had ever been that in Anarchy—absence of all
government—lay the only true order of society. He had always
acknowledged that to this end certain principles of morality recognized
by the whole community, were necessary. He had believed, on first coming
to the Island, that the mere absence of outward law would develop in men
that natural morality from which, under the blight of government, they
had fallen away; and he had opposed the work of the Priests of the West
on the ground that the artificial restraints of religion are as fatal as
civil enactments to the free growth of this natural virtue. But he had
seen what sort of fruit was borne by common human nature when first left
in a wild garden. His soul had been awakened to find that the morality
of which he had dreamed, kindled and made living could be no other than
the life of the Cross.
In truth, like the old Scholar of the Western settlement, his heart had
long been dwelling in the place of lowly service and of death to self,
without knowing the meaning of such a life, or putting it into the words
of the Christian faith; for the Christian faith that he had been taught
had been shut up in sacred books and disguised in sacred images, and so
hidden from his eyes.
But on the evening before this convention, after the great deliverance,
he had gone up the western slope of the mountain and had found the
Sister sitting in silent meditation at the door of her house, wearied
with all the anxieties and events of the day, and with the reaction that
comes to all high natures after times of tension and excitement. The
thought of the drowned Dacoits, of the unsettled state of the Island, of
the wickedness that abounded, and of her own helplessness for good,
weighed on her sensitive spirit. She was in Elijah’s mood when he said,
“Oh, that I now might die!”
To those who feel weary and wanting all things, the call is often to
work and to give; and so it was that evening with the Sister. They spoke
together by the door of her house till the full moon dropped from the
height of the northern sky towards the western sea; and as they talked
the things unseen seemed the only realities. The high hope and faith in
which the Sister had long lived and moved were communicated in that hour
to the seeking soul of the Prince; his whole being rose up to greet the
new vision of the Best; and when he took his leave of the teacher to
whom he owed so much, it was not to return at once to his home by the
southern shore. He climbed by a steep path to the mountain top, and
there, till the moon set and dawn came over the sea, he communed with
his own heart and swore a solemn allegiance to the Master whom he had
chosen.
To-day, full of hope and confidence, he rose among the people, and laid
before them his scheme of a Christian Anarchy—a society of men set free
from all outward law, set free from the bondage of self and of evil
desires, because the willing servants of a holy Lord.
As we have seen, he was not the first to speak in the assembly; his old
restless desire to make his voice heard was gone; he was clothed with a
new humility. The cause for which he pleaded was not his, but that of
One who hastes not:—
“Day by day,
And year by year He tarrieth: little need
The Lord should hasten.”
It has been shown that the people were ready in heart for such an
appeal. There was not one voice raised against him; each seemed fired by
a high enthusiasm for the good of all; each eager only that the highest
will should be done.
This will not seem strange to those who realize the excitement of the
times just past, and who remember how frequent in the history of
religion has been the sudden awakening, under strong feeling, of large
multitudes of men. I will not say that this was altogether unlike such
other awakenings; I only say that it was more lasting in its
consequences than many such have been.
With a people in this temper the structure of the new Polity seemed
rather the building up of a Church than the ordering of a Commonwealth.
Yet it truly resembled neither of these things. They determined that no
written laws, no written book of religion, no formal creed should have a
place among them. They had seen how law-making means law-breaking, and
they determined that their rule of life should be simply this one
thing—a principle, a passion, not a command; just this—Love to a living
Lord, in whom they recognized the perfection of all that the mind of man
can conceive as holiest and best, whom they knew to be among them
always. In all troubles and difficulties they stretched out hands of
prayer and proved His presence.
These being their thoughts, it was rather a furtherance of their work
than a hindrance of it that all the books of the Priests had been
consumed in the burning of the church. They did not attempt, as they
might well have done, to reconstruct a book of Faith from the words and
thoughts with which the memories of the Sister and some others were
stored.
These were held all the more precious because they had to be told by one
to another, and told again and again, till in the hearts of all were
embedded as shining jewels fragments of perfect truth and flashes of
mystical insight. Dearest to all were the parable of the Vine and Its
branches, the Story of the Cross, the “Sermon on the Mount,” and many
sayings such as these: “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life;”
“He that loveth his life shall lose it;” many words of St. Paul, and
especially those which tell of the struggle of the soul to get free from
the only real tyranny, and the splendid anarchy of the slaves of Christ;
many sayings of Thomas à Kempis, of Tauler, of Molinos, and of Marcus
Aurelius, dear to the heart of the Sister; many fragments of poems and
hymns such as she loved and had learnt; many beautiful old hymns which
some of the wives of the German Socialists remembered and sang. But it
would not be possible even to hint at the chosen words which ruled the
lives of that happy community, every voice in which swelled the sweet
hymn of praise which rose at morn and even among the Bread-fruit groves.
They did not assemble to worship or to sing, for they sang and
worshipped everywhere.
No one called anything his own; and each was eager to find opportunities
of helping others with his strength or his substance.
But as to the Dacoits, concerning them even the Prince was led to doubt
the fitness of Anarchy. They were not, indeed, now so strong, or the
rest of the community so weak, that they could not be forced to submit
to laws; but they did not seem able to understand the very rudiments of
that inner law which he saw was needful to the peace of a country
ordered on the principles of which we have spoken.
So they were taken in calm weather in the Lagoon boats to a small
neighbouring island, where they would find plenty of food, but no large
timber of which boats might be built; and they were left there to work
out for themselves the problem just solved on Meliora.
How long the Anarchy, which was truly a Theocracy, would have continued
in unbroken peace cannot be known. It is possible that, though the
children of the first settlers were passionately eager for settled
order, and enthusiastically religious, their children might show a
return of evil tendencies, and that those who did not remember the first
fearful days of strife in the Island might wilfully have roused again a
spirit of disorder; for the world and all the spheres mount only in
upward spirals toward that point of the Heavens where they shall rest at
last, and are turning always to the same point again, only a little
higher than before.
What did happen was this.
Not long after the time of which I have written, the Sister having died,
and been buried at her desire high up on the mountain, the Prince went
one evening to sit by her grave awhile and to gather strength by
communing with the spirit that had first led him into the way of
gladness.
It had been a sultry day, and the breeze that was wont to cool the
Island when the sun went down was this day asleep; no breath lifted the
heavy air.
The heart of the Prince was mournful too; only the hidden help which
never fails upheld him in the vague depression which stole over him.
Then he heard suddenly a strange rumbling sound in the mountain under
him; the earth shook, and as he sprang to his feet he saw a horrible
sight—the sea drawn back from the reef, sucked from the great Lagoon,
and then rushing in upon the Island and surging up over the reef, over
the fringe of Palms, over all the peaceful homes below. Twice this was
repeated as he staggered down from the highest point of the mountain;
and when the violence of the shock was over, the crater lay at his feet
a salt lagoon, and over all the fruitful plain the sea lay deep and
still.
He alone was left of all that land’s inhabitants.
To a nature like his there was nothing terrible in solitude, nor did the
whole of this awful event seem to him so sad as it would have been to
hear one evil word from the lips of a child.
He lived for some years after this a life of meditation and peace,
finding just enough food to supply his need among the fruits of the
higher mountain forests; and one day, in his extreme old age, a ship’s
boat seeking water entered the Lagoon. He was taken on board, and he
brought with him a manuscript which he had written on slips of the bark
of trees, relating the history of the Island. From his own lips yet more
of the story was gathered and written down by a Jesuit father who was
returning in the ship from a mission to the newly-settled Antarctic
Continent.
There is no more to be told. The old Prince died on the voyage, glad to
depart as soon as he had told his tale.
He had come to see many things clearly in his lonely years on the
mountain height. What these things were, beyond what has been written
here, he told to the Jesuit father—under the seal of confession.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NOTES.
_Page 22._
How little any thought in those happy days from what quarter the storm
of invasion would come, or how the whole order of the civilized world
would be once more sunk under waves of barbarism! We might now indeed
despair, only that as from each such wave in ages past a better world
has risen than that which went before, from the depth of our trouble now
may rise the best of all-the new earth to which the new Heaven shall
come down.
_Page 26._
A very interesting paper in a magazine of last century by Professor
Seeley was the first prophecy of this European Court. See _Macmillan’s
Magazine_, March, 1871.
_Page 37._
_The women._—Of course I do not here allude to the wives of the
Anarchists, of whom some accompanied their husbands.
_Page 48._
_Troops._—This must not be understood as if national armies were then
existing. The United States of Europe and America maintained a large
military force, which was sent hither and thither, where needed, as
representing the Power which preserved the order of the civilized world
and controlled the still savage or unruly.
_Page 63._
Burmah had before this time ceased to be governed by England, having
insisted on “Home Rule.”
_Page 78._
The now reduced number of the Dacoits was felt to be no longer a cause
of danger if the rest of the society were ordered and strong; for it
will hereafter be shown that even a free association for the ordering of
a state must be able to deal in some way with the disorderly.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.