STARS IN WATER
As an excuse for not appearing in time at the Agape, Castor had asserted
that he had been engaged on his Master’s work elsewhere. That was true. He
had been at the house of the timber merchant as we have seen, and he had
been detained by Æmilius as he left it. This latter had been lying on his
bed resting, whilst his garments were being dried.
He had overheard what had passed in the room of the dying woman.
When the bishop went forth, then Æmilius rose from his bed, cast the ample
toga about him, and walked forth. He caught Castor as he descended to the
water’s edge to be paddled away.
After a short salutation, the young lawyer said: “A word with you, sir, if
your time is as generously to be disposed of to a stranger as it is
lavished on the poor and sick.”
“I am at your service,” answered the bishop.
“My name,” said the young man, “is Æmilius Lentulus Varo. My profession is
the law. I am not, I believe, unknown in Nemausus, or at Arelate, where
also I have an office. But you, sir, may not have heard of me—we have
assuredly never met. Your age and gravity of demeanor belong to a social
group other than mine. You mix with the wise, the philosophers, and not
with such butterflies as myself, who am a ridiculous pleasure
seeker—seeking and never finding. If I am not in error, you are Castor
Lepidus Villoneos, of an ancient magisterial family in Nemausus and the
reputed head of the Christian sect.”
“I am he,” answered the bishop.
“It may appear to you a piece of idle curiosity,” said the young man, “if
I put to you certain questions, and esteem it an impertinence, and so send
me away empty. But I pray you to afford me—if thy courtesy will suffer
it—some information concerning a matter on which I am eager to obtain
light. I have been in the apartment adjoining that in which the mother of
the hostess lay, and I chanced—the partition being but of plank—to
overhear what was said. I confess that I am inquisitive to know something
more certain of this philosophy or superstition, than what is commonly
reported among the people. On this account, I venture to detain you, as
one qualified to satisfy my greed for knowledge.”
“My time is at your disposal.”
“You spoke to the dying woman as though she were about to pass into a new
life. Was that a poetic fancy or a philosophic speculation?”
“It was neither, it was a religious conviction. I spoke of what I knew to
be true.”
“Knew to be true!” laughed Æmilius. “How so? Have you traveled into the
world of spirits, visited the _manes_, and returned posted up in all
particulars concerning them?”
“No. I receive the testimony from One I can trust.”
“One! All men are liars. I knew a fellow who related that he had fallen
into an epileptic fit, and that during the fit his spirit had crossed the
Styx. But as he had no penny wherewith to pay the fare, I did not believe
him. Moreover, he never told the story twice alike, and in other matters
was an arrant liar.”
“Whom would you believe?”
“None, nothing save my own experience.”
“Not Him who made and who sustains your existence, my good sir?”
“Yes, if I knew Him and were assured He spoke.”
“That is the assurance I have.”
Æmilius shook his head. “When, how, where, and by whom did He declare to
men that there is a life beyond the tomb?”
“The _when_ was in the principate of Tiberius Cæsar, the _how_ was by the
mouth of His only‐begotten Son, the _where_ was in Palestine.”
The young lawyer laughed. “There is not a greater rogue and liar on the
face of the earth than a Jew. I cannot believe in a revelation made
elsewhere than at the center of the world, in the city of Rome.”
“Rome is the center of the world to you—but is it so to the infinite God?”
Æmilius shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. “I am a lawyer. I ask for
evidence. And I would not trust the word of a Jew against that of a common
Gaulish peasant.”
“Nor need you. The witness is in yourself.”
“I do not understand you.”
“Have not all men, at all times and everywhere desired to know what is to
be their condition after death? Does not every barbarous people harbor the
conviction that there is a future life? Do not you civilized Romans,
though you have no evidence, act as though there were such a life, and
testify thereto on your monumental cenotaphs?”
“I allow all that. But what of it?”
“How comes it that there should be such a conviction based on no grounds
whatever, but a vague longing, unless there were such a reality provided
for those who have this desire in them? Would the Creator of man mock him?
Would He put this hunger into him unless it were to be satisfied? You have
eyes that crave for the light, and the light exists that satisfies this
longing! You have ears that desire sounds, and the world is full of voices
that meet this desire. Where there is a craving there is ever a reality
that corresponds with and gives repose to that desire. Look,” said the
bishop, and pointed to the water in which were reflected the stars that
now began to glitter in the sky. “Do you see all those twinkling points in
the still water? They correspond to the living luminaries set above in the
vault. You in your soul have these reflections—sometimes seen, sometimes
obscured, but ever returning. They answer to realities in the celestial
world overhead. The reflections could not be in your nature unless they
existed in substance above.”
“There is a score of other things we long after in vain here.”
“What things? I believe I know. Purity, perfection, justice. Well, you do
not find them here entire—only in broken glints. But these glints assure
you that in their integrity they do exist.”
A boat was propelled through the water. It broke the reflections, that
disappeared or were resolved into a very dust of sparkles. As the wavelets
subsided, however, the reflections reformed.
Castor walked up and down beside Æmilius in silence for a few turns, then
said:—
“The world is full of inequalities and injustices. One man suffers
privation, another is gorged. One riots in luxury at the expense of the
weak. Is there to be no righting of wrongs? no justice to be ever done? If
there be a God over all, He must, if just—and who can conceive of God,
save as perfectly just?—He must, I say, deal righteous judgment and smooth
out all these creases; and how can he do so, unless there be a condition
of existence after death in which the wrongs may be redressed, the evil‐
doers be punished, and tears be wiped away?”
“There is philosophy in this.”
“Have you not in your conscience a sense of right as distinct from
wrong—obscured often, but ever returning—like the reflection of the stars
in the water? How comes it there unless there be the verities above?
Unless your Maker so made you as to reflect them in your spirit?”
Æmilius said nothing.
“Have you not in you a sense of the sacredness of Truth, and a loathing
for falsehood? How comes that, unless implanted in you by your Creator,
who is Truth itself?”
“But we know not—in what is of supreme interest to us—in matters connected
with the gods, what our duties, what our destiny—what is the Truth.”
“Young man,” said the bishop, “thou art a seeker after the kingdom of
Heaven. One word further, and I must leave thee. Granted there are these
scintillations within—”
“Yes, I grant this.”
“And that they be reflections of verities above.”
“Possibly.”
“Whence else come they?”
Æmilius did not, could not answer.
“Then,” said Castor, “is it not antecedently probable that the God who
made man, and put into his nature this desire after truth, virtue,
holiness, justice, aye, and this hunger after immortality, should reveal
to man that without which man is unable to direct his life aright, attain
to the perfection of his being, and look beyond death with confidence?”
“If there were but such a revelation!”
“I say—is it conceivable that the Creator should not make it?”
“Thou givest me much food for thought,” said the lawyer.
“Digest it—looking at the reflection of the stars in the water—aye! and
recall what is told by Aristotle of Xenophanes, how that casting his eyes
upward at the immensity of heaven, he declared _The One_ is God. That
conviction, at which the philosopher arrived at the summit of his
research, is the starting point of the Christian child. Farewell. We shall
meet again. I commend thee to Him who set the stars in heaven above, and
the lights in thine own dim soul.”
Then the bishop sought a boat, and was rowed in the direction of the town.
Æmilius remained by the lagoon.
Words such as these he had heard were novel. The thoughts given him to
meditate on were so deep and strange that he could not receive them at
once.
The night was now quite dark, and the stars shone with a brilliancy to
which we are unaccustomed in the North, save on frosty winter nights.
The Milky Way formed a sort of crescent to the north, and enveloped
Cassiopeia’s Chair in its nebulous light. To the west blazed Castor and
Pollux, and the changing iridescent fire of Algol reflected its varying
colors in the water.
Æmilius looked up. What those points of light were, none could say. How
was it that they maintained their order of rising and setting? None could
answer. Who ruled the planets? That they obeyed a law, was obvious, but by
whom was that law imposed?
Æmilius paced quicker, with folded arms and bowed head, looking into the
water. The heavens were an unsolved riddle. The earth also was a riddle,
without interpretation. Man himself was an enigma, to which there was no
solution. Was all in heaven, in earth, to remain thus locked up,
unexplained?
How was it that planets and constellations fulfilled the law imposed on
them without deviation, and man knew not a law, lived in the midst of a
cobweb of guesses, entangling himself in the meshes of vain speculations,
and was not shown the commandment he must obey? Why had the Creator
implanted in his soul such noble germs, if they were not to fructify—if
only to languish for lack of light?
Again he lifted his eyes to the starry vault, and repeated what had been
said of Xenophanes, “Gazing on the immensity of heaven, he declared that
the One was God.” And then, immediately looking down into the depths of
his own heart, he added: “And He is reflected here. Would that I knew
Him.”
Yet how was he to attain the desired knowledge? On all sides were
religious quacks offering their nostrums. What guarantee did Christianity
offer, that it was other than the wild and empty speculations that
swarmed, engaged and disappointed the minds of inquirers?
Unconscious how time passed, Æmilius paced the bank. Then he stood still,
looking dreamily over the calm water. A couple of months more and the air
would be alive with fire‐flies that would cluster on every reed, that
would waver in dance above the surface of the lagoon, tens of thousands of
drifting stars reflecting themselves in the water, and by their effulgence
disturbing the light of the stars also there mirrored.
Thinking of this, Æmilius laughed.
“So is it,” said he, “in the world of philosophic thought and religious
aspiration. The air is full of fire‐flies. They seem to be brilliant
torch‐bearers assuring us guidance, but they are only vile grubs, and they
float above the festering pool that breeds malarial fevers. Where is the
truth, where?”
From the distant city sounded a hideous din, like the bellow of a gigantic
bull.
Æmilius laughed bitterly.
“I know what that is, it is the voice of the god—so say the priestesses of
Nemausus. It is heard at rare intervals. But the mason who made my baths
at Ad Fines, explained it to me. He had been engaged on the temple and saw
how a brazen instrument like a shell of many convolutions had been
contrived in the walls and concealed, so that one woman’s breath could
sound it and produce such a bellow as would shake the city. Bah! one
religion is like another, founded on impostures. What are the stars of
heaven but fire‐flies of a higher order, of superior flight? We follow
them and stumble into the mire, and are engulfed in the slough.”