PAGE
I.
CAST OUT 17
II.
CLOUDS GATHERING 29
III.
NIGHT BY THE DEAD SEA 39
IV.
IN THE WILDERNESS 50
V.
THE BANQUET 60
VI.
THE CHAMBER OF MAGIC 75
VII.
SAVED 93
VIII.
BREAD ON THE WATERS 105
IX.
SACRIFICE 119
X.
AT ATHENS 132
XI.
HELENA 141
XII.
THE HALL OF APOLLO 149
XIII.
MY FIRST DEATH 159
XIV.
MY SPIRITUAL BODY 171
XV.
THE WORLD OF SPIRITS 184
XVI.
THE CHRIST ABOVE NATURE 193
XVII.
JUDGMENT OF THE JEWS 203
XVIII.
IMAGINARY HEAVENS 214
XIX.
THE MAGICIANS IN HELL 225
XX.
FRIENDS IN HEAVEN 236
XXI.
THE SPIRITUALLY DEAD 250
XXII.
BACK TO EARTH 261
XXIII.
IMPRISONED 271
XXIV.
BURIED ALIVE 280
XXV.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED 292
XXVI.
THE CITY OF COLONNADES 305
XXVII.
HELENA AGAIN 320
XXVIII.
TO THE LION 334
XXIX.
CHRISTIAN CANDLES 344
XXX.
THE GREAT COMBAT 355
XXXI.
FREE 367
XXXII.
WHAT REMAINS? 378
[Illustration: Ornament]
[Illustration: Ornament]
A STRANGE DISCOVERY
IN LIEU OF
A PREFACE.
[Illustration: Initial]
Many years ago I was enjoying in the harbor of New York the charming
hospitalities of the officers belonging to one of the finest vessels in
the British Navy. The company was gay, cultivated and brilliant. Student
and recluse as I then was, I was perhaps more delighted than any one
present with the conversation of those practical and polished men of the
world.
After supper I was attracted to a small group of earnest talkers, of whom
the surgeon of the ship seemed to be the centre and oracle. He was
speaking of exhumations a long time after death, of mummies and
petrifactions and other curious transformations of the human body. He
stated that he had examined some of the skeletons which had been dug out
of the ruins of Herculaneum. The bones were almost perfect after the lapse
of eighteen hundred years. The complete exclusion of air and water seemed
to be the only thing necessary to an indefinite preservation.
The chaplain of the vessel endeavored to give the conversation an æsthetic
and semi-religious turn by analyzing the feelings of mingled awe,
melancholy and curiosity with which most men survey the remains of a human
form—feelings always heightened by the antiquity of the relic, and by the
dignity of the person who lived and loved and labored in it.
“The fundamental idea,” said he, “is a profound respect for the human body
itself as the casket which has contained the spiritual jewel, the soul.”
“Yes,” remarked the surgeon; “nothing but the lapse of a people into
cannibalism can obliterate that sentiment. When the Egyptian embalmers
were ready for their work, a certain person came forward and made the
necessary incisions for taking out the entrails. He immediately fled away,
pursued by volleys of stones and curses from all the others. Hence also
the dissections of the dead by medical students are conducted with the
utmost secrecy and caution.”
“Schiller,” said I, “makes one of his heroes remark that the first time he
plunged his sword into a living man, he felt a shudder creep over him as
if he had desecrated the temple of God.”
“Besides the feeling of reverence,” continued the clergyman, “we have the
awe which death naturally inspires, the melancholy excited by the vain and
transitory nature of earthly things; and lastly, a tender and curious
interest for the brother-soul which has tasted the sweetness of life and
the bitterness of death, and passed onward to those hidden but grander
experiences which await us all.”
“Those shocking Egyptian mummies,” said one of the officers, “are so
disgusting that a strange horror is mingled with the gentler emotions you
describe.”
“I experienced that feeling,” said another, “on reading an account of the
exhumation of the remains, or rather the opening of the coffin, of King
Charles I., two hundred years after he had been beheaded. It was
increased, doubtless, by the idea of the separated head and body, and the
strange and lifelike stare of the king’s eyes, which collapsed like
soap-bubbles when they were exposed to the air.”
“There was something of the picturesque in that finding of a dead body by
some little children who were playing in a grotto in France. It was seated
on a stone bench and perfectly petrified, retaining, however, a sweet and
placid expression of countenance. The man was an old hermit, who
frequently retired into the deepest chamber of the grotto for religious
contemplation.”
“Imagine yourself,” said I, “in the silence and shadows of Westminster
Abbey, peering through some crevice in an old vault and getting a sight of
the shrunken dust of Shakespeare.”
“Passing from imagination to fact,” said solemnly the old surgeon, “I have
seen the body of a man lying upon the ground where it had lain undisturbed
for eighteen hundred years.”
“Eighteen hundred years!” exclaimed several voices at once.
“Yes, eighteen hundred years; and I was the first person who set eyes upon
him from the day of his death until I got into the cavern where he
perished.”
“A romance! a romance!” cried the minister. “Come, doctor, be
communicative and tell us all about it.”
“It is not a romance,” said the doctor, “but the facts were certainly very
curious.
“When I was a young assistant surgeon, attached to the sloop-of-war
Agamemnon, we were skirting leisurely the eastern shores of the
Mediterranean, and anchored one morning in sight of the ruins of the
ancient city of Sidon and opposite the westernmost spurs of Lebanon, the
Mont Blanc of Palestine.
“There is only one picture grander than a view of Mount Lebanon from the
sea, and that is a view of the sea from Mount Lebanon. I enjoyed the
former so keenly that I determined to obtain the latter also. We got up a
party of genial and stout fellows to ascend one of the highest peaks,
armed with pick-axes, to obtain geological specimens on our way.
“We had advanced but a short distance up one of the cliffs, when we
started from the scanty undergrowth some little animal—a wolf or jackal or
wild dog, all of which abound on Mount Lebanon. We all joined noisily in
the chase, and soon ran the frightened creature into one of the deep
crevices or fissures made in the earth by the tempestuous rains of that
region. Our picks were immediately brought into play, and in a short time,
to our very great astonishment, instead of digging the fugitive out of a
little hole in the ground, we opened our way into what was evidently the
rear or back part of a cave of considerable dimensions.
“Our party crawled in one after another, myself leading the way. The
contents of the place arrested our attention so strongly that we forgot
the object of our chase, which had buried itself in some holes or burrows
at the side of the cavern. The floor was of a yellowish-white limestone,
and all eyes were immediately directed, in the rather dim light, to the
figure of a man outstretched upon it.
“Yes, it was a man whose entire body, clothing and all, had dissolved into
one blended mass, and so long ago that it looked rather like a great
bas-relief of the human form projecting from the lighter-colored floor.
“The shape of the head and of the long hair and beard was complete. One
outstretched arm lay along the floor, and the fingers could be traced by
little ridges separate from each other. The protuberances of all the bony
parts showed that the skeleton still resisted the disintegrating process
of decay.
“What an awful death he must have experienced! For there was not a single
other object in the small space which remained of the cavern; not a stone
which might have served for a seat or a table; not an earthen vessel which
might have contained a draught of water.
“The fate of this unhappy being was evident. Whether he had lived in the
cavern or whether he had taken refuge in it from some great storm, he had
clearly rushed to the back part of it to escape some enormous landslide
and caving in at the front, which had opened toward the sea. He had been
buried alive! Having exhausted the little air that remained to him,
stricken down by terror, despair and suffocation, he had rendered up his
soul to the great Giver in silence, darkness and solitude.
“These facts were so obvious that we all lifted our hats before speaking a
word; thus paying the tribute of human sympathy to a fellow-creature
eighteen hundred years after he had ceased to need it.”
“How did you fix upon the date of his death?” asked the chaplain.
“You will see. A large cylindrical case of bronze was lying upon the
breast of the dead man. He must have valued it highly, for he had clasped
it to his bosom in the agonies of death. It was hermetically sealed with
such ingenuity that we found considerable difficulty in breaking it open.
It contained a parchment of great length, and rolled tightly around a
little brass rod. The parchment was closely written in beautiful Greek
characters. It was perfectly preserved. Two small gold coins fell out of
the white dry sand with which the case had been filled. One of them bore
the inscription of Tiberius Cæsar, and the other was stamped in the ninth
year of the reign of the emperor Nero. Thus in the accidental grave of its
author had his book been safely preserved amid all the mutations of the
world.”
The old doctor stroked his gray beard in silence, and I exclaimed:
“Who do you suppose this unfortunate man to have been?”
“That was revealed in the manuscript, but unfortunately not one of our
party could read Greek. I sent the case with its contents to an old uncle
of my mother, who had a little curacy near Binghamton. He was a great
Greek scholar, and devoted to his classical studies the little time he
could spare from the game of whist. I had a good deal of curiosity on the
subject, and wrote several times to my uncle from different parts of the
world before he condescended to reply. His answer was in substance this:
that the manuscript purported to be the autobiography of Eleazor or
Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead; that it was probably the work
of some heretic monk or crazy philosopher of the second or third century;
that, interwoven with romantic incidents in this world and the other, it
gave expression to many absurd and false doctrines; in fine, that it was
not worth my reading, and that I had better devote myself dutifully to
killing his Majesty’s enemies on the high seas, than to searching old
caverns for apocryphal documents which impugned the sacred verities of the
Apostolic Church.
“And so,” concluded the old surgeon, “I have never thought any more about
it.”
“Your uncle was no doubt right in his conjectures and wise in his advice,”
said the young chaplain. “The number and extent of the apocryphal
impositions upon the early Christian Church are almost incredible.”
“Were you satisfied,” said I, “with your good uncle’s opinion?”
“I have always believed,” replied the doctor, evasively and with a roguish
twinkle of his eye, “that if the manuscript had contained the Thirty-nine
Articles by anticipation, my uncle would have pronounced it divinely
inspired.”
“What became of it?” I inquired.
“Oh, it was sealed up again and sent to the nursery as a plaything for the
children. It is probably still in the possession of one of my cousins.”
The strange story of the old surgeon made a profound impression upon me;
for in spite of the incredulity of all the other listeners, I believed
from the first that the dust of that cavern was the dust of Lazarus, the
brother of Martha and Mary, and that the manuscript contained something of
genuine value to the Church and the world.
The opinion of the old curate and the echo of the young chaplain did not
weigh a feather in my estimation. Young as I was, I had acquired that rare
faculty of thinking for myself. Besides, I had had learned enough of human
nature to know that legal reforms are rarely suggested by lawyers; that
doctors always make war on a system of medicine better than their own; and
that priests instinctively repudiate anything which demands a
re-examination of the fundamental doctrines of their theological systems.
I had an inextinguishable desire to possess that manuscript, and set
myself earnestly about it. I cultivated the acquaintance of the genial old
surgeon, and contrived to render myself useful to him on more than one
occasion. When he sailed for England I extorted from him a promise that he
would send me the manuscript of Lazarus which his orthodox uncle has so
flippantly condemned.
A good many years passed away, and I heard nothing from him. At length
came a package, and a letter from England couched in very handsome terms,
a part of which ran thus:
“My beloved father on his deathbed made up the parcel which I now send
you, and requested me to transmit it to you with the following message,
which he made me write down as the words fell from his lips:
“‘Forgive your old acquaintance for neglecting until death the matters of
the dead. Read what Lazarus says, while I go in person to verify or
invalidate his story. I have lived passably well, and I die comparatively
happy. Good-bye!’”
I drew a deep sigh to the memory of the old surgeon, and set immediately
to work studying and translating the manuscript. I found that a difficult
task. It was not written in very classical Greek, and besides, was full of
Hebraisms, which sometimes obscured the sense. There were not only many
obscure things, but many things irrelevant, and many which would be
regarded as absurd and even childish in the present age.
It soon became clear that a literal translation of the manuscript would
not be of any great interest to the general reader. I determined to take
the astounding facts narrated, as a skeleton or framework around which to
build up a story of my own. This book is therefore a modern romance
founded upon ancient facts. The original might be called a prose poem.
Indeed, much of it is in the poetical form; the description of Helena, for
instance, in the eleventh chapter.
The key to the whole book is, that here are the views and experiences of a
man who, by what we may call a supernatural accident, was led into states
of thought two thousand years in advance of his contemporaries.
I present it to the public in a dress of the nineteenth century, hoping it
will reverse the decision of the old curate, who understood Greek and
whist better than he did the inappeasable hunger of the soul after the
unknown, and perhaps, alas! the unknowable.
[Illustration: Ornament]
In Both Worlds.