第74章

Try well the legends of the children's time;Ye are the chosen people, God has led Your steps across the desert of the deep As now across the desert of the shore;Mountains are cleft before you as the sea Before the wandering tribe of Israel's sons;Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan, Its coming printed on the western sky, A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame;Your prophets are a hundred unto one Of them of old who cried, "Thus saith the Lord";They told of cities that should fall in heaps, But yours of mightier cities that shall rise Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets, Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;The tree of knowledge in your garden grows Not single, but at every humble door;Its branches lend you their immortal food, That fills you with the sense of what ye are, No servants of an altar hewed and carved >From senseless stone by craft of human hands, Rabbi, or dervish, Brahmin, bishop, bonze, But masters of the charm with which they work To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!

Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit, Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!

Ye are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods, Each day ye break an image in your shrine And plant a fairer image where it stood Where is the Moloch of your fathers' creed, Whose fires of torment burned for span-long babes?

Fit object for a tender mother's love!

Why not ? It was a bargain duly made For these same infants through the surety's act Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven, By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well His fitness for the task,--this, even this, Was the true doctrine only yesterday As thoughts are reckoned,--and to-day you hear In words that sound as if from human tongues Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth As would the saurians of the age of slime, Awaking from their stony sepulchres And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!

Four of us listened to these lines as the young man read them,--the Master and myself and our two ladies.This was the little party we got up to hear him read.I do not think much of it was very new to the Master or myself.At any rate, he said to me when we were alone, That is the kind of talk the "natural man," as the theologians call him, is apt to fall into.

--I thought it was the Apostle Paul, and not the theologians, that used the term "natural man, I ventured to suggest.

--I should like to know where the Apostle Paul learned English?--said the Master, with the look of one who does not mean to be tripped up if he can help himself.---But at any rate,--he continued,--the "natural man," so called, is worth listening to now and then, for he didn't make his nature, and the Devil did n't make it; and if the Almighty made it, I never saw or heard of anything he made that wasn't worth attending to.

The young man begged the Lady to pardon anything that might sound harshly in these crude thoughts of his.He had been taught strange things, he said, from old theologies, when he was a child, and had thought his way out of many of his early superstitions.As for the Young Girl, our Scheherezade, he said to her that she must have got dreadfully tired (at which she colored up and said it was no such thing), and he promised that, to pay for her goodness in listening, he would give her a lesson in astronomy the next fair evening, if she would be his scholar, at which she blushed deeper than before, and said something which certainly was not No.