  Coming together again at CÆsarea Philippi (Paneas, Banias) after an interval of days, Saul and Sergius cross the southern spur of Hermon. A violent thunderstorm comes slowly up during the afternoon, which gives Sergius occasion, by way of mask to his own secret disquietude, to quote his Epicurean poet Lucretius on the subject of Jupiter's control of thunderbolts. As the storm increases in violence, the fears of Sergius overpower him, and he breaks down at last into a deprecatory prayer and vow to Jupiter. Saul then, the storm still raging, rehearses from Scripture appropriate fragments of psalm, timing them to the various successive bursts of tempest. The sound of a tranquil human voice has a quieting effect on Sergius, and even on the frightened steeds of the two travellers. The storm ceases, and they pass the night under a serene sky, ready to set out the next morning for the last stage of their journey to Damascus. FOR DAMASCUS.The splendor of the morning yet once more Was a theophany in Syria, When Saul and Sergius, met, from Paneas Started, with mind to overpass that day The spur of Hermon interposed between Them and Damascus. "Strange the human bent," Said Saul, "the universal human bent, Toward worship of unreal divinities! 'Paneas!' The very sound insults the name And solitary majesty of God, Jehovah, Ever-living, Only True. Think of it! 'Pan', forsooth! And God, who made These things which we behold, these waters, woods, And mountains, glens, and rocky cliffs, and caves, Who these things made, and made the mind of man Capacious of Himself, or capable At least of knowing Him Creator, such By His own noblest creature thus thrust forth, That a rough, rustic, gross, grotesque, burlesque, Goat-footed, and goat-bearded, horned and tailed Divinity like Pan, foul caricature At best of man himself who fashions him, And out of wanton fancy furnishes him His meet appendages of brute wild beast— That this deform abortion of the brain Might take the room, made void, of God outcast, And, with his ramping, reeling, riotous rout Of fauns and satyrs, claim to be adored! I feel the Hebrew blood within me boil At outrage such from man on God and man! Phoebus Apollo seems an upward reach Of human fancy in theogony; Some height, some aspiration, there at least, Toward what in man, if not the noblest, yet Is nobler than the beasts that browse, or graze. Apollo, too, I hate, but I loathe Pan!" "We Romans are more catholic than you Hebrews," said Sergius, "more hospitable To different peoples' different gods. Our own But we make room for others than our own. From Greece we have adopted all her gods, And all the gods of Egypt and the East Are domiciled at Rome—all save your god, Jehovah, his pretensions overleap The bounds of even our hospitality, Who not on any terms of fellowship Will sit a fellow with his fellow-gods. Him sole except, it is our policy To entertain with wise indifference In brotherly equality all gods Of whatsoever nations of the earth. A temple at Rome have we, Pantheon called, So called as to this end expressly built That there no human god might lack a home. Such is our Roman way; your Hebrew way Is different; different races, different ways." Sergius so spoke as if concluding all With the last word of wisdom to be said; He paused, and Saul mused whether wise it were To answer, when thus Sergius further spoke: "I marked late, when 'Neapolis!' I said, 'Sychar!' saidst thou, in tone as if of scorn; Wherefore? if I may know." "'Sychar,'" said Saul, "Imports deceit, and there deceit abounds. From the Samaritans we Jews refrain; Corrupters they of the right ways of God. Across their soil we either shun to go, Or, going, hasten with unpausing feet." "Those also have their ways!" said Sergius; "Such humors of the blood thou wilt not cure. Worship Jehovah ye, it is your way, And let us Gentiles serve our several gods, Or serve them not, be atheists if we choose— I, as thou knowest, an atheist choose to be— Of comity and peace the sole safe rule. This therefore is the sum—I say it again— Ways diverse worship men, or worship not, All as our natural bents may us incline. Keep your Jehovah, you, He is your God, Chosen, or feigned and fashioned to your mind— Keep Him, but not impose your ethnic dream, Or guess, of deity on all mankind." "No dream of ours," said Saul, "Jehovah is. Our Hebrew dreams of God have, like the dreams Dreamed by all races of mankind besides, Grovelled to low and lower, have bestial been, Or reptile, nay, to insensate wood and stone Descended; we have loved idolatry, We, with the rest, and hardly healed have been, Though purged with hyssop of dire history, Constrained—against the subtly treacherous soft Relentings of our heart, oft yielded to, Then punished oft full sore, which bade us spare Whom God to spare forbade—constrained to slay With our own swords, abolish utterly, The idolatrous possessors of this land, In judgment just on their idolatry, And lest we too be tainted with their sin; Yet foul relapse despite, and after, stripes, Stripes upon stripes again and yet again, Suffered from the right hand of God incensed, Defeat, captivity, long servitude, With the probe searched, with the knife carved until Scarce left was life to bear the cautery Wherewith a holy and a jealous God Out of our quivering soul throughly would burn Inherited from Adam in his fall, That devil-taught depravity which prompts Apostasy to other gods no gods— Hardly so healed, with dreadful chastisement, Has been my nation of her dreadful crime. Loth, slow, ingrate, rebellious pupils, we Taught have been thus to worship only God— Jehovah, only God of the whole earth!" Those last words as he spoke, Saul his right hand Swept round in waving gesture—for they now A height of goodly prospect had attained, Wherefrom, pausing to breathe their laboring steeds, They backward looked beneath them far abroad— Swept round his hand, as if the circuit wide Of the whole earth might there his words attest; Their fill they gazed, then upward strained once more. At length a stage of smoother going reached, Sergius, abreast of Saul, took up the word: "Yea, might one deem thy Hebrew race indeed Had been the subjects of such history, So purposed, then sound were thine argument And thy Jehovah would be very God, But other races too besides thine own Have had their chances, their vicissitudes; Fortune to all has served her whirling wheel, And every several race has had its turn Of rising now, now sinking in the dust. Wherefore should we you Hebrews sole of all Reckon divinely taught by history, Taught to be theists in an atheist world, Or in a world idolatrous, of God The True, the Only, only worshippers?" "The other nations all," so Saul rejoined, "Followed the bent of nature, had their will, What they chose did, and were idolatrous, God gave them up to their apostasy; Us God withstood, His Hebrews He forbade; With the same bent as others, as headstrong, We Hebrews strangely went a different way, And upward moved against a downward bent. A fiery flaming sword turned every way Forever met us on the errant track, And forced us right though still found facing wrong. God's prophets did not fail, age after age— To warn us, chide us, threaten, plead, conjure, Against our passion for idolatry. Yet, as defying all that God could do, Such was the force of that infatuate love Fast-rooted in the sottish Hebrew heart For idol-worship, that King Solomon, The greatest, wisest, wealthiest of our kings, Mightiest, most famous, most magnificent, The glory and the crown of Israel, The wonder and the proverb of the East— This king, at point of culmination highest To the far-shining splendor of our race, The son of David, Solomon, turned back From God who gave him his pre-eminence, From God, the Living God, turned back, and sold His heart, his spacious, all-experienced heart, To gods that were no gods. "Against a will, A set of nature, a prime pravity Stubborn like this, and tenfold impulse given Through such example in our first of kings, That, conflagration of infection round, We should escape and not idolatrous be, This, without miracle, were miracle, A miracle of chance, confounding chance, Monstrous, incredible, impossible! Nay, miracles on miracles were for us wrought, The manifest finger of God unquestionable, Yet to ourselves ourselves, to all men we, Wisely looked on, are chiefest miracle, Witness from age to age that God is God." With Hebrew heat, thus Saul to Sergius; The frequent steep ascents meanwhile, the halts For rest, for prospect, or for dalliance Under some cooling shade of rock or tree— Shield from the waxing fervors of the sun— Slack pace, due to the humors of their steeds Unchidden while their masters held discourse, Left the twain still below the topmost crest Of Hermon when the noontide hour was on. Large leisure to refection and repose Allowed, with converse, and mid-afternoon It was, before to horse again were got The horsemen, and their forward way resumed. As, lightly, they into the saddle sprang, Wakefully now along the horizon's rim Under the flaming sun in the deep west, There came a roll of thunder to their ears, Remote, and mellow with remoteness, rich Bass music in long rumbling monotone; They listened with delight to hear the sound. Then Sergius, as the vibration died In low delicious tremble from their sense, Said, coupling this with that in Saul's discourse, Fresh, or remembered from the days before: "That thunder and this mountain bring to me, Imagined, the wild scene on Sinai When your lawgiver gave his laws to you. He schemed it well to have a thunder-storm Chime in and be a brave accompaniment To enforce his ordinances upon the awe Of the unthinking timorous multitude. Popular leaders and lawgivers have Always and everywhere their tricks of trade, To impress, hoodwink, and wheedle vulgar minds. Our Sabine Numa, he Pompilius named, Had his mysterious nymph Egeria And that Lycurgus got an oracle From famous Delphi to approve his laws, Which having sworn his Spartans to observe At least till he returned from whither he went Abroad, he, after, masked in such disguise That never thence to have returned he seemed. The herd of men still love to be cajoled, Trolled hither and thither about with baited lies; Frighten them now with brandished empty threat, And now with laud as empty tickle them. Augustus taught the art to tyrannize Through forms of ancient freedom false and vain, The stale trick since of all our emperors. Your Hebrew Moses in his rude grand way Well plied his shifts of lead and government." Thunder, a rising mutter, broke again, And Sergius in his saddle turned to look; But Saul, with forward face intent, replied: "Nay, but our Moses thou dost misconceive. All was to lose and naught to gain for him Then when he left the ease, the pomp, the power, Of Pharaoh's court—of Pharaoh's daughter son This left, and loth his brethren led, slaves they, Out of the realm of Egypt to the sea— For such a multitude impassable, Yet passed, through mighty miracle, by all— Beyond the sea, into that wilderness Led them, where neither food nor water was, Yet food found they, and water, in the waste, Full forty years of error till they came Next to a land set thick with bristling spears Against them—though land promised them for theirs— And land that Moses never was to see, Save as afar in prospect from the mount, Because unworthy judged to enter there, Who unadvisÉd words in haste let slip, Unworthy judged, and meekly by himself Recorded judged unworthy—such a man, To such a people, so long led by him, Through such straits of extremity, not once Spake words to humor or to flatter them; Thwarted them rather, balked them of their wish, Upbraided, blamed, rebuked, and punished them, Each art of selfish demagogue eschewed. To rule and leadership like his, nowhere One key alone unlocks the mystery—God!" At that last word from Saul, like answer, came A deep-mouthed boom of thunder from the west, After a sword of lightning sudden drawn Then sheathed within the scabbard of the cloud, Which now, spread wide, had blotted out the sun. A vagrant breath of tempest shook the trees, And the scared birds flew homeward to their nests. Sergius remarked the stir of elements Uneasily the more that he alone Remarked it, Saul, involved in his own thought, Seeming unconscious of the outward world. The Roman, groping in his secret mind Vainly to find support of sympathy, Faltered to feel himself thus fronted sole With danger he could neither ward nor shun, In presence yet forbidding sign of fear. In this distress he buoyed himself with words, Cheer seeking in the sound of his own voice: "A merry place that in Lucretius Where this bold poet rallies Jupiter— In such a rattling vein of pleasantry, On his plenipotence with thunderbolts! Lucretius, thou shouldst know, interpreter Of Epicurus is to Roman minds; From whom we moderns learn the truth of things And generation of the universe. 'If Jupiter,' Lucretius sings and says, 'If Jupiter it be, and other gods, 'That with terrific sound the temple shake, 'Shake the resplendent temple of the skies, 'And launch the lightning whither each one wills, 'Why is it that the strokes transfix not those 'Guilty of some abominable crime, 'As these within their breast the flames inhale, 'Instruction sharp to mortals—why not this, 'Rather than that the man of no base thing 'To himself conscious should be wrapt about 'Innocent in the flames, and suddenly 'With whirlwind and with fire from heaven consumed? 'Also, why seek they out, the gods, for work 'Like this, deserted spots, and waste their pains? 'Or haply do they then just exercise Sergius so far, from his Lucretius, When the cloud, cloven, let out an arrowy flash, And, following soon, a muffled muttering threat Prolonged, that ended in a ragged roar— As if, with angry rupture, violent hands Atwain had torn the fabric of the sky. A shuddering pause, but again Sergius, Flying his poet's gibes at Jupiter: "'Why never from a sky clear everywhere 'Does Jupiter upon the lands hurl down 'His thunderbolts, and thunder-booms outpour? 'Or, when the clouds have come, does he descend 'Then into them that nigh at hand he thence 'The striking of his weapon may direct?'" One sheet of flame the bending welkin wrapt, And a broadside of thunder roared amain. With mortal strife against a mortal fear, Hidden, the Roman struggled, not in vain— As, faltering yet from his feigned gayety, He, in a forced voice almost grim, went on With that Lucretian blasphemy of Jove: "'Why lofty places seeks out Jupiter, 'Traced of his fires on lonely mountain-tops?'" No farther—flash on flash and crash on crash, Chaos of light and universe of sound!— For the wind roared a tumult like the sea Which the gulfs filled between the thunder-peals. One mighty blast, frantic as battle-charge When, mad with last despair, ten thousand horse Headlong into the hell at cannon-mouth Plunge—such a blast rushed down the rent ravine Whereby, along a shaggy side, the twain, Now nigh the utmost mountain summit, climbed. The glacial air, as in a torrent rolled Precipitous or vertical sheer down Some dizzy height in cataract, so swift! Unhorsed them both; but, crouching, man and steed, With one wise instinct instantly to all, Which equalled all—supreme desire of life— They huddling crept transverse to where a rock On their right hand lifted its moveless brow And, safely founded in the mountain's base, Made, leaning, an impendent roof which now Proffered a dreadful shelter from the storm. The wind, with such a weight oppressed, went down, And, with the sinking wind, a water-spout, Whirled roaring in its spiral from on high, Those watchers saw peel off, with one steep swoop Descending, a whole mountain-top and roll Its shattered forest into the ravine Suddenly thus with foaming torrent filled. Therewith, as weary were the storm, a lull; Lull only, for the welkin seemed to sink Collapsed about them, and what was the sky Became the nether atmosphere on fire, Enrobing them with lightning fold on fold And thunder detonating at their ears. Sergius, ere shut had seared his eyes the glare, Saw a gigantic cedar nigh at hand, Under a flaming wedge of thunderbolt, Riven in parted halves from head to foot, Fall burning down the frightful precipice. Spite of himself, his terror turned to prayer: "O Jupiter," he said, "it was not meant, What I spoke late against thy majesty! A pledged rich vow, will in thy temple hang, Then when I first shall safe reach Rome, inscribed 'From Sergius Paulus to King Jupiter, Lord of the lightning and the thunderbolt.'" "'Give ye unto Jehovah,'" so at last, Fragments of psalm responsive to the storm— As in antiphony of worship joined, He and the elements!—chanting, Saul burst forth, At intervals, between the swells of sound, And varying to the tempest's varying phase, "'Give ye unto Jehovah, lo, all ye 'Sons of the mighty, to Jehovah give 'Glory and strength; unto Jehovah give 'The equal glory due unto His name; 'Worship Jehovah in fair robes of praise!'" "'Deep calleth unto deep at the dread noise 'Made by Thy waterspouts. The earth, it shook 'And trembled; the foundations of the hills 'Moved and were shaken for that He was wroth. 'The heavens moreover bowed He, and came down, 'He His pavilion round about Him made 'Dark waters and the thick clouds of the skies. 'Hailstones and coals of fire! "'Jehovah's voice 'In power! "'Jehovah's voice in majesty! "'Jehovah's voice is on the waters! God, 'The God of glory thunders! "'Lo, His voice, 'Jehovah's voice, the mighty cedar breaks, 'Jehovah's voice divides the flames of fire! "'Praise ye Jehovah, heavens of heavens, and ye 'Waters that be above the heavens, Him praise! 'Praise ye Jehovah, from the earth beneath, 'Thou fire, thou hail, thou snow, and vapors ye, 'Thou, stormy wind that dost fulfil His word!'" So Saul, in dialogue with the elements, That heard him, and responded voice for voice. Sublimity into sublimity Other, immeasurable heights more high, Was lifted and transformed, the terror gone, Gone or exalted to ennobling awe— The thunder, and the lightning, and the hail Falling in power, the pomp of moving clouds, The sound of torrent and of cataract, The multitudinous orchestra of winds— Trumpet and pipe, resounding cymbal loud, Timbrel and harp, sackbut and psaltery— The majesty of cedars prostrate strewn In utmost adoration, the veiled sun, The kneeling heavens, face downward on the earth, In act of penitence as found unclean By the white-burning holiness of God— All this wild gesture of the elements And deep convulsion of the frame of things, Appalling only erst, interpreted By interjections such from Saul of phrase Inspired, seemed from confusion and turmoil Transposed and harmonized to an august Service and symphony of prayer and praise And solemn liturgy of the universe. Sergius was charmed insensibly to peace, And a calm human voice had subtle power To soothe to breathing rest the trembling steeds. Lifted the sky was from the burdened earth, The lightnings flashed less imminent, less thick. The thunder dulled his stroke, retired to far And farther in the muffling firmament, The hail ceased falling in a fall of rain, Through which at last the low descending sun Smiled in a rainbow on the opposite cloud. "God's sign," said Saul, "His seal of promise set Oft on the clouds of heaven when storm is past, In radiant curve of blended colors fair, That He with flood no more will drown the world." Therewith they got them to their path again, And, forward hastening, on the farther slope Of Hermon overpassed, were met by some Returning of their escort companies Who sought their laggard masters left behind. These had crossed earlier, and, before the storm, Housed them in covert, where all now with joy Welcomed their chiefs from threatened scath escaped. They slept that night beneath a starry sky Fair as if wrinkled never by a frown; To-morrow they would see that paradise, This their sleep filled with dream of things to be, Until the morning breaking radiant made The desert seem to blossom as the rose Wherein Damascus sat an oasis. |
|
