University of Virginia Library

It seems so strange to us of the new faith,
Who feel its beauty, joy, and holiness,
Rising above this lower Pagan creed,
Like morning o'er the dark and dreaming earth;
To us who have beheld, known, talked with those
Who walked beside our Lord, and heard his voice,
And with their own eyes saw his miracles,—
To hear these Romans, Marcus, Caius—nay,
Even Lucius, who is learned, liberal, trained
In every school of thought, deny them all:
Calling them mere impostures, or at best,
Distortions of the facts, half true, half false,
With nothing but the false miraculous!
It makes us grieve, as showing how they lack
That sense by which alone the natural man,
As Paul says, can receive the things of God.
But when had any Roman in all time
A spiritual sense? 'T is to the East
The power of prophecy is given: alone
It shapes religions, has the inner sight
That through the matter sees the soul beyond,
Is through its faith receptive, not its mind,
And nearer unto God, as is the child.
The West, immersed in things, is as the man,
And joys to fashion governments and laws:
It orders facts, it thinks, invents, and works,
But blind and deaf to spiritual truth
Lives in the Present, builds no infinite bridge
Into the Future, hopes not, nor divines.
At highest, 't is the world's great intellect,
Its understanding, brain, and not its soul.
Lucius is of the West; he cannot feel
Those finer impulses beyond the sense,
Those inward yearnings stretching out of sight,
Where reason cannot follow, after truth.
As far as intellect can lead him on
Up the clear path of logic, he will go;
The rest is nonsense, and, of course, he likes
The well-trod path as being the most safe.
And thus he reasons on the miracles:—

“Of facts like these, conforming to no law,
There are a thousand chances of mistake
To one in favour of the apparent facts,—
First, self-deception; strong desire to see
Begets the power of seeing; from itself
The nervously expectant sense projects
Its image, its mirage, or hears returned
The outward echo of the inward voice;
And while the reason and the judgment drowse,
The fancy, all alive, sees, hears, accepts.
Then come illusions of the senses;—Facts
Half seen are wholly false,—scarce facts at all.
Let but the fact be strange and new, surprise
Destroys the power of scrutiny.—Again,
Wonder, the habitual state of many minds
(Those, most of all, religiously inclined),
Love of the marvelous, a dread to peer
Too keenly into that which wears a garb
Of holiness, a proneness to revere
What others reverence—all lead astray.
Belief is passive: it receives, accepts;
But doubt is active: it disputes, rejects.
You think these wonders, facts. You say that Christ
Was holy in his aspect, pure in life,
And in his perfectness above mankind.
I will not question this: I only say
He was a man, at best, and not a god.
The Jews could not have crucified a god.
No, nor a demigod, like Hercules.

“Observe, I do not say as others do,
That he was wicked in intent, and sought
A kingly crown above his wretched tribe.
And if he did, I care not. What he said
Was well enough, only it was not new.
All that is good is found in Socrates,
Or Plato, or the old Philosophies.
Had he been born in Greece, he might, perhaps,
Have graced the train of one of these great men.
But in that dismal Syria, 'mid a herd
Of ignorant Jews, most of them fishermen,
Who worshiped him, he lost all common sense.
From what I hear, he grew half-cracked at last,
And thought himself a god, and claimed the power
Of miracles, like other madmen here.
Well, well: he suffered for all that by death,
And, I dare say, was better than the most
Among that loathsome people. For all that,
Touched in his brain he was, you must admit.
For what man in his senses ever dreamed
He from the dead should rise with pomp and power
A kingdom to establish on the earth?

“As for his miracles, I do not doubt
That some among that herd of credulous fools,
On whom he practiced, thought they saw these things.
But who was there with eyes and mind well trained
To sift the facts, to judge the evidence,
To question, to examine, to record?
Not one: the stupid crowd cried ‘miracle’
(For everything is miracle to them);
The Scribes and Pharisees, the learned men,
All stood aloof and scorned him and his works.
“And were they true, what prove they?—Why, in Rome
These wonder-working magians come by scores,
Each with his new inspired theogony,
Each with his miracle to prove him God!
For instance, there is Judas, whom they call
The Gaulonite; and his three sons as well;
There is Menander, and Cerinthus too,
Theudas, and the greatest two of all,
Simon of Gitton, named the Magian,
And Apollonius of Tyana.
Thousands assert for them, as you for Christ,
A supernatural power, a gift divine.
What shall I say? All surely are not gods!
No! nor a single one. Some, as I hear,
Are scholars versed in Egypt's mystic lore,
And by the subtle thought of Greece imbued,
With minds enriched by travel and strange tongues,
And skilled in writing, teaching, prophecy:
'T is even said their prophecies prove true!
If so, by chance, by happy guess, no more.
Yet if I hold these miracles of theirs
As mere delusions (and you say they are),
How can you ask me to accept on faith
Those Christ (a good man, if you will, but yet
An untaught Jew of Galilee) performed,
Far out of sight, with none to vouch for them
Except a ruck of wretched ignorant Jews?
As for their doctrines, systems, forms of faith,
There is an Eastern likeness in them all,
Simon or Christ—'t is nearly the same thing.

“And so this magian had the power, you think,
To drive out shrieking devils from the breasts
Of madmen, and compel them by his will
To rush into a herd of guiltless swine;
Nay, that he cured the sick, and raised the dead,
One Lazarus, four days buried, till he stank;
Even more, that he could raise himself to life
When crucified and dead, and in his tomb;
And all because these awe-struck vulgar Jews
Saw some one like him, and affirmed 't was he.
A woman first, a Mary Magdalene,
Set all these stories going. Who was she?
A half-mad courtesan, one who had owned
Her seven devils—but of her the less
You say the better. You'll at least admit
The kingdom that he promised on the earth,
The pomp, the power, the glory, were all trash.
He vanished very swiftly out of sight
For all his promises, and left the fools
Who trusted him to gape and stare to see
Some day the heavens open, as he said,
And him with angels coming. When he comes
Pray give me notice;—I, too, will believe;
Till then, excuse me; on such evidence
Of such grave portents, I to change my faith!
I would not hang a sparrow on it all.”
So Lucius thinks, and talks, and never sees
How strange a contradiction in him lies;
For he believes in all the wildest myths,
And miracles, and wonders of his gods,
Ay, and his demigods as well, and pays
To them his reverential sacrifice.
Like a good pagan, he believes them all,
Though he admits, of course, he never saw,
Nor any eyes of any living man;
Though all the evidence is far away,
Dimmed and obscured by misty centuries;
And though these myths are vouched by writings vague
Or by tradition only, differing, too,
In each tradition. Yet this faith being fixed,
Established by long ages of belief,
It must be true; and our good Lucius sees
In all these variations proofs of truth.
The facts remain, he says, despite them all,
Colored by this report or that report,
For this is human merely—only shows
How various minds are variously impressed;
One sees the fact as red, one green, one blue,
But all this difference proves the existing fact.

But when Christ comes within our very reach,
And living crowds behold his miracles,
Attesting them by strenuous belief,
And sudden cries, and life-long change of faith,
All are deceived; such strange things cannot be!
Yet either they were true or false. If false,
How were these crowds impressed to think they saw
What never happened? Is not this as strange,
As wondrous as the miracles themselves?
“Tricks, tricks,” he says, “they only thought they saw;
Do not a juggler's tricks deceive us all?
I have no faith in Apollonius
For all the evidence—it must be trick.
In ancient times the gods came down to man,
Assuming human powers—but that is past;
But when a human creature of to-day
Assumes their functions, and works miracles
Against the laws of nature, and calls up
The dead, the best thing is to hold him mad.”

No! Lucius will not try the old and new
By the same test; a kind of mystery shrouds
The ancient fact; the current of belief
For generations carries him along.
The early faith, stamped on his childish mind,
Can never be erased—'t is deep as life.
The priest, the sacrifice, the daily rites,
The formula, the fashion, the old use
Possess him, coloring all his life and thought;
And we, who in the new, pure faith rejoice,
Seem to his eyes, at least, but fools misled,
Who only seek his gods to overthrow,
And to whom ruin in the end must come.
We smile in pity—let us, too, be just.
'T is hard to root up all one's faith at once;
All the old feelings, all the happy dreams,
All the sweet customs, the long growth of years.
The very superstitions of our youth
Have fragrance in them. Underneath the words
We faltered, clinging to a mother's hand,
A dim, sweet music flows. To that old song
No new-writ verse will ever run so smooth.

We strike his faith, and whoso strikes our faith
We hold as foe—and oft lose sight of Truth
Defending dogmas, doctrines, formulas,
Shells though they be, from which the life has fled.
While yet the mind is plastic to a touch,
The die of doctrine strikes, deep in, our faith,
And age but hardens the impression there.
Half our fixed notions are but ancient ruts
Of empty words and formulas of thought,
Worn in by repetition and long use—
And easy run the wheels within these ruts.
He who assails and goads the mind to think,
Or starts it from the grooves of prejudice,
We call foul names, we hate, we scorn, we fear;
He seems at once a foe to man and God.
What will he do? Old superstitious props
Hold up our lives; if they be stricken down,
What shall befall us? Oh! that way lies death!
Old miracles, myths, dogmas, all things old,
Are reverent for their age. It is the new
We have to fear: as if God did not work
With fresh abounding power in our own day,
In our own souls; as if dead creeds could hold
The living spirit, and these pagan husks
Forever feed the soul that starves for Truth.

I will not say but in old myths resides
Something of good—some tender living germ
Of beauty and delight. Though I renounce
Their errors for this higher, holier life
That Christ has given; still, 't is sweet to think
Of Aphrodite rising from the sea,
The incarnate dream of beauty; of the staid,
Calm dignity of wisdom bodied forth
In grand Minerva; of the gracious joy,
The charm of nature, Bacchus represents;
Of Flora scattering flowers and breathing spring;
Of all those lovely shapes that lurking gleam
Through nature's sunny openings. Ah! I know
Reason rejects them for a higher thought,
And yet, at times, that old sweet faith returns
To tempt me back in its poetic train.
At times, the one Eternal Father seems
So far away, and this fair world that teemed
With airy shapes, so void and cold and bare.

But this is folly. Yet if in my heart
Old superstitions still possess a charm,
How harshly blame our Lucius, who remains
Fixed in the old—to whom we only seem
Rash innovators, bringing in new gods?
Of other stuff is our friend Caius made.
The folly of this faith he will admit;
“And yet,” he says, “the system stands our stead
Despite its follies—why then cast it down?
Truth is impossible; we cannot know;
The impenetrable veil of destiny
Behind our life, before our life is dropped.
All is an idle guess, and this mixed creed
Of superstitions has its gleams of truth.
It served our fathers; if we cast it down
Then chaos comes. Thinking results at last
In wretchedness. We cannot hope to know.
Only the gods know. Man's mind must be fed
With superstitions mixed with truth; pure truth
Would merely madden; for as we are made
Half mind, half matter, so our thoughts must be.
Then let our faith stand where it is; the beams
Are rotten here and there, but he who mends
May topple down the temple on our heads,
And leave us godless. Nay, the parasite
Of superstition, like the ivy, knits
The old wall's crumbling stones. For higher minds
A higher truth, a purer faith—but that
Through all these forms, we, who have eyes, can see,
The forms themselves the common herd demand.
Since all at last is theory, the best
Is to be happy, calm, and confident.
What is, is—and we cannot alter it.
Then plague me not with revelations new.
All things are revelations; every creed
Comes from above, from God, from all the gods.
Pure sunlight blinds the eye, so comes it veiled
With soft suffusion in the ambient air;
The sun, itself one speck—the positive
Set in an infinite negative of sky,
And beauty, offspring of the eternal light,
Dimmed to soft hues to suit our mortal sense.

“As for your miracles, I heed them not;
For all things, in one sense, are miracles.
Who can explain the simplest fact of life,
As how we see, or move our hand, or speak,
Or how we think, or what is life or death?
By dint of daily doing use wears out
All strangeness; and with words which but restate
And group the facts, we fancy we explain.
Our so-called laws of nature are but rules
Drawn by experience from recurrent facts,
Which every new phenomenon corrects.
Cause and effect are only cheating words;
We know no causes, we but see effects.
Yet, as in one sense all is miracle,
So, in another, no such thing exists.
The new, the strange, outside the common rule
Of man's experience, seems miraculous,
For mortal eyes are dim, and short of sight.
But could we through this world's phenomena
Pierce to the essence and the life of things,
All would arrange itself to perfect law—
No breaches, no exceptions, all pure law.”

Our Decimus, who hopes to win the rank
Of tribune, takes a somewhat different view.
“Don't talk to me,” he says, “of right or wrong,
Of true or false; we all must take the world
For what it is. Against established things
Why run your head, and spoil your chance in life?
Christ may have been a god, or he may not,
But here in Rome we worship other gods;
Better or worse is not the question here.
If you would win success, go with the crowd,
Nor like a fool against the current strive;
What will you gain by warring with the time,
And preaching doctrines that the general mind
Considers impious? Even were they true,
They only raise up foes to tread you down.
As for myself, I'm not the babbling fool
To utter all I think. I sacrifice
With all the rest, perform the common rites,
And do the thing that 's deemed respectable;
And so I win the favor of all men.
What care I if the crowd be right or wrong?
I use them just to serve my purposes,
As steps whereby to rise to place and power.
One should not be the last to leave the old,
Nor yet the first to welcome in the new.
The popular belief—that is my faith;
My gods are always on the side that wins.”

Marcus, the augur, whose whole life is spent
In omens, auguries, and sacrifice,
And service at the temple in white robes,
So deep is sunken in the pagan rut
He cannot start his mind even to think.
Our creed to him is rank impiety,
Worthy of death. He to the beasts would throw
Whoever dares our doctrines to embrace.
His faith is absolute; no shade of doubt
Has ever crossed him; he is planted there
Firm as a tree, or rather, like a wall;
A tree lives, grows, but he is simply dead,
Stone upon stone, dull, dead, fixed, like a wall.
Thus, buttressed up by custom's honoured props,
Established in the faith of centuries,
Engraved with mystic lines and Orphean hymns,
Old saws and sacred lore of ancient priests,
An honest, absolute, stolid wall he stands,
Firm to uphold the statues of the gods,
And shield them from the assaults of impious men.
If I beseech him to consider well
And reason on his faith, he cries, amazed,
“Reason! what more fallacious guide than that?
Reason! with human reason do you dare
To explain the gods, and to assail our faith?
They in the days of old revealed themselves,
Assumed our shapes, ordained the sacrifice
Of blood and wine upon our altars poured,
Their power attested by miraculous deeds,
And still by omens, portents, auguries,
Inform and aid us on our human path.
You do not understand them? oh, indeed!
And so you summon them before your bar,
Bid them explain their doings and their laws,
And if they fail to meet your views, why, then
You judge them and reject them. Oh, I see!
The gods must ask leave to be gods from us,
And beg our pardon if by ways obscure,
Instead of common human ways, they work,
Or else we will arise and get new gods.
Oh, Jupiter! who are these impious men?
Whence do they come, what do they mean, who thus
Set up at Rome their superstitions vile,
And with their feeble reason dare oppose
The will of heaven? Go, atheist, infidel,
Go, and ask pardon of the gods, and learn
Obedience, and humility, and fear,
Or Jove himself will from his right hand launch
His thunderbolt, and sweep you to your fate.”

At times, this solid, settled faith of his
Shakes me with doubt. For what if he be right,
And this new faith that so commends itself
To all I am and hope, be, at the worst,
Temptation and delusion, shall I set
My face against the verdict of the world?
Shall not the faith that soothed the dying bed
Of Socrates—the faith that Plato taught
And Cicero avowed, suffice for me?
Shall I dare question what such minds affirm?
“Obey! obey!” a voice within me cries
('T is the old echo of my early faith),
And then, “Arouse!” cries out a stronger voice,
“Arouse! shake off this torpor! Sink not down
In the old creed—easy because 't is old;
In the dead faith—so fixed, because 't is dead.”

Let us go in and speak with Paul again.
He is so strong, he braces up our faith,
And stiffens all the sinews of the mind.