 | The poems and prose writings of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield |  |
Of their proud temples, ne'er by foot profane
Invaded, waked the pagan oracles,
The ministers of mysteries all unrevealed,
Bewildered on the amphoræ that stood
Beneath their sacred stores —and turned, once more,
To matin visions of deluding faith,
Processions and responses, gorgeous robes,
Banquets, and free bequests when they alone
Stood o'er the dying, and dominion bought
By endless cycles of hypocrisies.
All hierarchies, howsoe'er unlike
In ritual, are in earthly hope the same;
Pleasure, their idol: ease, their ecstacy;
Power, their ambition; and the will of God,
The blasphemed dictate of their own mad lusts.
The priests of Pompeii were no believers in preshadowed Mohammedan sobriety or the Genevan doctrine of total abstinence; but, rather, devout apostles of good fellowship, bonhommie and bienseance, whose credenda have lacked no devotees among the administrators of a very different religion. Their amphoræ or wine casks were always amply supplied by votaries who did not doubt that their spiritual guides possessed the same prerogatives in Tartarus which less remote exclusives in sanctity assume to exercise in Hades. The skeletons of many priests, on the excavation of Pompeii, were found amidst the relics of their revel. Can we suppose that even the ministers of a degraded superstition and a most lascivious mythology could trust in the protection of Jove or Osiris? or must we rather conclude that criminal appetite excluded natural fear and that they reasoned, like Pompey on his last journey—“It is necessary that we should be gluttons and revellers, but it is not necessary that we should live?”
| The poems and prose writings of Sumner Lincoln Fairfield | |