University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER FIFTEENTH.
THE MANUSCRIPT OF BROTHER ANSELM.

III. THE IMAGE.

Once more we turn our gaze to the scene which occurred in the days
of John Huss—to the aged man who, placing one hand upon a shrouded
Image, saw four thousand worshippers prostrate on the floor of a spacious
cavern.

“Ye have heard the history,” he exclaimed, glancing afar over the multitude,
who had listened to the Legend of the Statue in breathless stillness
—“Now behold the Image!”

He flung the sackcloth aside, and suddenly descended from the rock.

Sad and alone, the leaden Image towered there, with the torchlight quivering
over its motionless eyeballs and broad forehead. As the light, agitated
by the subterranean air, flitted in gusts of radiance over the dusk
countenance, it seeemed at once to sneer and smile, to frown with sullen
anger and brighten into a holy joy.

Every face was raised to look upon it; every tongue was sealed; but
the vast crowd moved with an unceasing undulation. At last, from a thousand
lips, confused murmurs pealed upon the silence of the vault—

“It is no statue, but a Living Soul. See! The eyes brighten and the
lips move! The Lead will become Gold at last, and the Sneer be changed
into a Smile!”

These words might be distinguished amid that wildly whispered chorus,
and the white-haired man, leaning against the base of the rock, looked up
into the leaden face, while something like a radiant hope began to burn in
his eyes—

“Lord! Lord! Shall thy pure Soul, no longer imprisoned in creeds,
walk freely once more into the homes and hearts of men? Shall all thy
people gather around one altar, sharing the bread which is thy body, and
the water from the wooden bowl, emblematic of thy tears? Or shall the
day come, when the Poor will dare to claim the cup filled with pure wine,
symbolical of thy Blood? Shall the Lead indeed become Gold, and the
Smile chase the anguish from thy face?”

The light flashed fitfully—the Image seemed to smile; it did smile upon
the crowd of Bohemian Poor.

But as their solemn cry of triumph rose to the vaulted roof, a way-worn
man rushed through the prostrate crowd, his garments torn, his face covered
with roadside dust.

Darting forward, he sprang upon the rock, and his face—marked by the

consciousness of a dread message—was contrasted with the leaden countenance
of the Image.

“Brothers, Sisters, People, I come from Prague—” he shouted, with
the faint gestures of an exhausted man—“I saw John Huss—expire—
amid—the flames—”

He sank exhausted on the rock, and a silence, more eloquent than
groans or tears, descended upon the kneeling worshippers.

Soon they arose, and trooping silently around the altar, shared the bread
of the Serf with each other, and drank the water from the bowl, in memory
of their Lord, who said, many centuries before, that his Mission was
to his Brothers and his sisters, the Poor.

And all the while, the leaden Image, glowing faintly in the torchlight,
looked upon their Rude Sacrament with eyes of unutterable sadness. Yet
even in the sadness—so it seemed as the light flitted to and fro—there
seemed mingled a mocking sneer. Was it for the Poor, or for the Oppressor
who trod them into dust?

The aged man lifted up his voice—

“It is not yet time!' he cried—“But at last, after the People of the
Lord, whose tears and blood have not ceased to flow for five thousand
years—at last, after they have suffered enough, and the cup of their anguish
is full—the Lead will become Gold, and the Sneer be changed into
a Smile!”

Has this Legend of the wild Boheman land no meaning for the people
of all ages?

Let us seek for the Image amid scenes and men of all ages, that have
died since the day of John Huss, and ask an answer to these earnest
questions—

Did the Lead ever become Gold? Did the Sneer ever change into a
Smile? Did the pure beautiful Spirit ever escape from the leaden form of
ereed and ritual, and walk freely into the homes and hearts of men, as in
the days of Gethsemane and Calvary?

These questions we cannot answer; but a singular tradition prevails—
we cannot prove its correctness—that the Leaden Image has appeared on
various occasions in the history of the world. It is a tradition, to be sure,
and yet there may be embodied, in its wild details, some rude Truth, or
perchance the gleam of a rude Truth.

One day a white-haired man was burned to cinders, in the open square
of a Protestant city. Ere he died, and while the flames were slowly de
vouring his flesh, he never ceased to cry, “Jesus, Saviour of sinners, have
mercy on me! Christ, pity me!” And all the while, from a window of
a neighboring house, a gaunt man, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes,
watched the agonies of the burning wretch, and said, in a low voice, “The
Church hath power to put down all heresy by the sword.”

The watcher was called John Calvin, and the wretch whose slow agonies
he watched bore the name of Michael Servetus.

And as the cindered bones of Servetus crumbled amid the ashes of the
fire—while Calvin took up his Evangelical pen and wrote a Thesis in
defence of the Deed—there appeared to the other spectators of the scene,
a singular vision of a Leaden Image, standing very near the stake, with a
fathomless scorn upon its motionless lip and fixed eyeballs.

It seemed like an Image of Jesus, not the Jesus of the Bible—pure,
loving and serene—but the ferocious creation of John Calvin's vindictive
soul.

So we might trace the history of the Leaden Image through various
scenes and ages. There are persons who maintain, that such an Image
never existed, but that a Spectre, something like it, stamped with a sullen
grandeur on its dusk forehead, has appeared at certain intervals in the
history of the world; appeared as a Warning, an Omen, an Incarnate
Scorn.