 | II. Inklings of adventure |  |
2. II.
In all simple states of society, sunset is the hour of
better angels. The traveller in the desert remembers
his home,—the sea-tost boy his mother and her last
words,—the Turk talks, for a wonder, and the chattering
Greek is silent, for the same,—the Italian forgets
his moustache, and hums la patria,—and the Englishman
delivers himself of the society of his companions,
and “takes a walk.” It is something in the influences
of the hour, and I shall take trouble, some day, to
maintain that morn, noon, and midnight have their ministry
as well, and exercise each an unobserved but salutary
and peculiar office on the feelings.
We all separated “after tea;” the Suridji was off to
find a tethering place for his horses; the Englishman
strolled away by himself to a group of the “tents of
Kedar” far down in the valley with their herds and
herdsmen; the Smyrniote merchant sat by the camel-track
at the foot of the hill waiting for the passing of a
caravan; the Green Mountaineer was wandering around
the ruins of the apostolic church; the Dutchman was
sketching the two Ionic shafts of the fair temple of
Cybele; and I, with a passion for running water which
I have elsewhere alluded to, idled by the green bank
of the Pactolus, dreaming sometimes of Gyges and Alexander,
and sometimes of you, dear Mary!
I passed Job on my way, for the four walls over
which the “Angel of the Church of Sardis” kept his
brooding watch in the days of the Apocalypse stand
not far from the swelling bank of the Pactolus, and
nearly in a line between it and the palace of Crœsus. I
must say that my heart almost stood still with awe as I
stepped over the threshold. In the next moment, the
strong and never-wasting under-current of early religious
uncovered my head, and felt myself stricken with the
spell of holy ground. My friend, who was never without
the Bible that was his mother's parting gift, sat on
the end of the broken wall of the vestibule with the sacred
volume open at the Revelations in his hand.
“I think, Philip,” said he, as I stood looking at him
in silence, “I think my mother will have been told by
an angel that I am here.”
He spoke with a solemnity that, spite of every other
feeling, seemed to me as weighty and true as prophecy.
“Listen, Philip,” said he, “it will be something to
tell your mother as well as mine, that we have read the
Apocalypse together in the Church of Sardis.”
I listened with what I never thought to have heard
in Asia—my mother's voice loud at my heart, as I had
heard it in prayer in my childhood:—
“Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have
not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with
me in white: for they are worthy.”
I strolled on. A little farther up the Pactolus stood
the Temple of Cybele. The church to which “He”
spoke “who hath the seven Spirits of God and the seven
stars,” was a small and humble ruin of brick and mortar;
but, of the Temple of the Heathen Mother of the
World, remained two fair columns of marble with their
curiously carved capitals, and the earth around was
strewn with the gigantic frusta of an edifice, stately
even in the fragments of its prostration. I saw for a
moment the religion of Jupiter and of Christ with the
eyes of Crœsus and the philosopher from Athens; and
then I turned to the living nations that I had left to
wander among these dead empires, and looking still
on the eloquent monuments of what these religions
were, thought of them as they are, in wide-spread Christendom!
We visit Rome and Athens, and walk over the ruined
temples of their gods of wood and stone, and take pride
to ourselves that our imaginations awake the “spirit of
the spot.” But the primitive church of Christ, over
which an angel of God kept watch, whose undefiled
members, if there is truth in holy writ, are now “walkking
with him in white” before the face of the Almighty
—a spot on which the Saviour and his Apostles prayed,
and for whose weal, with the other churches of Asia,
the sublime revelation was made to John—this, the
while, is an unvisited shrine, and the “classic” of Pagan
idolatry is dearer to the memories of men than the
holy antiquities of a religion they profess!
| II. Inklings of adventure | |