 | CHAPTER V.
THE APPIAN WAY AND THE CATACOMBS. Ellie, or, The human comedy |  |
5. CHAPTER V.
THE APPIAN WAY AND THE CATACOMBS.
But the emotion of the journalist soon passed: it is true
that he passed his handkerchief over his moist brows, but
that might very well have been caused by the heat of the
rooms.
“You have a terrible habit of analysis, doctor,” he said,
at length, “but you have also the fatal error in your calculation,
which puts all this in quite another light.”
“What error?”
“You regard life and happiness as the sworn foes of
pain and death.”
“Foes! are they not?”
“I don't know that I have put my idea in the right
words,” said Sansoucy, thoughtfully, “but it seems to me,
doctor, that there is something more—some greater happiness
than any earthly thing. If that be so, death is the
portal to the good and pure, by which they enter into this
larger happiness!”
For a moment the doctor looked at his companion with
a sort of disdainful surprise: then his former sardonic
smile returned.
“I thought you were a philosopher, and had rejected
these superstitions!” he said.
“Superstitions?”
“Yes—belief in another state of being.”
“Thank God I have done nothing of the sort. I am
neither an atheist, a pantheist, nor an infidel.”
“I am all three.”
“I am sorry,” said Sansoucy, coolly.
“Don't be sorry for me!” cried the physician, almost
scornfully, “be sorry for yourself—for the dominion which
this tradition still retains over your mind. It absolutely
makes me angry to see men of your intelligence taking up
with the miserable cant of the age, and rejecting those
noble lights of reason, Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and
Michelet.”
“I detect everywhere in Paine the poorest materialism,
and the narrowest range of thought,” said Sansoucy, bracing
himself for the struggle.
“Materialism!” said the physician, scornfully; “and
what of Voltaire?—perhaps you—”
“Do not admire that brilliant and wicked genius?
Well, no, doctor, I find in Voltaire, wit, political genius,
the revolt of intellect against feudality, and a heart like a
dry crucible. He was the type of the nation he has caricatured—half-tiger
and half-monkey.”
“And Rousseau—pray, what do you think of him?”
said Doctor Fossyl, curling his lip.
“I think he was a bad citizen and a depraved man,
who did not know his own obliquity of moral vision, and
thought the whole world squinted. As to Mr. Michelet,
DOCTOR FOSSYL DISCUSSES THE DANCE OF DEATH.
[Description: 506EAF. Illustration page. Illustration of a party scene with two women sitting on an ottoman and three men standing around them.]
pretty points in the Reign of Terror, and deifies the
philosophers of that corrupt age, I tell you frankly,
doctor, that his book makes me sick. He has refuted
his “French Revolution,” so often in his “History of
France,” that if his present philosophy were not repulsive,
it would be ludicrous.”
The doctor smiled disdainfully, and said; “Well, now
that you have got through your fine criticism, tell me
what more you have against these powerful geniuses than
your own ipse dixit—then we will weigh your respective
intellects.”
“I will submit to no such test. I reject it in
advance.”
“You reject it!”
“Always. I do not pretend to measure my intellect
against your friends, Rosseau and the rest—though I
could find in them the most lamentable discrepancies. I
reject absolutely, wholly, unhesitatingly, the philosophy
which submits these profoundly spiritual questions to the
test of a cold, unvarying, mathematical analysis. I refuse
to recognize the dry hard reason of the trained dialectician,
as the proper scales to weigh these matters of life
and death—of time and eternity.
But I still adore Him,'
`I feel this.' There is my platform, doctor. The poor
human reason faints before these problems, and the heart
speaks as God intended it should.”
The physician looked at Sansoucy as if he had uttered
a fatuity which reason should disdain to combat for a
moment.
“And so you believe there is divinity in the vital principle,
do you?” he sneered.
“Yes.”
“That with the severed head, the pierced heart, this
principle departs, and goes to a larger universe?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Poor human nature! how pitiable!” said the physician,
half to himself; “here is a man who has a clear
and accurate mind, an apprehensiveness really remarkable,
and his intellect is shackled still by the poorest
superstition.”
“What did you say, doctor?”
“I say, I wish to know if you label this package of
ideas, Faith or Reason?”
“The former, I trust.”
“Faith?”
“Yes.”
“Faith in what?”
“In God, immortality,—the atonement of Jesus
Christ.”
“You! you have this last weakness! the atonement!”
“If it is a weakness, doctor, I wish to live and die in
my deception.”
“A pretty faith! Why don't you act up to it?”
“Because I am human, and consequently weak.”
“Bah! and I suppose if I asserted that all men were
gods—”
“I should say there was one exception—myself—a
worm with a spark of divinity within me:—a light-worm,
which has in itself what the whole earth has not, and
must take from the sun—light!”
“A pretty reasoner! Why not unite yourself to the
Church?”
“I hope I shall, some day.”
“You would make a fine and consistent member!”
“That is a bitter taunt, doctor, but a very just one.”
I am not taunting you: you are no Christian.”
“That is true, doctor. But as far as my historical
faith goes, it is strong and complete.”
“What is it?”
“It would take me a month to present it.”
“One point, then!” said Doctor Fossyl, satirically.
“Well, here is one. A man named Jesus Christ,
appeared in Judea, a province of the Roman Empire,
about eighteen hundred years ago, did he not?”
“Granted.”
“He was a pure man, was he not?”
“Who knows certainly anything about it?”
“I will tell you. Jefferson, the pupil of the French
sceptical philosophers, said he was the sublimest philosopher
who ever existed, and that men would finally rank
him above Socrates.”
“Well?”
“Jean Paul Richtei, the greatest and mightiest
development of German intellect—greater than Goethe,
I think—although he was an infidel, almost worshipped
as the supreme type of human greatness and goodness.”
“Very well.”
“Well, this man, who is acknowledged to have been the
purest and most truthful of men, went about saying that
he was the promised Messiah, that every one was looking
for—you cannot question the historical fact of this
expectation in Palestine then—and he further said, and
that repeatedly, that he was the Son of God, equal with
the Father.”
“Your conclusion?”
“It is this. That if this supreme type of human
truth and purity, systematically uttered a falsehood, then
earth and heaven are a gigantic delusion, and the universe
a lie. Nothing is true—and existence is a mockery, a
degraded farce. That is my conclusion.”
“What a pretty syllogism you make. I suppose you
will say next that the spread of Christianity proves its
divine origin.”
“I have no hesitation in saying so.”
“Bah! what do you do with Mahomet, the impostor
and false prophet. I believe he founded a somewhat similar
affair which lasts still.
“Yes; but, my dear doctor, you are arguing very
weakly for a man of your perspicuity.”
“Weakly!”
“Yes; and I have only to point you to the two systems
to show you as much. Mahomet, with the Koran in his
left hand and the scimetar in his right, said to his wild
hordes, `Go forth in my name and conquer. If you are
of the earth, subjugates nations, and makes you conquerors
and princes. If you fall, the word of God is pledged to
you in this book, that you shall go to a paradise of murmuring
streams and verdurous plains—to the embrace of
beautiful houris, fairer than your dreams, and all the
ecstacies of sense, sublimated and made supernaturally
susceptible of bliss by the pure atmosphere of this sunny
paradise.' I think that I should have been a Mahommedan—I
wonder that all men, with this splendid bourne
for their dim yearnings, are not.”
“You had better become one.”
“No; but let me finish. I say that this was Mahomet's
creed—these his promises. What were those of Christ?
He said, `They have persecuted me, and they will also
persecute you. The time is coming when whoever kills
you will think he is doing God service; in the world you
shall have tribulation; while the world is rejoicing you
shall weep and lament; you shall be persecuted, beaten,
despised; you shall suffer hunger and thirst, and poverty
and nakedness; the world shall be your enemy, and shall
place its heel upon you. Remember all this, and then sell
your goods, leave your father and mother, sister and
brother, and wife and child, and follow me!' There is
the Christian and the Mahommedan system. Judge if the
spread of Mahommedanism was not natural—the spread
of Christianity supernatural!”
“Have you finished?” said Doctor Fossyl, with a curling
lip, “or have you any more philosophic contrasts?”
“Contrasts!” said Sansoucy. “You want contrasts,
between Christian and anti-Christian deaths, and the epitaphs
upon their tombs. Would you see the pagan character
in a nut-shell? Go to the Appian Way at Rome—
that vast high-road of hewn stone, upon which the spoils
and captives of the world flowed into Rome, and her
legions thundered out—where the silken litters of courtezans
passed, on the backs of Nubian slaves—courtezans,
such as Messalina, the enchantress, Faustina, the Empress,
the sisters of the Emperor Commodus, and the most high-born
and beautiful daughters of Rome: the Appian Way,
where the witty and corrupt Horace waved his perfumed
hands, covered with rings; where the poor philosophies
of Greece were discussed by the glittering crowd of splendid
young patricians; where riotous pleasure reigned
supreme, the sole real god of that multitude, who, men
and women, given up to luxurious and sensual delights,
passed to and fro—a splendid and deplorable carnival—in
the eternal race for a new passion, an unknown excitement.
Cast your eyes upon this crowd, thronging the
Appian Way, and then pass across to the immense tombs
of Etruscan marble, where those who fainted in the carnival,
and were called away, laid down to rest—where the
millionaires of Rome cut their ostentation and their philosophy
in stone. Those tombs are there to-day—look at
the epitaphs. “To the shade of Claudius Secundus; on
earth he enjoyed everything—baths, wine and women: these
ruin the constitution, but they make life what it is. Farewell!”
Go a little further and you find another. “I came
from nothing—I return to what I was: my fortune will be
lived well: my play is ended, yours will soon be—farewell
and applaud!” There is the pagan life and death, doctor:
life a passionate carnival of fiery and corroding lusts
and passions; death a hopeless and shuddering relapse,
as they thought, into eternal annihilation; for that man
never lived who went, as he believed, into the dust, without
a shudder, though, like the old Greeks, he might crown
himself with flowers, and distort his lips into a smile.
Well, close by all this galvanic excitement, while this gay
crowd flowed on, living for sense, and reaping its reward
of splendid misery and despair—all this, while the dark
Catacombs beneath their feet were filled with the believers
in what Tacitus called a `pernicious superstition”—with
Christians—the followers of an old man called Paul, who,
in hunger and thirst, in spite of stonings and stripes, and
the threats of a thousand enemies, had preached, and now
preached to them, what you may call, if you choose,
another philosophy only: the philosophy that those who
listened to him, and the glittering crowd of Roman patricians—the
courtezan passing above in her litter, and the
child kneeling at his feet—the Jew and the Greek—the
slave and the freedman—the rich and the poor—were all
under a supreme curse, from which only faith in Jesus
called the Christ, and crucified at Jerusalem, could preserve
them. This was the philosophy taught by Paul to
a few miserable and hunted outcasts, who knelt around
him in the dark dungeon of the Catacombs, and sang
their hymns of joy, and faith, and hope. When the beloved
eyes of some little child were closed by its mother's
flight, what was the spectacle? What were the epitaphs
which these Christians of the Catacombs placed upon the
sacred graves, while the solid earth overhead shook with
the thunder of splendid chariots, and the desperate orgies
of that revelling multitude, hastening to death and, as
they vainly thought, extinction? You know those epitaphs
well—but listen; listen how like angel-voices! like
sweet benedictions!—“Valeria sleeps in peace!”—some
little child, perhaps,—a tender flower, which Jesus took
from its mother's bosom to his own. “Florentius peacefully!”
“Vigilantius sleeps in Christ!” Sleeps, it may
be, after a long life of toil, and suffering, and agony—
perhaps after fighting as a gladiator in the amphitheatre,
or struggling breast to breast with wild beasts, at the
festivals: all, the child, the gladiator, the apostle, `sleep in
Christ,' awaiting his glorious coming. These are the
pagan and the Christian systems, Doctor—the infidel and
the believer—their lives and deaths. For myself, no word
of yours is necessary to tell me that I am little better than
that crowd upon the street above—that I resemble in
nothing the company beneath them. I lament and deplore,
sir, the truth of the charge, and I will try to change.
But one poor merit I have—a naked belief; and so conclusive
is this conviction with me, that a doubt of the
divine origin of Christianity seems to me monstrous—I
must say it—and the man who conscientiously believes the
system only a fiction, appears to me blind to that extent,
that a million of dazzling suns would be but darkness
to him!”
Sansoucy paused, and looked thoughtfully at the crowd;
then interrupting the physician, who was about to utter
one of his disdainful replies, he said:
“This is a singular conversation for a ball-room, doctor,
farce as you considered it. I am not a proper preacher
of Christianity, and I deeply regret that my faith is only
a speculative and historical faith, which does not guide my
life, now let us change the subject and talk about something
else. How is Joe Lacklitter? You saw him?”
“Yes,” growled the doctor, who seemed to be utterly
careless about any reply in words to his opponent, “he is
better.”
“Get him up as soon as possible, my dear doctor.”
“Very good—but you pay?”
“Yes.”
“I can trust you without a written obligation,” he
muttered.
Sansoucy looked at him with a smile; and his countenance
thus returned to its habitual expression of careless
good humor.
“I am much obliged to you: I hope any one in the
room would.”
“Butterflies!”
“Just now they were skeletons! Ah, my dear doctor,
you make a double blunder. They are neither—they are
men and women with a thousand good and bad qualities
going through their Life-Drama. There is Incledon—I
promised to meet him—good bye.”
The physician uttered a surly growl; and Sansoucy
disappeared in the undulating and uproarious crowd.
| CHAPTER V.
THE APPIAN WAY AND THE CATACOMBS. Ellie, or, The human comedy | |