Part 45 (2/2)
_Lucian._ Possibly: for if ever I fall among thieves, n.o.body is likelier to be at the head of them.
_Timotheus._ Uncharitable man! how suspicious! how ungenerous! how hardened in unbelief! Reason is a bladder on which you may paddle like a child as you swim in summer waters: but, when the winds rise and the waves roughen, it slips from under you, and you sink; yes, O Lucian, you sink into a gulf whence you never can emerge.
_Lucian._ I deem those the wisest who exert the soonest their own manly strength, now with the stream and now against it, enjoying the exercise in fine weather, venturing out in foul, if need be, yet avoiding not only rocks and whirlpools, but also shallows. In such a light, my cousin, I look on your dispensations. I shut them out as we shut out winds blowing from the desert; hot, debilitating, oppressive, laden with impalpable sands and pungent salts, and inflicting an incurable blindness.
_Timotheus._ Well, Cousin Lucian! I can bear all you say while you are not witty. Let me bid you farewell in this happy interval.
_Lucian._ Is it not serious and sad, O my cousin, that what the Deity hath willed to lie incomprehensible in His mysteries, we should fall upon with tooth and nail, and ferociously growl over, or ignorantly dissect?
_Timotheus._ Ho! now you come to be serious and sad, there are hopes of you. Truth always begins or ends so.
_Lucian._ Undoubtedly. But I think it more reverential to abstain from that which, with whatever effort, I should never understand.
_Timotheus._ You are lukewarm, my cousin, you are lukewarm. A most dangerous state.
_Lucian._ For milk to continue in, not for men. I would not fain be frozen or scalded.
_Timotheus._ Alas! you are blind, my sweet cousin!
_Lucian._ Well; do not open my eyes with pincers, nor compose for them a collyrium of spurge.
May not men eat and drink and talk together, and perform in relation one to another all the duties of social life, whose opinions are different on things immediately under their eyes? If they can and do, surely they may as easily on things equally above the comprehension of each party. The wisest and most virtuous man in the whole extent of the Roman Empire is Plutarch of Cheronaea: yet Plutarch holds a firm belief in the existence of I know not how many G.o.ds, every one of whom has committed notorious misdemeanours. The nearest to the Cheronaean in virtue and wisdom is Trajan, who holds all the G.o.ds dog-cheap.
These two men are friends. If either of them were influenced by your religion, as inculcated and practised by the priesthood, he would be the enemy of the other, and wisdom and virtue would plead for the delinquent in vain. When your religion had existed, as you tell us, about a century, Caius Caecilius, of Novum Comum, was proconsul in Bithynia. Trajan, the mildest and most equitable of mankind, desirous to remove from them, as far as might be, the hatred and invectives of those whose old religion was a.s.sailed by them, applied to Caecilius for information on their behaviour as good citizens. The reply of Caecilius was favourable. Had Trajan applied to the most eminent and authoritative of the sect, they would certainly have brought into jeopardy all who differed in one t.i.ttle from any point of their doctrine or discipline. For the th.o.r.n.y and bitter aloe of dissension required less than a century to flower on the steps of your temple.
_Timotheus._ You are already half a Christian, in exposing to the world the vanities both of philosophy and of power.
_Lucian._ I have done no such thing: I have exposed the vanities of the philosophizing and the powerful. Philosophy is admirable; and Power may be glorious: the one conduces to truth, the other has nearly all the means of conferring peace and happiness, but it usually, and indeed almost always, takes a contrary direction. I have ridiculed the futility of speculative minds, only when they would pave the clouds instead of the streets. To see distant things better than near is a certain proof of a defective sight. The people I have held in derision never turn their eyes to what they can see, but direct them continually where nothing is to be seen. And this, by their disciples, is called the sublimity of speculation! There is little merit acquired, or force exhibited, in blowing off a feather that would settle on my nose: and this is all I have done in regard to the philosophers: but I claim for myself the approbation of humanity, in having shown the true dimensions of the great. The highest of them are no higher than my tunic; but they are high enough to trample on the necks of those wretches who throw themselves on the ground before them.
_Timotheus._ Was Alexander of Macedon no higher?
_Lucian._ What region of the earth, what city, what theatre, what library, what private study, hath he enlightened? If you are silent, I may well be. It is neither my philosophy nor your religion which casts the blood and bones of men in their faces, and insists on the most reverence for those who have made the most unhappy. If the Romans scourged by the hands of children the schoolmaster who would have betrayed them, how greatly more deserving of flagellation, from the same quarter, are those hundreds of pedagogues who deliver up the intellects of youth to such immoral revellers and mad murderers! They would punish a thirsty child for purloining a bunch of grapes from a vineyard, and the same men on the same day would insist on his reverence for the subverter of Tyre, the plunderer of Babylon, and the incendiary of Persepolis. And are these men teachers? are these men philosophers? are these men priests? Of all the curses that ever afflicted the earth, I think Alexander was the worst. Never was he in so little mischief as when he was murdering his friends.
_Timotheus._ Yet he built this very city; a n.o.ble and opulent one when Rome was of hurdles and rushes.
_Lucian._ He built it! I wish, O Timotheus! he had been as well employed as the stone-cutters or the plasterers. No, no: the wisest of architects planned the most beautiful and commodious of cities, by which, under a rational government and equitable laws, Africa might have been civilized to the centre, and the palm have extended her conquests through the remotest desert. Instead of which, a dozen of Macedonian thieves rifled a dying drunkard and murdered his children.
In process of time, another drunkard reeled hitherward from Rome, made an easy mistake in mistaking a palace for a brothel, permitted a stripling boy to beat him soundly, and a serpent to receive the last caresses of his paramour.
Shame upon historians and pedagogues for exciting the worst pa.s.sions of youth by the display of such false glories! If your religion hath any truth or influence, her professors will extinguish the promontory lights, which only allure to breakers. They will be a.s.siduous in teaching the young and ardent that great abilities do not const.i.tute great men, without the right and unremitting application of them; and that, in the sight of Humanity and Wisdom, it is better to erect one cottage than to demolish a hundred cities. Down to the present day we have been taught little else than falsehood. We have been told to do this thing and that: we have been told we shall be punished unless we do: but at the same time we are shown by the finger that prosperity and glory, and the esteem of all about us, rest upon other and very different foundations. Now, do the ears or the eyes seduce the most easily and lead the most directly to the heart? But both eyes and ears are won over, and alike are persuaded to corrupt us.
_Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I was leaving you with the strangest of all notions in my head. I began to think for a moment that you doubted my sincerity in the religion I profess; and that a man of your admirable good sense, and at your advanced age, could reject that only sustenance which supports us through the grave into eternal life.
_Lucian._ I am the most docile and practicable of men, and never reject what people set before me: for if it is bread, it is good for my own use; if bone or bran, it will do for my dog or mule. But, although you know my weakness and facility, it is unfair to expect I should have admitted at once what the followers and personal friends of your Master for a long time hesitated to receive. I remember to have read in one of the early commentators, that His disciples themselves could not swallow the miracle of the loaves; and one who wrote more recently says, that even His brethren did not believe in Him.
_Timotheus._ Yet, finally, when they have looked over each other's accounts, they cast them up, and make them all tally in the main sum; and if one omits an article, the next supplies its place with a commodity of the same value. What would you have? But it is of little use to argue on religion with a man who, professing his readiness to believe, and even his credulity, yet disbelieves in miracles.
_Lucian._ I should be obstinate and perverse if I disbelieved in the existence of a thing for no better reason than because I never saw it, and cannot understand its operations. Do you believe, O Timotheus, that Perictione, the mother of Plato, became his mother by the sole agency of Apollo's divine spirit, under the phantasm of that G.o.d?
_Timotheus._ I indeed believe such absurdities?
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