Part 7 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: Ornament]
V.
_THE BANQUET._
[Ill.u.s.tration: Initial]
I am too deeply impressed with the vanity of our worldly affairs in comparison with the verities of the spiritual life, to employ my own time or engage a reader's attention with a biography, however pleasing or romantic, unless there was a subtle connecting link, which I expect to reveal, between the facts narrated and those eternal truths which overshadow all others in importance.
I, alone of all mankind, have lived consciously in both worlds long enough to discover their relations to each other. What my fellow-men have seen only on the surface, I have examined interiorly. I have seen the secret springs of human pride, ambition, pa.s.sion and folly. I have seen the souls of men as they appear in the sight of angels. And my instructions in that world were all based upon my experiences in this.
It is now necessary to drop for a while my personal narrative, and to go back and relate, from the evidence of others, what happened in Bethany during my absence.
My sisters had been left with our atrocious uncle, like two lambs under the guardians.h.i.+p of a wolf. One capable of a.s.sa.s.sinating his nephew, a mere youth, would not hesitate at any wickedness against his beautiful nieces. This man's character was so cruel and wicked, that some explanation is needed of the singular maturity of diabolism to which he had attained.
Magistus had neither religion nor honor. Honor binds us in duty to our neighbor, as religion binds us both to G.o.d and the neighbor. It is a moon which s.h.i.+nes brilliantly in the absence of the sun. The light of honor is also but the reflected light of religion. When both s.h.i.+ne together, honor is absorbed and swallowed up in the more effulgent blaze of religion. The soul without religion or honor, is like the earth without sun or moon-cold, dark, desolate, hideous.
Such was the soul of Magistus.
Irreligion, like drunkenness, is sometimes inherited. The father of Magistus was a scoffer and sensualist. Fatal incubus of moral deformity descending from father to son! In this he was typical of the age. The hereditary pressure toward h.e.l.l was so great, that a few more centuries of transmission would have brought the world into perfect sympathy with the lower regions. The advent of the Lord arrested that for a while.
Without religion or honor man is very close to h.e.l.l. The veriest barbarian has some faint idea of natural religion, and some feeble impulse of natural honor, which distinguish him from the beasts and unite him to his kind. These are barriers against the influx of infernal life. He is ignorant of the devils within him, and the devils within him are ignorant of him. Wise and blessed provision! Were he brought into conscious rapport with his own attendant evil spirits, he would soon be one with them. Their life in h.e.l.l and his life on earth would be animated by the same breath.
This had happened to Magistus.
Not that he was a barbarian. He was an educated, cultivated man, accustomed to the luxuries and full of the suavities of civilized life.
Civilization and religion are not synonymous. h.e.l.l itself has a stupendous civilization. Magistus was a Pharisee by profession: a ritualist, and a strict observer of feast-days and ordinances and ceremonies. That, however, was not the man, but only his outer garment-his cloak. Supposed by the world to be virtuous and honest, this wealthy and reputable Pharisee was spiritually a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
He was a spiritualist, a sorcerer, a necromancer, a magician. He at first sought and became familiar with these people, with their studies and arts, from natural curiosity. It was very pleasant to call up his dead father and various dead friends, and converse with them. It was agreeable to know that they were all happy, and advancing in various degrees toward the infinite divine perfection. They showed him wonderful things. They performed miracles in his sight greater than those which the magicians of Egypt performed before Pharaoh.
Then they told him that the Jewish Scriptures were not divinely inspired, but a medley of fables, pa.s.sable poetry and childish philosophy. He had already suspected this; and he congratulated the spirits on possessing a critical genius so similar to his own. He finally acquired, from these supernatural instructors, a grand system of philosophy, revealing the divinity of nature and the laws of progress.
Having become convinced that there are great and subtile powers emanating from the spiritual world, unknown to most men, he determined to avail himself of those powers for his own private ends. He became a secret pupil and disciple of magicians and wizards. He communicated with spirits and permitted them to take possession of him, soul and body, so that they spoke through his mouth and wrote through his hand and came at his call.
He learned all the tricks and spells of legerdemain, the arts and formulas and incantations of magic, and the rites and ceremonies of the black art in its broadest sense. He obtained means of seeing objects at any distance, of producing hallucinations or optical illusions, of personating the dead, of finding hidden treasures, of reading men's thoughts, of sowing enmity between friends, of discovering secrets, and a thousand other astounding and almost incredible things.
The soul is not destroyed in a moment: it is the work of years. The evil spirits and demons with whom he was thus brought into contact, slowly poisoned the fountain-head of character; extinguished his reverence, his modesty, his respect for marriage; undermined his conscience; swept away all religious and even social and civil scruples; and fired and sustained all his evil propensities; so that, externally a faithful disciple of Moses, he was interiorly a devil, governed only by the love of self and the world.
This formidable hypocrite, the most of whose wealth had been obtained by secret frauds, and was not unstained with blood, had his dwelling in the centre of an immense area surrounded by lofty walls and concealed by a dense grove of trees. He received no visitors but those who came to him at night, and for no good purpose. He had the character of a recluse, devoted to sacrifice and prayer. He thus indulged his secret vices and carried on his diabolical incantations unsuspected. The dark shadows of his princely mansion enveloped a degree of a.s.syrian luxury scarcely exceeded by the Caprean court of the emperor Tiberius.
Caiaphas, the priest, was his best friend, who shared his private pleasures and maintained by constant applause his public reputation for sanct.i.ty and honor.
The influence of evil spirits who possess us is at first gentle and subtile, coinciding with our own inclination. Thinking to lead, we are led. When a man is chained so that he can no longer resist, they urge him headlong to a crisis. They fire his evil pa.s.sions; they blind his perverted intellect; they inflate his pride and self-conceit; they make him scornful and regardless of others, impatient of all barriers to his self-gratification, and a.s.sure him of boundless immunity and protection.
In this state of horrible fantasy and inflamed pa.s.sion, he is ready to trample upon all laws human and divine.
To this fearful point in his spiritual life had Magistus arrived.
When my father was driven into the wilderness, Caiaphas and my uncle plotted together how to get speedy and sole possession of his great wealth. To get rid of or destroy his children was the first, and, indeed, the only thing necessary. But they resolved to allow some months to elapse-to let our misfortunes die out from the public memory, and even ourselves be quite forgotten. Hence the seclusion, the solitude, the systematic neglect to which we were subjected.