Part 7 (1/2)
”That's putting it too strong,” remarked the Doctor. ”I only follow at a distance--a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker, Hommel, and so on.”
”Unluckily I--I don't read German readily,” Theron explained with diffidence.
”That's a pity,” said the doctor, ”because they do the best work--not only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the ma.s.s defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.”
The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. ”I don't seem to know any one,” he murmured.
The others exchanged glances.
”But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,” pursued the doctor, regarding their guest with interest through his spectacles, ”why do you specially hit upon Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?”
Theron had recovered something of his confidence. ”Oh, no,” he said, ”that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech, and the simple, straightforward G.o.dliness of his later years. No, all those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the individual?”
Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.
”I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,”
he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go so well with his gown. ”Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all: he is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the Hebrews; Heth of the Hitt.i.tes; a.s.shur of a.s.syria.”
”But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?” queried Theron.
The priest smiled and shook his head. ”Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names, 'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight hundred years before him.”
”It seems pa.s.sing strange that we should not know it now, then,”
commented Theron; ”I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.”
Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. ”Ah, there we get upon contentious ground,” he remarked. ”Why should 'everybody' be supposed to know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.
We were speaking of eponyms.”
”Yes,” said Theron; ”it is very interesting.”
”There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out much,” continued the priest. ”Probably the Germans will get at that too, sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the Hitt.i.tes. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two princ.i.p.al leaders called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an ancestor, grandson of j.a.phet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge, just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-wors.h.i.+p is identical with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings.”
Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: ”That peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.”
”But you still preach?” asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.
”No! no more! I only talk now and again,” answered the priest, with what seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation back again. ”The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date, doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was the young G.o.d who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because this Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original prototype of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours.”
Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a swift, startled look about the room--the instinctive glance of a man unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with this vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling, with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and bewildered stare.
Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.
”It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps on learning nowadays about its babyhood,” he said. ”All I have done is to try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more we know, the nearer we shall approach the Throne.”
Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his watch. ”I'm afraid--” he began.