Part 22 (1/2)
”No, you are not proud, but still you have a.s.surance. That I have not.
Do you know how I got my name?”
”Well?”
”They called me Van Vianen, became I was found near Vianen. I have no parents.”
She said this deeply humiliated and ashamed. And in my heart I laughed, because now after all she too showed herself apprehensive of the voice of the herd, and because she felt as a disgrace, the very thing that, as an aureole of romance, had delighted me.
”Oh, is it only that!” I cried; ”that I already knew. All week I have thought of the poor, dear little one as crying, it was laid down upon the gra.s.s by a desperate mother. Likely it was a royal child, Elsje!”
Elsie laughed, rea.s.sured and happy.
”They let me become a Mennonite. Not Jan Baars, but his sister who took me into her home as a child.”
”Ah! Mennonite!” said I. I hadn't the slightest idea what theological, ethical and ritual peculiarities were attached to this creed. I only knew that it must be one of the innumerable variations or sects of Protestantism.
”To be sure it's a good custom of the Mennonites that they don't baptize you as a child, when you don't yet know whether you would rather be a Roman Catholic or an Israelite, but later, when you are confirmed and can yourself choose. But look! when I was eighteen I knew just as little what to choose. And now I don't know yet.”
”And still you let yourself be baptized?”
”Why yes, there was surely no wrong in that. But if they would have you choose well they would first have to let you serve an apprentices.h.i.+p with the Romans, then another with the Protestants, then another with the Jews and then with the Mohammedans?”
”Not to mention the Hindus, the Buddhists and the s.h.i.+ntoists,” said I.
”So that you would need seven lives before you could let yourself be baptized, isn't it so? And yet it is so necessary, so very, very necessary that you choose the right thing, isn't it? I never can understand how all people just live on carelessly, and all believing something different, and never consider that they might perhaps be wrong, and how terrible that would be. They simply a.s.sume, and only feign a.s.surance, and you never hear them talk of it, so they probably do not break their hearts about it. And if you were to believe them, then everyone who thinks differently than they is a miserable wretch.
But they all think differently, and so one or the other must be wrong, and yet they are all equally certain and a.s.sured. How is that possible now? Why it's absurd!”
I thought it was already a great deal for Elsie, in her solitude, to have arrived at the realization of this absurdity. Then I threw out my sounding-line -
”What do you think of Christ, Elsie?”
”I love best to read of Jesus; I think it wonderful to read - especially toward Christmas time - how he came on earth as a little child, and about the star and the shepherds. When I think of Jesus, I always think of him as a little child with Mary his Mother. I should like to have a picture or an image of them, but that's considered Catholic. Do you know more of Jesus and can you tell me all about him?”
”I asked about Christ, Elsie.”
”Isn't that the same?”
”They are all only names from which we can choose. I prefer to say Christ, because I don't believe that there lived a man called Jesus who was Christ. But I do positively know that there is something that all men call Christ, and that lives and knows and loves us. And this Christ they already knew long before Jesus is said to have lived. I have seen images of the Mother with the child exactly like the one you would like to have, and it was thousands of years older than Jesus and made by the Egyptians, and instead of Mary and the Christ Child they spoke of Isis and the Horus Child, and the Chinese too made such images.”
”And what do they mean by it?”
”Ordinary people mean a holy mother with a holy child, a saviour. But the few wiser ones probably mean the earth mother and the child humanity. I at least presume it, and when men now speak of Christ, then I believe, Elsje, that the most and the best, those who really mean something by the word, something real that they have felt - that they mean something that is equivalent to humanity.”
”Humanity? that means nothing to me. Jesus for me is a living, beloved and loving being, who helps and supports me, an exalted, holy being.
Humanity - that is nothing to me, an empty word.”
”Right, Elsje, I readily believe it. But empty words can be filled with knowledge. There are learned professors to whom the word Jesus or Christ is entirely hollow or empty. But the word humanity implies for them a real and well-known thing, the entire human race which in its development and growth, in its expression and forms of life they have studied minutely. These professors again would be able to fill the word Christ with the exalted and tender feelings which it arouses in Elsje, if they had learned to feel like Elsje. And now it is my personal opinion with which, so far as I know, I stand quite alone in the world, that Elsje and the professors, were they to compare one another's observations, would come to realize that it is precisely the same real being that fills the word Christ and the word Humanity: the religious word Christ and the biological, scientific word Humanity.”
”But humanity - that is not a being, not a personality ? that is a lot of people. People that I don't know. How can I care about them and how can they care about me?”