CHAPTER XXI.
Questions Addressed to Jehovah—Intestinal Proof—Abraham's Losing Sixty Years of his Life—The King of Sodom's Restoration to Life—Melchisedek—His Series of Lectures—A Dream which is not all a Dream.
O Lord, there are one or two, other trifles I should like to draw you attention to if you have a moment to spare for such worms of the dust as I am. Up to this time I have had no intimation that I bore you, and so I am encouraged to proceed. If my questions teased you, you could soon give me a hint to stop. You have always a spare thunderbolt or two lying on your drawing-room table: by way of hint that you wished to hear no more of my questions, you could let fly at me with one of those said thunderbolts, and reduce me to something alarmingly like a spilt bucketful of bill-sticker's paste. In that cataclasmic form I should not be likely to trouble my "maker" with questions in regard to his Book. Or, if you liked to take a gentler way of letting me know I was a nuisance, you could, O Lord, gently drop one of Sarah's slippers down upon my head, with a pretty little scented note inside it:—
"To Saladin, with Jehovah's compliments. —J. will answer S. all his questions when S. comes to heaven."
That would be quite enough. I should build up my Ebenezer and set the slipper on the top of it, and say: "Thus far hath the Lord holpen me." You may possibly deem it a trifle presumptuous on my part to ask questions at such an august three-in-one puzzle as you are. I should not have the boldness to trouble you, O Lord, if you would give any of your servants the brains to answer me. I should never trouble the peer to give me, personally, information I could have from his flunkey. But your flunkeys, O Lord, are stone-blind leaders of the blind. I can get no answers from them, and so I come direct to you. Their business is to make their living by canting about your Book to the unquestioning herd,'and they would rather take a toad by the nose than attempt to answer such questions as I put. I asked one of your servants the other day—a very choice one with a red face and a white tie—if he would be good enough to furnish me with anything approaching valid historical proof that that son of yours ever tramped the country preaching till he ultimately got nailed to two sticks. I expected to hear of evidence from Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, et hoc genus. But that servant of yours, with the red face and the white tie, simply laid his hand on his heart, or his stomach (I am not physiologist enough to say exactly which), and, turning up his eyes, the way a duck does in a thunderstorm, observed, "My evidence is here." It was clear to me that the evidence lay somewhere in his intestines. That may be all very well for him. You may have constructed him so that he has evidence of the Crucifixion in his hepatic artery, corroboration of the Atonement in the splenic veins, and proof of the Resurrection in his gastric juice. But you have not constructed me on that accommodating plan, Lord. My internal arrangements have evidently been contrived to digest and assimilate my food. When I ask them about you, they are dumb; when I ask them about your son Jesus, they know nothing about him. When historical proofs have to be examined, I have to use my head, such as it is. I never found my liver of any use in such investigations, and the soles of my feet I have not yet tried. They are not easily got at; but I will have them thoroughly examined if you give me a hint that, on them, I am likely to "find Jesus."
But, to be serious, how is it, O Lord, that you have constructed certain of your creatures on such a plan that they have proof of the Incarnation, the Redemption, etc., somewhere in their inside? How is it that my inside, and that the insides of my readers, are fit only for digestive and circulatory functions, and that they know as much about the weighing of evidence as the calves of my legs do about shooting snipes? I mention this lest you may have been interrupted in the "creating" of me, and have turned me off as finished before you had put the finishing touches upon me. If this be so, O Lord, and you think it worth your while to put on the finishing touches, you know where to find me. How long would you take to put a new inside in me, one furnishing proofs of the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension? I could spare you a week to complete the job, asking Julian and Fra: Ollæ to conduct the Secular Review while I was being overhauled. One condition only. If you take away my inside for repairs and additions, be sure to bring it back. I should not like to be left altogether hollow, and to be as the sounding brass and the tinkling cymbal.
Well, O Lord, from the foregoing you will be able to understand my position, and why I ask my questions at you direct, and not at the nearest mountebank you have stuck up in that impostor's box yclept a pulpit. Now for a question or two connected with your Book that baffle even the unscrupulous ingenuity of your pulpit hirelings. You will remember of old Abraham, or אברהם, as you more likely called him? Of course you remember of him: you keep him sitting up there somewhere, with his shirt-front constantly open, that saints may be taken into his bosom. This Abraham was, according to the Hebrew chronology, born 2,083 years after the "creation;" but, according to the Septuagint, 3,549 years after that event. So the two editions of thy Most Holy Word make a difference of 1,466 years in settling the date of the birth of thy servant Abraham, in whose bosom I may by and bye find a place and ask him to tell me the exact year in which he was born. Whether is the Hebrew version or the Septuagint version right, O Lord? or are they both wrong? or was there any Abraham at all? Down in this part of the world the saints pin their faith to your Hebrew version ; but when your son was tramping up and down Palestine some eighteen hundred years ago he generally quoted from the Septuagint. Which of the two versions do you wish me to prefer, or do you allow me to take my choice? If you do, my choice falls upon neither.
Yet some more figures, O Lord, in regard to your servant Abraham with the bosom. This person with the bosom was born when his father was 70; but, when his father had reached the age of 205, Abraham was only 75 years old! During his father's lifetime he had apparently lost 60 years! How did he do it? I have heard of a watch stopping, O Lord, and of a shake setting it going again; but a man stopping, O Lord, and for 60 years too, it must have taken a tremendous shaking to set him going again. You must have set your feet wide to steady yourself, and, then taking him in your hands, as a maidservant does a hearth-rug, have given him a shaking that set the world's windows chattering and shook the foundations of the earth. Certainly a strange person must have been this Abraham with the bosom! A man who had managed to be only 75 years of age, when everybody else born in the same year was 135 years of age, is a man worth going all the way to heaven to see. It is no use asking your paid lackeys here about this matter. Your great hierophants, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, gave it up as inexplicable, and your erudite servant, Calmet, ventures on an explanation which leaves confusion worse confounded; and therefore, O Lord, I appeal direct to you.
And, O Lord, another person connected with Abraham also lost some time; I do not know how much. Abraham, like all your saints, was pretty good in the fire and slaughter line. One of his fights was on account of Lot: you will remember Lot, the man with the daughters, and who had a wife who was turned into salt while you peppered away at Sodom. Well, in fighting for this Lot, Abraham and his 318 servants slew the King of Sodom; but, after having been slain, "the King of Sodom went out to meet him (Abraham) after the slaughter of Chedorlaomer."[1] A smart man this King of Sodom. How much time did he lose? Was he used to killing, as the proverbial eels were to skinning? What mysterious personages flit about among the pages of that Book of yours, O Lord!
O Lord, what have you done with Melchisedek? He had no "beginning of days or end of life;" so, of course, he is still living somewhere; but he is remarkably quiet. We never hear a word of him. He must be pretty bald by this time, unless he has taken to using Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer. Having known Abraham, he could possibly tell me the year in which that patriarch was born, and how he contrived to lose the 60 years out of his life and managed to be only 75 when he should have been 135 years old. This Melchisedek had no genealogical tree. Be where he may, no portraits of his ancestors adorn the walls of his dining room. He had neither father nor mother. Some people manage to do with little or no father; your own son, for instance, had only a ghost for a father, and the fathers of some others I wot of are exceedingly hazy and dubious. But this Melchisedek, King of Salem, priest of the Most High God, had no mother! This beats Baxter. This Melchisedek of yours, O Lord, seems to have been a sort of circle without either a centre or a circumference. Where is he now? I should go a long way barefooted to see him. How interesting to have a chat with one who has had a chat with Abraham! Some of your Gospel-shops, O Lord, are in low funds. You should raise the wind by hiring out this Melchisedek of yours to deliver a series of lectures on the steppes of Tartary, or some such place that would hold his audience. Lecture No. I. might be—"How I contrived to get born without having a father."
No. II.—"How I contrived to get born without having a mother."
No. II.—"How I managed to have no beginning of days."
No. IV.—"How I manage to have no end of life."
No. V.—"How I manage to draw my salary as Priest of the Most High God."
No. VI.—"How I managed to be King of Salem long before there was a Salem on the face of the Earth."[2]
No. VII.—"Chats with Abraham and Sarah, and general reminiscences of the world before the Flood."
I am interested, O Lord, in this Melchisedek of yours, and it passeth my understanding to conjecture why you make so little of him. If you cannot send him out to lecture on Salisbury Plain, you might consider the propriety of sticking him up among the mummies or the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum. If you could only tell me where he is, I could go and "heckle" him, and he might explain to me not a few of the questions which I am now, reluctantly, pestering you with. He had no beginning and you had no beginning. So, before you took it into your head to "create" the heavens and the earth, there was a Melchisedek. He was King of Salem centuries before Salem existed; so he possibly walked to and fro on the earth millions of years before the earth was "created." When Melchisedek and you had high jinks together before the world was, where was I? Was I simply a bee in Melchizedek's bonnet? or where did you keep the large quantity of nothing out of which you subsequently "created" the world and me? Would it not have been as well to have done me the honour to ask me whether I had any desire to be "created".? If you had explained to me that the "creating" of me and things like me would have caused you and your family so much trouble and annoyance, including your bother in getting up the Flood and the fatigue your son was put to in flying down here and flying back to heaven again, I should have politely declined to be "created" at all. I do not care to put gods and the like to trouble on my account. If you had explained to me that you intended to "create" me a sort of tub that could stand upon its own bottom, I might have consented to be "created." But you have fashioned me into an automatic squirrel, revolving in my wheel forever, cracking my nuts, and indulging in my silly chattering and squeals while I am shut in from the pleroma of the Universe by the cage of the Esoteric with its bars of Mystery. You have made nearly all men, O Lord, dull owls, that eat much and think nothing and believe the incredible. And, for your glory and amusement, you have made a restless and sporadic few who eat little and think much, and whose brain-hammers ever clang upon the anvil of Fate, amid sweat and fire, forging empirical keys to turn the bolt of the lock of the Unknowable. O had I been blest with the stupidity not to inquire, or not curst with the Tantalus cup of ever inquiring in vain! Embrace your demonstrations, and they are shadows, and all your proofs are visions.
In spite of the shadows and the visions, I rest my fate upon a dream which is not all a dream. I am a soldier far from home. The helm is on my head and the spear in my hand. I feel that I have left somewhere where time is eternal or where time is unknown. Drilled by an unseen baton, I fight under an invisible banner—now with gladiators in the arena, now with snakes in the fen; and the voice of the leader that commands me is a voice inaudible to mortal ear. Somewhere in the realm I have left there is a home with a snow-white door-step, and over the door the red and white roses link and twine and breathe the fragrance of love. On that door-step and under these roses stands my young wife, with my babe in her arms. Down the valley rolls the thunder of the drum, up the hill rises the bugle's silver clang: "Gird on your sword and away!" I obey the summons and depart. I kiss my wife, my plume mingling with the roses; the babe cries, frightened by the jangling of my spurs. Down the lane I ride, hedged round by the spears, overshadowed by the banners. There is a turn in the lane: I wheel round and kiss my hand in a long adieu. My wife's eyes are following me, tearful and loving. I wave my plumed helmet to her in farewell; and, in response, she holds aloft in her hands her babe and mine. The turn in the lane is made—and all is lost.
But I will return. Brief on this earth are the bivouac, the march, and the battle. Something stronger than Death and strong as God has told me I will return. When the solemn fir strikes his roots into my grave and the rank hemlock through the decayed coffin boards has absorbed my blood, I shall have returned to that home where my babe was held aloft among the roses, and where my wife sobbed "Farewell!" I fear not misery nor dread extinction. One injury at least has been answered. The tears of the mourner gleam in the rainbow of Hope. The perfume of unseen lilies streams forever through the gate of the grave.