THE COMBAT WITH APOLLYON.* UT now, in this Valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back or to stand his ground. But he considered again that he had no armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts; therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground. For, thought he, had I no more in my eye than the saving of my life, 'twould be the best way to stand. So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now, the monster was hideous to behold; he was clothed with scales like a fish (and they are his pride), he had wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke, and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion. When he was come up to Christian, he beheld him with a disdainful "The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator and the divine, this homely dialect-the dialect of plain workingmen-was perfectly sufficient."-Lord Macaulay. countenance and thus began to question with him: APOL. Whence come you, and whither are you bound? CHR. I am come from the city of Destruction, which is the place of all evil, and I am going to the city of Zion. APOL. By this I perceive that thou art one of my subjects; for all that country is mine, and I am the prince and god of it. How is it, then, that thou hast ran away from thy king? Were it not that I hope thou mayest do me more service, I would strike thee now, at one blow, to the ground. CHR. I was indeed born in your dominions, but your service was hard and your wages such as a man could not live on, "for the wages of sin is death;" therefore, when I was come to years, I did as other considerate persons do-look out if perhaps I might mend my condition. APOL. There is no prince that will thus lightly lose his subjects, neither will I as yet lose thee; but, since thou complainest of thy service and wages, be content to go back. What our country will afford I do here promise to give thee. CHR. But I have hired myself to another, even the King of princes; and how can I with fairness go back with thee? APOL. Thou hast done in this according to the proverb-" changed a bad for a worse. But it is ordinary for those that have professed themselves his servants, after a while, to give him the slip and return shall be well. again to me. Do thou so too, and all is most glorious in their account, for for present deliverance they do not much expect it, for they wait for their glory, and then they shall have it, when their Prince comes in his and the glory of the angels. CHR. I have given him my faith and sworn my allegiance to him; how, then, can I go back from this and not be hanged as a traitor? APOL. Thou didst the same to me, and yet I am willing to pass by all if now thou wilt yet turn again and go back. CHR. What I promised thee was in my minority; and, besides, I count that the Prince under whose banner now I stand is able to absolve me yea, and to pardon also what I did as to my compliance with thee; and besides, O thou destroying Apollyon, to speak truth, I like his service, his wages, his servants, his government, his company and country, better than thine. And therefore leave off to persuade me further: I am his servant, and I will follow him. APOL. Consider again, when thou art in cool blood, what thou art like to meet with in the way that thou goest. Thou knowest that for the most part his servants come to an ill end because they are transgressors against me and my ways. How many of them have been put to shameful deaths! And, besides, thou countest his service better than mine, whereas he never yet came from the place where he is to deliver any that served him out of our hands; but, as for me, how many times, as all the world very well knows, have I delivered, either by power or fraud, those that have faithfully served me, from him and his, though taken by them! And so will I deliver thee. CHR. His forbearing at present to deliver them is on purpose to try their love, whether they will cleave to him to the end; and, as for the ill end thou sayest they come to, that APOL. Thou hast already been unfaithful in thy service to him, and how dost thou think to receive wages of him? CHR. Wherein, O Apollyon, have I been unfaithful to him? APOL. Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked in the gulf of Despond; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid of thy burden, whereas thou shouldst have stayed till thy Prince had taken it off. Thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice things; thou wast also almost persuaded to go back at the sight of the lions; and when thou talkest of thy journey and of what thou hast heard and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vainglory in all that thou sayest or doest. CHR. All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honor is merciful and ready to forgive. But, besides, these infirmities possessed me in thy country, for there I sucked them in, and I have groaned under them, been sorry for them, and have obtained pardon of my Prince. Then Apollyon broke out into a grievous rage, saying, "I am an enemy to this Prince. I hate his person, laws and people, and am come out on purpose to withstand them." CHR. Apollyon, beware what you do, for I am in the King's highway-the way of holiness; therefore take heed to yourself. Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, "I am void of fear in this matter. Prepare thyself to die, for I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no further; here will I destroy thy soul." And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast, but Christian had a shield in his hand, with which he caught it, and so prevented the danger of that. Then did Christian draw, for he saw 'twas time to bestir him, and Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing darts as thick as hail; by the which, notwithstanding all that Christian could do to avoid it, Apollyon wounded him in his head, his hand and foot. This made Christian give a little back; Apollyon, therefore, followed his work amain, and Christian again took courage and resisted as manfully as he could. This sore combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was almost quite spent; for you must know that Christian, by reason of his wounds, must needs grow weaker and weaker. Then Apollyon, espying his opportunity, began to gather up close to Christian, and, wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall, and with that Christian's sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, "I am sure of thee now." And with that he had almost pressed him to death, so that Christian began to despair of life. But, as God would have it, while Apollyon was fetching of his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and caught it, saying, "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I fall I shall rise,'" and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him give back as one that had received his mortal wound. Chris tian, perceiving that, made at him again, saying, "Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him that loved us;'" and with that Apollyon spread forth his dragon's wings and sped him away, that Christian for a season saw him no more. In this combat no man can imagine, unless he had seen and heard as I did, what yelling and hideous roaring Apollyon made all the time of the fight: he spake like a dragon. And, on the other side, what sighs and groans burst from Christian's heart! I never saw him all the while give so much as one pleasant look till he perceived he had wounded Apollyon with his two-edged sword; then, indeed, he did smile and look upward, but 'twas the dreadfullest sight that ever I THE grave has just closed over the morfor ever associated with a series of achievements in the domain of discovery and invention the most wonderful our race has ever known-wonderful in the results accomplished; more wonderful still in the scientific revelations which preceded and agencies employed; most wonderful in the accompanied their development. tal remains of one whose name will be The electro-magnetic telegraph is the embodiment I might say the incarnation-of many centuries of thought, of many generations of effort to elicit from Nature one of her deepest mysteries. No one man, no one It is the century, could have achieved it. * Remarks made at the Morse memorial meeting, held in the hall of the House of Representatives, April 16, 1872. child of the human race-" the heir of all the ages." How wonderful were the steps which led to its creation! The very name of this telegraphic instrument bears record of its history-" electric, magnetic," the first word from the bit of yellow amber whose qualities of attraction and repulsion were discovered by a Grecian philosopher twenty-four centuries ago, and the second from Magnesia, the village of Asia Minor where first was found the loadstone whose touch for ever turns the needle to the north. These were the earliest forms in which that subtle, all-pervading force revealed itself to men. In the childhood of the race men stood dumb in the presence of its more terrible manifestations. When it gleamed in the purple aurora or shot duskyred from the clouds, it was the eye-flash of an angry God before whom mortals quailed in helpless fear. When the electric light burned blue on the spear-points of the Roman legions, it was to them and their leaders a portent from the gods beckoning to victory. When the phosphorescent light which the sailors still call St. Elmo's fire hovered on the masts and spars of the Roman ship, it was Castor and Pollux, twin gods of the sea, guiding the mariner to port, or the beacon of an avenging god luring him to death. When we consider the startling forms in which this element presents itself, it is not surprising that so many centuries elapsed before man dared to confront and question its awful mystery. And it was fitting that here, in this new, free world, the first answer came, revealing to our Franklin the great truth that the lightning of the sky and the electricity of the laboratory are one—that in the simple electric toy are embodied all the mysteries of the thunderbolt. Until near the beginning of the present century the only known method of producing electricity was by friction. But the discoveries of Galvani in 1789, and of Volta in 1800, resulted in the production of electricity by the chemical action of acids upon metals, and gave to the world the galvanic battery, the voltaic pile and the electric current. This was the first step in that path of modern discovery which led to the telegraph. But further discoveries were necessary to make the telegraph possible. The next great step was taken by Oersted, the Swedish professor who in 1819-20 made the discovery that the needle, when placed near the galvanic battery, was deflected at right angles to the electric current. In the four modest pages in which Oersted announced this discovery to the world the science of electro-magnetism was founded. As Franklin had exhibited the relation between lightning and the electric fluid, so Oersted exhibited the relation between magnetism and electricity. From 1820 to 1825 his discovery was further developed by Davy and Sturgeon of England, and Arago and Ampère of France. They found that by sending a current of electricity through a wire coiled around a piece of soft iron the iron became a magnet while the current was passing and ceased to be a magnet when the current was broken. This gave an intermittent power-a power to grapple and to let go at the will of the electrician. Ampère suggested that a telegraph was possible by applying this power to a needle. In 1825, Barlow of England made experiments to verify this suggestion of the telegraph, and pronounced it imprac ticable on the ground that the batteries then used would not send the fluid through even two hundred feet of wire without a sensible diminution of its force. In 1831, Joseph Henry, now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, then a professor at Albany, New York, as the result of numerous experiments discovered a method by which he produced a battery of such intensity as to overcome the difficulty spoken of by Barlow in 1825. By means of this discovery he magnetized soft iron at a great distance from the battery, pointed out the fact that a telegraph was possible, and actually rang a bell by means of the electro-magnet acting on a long wire. This was the last step in the series of great discoveries which preceded the invention of the telegraph. When these discoveries ended, the work of the inventor began. It was in 1832-the year that succeeded the last of these great discoveries-when Professor Morse first turned his thoughts to that work whose triumph is the triumph of his race. He had devoted twenty-two years of his manhood to the study and practice of art; he had sat at the feet of the great masters of Europe, and had already by his own works of art achieved a noble name; and he now turned to the grander work of interpreting to the world that subtle and mysterious element with which the thinkers of the human race had so long been occupied. I cannot here recount the story of that long struggle through which he passed to the accomplishment of his great result how he struggled with poverty, with the vast difficulties of the subject itself, with the unfaith, the indifference and the contempt which almost every where confronted him; how at the very moment of his tri umph he was on the verge of despair when in this very Capitol his project met the jeers of almost a majority of the national legislature. But when has despair yielded to such a triumph? When has such a morning risen on such a night? To all cavillers and doubters this instrument and its language are a triumphant answer. That chainless spirit which fills the immensity of space with its invisible presence, which dwells in the blaze of the sun, follows the path of the farthest star and courses the depths of earth and sea-that mighty spirit has at last yielded to the human will. It has entered a body prepared for its dwelling; it has found a voice through which it speaks to the human ear; it has taken its place as the humble servant of man; and through all coming time its work will be associated with the name and fame of Samuel F. B. Morse. Were there no other proof of the present value of his work, these alone would suffice that throughout the world, whatever the language or the dialect of those who use it, the telegraph speaks a language whose first element is the alphabet of Morse; and in 1869, of the sixteen thousand telegraphic instruments used on the lines of Europe, thirteen thousand were of the pattern invented by him. The future of this great achievement can be measured by no known standards. Morse gave us the instrument and the alphabet; the world is only beginning to spell out the lesson whose meaning the future will read. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD. |