And here indeed what was metaphor is converted into substance and applied to practice. The unsoundness of doctrine is not cut off nor cauterised; the professor is. The head falls on the scaffold, or fire surrounds the stake, because a doctrine is animals, for want of the man who has escaped them, lacerate and trample his cloak or bonnet. This, although the work of brutes, is not half so brutal as the practice of theologians, seizing the man himself, instead of bonnet or cloak. are commanded to look into and study. These | hear of nothing so commonly as fire and sword. are so uninviting, that many close again the volume of salvation, clasp it tight, and throw it back in our faces. I would rather show a man green fields than gibbets and if I called him to enter the service of a plenteous house and powerful master, he may not be rendered the more will-bloodless and incombustible. Fierce outrageous ing to enter it by my pointing out to him the stocks in the gateway, and telling him that ninetenths of the household, however orderly, must occupy that position. The book of good news under your interpretation, tells people not only that they may go and be damned, but that unless they are lucky, they must inevitably. Again it informs another set of inquirers that if once they have been under what they feel to be the influence of grace, they never can relapse. All must go well who have once gone well; and a name once written in the list of favorites can never be erased. Calvin. This is certain. Calvin. We must leave such matters to the magistrate. Melancthon. Let us instruct the magistrate in his duty; this is ours. Unless we can teach humanity, we may resign the charge of religion. For fifteen centuries, Christianity has been conveyed into many houses, in many cities, in many regions, but always through slender pipes; and never yet into any great reservoir in any part of the earth. Its principal ordinances have never been observed in the polity of any state whatever. Abstinence from spoliation, from oppression, from bloodshed, has never been inculcated by the chief priests of any. These two facts excite the doubts of many in regard to a divine origin and a divine protection. Wherefore it behoves us the more especially to preach forbearance. If the people are tolerant one toward another in the same country they will become tolerant in time toward those whom rivers or seas have separated from them. For surely it is strange and wonderful that nations which are near enough for hostility should never be near enough for concord. This arises from bad government; and bad government arises from a negligent choice of counsellors by the prince usually led or terrified by a corrupt, ambitious wealthy (and therefore unchristian) priesthood. While their wealth lay beyond the visible horizon. they tarried at the cottage, instead of pricking on for the palace. Melancthon. Let us hope then, and in holy confidence let us believe, that the book is large and voluminous; that it begins at an early date of man's existence; and that amid the agitation of inquiry, it comprehends the humble and submissive doubter. For doubt itself, between the richest patrimony and utter destitution, is quite sufficiently painful and surely it is a hardship to be turned over into a criminal court for having lost in a civil one. But if all who have once gone right can never go astray, how happens it that so large a part of the angels fell off from their allegiance? They were purer and wiser than we are, and had the advantage of seeing God face to face. They were the ministers of his power; they knew its extent; yet they defied it. If we err, it is in relying too confidently on his mercies; not in questioning his omnipotence. If our hopes forsake us, if the bonds of sin bruise and corrode us, so that we can not walk upright, there is, in the midst of these calamities, no proof that we are utterly lost. Danger far greater is there in the Calvin. By the grace and help of God we will presumption of an especial favour, which men in-turn them back again to their quiet and whole comparably better than ourselves can never have some resting-place, before the people lay a rough deserved. Let us pray, O Calvin, that we may hand upon the silk. hereafter be happier than our contentions and animosities will permit us to be at present; and that our opponents, whether now in the right or in the wrong, may come at last where all error ceases. Calvin. I am uncertain whether such a wish is rational: and I doubt more whether it is religious. God hath willed them to walk in their blindness. To hope against it, seems like repining at his unalterable decree; a weak indulgence in an unpermitted desire; an unholy entreaty of the heart that He will forego his vengeance, and abrogate the law that was from the beginning. Of one thing I am certain: we must lop off the unsound. Melancthon. What a curse hath metaphor been to religion! It is the wedge that holds asunder the two great portions of the Christian world. We But you evaded my argument on predestination Melancthon. Our blessed Lord himself, in his last hours, ventured to express a wish before his heavenly Father, that the bitter cup might pass away from him. I humbly dare to implore that a cup much bitterer may be removed from the great body of mankind; a cup containing the poison of eternal punishment, where agony suc ceeds to agony, but never death. Calvin. I come armed with the Gospel. Melancthon. Tremendous weapon! as we have seen it through many ages, if man wields it agains man: but like the fabled spear of old mythology endued with the faculty of healing the saddes wound its most violent wielder can inflict. Ob scured and rusting with the blood upon it, let u hasten to take it up again, and apply it, as bes we may, to its appointed uses. The life of our Saviour is the simplest exposition of his words. Strife is what he both discountenanced and forbade. We ourselves are rightminded, each of us all: and others are rightminded in proportion as they agree with us, chiefly in matters which we insist are well worthy of our adherence, but which whosoever refuses to embrace displays a factious and unchristian spirit. These for the most part are matters which neither they nor we understand, and which, if we did understand them, would little profit us. The weak will be supported by the strong, if they can; if they can not, they are ready to be supported even by the weaker, and cry out against the strong, as arrogant or negligent, or deaf or blind; at last even their strength is questioned, and the more if, while there is fury all around them, they are quiet. I remember no discussion on religion in which religion was not a sufferer by it, if mutual forbearance, and belief in another's good motives and intentions, are (as I must always think they are) its proper and necessary appurte liances. Calvin. Would you never make inquiries? Meandthon. Yes; and as deep as possible; but into my own heart; for that belongs to me; and God hath entrusted it most especially to my own superintendence. Calvin. We must also keep others from going astray, by showing them the right road, and, if they are obstinate in resistance, then by coercing and chastising them through the magistrate. Melancthon. It is sorrowful to dream that we are scourges in God's hand, and that he appoints for us no better work than lacerating one another. I am no enemy to inquiry, where I see abuses, and where I suspect falsehood. The Romanists, our great oppressors, think it presumptuous to search into things abstruse; and let us do them the justice to acknowledge that, if it is a fault, it is one which they never commit. But surely we are kept fficiently in the dark by the infirmity of our ature: no need to creep into a corner and put our hands before our eyes. To throw away or turn aside from God's best gifts is verily a curious sign of obedience and submission. He not only hath en us a garden to walk in, but he hath planted also for us, and he wills us to know the nature and properties of everything that grows up within Unless we look into them and handle them and register them, how shall we discover this to be salutary, that to be poisonous; this annual, that perennial? Calvin. Here we coincide; and I am pleased to find in you less apathy than I expected. It becomes us, moreover, to denounce God's ven geance on a sinful world. Melancthon. Is it not better and pleasanter to how the wanderer by what course of life it may be avoided? is it not better and pleasanter to enlarge on God's promises of salvation, than to insist on his denunciations of wrath? is it not better and pleasanter to lead the wretched up to his mercy-seat, than to hurl them by thousands under his fiery chariot? Calvin. We have no option. By our heavenly Father many are called, but few are chosen. Melancthon. There is scarcely a text in the Holy Scriptures to which there is not an opposite text, written in characters equally large and legible; and there has usually been a sword laid upon each. Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him; and he becomes so ferocious by what he calls holding it fast, that he appears to me as if he held it fast much in the same manner as a terrier holds a rat, and you have about as much trouble in getting it from between his incisors. When at last it does come out, it is mangled, distorted, and extinct. Calvin. M. Melancthon! you have taken a very perverse view of the subject. Such language as yours would extinguish that zeal which is to enlighten the nations, and to consume the tares by which they are overrun. Melancthon. The tares and the corn are so intermingled throughout the wide plain which our God hath given us to cultivate, that I would rather turn the patient and humble into it to weed it carefully, than a thresher who would thresh wheat and tare together before the grain is ripened, or who would carry fire into the furrows when it is. Calvin. Yet even the most gentle, and of the gentler sex, are inflamed with a holy zeal in the propagation of the faith. Melancthon. I do not censure them for their earnestness in maintaining truth. We not only owe our birth to them, but also the better part of our education; and if we were not divided after their first lesson, we should continue to live in a widening circle of brothers and sisters all our lives. After our infancy and removal from home, the use of the rod is the principal thing we learn of our alien preceptors; and, catching their dictatorial language, we soon begin to exercise their instrument of enforcing it, and swing it right and left, even after we are paralysed by age, and until Death's hand strikes it out of ours. I am sorry you have cited the gentler part of the creation to appear before you, obliged as I am to bear witness that I myself have known a few specimens of the fair sex become a shade less fair, among the perplexities of religion. Indeed I am credibly informed that certain of them have lost their patience, running up and down in the dust where many roads diverge. This surely is not walking humbly with their God, nor walking with him at all; for those who walk with him are always readier to hear His voice than their own, and to admit that it is more persuasive. But at last the zealot is so infatuated, by the serious mockeries he imitates and repeats, that he really takes his own voice for God's. Is it not wonderful that the words of eternal life should have hitherto produced only eternal litigation; and that, in our progress heavenward, we should think | remove, we are guilty (I pronounce it) of idolatry: it expedient to plant unthrifty thorns over bitter wells of blood in the wilderness we leave behind us? Calvin. It appears to me that you are inclined to tolerate even the rank idolatry of our persecutors. Shame! shame! Melancthon. Greater shame if I tolerated it within my own dark heart, and waved before it the foul incense of self-love. Calvin. I do not understand you. What I do understand is this, and deny it at your peril.. I mean at the peril of your salvation.. that God is a jealous God: he himself declares it. Melancthon. We are in the habit of considering the God of Nature as a jealous God, and idolatry as an enormous evil; an evil which is about to come back into the world, and to subdue or seduce once more our strongest and most sublime affections. Why do you lift up your eyes and hands? Calvin. An evil about to come back! about to come! Do we not find it in high places? Melancthon. We do indeed, and always shall, while there are any high places upon earth. Thither will men creep, and there fall prostrate. Calvin. Against idolatry we still implore the Almighty that he will incline our hearts to keep his law. Melancthon. The Jewish law; the Jewish idolatry. You fear the approach of this, and do not suspect the presence of a worse. we prefer the intangible effigy to the living form. Surely we neglect the service of our Maker if we neglect his children. He left us in the chamber with them, to take care of them, to feed them, to admonish them, and occasionally to amuse them: instead of which, after a warning not to run into the fire, we slam the door behind us in their faces, and run eagerly down-stairs to dispute and quarrel with our fellows of the household who are about their business. The wickedness of idolatry does not consist in any inadequate representation of the Deity, for whether our hands or our hearts represent him, the representation is almost alike inadequate. Every man does what he hopes and believes will be most pleasing to his God; and God, in his wisdom and mercy, will not punish gratitude in its error. Calcin. How do you know that? Melancthon. Because I know his loving-kindness, and experience it daily. Calvin. If men blindly and wilfully run into error when God hath shown the right way, he will visit it on their souls. Melancthon. He will observe from the serenity of heaven, a serenity emanating from his presence, that there is scarcely any work of his creation on earth which hath not excited, in some people or other a remembrance, an admiration, a symbol, of his power. The evil of idolatry is this. Rival Calcin. A worse than that which the living God nations have raised up rival deities: war hath hath denounced? Melancthon. Even so. Calvin. Would it not offend, would it not wound to the quick, a mere human creature, to be likened to a piece of metal or stone, a calf or monkey? Melancthon. A mere human creature might be angry; because his influence among his neighbours arises in great measure from the light in which he appears to them; and this light does not emanate from himself, but may be thrown on him by any hand that is expert at mischief: beside, the likeness of such animals to him could never be suggested by reverence or esteem, nor be regarded as a type of any virtue. The mere human creature, such as human creatures for the most-part are, would be angry; because he has nothing which he can oppose to ridicule but resentment. Calvin. I am in consternation at your lukewarmness. If you treat idolaters thus lightly, what hope can I entertain of discussing with you the doctrine of grace and predestination. Melancthon. Entertain no such hope at all. Wherever I find in the Holy Scriptures a disputable doctrine, I interpret it as judges do, in favour of the culprit: such is man: the benevolent judge is God. But in regard to idolatry, I see more criminals who are guilty of it than you do. I go beyond the stone-quarry and the pasture, beyond the graven image and the ox-stall. If we bow before the distant image of good, while there exists within our reach one solitary object of substantial sorrow, which sorrow our efforts can been denounced in the name of Heaven: men have been murdered for the love of God: and such impiety hath darkened all the regions of the world, that the Lord of all things hath been invoked by all simultaneously as the Lord of Hosts. This is the only invocation in which men of every creed are united: an invocation to which Satan, bent on the perdition of the human race, might have listened from the fallen angels. Calvin. We can not hope to purify men's hearts until we lead them away from the abomination of Babylon: nor will they be led away from it until we reduce the images to dust. So long as they stand, the eye will hanker after them, and the spirit be corrupt. Melancthon. And long afterward, I sadly fear. We attribute to the weakest of men the appellations and powers of Deity: we fall down before them: we call the impious and cruel by the title of gracious and most religious: and, even in the house of God himself, and before his very altar, we split his Divine Majesty asunder, and offer the largest part to the most corrupt and most corrupting of his creatures. Calvin. Not we, M. Melancthon. I will preach, I will exist, in no land of such abomination. Melancthon. So far, well: but religion demands more. Our reformers knock off the head from Jupiter: thunderbolt and sceptre stand. The attractive, the impressive, the august, they would annihilate, leaving men nothing but their sordid fears of vindictive punishment, and their impious doubts of our Saviour's promises. Calvin. We should teach men to retain for ever the fear of God before their eyes, never to cease from the apprehension of His wrath, to be well aware that He often afflicts when He is farthest from wrath, and that such infliction is a benefit bestowed by Him. Melancthon. What! if only a few are to be red when the infliction is over? Calein. It becometh not us to repine at the number of vessels which the supremely wise artifeer forms, breaks, and casts away, or at the pacity it pleaseth him to preserve. The ways of Providence are inscrutable. Melancthon. Some of them are, and some of them are not; and in these it seems to be his design that we should see and adore his wisdom. We fancy that all our inflictions are sent us directly and immediately from above: sometimes we think it in piety and contrition, but oftener in moroseness and discontent. It would, however, be well if we attempted to trace the causes of them. We should probably find their origin in some region of the heart which we never had well explored, or in which we had secretly deposited our worst indulgences. The clouds that intercept the heavens from us, come not from the heavens, bat from the earth. Why should we scribble our own devices over the Book of God, erasing the plainest words, and rendering the Holy Scriptures a worthless palimpsest? Can not we agree to show the nations of the world that the whole of Christianity is practicable, although the better parts never have been practised, no, not even by the priesthood, in any single one of them. Bishops, confessors, saints, martyrs, have never denounced to king or people, nor ever have attempted to delay or mitigate, the most accursed of crimes, the crime of Cain, the crime indeed whereof Cain's was only a germ, the crime of fratricide, war, war, devastating, depopulating, soul-slaughtering, heaven-defying war. Alas! the gentle call of mercy sounds feebly, and soon dies away, leaving no trace on the memory: but the swelling cries of vengeance, in which we believe we imitate the voice of Heaven, run and reverberate in loud peals and multiplied echoes along the whole vault of the brain. All the man is shaken by them; and he shakes all the earth. Calvin! I beseech you, do you who guide and govern so many, do you (whatever others may) spare your brethren. Doubtful as I am of lighter texts, blown backward and forward at the opening of opposite windows, I am convinced and certain of one grand immovable verity. It sounds strange; it sounds contradictory. Calvin. I am curious to hear it. Melancthon. You shall. This is the tenet. There is nothing on earth divine beside humanity. WALKER, HATTAJI, GONDA, AND DEWAH.* Walker. Hattaji! you may rest assured that the operation not dangerous to the boys, and that it will preserve them in future from the most loathsome and devastating of maladies. Hataji. I do not fear that it will impair the trength of the children, or remove an evil by a worse: but will it not, like the other, leave marks, and spoil the features? Gonda. Spoil what features, father? Are we met boys? Derak. Gonda! be still! Walker. How is this? what do they mean, Fattaji why do you look so discomposed? Hattaji. Ah, children! you now discover your Dissimulation with you will soon grow er, with me never. Praise be to God! I a robber, not a merchant falsehood is my horrence. Thou knowest the custom of our Jerijah tribe. Every female our wives bring forth, is, in less time and with less trouble, removed from the shine that falls upon the threshold of life. A drop of poppy-juice restores it to the stillness it has just quitted; or the parent lays on the lip an unrelenting finger, saying, "O pretty rose-bud, thou must breathe no fragrance! I must never irrigate, I must never wear thee!" Thou Walker. We know this horrid custom. hast then broken through it? Eternal glory to thee, Hattaji! The peace of God, that dwells in every man's breast while he will let it dwell there, be with thee now and evermore! Hattaji. Children! you must keep this secret better than your own. He wishes me the peace of God. I should be grieved were he condemned to many penances for it. The Portuguese call it heresy to hope anything from God for men of another creed. Will not thy priests, like theirs, force thee to swallow some ass-loads of salt for it? When I was last in Goa, I saw several of them in girl's frocks, and with little wet rods in their hands, put a quantity of it into the mouth of a Malay, as we do into the mouths of carp and eels, to purify them before we eat them; and with the same effect. Incredible what a quantity of heresies of all colours it brought up. He would have performed his ablutions after this function; and never did they appear more necessary; but the priests buffetted him well, and dragged him away, lest, as they said, he should relapse into idolatry. You Englishmen do not entertain half so much abhorrence of idolatry, as the French and Portuguese do: for I have seen many of you wash your hands and faces, without fear and without shame; and it is reported that your women are still less he tells us; and God has made us all three happy, scrupulous. You can pardon me the preservation of my girls. So careful are you yourselves in the concealment of your daughters, that I have heard of several sent over to India, to keep them away from the sofa of Rajahs, and the finger of mothers: even the Portuguese take due precautions. None perhaps of their little ones born across the ocean, are considered worth the expenditure of so long a voyage, like yours; but those who are born in Goa, are seldom left to the mercy of a parent. The young creatures are suckled and nursed, and soon afterward are sent into places where they are amused by bells and beads and embroidery, and where none beside their priests and santons can get access to them. These holy men not only save their lives, but treat them with every imaginable kindness, teaching them many mysteries. Indeed, they perform such a number of good offices in their behalf, that on this account alone they, after mature deliberation, hold it quite unnecessary to hang by the hair or ribs from trees and columns, or to look up at the sun till they are blind. Walker. Were I a santon, I should be much of the same opinion. Gonda. O no, no, no. So good a man would gladly teach us anything, but surely would rather think with our blessed dervishes, and would be overjoyed to hang by the hair or the ribs, to please God. Walker. Sweet child! We are accustomed to so many sights of cruelty on the side of the powerful, that our intellects stagger under us, until we fancy we see in the mightiest of beings, the most cruel. Does not every kind action, every fond word of your father, please you greatly? Gonda. Everyone: but I am little; all things please me. Walker. Well, Hattaji! thou art not little; tell me then, does not every caress of these children awaken thy tenderness? Hattaji. It makes me bless myself that I gave them existence, and it makes me bless God that he destined me to preserve it. Walker. It opens to thee in the desarts of life, the two most exuberant and refreshing sources of earthly happiness, love and piety. And if either of these little ones should cut a foot with a stone, or prick a finger with a thorn, would it delight thee? Hatta. A drop of their blood is worth all mine the stone would lame me, the thorn would pierce my eye-balls. : Walker. Wise Hattaji! for tender love is true wisdom; the truest wisdom being perfect happiness. Thinkest thou God less wise, less beneficent than thyself, or better pleased with the sufferings of his creatures? Gonda. No; God is wiser even than my father, and quite as kind: for God has done many things which my father could never do, nor understand, | and my father has made happy only me and Dewah. He seems to love no one else in the world; and now we are with him, he seldom goes forth to demand his tribute of the Rajahs, and is grown so idle, he permits them to take it from every poor labourer; so that in time a Rajah will begin to think himself as brave and honest a man as a robber. Can not you alter this? Why do you smile? Walker. We Englishmen exercise both digni ties, and therefore are quite impartial, but we must not interfere with Hattaji and his subsidiary Rajahs. Have you lately been at Goa, Hattaji? Hattaji. Not very. Walker. Nevertheless you appear to have paid great attention to their religious rites. Hattaji. They are better off than you are in those matters. I would advise you to establish a fishery as near as possible to the coasts of their territory, and seize upon their salt-works for curing the fish. Walker. Why so? Hattaji. They have several kinds which are effec tual remedies for sins. I do not know whether they have any that are preventative; nor does that seem a consideration in their religion. Indeed, why should it? when the most flagrant crime can be extinguished by putting a fish against it, with a trifle of gold or silver at head and tail. Walker. A very ingenious contrivance ! Hattaji. I would not offend. . but surely their priests outdo yours. Walker. In the application of fish? or what? Hattaji. When I say it of yours, I say it also of ours, in one thing. We have people among us, who can subdue our worst serpents, by singing: theirs manage a great one, of which perhaps you may have heard some account, and make him appear and disappear, and devour one man and spare another, although of the same size and flavour: which the wisest of our serpent-singers can not do with the most tractable and the best-conditioned snake. Gonda. O my dear father! what are you saying! You would make these infidels as great as those of the true faith. Be sure it is all a deception: and we have jugglers as good as theirs. We alone have real miracles, framed on purpose for us, not false ones like those of the Mahometans and Portuguese. Walker. What are theirs, my dear? Gonda. I do not know: I only know they are false ones. Hattaji. Who told thee so? ay, child! Gonda. Whenever a holy man of our blessed faith has come to visit you, he seized the oppor tunity, as he told me, if you were away for a moment, to enlighten and instruct me, taking my hand and kissing me, and telling me to be lieve him in everything as I would Vishnou, and assuring me that nothing is very hateful but unbelief, and that I may do what I like if I believe. Walker. And what was your answer? |