“If I could only carry to Bethany what I feel now!” ejaculated the young chaplain, as he hurried along from the knights’ celebration of Pentecost, homeward, at the time that the Moslems were summoned to evening prayers by the minaret calls.
After his greeting, on arriving at his abode, his first words were: “I’ve seen the crowns of fire, and now comprehend the meaning of Pentecost, where men gathered from varied climes, heard each the spirit’s message in his own tongue! The Spirit is the interpreter!”
“By what aid came this revelation?”
“God and the Hospitaler.”
“We have the first here; let us call the other, that the temple on the hill be made to feel the glow. The time is opportune, for each day witnesses new triumphs of our cause.”
When the knight arrived a feast was in progress. His air awed those to whom he was a stranger, and there were not a few who thought within themselves,
“Is he a prophet?”
Abruptly, as usual, he began:
“Friends: I would that all hearts here were moved by justice to enthrone the Queen whose praise your frank youths have been sincerely singing. I am here to-day to proclaim her rights, and in so doing I shall appeal to that sure word which survives when all else fails. She was of David’s royal line; the noblest one of all the earth. To the proof? The Christian Scriptures, from the hands of Matthew and Luke, present her ancestral descent. These apostles wrote as God directed, and, after all, only reaffirmed that already set forth in the most carefully, religiously guarded records of all antiquity, the Jewish genealogical tables.
“You know that the ancient Jews held those tables in sacred regard, for on their integrity depended the proof of the things to them most dear, as they believed. By them every Jew could trace his Abrahamic descent, and to Abraham’s seed were all the great promises of the covenant. By those tables they proved their title to the land of promise, Canaan. Every Jew, believing himself one of God’s chosen people, and that his advancement and the advancement of his posterity in the Divine favor, depended on the purity of the blood of both, felt that he needed the guidance of those tables to preserve him from any admixture with alien or Gentile blood. The Aaronic priesthood was hereditary and the priesthood was initial in the religious system of the Hebrews. Its legitimacy was preserved chiefly by these hereditary charters. Then all true Israelites looked for the coming of a Savior, Priest and King to bring to the chosen transcendent glory, and to win an universal dominion, marked by love, joy and peace. Every Jew knew that Great One was to spring from the house of David, and all within that Judaic line hoping that he or his children might be near akin to the One to come, carefully, constantly, proudly guarded and studied these records of descent. Birth was the foundation upon which all Jewish institutions were founded. ‘So all Israel was reckoned by genealogies.’ They lived in a reign of blood, and in blood to be Jewishly thoroughbred was, they thought, to be most highly favored. They had not yet discerned the law of the new dispensation, which declares all men akin; a dispensation seeking to build up a superior humanity by first of all transforming and exalting the inner life. By the revered records of these Jewish patriarchs, both holy and love-ladened, place the writings of Matthew and Luke, and with concurrent testimony, unimpeachable as well as conclusive, the legitimacy of Jesus the son of Mary is proven! He was beyond a cavil of David’s kingly line. There were Christ-haters who contested at every point His claim of Messiahship. They forged lies freely; they hurled after Him slanders innumerable; they insinuated that He was born in fornication; they affected to flee from Him as one having a devil; they denounced Him to Jewish as well as Roman authorities as a liar, a seducer of men and a traitor. In a word, they howled Him down in every way they could, unabashed by the splendor of His baptismal indorsement, unsilenced by the awful warnings of His cross. But in their desperation they never dared to challenge the records which proved Him ‘the son of David.’ Now had His claims rested upon His relations to His earthly father, Joseph, they would have been disproven. All Jewry would have quickly, fiercely proclaimed Him a pretender and not in the family of promise. The Christ was heir of David’s name and fame because His mother was, and so in exalting Him you crown the saintly woman who bore Him! He was the adopted son of Joseph, type of all His followers, adopted sons of a Royal Father. He was legitimate through his mother, type of all his followers, brought into the royal family of God by the power of a mystic new birth.
“But there is another line running backward, preserved through the centuries to connect the first Adam with this last one. This line runs from Christ through his mother to Eden. Behold the august truth suspended by that chain of names! Names; only names of the dead! names of the forgotten! Jesus by Mary is linked to the chain! It’s an old, old chain, but yet it has gems in its links. Each named is the child of another living before, and the history of each is recorded in two words, ‘begat,’ ‘died.’ A chain of dust! One man precedes another. Each in turn vanishes until immortality is confronted in the last sentence: ‘Adam, who was the son of God!’ The first mortal son of God uncrowned and led away from his kingdom, by a woman, to death! The twain go down together, each ruinous to the other, with nothing left them but a hope; and that hope rested upon a to them mysterious promise: ‘The seed of the woman shall crush the head of the serpent!’ It would have staggered their faith had one told them that in God’s revenges, all compensating, all healing, she that led down was of the sex that should lead upward. Out of their darkness there came a seeming dawn, and Eve cried ecstatically at the birth of Cain:
‘I have gotten a man from the Lord!’
“They thought he was a token of renewed favor and probably the redeemer from the curse. He turned out a murderer, and introduced them to the supreme horror of humanity—death. The conflict of light and darkness went on, and the first pair tasted death themselves, looking along the horizon of unrealized hopes to the last and waiting, as all their posterity through painful centuries waited, for the Man that was to save. The long years with leaden tread marched on, struggles amid suffering weighty and countless, accompanied the race; of them all woman bore the heavier part, but she kept somehow the larger hope. Each Jewish mother, with a pride of sex secretly cherished, watched and longed for the coming from herself of the ONE who was to lift her up and crown her queen, indeed.
“God at last gathered all woman’s trustful hopings into one great answered prayer, and deigning, in sovereign love, His marvelous co-operation, brought forth another and a perfect Adam.
“We are informed that Joseph and Mary went, about the time of Jesus’ birth, in compliance with Roman law, to Bethlehem to pay their personal taxes. The Roman tax lists were based upon the records of family descent so far as concerned the Jews.
“To make the collection certain beyond the possibility of any one’s escape, the law required each taxable subject to pay his allotted tribute in the city of his nativity. The father and mother of Jesus were cited to the city of David. Thither they went. And so in the providence of God it happened that pagan Rome was summoned to the cradle of the infant Savior and made unwittingly an attester to all time that He was of a family by right recorded among those descended from great David.
“The son and the mother here stand or fall together. If Mary was not of David’s line, then the Son she bore was not, and He is left without proof of being of the seed of David.
“Joseph was not the father of the Christ after the flesh. The lives of mother and son are eternally intertwined. If we honor one we must needs honor the other; abating the fame of one we degrade the other.
“Jesus’ claims to being the Messiah depended upon the fact that His mother was of the tribe and family royal. The absolute requirements of prophecy can only be met in the Messiah by His being of the House of David. Jesus himself admitted and fairly met this necessity. So he questioned the Pharisees: ‘What think ye of Christ? Whose son is he?’ ‘They say unto him, the Son of David.’ Admitting this, the Savior propounded the question involving sonship and spiritual unity with God which His questioners could not answer:
“‘If David then call him Lord, how is he son?’
“‘Neither durst any man from that day forth ask Him any more questions.’
“Had He denied the necessity of Davidic origin they could have overwhelmed Him with Scriptures. Had he not been of that family the most ignorant Jew would have promptly rejected His claims to being the Hope of Israel.
“Peter the apostle, amid the soul-trying solemnities of Pentecost, speaking to the representatives of people from all parts of the earth and for all time, cried: ‘Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you concerning the Patriarch David: Being a prophet, and knowing God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.’
“This orator spoke then with the accuracy of one in the presence of the Holy Ghost, and not only made sincere, but illuminated, by the torch of God. This is conclusive, but the reiteratives of the inspired writers justify us in presenting their cumulative evidence.
“After Peter comes the learned Hebrew of the Hebrews, Paul; before his conversion to Christianity declaring himself to have been ‘after the most straightest sect a Pharisee;’ after that conversion, rejoicing to the end of life, as of the true, new Israel by faith in Him that makest all new.
“Twice Paul met Mary’s son mysteriously, face to face, within the very confines of Glory. Let Paul speak: ‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, separated unto the gospel of God, concerning His Son, our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh!’
“Let us not longer make a mock of eternal, holy verities! Christ was of David’s flesh through His mother, and born to be a real king of a real kingdom, not a phantom kingdom! That kingdom must come; yea, blessed be Jehovah! it is coming.
“Joseph, the putative father of Jesus, adopted Jesus as his son, but he could not, by that legal act, make his foster son, whose father was the Holy Spirit of the seed of David, after the flesh! Jesus received, then, His royal blood from Mary, and bore His Kingly title after the flesh as ‘the crown wherewith his mother crowned Him.’ Revelations harmonize; Luke and Matthew must therefore agree with Paul and Peter.
“The tables of Luke and Matthew agree down to David’s time, but then they diverge, until they are converged in Jesus, through the undoubted legitimacy of Mary as a descendant of David and the adoption of Jesus by Joseph, a scion of another branch of the same great family. Luke gives a sentence, all luminous, but first puzzling: ‘Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli.’ ‘Ah, as was supposed!’ sneers the infidel. ‘As was supposed! supposed!!’ hatefully shouts some insinuating, ignorant Jews! But now let us fill out, naturally, Luke’s statement, ‘as was supposed, the son of Joseph, but in reality the son of Heli.’ But here it may be asked, was Jesus the son of Heli? It is, I answer, not infrequently in the Scriptures that a grandson is called a son. Jesus was probably the grandson of Heli. It was a common custom of the Jews, except in cases of especial necessity, not to record the names of women in tracing lines of descent. Men kept the books, and it had become a habit with the lords of creation to thrust woman into the background. Mary was too insignificant a person, socially considered, in her time, to be registered in her own name in the hereditary charters. Joseph was put in her stead, as her representative. There was not any supposition about the descent of Mary, but these scribes, who had charge of the books, thought it were more creditable to the male sex to record Joseph as the father of Jesus, and, by a little fiction, suppose him to have descended through the former from Heli, than to say Mary descended from Heli and Jesus descended from Mary. The Romans encouraged this, and also the politicians. Men were the only ones to fight or pay taxes, and, as political factors, were strictly watched by those in authority. Luke, in reality, gives Mary’s line. He was scholarly and accurate, besides that a physician, and we judge by all experience that there is that in the profession of medicine which makes its followers tender toward all suffering, consequently especially tender to women, the largest inheritors of the pains that beset our race. Doctor Luke, like those of his fraternity, by an act of graceful justice, in the spirit of Christianity which is essentially humane, just, and courtly, accorded gladly the woman her place. But the ‘doomsday books’ of the Jews, containing their family trees or genealogies, perished with the perishing of the Jewish nation. Those records had done their work; it was time for them to go. They had become by misuse agencies of evil. They stood long enough to demonstrate that God works through cycles vastly wide, and that His definite promise made to Adam, Abraham and many of their successors, had finally been fulfilled, at the end of thousands of years, with a miraculous explicitness. The records disappeared after Christ came, and herein was a providence saying to the watchers: ‘He is come. No need further of the patents of His ancestry to aid your watching.’ More than that, they being gone, no other could arise claiming to be Shiloh, with hope of convincing any by appeal to proof from the records of ancestry.
“Shiloh and his white kingdom have come. It is ruling the earth; not in memories of its mighty dead, but by its regal, potent virtues and charities. The battering rams of Titus destroyed wall and Holy Temple, but thus was let in new dawn. Above the storm of that awful conflict the spiritual may discern in living letters the mightly words of God which dispelled disordering darkness from the universe at the beginning: ‘Let there be light,’ and, indeed, ‘light was.’ The obliterated records of Jewish ancestral lines, on which alone many a worthless child of Abraham based his claims to superiority, his right to despise and neglect his fellow men, his justification to tyrannize, and finally his hope of favor with God, ceased to present their sturdy barriers to the entering in of a better hope. Then came in the beginning of this new era; now the patent of nobility is noble character; this is the time to be marked by an universal recognition of universal brotherhood in a kingdom where there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, male nor female. A kingdom where righteousness, impartial justice, liberty, equality, purity and humanity are to be the regnant potencies. In this kingdom, how fittingly, Christ stands as the king and ideal of man, and how fittingly his mother supplements his sway by being presented herself to all womankind as a queenly ideal. Let him or her dispute her title, who can surely say the earth, in this redemption period, needs no such sublime epitome of womanly virtue and worthfulness.
“My words are ended for to-day, assembled men and women. Some of these things spoken may seem like deep sayings, but I leave them to find their lodgment in your hearts and minds. I trust them, knowing that Truth has a sword which cuts her way, each sweep of that sword making light.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE “LIGHT OF THE HAREM” IN “THE TEMPLE OF
ALLEGORY.”
“The glory of the Lord came from the way of the east, ... and the earth shined with His glory. Thou son of man show the house to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities, and let them measure the pattern.”—Ezekiel, xliii.
“My Cornelius once said I might expend the fortune coming from my grandfather, Harrimai, as I chose.”
“Why, that’s so without my saying. I did not court your grandfather, nor his ownings, and have gotten affluence beyond the wildest dreams of a lover in Miriamne’s self.”
“I think the old church on the hill is smiling day by day, more and more.”
“I’ve noted the improvement, and it assures me our hearers are growing. A meanly kept sanctuary, witnesses of starved worshipers. Some churches might be called stables for all-devouring, nothing-giving, lean kine.”
“I’d like to be brought to confession; question me!”
“Question? I can not doubt either Miriamne or her doings; to question, one must doubt.”
“Sir Courtly! But I’ll flank your courtesy; I’ve purchased and furbished up the old ecclesiastical pile.”
“I might have guessed it was Miriamne’s work! Now, good Bishop of Bethany, appoint me Rector.”
“Churchman forever! We’ll have no Rector.”
“No Rector? No sermons? No congregation?”
“We’ll have a multitude, if we can get into the place the God-shine; that brightens and draws ever.”
“Allurement by light! A new device. Are we to have a tryst where lotus-dreamers may take sun-baths?”
“Curiosity, too proud to question directly, travels around with banterings.”
“Incisive Miriamne, my ægis, thin as paper, is shredded: I confess!”
“Confession compels pardon and counsel. I’ll give both. The restored sanctuary is to be the capitol of our fraternity, the ‘Sisters of Bethany.’”
“Capitol? Are you inviting the Sultan to take your homes and your heads? A capitol sounds like politics, revolution and things governmental.”
“There is to be war and a revolution; our munitions are to be solely moral agencies; our aim, to revolve the world around toward Paradisiacal days. I’d have parting streams flow out from Bethany to water the earth, and sing anew the jubilant strains of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates.”
“Arcadia! Alas, how sad such dreams, because so impossible to realize. The Arcadians, so charming in the poet’s pictures, were, in fact, very warlike, very loutish, very human.”
“Say not that what has been must always be. Moses, at a time when Israel was at its lowest dip, received of God a pattern of the Tabernacle. The God of Moses is unchangeable. I’ve gotten from Him a pattern, also.”
“And now I question, as you wish!”
“The old sanctuary is to be a ‘Temple of Allegory.’ We shall attempt therein to picture the finest truths by symbols that shall make them tangible and irresistible.”
“A splendid ambition! Possess me of your intricacies of canon and catechism. I’d accept them.”
“You overlook our simplicity by expecting complexity. We shall not walk like ghosts, hampered by the grave-clothes of the dead, though august forms. Seven words, enough for each day of the round week, are our whole profession: ‘Humanity toward humanity, with godliness toward God.’”
As they conversed, they walked toward the old sanctuary at the suburbs of Bethany, and now were drawing near it.
“Behold, Miriamne, the Hospitaler; yonder.”
“Yes, I’ve called the knights hither; the Hospitaler will dedicate our temple to-day.”
“But has he ecclesiastical authority so to do?”
“The same authority that these growing shrubs and vines have to make the place beautiful. See, I’ve pierced the walls of the grim pile, wherever I could, to make a window. The Hospitaler is to take them for a theme.”
“Windows for themes?”
“He is able; and understands by them that we’d have let into musty beliefs floods of sweet light.”
“The knights are singing!”
“Yes, the Grail song, ‘Faint though pursuing;’ the dedication has commenced.”
The words sung recited the grail quest; but its chorus, a simple one, was much the same as that sung at the May-day festivities on a former occasion. The people gathered, heartily joined in the chorus. When the singing ceased, the Knight, in his usual abrupt manner, began addressing the assembly:
“The beloved young missioners have undertaken, by means of their handiwork here, to strikingly present the noblest truths, and they have taken a step in the right direction. Love for the pictorial, manifest especially in children, grows with growth; those adult needing and seeking, as they grow, finer, grander symbols. Our Divine Lord, who ‘knew men’ and ‘knew what was in man,’ did not rebuke, but rather utilized this taste of man, by teaching the profoundest things of His Kingdom by means of it. He came as close as close could be to the very core of human life, as it was or to all time will be. While He might have navigated Galilee in a palatial barge, borne over be-flowered waves by perfumed breezes and golden wings, with the aureoled spirits, ‘who do excel in strength,’ by thousands, to escort Him, He chose rather to journey in an all-winning humility, borrowing, as He had need, the old boat of some poor Tiberian fisherman. He might have entered Jerusalem, that last time, in an Elijah-like chariot, dazzling the city with splendors surpassing those that the rapt John beheld on Patmos; but the King of Glory, seeking to be the King of all men, elected in that supreme moment to get near to men by approaching the august courts of Herod and Caiphas, and the commons as well, on an ass—an humble beast, and borrowed at that. All this allegorized the condescension and sympathy of Jehovah. The universe is full of patterns! The books of Nature, Revelation, and Providence, having a common authority, are constant in the use of pictured truth. Nature gives us the dawning of light and the marshaling of order out of darkness and chaos. There is the low earth, the high firmament, ripe summer going down into the winding sheets of winter and up to the resurrections of spring. Twig, flower, seed, forest; insect that creeps, and bird that flies; the speck-life moved, and the behemoth; the atom and the planet-system—waning and growing, dying and living, from formlessness to beauty, from time to eternity! Then take the inspired picture-history: Eden’s fall, Egyptian captivity, the Red Sea passage, the wilderness, the manna by the way, the rest by the Mount of the Law, the entrance to the Promised Land. Lastly, the Incarnate One, an eternal symbol, the realization and fulfillment of all preceding. ‘Which things are an allegory,’ exclaimed Paul, with a sweeping back-look. The three books present to the thoughtful pictured banners innumerable, to wave him onward. This temple is dedicated to the purpose of pointing to these pictures. Fitly the ‘angels of the mount’ have determined to make prominent the beautiful, patient, modest Mary, Mother of Jesus. And to study her intelligently or profitably, it is necessary to know her not only as an historical personage, but as one in the cavalcade of symbolism unfolded by Sacred Writ and by Nature. She passes by, herself every way unique, the exemplar of God to those aspiring after gentle, devout girlhood, pure and wise maiden-life, constant wifehood, and patient, consecrated, and influential motherhood. Turn again to the Divine Word, the beacon of the ages, the history of Providence, the solver of life’s problems. It is made up of an entrancing array of symbols, types, prophetic dramas, and gorgeously constructed visions, constantly representing or dextrously pointing, by countless trophies and allegories, to its Ideal and Darling, Mary’s Son, who ‘spoke as man never spake, yet who without a parable spake nothing.’ Though the literary ages are strewn with long winrows of dead books, no work of man long surviving the mutations of time, God’s picturesque handiwork, the inspired volume, as potently molds the thoughts, charms the affections and quickens the hopes of our race with its tokens, types, idyls and illustration as it did when the earth was younger by far than it is now. It is a living fountain, not only giving, but retaining its immortality! It abides because it masterfully deals with the things that pertain to the wonderland of the soul. How necessary its methods is at once apparent to any one who considers, discerningly, man as a complex union of spirit and matter; wonderful forever, but ‘very good,’ since the All Holy, Great High Priest performed the nuptial ceremony of that union. If there could be found a being able to reason, as a man, who had not within himself this unity, and who had never experienced its phenomena, such would at once combat the possibility of its existence. Even those so organized, and momentarily realizing the jointure of the God-like spirit with the earthly body, the higher condescending to and communing with the inferior, the inferior at times over-persuading, dominating and utterly shipwrecking its great spiritual co-partner, are compelled to admit the whole as being a fact without parallel, alike inscrutable and bewildering. A life-time of profoundest introspection can carry the greatest mind, herein, only to the confines of new wonders. But the interest in the study of the unwritten, unvoiced language of symbolisms by which the wonderfully united twain, soul and body, confer and commune with each other deepens with the study. What a fine, expressive, rapid, exact, exalted language that must be! To each well understood; without their arcana unknown, unheard, incomprehensible. And it is of necessity all symbol, natural, intuitive, without a single arbitrary sign! This sign-language acts by symbol in the royal temple of memory and imagination. And so again we perceive the representative, picturesque or typical is the medium of the fine, the deep and the lofty in expressing truth. This is the soul’s language, by which it communes with whatever else there is in man, through which it receives the songs of Heaven, and the august or tender messages of the Spirit, out of the deathless land.
“When this sphere of ours was rolling swiftly onward through the shadows of night, as well as swiftly downward through darker shadows of sin, Divine love said ‘Let there be light.’ Then the hosts of heaven saw at Bethlehem a mother and babe marking the place of world-dawn, unfolding the design of Deity to effect redemption by touching the race of man at infancy; the most effective because the most plastic point; through motherhood the most influential because the tenderest instrumentality. The never-to-be-forgotten spectacle thrilled, with a new ecstasy, the beings of glory whose every throb of life is joy. They tracked the heavens about with light as they sped out to keep abreast the fleeing earth and shout over Bethlehem, ‘Glad tidings! Glad tidings!’ They saw Eden restored through the advent of a new, pure home; they saw a mystic covenant between God and man typified in the child begotten of a human mother in conjunction with the Eternal Father. By this there seemed to be an attesting that humanity was to be raised to Divine favor; there also was a symbol showing the value of law; for through the incarnation, Deity, in the form of a babe, became submissive to law administered by a mortal mother.
“He is blind who can not see in all these things God’s purpose to elect some of His creatures to be His co-laborers in the choicest co-operations, and also to be exemplars of what He does and would do. These things being so, we do well to learn the alphabet of His goodness from His elect heroes, heroines and saints; and I proclaim to-day my innermost belief in Christ as the argument, logic and fruit of God’s love; but, at the same time, I praise, as one enravished, the character of her who was God’s poem, God’s peroration! We now proclaim this temple dedicated to the purposes of showing forth the things I have spoken.”
The Hospitaler abruptly ceased his address, as he began it. There were other services consisting of psalm-singing and prayers, and the service was ended.
As the congregation dispersed, the young missioner, Cornelius, exclaimed: “Miriamne, the Hospitaler has awakened me as from sleep by God’s truth. Oh, the heavens are not as full of shining stars as God’s truth is full of beauty! It seems strange that men like myself, and wiser, are so long in bringing these things to their minds. You, my dear little mystic, are my interpreter.
“It’s just as I told you, wife. We must go in pairs. In the Egyptian mythologies, Osiris had his Isis, Amen-Ra his Maut, and Kneph his Sate. Thank God I have my adolescent other self!”
“I, a woman, help you? My sex is honored by the praise. Are they worthy of all they need? Is it madness to seek to gather all women having gifts and needs into a helped and helping fraternity whose creed is a fine example? If I help Cornelius, cannot a peerless one like Mary help all?”
“Pardon the thought, but one word haunts me—idolatry!”
“Impossible! We all need soul company, and have room within for such. We must have an inner population of real heroines and heroes or be filled with ghosts and myths. The empty soul, eaten up with self-worship, goes mad; the myth-possessed becomes an idolater. If we harbor the God-like, keeping the highest place for Deity, our inner selves will be no hideous chambers of imagery, but a counterpart of heaven.”
“But some have fallen into putting Mary before Jesus, and so we’ve seen the advent of Mariolatry.”
“But this only, and surely, here I know, no friend of the Divine Son can dethrone Him by honoring her, aright; indeed, as He, Himself, did. It was of Him she spoke when exclaiming: ‘My soul doth rejoice in God my Savior!’ Can one truly honor Him and despise and ignore the woman who gave Him human birth? Can one have His mind and forget her for whom love was uppermost to Him in His supreme last hours? Can one honor her aright, and yet dethrone the Son whom she enthroned? She bore Him, then lived for Him. She honored herself in bearing Him, and was His mother, His teacher and His disciple. He revered her, she worshiped Him. Awed by His augustness, she was yet conscious of an ownership of His greatness; believing in His divinity, she yet enjoyed the nearness to Him of a mother.”
“I can not but believe that she is a queen, indeed, high among the glorified who reign with God! I question again: Who ever did, or could, become heretic or carnal by sincerely revering the peerless woman whom Christ enthroned on His heart?”
“I know at least that the fathers at imperial and pagan Rome placed a representation of Mary in their Pantheon when public policy made it an imperative necessity to overthrow the influence of the lewd, fanciful and ungodly ideals that had been set up therein,” responded Cornelius.
“The world is a Pantheon full of corrupt ideas. Let us raise high the choice ones God has sent us—But see, yonder is the wife of a poor old Druse camel-driver. She was once a sinner in the streets of Jerusalem. Now she is a Sister of Bethany, allured to goodness by our Temple’s allegories!”
“A woman that was a sinner, a scarlet woman?”
“Only such. No; all of that! One woman; a lost one? How little to man; how much to God! Had nothing else been done, heaven would have been set singing, as ever, over a sinner’s return. That’s reward enough for all we’ve attempted.”
“Now I’m interested, indeed!”
“Well you may be, when you hear all. We’ve here one once a harem beauty, who, having lost her power to fascinate, was committing her life to that hag-cunning belonging to old women who supplement their decaying power by wickedness, fox-like and serpentine.”
“The old, old story; yet I thank God if her life be sweetened.”
“Hers is a strange story.”
“May I know it?”
“Yes; it is, as I’ve gathered it in scraps, a sad romance. She was born of Georgian parents, among the mountains of Armenia, and gifted, in her youth, as are most of those of her sex in that country, with unusual personal beauty. She early attracted the attention of the monsters who dealt in human flesh, and a Georgian noble unrighteously claiming her family as his serfs, bartered away Nourahmal to merchants seeking recruits for Mameluke harems. She became, in time, part of the retinue of a sheik by the name of Azrael, a desperate adventurer, who, on account of his blood-deeds, was called by his followers the ‘Angel of Death,’ His luxurious and desperate way of living justified his claim to Turkish extraction; his adroitness and avidity for intrigue stamped him as a Mameluke.”
“Nourahmal? Azrael? Why, these must be the same of whom I’ve heard Sir Charleroy speak?” queried Cornelius.
“The same!”
“She comes out of the past as one from the dead!”
“And her story is a series of strange events. It is as follows: Azrael suspected her of having abetted the escape of my father and Ichabod, therefore determined to kill her. She gained a temporary respite through having saved her master’s life from an assassin plotting to supplant him; though she periled her own in so doing.
“As Azrael awaited her recovery from the wounds she had suffered in his behalf, he devised another scheme which he hoped would compass his favorite’s destruction and his own elevation. He was ambitious to be Sherif of Mecca. To attain that honor he saw he must needs do something to enhance his popularity greatly with his Mohammedan followers, and so conceived the plan of getting into his power, Harrimai of the Jews and Adolphus of the Christians. His purpose was to rack those two leaders into apostasy and the betrayal of their followers. Had he succeeded, the event would have been crushing to Jews and Christians east of Jordan. He promised Nourahmal her freedom and restoration to her Georgian home if she aided him in his design; though he did not disclose his purpose to her beyond that of securing the presence of Von Gombard and Harrimai in his camp. She felt that there was some malign, hidden purpose in her master’s breast, but deemed it expedient, at the outset, to seem to co-operate in his plan.”
“But how was the sheik using his strategy against Nourahmal?”
“As a fiend! He, having no conception of a friendship between a man and a woman that was pure and free from intrigue, suspected the relations between his favorite and Ichabod. He thought the two only needed the opportunity to precipitate into perfidy. He laid his plan darkly, and, leaving a trusty follower to carry it out, hastened forward to Mecca.”
“But surely, Nourahmal was not what he thought her!”
“No; though training her as a plastic child, he judged she was what he had tried to make her; at her worst she was. But let me continue. The assault on my parents and Ichabod, on the road between Gerash and Bozrah, was the opening of the drama. The plan then was to seize Rizpah, and under pretense of negotiating for her ransom, inveigle Harrimai into the hands of Azrael’s followers. Nourahmal was to aid in this by affecting tears, pleading for pity and suggesting the sending for the girl’s father.”
“What besetments perilous we pass through, all unknown to us! Harrimai and your parents, to their death, never suspected the devices worked against them!”
“Nor dreamed that a harem favorite, a mere girl, and an utter stranger to them, was their good angel!”
“Good angel! How?”
“She witnessed the assault from behind a sequestering wall, in company with a follower of the sheik, commissioned to kill her instantly if she faltered in the part appointed her. This infernal guard was also charged to insinuate into her mind the feasibility of elopement with Ichabod. If she could be compromised, Azrael knew he could justify her death to those who remembered her heroic defense of himself. That was to follow as soon as she had done her part in inveigling Harrimai to Azrael’s camp.”
“A demonstration of a personal devil, Miriamne.”
“I’d say rather of an overruling God.”
“How fared Nourahmal after Azrael’s chagrin?”
“Cornelius anticipates me. When she saw Ichabod fall, a sudden desire for liberty for herself and to help the imperiled Rizpah, prompted her to drive a dagger into the heart of her guard and cry, ‘Rescuers come!’ That cry drove the remnants of the assailers of Sir Charleroy to sudden flight. She asserted to the fugitives that Laconic, the new runner, just passing, had slain her guard, and so allayed suspicion until opportunity of escape came. She soon made her way to Bozrah, where she found among the Christians a temporary home. From thence she drifted into Jerusalem.”
“’Twas strange she did not turn toward Gerash.”
“I said as much to her, but desire to get as far as possible from Azrael, and as near as possible to the Holy City, of which Ichabod had so glowingly spoken to her, determined her course; besides that, Ichabod being dead, Gerash was a strange place to her—Jerusalem seemed to her, she said, near heaven.”
“Had she only known it, she was near heaven in Bozrah, being near Von Gombard.”
“Her story weaves a chaplet for his tomb to-day; for now it appears that from Nourahmal the old priest foreknew the intention of those Saracens, who assailed the city that day I was with him. Though they designed capturing him to put him on the rack, he rushed into the conflict, crying, ‘Kill the foe with kindness!’ The assault would have been fatal to Bozrah, too, had not the leader of one of the invading bands ordered a retreat, just at the point of victory. This was indirectly Nourahmal’s work; for that leader had been won by her to esteem Christians far enough to be unwilling to murder them, though not adverse to plundering them. That was a great improvement in a Mohammedan.”
“And Nourahmal knows from you that you are Sir Charleroy’s daughter?”
“Yes, by that I won her confidence. Indeed, she began this confidence at first, by saying, ‘I love you, because you so remind me, angel of the mount, of a Christian knight, who was the dear friend of the only pure and unselfish man I knew in all my youth! Such words led to questions and explanations. The rest you know.”
“And you have allured, comforted and enlightened her?”
“By God’s help, I have. I have told her of the universal sisterhood, of all women, who take as their exemplar the worthy mother of the One who proclaimed the universal brotherhood of man. This knowledge is her joy and inspiration. When I am with her, she never tires of hearing of the ‘Queen of David’s House,’ the mother of mothers.”
“But how have you allured her hither, Miriamne?”
“You have questioned curiously with your eyes, at least, concerning those gated alcoves and curtained balconies in our Temple of Allegory. They helped her!”
“Since you say they are not ‘Confessionals,’ as I call them, tell me what they are?”
“‘Rock clefts’ our sisterhood calls them; some are doors to little adjacent chapels; some are quiet resting places, where, in impressive solitude, souls in prayer may find the mountain manna, for which the Savior sought in many a lone night-watching; and some are places where are presented, under entrancing symbols, exalting truths.”
“Words have failed to turn the world to faith: may signs do better.”
“I’ve put truth into visible form, that they who get it here may learn that truth thus is only up to its full might. I’d have my followers believe in visible, not phantom, truth; so believing, truth will not be a ghostly proclamation, the toy of the mind, but a force moving hands and hearts!”
“And you have met Nourahmal’s case?”
“Yes; fully in what we call the ‘Lover’s Bower,’ yonder. Remember she has been the victim of mock love, from first to last.”
“The ‘Lover’s Bower’?”
“Behold the trophy and the bower! There is Nourahmal, now rapturously contemplating the picture of Joseph putting the ring of espousal on the hand of the Virgin Mary.”
“Nourahmal? That gray-haired, hard-faced woman, holding the hand of a charming girl?”
“That is Nourahmal; the younger woman is Beulah, her grand-daughter; they two are almost inseparable now.”
“An oleander by a limestone cliff! And so she takes her station by a scene of betrothal, forgetting that hymen’s altars can be fired by youth alone!”
“The world says so; but yet a disappointed life may sometimes learn why it has been a failure, by studying the ashes of time gone in the light of quickened memories.”
“What finds Nourahmal there?”
“Golden lessons. First for her grand-daughter, her idol. She never tires of saying before yon picture to that maiden now her charge: ‘My flower, my lamb, be always as pure as the espoused of Joseph, and you will be a jewel which your husband, if he be a true man, will ever proudly wear on as his heart. My flower, my lamb, no woman should leave all for any man, unless she is certain of finding in him father, mother, brother, sister, companion, as Mary found in Joseph!’”
“But how did these things bless Nourahmal herself?”
“Love counterfeited, blasted her life. She believed that it was only gross passion masquerading in attractive, delusive colors. So believing, it was difficult to tell her of the Love of God so she could realize its wealth. Love was only great selfishness, excited and persistent, to her mind. It was something to teach her that the genuine affection was utterly otherwise; in fact the foundation and crown of all the noblest sentiments implanted by God in His choicest creations.
“I have sought to allegorize here, true affection in all its perfection. It seems to be fitting to do so, for my ideal queen was ruled by it. She never could have loved to the depths she did, as a mother, if she had not had within her being all the possibilities of woman’s love. And in a rightly balanced woman love is all-impressive, all-controlling; with her worship is loving and loving is worship. Here I shall seek to refine that sentiment in the hearts of my sisters until each becomes an evangel in its behalf. Then mankind will understand the wealth a woman bestows on the man that wins her. There is nothing in her career that surpasses it, except that sovereign act wherein she lays herself a convert on God’s altar. I am seeking to exalt this sacred act, the loving of the gentler sex, until all men, brought to revere it as they ought, shall become true knights; until society shall be of one mind in crying traitor to every man that contemns it in wedlock, and ready to lash naked around the world every betrayer who awakens it in innocency to lead it astray.”
“I can only again exclaim, oh! how full of flowers and honey is my Miriamne’s creed and gospel!”
“And the churchman so exclaims because I’ve put love where God put it, at the front of religion’s cohorts! Can there be a religion worth the name that does not masterfully meet the requirements of the relations most sacred between human beings?”
As she spoke she led her husband under the splendid painting of Joseph espousing Mary, toward the entrance of the bower, remarking: “This vestibule, from the Roman word Vesta, Goddess of Purity, is suggestive. Rome placed Vesta among the household gods, and was wont to have an altar at every outer door. If Purity guard the door, Light and Love will dwell within. See the laurel, emblem of victory, as the ancients put it by Purity’s altar; so do I. Love, when pure, is all-victorious!”
“Miriamne, these old truths seem to me very charming as you now present them; but can Nourahmal and others like her enter into their meaning?”
“A pious saint of our church says that the star which guided to Bethlehem finally sank into a spring, where it may be yet seen by women if they be pure.”
As they thus communed he passed through an arched doorway, and was admitted to a grand court, three sides of which were inclosed by the temple and two of its wings, the fourth side hedged by palms, vine-interlaced. The sky was the roof, the carpet the floor of that country. Just in front of the palm-hedge, on a grassy hillock, conspicuous beyond all else, was a colossal stone face. It seemed as if it had emerged from the earth, bald of all life—desolation expressed in mute stone.
“Astarte here!” exclaimed Cornelius.
“Yes; that’s part of my Bashan inheritance, from Kunawat, the land of Job.”
“A woman and a devil beset him; (the two are in this face, methinks). Its hideousness, as its import, seems inappropriate in Love’s Bower.”
“Yes, ’tis hideous now, though once the face had beauty. It is not futile for young-love to remember that time gouges deformity into beautifulness, nor for all to remember how the Kings of the East in Moses’ time overthrew the Rephaim, the fallen giant followers of the goddess. The East is the home of light, and light is fateful to evil lives. Where are the Astarte-devotees now?”
As the man listened his eyes wandered to the place where the palm grove came up against the temple wing, and there he observed a purling ribband of water.
“Cornelius sees my poem of silver. It comes from a grove of cedars and sharon roses, out of a spring in the bosom of a hill. Look the other way. It passes under the alcove, under the temple wall; a short, dark passage brings it to liberty, ending in the Virgin’s Pool of Kidron. The sun allures it up to the clouds at last. But listen; it sings as it runs!”
“I hear many blending melodies.”
“Do you see that canopied dais? There the instructor, or preacher if you will, stands. The stream passes near it, getting impulse by a fall; true love is speeded when it runs by truth. That’s my lesson. Then there are Æolian harps this side and that of the dark alcove, the latter the type of the tomb.”
“But why?”
“True love has music both sides of the grave.”
“Mystic!”
“Interpreter, say.”
“But I hear the songs of birds?”
“There they are, this side the dark exit: but in a cage, supported above the current by an hour-glass and sickle.”
“Grim emblems.”
“Yes; but it’s a grim truth that love’s joy notes here are caged, hampered and transitory. The hour-glass and sickle are, when those notes are sung, ever.
“Look to the West.”
“I look, and see nothing but the picture of a sunset.”
“Yes, and that curtains the ‘Rest of the Aged’ in our temple.”
“But whither am I led by these words?”
“Led to look toward sunset, for morning, by faith. You remember the Christ was never old; neither are they who draw their life from Him. The ‘Ancient of Days’ not only has, but gives, eternal youth. Oh, there were young men at His sepulcher; yet those angels could count their years by centuries! Let the hour-glass make record and the sickle reap; the passion flower recalls a vernal life, where the oldest saints are the youngest, where all existence is growth, refreshment, glory, exultation! There, love is law and law is love, and to love is to live and to live is to love. We get a breath of this life here as we enter the vicinage of the immortal pair, Jesus and Mary; and we get a distant view of the whole from the mountains of the gospel.”
“I believe, and yet sometimes start back at the question, ‘What if, after all, at the end almost of eternities there come monotony, decadence, satiety—death?’ Next after hell, and nigh as horrible, is annihilation; and worst of all, eternal existence with nothing for which to strive—a living death!”
“They say, that in Egypt, a palm bowed to give shade to the mother, Mary; while the aspen refused to her any comfort. Then Christ blessed the palm and it became the fruitful evergreen, while the aspen leaf is fated to the end of time by constant tremblings to betoken the agues of a cursed life. But, under the sun in submission, our aspen lives are turned to palms! We, having His life, need never tremble at death, for we shall ever throb with a loving like His.”
“But there are many conditions and needs to womankind. Let us speak of these, since the present is hers, the future God’s.”
“The knights vainly tried swords; my King promised to draw all men to Himself. You told me how Sir Galahad, the pure knight, had made, about the Holy Grail, when he found it, a chest of precious stones and gold. Now, I’ve found the virgin pattern of perfection, representative of the human-like beating heart of God. Here I’ve set her, exalted her. This shall be her golden precious palace. Though dead, here shall be presented in the grandeur of her character, the sweetness of her power. By and by, it may come about that all mankind akin, shall make it the chief duty of Church and State, to care, with a loyal tenderness, for all women, all children, from first and last; that not one such shall be left miserable. That will be the world obeying the Crucified’s, ‘Behold thy mother.’”