X.—THE FALL, THE CHEETAH, AND THE CUP.
Jai Singh, a man of good family, but poor, stood by the side of the road as Parduman, once his boyhood’s companion, rode by. Parduman was mounted on an Arab horse of great value, richly caparisoned; and two syces attended their master. Envy and covetousness awoke in the heart of Jai Singh as he gazed.
“Why should that fellow have all life’s honey, and I he left the gall?” he exclaimed. “Would that your horse were mine; ay, and the heavy bags of rupees also, that have fallen to the lot of one less worthy than myself to possess them!”
“O my son, beware of desiring that which is another’s!” said Isaac, the aged catechist, who had been a friend and teacher of Jai Singh from his childhood, and who, chancing to be near, had overheard the exclamation. “In the Word of God it is written: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s” (Ex. xx. 17).
“What matters the thought, if the act be blameless?” inquired Jai Singh. “I will never lift up my hand to steal or to slay.”
“As the seed to the plant, as the crocodile’s egg to the living reptile, so is the thought of the heart to the deed of the hand,” answered old Isaac. “Man seeth the action, God searcheth the heart. In God’s sight he that hateth, murders; and he that coveteth, steals. It is written in the Bible: The love of money is the root of all evil (1 Tim. vi. 10). Dig up the root, and no poisonous fruits can appear.”
Jai Singh shrank from the purity of such a religion as this, which must convict all men of sin before God. Rather impatiently he said, “Unless evil be seen, I deny that it is evil at all.”
“Hear an incident of my life which has been to me as a parable,” said old Isaac. “Before I had one white hair in my beard, I went on a journey in a mountainous part of our land. Going up a steep place, my horse stumbled and threw me, and I fell down a precipice; but my dress caught in some bushes, and though hurt I was able to regain the road and again mount my horse. Riding on again, I had not gone far when a cheetah burst from the thicket, and suddenly sprang upon me. I was a strong man then, and carried a sharp knife in my girdle; after a struggle the cheetah was killed, but I bear on me the marks of its claws to this day. Weary and weakened by the loss of blood, I was forced to stop at the nearest house, though it was the house of one whom I had known as a deadly enemy. He received me with sullen looks, but denied me not rest nor food. He brought to me a cup of wine, and I drank it; I knew not that there was poison in the cup. The evil that I saw not, O Jai Singh! was worse than the more startling dangers through which I had passed. I suffered more from the poison hidden in my frame, than from the fall down the precipice, or the claws of the cheetah.”
“How is it that you are here to-day, if you were poisoned?” inquired Jai Singh.
“When, after leaving my enemy’s house, I arrived at the place for which I was bound,” replied Isaac, “I was in sore sickness and pain; but I found there a doctor of great skill, who gave me a powerful antidote, and after much suffering I rose from my sick-bed healed. And from the Christian doctor I also received knowledge of the only antidote for sin,—whether it be the open sin which man condemns, or the poison of sin, such as covetousness, lying concealed in the heart.”