Klytia: A Story of Heidelberg Castle

by Adolf Hausrath

Paul shook his head sadly: "Even if that were the case, how can one tainted by suspicion, a racked cripple, a walking corpse stretch out his arms towards this young sweet life? It would indeed be a crime."

At that minute a young pale head bowed down over him, fresh warm lips were fastened on his pale mouth. "I will never nurse any but this patient," she said in a low trembling voice.

"Lydia," cried Paolo in his delight. "Thou art willing to bind thy happy destiny to that of a cripple?"

"I shall make him once more as healthy and frolicsome as the squirrel on the tops of the trees," joyously laughed Klytia. A sunbeam of joy passed over the face of the pale man. The artist retired however to his studio, turned the marble bust with its face to the wall, and began assiduously to work at the façade of Herr Belier's future house.

"Hast thou in truth chosen the Papist, the stranger as the companion of thy life-time?" asked Erastus with a grave shake of the head, as Klytia with her arm wound round Paul announced her determination to her father.

"His land shall be my land and his God shall be my God," replied Klytia with an inward joy, which Erastus knew he could not oppose.

"I did not wish to mix the things of this world with those of another," now said Paul modestly, "otherwise I should have told you that I cannot return to the old Communion. Before this I used to rage against your church, which broke down the altars, and laid waste the sacred places; but you have one great advantage over us, you have no slaves. Moreover dogma has no longer for me the same importance that it used to have. Each of us strove after the right doctrine, but who can tell in this day of shattering of opinions and ideas what the right doctrine may be? You persecuted the Baptists and Arians owing to true principles. The Calvinists persecuted you, the Palatines hate both Zwingliites and Lutherans. I however hated all Baptists, Zwingliites, Lutherans and Calvinists. We have all steeped our hands in blood in honor of that God who said to us: 'thou shalt not kill.' If we continue in this way, soon in this beauteous land the groans of the tortured and the blood of the slain will cry to heaven as in the Netherlands and in France, and what that may mean, is only known to one who may have experienced it on his own body. One must have looked the most terrible death in the face, to be convinced, how small in reality is the belief for the which we are ready to die. As lately I was pondering over in my prison: Who can indeed possess a certain and sure promise of the Spirit, that his doctrine is of God, where then in the ocean of deceit is the safe rock on which we may take a firm foothold? The words of a heretic whom I formerly deeply despised came uppermost to me. That Baptist whom you yourself know. 'The Spirit,' he cried once to me, 'exists not outwardly in dogma and in cultus, but only in the life. Then only does it appear in that one sees, feels and hears it. We know more certainly the right that should be done, than the right that should be taught. Therefore true belief is this, that you do the will of God, not that you revolve principles of dogma concerning things invisible which are not of man but of God.' At that time I covered my ears with my hands, so as not to hear such blasphemous arguments, but they came back to me in the stillness of the prison. When the witch acknowledged that she had never seen the devil, for the which we burnt her, the idea stirred me to the roots of my heart, for what uncertainties we often commit a certain wrong. All our errors arise from our thinking too much of God's honor, too little of his law, speak too much of the invisible world, too little of the visible. We were pious because we murdered for the sake of another world; we were pleasing in God's sight because for the other world we lied, deceived and led men astray, and because we made our love of power and right the affair of the Deity, all our other sins should therefore be pardoned. Our care for that unknown world has led us to despise this visible one. To become angels in heaven, we were ravening wolves on earth. Only when I thought over the word which the heretic had called out to me: 'The spirit is nowhere visible but in the life,' then only did the scales fall from my eyes, and I determined to commit the doctrines of God into God's own hands, and to do in this life, what he had plainly revealed to me in heart and by word."

Erastus returned no answer, as Herr Belier came in with Xylander who wished to greet Erastus. After a time they were joined by Felix, who within the last few days had looked less cheerful than usual. "Our friend would leave us," said the Huguenot. "He goes first to Innsbruck to visit Master Colins and then returns to Naples. In vain I have begged him to renounce papistry; he declares that he will not cut himself off from his people, and that art-loving Italy will never raise itself to our worship of God in Spirit and in Truth."

"You are right," said Erastus kindly. "We cannot make use of the Papal Church as it now is and the Italians cannot use our churches as they now are. It is sufficient for us to think out our thoughts and to act accordingly, the Italians wish them represented before them sensuously. Perhaps the time may come when this dissonance solves itself into a higher harmony, as Lydia once said, in which the white surplices and black gowns will be as much things of the past as are to-day Garizim und Moriah, or the disputes of the Levites and Samaritans, nevertheless I fear that the day is much further off than Lydia thinks. But we have indeed the promises of a time, when there will be no temple and no priest and I believe that the world will give a sigh of relief when the last Theologian has been buried." "I should myself like to be standing by that grave," said Xylander vivaciously. "I would place with this humanitarian all the implements with which he worked, his symbolical books, bishops' mitres, pitch torches, the pears of torture, and a bit of Sylvan's bloody shirt which was wickedly sent to me on the day after the poor man's death. They would trumpet in the next world that Kalchas and Teiresias, Augurs and Haruspices were soft-hearted fellows in comparison with those who came after them. When I consider the amount of blood that has been shed since the days of Constantine to the present time, I wish that a Church had never existed!" "No," replied Erastus, "it was not my meaning that we should overthrow the Church because the priests do not satisfy us. That would be like tearing down a house, because the owner was not popular. We must only place it in other hands, rule it in a different manner, and for this reform, which is so necessary, I know of no better fundamental doctrine than that, which Magister Paul intends to preach for the future, that the Spirit exists only outwardly in one way, and that is in the Life."

"I hope sincerely," said Felix turning to his brother, "that thou are not serious in wishing to spend thy days in misery in this land of fogs, and in cold churches without music, to waste thy life full of hope in fruitless preachings unaided by art? No, come with me. Thou art an Italian and can'st not live without the aesthetic, and if thou remainest, wilt soon enough have to sing out the super flumina Babylonis."