The Winepress

by Christine Beals

He had been so sure of his standards, so certain of the infallibility of his ideals. He felt that if the voice of the Lord had spoken to him, as it spoke to Moses from the burning bush it could not have brought to him more conviction than the ideals of his early manhood had afforded him--yet he had failed, his life was a wreck, a derelict stranded on the shore of time.

His mind had been so filled with the convictions that had come to him with the stamp and seal of his forefathers upon them that he had not grasped the possibilities, nor realized the demands of the vital, ever-present and progressive forces about him. And as one who starts upon a race bound and handicapped from the start, the inevitable had come upon him. But these underlying causes that had made shipwreck of his hopes and a tragedy of his existence had been to him as an unwritten book, unseen and unknown. And always when his mind had gone back over the past he had seen only the strewn and broken wreckage of his hopes, and the future was black with a dumb agony that he had no heart to face.

But one of the facts of this creation of ours and of the eternal verities that govern it is that sincerity never seeks in vain; when the sincerity of the soul asks, divine Love does not, could not, fail to respond. We must understand that there are many phases of mortal thought that parade under the mantle of sincerity which have little or no relation to that which is truly sincere. Sometimes we, as untutored children, ask for that which we would instantly cast from us were our requests granted; many times we beg and plead for that from which our very souls would shrink and cower; and very many times our motives are so obscure and our desires so warped and misshapen that we have no logical conception of that for which we ask. But the eternal fact remains: Man never yet asked for bread and was given a stone, never yet asked for an egg and was given a scorpion.

Now the man's life, bare to the quivering quick, stripped of every hypothesis, analysis and subterfuge of philosophy, was asking, sincerely asking, why he had failed. His self-righteousness slipped from him and lay like a cast-off garment at his feet; prejudice, which had held him in so firm a grip, retreated and slunk back into the dim, illusory creation where its multiform delusions have their inception; pride, humbled and forsaken, trailed its glittering pageant out of the range of his vision.

The branches of a tree outside the cave swayed in the wind and brushed against the rocks with a soft, rustling sound, and the birds called across the cavern and circled about the man's motionless figure. But outward conditions, location, surroundings and lapse of time were for the time no part of Mr. Thorpe's experience. The sun crept up in the heavens until it reached the meridian. The dog, the man's only companion in his rambles, came to his side and thrust his nose against the canvas bag, but receiving no attention, stretched himself again patiently beside his master.

When Mr. Thorpe raised his eyes from the stones at his feet he was not surprised at that which he saw. That which he beheld was exactly that which he raised his eyes expecting to see. On one side of the cavern there stood a grim, relentless form, heavy-browed and strongly built. There were iron bands about the waist and thighs and iron circles on the ankles, arms and wrists. One hand held an iron sword, the other an iron pen. And branded deep into the forehead in letters of red-hot iron was the word INTOLERANCE. On the opposite side of the cavern stood a figure of less massive proportions, of easy grace and supple bearing, clothed in a simple, clinging garment of white. In one outstretched hand was held a burning torch, and in the other a pen of light, tipped with a diamond point. Glittering gems upon the forehead fashioned the word FREEDOM. From out of the past they came, years, centuries, ages were upon them.

Now on the stones of the cavern walls each figure began to write, carefully, silently, remorselessly, until slab after slab stretching away into the dim recesses of the cave was filled with the history of the past. Every word that the iron pen recorded stood out clearly and distinctly, and there was no choice but to read. The silent spectator felt his senses shrink and quiver and his heart grow sick as the record passed before him, but he was not spared. His body grew rigid and every sense was in revolt, but the iron-bound hand did not waver nor relent. So vivid was the record that all the awful carnage and bloodshed, torture and persecution were as though actually transpiring before his tortured gaze, and the air was filled with the shrieks of the dying and groans and invectives of the tortured and tormented. But the physical horror of it did not compare with the agony of noble minds and fearless souls whose mental anguish the iron-bound hand did not hesitate to record.

The silent man, alone with these strange creations of his brain, fell to tracing the work of this iron-bound monster back to its birth or beginning. And as he pondered and questioned, it came to him with a distinct shock that the first intolerance was that which opposed itself to God's creation in the Garden of Eden. Its first form was that of a sinuous serpent; its voice that of the subtle testimony of the senses! He found also that this monster had assumed a form, and found a voice in every age in which mortal man had lived. And it came to him straight as an arrow and as keen to his highly-wrought senses that the relentless iron pen was writing, along with the other records, the history of the Church, the Church which had seemed to him to be infallible, which had come to him fraught with the faith of his ancestors, steeped in the blood of martyrs, and which held within its sacred teachings the only possible redemption for mankind, the Church for which he had labored. But he was not yet spared; remorse and contrition were having their way with him, and the sweat of agony was on his brow. For the first time in his life he entertained a doubt as to a literal hell; for what could a quenchless fire do to the physical body, compared to this which the bigotry and intolerance of his life were uncovering before him?

It was a relief to turn from this mental gloom, this verge of madness, from all this record of pain and woe, the history of the world's wrongs, to turn and behold the supple figure in white, writing with the diamond's flashing point. Here was a record of God's creation, untouched by mortal sense; a story of man untempted and woman unbeguiled; all things the image and reflection of the one God. Only that which is good and true and pure, that which is noble and righteous, was recorded by the flashing pen; the freedom which God gives to man can write no other record.

The events of the ages passed as a panorama before the solitary observer. From the bookshelves of the world were selected volumes written by a master hand, books that had stood the test of time and lived through the years. And the fact stood out with distinctness that the souls of the men who wrote them were not shackled, they were not slaves to another's will, nor bound by another's power, but that the minds that conceived them stood in absolute freedom before God. He was made to feel the throb and pulse of freedom, unbound and unfettered, that surged through the life of the artists that have painted the world's famous pictures and fashioned its works of art. He saw man expanding beneath the touch of the Infinite, answerable to the Infinite only.