When will humanity be great enough and good enough to distinguish between the fault of the potter and the fault of the pot! When can it look over the myriads of human beings, each with his flaws and limitations, and pity instead of blame!
The history of the past is a record of man’s cruel inhumanity to man; of one imperfect vessel accusing and shattering another for the faults of both. In ancient times and amongst savage tribes, the old, the infirm, and the diseased were led out and put to death; even later, the maniac and imbecile were fettered, chained, beaten, and imprisoned because they were different from other men. The world has grown a little wiser, and perhaps humaner, as the centuries have passed away. We have learned to build asylums, and treat the afflicted with tenderness and care. We have learned not to blame the dwarf for his stature; the hunchback for his load; the deaf because they cannot hear, and the blind because they cannot see. We do not expect the midget to carry the giant’s load, or the cripple to triumph in a contest of speed. We establish a regulation size for policemen and soldiers, but we do not put a man to death because his stature is below the standard fixed. We forgive the size of the foot, the length of the arm, the shade of the hair, the color of the eye, and even the form of the skull. But, while we do not blame a man because he has an ill-shaped head, we punish him because the brain within conforms to the bone which molds its form. The world has made guns and swords, racks and dungeons, chains and whips, blocks and gibbets, and to these have dragged an endless procession thro’ all the past. It has penned and maimed, tortured and killed, because the potter’s work was imperfect and the clay was weak. During all the ages it has punished mental deformity as a crime, and without pity or regret has crushed the imperfect vessels beneath its feet. Every jail, every scaffold, every victim—is a monument to its cruelty and blind unreasoning wrath. Whether it was a fire kindled to burn a heretic in Geneva,—a gibbet erected to kill a witch in Salem,—or a scaffold made to put to death an ordinary “criminal,” it has ever been the same,—the punishment of the creature for the creator’s fault. There might be some excuse if man could turn from the frail, cracked vessels, and bring to trial the great potter for the imperfect work of his hand.
But we live in the shadows; we can see only the causes and effects that are the closest to our eyes. If the clouds would rise, and the sun shine bright, and our vision reach out into time and space, we might find that these cracked vessels serve as high a purpose in a great, broad scheme, as the finest clay, wrought in the most beautiful and perfect form. The following stanza was born of this philosophy and would inevitably come from the broad, charitable brain that had studied the creeds that told of the cruelty of the great Maker, but whose brain and conscience had not been stunted and warped by their palsying dogmas:
Then said a Second—“Ne’er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy;
And he that with his hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.”
The cruel religious dogmas, which in Omar’s land and Age, as in our own, blackened both man and his Maker, had no terrors for a soul like his. He could not believe in eternal punishment. The doctrine was a slander, alike to God and man. He felt something of the greatness of a force that could permeate and move the countless worlds, which make up the limitless, unfathomed infinite we call the Universe. He saw in man one of the smallest and most insignificant toys created by this power to serve some unknown end; and he could not believe that the Master-Builder would demand of his imperfect children more than he had furnished them the strength to give. His faith in the justice of man’s case before the great Judge is shown in the following stanza:
Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,