If that fatal dart we feel,
Art nor charm nor skill can heal.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." These are the words of Christ, and although I do not doubt that they have been understood according to the deep wisdom with which they were uttered, yet I will discourse a little, not upon them, for they have no need of comment, but after their instruction. Man should avoid those studies which make him doubt. He should love himself first, but in a just manner, then his family, then his country. There have been, and perhaps there still are, men who love their country more than themselves; but an acute observer will easily understand that sacrificing one's life (compared to which, everything else seems but of little value) is generally induced by a great love of praise and an uncontrollable thirst for fame; and that in truth they love renown better than life. The soul should be neither a Menade nor a Bacchante through the fields of knowledge; science has its fatal orgies, more than dissipation; the waters do not always flow clear, fresh, and sweet from its urn; they are sometimes poisoned. The tree of knowledge is not only, not the tree of life, but the Lord said to man:—"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The man who has seen too much, like Delia contemplating the sun, has become blind with too much light; his heart has turned to ashes, he is not exalted by anything, has faith in nothing; virtue and crime, morality and vice, sound the same to him, they are like sweet fruits in one country, and poisonous ones in another, the fault of the earth or the climate: the soul is to him a breath which ceases with death, home the place where he shelters his head from the storm: God a name.
Man should be satisfied to stop short at the quia:[44] for if he trusts himself to travel thus at random through the regions of knowledge, the evils resulting from this restless wandering would be equal to those which are the consequence of continual travelling throughout the physical world. The latter takes away his family, friends, and home: the former his faith and affections. Job truly compares too much knowledge to a heap of ashes, for it is in truth the most unhappy remains of a fire which will never burn again. I have already said the Creator should have suspended truth as the only luminary from the firmament: for then no one could have doubted its beneficial light and heat, as perhaps some have done of the Sun: and I say perhaps, since there have been men who doubted whether the sun was a mass of fire, believing it to be rather a mass of ice causing a rotary motion in the molecules of the air:—which is a German idea. Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, represents the symbol of this insatiable desire of knowledge: he travels and travels over desert shores, over burning sands, over snowy fields: he has seen the cupola of St. Peter's, the mosques of Constantinople, and the temples of Brahma and Buddha: he has seen dogs, oxen, crocodiles, and serpents worshipped: even onions raised to the dignity of Gods!
Porrum et cepe nefas violare, ac frangere morsu. O sanctas gentes, quibus haec nascuntur in hortis Numina!—Juvenal, Satire 15.
He has seen bloodless sacrifices, sacrifices of blood and human victims; he has seen everything: he has forgotten all he knew, and all that he has learned is not sufficient to appease the feverish craving of his intellect: all that he wishes to know in order to satisfy his burning thirst, is inclosed within the urn of destiny: he hates to return home, for no one expects him there: his relatives are dead, generations have forgotten his name: he loves no one, and no one loves him: he refuses friends, rejects affections, and avoids binding ties which he MUST unbind to-morrow. Perhaps in that great day when God will reveal his eternal face to the vast multitude of created things, his agony will be appeased, and God will give him rest, not for having loved much, but because he suffered much.[45]
Be contented, race of man, at the quia:—
State contente umane genti al quia, Che se potuto aveste veder tutto, Mestier non era partorir Maria.—Dante.
else you will feel the earth tremble beneath your feet, and the heavens fall upon your heads. You grow up educated in the supreme idea of a Being who animates with the breath of his immortal mouth all that has life in the universe; who breaks the oppressor like a fragile reed, and shelters the oppressed under his mighty wing; but in travelling you will find people who neither know God nor worship Him; but make to themselves a God of dogs, serpents, oxen, elephants, and onions, and often of a monster hideous to look upon, but much more hideous in his bloody rites. It is piety in you to watch over your old infirm father, to comfort him in his last moments with loving cares, and close his eyes in peace; and yet there were and still are people, who esteem it filial piety to drag their parents from their suffering beds, and hanging them to the branches of trees, light beneath them great fires, crying in their giddy dance around them:—"when the fruit is ripe, it must fall,"—until the body falls and is consumed in the fire. And you, fathers in our beloved country, what sufferings would you not undergo, in order not to see your beloved children torn from your arms, or murdered?
In China, they offer children as food to dogs, or throw them into the river. In Africa they sell them; and Clapperton tells of a negro woman, who offered her children for sale to him, and because he would not buy them, cursed and beat them because they did not please the white man. We deem it sacred to bury our beloved dead within splendid monuments or tombs; elsewhere it is sacred to feed on their limbs. Remorse and public hate await him who can and does not save a drowning man: in China remorse and reproach are his reward who saves the shipwrecked sailor. We have laws and sentences against robbery, and the more skill and cunning do the thieves show, the more are they punished. The Spartans rewarded thieves, and the more skill they displayed the greater was the reward.