The sibyl—agitated by one of those enthusiastic impulses which gave her so much influence over their imaginations, and which often modified the opinions and decisions of the chiefs themselves—broke the circle, and rushed into the midst. Her language, always energetic and burning; her tall form, her floating drapery, her thin frame trembling yet majestic, the convulsive tremor of her ever veiled head, and withal, a grace which at once betokened the former existence of beauty which moves the mind when it ceases to appeal to the senses;—in fine, even her broken voice, which at once assumed a strange expression, had conspired to make her a mysterious being, and invested her with persuasive power and irresistible prestige.
All were silent to hear the voice of her inspiration. Consuelo was perhaps more moved than others, because she was aware of her singular story. She asked herself, shuddering with strange emotion, if this spectre, escaped from the tomb, really belonged to the world, and if, after having spoken, she would not disappear in the air, like the flame on the tripod, which made her appear so blue and transparent.
"Hide from the light these affirmations," said Wanda, with a shudder. "They are impious oaths when what is invoked is an instrument of hatred and murder. I know the old world attached the sword to the side of all reputed free, as a mark of independence and virtue. I well know that, in obedience to the ideas you have here preserved in spite of yourselves, the sword is the symbol of honor—that you deem you make holy engagements when, like citizens of old Rome, you swear on the sword. But here you would profane a solemn vow. Swear, rather, by this flame and tripod—the symbol of life, light, and divine love. Do you yet need emblems and visible signs? Are you yet idolators? Do the figures around this temple represent aught but ideas? O! swear rather by your own sentiments, by your better instincts, by your own heart; and if you dare not swear by the living God, the true, eternal, and holy religion, swear by pure humanity, by the glorious promptings of your courage, by the chastity of this young woman and her husband's love—swear by the genius and beauty of Consuelo, that your desire, that even your thoughts will never profane this holy arc of matrimony, this invisible and mystic altar on which the hand of an angel engraves the vow of love.
"Do you know what love is?" said the sibyl, after having paused for an instant, in a voice which every moment became more clear and penetrating. "If you did, oh! you venerable chiefs of our order and priests of our worship, you would never suffer that formula, which God alone can ratify, to be pronounced before you; and which, consecrated by men, is a kind of profanation of the divinest of mysteries. What power can you give to an engagement which in its very nature is miraculous? Yes, the confounding of two wills in one is in itself a miracle, for every heart is in itself free by virtue of a divine right. Yet when two souls yield and become bound to each other, their mutual possession becomes sacred, and as much a divine right as individual liberty. You see this is a miracle—that God reserves its mystery to himself, as he does that of life and death. You are about to ask this man and woman if during their lives they will belong respectively to each other. Their fervor is such that they will reply, 'Not only for life, but forever.' God then inspires them, by the miracle of love, with more faith, power, virtue, than you can or dare to ask. Away, then, with sacrilegious oaths and gross laws. Leave them their ideal, and do not bind them to reality by chains of gold. Leave the care of the continuation of the miracle to God. Prepare their souls for its accomplishment; form the ideal of love in them; exhort, instruct; extol and demonstrate the glory of fidelity, without which there is no moral honor, no sublime love. Do not come between, however, like Catholic priests, like magistrates, to interfere by the imposition of an oath. I tell you again, men cannot make themselves responsible, or be guardians of the perpetuity of a miracle. What know you of the secrets of the Eternal? Have we already penetrated the temple of the future, in that celestial world where, beneath sacred groves, man will converse with God as one friend does with another? Has a law for indissoluble marriage emanated from the mouth of God? Have his designs been proclaimed on earth? Have you, children of men, promulgated this law unanimously? Have the Roman pontiffs never dissolved marriage? They call themselves infallible! Under the pretext of the nullity of certain engagements, have they not pronounced real divorces, the scandal of which history has preserved in its records? The Christian societies, the reformed sects, the Greek church, following the example of the Mosaic dispensation, and all ancient religions, frankly introduced divorce into modern law. What then becomes of the holiness and efficacy of a vow to God, when it is maintained that man can release us from it? Touch not love by the profanation of marriage. You cannot stifle it in pure hearts. Consecrate the conjugal tie by exhortations, by prayers, by a publicity which will make it respectable, by touching ceremonies. You should do so, if you be our priests—that is to say, our aids, our guides, our advisers, our consolers, our lights. Prepare souls for the sanctity of a sacrament; and, as a father of a family seeks to establish his children in positions of prosperity, dignity, and security, occupy yourselves—our spiritual fathers—assiduously in fixing your sons and daughters in circumstances favorable to the development of true love, virtue, and sublime fidelity. When you shall have analysed them by religious ordeals, and ascertained that in their mutual attraction there is neither cupidity, vanity, nor frivolous intoxication, nor that sensual blindness that is without ideality—when you have convinced yourselves that they appreciate the grandeur of their sentiments, the holiness of their duty, and the liberty of their choice, then permit them to endow each other with their own inalienable liberty. Let their families, their friends, and the vast family of the faithful, unite to ratify this sacrament. Attend to my words! Let the sacrament be a religious permission, a paternal and social permission, an encouragement, an exhortation to perpetuate the engagement. Let it not be a command, an obligation, a law, with menaces and punishments—a forced slavery, with scandal, prisons and chains if it be violated; for in this way you would reverse the whole miracle in all its entirety accomplished on earth. Eternally fruitful providence—God, the indefatigable dispenser of grace, always will conduct before you young, fervent, and innocent couples, ready to bind themselves for time and eternity. Your anti-religious law and your inhuman sacrament will always abrogate the effect of grace in them. The inequality of conjugal rights between the sexes—impiety made venerable by social laws—the difference of duty in public opinion—all the absurd prejudices following in the wake of bad institutions, will ever extinguish the faith and enthusiasm of husband and wife. Those who are most sincere, who are most inclined to fidelity, will be the first to grow sad, and become terrified at the duration of the engagement, and thus disenchant each other. The abjuration of individual liberty is in effect contrary to the will of nature and the dictates of conscience when men participate in it, for they oppress it with the yoke of ignorance and brutality. It is in conformity with the will of generous hearts, and necessary to the religious instincts of strong minds, when God gives us the means to contend against the various snares man has placed around marriage, so as to make it the tomb of love, happiness, and virtue, and a "sworn prostitution," as our fathers the Lollards, whom you know and often invoke, called it. Give to God what is God's, and take from Cæsar what is not his."
"And you, my children," said she, turning towards Albert and Consuelo, "you, who have sworn to reverence the conjugal tie, did not, perhaps, know the true meaning of what you did. You obeyed a generous impulse, and replied with enthusiasm to the appeal of honor. That is worthy of you, disciples of a victorious faith! You have performed more than an act of individual virtue—you have consecrated a principle without which there can be neither chastity nor conjugal fidelity.
"O love! sublime flame—so powerful and so fragile, so sudden and so fugitive! light from heaven, seemingly passing through our existence, to die before we do, for fear of consuming and annihilating us, we feel you are a vivifying fire, emanating from God himself, and that whoever would fix it in his bosom and retain it to his last hour, always ardent, always in its pristine vigor, would be the happiest and noblest of men. Thus the disciples of the ideal will always seek to prepare sanctuaries for you in their bosoms, that you may not hasten to return to heaven. But alas! you whom we have made it a virtue to honor, have declined to be renewed at the dictate of our institutions, and have remained free as the bird of the air, capricious as the flame on the altar. You seem to laugh at our oaths, our contracts and our will. You fly from us in spite of all we have invented to fix you in your manners. You no longer inhabit the harem, guarded by the vigilant sentinels which Christian society places between the sentence of the magistrate and the yoke of public opinions. Whence, then, comes your inconstancy and your ingratitude? Oh! mysterious influence! oh, love! cruelly symbolised under the form of an infant and blind god! what tenderness and what contempt inspire human hearts you enkindle with your blaze; and whom you desert, leaving them to wither amid the anguish of repentance, and, more frightful yet, of disgust! Why is it that man kneels to you in every portion of the globe—that you are exalted and deified—that divine poets call you the soul of the world—that barbarous nations sacrifice human victims to you, precipitating wives on the fire at the husband's funeral—that young hearts call you in their gentlest dreams, and that old men curse life when you abandon them to the horror of solitude? Whence comes that adoration—sometimes sublime, sometimes fanatical—which has been decreed you from the golden infancy of humanity to our age of iron, if you be but a chimera, the dream of a moment of intoxication, an error of the imagination, excited by the delirium of the sense. Ah! it is not a vulgar instinct, a mere animal want. You are not the blind child of Paganism, but the true son of God, and very essence of the divinity. You have not yet revealed yourself to us, except through the mist of errors; and you would not make your abode among us, because you were unwilling to be profaned. You will return to us, as in the days of the fabulous Astrea, as in the visions of poets, to fix your abode in our terrestrial paradise, when we shall, by our sublime virtues, have merited the presence of such a guest. How blessed then will this abode be to man! and then it will be well to have been born."
"We will then be brothers and sisters, and unions, freely contracted, will be maintained by your own power. When, in place of this terrible contest, whose continuance is impossible—conjugal fidelity being forced to resist infamous attempts at debauch, hypocritical seduction or mad violence, hypocritical friendship and wise corruption—every husband will find around him chaste sisters, himself the jealous and delicate guardian of the happiness of a sister confided to him as a companion; while every wife will find in other men so many brothers of her husband, proud of her happiness and protectors of her peace; then the faithful wife will no longer be the fragile flower that hides herself to maintain the treasures of her chastity, often a deserted victim, wasting in solitude and tears, unable to revive in her husband's mind the flame she has preserved in purity in her own. The brother then will not be forced to avenge his sister, and slay him she loves and regrets, in obedience to the dictates of false honor. The mother will not tremble for her daughter, nor the child blush for its parent. The husband then will be neither suspicious nor despotic; and, on her part, the wife will escape the bitterness of the victim and the rancor of the slave; atrocious suffering and abominable injustice will cease to sully the peace of the domestic hearth. It may be some day, that the priest and the magistrate, relying with reason on the permanent miracle of love, will consecrate in God's name indissoluble unions, with as much wisdom and justice as they now ignorantly display impiety and folly.
"But these glorious days are not yet come. Here, in this mysterious temple, where we are now united in obedience to the evangelists, three or four in the name of the Lord, we can only dream of divinest joys. It is an oracle which then escapes from their bosoms. Eternity is the ideal of love, as it is of faith. The human soul never comes nearer to the apex of its power and lucidity than in the enthusiasm of a great love. The always of lovers is an eternal revelation, a divine manifestation, casting its sovereign light and blessed warmth over every instant of their union. Woe to whoever profanes this sacred formula! He falls from grace to sin—extinguishes the faith, power and light in his heart."
"Albert," said Consuelo, "I receive your promise, and adjure you to accept mine. I feel myself under the power of a miracle, and the always of our brief lives does not resemble the eternity for which I give myself to you."
"Sublime and rash Consuelo," said Wanda, with a smile of enthusiasm, which seemed to pass through her veil, "ask God for eternity with him you love, as a recompense of your fidelity to him in this brief life."