CHAPTER XIII
NATURE WORSHIP
And this is not wrong. Buddha bids us seek truth and morality without hope. The sentimentalist would say, ‘Work for the love of labour;’ but we hold that this is not inducement enough. Walk hard, because fatigue ought to be a pleasure? No! walk to produce the fatigue, that you may be able to know to the full extent the delightful flavour of rest. Work, be it at painting or writing, that you may see the idea embodied and perpetuated; if it be at bricklaying, that you may see the wall rise up, layer by layer; help the needy and afflicted, that you may comfort them; raise the fallen, that you may see them rise.
Be pure and charitable and as sinless as you can with the help of God, that you may stand holy in that holy Light. Use your influence to make those purer around you, that you may have only the incense of purity surrounding you now and hereafter. Thus, to be virtuous after the creed of Gautama is work such as Hercules worked at the stables of Augeas; to be virtuous, as Jesus Christ taught, is to be inspired with the presence of God all through earth’s life and stand unsubdued at its close.
When Hannibal, and after him Napoleon, crossed the Alps, Italy lay to their hand; the certain prospect of Italy, fertile and rich, aided them in the removal of fearsome barriers, imparted to them the daring to brave toppling crags, slipping ice-ridged streams, appalling heights, quivering avalanches, swaying to and fro as they passed, swinging over in their rear with that muffled soul-sickening thud which they knew meant a snowy grave to those behind. Italy, the grape-hung, the sun-laved, was before them on the other side, with its wealth and power—nay, it was with them, in their hunger and bitter cold, as the presence of God is with the devout every hour of his earth-life.
But when Bonaparte came within sight of Moscow, the vision of which had supported him and his famished army all through those awful icy leagues, and beheld in the light of those blazing domes the destruction of his hopes, then, and only then, the full bitterness of that winter march began.
So with the warrior prince-leader of Israel, when he stood up face to face with God and cried out in the passionate strength of his man-thirst, ‘Let me go over and see the good land’—the land he had worked and walked so long to see, for which he had given up all the pomp of the Egyptian court, and, still greater sacrifice, the erudite society of the sumptuous priesthood, to consort with a nation of spiritless, ignorant, and discontented slaves.
I like to embody this great leader of Israel, not as his countrymen knew him when he led them out of the land of bondage, the snowy-bearded grave statesman and law-giver, but as the Prince Rameses, the mighty Egyptian Lord of Lords, the favoured son of the Queen Amense, always the companion of philosophers and sages, hearing the petitions of his people in the outer courts, driving his gold-embossed chariot between long avenues of sphinxes, reviewing his countless hosts in the open plain outside the great royal city of On, crowned victor as he swept home from battle, over garlands of roses and lilies, with armies of white-vestured priests of Ptah, dancing girls, singing maidens, and the sacred women of Bast (the lady of Auchta), all surrounding with fumes of incense and hymns of praise Egypt’s pride Rameses the Mighty.
