Et tu, Brute! (And thou too, O Brutus!) cried Cæsar as he fell pierced, indeed, with twenty-three wounds, but slain at the sight of his beloved Brutus among the murderers. That was death in death. And if my enemy had done this to me, verily, I could have borne it. But thou, my friend and my familiar!—This agonizing cry—shrieked so that all the world may hear by Cæsar, Wolsey, Joan—rises in bitter silence in many a heart. Only those we love have power to wound us; and we stand defenceless, unresenting, dim-wondering, yet loving. Nancy of the slums under the murderous blows of Bill Sykes, Cæsar as he gazes at Brutus, Joan of Arc blessing Charles VII. from her Calvary of flames—shine as radiant silhouettes of human nobility on the somber overshadowing background of human ingratitude.
Joan’s Voices.
“This pure, this gentle creature cannot lie!
No, if enchantment binds me, ’tis from Heaven
My spirit tells me she is sent from God.”—Schiller.
Both the French and the English firmly believed that Joan of Arc was aided by some preternatural power; but was she borne upward by “airs from heaven or blasts from hell”? Burned at the stake as a Witch, Relapsed Heretic, Accurst—thus died the Maid whom the Church has raised to her altars.
But ere we too scathingly condemn that scene, disgraceful alike to the Church and to human nature, which was enacted in the Rouen market-place May 31, 1531; it might be well to turn a balancing gaze upon our own Cotton Mather madness which had its orgies upon Gallows Hill, Salem, June-September 1692. Nor are we of the passing day and hour sufficiently washed white of the soot of Occultism that we may conspicuously disclaim the witch-burning at Rouen. In the late Christian Science rupture accusations of “mental assassination” and the use of “malicious animal magnetism” were mutually charged. Just what that may mean in the esoteric circle, I know not; but full meaning and full knowledge would doubtless ramify back to Rouen.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”
Yes, infinitely more: all that the human eye can see or the ear hear or the intellect know is but as a shore-lapping wave of the infinite ocean of the Seen, the Heard, the Known. And what if some eye be abnormally endowed with vision, or some ear be attuned beyond the normal for hearing, or some finely fashioned intellect transcend ordinary knowing—shall it not inevitably see more or hear more or know more of that infinite ocean? and shall it not fearlessly and fully make known what it sees or hears or knows? And then what? Why we gregarious Little People, spitefully content in limitations, will with consenting conscience, condemn the witch to death.