The thoughts of M. Jérôme Coignard, then,—here somewhat to retrace my argument,—untiringly return to the most diverting of all themes, to the relationship between God and His children, and what familiary etiquette seems most adapt to keep that relationship an affable one. I know that religion is, just now, rather out-of-date. I know that nowadays a great deal of atheism is going about among the foolish and unreflective. But we may wiseliest, I am sure, put out of mind the notion of there being no God, and of the dead finding beyond the black door at the end of the gray corridor, that silver-handled door which is the sole exit from our workaday existence, nothing whatever. Even if one would, upon the whole, prefer to find there nothing, here it remains, in every sense, a rather wasteful parade of agnosticism to admit the existence of nothing.
It is wasteful because no diversion is to be had of thinking about nothing. But any amount of diversion can be gained from meditation upon the strange realms beyond the tomb for which we may, quite conceivably, all be en route: for in this place also is the proffered lure that ageless aspiration toward lands which are in nothing familiar.
These conjectural kingdoms were, of course, the earliest chosen subject matter for poetic adornment everywhere: poets were, of course, the first to guess at what it would be most interesting to find beyond the black door: and every ancient religion, again, of course, grew up from people indulging in the two habits, now equally antique, of reciting poetry and of taking it seriously. They had at least the excuse that this poetry was magnificent, because in surveying and populating these post mortem countries the creating romanticist has displayed his most imposing reach of power.... Here he, indeed, has need of power: for he is here intent to make sport with his third great opponent, and to play with death; intent to bereave the tyrant of all terribleness, intent to color roseately the dreadful face of doom, intent to detect in the skeleton's multidentate grinning a smile of reassurance. He has done this, handsomely.
—Though, to be sure, these promised paradises are fugacious: over and over again has the Scriptural prophecy been fulfilled as to the heavens being rolled up like a scroll, and one by one the heavens pass away with no greater noise than is made by the staid commentaries of ethnologists. For a winter that will have no ending has oppressed the blissful fields of Aälu: the proud castle of Nin-kigal is pulled down, its seven gates are fallen away into dust; and only pedants now and then recall the lion-guarded golden thrones whereon sat crowned, and endowed with eternal youth, the chief ones and the sages of Babylon. Manannan holds court no more in Emhain. Instead, he amicably shares his somewhat lowlier estate in nothingness with Oannes and Ahura-Mazda; for all of these well know to-day that all promised paradises are fugacious.... Nor may the noblest of heroes any longer win to Xisuthros and that most lovely, nameless land, "at the mouth of the rivers," wherein contentment had no wasting away under the nibbling of time, and human grief was like the fragment of some word in a torn manuscript written in a language which no man any more remembers. The white vase of Thoth is broken, also: he has no need of it to-day, he has desisted from the weighing and the taxing of ghostly imports, now that the narrow bridge which led across the abyss to Sraosha's thousand-pillared palace upon Demavend, has for some while been closed to traffic. For these promised paradises are really very fugacious.... So the carved and shining house of E-Sagila is decayed; and Olympos may not claim to oversee and rule the doings of gods and men from a rather modest official altitude of 9,754 feet. Only the professorial in quest of solar myths now care to thrust and poke, like rag-pickers, among the dust-heaps that were Gimli and Audlang and Vidblain: and time strips every paradise alike of its delights and its believers. Yet, at forty-five, one does not really marvel at the flying of felicity anywhence. And so it seems a stranger pillagement that all the hells, which once were the fine thriving homes of bale and anguish, have been by time's dilapidation bereft of every little discomfort. For the ice of Nifleheim is melted: the dreadful flames of Tartarus have spluttered out like damp firecrackers: even Aratu, wherein reigned mere oblivion, has been swallowed by oblivion.... Poets build against eternity sometimes in dealing with trifles; but never in erecting the eternal homes of men.
Meanwhile it is most gratifying to reflect that, while they lasted, the glories and the terrors of all this celestial architecture divertingly filled many lives with spiritual consolation and salutary dread; have checked extravagance in the way of bloodletting or of chastity or of whatever at the time was vice; have heartened the devout to eat their parents or to burn infidels or to give alms, or to do whatever else at the time was virtue; and have evolved their countless hierarchies of saints and holy persons. Here is no room for irony. Nuns, doubtless, have assumed the veil and entered convents in a religious exaltation as lofty as that with which the virgins of Assyria put on the crown of little cords and went to the temple of Mylitta and their first communion with the first amorous male passer-by. Yet, to uphold the splendors of the paradise of Mohammed his Mussulmans have waged religious wars with a malignity not often surpassed by the servitors of Christ: and Solomon may well have gazed upon the completed Temple, and have beheld the ark of the covenant of the Lord brought in unto the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim, in very much that pious joy with which, from high Tenochtitlan, rapt priests looked down upon the slowly advancing line, two stately miles in length, of warriors who ascended to disembowelment upon the jasper altar of Huitzilopochtli. In fine, these hells and paradises, the while that their bright evanescence lasted, have provided employment, and support, and recreation, and exalted sentiments to boot, for innumerable millions.
Even so, in populating these worlds, the romanticist has been tardy ever to imagine the gods as other than sinister and, as a rule, detestable beings. You see, the creature stays incurably logical, he is as faithful to logic as was Florian de Puysange in the old story, and he reasons from effect to cause. The romanticist has thus from the first been unable to conceive of this world, which he found, upon the whole, abominable, as being the creation of any other sort of Demiurge, or as being ruled by any other sort of overlords. In all heathen theogonies heaven is thus the home of every pravity in the way of lust and greed, of deceit and cruelty and plain childishness; and looms as a mysteriously splendid court of rogues and paphians presided over by a supreme tyrant, who is also a master-rogue. This formula was, very gradually, improved upon by Hebraic poets, who in particular recolored all anaphrodisiacally: so that the Old Testament presents, by and large, a rather novel and a more strait-laced notion of the Demiurge and his immediate entourage; with only here and there, in passages about the sons of God and the daughters of men, and more embarrassingly in the stories of Eve and Sarah, the unedited, unexpurgated, unrecolored legend of divine amours left, to consideration, apparent.
§ 51
But about the Jahveh-Elohim of the Old Testament, who remains by tacit admission the God the Father of the New Testament, I really prefer here not to speak at all. I find it far too difficult to resist an unfair bias in the favor of any target of so many assaults. For His present embarrassment is not merely that Colonel William Jennings Bryan[7] and the Reverend William Ashley Sunday[8] have ruthlessly united to compromise Him with their praise: even the state legislators of Tennessee and Oklahoma, and Florida, have officially endorsed Him in His difference of opinion with Charles Darwin, and rest vociferant in Zion.... Outside, is a troubling babblement about tribal deities and Babylonian myths, and a rather distressing tendency to discuss the birth of Christ from Joseph's point of view. Meanwhile the ordained and inescapable clergy are at pains to suggest that in His official revelations the Lord God of Sabaoth, like the dear, queer, overmodest old fellow He is, has branded Himself with uncommitted atrocities; and in their denials of any really grave wrong-doing, commend Him in terms as high as were, from any pulpit, ever applied to a prohibition agent detected in embezzlement. And meanwhile too, among the advanced young, there is much superior sniffing at His bloodthirstiness and variability of mind, at Jonah's great fish and the bears of Elisha, at Noah's raven and Adam's rib. And I find it droll to reflect that the deity who was everywhere trusted and worshipped in my youth is to-day as little regarded as Jupiter Stator or Marduk of the Bright Glance.
And to me His downfall seems in some ways rather sad. For, as I recall it, He was not thought of as being particularly cruel and dreadful—any longer. And the Old Testament was accepted in its entirety and without any especial difficulty in the Virginia of that day, wherein almost all other generally respected elderly gentlemen had been, as a matter of public knowledge, rather wild in their youth.... As I recall it, there was a prevalent feeling that God had some while since settled down, in very much the manner of your grandfather; and that the Amalekites and the Hittites and all those other demolished persons were in some way connected with the hundreds of Yankee soldiers whom, for equally inexplicable but assuredly good causes, your grandfather had killed so long before you were born. Thus there was no large difficulty about our Episcopalian Jehovah, and really no terribleness....
And I sometimes incline to question if this god—with wild oats undeniably sown and harvested in the past, but with a prevailing disposition nowadays to be agreeable, subject always to His not having been of late upset by one or another mysterious grown-up affair,—was not, after all, the most plausible sort of demiurge I have yet heard of. He still seems to me the likeliest creator, upon the whole, to have fashioned, it may be in some moment of youthful indiscretion and effusion, such as elsewhere had resulted in people having mulatto cousins, the wholly incomprehensible world we live in.... And essentially, I find, I still believe in Him, with a faith that undermines and goes deeper than mere reason because it was developed in me earlier. During thunderstorms this faith assumes especial vigor: and while I do not presume to think all this terrific display was got up solely for my benefit, the notion most certainly does flicker about me, livid and troubling, that while He has this storm in hand, and is actually passing my way, it might appear to Him mere thriftiness to use a thunderbolt in the old, practical, explicit manner. So I do not quite heartily enjoy the beauty of a thunderstorm.... But the point is that this demiurge also conformed to the great general rule. The point is that men have not ever, at any time, pictured the benevolence of their gods and creators as being anything like a good risk; and that no mythology has ever told of such gods as would in strict logic seem apt to be foreplanning a pleasant future for anybody.