As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this hard blow still more bitter, it was this,—that Eymann's band, like his reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[[61]] as in a napkin-press; for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at all, still it was certainly better and more human—that is, more foolish—that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[[62]] they searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian, "redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in the Bible only by daylight, not by funeral-torches."
The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a ladder and much oil, but with the oil they extinguish the lamps and their own thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up to the gallows.
As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks' child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw, thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the supporting amulet of children (particularly of Dauphins), saying, meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second story, and found at his feet a smashed—mouse under his long-sought Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[[63]] for which one needs only a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates. Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then, auto-da-fés also?"
I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the shooting down of an army in general history,—the loss of another's hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[[64]] ... This interest arises from the source whence it comes with those to whom the case really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a trifle, when it takes up many moments, becomes so great to us, and this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the Orbis Pictus,[[65]] consists of points—of black and golden ones—seems so long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious mood stand so near to our mirthful.
Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks, to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon did into empty pots.[[66]] In German countries, mine and a few others excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,—one to recognize it, and one more to do it away. The views of a consistory always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders (circularia) do.
In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again, or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair childhood's days,—figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones, which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew, opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish sorrows here,—among them the length of the sermon,—and of his childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said Horion,—and we will say it with him,—"all was to thee as yet infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm, quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits, graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the skeleton remains there,—the latticed pew."
But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus, how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,—at evening, when we stand low in the western horizon and go out,—then, when we turn round, and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,—oh! then, how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,—the garden of childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising, and still suffused with an old, pale redness,—how much more magically will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year, went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with a real childish gusto to think that there were four moving creatures[[67]] in the temple,—the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[[68]] and himself. Is there anything more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long, horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but stiffened statues?
After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to Apollonia, that majoress-domo,—must carry away bean-poles and seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,—fan out therefrom butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,—tie back the twigs which had grown over the windows,—lug down the orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree, out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[[69]] so often as its strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian to take part in these puppet-plays,[[70]] and between them, in this preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations: "Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,—this festival may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,—even the clouds dispersed,—Clotilda would come. The primate of the festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,—the little six-weeks'-man,—memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little speaker to close his throat-lid[[71]] and eyelids at once. At first I had come near suppressing—from respect for the Parson's lady—the fact that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged as others, if she had children or milk....