"Thou mayst some day find use for the fact that was well known to the priesthood, who were the repository of all knowledge in the land of Kem, that in the embryonic or total life, both in animals and in man, there is absolutely no distinction of sex. Up to a short period prior to its birth, it is impossible to determine whether the offspring will be male or female--from which fact it seems to follow that sex is not a primary or essential function of animal existence, but dependent upon conditions during gestation which centuries of investigation have failed to disclose. Dost thou remember how bitterly the sacred books of the Israelites, from Moses down, denounce Baal, and Ashtaroth, and the star-god Remphan, and all the secret rites of the national religions of all other people except their own, the Egyptians included? Hast thou observed that many of the ceremonies which other nations practiced as part of religion are denounced by Moses as crimes punishable with death? Hast thou observed that throughout the Jewish scriptures, and especially throughout the Pentateuch, there are bitter and vindictive laws and customs devised for the express purpose of segregating the Israelites from all other peoples, for building up, as it were, a wall of partition between them and all other nations--and this, notwithstanding the fact that it would have been natural and right for Moses and his people, if they believed themselves to be in possession of the truth, to seek to impart that truth to others, and so procure the universal acceptance thereof? Hast thou marked the fact that the missionary spirit, which was the glory of every other religion, so as to create continual wars undertaken for the sole purpose of forcing other peoples to adopt the religion of the conqueror, was constantly repressed by the Jewish laws and branded as a crime? And hast thou ever reflected upon the real signification of these facts?"
"Yea," answered Arius, "and I have been taught that God, by Moses, so commanded the Jews in order to preserve the peculiar people from being seduced into following after strange gods, and adopting the idolatries which were everywhere believed in. For the idolatries thou hast named, and every false religion which had for its symbol a moon, a cow, a cock, or any symbol intended to indicate the fecundity of Nature, was only the worship of that very mystery of sex of which thou hast spoken such strange things, the deification of lasciviousness, the apotheosis of sensualism."
"They finally became so, indeed," said Am-nem-hat, sadly, "when the original truth became thoroughly corrupted; but it was not so in the beginning. For if thou wilt keep in mind the fact that the original faith of every primitive nation held the true God to be a dualism that was to become a triad by the generation of a Son; if thou wilt remember that this Son was also held to be Hapi, 'the hidden,' 'the concealed,' 'the unrevealed,' even as unto this day the high-priest of every temple in Egypt will declare unto thee; and, considering these things, thou wilt not surely say that the grand roll of Egyptian priests, stretching back for more than thirty centuries of recorded history from this age of ours, were all mere sensualists. On the contrary, thou wilt see in these singular rites and ceremonies, even in their present degraded form, the signs and symbols of a deathless longing in the hearts of that grand, pure, holy race of sacred priests, and of a search prosecuted over land and sea, through heaven, and earth, and hell, during all the fruitless and slow-gliding centuries, by every art, science, and resource known to men--a longing and a search after Hapi, 'the hidden one,' 'the concealed Son,' 'the unrevealed Saviour,' for whom the whole creation groaneth--a sublime spectacle, sad and grand enough to move a god to pity! For while the crowd see only a splendid pageant in that annual festival in which, with torches and with magnificent display, the priests and the whole population at Memphis wander over the city, the river, and the lake, seeking in earth, and fire, and water, for the dismembered body of the dual god, thou wilt find among them aged, pure, sad, learned men, who see in the same grand spectacle the perpetual memorial of their world-old search for Hapi, 'the concealed'; and, if thou couldst gaze into their shut, silent, sorrowful hearts, thou wouldst see all the faculties of soul and spirit exhaling in a yearning prayer that he might come! and at the gate of every temple thou wouldst find the priestly symbol, the Sphinx, the sleepless watcher, cut out of imperishable stone, 'gazing right on with calm, eternal eyes,' till Hapi come!--for such is the true signification of Hesiri-Hes, whom the Greeks call Osiris-Isis! And even in the later and more degraded worship of the bull-god Apis, while the common crowd see only the apotheosis of sensualism, as thou hast called it, in the fact that, when a new Apis is discovered, devout women at Memphis, during forty days, expose themselves stripped naked to the gaze of the sacred brute, the sad-faced priests realize that the endless and unavailing search to discover Hapi, 'the concealed,' had sometimes been prosecuted by unlawful means, against which Moses, in the Jewish scriptures, denounced the penalty of death. And the period of forty days was purposely chosen in order to cover by a few days, in both directions, a lunation of the moon; for the worship of the moon-god universally connected the lunations of that planet with the sexhood of women. But thou wouldst greatly err if thou shouldst believe that in its original, undegraded form, this worship was sensualism; for it began with some new effort to wring out of the mystery of sex the secret of Hapi, 'the concealed'; and was glorified by the fact that it was part and parcel of the weary, world-old search after him! Oh, will he ever come?"
Then the boy sprang to his feet, to the very tips of his toes, his right hand vibrating, his head erected and bent forward, his dark eyes gleaming with mesmeric light, his whole form and face glowing with passionate and quivering emotion, and he cried aloud: "Thou art pious and aged and learned! Thou teachest me much! But I will also teach thee something! As surely as thou livest, Hapi, the Hidden, whom thou callest the desire of all nations, hath already come in the flesh, and his name is Jesus Christ."
"Perhaps so, perhaps so," said the ancient, mournfully. "But the priests of Kem, during the past three thousand years, often imagined that they had found him, and as often met with bitter disappointment. The Sphinx still watches with unwinking gaze for the solution of the mighty problem, and the old are difficult to convince."
But at that moment Theckla burst in upon them, flushed and weary with her romping with the goats, crying out, "O sacred Hapi, I am so hungry and so tired!" Then the old man spread out a linen cloth upon the table, and, at his desire, Arius and Theckla placed thereon the table-ware and the dainties taken from the basket which the boy had brought, while he took from a little spring nigh his hermitage a jar of cool, refreshing goat's milk: and they three did feast right joyously.
CHAPTER IX.
THE DEMOCRACY OF FAITH.
It was indeed a singular thing to hear, the usual conversation of those young people about religious questions upon which the greatest minds of subsequent ages have spent their force without exhausting them; but it should be remembered that everything like exact science was then in its infancy: all that was actually known of medicine, chemistry, geology, geometry, geography, botany, and even of mathematics, could be very quickly learned; and around this narrow limit of ascertained truth spread a boundless wilderness of vagrant speculation, in which the seeker after learning might wander a whole lifetime without ever being able to add one single valuable fact to the stock of knowledge; so that religion, whether Christianity or paganism, was universally regarded as the one thing that might most profitably be learned and known; and education, even from infancy, consisted in acquiring the knowledge of it: and this education was among the heathen chiefly objective, handling the visible, tangible symbols of a superstition which possessed only the most meager elements of subjective truth and power, except, perhaps, for the higher priests who had been initiated into mysteries unknown to the common people; while among the Christians the process was almost reversed. Christianity had no objective life, except in the person of Jesus Christ; and the subjective power which it possessed upon both intellect and consciousness had no assignable limits, inasmuch as it seemed to make the martyrs almost insensible to physical pain, and yet could produce a moral sensitiveness so acute that to be conscious of willful deception might work the death of the body, as in the case of Ananias and Sapphira when they lied to Peter about the consecration of their property to holy uses. This education among the Egyptians, especially among females of the higher classes, was chiefly oral, but among the Christians the young were taught both orally and by the written text.
One of the strangest and yet most logical results of the Christian teachings and practice (and one which has been, for very sufficient reasons, ignored by the theologians) was to develop a radical and uncompromising spirit of democracy throughout the Christian communities or churches. The early Christians uniformly held that they, as Christians, belonged to a kingdom which was in, but not of, the world--a kingdom for which no earthly potentate had right or power to legislate; and this living faith loosened the bond of allegiance and dissolved the sense of obligation as to all human authority, and was the negation of the lawfulness of temporal government over the subjects of the kingdom for which they recognized no king but Christ. While, for the sake of peace, they were willing to render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's, by paying taxes to that government under which they lived, and by even yielding ready obedience to all laws and customs which did not come in conflict with the higher law of the kingdom, the rights of conscience, they universally regarded these laws as extraneous to their own organization, foreign statutes, imposed upon them from without; and, being solicitous to render unto God the things which are God's, they steadily abstained from any participation in the affairs of government, and quietly assumed the right to judge for themselves whether any law, regulation, or custom, prescribed by the sovereign power, or other human authority, was or was not such as they might conscientiously obey. And, while they would no more have thought of holding office under pagan rulers or of participating in their legislation and government than they would have thought of accepting the priesthood of a heathen temple and participating in its idolatrous worship, they obeyed all laws alike, except such as conflicted with conscience, and these they refused to obey in the very face of persecutions, torture, and death. But this fearless assertion of the rights of conscience necessarily involved the right to sit in judgment upon all human laws and the powers that ordained them, and to determine for themselves whether the law was lawful. That helpless spirit of blind obedience to the decrees of despotic governments which characterized the pagan peoples was, therefore, impossible to the Christians. In the very teeth of universally established law and custom, they steadily refused to bear arms, to own slaves, to seek any legal redress in civil courts, to follow the law of their domicile in regard to the ownership of property or the succession to estates of the deceased, just as they refused to sacrifice to the gods, or to call any man master. Under the same lofty conception of the rights of conscience, in lands where women were bought and sold like cattle, they refused to practice polygamy; and in lands where female chastity was unknown and plural wives and concubines were esteemed to be the insignia of honor and influence, they clave fast to that monogamic marriage which Jesus had elevated into a holy sacrament; and while throughout the world women were regarded as slaves, as domestic chattels, or, at the very best, as an inferior race and a necessary evil, so that the birth of a female child was looked upon as a household calamity, the Christian faith that the Holy Ghost conceived Christ before he was born of a virgin and manifested in the flesh, glorified and exalted the dignity of womanhood and maternity, and created the idea of personal responsibility, rights, and duties for both sexes alike. The logical tendency of Christianity was, therefore, to originate the idea of personal liberty for all men, unknown to the world before; to repudiate the heathen doctrine of the divine character and right of kings; to sit in judgment upon their laws, and to intelligently obey, or refuse to obey, them; in a word, to cultivate and exercise, as a matter of religious faith, that spirit of personal independence, both of action and of thought, which we in later times denominate democracy, the concrete form of which was the election of deacons, presbyters, and bishops by the people unto whom they ministered.