Judah's gods were largely gold and sex. Moses gave, however, their vital revelation. His creative spirit distilled the idea of Jehovah, invisible lawgiver and controller set above all visible creation. Still the weakness of the Israelites has remained until this day—a passion for sex and gold.
Gold in itself has nothing of evil in it. It is as innocent as iron or tin. If we call gold fine and lead base it is because we ascribe to them our human ideas about them. Gold at best was prized for its beauty and its scarcity. It could fittingly adorn a bride, it could fittingly be devoted to Jehovah, as in the building of the Temple; but once it had been used to make a golden calf it had been defouled and could not be worn again or devoted to the True God. Moses made the children of Israel eat that disgraced gold—after the calf which they made of their Egyptian spoils had been consumed by fire.
It is, however, possible that much of the gold of the Egyptians is worn and used by men and women to-day. Gold does not easily perish and yet is not easily recognizable. It exists from age to age, cast and recast in ever new forms, gilding ever new superstitions, glories, and ambitions. The gold of Darius was the gold of Alexander, and the gold of Alexander was gold in the triumphs of the Romans. In turn it adorned the rude limbs of Hans and Goths and Franks and Saracens. It glittered in the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It was part of the treasure of the Popes—but why labor the point? Gold has not been allowed to disappear. Tombs are rifled for it. Ocean's bottom is dredged for it. Every man who digs the soil is ready to identify it.
The gold of the New World proved a marvelous accession and drew men to it more than did the Cross of our religion. The Wise Men fixed their eyes on the East, seeking to lay aside their pride and bow to the spiritual new birth. But the young men of our era set their eyes upon the West, saying, "Gold—we will go there for gold." And the older men looked there also, asking for Power, of which gold is the index.
Ah, it has been and is the great desideratum, gold, pockets full, coffers full, bank full, heart full—to be finished with the practical problem of life and to have at our disposal all that gold can command.
With their gold the rich gild temples as of old, forgetting the lesson that our God "preferreth above all temples the upright heart and pure." The cynics and the buffoons and the rabble make also their golden calves which in turn some spiritual Moses will cast down.
But where is the poetry of the quest of El Dorado? Surely always in the quest and never in the attainment. If ever in life you find what you are seeking you have gone wrong. Finding, you lose. The whole of life is balanced betwixt the aching heart and the golden dream.
When the quest is transmuted to music, which at its highest strives to express the inexpressible, the ineffable, the unqualified x of life, gold is represented in deep notes and remote superterrestrial harmonies suggesting a golden age, a golden dream, all that we have missed, the pathos of mortality, the forever lost, the infinitely precious past. There were beautiful women, myriads of them, each distinct and lovely, in far-off other times, centuries, ages ago, Queens of Sheba, Helens. They sleep like the daughter of Pharaoh beside a lotus flower, gone to dust, going to dust, to infinite fineness. Your eyes never saw them; they lifted their faces in the morning, at sunrise in the valleys, or on the mountains, far away, in other times. We look back to them from the afternoon, from the evening, from a later time; we cannot see them. They are hidden forever, like the heart of the world.
"Seek and ye shall find" means "Seek forever and ye shall find." "Knock, and it shall be opened" means "Knock forever and it shall be opened." How can we in our mortality find the gold? We cannot. The true El Doradoist, hammer in hand, is knocking and tapping forever, seeking veins of gold, seeking hollow chambers, seeking and opening tombs, climbing westward after a vision which forsakes him every day of his life.
But whither have we led our thoughts, into what starlit unreality? This volume, the like of which was no doubt burned at Alexandria thousands of years ago, is a study of reality, is it not?—the study of the quest of an everlasting substance by those who cannot last. It concerns largely the five last centuries of the second millennium after Christ, and certain peoples called Spanish, Indian, Anglo-Saxon. The Spanish people obtained a great hold on the gold, but it has fallen from their grasp. Americans now are foremost on the track of El Dorado, a super-race who seek gold, it is true, but seek more the Power of which gold is the index. They will take gold by machinery; power giving gold and gold giving power. They have seen in the mirage a golden dream and called it Pan-America.