“I confess myself conquered,” said Henry Herbert, as soon as the story was concluded. “Some points in the allegory are clear, as the way to the Holy Land, and the sprinkling of the blood of the Lamb, but the rest are beyond my discovering.”
“The explanation,” said Herbert, “is undoubtedly more recondite than any we have read as yet. The great emperor is our Father in heaven; the three blows on his gate are prayer, self-denial, charity; by these three any one may become his faithful servant. Guido is a poor Christian, by baptism made his servant. His first service is to serve his God, and to prepare the heart for virtue. His second duty is to watch; ‘for he knoweth not the day nor the hour when the Son of Man cometh.’ His third task is to taste of repentance, which was good to the saints who are departed, is good to such of us as it brings to salvation, and will be good to all in the last day. The fourth duty is to invite Christ’s enemies to be his friends, and to come to the banquet of his love for he ‘came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ The fire that burneth without smoke, is the fire of charity, which burneth free of all ill-will and bad feeling. The way to the Holy Land is our course heavenward. We are to sail over our sea, the world; in the midst of which standeth our rock, even our heart, on which the holy bird of God’s Spirit resteth. The seven eggs are the gifts of the Spirit. When the Spirit leaves us, the Devil hasteth to defile our hearts; but the blood of the Lamb which was slain for us, even our Saviour, will ward off the attack of our enemy, so long as we are sprinkled therewith.”
“The explanation is characteristic of the age,” said Herbert. “What then,” rejoined Lathom, “will you say to the moral drawn by these writers from the wonders that Pliny believed in, without seeing, and Sir John de Mandeville tried to persuade the world he believed in, from seeing?”
“What,” said Thompson, “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders?”
“No creature is so monstrous, no fable so incredible, but that the monkish writers could give it a moral form, and extract from its crudities and quiddities some moral or religious lesson.”
“They believed in the words of the song,” said Thompson—
“‘Reason sure will always bring
Something out of every thing.’”
“Pliny’s dog-headed race,” said Lathom, “whom Sir John places in the island of Macumeran, and at the same time gives to them a quasi pope for a king, who says three hundred prayers per diem before he either eats or drinks, were naturally regarded by the middle-age writers as symbolical and priestly preachers of faithful hearts and frugal habits; whilst of those other islanders, who ‘have but one eye, and that in the middest of their front, and eat their flesh and fish raw,’ the monk says, ‘These be they that have the eye of prayer.’ The Astomes who have no mouths, ‘are all hairie over the whole bodie, yet clothed with soft cotton and downe, that cometh from the leaves of trees, and live only on aire, and by the smelling of sweet odors, which they draw through their nose-thrills,’ are the abstemious of this world, who die of the sin of gluttony, even as an Astome by the accidental inhalation of bad odor. Humility is signified by the absence of the head, and the placing of the face in the breast; and a tendency to sin is foreshadowed by a desire and habit of walking on all fours, or pride by short noses and goat’s feet. The Mandevillean islanders, who had flat faces without noses, and two round holes for their eyes, and thought whatsoever they saw to be good, were earth’s foolish ones; as those foul men, who have their lips so great, that when they sleep in the sun they cover all their face therewith, are the just men, the salt of the earth.”
“One would as soon dream of allegorizing the Sciapodes of Aristophanes, or Homer’s Cranes and Pigmies,” said Thompson.