And the emperor said, “Speak on.”
Then said the man: “Lo, as I entered the temple of the three images, the first image extended to me its finger, as though it would say, ‘Take this ring’; but yet I doubted of its wishes, until I read the superscription, ‘My finger is generous’; then knew I that it was the pleasure of the statue to give the ring, and I obeyed and took it. Then came I to the image with the beard of gold. Methinks the maker of this had no beard; shall the creature be better than the creator? that were a plain and manifest wrong. But still I was modest, and hesitated, until the words of the inscription, ‘Let him that is beardless come to me, and I will give him one,’ forbade me to refuse to supply my own wants by the statue’s gift. As for the golden cloak, it was in pure charity that I took it away. Stone is cold, and metal is cold; the image is of the former, the cloak of the latter. In winter it was adding cold to cold, in summer it was too heavy and warm for the season. Still should I have forborne to rob the statue of its cloak, had I not seen the words, ‘I fear no one.’ Such intolerable arrogance, in a woman too, was to be punished. I took the cloak to humble the statue’s pride.” But all these excuses were useless.
“Fair sir,” replied Leo, “do you not know the law, that he who robs the statues shall die?—let the law be obeyed”; and it was as the emperor said.
“Your tale reminds me strongly of the witticisms by which the elder Dionysius justified his theft of the golden cloak of Jupiter and the beard of Æsculapius,” said Herbert.
“What, when he exchanged the cold gold garment for the warm woollen robe, and took off the beard of the son of the beardless?” remarked Thompson; “but let us hear the moral.”
“The moral of this tale,” said Lathom, “is the least strained, and perhaps the best of all the applications attached to the legends. The emperor is God. The three images the three sorts of mankind in whom God takes delight. The first image, with its extended hand and proffered gift, is no bad symbol of the poor and simple of this world, who prevail little among the great and powerful unless their gift is ready in the extended hand.”
“Why fleecest thou the poor?” asks conscience. “May I not receive the proffered gift when freely offered?” replies the wicked man. “Did I not take it, men would laugh at me—to curb their tongues I take.”
“A bitter and too often true lesson in all times and all nations,” remarked Herbert. “We seldom want for a good excuse.”
“The second image,” continued Lathom, “is the symbol of those who are raised to wealth by God’s especial blessing, and from whom the wicked seek to take away their property by every pretext. ‘We are bald,’ cry they; ‘we are poor; let us divide this man’s riches among us.’”
“There were chartists in those days as well as now; levelling comes natural to some minds,” said Thompson. “But to the third figure.”