"God bless you!" he broke in. "I must go on deck again."
He vanished as he spoke, and a dim suspicion of his purpose arose in my mind; but before I could act upon it, a loud, confused outcry arose on the deck, and as I rushed up the cabin stairs, I heard amid the hurrying to and fro of feet, the cries of "Man overboard!"—"Bout ship!"—"Down with the helm!" The cause of the commotion was soon explained: Hendrick had sprung overboard; and looking in the direction pointed out by the man at the wheel, I plainly discerned him already considerably astern of the cutter. His face was turned toward us, and the instant I appeared he waved one arm wildly in the air: I could hear the words, "Your promise!" distinctly, and the next instant the moonlight played upon the spot where he had vanished. Boats were lowered, and we passed and repassed over and near the place for nearly half an hour. Vainly: he did not reappear.
I have only further to add, that the parcel intrusted to me was safely delivered, and that I have reason to believe Mrs. Hendrick remained to her last hour ignorant of the sad fate of her son. It was her impression, induced by his last letter, that he was about to enter the South-American service under Cochrane, and she ultimately resigned herself to a belief that he had there met a brave man's death. My promise was scrupulously kept, nor is it by this publication in the slightest degree broken; for both the names of Hendrick and Pickard are fictitious, and so is the place assigned as that of the lieutenant's birth. That rascal Sparkes, I am glad to be able to say—chasing whom made me an actor in the melancholy affair—was sent over the herring pond for life.
THE TUB SCHOOL.
Speaking without passion, we are bound to state, in broad terms, that the founder of the Diogenic philosophy was emphatically a humbug. Some people might call him by a harsher name; we content ourselves with the popular vernacular. Formidable as he was—this unwashed dog-baptized—with a kind of savage grandeur, too, about his independence and his fearlessness—still was he a humbug; setting forth fancies for facts, and judging all men by the measure of one. Manifestly afflicted with a liver complaint, his physical disorders wore the mask of mental power, and a state of body that required a course of calomel or a dose of purifying powders, passed current in the world for intellectual superiority; not a rare case in times when madness was accounted potent inspiration, and when the exhibition of mesmeric phenomena formed the title of the Pythoness to her mystic tripod.
Diogenes is not the only man whose disturbed digestion has led multitudes, like an ignis fatuus, into the bogs and marshes of falsehood. Abundance of sects are about, which their respective followers class under one generic head of inspiration, but which have sprung from the same hepatic inaction, or epigrastic inflammation, as that which made the cynic believe in the divinity of dirt, and see in a tub the fittest temple to virtue. All that narrows the sympathies—all that makes a man think better of himself than of his "neighbors"—all that compresses the illimitable mercy of God into a small talisman which you and your followers alone possess—all that creates condemnation—is of the Diogenic Tub School; corrupt in the core, and rotten in the root—fruit, leaves, and flowers, the heritage of death.
A superstitious reverence for a bilious condition of body, and an abhorrence of soap and water, as savoring of idolatry or of luxury—according to the dress and nation of the Cynic—made up the fundamental ideas of his school; and to this day they are the cabala of one division of the sect. We confess not to be able to see much beauty in either of these conditions, and are rather proud than otherwise of our state of disbelief; holding health and cleanliness in high honor, and hoping much of moral improvement from their better preservation. But to the Tub School, good digestive powers, and their consequence, good temper, were evidences of lax principles, and cleanliness was ungodliness or effeminacy; as the unpurified denouncer prayed to St. Giles, or sacrificed to Venus Cloacina. Take the old monks as an example. Not that we are about to condemn the whole Catholic Church under a cowled mask. She has valuable men among her sons; but, in such a large body, there must of necessity be some members weaker than the rest; and the mendicant friars, and do-nothing monks, were about the weakest and the worst that ever appeared by the Catholic altar. They were essentially of the Tub School, as false to the best purposes of mankind as the famous old savage of Alexander's time. Dirt and vanity, bile and condemnation, were the paternosters of their litany; and what else lay in the tub which the king over-shadowed from the sun? All the accounts of which we read, of pious horror of baths and washhouses—all the frantic renunciation of laundresses, and the belief in hair shirts, to the prejudice of honest linen—all the religious zeal against small-tooth combs, and the sin which lay in razors and nail-brushes—all the holy preference given to coarse cobbling of skins of beasts, over civilized tailoring of seemly garments—all the superiority of bare feet, which never knew the meaning of a pediluvium, over those which shoes and hose kept warm, and foot-baths rendered clean—all the hatred of madness against the refinements of life, and the cultivation of the beautiful: these were the evidences of the Diogenic philosophy; and of Monachism too; and of other forms of faith, which we could name in the same breath. And how much good was in them? What natural divinity lies in fur, which the cotton plant does not possess? Wherein consists the holiness of mud, and the ungodliness of alkali? wherein the purity of a matted beard, and the impiety of Metcalfe's brushes, and Mechi's magic strop? It may be so; and we all the while may be mentally blind; and yet, if we lived in a charnel-house, whose horrors the stony core of a cataract concealed, we could not wish to be couched, that seeing, we might understand the frightful conditions of which blindness kept us ignorant.
But bating the baths and wash-houses, hempen girdles, and hairy garments, we quarrel still with the animus of Diogenes and his train. Its social savageness was bad enough—its spiritual insolence was worse. The separatism—the "stand off, for I am holier than thou"—the condemnation of a whole world, if walking apart from his way—the substitution of solitary exaltation for the activity of charity—the proud judgment of God'S world, and the presumptuous division into good and evil of the Eternal; all this was and is of the Cynic's philosophy; and all this is what we abjure with heart and soul, as the main link of the chain which binds men to cruelty, to ignorance, and to sin; for the unloosing of which we must wait before we see them fairly in the way of progress.
How false the religion of condemnation!—how hardening to the heart!—how narrowing to the sympathies! We take a section for the whole, and swear that the illimitable All must be according to the form of the unit I; we make ourselves gods, and judge of the infinite universe by the teaching of our finite senses. They who do this most are they whom men call "zealous for God's glory," "stern sticklers for the truth," and "haters of latitudinarianism." And if all the social charities are swept down in their course, they are mourned over gently; but only so much as if they were sparrows lying dead beneath the blast that slew the enemy. "'Tis a pity," say they, "that men must be firm to the truth, yet cruel to their fellows; but if it must be so, why, let them fall fast as snow-flakes. What is human life, compared to the preservation of the truth?" Ah! friends and brothers—is not the necessity of cruelty the warrantry of falsehood? The truth of life is Love, and all which negatives love is false; and every drop of blood that ever flowed in the preservation of any dogma, bore in its necessity the condemnation of that dogma.