The Epic of Saul

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

"Those also have their ways!" said Sergius;
"Such humors of the blood thou wilt not cure.
Worship Jehovah ye, it is your way,
And let us Gentiles serve our several gods,
Or serve them not, be atheists if we choose—
I, as thou knowest, an atheist choose to be—
Of comity and peace the sole safe rule.
This therefore is the sum—I say it again—
Ways diverse worship men, or worship not,
All as our natural bents may us incline.
Keep your Jehovah, you, He is your God,
Chosen, or feigned and fashioned to your mind—
Keep Him, but not impose your ethnic dream,
Or guess, of deity on all mankind."

"No dream of ours," said Saul, "Jehovah is.
Nay, nay, alas, far otherwise than so,
Our Hebrew dreams of God have, like the dreams
Dreamed by all races of mankind besides,
Grovelled to low and lower, have bestial been,
Or reptile, nay, to insensate wood and stone
Descended; we have loved idolatry,
We, with the rest, and hardly healed have been,
Though purged with hyssop of dire history,
Constrained—against the subtly treacherous soft
Relentings of our heart, oft yielded to,
Then punished oft full sore, which bade us spare
Whom God to spare forbade—constrained to slay
With our own swords, abolish utterly,
The idolatrous possessors of this land,
In judgment just on their idolatry,
And lest we too be tainted with their sin;
Yet foul relapse despite, and after, stripes,
Stripes upon stripes again and yet again,
Suffered from the right hand of God incensed,
Defeat, captivity, long servitude,
With the probe searched, with the knife carved until
Scarce left was life to bear the cautery
Wherewith a holy and a jealous God
Out of our quivering soul throughly would burn
That clinging, deep, inveterate human plague
Inherited from Adam in his fall,
That devil-taught depravity which prompts
Apostasy to other gods no gods—
Hardly so healed, with dreadful chastisement,
Has been my nation of her dreadful crime.
Loth, slow, ingrate, rebellious pupils, we
Taught have been thus to worship only God—
Jehovah, only God of the whole earth!"

Those last words as he spoke, Saul his right hand
Swept round in waving gesture—for they now
A height of goodly prospect had attained,
Wherefrom, pausing to breathe their laboring steeds,
They backward looked beneath them far abroad—
Swept round his hand, as if the circuit wide
Of the whole earth might there his words attest;
Their fill they gazed, then upward strained once more.
At length a stage of smoother going reached,
Sergius, abreast of Saul, took up the word:
"Yea, might one deem thy Hebrew race indeed
Had been the subjects of such history,
So purposed, then sound were thine argument
And thy Jehovah would be very God,
And God alone, and God of the whole earth.
But other races too besides thine own
Have had their chances, their vicissitudes;
Fortune to all has served her whirling wheel,
And every several race has had its turn
Of rising now, now sinking in the dust.
Wherefore should we you Hebrews sole of all
Reckon divinely taught by history,
Taught to be theists in an atheist world,
Or in a world idolatrous, of God
The True, the Only, only worshippers?"

"The other nations all," so Saul rejoined,
"Followed the bent of nature, had their will,
What they chose did, and were idolatrous,
God gave them up to their apostasy;
Us God withstood, His Hebrews He forbade;
With the same bent as others, as headstrong,
We Hebrews strangely went a different way,
And upward moved against a downward bent.
A fiery flaming sword turned every way
Forever met us on the errant track,
And forced us right though still found facing wrong.
God's prophets did not fail, age after age—
Until for that we needed them no more—
To warn us, chide us, threaten, plead, conjure,
Against our passion for idolatry.
Yet, as defying all that God could do,
Such was the force of that infatuate love
Fast-rooted in the sottish Hebrew heart
For idol-worship, that King Solomon,
The greatest, wisest, wealthiest of our kings,
Mightiest, most famous, most magnificent,
The glory and the crown of Israel,
The wonder and the proverb of the East—
This king, at point of culmination highest
To the far-shining splendor of our race,
The son of David, Solomon, turned back
From God who gave him his pre-eminence,
From God, the Living God, turned back, and sold
His heart, his spacious, all-experienced heart,
To gods that were no gods.
"Against a will,
A set of nature, a prime pravity
Stubborn like this, and tenfold impulse given
Through such example in our first of kings,
That, conflagration of infection round,
We should escape and not idolatrous be,
We only of all nations on the earth,
This, without miracle, were miracle,
A miracle of chance, confounding chance,
Monstrous, incredible, impossible!
Nay, miracles on miracles were for us wrought,
The manifest finger of God unquestionable,
Yet to ourselves ourselves, to all men we,
Wisely looked on, are chiefest miracle,
Witness from age to age that God is God."

With Hebrew heat, thus Saul to Sergius;
The frequent steep ascents meanwhile, the halts
For rest, for prospect, or for dalliance
Under some cooling shade of rock or tree—
Shield from the waxing fervors of the sun—
Slack pace, due to the humors of their steeds
Unchidden while their masters held discourse,
Left the twain still below the topmost crest
Of Hermon when the noontide hour was on.
Large leisure to refection and repose
Allowed, with converse, and mid-afternoon
It was, before to horse again were got
The horsemen, and their forward way resumed.
As, lightly, they into the saddle sprang,
Out of a purple-dark dense cloud that slept
Wakefully now along the horizon's rim
Under the flaming sun in the deep west,
There came a roll of thunder to their ears,
Remote, and mellow with remoteness, rich
Bass music in long rumbling monotone;
They listened with delight to hear the sound.

Then Sergius, as the vibration died
In low delicious tremble from their sense,
Said, coupling this with that in Saul's discourse,
Fresh, or remembered from the days before:
"That thunder and this mountain bring to me,
Imagined, the wild scene on Sinai
When your lawgiver gave his laws to you.
He schemed it well to have a thunder-storm
Chime in and be a brave accompaniment
To enforce his ordinances upon the awe
Of the unthinking timorous multitude.
Popular leaders and lawgivers have
Always and everywhere their tricks of trade,
To impress, hoodwink, and wheedle vulgar minds.
Our Sabine Numa, he Pompilius named,
Had his mysterious nymph Egeria
To bring him statutes for all men to heed;
And that Lycurgus got an oracle
From famous Delphi to approve his laws,
Which having sworn his Spartans to observe
At least till he returned from whither he went
Abroad, he, after, masked in such disguise
That never thence to have returned he seemed.
The herd of men still love to be cajoled,
Trolled hither and thither about with baited lies;
Frighten them now with brandished empty threat,
And now with laud as empty tickle them.
Augustus taught the art to tyrannize
Through forms of ancient freedom false and vain,
The stale trick since of all our emperors.
Your Hebrew Moses in his rude grand way
Well plied his shifts of lead and government."

Thunder, a rising mutter, broke again,
And Sergius in his saddle turned to look;
But Saul, with forward face intent, replied:
"Nay, but our Moses thou dost misconceive.
All was to lose and naught to gain for him
Then when he left the ease, the pomp, the power,
Of Pharaoh's court—of Pharaoh's daughter son
Esteemed, and to imperial futures heir—
This left, and loth his brethren led, slaves they,
Out of the realm of Egypt to the sea—
For such a multitude impassable,
Yet passed, through mighty miracle, by all—
Beyond the sea, into that wilderness
Led them, where neither food nor water was,
Yet food found they, and water, in the waste,
Full forty years of error till they came
Next to a land set thick with bristling spears
Against them—though land promised them for theirs—
And land that Moses never was to see,
Save as afar in prospect from the mount,
Because unworthy judged to enter there,
Who unadviséd words in haste let slip,
Unworthy judged, and meekly by himself
Recorded judged unworthy—such a man,
To such a people, so long led by him,
Through such straits of extremity, not once
Spake words to humor or to flatter them;
Thwarted them rather, balked them of their wish,
Upbraided, blamed, rebuked, and punished them,
Each art of selfish demagogue eschewed.
To rule and leadership like his, nowhere
Wilt thou find precedent or parallel;
One key alone unlocks the mystery—God!"

At that last word from Saul, like answer, came
A deep-mouthed boom of thunder from the west,
After a sword of lightning sudden drawn
Then sheathed within the scabbard of the cloud,
Which now, spread wide, had blotted out the sun.
A vagrant breath of tempest shook the trees,
And the scared birds flew homeward to their nests.
Sergius remarked the stir of elements
Uneasily the more that he alone
Remarked it, Saul, involved in his own thought,
Seeming unconscious of the outward world.
The Roman, groping in his secret mind
Vainly to find support of sympathy,
Faltered to feel himself thus fronted sole
With danger he could neither ward nor shun,
In presence yet forbidding sign of fear.

In this distress he buoyed himself with words,
Cheer seeking in the sound of his own voice:
"A merry place that in Lucretius
Where this bold poet rallies Jupiter—
The whole Olympian crew, Jupiter most—
In such a rattling vein of pleasantry,
On his plenipotence with thunderbolts!
Lucretius, thou shouldst know, interpreter
Of Epicurus is to Roman minds;
From whom we moderns learn the truth of things
And generation of the universe.
'If Jupiter,' Lucretius sings and says,
'If Jupiter it be, and other gods,
'That with terrific sound the temple shake,
'Shake the resplendent temple of the skies,
'And launch the lightning whither each one wills,
'Why is it that the strokes transfix not those
'Guilty of some abominable crime,
'As these within their breast the flames inhale,
'Instruction sharp to mortals—why not this,
'Rather than that the man of no base thing
'To himself conscious should be wrapt about
'Innocent in the flames, and suddenly
'With whirlwind and with fire from heaven consumed?
'Also, why seek they out, the gods, for work
'Like this, deserted spots, and waste their pains?
'Or haply do they then just exercise
'Their muscles, that thereby their arms be strong?'"

Sergius so far, from his Lucretius,
When the cloud, cloven, let out an arrowy flash,
And, following soon, a muffled muttering threat
Prolonged, that ended in a ragged roar—
As if, with angry rupture, violent hands
Atwain had torn the fabric of the sky.
A shuddering pause, but again Sergius,
Flying his poet's gibes at Jupiter:
"'Why never from a sky clear everywhere
'Does Jupiter upon the lands hurl down
'His thunderbolts, and thunder-booms outpour?
'Or, when the clouds have come, does he descend
'Then into them that nigh at hand he thence
'The striking of his weapon may direct?'"