“I have seen the Messiah several times since that miracle. He was walking the streets with several fishermen of Galilee, whom they say he has chosen to be his apostles. The greatest takes up the least to connect all the intermediates with himself. The group is always followed at a distance by a woman clad in deep mourning, and wearing a thick black veil. She never approaches near enough to speak or be spoken to. No man knows where she lodges or how she lives; but the first dawn of light always reveals her dark figure opposite the house in which Jesus has slept.
“Who can she be? says every one to himself and to others. Whoever she is, her humility and devotion are very touching; and the Power which can work miracles no doubt reads her heart and is leading her to himself.
“Martha is profoundly impressed and greatly bewildered by the miracles and character of Jesus; but she cannot yet believe that he is the veritable Messiah predicted by the prophets. She thinks the Messiah must be a great [pg 138]Prince, who will restore the power of David and the glory of Solomon to the Jewish nation, and make our temple the temple of the whole world. Our hearts, I think, our purified hearts, are the temples in which he is to reign!
“Our dear, good, pagan uncle smiles quietly at my enthusiastic faith, and encourages Martha’s doubts by telling us of great and good magi in Persia, who performed greater miracles than those of Moses.
“Ah, Lazarus! How can you linger away off in those beautiful and wicked cities of Greece, buried in spiritual darkness, and studying their foolish or insane philosophies, when the Source of all light has risen, and the Fountain of all truth has been opened in your own country! Oh hasten to your home in our hearts and see these great things for yourself. If you cannot share my faith, you will at least receive and reciprocate my love.
“Ever your Mary.”
If these strange things had occurred soon after my father’s death, when the spirit of religious inquiry was strong, and when I loved to search the Scriptures with my sisters, I would have been deeply, intensely interested in them. But the hardest thing in the world is to make a devotee out of a man who thinks himself a philosopher.
My uncle had not converted me to the doctrines of Zoroaster, but he had convinced me that Zoroaster, Moses, and all the great leaders of religious thought derived their inspiration from the same source. I came tacitly to believe that no special Messiah was coming to [pg 139]the Jews, any more than to the Persians or Egyptians or Romans, all of whom needed deliverance from mountains of sin and wildernesses of error, quite as much as the Hebrew nation which constituted so small a fraction of the human race.
Moreover the influence of travel, and especially my free and happy life at Athens, had quite denationalized me. I was no longer a Jew.
I had breathed the mystic and magical air of Egypt, and had peeped into one of the very cradles of the human race; where I found everything so strange and so unlike what I had been taught by our childish Hebrew traditions.