The Martyrdom of Man - Winwood Reade (golden son ebook txt) 📗
- Author: Winwood Reade
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city. A crowd streamed out to meet him, and a crowd followed him
behind. The people cast their mantles on the road before him, and also
covered it with green boughs. He rode through the city gates straight to
the Temple, dismounted, and entered the holy building.
In the outer courts there was a kind of bazaar in connection with the
Temple worship. Pure white lambs, pigeons, and other animals of the
requisite age and appearance were there sold, and money merchants,
sitting at their tables, changed the foreign coin with which the pilgrims
were provided. The young man at once proceeded to upset the tables and
to drive their astonished owners from the Temple, while the crowd
shouted and the little gamins, who were not the least active in the riot,
cried out, “Hurrah for the son of David!” Then people suffering from
diseases were brought to him, and he laid his hands upon them and told
them to have faith and they would be healed.
When strangers inquired the meaning of this disturbance they were told
that it was Joshua—or—as the Greek Jews called him, Jesus—the
Prophet of Nazareth. It was believed by the common people that he was
the Messiah. But the Pharisees did not acknowledge his mission. For
Jesus belonged to Galilee, and the natives of that country spoke a vile
patois, and their orthodoxy was in bad repute. “Out of Galilee,” said the
Pharisees with scorn, “out of Galilee there cometh no prophet.”
All persons of imaginative minds know what it is to be startled by a
thought; they know how ideas flash into the mind as if from without, and
what physical excitement they can at times produce. They also know
what it is to be possessed by a presentiment, a deep, overpowering
conviction of things to come. They know how often such presentiments
are true, and also how often they are false.
The prophet or seer is a man of strong imaginative powers which have
not been calmed by education. The ideas which occur to his mind often
present themselves to his eyes and ears in corresponding sights and
sounds. As one in a dream he hears voices and sees forms; his whole
mien is that of a man who is possessed; his face sometimes becomes
transfigured and appears to glow with light; but usually the symptoms are
of a more painful kind, such as foaming of the mouth, writhing of the
limbs, and a bubbling ebullition of the voice. He is sometimes seized by
these violent ideas against his will. But he can to a certain extent produce
them by long fasting and by long prayer, or in other words by the
continued concentration of the mind upon a single point; by music,
dancing, and fumigations. The disease is contagious, as is shown by the
anecdote of Saul among the prophets, and similar scenes have been
frequently witnessed by travellers in the East.
Prophets have existed in all countries and at all times, but the gift
becomes rare in the same proportion as people learn to read and write.
Second sight in the Highlands disappeared before the school, and so it has
been in other lands. Prophets were numerous in ancient Greece. In the
Homeric period they opposed the royal power and constituted another
authority by the grace of God. Herodotus alludes to men who went about
prophesying in hexameters. Thucydides says that while the
Peloponnesians were ravaging the lands of Athens there were prophets
within the city uttering all kinds of oracles, some for going out and some
for remaining in. It was a prophet who obtained the passing of that law
under which Socrates was afterwards condemned to death. In Greece,
Egypt, and in Israel the priests adopted and localised the prophetic power.
The oracles of Amon, Delphi, and Shiloh bore the same relation to
individual prophets as an Established Church to itinerant preachers. Syria
was especially fertile in prophets. Marius kept a Syrian prophetess
named Martha, who attended him in all his campaigns. It matters nothing
what the Syrian religion might be; the same phenomenon again and again
recurs. Balaam was a prophet before Israel was established. Then came
the prophets of the Jews, and they again have been succeeded by the
Christian cave saint and the Moslem dervish, whom the Arabs have
always regarded with equal veneration. But it was among the Jews from
the time of Samuel to the captivity that prophets or dervishes were most
abundant. They were then as plentiful as politicians—and politicians in
fact they were, and prophesied against each other. Some would be for
peace and some would be for war: some were partisans of Egypt, others
were partisans of Babylon. The prophetic ideas differ in no respect from
those of ordinary men except in the sublime or ridiculous effect which
they produce on the prophetic mind and body. Sometimes the predictions
of the Jewish prophets were fulfilled, and sometimes they were not. To
use the Greek phrase, their oracles were often of base metal, and in such a
case the unfortunate dervish was jeered at as a false prophet, and would in
his turn reproach the Lord for having made him a fool before men.
The Jewish prophet was an extraordinary being. He was something more
and something less than a man. He spoke like an angel; he acted like a
beast. As soon as he received his mission he ceased to wash. He often
retired to the mountains, where he might be seen skipping from rock to
rock like a goat; or he wandered in the desert with a leather girdle round
his loins, eating roots and wild honey, or sometimes browsing on grass
and flowers. He always adapted his actions to the idea which he desired
to convey. He not only taught in parables but performed them. For
instance, Isaiah walked naked through the streets to show that the Lord
would strip Jerusalem, and make her bare. Ezekiel cut off his hair and
beard and weighed it in the scales: a third part he burnt with fire, a third
part he strewed about with a knife, and a third part he scattered to the
wind. This was also intended to illustrate the calamities which would
befall the Jews. Moreover he wore a rotten girdle as a sign that their city
would decay, and buttered his bread in a manner we would rather not
describe, as a sign that they would eat defiled bread among the Gentiles.
Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke as a sign that they should be taken into
captivity. As a sign that the Jews were guilty of wantonness in
worshipping idols, Hosea cohabited three years with a woman of the
town; and as a sign that they committed adultery in turning from the Lord
their God, he went and lived with another man´s wife.
Such is the ludicrous side of Jewish prophecy; yet it has also its serious
and noble side. The prophets were always the tribunes of the people, the
protectors of the poor. As the tyrant revelled in his palace on the taxes
extorted from industrious peasants, a strange figure would descend from
the mountains and, stalking to the throne, would stretch forth a lean and
swarthy arm and denounce him in the name of Jehovah, and bid him
repent, or the Lord´s wrath should fall upon him and dogs should drink
his blood. In the first period of the Jewish life the prophets exercised
these functions of censor and of tribune, and preached loyalty to the god
who had brought them up out of Egypt with a strong hand. They were
also intensely fanatical, and published Jehovah´s wrath not only against
the king who was guilty of idolatry and vice, but also against the king
who took a census, or imported horses, or made treaties of friendship with
his neighbours. In the second period the prophets declared the unity of
God and exposed the folly of idol-worship. They did even more than
this. They opposed the ceremonial law, and preached the religion of the
heart. They declared that God did not care for their Sabbaths and their
festivals, and their new moons, and their prayers and church services and
ablutions, and their sacrifices of meat and oil and of incense from Arabia
and of the sweet cane from a far country. “Cease to do evil,” said they;
“learn to do well; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the
widow.” It is certain that the doctrines of the great prophets were
heretical. Jeremiah flatly declared that in the day that God brought them
from the land of Egypt he did not command them concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices, and this statement would be of historical value if
prophets always spoke the truth.
They were bitter adversaries of the kings and priests, and the consolers of
the oppressed. “The Lord hath appointed me,” says one whose oracles
have been edited with those of Isaiah, but whose period was later and
whose true name is not known, “the Lord hath appointed me to preach
good tidings unto the meek; he that sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to give unto them that mourn
beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for lamentation, the garment of praise for
the spirit of heaviness.”
The aristocracy who lived by the altar did not receive these attacks in a
spirit of submission. There was a law ascribed to Moses—like all the
other Jewish laws, but undoubtedly enacted by the priest party under the
kings—that false prophets should be put to death; and though it was
dangerous to touch prophets on account of the people, who were always
on their side, they were frequently subjected to persecution. Urijah fled
from King Jehoiakim to Egypt; armed men were sent after him; he was
arrested, brought back and killed. Zachariah was stoned to death in the
courts of the Temple. Jeremiah was formally tried and was acquitted, but
he had a narrow escape: he was led, as he remarked, like a sheep to the
slaughter. At another time he was imprisoned; at another time he was let
down by ropes into a dry well; and there is a tradition that he was stoned
to death by the Jews in Egypt after all. The nominal Isaiah chants the
requiem of such a martyr in a poem of exquisite beauty and grandeur.
The prophet is described as one of hideous appearance, so that people hid
their faces from him. “His visage was marred more than any man, and
his form more than the sons of men.” The people rejected his mission
and refused to acknowledge him as a prophet. “He was despised and
rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He was
arraigned on a charge of false prophecy; he made no defence, and he was
put to death. “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he opened not his
mouth: he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before
her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from the
prison to the judgment; he was cut off from the land of the living.” It was
believed by the Jews that the death of such a man was accepted by God as
a human sacrifice, an atonement for the sins of the people, just as the
priest in the olden time heaped the sins of the people on the scapegoat and
sent him out into the wilderness. “He bare the sins of many, and made
intercession for the transgressors. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity
of us all. Surely he hath borne our griefs and hath carried our sorrows.
His soul was made an offering for sin. He was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for
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