“I do not say that a social cyclone is impending; but the signs of the times certainly admonish us that if Christianity is to avert a revolution of the most gigantic proportions, and the most ruinous results, we have not an hour to lose in assuring the restless masses that they have no better friends than are the professed disciples of Him whose glory it was to preach the gospel to the poor, and to lift up their crushing burdens.”—Rev. Dr. A. J. F. Behrend’s “Socialism and Christianity.”
“My soul doth magnify the Lord.... He hath put down princes from their thrones, and exalted them of low degree.”—Mary.
The daughter of Sir Charleroy found a home and a mother with Dorothea Woelfkin, the widowed parent of her affianced. What manner of woman the latter was may be readily inferred from the character of her beloved and only son, Cornelius. It sufficeth to say, mother and son were in all things wonderfully alike.
“Miriamne, I’ve called to ask, if we get the consent of my mother, that you attend a conclave of knights, to be secretly held, after Moslem prayers this evening.”
“Where?”
“At the house of the Christian sister, aged Phebe; just by the second wall of the city.”
“And why do they meet?”
“An eloquent Hospitaler, lately returned from a[499] long mission, is to address the companions and their friends.”
“A Hospitaler; what’s his name?”
“Ah, there it is; the question all ask, and none can answer! He has given full tokens of his right to confidence, but declines, for reasons which he says are most pious, to reveal himself further than that he is a Knight Hospitaler of Rhodes.”
“Rhodes? Is he very tall, of piercing eyes, his hair long and jet, with streaks of gray?”
“Even so.”
“My father knew such a man, whom he called ‘silver-tongued.’”
“This man is as eloquent as Apollos.”
“We met such an one, and were with him for a time. We left him here, on our journey from Acre to Bozrah.”
“Did you penetrate his secret?”
“I did not, though my father once said to him ‘Grail.’ After that he kept aloof from us.”
“A proof it must be as I’ve suspected; the Hospitaler is one of the new Grail-Knights!” exclaimed Cornelius.
“And he is here? I must hear him again. The words he spoke to me in Gethsemane have followed me night and day since. He made the journey of Mary and Christ, by way of Kedron, to the cross, seem like a present reality; a path typical of the one before every child of God. I saw it all then, but have been unable since to find it. Oh, I burn with desire to have the ‘silver-tongued’ guide me to that pathway again.”
At the appointed time the twain sought the house of Christian Phebe, and found it wrapped in gloom; the only sign of life without being a man garbed as a camel[500] driver, standing guard at the door. Cornelius whispered to Miriamne, “He’s a knight—the warden.” The young man gave the watchman a secret signal; the latter communicated through a little gated window, with those within, and quickly the door swung open, admitting Woelfkin and his companion. Within were light and cheerfulness contrasting with the gloom without. A goodly company was already assembled, chiefly made up of Crusaders, but now unharnessed. The faces of the pilgrim soldiers betokened a change within. They betokened spirits subdued, but not crushed; hearts having surrendered ambition for devastating conquest, to welcome a finer hope. There were few things about the place suggestive of war, and many suggestive of peace. At one end of the room stood a desk, in shape much like an altar. It was draped with a Templar banner, and to its side were fastened a sword, bent in the shape of a sickle, and two spears forming a cross, supporting a cup; the latter was in form the same as the cup of the Passion.
“There is something about this place that recalls the chapel of the Palestineans, in London, Cornelius.”
“Well, you and I were there; now we are here. In that the two places have likeness,” pleasantly responded the maiden’s escort.
Miriamne’s eyes wandered from object to object, as if seeking proof of, her assertion, and her companion followed her gaze with a glance about the place, which finally rested, as his glances were wont, on the eyes of Miriamne.
“Oh, the devoutness, the peace, the fellowship!” she exclaimed.
Just then there was a movement: a number of the[501] men present arose; a hailing sign, significant to the initiated, was given by some, while simultaneously a slight applause passed around the room:
“’Tis he,” whispered Miriamne.
“Your Hospitaler?”
“Yes.”
The knights all stood and sang in subdued voices, a psalm of hope. “The movement of the melody suggests pilgrims climbing a hill.” At least, so the maiden said its movement seemed to her.
When the psalm was finished, the knights resumed their seats and the Hospitaler, without preliminary, at once addressed them:
“Knights of Christ, few and often in hiding, I would remind ye that no plan of God is futile, and that His cause has no backward movement.
“A dream of conquest, restoration and glory came over all followers of the cross. The dream had within it a hope of a holy land in Christian possession, and all the children of earth getting from it the story of the true faith. Then there was to come, we believed, the golden age, in which all mankind in sweet charity’s glorious fellowship should go forward.
“Nature, man’s mother, prays in a million mournful voices for that golden day; and God, man’s eternal and loving Father, works by countless invincible agencies to cause its full dawning. We Crusaders gave our lives by thousands for our faith, but we seemed to have done little beside change the name of this land from Philistine to Palestine. One, to be sure, is softer to the ear than the other, but to the heart both names bring the same miserable thoughts. Yet there was more than this attained. Ye remember how our cavalier soldiers[502] expressed their chivalric impulses in honoring that queen of women, Our Lady? Like the rising of sun at midnight, came the conviction to Christian Europe when at its worst, socially, that reform must begin by purifying the homes of the people, by exalting all home life. To do this, the mothers who bare and nurture the fruits of the home, as well as making them for weal or for woe what they are, must needs be exalted by right as well as by fitness to their queenship. Every knight’s praise of Mary was an avowal of faith; his faith that woman could be, should be, what his imagination pictured Mary to have been.
“The knightly Christians were among the first to be moved by the belief that that was a monstrous blight, a heresy toward God and nature which regarded the finer sex as necessities or luxuries. Impressed by reverence for Mary, the banded soldiers of the cross began to feel their mission to be not only the recovery of the dead, but also of the living from infidel dominion; hence, each Crusade banner came as a sunburst to those, who, under the spell of gross passion, were enslaving their natural co-partners.
“Men, while the harem ideal stands, while woman is impotent because uncrowned, our lofty hopes can not bear fruit nor will our labors be ended!”
The speaker was interrupted by a murmur of applause that ran around the circle of auditors.
Miriamne glowed with delight, and raised her hand impressively and nodded toward Cornelius. He only saw the motion and easily interpreted it as meaning, “There, that’s what I felt, but could not express.”
The speaker continued: “God said it is not good that the man should be alone; time that resolves all[503] mysteries, and experience which transmutes to gold all the rubbish of guess and experiment, has irrevocably declared that man cannot be to his fullness, in a state of solitary grandeur. He and the woman go up or down together; and, whether a seraph or a serpent leads her, the man by inclination or by force is sure to follow her footsteps.
“We Crusaders had a glimpse of the truth, but lost it to follow an ignis fatuus. Yet, in this land, we confronted the harem with the home ruled by one queenly wife and mother. The world, beholding the contrast begins to believe, as never before, in the supremacy, over all institutions, of that one where, under Eden’s covenant charters, purity and mother-love mold the race in the name of sole and patient love. The Saracens paraded their houris, their concubines, and their slaves as the proofs of their prowess; but the Christians challenged the array by the quality of their possessions, commencing with their women of God’s blood royal, and ascending to each revered personage, from love’s companions, to Mary, to Jesus. He that nobly deals with the one by his side will find her putting on a glory that will brighten the luster of his kingliness, and bringing forth to him those having the power to grasp and mold the destinies of coming years. Listeners, mark me; there is a............