“Would I had fallen upon those happier days, And those Arcadian scenes....
Vain wish! Those days were never! airy dreams
Sat for the picture, and the poet’s hand
Imposed a gay delirium for a truth.
Grant it; I still must envy them an age
That favored such a dream; in days like these
Impossible when virtue is so scarce,
That to suppose a scene where she presides
Is tramontane, and stumbles all belief.”
—Young.
 
“The glory of the Lord came from the way of the east, ... and the earth shined with His glory. Thou son of man show the house to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities, and let them measure the pattern.”—Ezekiel, xliii.
 
“My Cornelius once said I might expend the fortune coming from my grandfather, Harrimai, as I chose.”
 
“Why, that’s so without my saying. I did not court your grandfather, nor his ownings, and have gotten affluence beyond the wildest dreams of a lover in Miriamne’s self.”
 
“I think the old church on the hill is smiling day by day, more and more.”
 
“I’ve noted the improvement, and it assures me our[549] hearers are growing. A meanly kept sanctuary, witnesses of starved worshipers. Some churches might be called stables for all-devouring, nothing-giving, lean kine.”
 
“I’d like to be brought to confession; question me!”
 
“Question? I can not doubt either Miriamne or her doings; to question, one must doubt.”
 
“Sir Courtly! But I’ll flank your courtesy; I’ve purchased and furbished up the old ecclesiastical pile.”
 
“I might have guessed it was Miriamne’s work! Now, good Bishop of Bethany, appoint me Rector.”
 
“Churchman forever! We’ll have no Rector.”
 
“No Rector? No sermons? No congregation?”
 
“We’ll have a multitude, if we can get into the place the God-shine; that brightens and draws ever.”
 
“Allurement by light! A new device. Are we to have a tryst where lotus-dreamers may take sun-baths?”
 
“Curiosity, too proud to question directly, travels around with banterings.”
 
“Incisive Miriamne, my ?gis, thin as paper, is shredded: I confess!”
 
“Confession compels pardon and counsel. I’ll give both. The restored sanctuary is to be the capitol of our fraternity, the ‘Sisters of Bethany.’”
 
“Capitol? Are you inviting the Sultan to take your homes and your heads? A capitol sounds like politics, revolution and things governmental.”
 
“There is to be war and a revolution; our munitions are to be solely moral agencies; our aim, to revolve the world around toward Paradisiacal days. I’d have parting streams flow out from Bethany to water the earth, and sing anew the jubilant strains of Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates.”
 
[550]
 
“Arcadia! Alas, how sad such dreams, because so impossible to realize. The Arcadians, so charming in the poet’s pictures, were, in fact, very warlike, very loutish, very human.”
 
“Say not that what has been must always be. Moses, at a time when Israel was at its lowest dip, received of God a pattern of the Tabernacle. The God of Moses is unchangeable. I’ve gotten from Him a pattern, also.”
 
“And now I question, as you wish!”
 
“The old sanctuary is to be a ‘Temple of Allegory.’ We shall attempt therein to picture the finest truths by symbols that shall make them tangible and irresistible.”
 
“A splendid ambition! Possess me of your intricacies of canon and catechism. I’d accept them.”
 
“You overlook our simplicity by expecting complexity. We shall not walk like ghosts, hampered by the grave-clothes of the dead, though august forms. Seven words, enough for each day of the round week, are our whole profession: ‘Humanity toward humanity, with godliness toward God.’”
 
As they conversed, they walked toward the old sanctuary at the suburbs of Bethany, and now were drawing near it.
 
“Behold, Miriamne, the Hospitaler; yonder.”
 
“Yes, I’ve called the knights hither; the Hospitaler will dedicate our temple to-day.”
 
“But has he ecclesiastical authority so to do?”
 
“The same authority that these growing shrubs and vines have to make the place beautiful. See, I’ve pierced the walls of the grim pile, wherever I could, to make a window. The Hospitaler is to take them for a theme.”
 
“Windows for themes?”
 
[551]
 
“He is able; and understands by them that we’d have let into musty beliefs floods of sweet light.”
 
“The knights are singing!”
 
“Yes, the Grail song, ‘Faint though pursuing;’ the dedication has commenced.”
 
The words sung recited the grail quest; but its chorus, a simple one, was much the same as that sung at the May-day festivities on a former occasion. The people gathered, heartily joined in the chorus. When the singing ceased, the Knight, in his usual abrupt manner, began addressing the assembly:
 
“The beloved young missioners have undertaken, by means of their handiwork here, to strikingly present the noblest truths, and they have taken a step in the right direction. Love for the pictorial, manifest especially in children, grows with growth; those adult needing and seeking, as they grow, finer, grander symbols. Our Divine Lord, who ‘knew men’ and ‘knew what was in man,’ did not rebuke, but rather utilized this taste of man, by teaching the profoundest things of His Kingdom by means of it. He came as close as close could be to the very core of human life, as it was or to all time will be. While He might have navigated Galilee in a palatial barge, borne over be-flowered waves by perfumed breezes and golden wings, with the aureoled spirits, ‘who do excel in strength,’ by thousands, to escort Him, He chose rather to journey in an all-winning humility, borrowing, as He had need, the old boat of some poor Tiberian fisherman. He might have entered Jerusalem, that last time, in an Elijah-like chariot, dazzling the city with splendors surpassing those that the rapt John beheld on Patmos; but the King of Glory, seeking to be the King of all men, elected in that supreme moment to get near to men by approaching the august courts of Herod and Caiphas, and the commons as well, on an ass—an humble beast, and borrowed at that. All this allegorized the condescension and sympathy of Jehovah. The universe is full of patterns! The books of Nature, Revelation, and Providence, having a common authority, are constant in the use of pictured truth. Nature gives us the dawning of light and the marshaling[552] of order out of darkness and chaos. There is the low earth, the high firmament, ripe summer going down into the winding sheets of winter and up to the resurrections of spring. Twig, flower, seed, forest; insect that creeps, and bird that flies; the speck-life moved, and the behemoth; the atom and the planet-system—waning and growing, dying and living, from formlessness to beauty, from time to eternity! Then take the inspired picture-history: Eden’s fall, Egyptian captivity, the Red Sea passage, the wilderness, the manna by the way, the rest by the Mount of the Law, the entrance to the Promised Land. Lastly, the Incarnate One, an eternal symbol, the realization and fulfillment of all preceding. ‘Which things are an allegory,’ exclaimed Paul, with a sweeping back-look. The three books present to the thoughtful pictured banners innumerable, to wave him onward. This temple is dedicated to the purpose of pointing to these pictures. Fitly the ‘angels of the mount’ have determined to make prominent the beautiful, patient, modest Mary, Mother of Jesus. And to study her intelligently or profitably, it is necessary to know her not only as an historical personage, but as one in the cavalcade of symbolism unfolded by Sacred Writ and by Nature. She passes by, herself every way unique, the exemplar of God to those aspiring after gentle, devout girlhood, pure and wise maiden-life, constant wifehood, and patient, consecrated, and influential motherhood. Turn again to the Divine Word, the beacon of the ages, the history of Providence, the solver of life’s problems. It is made up of an entrancing array of symbols, types, prophetic dramas, and gorgeously constructed visions, constantly representing or dextrously pointing, by countless trophies and allegories, to its Ideal and Darling, Mary’s Son, who ‘spoke as man never spake, yet who without a parable spake nothing.’ Though the literary ages are strewn with long winrows of dead books, no work of man long surviving the mutations of time, God’s picturesque handiwork, the inspired volume, as potently molds the thoughts, charms the affections and quickens the hopes of our race with its tokens, types, idyls and illustration as it did when the earth was younger by far than it is now. It is a living fountain, not only giving, but retaining its immortality! It abides because it masterfully deals with the things that pertain to the wonderland of the[553] soul. How necessary its methods is at once apparent to any one who considers, discerningly, man as a complex union of spirit and matter; wonderful forever, but ‘very good,’ since the All Holy, Great High Priest performed the nuptial ceremony of that union. If there could be found a being able to reason, as a man, who had not within himself this unity, and who had never experienced its phenomena, such would at once combat the possibility of its existence. Even those so organized, and momentarily realizing the jointure of the God-like spirit with the earthly body, the higher condescending to and communing with the inferior, the inferior at times over-persuading, dominating and utterly shipwrecking its great spiritual co-partner, are compelled to admit the whole as being a fact without parallel, alike inscrutable and bewildering. A life-time of profoundest introspection can carry the greatest mind, herein, only to the confines of new wonders. But the interest in the study of the unwritten, unvoiced language of symbolisms by which the wonderfully united twain, soul and body, confer and commune with each other deepens with the study. What a fine, expressive, rapid, exact, exalted language that must be! To each well understood; without their arcana unknown, unheard, incomprehensible. And it is of necessity all symbol, natural, intuitive, without a single arbitrary sign! This sign-language acts by symbol in the royal temple of memory and imagination. And so again we perceive the representative, picturesque or typical is the medium of the fine, the deep and the lofty in expressing truth. This is the soul’s language, by which it communes with whatever else there is in man, through which it receives the songs of Heaven, and the august or tender messages of the Spirit, out of the deathless land.
 
“When this sphere of ours was rolling swiftly onward through the shadows of night, as well as swiftly downward through darker shadows of sin, Divine love said ‘Let there be light.’ Then the hosts of heaven saw at Bethlehem a mother and babe marking the place of world-dawn, unfolding the design of Deity to effect redemption by touching the race of man at infancy; the most effective because the most plastic point; through motherhood the most influential because the tenderest instrumentality. The never-to-be-forgotten spectacle thrilled, with a new ecstasy, the beings of[554] glory whose every throb of life is joy. They tracked the heavens about with light as they sped out to keep abreast the fleeing earth and shout over Bethlehem, ‘Glad tidings! Glad tidings!’ They saw Eden restored through the advent of a new, pure home; they saw a mystic covenant between God and man typified in the child begotten of a human mother in conjunction with the Eternal Father. By this there seemed to be an attesting that humanity was to be raised to Divine favor; there also was a symbol showing the value of law; for through the incarnation, Deity, in the form of a babe, became submissive to law administered by a mortal mother.
 
“He is blind who can not see in all these things God’s purpose to elect some of His creatures to be His co-laborers in the choicest co-operations, and also to be exemplars of what He does and would do. These things being so, we do well to learn the alphabet of His goodness from His elect heroes, heroines and saints; and I proclaim to-day my innermost belief in Christ as the argument, logic and fruit of God’s love; but, at the same time, I praise, as one enravished, the character of her who was God’s poem, God’s peroration! We now proclaim this temple dedicated to the purposes of showing forth the things I have spoken.”
 
The Hospitaler abruptly ceased his address, as he began it. There were other services consisting of psalm-singing and prayers, and the service was ended.
 
As the congregation dispersed, the young missioner, Cornelius, exclaimed: “Miriamne, the Hospitaler has awakened me as from sleep by God’s truth. Oh, the heavens are not as full of shining stars as God’s truth is full of beauty! It seems strange that men like myself, and wiser, are so long in bringing these things to their minds. You, my dear little mystic, are my interpreter.
 
“It’s just as I told you, wife. We must go in pairs. In the Egyptian mythologies, Osiris had his Isis, Amen-Ra his Maut, and Kneph his Sate. Thank God I have my adolescent other self!”
 
[555]
 
“I, a woman, help you? My sex is honored by the praise. Are they worthy of all they need? Is it madness to seek to gather all women having gifts and needs into a helped and helping fraternity whose creed is a fine example? If I help Cornelius, cannot a peerless one like Mary help all?”
 
“Pardon the thought, but one word haunts me—idolatry!”
 
“Impossible! We all need soul company, and have room within for such. We must have an inner population of real heroines and heroes or be filled with ghosts and myths. The empty soul, eaten up with self-worship, goes mad; the myth-possessed becomes an idolater. If we harbor the God-like, keeping the highest place for Deity, our inner selves will be no hideous chambers of imagery, but a counterpart of heaven.”
 
“But some have fallen into putting Mary before Jesus, and so we’ve seen the advent of Mariolatry.”
 
“But this only, and surely, here I know, no friend of the Divine Son can dethrone Him by honoring her, aright; indeed, as He, Himself, did. It was of Him she spoke when exclaiming: ‘My soul doth rejoice in God my Savior!’ Can one truly honor Him and despise and ignore the woman who gave Him human birth? Can one have His mind and forget her for whom love was uppermost to Him in His supreme last hours? Can one honor her aright, and yet dethrone the Son whom she enthroned? She bore Him, then lived for Him. She honored herself in bearing Him, and was His mother, His teacher and His disciple. He revered her, she worshiped Him. Awed by His augustness, she was yet conscious of an ownership of[556] His greatness; believing in His divinity, she yet enjoyed the nearness to Him of a mother.”
 
“I can not but believe that she is a queen, indeed, high among the glorified who reign with God! I question again: Who ever did, or could, become heretic or carnal by sincerely revering the peerless woman whom Christ enthroned on His heart?”
 
“I know at least that the fathers at imperial and pagan Rome placed a representation of Mary in their Pantheon when public policy made it an imperative necessity to overthrow the influence of the lewd, fanciful and ungodly ideals that had been set up therein,” responded Cornelius.
 
“The world is a Pantheon full of corrupt ideas. Let us raise high the choice ones God has sent us—But see, yonder is the wife of a poor old Druse camel-driver. She was once a sinner in the streets of Jerusalem. Now she is a Sister of Bethany, allured to goodness by our Temple’s allegories!”
 
“A woman that was a sinner, a scarlet woman?”
 
“Only such. No; all of that! One woman; a lost one? How little to man; how much to God! Had nothing else been done, heaven would have been set singing, as ever, over a sinner’s return. That’s reward enough for all we’ve attempted.”
 
“Now I’m interested, indeed!”
 
“Well you may be, when you hear all. We’ve here one once a harem beauty, who, having lost her power to fascinate, was committing her life to that hag-cunning belonging to old women who supplement their decaying power by wickedness, fox-like and serpentine.”
 
“The old, old story; yet I thank God if her life be sweetened.”
 
[557]
 
“Hers is a strange story.”
 
“May I know it?”
 
“Yes; it is, as I’ve gathered it in scraps, a sad romance. She was born of Georgian parents, among the mountains of Armenia, and gifted, in her youth, as are most of those of her sex in that country, with unusual personal beauty. She early attracted the attention of the monsters who dealt in human flesh, and a Georgian noble unrighteously claiming her family as his serfs, bartered away Nourahmal to merchants seeking recruits for Mameluke harems. She became, in time, part of the retinue of a sheik by the name of Azrael, a desperate adventurer, who, on a............