Part 13

=Paw or Hand.=--The pupil said: "In Kipling's wonderful _Jungle Book_, the boy is intimate with all kinds of animals but not with apes, which are the worst of all creatures and composed of wickedness and crime. When Goethe, in the second part of _Faust_, wishes to represent phantoms and evil spirits, he uses the same masks and costumes as for the monkeys in the Witches' Kitchen in the first part. And it is among these degenerate brutes that man (?) now does his best to seek his ancestry. For my part I would rather trace my origin from a noble horse, or a sagacious and honest elephant, or from a courageous and thankful eagle.

"But it is probable that apes spring from degenerate men, escaped criminals, and ship-wrecked Robinson Crusoes. The hand of the chimpanzee is not a paw which is being evolved into a hand, but it is a human hand which is degenerating into a paw. A palmist could read the lines of it; a manicurist could improve it and make it capable of wearing a glove. If man really sprang from apes, according to the law of phylogeny, a child ought to be born with a hairy body. But now it comes into the world as smooth as an angel, often without hairs even on its head. It is a disgrace to me that I served the Ape-king, the seducer of my youth! And it was so stupid!"

=The Thousand-Years' Night of the Apes.=--When the sun of Christianity rose over the world, it naturally became night for the apelings. When they turned their backs to the light, everything became distorted for them. Right became left, east became west, good became evil, black became white, day became night. Therefore one reads still of their thousand-years' night, as they call the Middle Ages. When the savage tribes of Europe became tame, when the aged and sick became objects of pity, when governments ruled and laws protected, when faith, hope and love, self-sacrifice and chivalry flourished, then it was night for the pagans. When Europe received science, when Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Arnold, and Basilius founded chemistry, metallurgy, and physic, their darkness increased. When mediæval art culminated in the noblest work of art there is--the Gothic cathedral--then it grew dark before the eyes of the giants; their ears could not endure the chime of bells and organ-music. Finally the Middle Ages discovered gunpowder, the compass, and printing. A religious man, whose sails bore the sign of the cross, discovered America. But Pauli, the disciple of Clemens Romanus, already knew "the ocean which cannot be crossed by men, and the lands which lie behind it."[1]

In the midst of the darkness of the heathen there was the light of convent-schools and universities, in which spiritual as well as worldly wisdom was taught. Poems of chivalry, romances and dramas were composed. Charlemagne was a Christian King Solomon; he defeated the Philistines in Saxony, built temples out of the ruins of Rome, held learned conversations and listened to legends, cultivated the land and gave laws. That was the brightest phase of a Europe grown patriarchal and Christian. The gods certainly did not walk any more on earth, but God's messengers were in constant communication with men, and disclosed to them the secrets of God's kingdom, which were written down in Apocalypses and, best of all, in the _Legenda Aurea_. Thomas à Kempis's _Imitation of Christ_ was printed and is still read even by Protestants. One can even read the Church Fathers, Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom; Augustine was used in my youth as a confirmation-manual. Two hundred years before the Reformation--the schism in the Church as it should rather be called--Dante wrote the most Christian of all poems, which the heathen have tried to steal for themselves. Boccaccio expounded the _Inferno_ from a professor's chair, a fitting penalty for the trespasses of his youth. Botticelli, Lippi, Ghirlandajo were the great religious painters of the Middle Ages. Their pupils Michael Angelo and Raphael were devout Christians, although the heathen have wished to appropriate them under the false designation Renaissance, or new birth of heathenism. When at the beginning of modern times it began to grow dusk, the dawn rose for the heathen and for "the last Athenians." The last? There will certainly be more Athenians who will wish to carry owls to Athens.

[Footnote 1: Clement, Epistle to the Romans, chap. xx.]

=The Favourite.=--Julian was an Illyrian, from the predatory state composed of a mixed Phœnician race who worshipped Baal and Astarte. He had a small head, and no occiput; he had thick lips, a beard that swarmed with vermin, long nails and black hands with which he groped in the bleeding bodies of slain beasts in order to prognosticate the future from their hearts and livers. His cheerful religious services consisted in the sacrifice of animals, and were accompanied by the dances of immodest girls. In order to refute ancient prophecy, he wished to build again the Temple at Jerusalem. But fire broke out of the ground, so that the undertaking was frustrated at its commencement. This madman once came to Antioch, where there were a hundred thousand heathen whom he expected to receive him with public sacrifices and dances. Instead of which he was met by a solitary priest bearing a goose. That was all!

This unattractive person, who has become the darling of _The Last Athenian_[1] and the new heathen, was finally enticed into a desert. There he suffered hunger and thirst till a lance pierced his liver. But it is incredible that he exclaimed, "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" He was far too stupid for that.

=Scientific Villainies.=--If anyone comes to you and says, "I don't understand the proof for the existence of God," you should answer, "You don't understand because your wickedness darkens your understanding." All atheists are rascals, and all rascals are atheists. Their intelligence is so beclogged with sin that they cannot understand the simplest teachings of Christianity, the Incarnation and, consequently, Immaculate Birth of God, His Resurrection and Ascension.

When the sectaries came to Luther and said that they could not understand him, because they had another Spirit, he answered, "I smite your Spirit on the snout! God rebuke thee, Satan!" A godless man or a so-called free-thinker is a rascal who permits himself everything. His natural sympathy for scoundrels is so strong that he will swear a false oath in order to save the guilty from condemnation by a false alibi. He will accuse an innocent man, and persecute him from one court of appeal to another, in order to get him into prison, and will demand a large sum of money as a reward for his ill-doing.

When the guilty is acquitted they give him a banquet, his companions write odes in his honour, he is promoted and finally appointed to be an instructor of youth. When an atheist adopts the pursuit of science, one is sure only villainy will result. He says falsely that he has seen such and such things under the microscope, in order to be able to write a treatise on them. If he is an astronomer he will see as many canals in Mars as his professor wishes. If his professor does not believe in the canals in Mars, he will not see any.

[Footnote 1: _The Last Athenian_, title of a work by Victor Rydberg.]

=Necrobiosis, _i.e._ Death and Resurrection.=--During the winter I found the chrysalis of a cockchafer and laid it on my writing-table. One evening in the lamplight it began to click and make small movements. Believing that the warmth had developed my beetle I opened its black coffin, but found to my astonishment only a white slime without a sign of organisation; it smelt of sour gastric juice. This half-fluid mass, however, possessed the capacity of movement. Later on, when I had a microscope with a large field of view, I opened the chrysalis of a butterfly and examined it. On a clear yellow background of fluid matter there was sketched, as it were, the outline of the future butterfly in half-shadow, without, as yet, any bodily organisation. That is called "necrobiosis," or the dying-off of living tissue. And the deliquescence of the chrysalis in slime is termed "histolysis." Its reorganisation is said to take place by means of _corpora adiposa_, or particles of fat. More than this I do not know. I wrote to Germany (where they are accustomed to know everything) and asked for some works treating of the metamorphosis of the chrysalis, but there were none on this most important and interesting question. Father Darwin and his son Haeckel knew nothing and wished to know nothing about the resurrection; they only knew about birth and death. Finally I bought for five-and-twenty kroners a large work on butterflies composed by a professor. There was not a word in it regarding the necrobiosis of the chrysalis. But sometimes I see on a gravestone within a church wall this symbol: caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly.

=Secret Judgment.=--When one sees a fact repeated regularly and under defined conditions, one believes one has discovered a law. I think I have discovered a law, and consequently a tribunal whose decisions we see, but whose inner working we can only guess at. I had a relative who had reached a certain age without "ever having time" to think of death. On the 18th January of the year 18-- he had a stroke and fell. That was the first warning. Then he began to think about death and the life after this, and occupied himself thus for six years; then he died exactly on the same day, on the 18th of January. The fact of the interval being six years made me think of Bismarck's six years in Sachsenwald, when he sat alone and brooded on the transitory character of greatness, and curiously enough injured his reputation through being betrayed by vanity into making incautious revelations. Then it occurred to me that Napoleon was six years on St. Helena, and finally became so well "prepared" that he received the sacrament on his death-bed. Whether Heine lay on the ground for exactly six years, with his body wasted to the size of a child's and tormented by the fear of losing his wife, I cannot say definitely; but it was about six. It is well known that the pious Linnæus had to spend his last years seated in a chair, lamed by paralysis; nor did even he escape being worried by a quarrelsome wife, God alone knows why!

Our great and glorious Tegner received his first warning in 1840. It was accompanied by a condition like that described in my _Inferno,_ during which, among other things, he saw his whole poetical work in a depreciatory light, and even at last wished to cancel it all. After just six years' preparation he died on November 2, 1846, in a cheerful state of mind, the sky being lit up at the time by a splendid aurora. Goldschmidt mentions that and still more remarkable things in his excellent _Nemesis Divina_. I read lately how Fersen was murdered in his carriage on June 20, 1810. I recalled to mind that it was the same Fersen who drove the carriage in which Marie Antoinette fled to Varennes. I referred to the _History of the World_, and found that the flight to Varennes took place on June 20, 1791. The question arises: "Was it a crime to wish to save the queen?" The author of the article in the _Biographical Lexicon_ mentions the crime by name; but it was something other than the attempt to further her escape.

=Hammurabi's Inspired Laws Received from the Sun-God.=--The laws of Hammurabi occupy fifteen quarto pages. That is the whole find! And these pages are to nullify the Bible, which is so unsearchably rich and possesses such mysterious depths that everyone in trouble, who with humility seeks for counsel and comfort there, finds it forthwith, although he may first receive some blows which strike the nail on the head!

Hammurabi's laws in fifteen pages resemble Deuteronomy to a certain degree, but are much more meagre; they often recall our old Swedish law with its trivialities. For instance: "If anyone strikes out a man's teeth, his teeth shall be struck out; but if he strikes out the teeth of an emancipated slave, he shall pay one-eighth of a mina of silver."

In any case God is one, and His laws are in principle the same. The Bible may have used the same source as Hammurabi. But when the heathen try to use the laws of the Assyrian clay tablets in order to prove that the Bible is not inspired, they miss the mark. "Inspired" means "received from God." See how the heathen has adorned his paltry pamphlet with a frontispiece, which asserts, against his will, that Hammurabi's laws were also inspired. For the frontispiece portrays Hammurabi receiving his laws from the Sun-god.

=Strauss's Life of Christ.=--Now that I am sixty years old, it occurred to me to see what sort of a book Strauss's _Leben Jesu_ is before I depart. In my youth, in the 'sixties, we read in school (of our own accord, however) "the last Athenian's doctrine of the Bible," but we never succeeded in seeing the original _Life of Jesus_. And although I have been in libraries, collected books, visited second-hand book-stalls, I have not seen Strauss's book. It seemed as though it had been confiscated by the Invisible Powers. Now when I am sixty, it has arrived and I tried to read it. But I could not.

It was simply unreadable! All these many pages contained nothing, and what was printed seemed to me incomprehensible, soulless, dry.

A man who writes a book about what he does not understand; a student who has learnt the æsthetic systems by heart; a philosopher who tries to define the beautiful; a mathematician who wants to prove or disprove axioms; a drunken man who tries to play the flute; a feeble foolish attempt to explain God's great miracle in the Atonement. I threw the book away, else I should have gone to sleep over it.

Strauss died in 1874, and in spite of the last stage of his development, when he did not believe any more in the immortality of the soul, he spent his last hours in reading Plato's _Phædo_, in which at the death-bed of Socrates the immortality of the soul is so clearly demonstrated.

His death was like that of Socrates, his pupils said. But they do not inform us whether the cup of poison was at hand.

=Christianity and Radicalism.=--Christianity is really more radical than Radicalism. Christ turns his back on the whole of society with its institutions, science, and art. He warns us against the scribes; the rich are not his friends, but rather Lazarus; the rich youth is told to sell all that he has and to give to the poor. To soldiers Christ says, "Those who take the sword shall perish with the sword." He says nothing about science, art, and industry because He is indifferent to them. He has no great illusions about men, for he calls them "a generation of vipers." And rightly; since the earth is a prison for those who have committed crimes in heaven, we are all rascals; but it is the prison chaplain's duty to preach pardon to those who behave properly. To open the prison would be unwise and unlawful; there Christianity differs from Anarchism. Give custom to whom custom is due, and to Cæsar what is Cæsar's. Authority is ordained of God, and beareth not the sword in vain.

Christianity and Radicalism accordingly agree in their criticism of society, but not in the inferences they draw. The Christian endures the sufferings of the prison-house with religious resignation; he does not waste valuable time in making foolish proposals regarding the reform of prison-life and management. In order to obtain mitigation and pardon, and to escape the dark cell and scourging, he tries to behave well, but he does not believe that the prison can be a place of recreation.

All that Rousseau, Max Nordau, and Tolstoi have said against the faults of society is quite true, but their inferences are false. Socialism, _i.e._ pagan socialism, which preached development and progress, went its crab-like course backwards to the trade unions which had been dissolved, limited industrial freedom, introduced inquisitorial methods, excommunicated heretics. In the great strike non-socialists were refused water and gas, bread and milk for children. They compelled the contented to be discontented, made men wild and despairing, and really made things worse, when they ought to have improved them.

But in their pagan Radicalism they did not attain to the height of Christianity. Unbelieving, they believed in everything that was false--scientific fallacies, politico-economical errors, philosophical stupidities. Into a pagan one may instil every possible falsehood and stupidity; but for the truth in its real relations he is deaf and blind.

To have a moderate quiet contempt of the world, to be already half out of it, one's staff in one's hand and one's knapsack on one's back, ever ready for departure, to have clean hands and a good conscience--that is the way not to be easily assailable. Then one is not envied, and suffers not from disappointments and humiliations, for one is prepared for all, and has anticipated all in advance.

"Vanity, Vanity," saith the Preacher. "Sow in the morning thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall succeed, or whether both alike are good."

=Where Are We?=--If men only knew where they are!

The description which the ancients gave of Tartarus exactly fits our condition in this life. The ambitious man rolls his stone up the hill like Sisyphus, and when he has got it to the top it rolls down again. A certain architect spent twenty-five years of his life in working and intriguing in order to build a temple for the state. The temple was built and consecrated, a torch-light procession was held in honour of the architect, and he was crowned with a laurel-wreath. The next day the newspapers informed us that the temple must be pulled down because it was a failure. The architect died half a year afterwards in an asylum; the temple was demolished and the architect's name forgotten and obliterated. Tantalus, the rich miser, stands in the midst of a spring of water, but cannot drink; branches laden with fruit hang over his head, but when he stretches out his hand to pluck a fruit a gust of wind comes and tears the branch away. The rich man has worked and swindled till old age begins. Then at last, when the grouse come flying towards him, he has no teeth left; his wine-cellar is full, but the doctor has forbidden him wine. That is Tantalus!

Ixion revolves on his wheel, at one moment up, at another down. The ancients assigned as the reason of his punishment that he had boasted of the favour of a woman who had never been his.

The Danaides, the coquettes, are perpetually drawing water, but their vessel is like a sieve; everything enters it, but nothing remains.

All day long and every day one hears the expression "That is hell!"--such is the universal view. When things look a little brighter, the table is covered, the bed made, and we feel well again. We cheat ourselves often with alcohol, and continue our somnambulism. Then we are awoken by a noise, start up, rush about, weep, and then go to sleep again. At last sleep is banished once for all, and we wake never to sleep any more. Once we are well awake no opiates are of avail.

Then we discover the whole cheat. We see where we are, and what our past, which seemed so real, was. The comparatively wise man then turns away from the phantoms and shadows of reality in order to seek the other, the true, the actual Real. Then the state is seen to be a prison; the defenders of the fatherland are body-snatchers; society is a madhouse, whose warders are the officials and police; family life is concubinage; capitalists are usurers; the fine arts are superfluities; literature is printed nonsense; industry feeds unnecessary luxury; railways are instruments of torture; the electric light ruins the eyes; all the blessings of civilisation are either curses or superfluous.

When we have seen this, we turn our backs on all and seek the only thing that holds, that gives a real answer, that fulfils what it promises. But this super-real fools call a phantom.

=Hegel's Christianity.=--There are two Voltaires: one, the mocker at all definite religion, who is revered by the godless; the other, the fanatical champion of God who is ridiculed by the atheists because he believed in God as naïvely as a child. Voltaire recovered his reason before he died, as lunatics are wont to do; when he died he was definitely religious and took the sacrament. There are also two Hegels. But they are more complicated than Voltaire, who was as simple as a feuilletonist. Hegel discovered with his logic that what exists has a right to exist; he defends the _status quo_, society, state, religion with all their corollaries, because they have proceeded from God; everything is right since it exists. "It belongs," he says, "to the essence of religion that it should realise itself in several historical religious forms. Of these, however, Christianity is the only one which suitably expresses the essence of religion. In her doctrine of the Trinity the Christian Church contains the nucleus of all philosophical speculation. For this signifies nothing less than that the Eternal God, enthroned in His majesty over the sphere of the finite, condescends and reconciles Himself to the finite, becomes man, suffers, dies, and returns to Himself as the Holy Spirit." That is well put; but every schoolchild knew it already from Luther's "little catechism." For what object then is this extraordinary accumulation of several thousand pages of incomprehensible philosophy? To what purpose? Hegel died of cholera in 1831, after traversing many devious ways, as a simple, believing Christian, without any philosophy, repeating the penitential psalms.

="Men of God's Hand."=--That is Kind David's expression (Ps. xvii., 14) which he uses of the godless, to whom the Lord gave power over His people Israel when they behaved badly. Thereby is the knotty problem solved, why God gives the godless power, honour, and wealth, while He often chastises His servants.

The Pharaohs were idolaters and wizards, but God's chosen people had to be their slaves. The Philistines worshipped Baal and Astarte, but they were allowed to devastate Canaan and even to carry away the Ark of the Covenant. Nebuchadnezzar was no saint, quite the contrary, but he was permitted to carry the children of Israel into captivity. Good men are not adapted to be instruments of chastisement, and the office of executioner is not an enviable one. Everyone has his Egyptian armed with a rod, whether they are called superiors, employers, customers, the public, newspapers, or even public opinion.

All strive for an imaginary independence or so-called freedom, while there is no independence and no freedom. Therefore the effort is vain. Only one thing remains--to reconcile oneself to obedience to human authority for the Lord's sake, and to pay taxes where taxes are due. And where one earns one's bread, one must be polite. Vex, not thyself that thy trade and thy position are difficult; God has so appointed it.