Section 7

A general idea seems extant among men, that the majority must necessarily be right, and it is pretty apt to be the case that they are, if right means a certain agreed upon state of things which gives satisfaction to the mass. People get accustomed to the condi- tions, and hate the upheaval which arises from a change of base, even though the alternative broaden their possibilities. A Galileo is generally tortured in some form or other when he first asserts himself; for the very shock to the inertia of being,
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wtich results from the possibility of a world moving is beyond toleration; and though the pioneer of a truth whispers, "E pur'si muovef" a hundred times, he still does penance at the command of the Inquisition.
When a minority of one faces a majority of the world's balance, he tnust be entirely sure of himself , otherwise he is trampled to earth and ground to powder. The secret, sad satisfaction felt by an untimely dis- coverer, of a something which must inevi- tably overturn the settled opinion of every dogmatic religionist or scientist on earth, is more of pain than pleasure. He knows his danger well, and is fully aware that his safety depends absolutely upon the first move; single and unarmed he must con- quer a band of howling wolves, with the divine glance of his eye. All the Bibles of all the Cults are bound to be thrown at his head, and all the curses of all the churches roared in his ears. He will be jeered at and spit upon, torn to pieces and devoured by an outraged crowd, unless he can so
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flash his truth upon them, that they shall become temporarily blind. Ere they fully recover he must pile proof upon proof, evi- dence upon evidence, till, stunned, hypno- tized, lost in wonder, he catches them on the rebound and towers above their unwill- ing heads absolute master.
Is it any wonder in face of this, that the discoverer along the lines of art, science, religion, philosophy, hoards his treasure as though it were a subtle poison, too precious for aught save himself, who might at any moment most ardently desire an instantaneous departure to the other world.
To overthrow Conventional Opinion is to uproot religion, and reduce clerical salaries ; it causes empty pews in the Cathedral and modifies the sale of bibles; it unseats College Professors, severs the chains of women and educates children ; it levels cast and exonerates the monkey ; it changes the location of Heaven and alters the where- abouts of Hell.
Power 1 Power ! The secret manipu- lator of the finances of Europe is infantile
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compared with one who has discovered something revolutionary, and carries the proof in his pocket; some bit of explosive that shall blow up the Pacific and rift a continent. There may be no new thing possible under the sun, but remember the celestial luminary is very old, and the his- toric age is but a dot in time. To all intents and purposes, as far as our present memories are concerned there is a deal that is new; and the appearance of each darer of Conventional Opinion, who has a right to dare, is followed by an upheaval.
If you love smooth sailing, summer seas and dead calm, be extremely careful how you defy Public Opinion with either a dis- covery or an idea, especially an idea. If you are fond of love-lit eyes of approval and a pat on the back, agree with your ances- tors and contemporaries, agree with every- body, approve everybody. If the crowd fight among themselves, agree with the last man at the last place. If you are caught in the rabble, keep still, for the love of heaven refrain from committing yourself.
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In this way you will obtain fat positions, and liberal emoluments ; an idol of society, the flower of a season, your tomb will be inscribed with an eulogy, and history will gloat upon your name — for a generation — but later — Ah me !
If you prefer temporary fame to eternal glory, if you would deck your brow with fading flowers rather than the bay, if a decade of splendor is all that you demand, let Conventional Opinion have its way; swallow accepted creeds with your meals and permit the prevailing idea to manifest itself in 3'our clothes; be in fashion or die. But if a certain starry truth has caught your eye, one so dim that only your long sight has sensed it, invent your telescope, set it upon the street corner and invite the crowd to look; though they dread the evidence of their own senses and stone you to death later on, an enthusiastic people will erect your monument at the cost of their own jewels, while they keep the grass on your g^ave green by showers of precious tears. All this, if you deserve it; but if not, bury your
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knowledge in your breast, as did the Her- metic Seers of the middle ages, and grow strong upon the consolation of your hoarded wealth. This is but a matter of choice; as a man sows so shall he reap. The coward has a temporary reward, the brave an eternal. The miser gloats and the Sage is satisfied. If you have gone far in the teachings of a certain cult your priest will talk to you thus: "The mass of the world sit down and weep because the stars do not drop in your laps; once in a while, some one brave enough builds a ladder and climbs to a star. If you look for examples you will find them extremely few; if you read biography, it will be like a blow in your face. Your busi- ness is to defy tradition, challenge fate and make your own mark though it be a reve- lation in chirography. Write your own book of fiction, and reverse all thiugs that ever were written; begin with a marriage and end with true love; start with a funeral and close with a wedding. Let eternity take time by the forelock, and crowd yesterday and to-morrow into to-day.
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"The boast of the Philosopher is, that he has discovered something; the boast of the Master is that he has applied something. Science supposes an ether, the Master merges himself into it; Art paints a picture, the Master realizes it; Music sings a song, the Master becomes one of the notes.
" You enter the gateway of the road, and you stare np at this monstrosity and shiver. You are not afraid but you find no vulner- able point; he is as rigid as a rock, and you crawl up his feet like an insect; he has no idea that you are there. Let me tell you something, sting him, sting him deep and sharp, again and again, keep on, from his toes to his ears. He will squirm and howl, keep on, crawl over him, be quick and spry, he is so slow that he cannot catch you. You can never destroy him, never, but make him frantic; he will dance about; then slip past, he will never know. In fact you will get the better of him.
"Now this creature which you have con- quered is Conventional Belief. He is turn- ing to stone; he will be a statue some day;
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his blood flows so sluggishly now that it took a long time for you to make an impres- sion. Some day he will crumble to pieces on his own account, but you have no time to wait for that, sting him. We warn you that it is hard, terrible, but we promise you that at the end of it such power as Christ had. ' In what,' you ask us, ' lie these extreme difficulties ? ' and we answer that the first and hardest consists in your inher- ent (?d5/»«ac)',- not an intentional obstinacy, but in that something which inheritance has given."
Thus speaks a certain priest; whether his sermon be wise is left for you to decide. Be assured of this however, if you seek the Crest of Olympus and the Halls of the Immortals, dare, if you have discovered the torch of a so-called truth, to wave it over the heads of an indignant crowd even at the risk of being burned to death. Your funeral pile will become an inextinguishable flame of Vesta, on wliose luster the purity of the world's Rome will hinge.
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HELL.
Imagine a Nineteenth Century Dante starting out to explore Hell, and suppose he takes as companion a Virgil of the Middle Ages. Let his descent into the nether world be from a local point, and his record of the same be printed and preserved as a standard upon the subject among the moderns. He would tell of his wanderings amid the shades of the dead, followed speedily by his explora- tions among the haunts of the living. The negative hall of the departed, being far removed from the awe inspiring inferno of the denizens upon this side. So having shaken the impalpable dust of the region of ghostland from his sacred feet, let us see where he locates the place called Hell, and how, after much searching, he found it.
First he souglit, in company with his laurel-crowned bard, the dim alleys and underground haunts of the great city; using the prerogative of the Sage, he disguised himself and his attendant in an atmosphere of opaque mist. Draped in the celestial aura which passes everywhere for a phe- nomenal bit of fog, he secretly investigated the ghastly rendezvous of murderers and thieves, watching and listening with intense interest to theirplots and lucredible schemes. They seemed nervous, suspicious, afraid, and yet he detected a flavor of insane bliss in their lives; the spice of danger had an exhilerating effect, and kept remorse somewhat at bay; monotony and ennui had no meaning for these restless blood-letters and robbers. The element of change was rampant among them and a certain close fraternity which satisfies the longing of every heart, no matter how bad, and repudiated in their case the possibility of Hell. Even amoug these apparently irreclaimable souls, existed bonds of affection and possibilities of variety which necessitated heat and light. Their
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very plots and schemes called into play the intellectual faculties to a far greater degree than the demands made upon them in ordi- nary life; they had nerve, action, thought, emotion, fraternity, excitement, nearly all of the qualifications which a soul in Hell has not. So Dante and Virgil turned their backs, having been electrified by the uncanny fas- cination of the place, to seek the Inferno elsewhere.
Next they penetrate the haunts of shame, where vice outdoes itself, and the beast in man strangles the angel. Here surely must Hell be. No ray of light can penetrate the closed shutters of the prostitute, or warm the heart of the courtesan. But wait — habit dulls the edge of vice, and automatic prosti- tution, like eating and drinking, becomes an almost unconscious necessity; apart from the body, the soul in a creature blinks, and if it finds a reflector anywhere, will glory in its own sheen. The crowded condition of this universal Yoshiwara, the necessity for the adornment of the victims of the same, the tinsel splendor with its snake glitter,
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unsuccessfully emalated by the aspiring denizens of respectable streets, the risk and danger, the tottering elevation of an occa- sional inmate, the grati6ed vanity, the exchange of sentiment, idea and affection among themselves, all tend to veil vice in glamour, and substantiate a sort of super- ficial heaven, bubbling with a wine-instilled pleasure, which is a long way removed from Hell. Even in the wilderness of streets where a famished Hager wanders, too old, too ugly, to evoke an answering smile, even there shines a ray of hope, and a responsive glance of pity uow and then caught from sympathetic eyes. The abandoned know not Hell; and Dante, weeping, turned away. Slowly from the slums and haunts of vice he ascended to the avenues of the rich; an invisible guest, he sought the domestic hearth where a suspicious wife watched, with half- shut eyes, the vagaries of an uncertain mate. And lie discovered that even though the mar- riage vow meant no more than an unholy promise, even though infidelity were as fashionable as divorce, even though opinions
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on the relations of the sexes were as loose as humanity's conception of dogma, in spite of this he found on the avenues of the rich, in the homes of the fashionable as in the haunts of the poor, a percentage of happi- ness, and an utter absence of the condition which he conceived as Hell.
And then he sought the church and sat under the droppings of the sanctuary, with some faint idea that here extremes would meet; that in the whited sepulcher were rotting dead men's bones, and that uuder the vestment of the priest beat the heart of the arrant hypocrite. His eyes wandered along the pews and up into the dim splen- dors of the arches, when low, upon his ears there stole soft streams of melody, as if veiled angels were playing harps before the throne. In ecstacy of sadness, with Virgil by his side, he stole along the receding nave out into the sunlight, to shake the liquid notes of melody from his trembling soul, as birds shake raindrops from their wings. " Where music is, is heaven," said he; and henceforth he kept far off from concert halls,
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and houses where the feet in mazy dance keep time to thrilling notes.
He sought the slaughter shambles, where dumb beasts with eyes like hunted stags are murdered by the last device of science, which in its very mystery is cruelty well- dressed. " Alas I he who draws the cup of blood has rosy cheeks — Hell is not here," said he.
Out in the suburbs he descried a hut where dwelt the miser — the fabled anchoret who conquers time, and dies to live again — his eyes were yellow from reflecting gold, his long nailed fingers glittered like gilt pens, a sun of gold above his head, streets paved with precious stuff. Could this be Hell ? And Dante whispered into Virgil's ear, " He who gloats on other than himself, even though it be but dross, esctz/s/// Hell."
And then, as speedily as sunbeam finds the earth, he sought the "upright man." He met him in the mart of trade, erect and cold — a statue with uplifted eyes. His atmosphere was frigid like the Arctic Zone, his look was blank, his touch was ice ; he
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loved none otHer than himself, nor was he loved. Correct beyond compare, his fault of &ults was that of having none. When not raised to the vacant sky, his eyes turned inward, searching vaguely through the icy avenues of self, for some warm place, some flickering flame of that imperishable fire which even the wicked keep alive; but the embers were concealed far down beneath an avalanche of snow, and all was cold — cold. He lived in one perpetual chill, and shivered with a moral ague, even in the sun. Nothing without was his— no mirror, however foul, in earth, or sea, or sky, threw back to him a picture of himself — and gazing on the end- less, frozen sea within, no tears dropped from his eyes to melt the icebergs drifting there. He suffered as does one long- damned. His Ego-eye stared — stared at self, and would not be put out; it froze, back in his head, and still it saw his intellect, full conscious to its very core, undjring, icy, beheld — beheld z. second self, congealed and stark. Whence, then, this wish to feel, while all that man calls heart is dead?
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"Ah Virgil," whispered Dante, "The heart can wei/er die ; a smouldering fire in him; it gnaws as does an insect at the tree's tap- root; and while he freezes yet he bums. Pent up, with no volcanic vent, he stands, a snow-capped mountain, seething with inter- nal fire. No object hath he but himself on which to spend his flame. Behold a vulture pecking at his breast, whose beak is hotter than a fiery barb, while on his head there rests a crown of ice. At last we pause, our quest is done, for this is Hell /
Ah! Ah! Ah! And we Divines of the Nineteenth Century spend hours towering over our congregations, debating the prob- ability or improbability of a literal hell; we ponder long days whether it is beneath us in the bowels of the earth, or on some far- off star devoted to infernal damnation. We, in the face of science and comprehensive research, wonder if the blaze is the actual result of physical combustion, and whether an unlimited supply of unfortunate meteors are shoveled into the insatiate furnace by a
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relay of horned and grinning devils. Actu- ally in tte dawn of the Twentieth Century since Christ, the same college bred men who waste their brain fiber on the infallibility of the penal inspiration of Jewish scriptures, lavish it also on what that infallibility might mean in its interpretation of Hell.
Of all the amazing exhibitions of high culture which this enlightened century has produced, this is by far the most aston- ishing. The wonder lies in the fact, that these same Divines and college savants preach science one moment and hell-fire the next ; or if they modify their Inferno to a mild form of burning, that they seek an actual place where the eternal immola- tion shall go on. Never was the incon- sistency of an age so manifest as in ours.