Chapter IV.“Love, and do what thou wilt.”
Chapter IV.
“Love, and do what thou wilt.”
The next day another great meeting was convened.
Their deliverance and the manner of it had wrought a great change in many, especially in the less educated of the community, who experienced at that time aconversion—thatreversal of the natural selfish state which makes self come last instead of first in the thoughts of a man, and which leads him also to realize a Presence in the Unseen. I mention this because it very much changed the nature of their deliberations. I do not say that these conversions would have had a lasting effect but for certain events which followed.
All desired a settled order in the Island. Those who were not truly in principle Anarchists, but rather Democrats, proposed some form of social contract by which they might “confer all their power and strengthupon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that might reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their Person: and every one to owne, and acknowledge himself to be Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall Act, or cause to be acted in those things which concerne the common Peace and Safetie; and therein to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgments to his Judgment. This is more than consent or concord; it is a real Unitie of them all, in one and the samePerson, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, ‘I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this Man or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him and authorize all his actions in like manner.’”
These words are originally those of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, and these, or something like these, were spoken on this occasion by a young Englishman of gentle birth and manners, but of very ungentle notions when first he came to the Island. He was not one of those whocame of their own free will, but as a branded man, having continued, after many warnings, to gather large companies of men in the London squares, and to exhort them to Revolution.
He was now, notwithstanding, as we have seen, rather old-fashioned in his ideas, and his proposal was met by not a little opposition. Who, it was asked, should be the governing body? How chosen? Who should make, and who enforce, the laws? All the old well-worn, yet not worn-out difficulty about elections, and minorities, and oligarchies, seemed to appear in forecast on the Island, whichat least had never known these evils; and the young man, as the argument proceeded, felt himself to have been in the wrong.
But the voice which on this day made itself heard with the most clearness and decision was that of a Russian Prince, who was persuaded as firmly as he had ever been that in Anarchy—absence of all government—lay the only true order of society. He had always acknowledged that to this end certain principles of morality recognized by the whole community, were necessary. He had believed, on first coming to the Island, that the mere absence of outward lawwould develop in men that natural morality from which, under the blight of government, they had fallen away; and he had opposed the work of the Priests of the West on the ground that the artificial restraints of religion are as fatal as civil enactments to the free growth of this natural virtue. But he had seen what sort of fruit was borne by common human nature when first left in a wild garden. His soul had been awakened to find that the morality of which he had dreamed, kindled and made living could be no other than the life of the Cross.
In truth, like the oldScholar of the Western settlement, his heart had long been dwelling in the place of lowly service and of death to self, without knowing the meaning of such a life, or putting it into the words of the Christian faith; for the Christian faith that he had been taught had been shut up in sacred books and disguised in sacred images, and so hidden from his eyes.
But on the evening before this convention, after the great deliverance, he had gone up the western slope of the mountain and had found the Sister sitting in silent meditation at the door of her house, wearied with all the anxieties andevents of the day, and with the reaction that comes to all high natures after times of tension and excitement. The thought of the drowned Dacoits, of the unsettled state of the Island, of the wickedness that abounded, and of her own helplessness for good, weighed on her sensitive spirit. She was in Elijah’s mood when he said, “Oh, that I now might die!”
To those who feel weary and wanting all things, the call is often to work and to give; and so it was that evening with the Sister. They spoke together by the door of her house till the full moon dropped from the height of the northernsky towards the western sea; and as they talked the things unseen seemed the only realities. The high hope and faith in which the Sister had long lived and moved were communicated in that hour to the seeking soul of the Prince; his whole being rose up to greet the new vision of the Best; and when he took his leave of the teacher to whom he owed so much, it was not to return at once to his home by the southern shore. He climbed by a steep path to the mountain top, and there, till the moon set and dawn came over the sea, he communed with his own heart and swore a solemnallegiance to the Master whom he had chosen.
To-day, full of hope and confidence, he rose among the people, and laid before them his scheme of a Christian Anarchy—a society of men set free from all outward law, set free from the bondage of self and of evil desires, because the willing servants of a holy Lord.
As we have seen, he was not the first to speak in the assembly; his old restless desire to make his voice heard was gone; he was clothed with a new humility. The cause for which he pleaded was not his, but that of One who hastes not:—
“Day by day,And year by year He tarrieth: little needThe Lord should hasten.”
“Day by day,And year by year He tarrieth: little needThe Lord should hasten.”
“Day by day,And year by year He tarrieth: little needThe Lord should hasten.”
“Day by day,
And year by year He tarrieth: little need
The Lord should hasten.”
It has been shown that the people were ready in heart for such an appeal. There was not one voice raised against him; each seemed fired by a high enthusiasm for the good of all; each eager only that the highest will should be done.
This will not seem strange to those who realize the excitement of the times just past, and who remember how frequent in the history of religion has been the sudden awakening, under strong feeling, of large multitudes of men. I will notsay that this was altogether unlike such other awakenings; I only say that it was more lasting in its consequences than many such have been.
With a people in this temper the structure of the new Polity seemed rather the building up of a Church than the ordering of a Commonwealth.
Yet it truly resembled neither of these things. They determined that no written laws, no written book of religion, no formal creed should have a place among them. They had seen how law-making means law-breaking, and they determined that their rule of life should be simply thisone thing—a principle, a passion, not a command; just this—Love to a living Lord, in whom they recognized the perfection of all that the mind of man can conceive as holiest and best, whom they knew to be among them always. In all troubles and difficulties they stretched out hands of prayer and proved His presence.
These being their thoughts, it was rather a furtherance of their work than a hindrance of it that all the books of the Priests had been consumed in the burning of the church. They did not attempt, as they might well have done, to reconstruct a book ofFaith from the words and thoughts with which the memories of the Sister and some others were stored.
These were held all the more precious because they had to be told by one to another, and told again and again, till in the hearts of all were embedded as shining jewels fragments of perfect truth and flashes of mystical insight. Dearest to all were the parable of the Vine and Its branches, the Story of the Cross, the “Sermon on the Mount,” and many sayings such as these: “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life;” “He that loveth his life shall lose it;” manywords of St. Paul, and especially those which tell of the struggle of the soul to get free from the only real tyranny, and the splendid anarchy of the slaves of Christ; many sayings of Thomas à Kempis, of Tauler, of Molinos, and of Marcus Aurelius, dear to the heart of the Sister; many fragments of poems and hymns such as she loved and had learnt; many beautiful old hymns which some of the wives of the German Socialists remembered and sang. But it would not be possible even to hint at the chosen words which ruled the lives of that happy community, every voice in which swelledthe sweet hymn of praise which rose at morn and even among the Bread-fruit groves. They did not assemble to worship or to sing, for they sang and worshipped everywhere.
No one called anything his own; and each was eager to find opportunities of helping others with his strength or his substance.
But as to the Dacoits, concerning them even the Prince was led to doubt the fitness of Anarchy. They were not, indeed, now so strong, or the rest of the community so weak, that they could not be forced to submit to laws; but they did not seem able to understand the very rudimentsof that inner law which he saw was needful to the peace of a country ordered on the principles of which we have spoken.
So they were taken in calm weather in the Lagoon boats to a small neighbouring island, where they would find plenty of food, but no large timber of which boats might be built; and they were left there to work out for themselves the problem just solved on Meliora.
How long the Anarchy, which was truly a Theocracy, would have continued in unbroken peace cannot be known. It is possible that, though the children of the first settlers werepassionately eager for settled order, and enthusiastically religious, their children might show a return of evil tendencies, and that those who did not remember the first fearful days of strife in the Island might wilfully have roused again a spirit of disorder; for the world and all the spheres mount only in upward spirals toward that point of the Heavens where they shall rest at last, and are turning always to the same point again, only a little higher than before.
What did happen was this.
Not long after the time of which I have written, the Sister having died, andbeen buried at her desire high up on the mountain, the Prince went one evening to sit by her grave awhile and to gather strength by communing with the spirit that had first led him into the way of gladness.
It had been a sultry day, and the breeze that was wont to cool the Island when the sun went down was this day asleep; no breath lifted the heavy air.
The heart of the Prince was mournful too; only the hidden help which never fails upheld him in the vague depression which stole over him.
Then he heard suddenly a strange rumbling sound in the mountain under him;the earth shook, and as he sprang to his feet he saw a horrible sight—the sea drawn back from the reef, sucked from the great Lagoon, and then rushing in upon the Island and surging up over the reef, over the fringe of Palms, over all the peaceful homes below. Twice this was repeated as he staggered down from the highest point of the mountain; and when the violence of the shock was over, the crater lay at his feet a salt lagoon, and over all the fruitful plain the sea lay deep and still.
He alone was left of all that land’s inhabitants.
To a nature like his there was nothing terriblein solitude, nor did the whole of this awful event seem to him so sad as it would have been to hear one evil word from the lips of a child.
He lived for some years after this a life of meditation and peace, finding just enough food to supply his need among the fruits of the higher mountain forests; and one day, in his extreme old age, a ship’s boat seeking water entered the Lagoon. He was taken on board, and he brought with him a manuscript which he had written on slips of the bark of trees, relating the history of the Island. From his own lips yet more of the story was gathered andwritten down by a Jesuit father who was returning in the ship from a mission to the newly-settled Antarctic Continent.
There is no more to be told. The old Prince died on the voyage, glad to depart as soon as he had told his tale.
He had come to see many things clearly in his lonely years on the mountain height. What these things were, beyond what has been written here, he told to the Jesuit father—under the seal of confession.