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Page 15
[Footnote 4: Addison's translation, Book III, pages 188-198.]
"Act�on was the first of all his race,
Who grieved his grandsire in his borrowed face;
Condemned by stern Diana to bemoan
The branching horns and visage not his own;
To shun his once-loved dogs, to bound away
And from their huntsman to become their prey;
And yet consider why the change was wrought;
You'll find it his misfortune, not his fault;
Or, if a fault it was the fault of chance;
For how can guilt proceed from ignorance?"
The story of Circe is the common story of those who have yielded to the
flesh. The companions of Ulysses visited the palace of Circe, were
allured by her charms, and the result is read in these words:
"Before the spacious front, a herd we find
Of beasts, the fiercest of the savage kind.
Our trembling steps with blandishments they meet
And fawn, unlike their species, at our feet."
The strong words of Milton are none too strong:
"Their human countenance
The express resemblance of the gods, is changed
Into some brutish form."
A common subject with artists has been the temptations of the saints.
They have fled from luxury, and what they supposed to be moral peril,
but have found no solitude to which they could go and leave their bodies
behind. In the silences faces have appeared to them full of alluring
entreaty, and more than one anchorite has found to his sorrow that he
carried within himself the cause of his danger.
A singularly vivid painting represents one of the saints in the desert,
and clinging to him, with their arms around his neck, are two figures of
exquisite physical beauty. Their charms are so near and perilous that
the pale and haggard man in desperation has shut his eyes, and in this
extremity, with his one free hand, is frantically clinging to a cross.
The artist has accurately depicted the condition in which the soul finds
itself as it begins its growth;--its chief enemies are those of its own
household.
Happy indeed is it for all that none see at the first the obstacles in
their way. Faint and far shines the splendor of the goal; the hindrances
are reached one by one, and each one, for the moment, seems to be the
last.
But close and persistent as is the animal entail, it is not
unconquerable. Many a Sir Galahad, and many a woman fair and holy as his
pure sister, have lived on this earth of ours. They were not always so;
and their beauty and holiness are but the outshining of spiritual
victory.
Is this environment of evil necessary to the development of the soul? We
may not know; but we do know that it can be conquered, and some time and
somehow will be conquered; and that then men, like ourselves, grown from
the same stock, evolved from the lower levels, will constitute "the
crowning race."
"No longer half akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit."
These are a few samples of the hindrances which the soul must face in
its progress through "the thicket of this world." But these are not all.
Hardly less serious is the ignorance which clothes it like a garment. It
comes it knows not whence; it journeys it knows not whither, and
apparently is attended by no one wiser than itself.
Hugo's awful picture of a man in the ocean with the vast and silent
heavens above, the desolate waves around, the birds like dwellers from
another world circling in the evening light, and the poor fellow trying
to swim, he knows not where, is not so wide of the mark as some
thoughtless readers might suppose.
The soul is ignorant and timid, in the vast and void night, with its
environment of ignorance and of other souls also blindly struggling. At
the same time there is the consciousness of a duty to do something, of a
voice calling it somewhere which ought to be heeded, and of having
bitterly failed.
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