Lectures Delivered in America in 1874

LECTURE IV

THE SERVANT OF THE LORD

I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation.  Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay—as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say, See what a superior people you are now,—how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793.  Well that would be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins, certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement, by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its evil.  For me, true to that which I proposed in my last lecture, I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the Lord.  For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons—First, because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; and next, because he proved himself to be such by his actions and their consequences—at least in the eyes of those who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which all human history is—

His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done, in these our days.  But while we thank God that such work is now as unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it; and to do it, as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done before or since.

True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free self-governed peoples—

And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than once corrupt the world.  And yet in it, too, God may have more than once fulfilled his own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some 2,400 years ago.  For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other, speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to their own fiends at home.  Among such as these, empires did introduce order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and humanity.  They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human race till they had moulded them into one.  They did it cruelly, clumsily, ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was not—alas, alas!—done somewhat ill?

Let me talk to you a little about the old hero.  He and his hardy Persians should be specially interesting to us.  For in them first does our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history.  In them first did our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the future world.  And to the conquests of Cyrus—so strangely are all great times and great movements of the human family linked to each other—to his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and I am speaking to you at this moment.

It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for you, however clumsily, once more.

In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now call Persia, the dwelling place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek, and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs.  They had wandered thither, said their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which left them but two months of summer to ten of winter.

They despised at first—would that they had despised always!—the luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs of the Medes—a branch of their own race who had conquered and intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but short-lived Median Empire.  ‘Soft countries,’ said Cyrus himself—so runs the tale—‘gave birth to small men.  No region produced at once delightful fruits and men of a warlike spirit.’  Letters were to them, probably then unknown.  They borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they conquered.  From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads were instructed but in two things—to speak the truth and to shoot with the bow.  To ride was the third necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, after they had descended from their mountain fastnesses to conquer the whole East.

Their creed was simple enough.  Ahura Mazda—Ormuzd, as he has been called since—was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light and life and good.  He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the tree, before the fire, before man the truthful, before the Devas and beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth.

He needed no sacrifices of blood.  He was to be worshipped only with prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown herb Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was not he, but the symbol—as was light and the sun—of the good spirit—of Ahura Mazda.  They had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a sign of folly.  They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of the old world.  When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, they became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the depths of national shame, captivity and exile, saw in them brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was holding by his right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt itself, should be crushed, though alas! only for a while, by men who felt that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to sweep out all that with the besom of destruction.

But that was a later inspiration.  In earlier, and it may be happier, times, the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, disorder, uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms.  ‘He therefore is a holy man,’ says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, ‘who has built a dwelling on the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children, and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices.’

To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd’s world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order and of Good.

For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians.  Evil was not for them a lower form of good.  With their intense sense of the difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful; to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them at last impersonate and a person.

Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their great prophet, Zoroaster—splendour of gold, as I am told his name signifies—who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him.  He, too, tried to solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who has succeeded yet?  Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman, Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned being.  He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd alike in nature and in man.  He was the cause of the fall of man, the tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as Ormuzd was.  But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older Zoroastrian creed.  With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not be eternal in the future.  Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the day when three prophets—the increasing light, the increasing truth, and the existing truth—should arise and give to mankind the last three books of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.

Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what might they not do when the hour and the man arrived?  They were not a big nation.  No; but they were a great nation, even while they were eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in the sterile valleys of Farsistan.

And at last the hour and the man came.  The story is half legendary—differently told by different authors.  Herodotus has one tale, Xenophon another.  The first, at least, had ample means of information.  Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the height of its seeming might and splendour and effeminacy.  He has married his daughter, the princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal-king or prince of the pure Persian blood.  One night the old man is troubled with a dream.  He sees a vine spring from his daughter, which overshadows all Asia.  He sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him that Mandane will have a son who will reign in his stead.  Having sons of his own, and fearing for the succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her child is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain.  The courtier relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on the mountains.  The herdsman relents in turn, and brings the babe up as his own child.

When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at play with the other herd-boys, and they choose him for a mimic king.  Some he makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his messages.  The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him seized by his guards and chastised with the whip.  The ancestral instincts of command and discipline are showing early in the lad.

The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old king, who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy.  The boy answers in a tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon’s Cyrus would have answered, that I must believe that both Xenophon’s Cyrus and Herodotus’ Cyrus (like Xenophon’s Socrates and Plato’s Socrates) are real pictures of a real character; and that Herodotus’ story, though Xenophon says nothing of it, is true.

He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just.  He had been chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit.  The boy whom he had chastised was one of those who chose him.  All the rest obeyed: but he would not, till at last he got his due reward.  ‘If I deserve punishment for that,’ says the boy, ‘I am ready to submit.’

The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose features seem somewhat like his own.  Likely enough in those days, when an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman.  A suspicion crosses him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling herdsman.

To the poor wretch’s rapture the old king lets him go unharmed.  He has a more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise confesses the truth.  The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words.  It is best as it is.  He has been very sorry himself for the child, and Mandane’s reproaches had gone to his heart.  ‘Let Harpagus go home and send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince.  To-night there will be great sacrifices in honour of the child’s safety, and Harpagus is to be a guest at the banquet.’

Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the king’s meat?  He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put before him, out of which he is to take—in Median fashion—what he likes.  He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son.  Like a true Eastern he shows no signs of horror.  The king asks him if he knew what flesh he had been eating.  He answers that he knew perfectly.  That whatever the king did pleased him.

Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive, and bided his time.  The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus—as we must now call the foundling prince—had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life.  But Harpagus does not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts.  He has wrongs to avenge on his grandfather.  And it seems not altogether impossible to the young mountaineer.

He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge in it.  He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.

He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to avenge.  And the two little armies of foot-soldiers—the Persians had no cavalry—defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.

And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly anything, save the fact that they were made.  The young mountaineer and his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been.  They gather to them, as a snow-ball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe whom they overcome.  They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and affection by that righteousness—that truthfulness and justice—for which Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book of his—the Cyropædia.  The great Lydian kingdom of Crœsus—Asia Minor as we call it now—goes down before them.  Babylon itself goes down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar’s feast; and when Cyrus died—still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say—he left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Hindostan.

So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational enough.  It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.  They are inclined to ‘relegate it into the region of myth;’ in plain English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe.  What means those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years of Cyrus, I for myself, cannot discover.  And I say this without the least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons.  For there are—and more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this earth—a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic.  They know the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the consciences, the very bodies of men and women.  They dread so much from experience the abuse of that formula, that a thing is so beautiful it must be true, that they are inclined to reply, ‘Rather let us say boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be true.  Let us mistrust, or even refuse to believe à priori, and at first sight, all startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is not as dull as the ledger of a dry goods’ store.’  But I think that experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water philosophy.  The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.  The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics, startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial crime and folly.  Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take care not to tell, because we shall not be believed?  Let the ditch-water philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many a landslip.  It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences be what they may.

How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades?  Were they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other?  Certainly not for lightening an overburdened population.  Nay, is not the history of your own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man?  Believe me, man’s passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human movement.  And a truer law of social science than any that political economists are wont to lay down, is that old ‘Dov’ é la Donna’ of the Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or criminal, which was brought before him, ‘Dov’ é la Donna?’  ‘Where is the lady?’ certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably at the bottom of the matter.

Strangeness?  Romance?  Did any of you ever read—if you have not you should read—Archbishop Whately’s Historic Doubts about the Emperor Napoleon the First?  Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved, as early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic School, that the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be treated by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no evidence of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes and strange defeats was probably invented by our Government in order to pander to the vanity of the English nation.

I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition, foreshadows, wittily enough—that if one or two thousand years hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous—and that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains.  What will they make, two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle?  Will not that, and stranger facts still, but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his fellow-slaves?

But enough of this.  To me, these bits of romance often seem the truest, as well as the most important, portions of history.

When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare, telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter, telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That must be true.  So beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and unexpected, it is all the more likely not to have been invented.

So with that other story—How young Cyrus giving out that his grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them into a great meadow and feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his father’s farm would yield, and asked them which day they liked best; and, when they answered as was to be expected, how he opened his parable and told them, ‘Choose, then, to work for the Persians like slaves, or to be free with me.’

Such a tale sounds to me true.  It has the very savour of the parables of the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with which the tale begins.  Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be true.  Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history is not all wrong.  Its advocates are right in saying great historic changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable event.  They have been preparing, perhaps, for centuries.  They are the result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more perfectly understood.