“History never releases her slaves. He who has once drunk of that sharp, strong wine goes on drinking it, even to the end.” So spake Michelet, himself one of the priests of History. For History has her priests, who minister in her temples and convey her messages to the world. She has also her slaves, who do her humbler work — “temple-sweepers,” as Ephesus was of old to the great goddess Diana. They do it willingly — ay, and very often they do it because they cannot help it. An impulse they cannot resist drives them on.
The following pages contain the substance of a few informal “Talks” actually given under such an impulse to a little company of friends, by one of these humble slaves of History, sold into her service in childhood, and kept at work chiefly in one particular corner of her vast temple. From this experience there has sprung not know — our own answer we do know, full well. It is a glad and proud one: “There are plenty more where these came from.” Amidst so much that one longed to tell — so much that burned in the heart and trembled on the lip — the difficulty has been only what to choose. Spain, with the grand and solemn tragedy of her autos-da-fé; Italy, the Niobe of nations, with her many noble sons slain in this cause to weep over; Austria, Hungary, Poland, and the Northern nations — all these have been left out — England but faintly touched upon, and Scotland scarce at all. And France? Between the death by fire of the first martyrs of the Reformation there in 1525 and of the last on the gallows in 1762, what sad yet magnificent stories have been left untold! What abysses of horror and anguish, what heights of triumphant faith and patience have been passed over! But we forbear. For—
“Still they come, and still the cry is More!’”
Yet perhaps these very little Talks on a very great subject may induce some to search farther, and to explore for themselves the treasures of this mine.
There is one vast gallery which, properly speaking, is a part of it, but which yet it does not fall within our province to enter. Protestant Missions, which in our own age have attained to such an immense development, have already a voluminous history, abounding in the elements of romance. But all this must be left to other hands. Our work is only with the days of our fathers, and with “the old times before them.”
Two things, which yet would have greatly strengthened our case, will be found wholly absent from our Talks. We have, deliberately and of set purpose, left untouched the horrible details of cruelty — often of ingenious, diabolical cruelty — that meet us continually in the records of persecution and of martyrdom. There are things which, once read or heard, can never be forgotten again. They will not leave us; they haunt our memories; they come back to us when we desire them least, in our hours of gloom and depression, or—
“In the dead unhappy night, when the rain is on the roof.”
There are things which the eye can rest on— must rest on sometimes, if we are to read history at all — but the ear cannot bear to hear or the lip to utter them. The only comfort is, that they are past; and that, if those who suffered them could speak to us now, each one of them would say—
“For me, I have forgot it all.”
There is another case in which “silence is golden,” though silence may mean the sacrifice of cogent and convincing arguments. We are silent about the worst and most terrible corruptions of the Church that persecuted — often of the very persecutors themselves. We choose rather to think and talk of “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report.” If we think of these things we shall find them — and nowhere more conspicuously than in the age-long struggle between the Faith of Christ and the errors and corruptions of Rome.
“All high deeds that make the heart to quiver
With a deep emotion as we read
Are Divine, and go back to the Giver;
Courage, high endurance, generous deed
Come from Christ, and unto Christ returning
Find their full acceptance only there,
In that Center of all noble yearning,
In that Type of all perfection fair.”
MRS. ALEXANDER.