Chapter V (2)

His face shone. “But you have not seen the cups in the _Santa Casa_ from which the Holy Family drank. And their little bells, and——”

“I have seen enough,” I said.

“And the cannon-ball,” he went on in undiminished gratitude. “The cannon-ball which shattered the pavilion of Pope Julius II when he was besieging a city, but which by the grace of the Blessed Virgin left him un——”

I escaped into the crowd of snooded peasant women and worked my way along the aisle till I stood outside the portal under a gigantic Madonna and Child.

But the beadle was beside me.

“Go and look at the Fontana della Santa Casa.” And he pointed in parting gratitude to the centre of the piazza. “_Bellissima!_”

I did not go, but I looked at the great marble fountain with its grotesque beasts and Cupids and basins, and remembering the humble village fountain at which the carpenter’s daughter had filled her urn, I turned sharply to the right and found myself descending a long sordid street of shops and stalls, all doing a busy trade—despite the Sunday—in crosses, rosaries, crucifixes, chaplets, picture-postcards, medals, and all the knick-knacks of holiness. Sometimes through open windows of the ugly one-storey houses I caught sight of the landscape below—the path descending to the sea, bordered with buttercups and a-flutter with birds, the rolling olive-plains, the strip of blue sea, the wonderful headland. Never had I seen a lovelier view shut out by meaner buildings. With its patches of refuse and its dreary shops and booths it seemed the ugliest street in all Italy, bearing on its face the mark of its bastard origin—a city grown up not from natural healthy human life, but for the exploitation of a miracle.

And this it was that drew gold like water from the crowned heads of Europe. And this it was that had drawn hither even Descartes, the first Apostle of Philosophic Doubt. Surely “_Non_ cogito, ergo sum,” is the motto of Faith, I thought.

* * * * *

I stood in a vast ancient market-place among canvas-covered stalls, by a lovely fountain with a smiling little Bacchus that faced an old cathedral, and I gazed like ten thousand others at a lovely open-air pulpit that rose in the shadow of a tall campanile. From a bronze capital it rose, girdled with beautiful marble reliefs of dancing children by Donatello and protected from the sun by a charming circular roof, and in this delectable coign of vantage stood a priest holding something that fevered the perspiring mob.

“_La sacra cintola! La sacra cintola!_”

I knew what the Virgin’s girdle would be like, for had I not seen her handing it to St. Thomas in Lippo Lippi’s picture in this same town of Prato, as she flew up to heaven in the radiance of her youth and beauty, standing on cherubs’ heads and escorted by angels? But now so far as I could see this tasselled belt, it seemed to correspond ill with the waist measurement of the little mother of Nazara.

Some white pigeons fluttered round the priest’s head and settled on the pulpit, and a great sigh of ecstasy went up from the people.

I looked round at the little Bacchus. But he was still smiling.

* * * * *

I stood before an altar in a little church, but this time a sweet-faced woman in a wimple stood beside me.

“The wall is behind the altar,” she said. “And once a year the miraculous image of the Madonna of the Bed is shown to the people of Pistoja and the pilgrims, exactly as Our Lady of the Graces impressed it on this piece of wall here when she appeared to the sick girl. Very beautiful is she in her crown and mantle, clasping to her arms the crowned Bambino as she flies upwards.”

“And where is the bed?”

“The bed was removed from this sanctuary, which it blocked up disproportionately. A separate little chapel was built for it.”

We passed to the bed-chapel by way of the old cloisters of the Ospedale, and saw in a small room a heavy brownish wooden bed with a red quilt, made as for an occupant. A Madonna and Child was painted on the headpiece, and a Madonna and Child at the foot, and a Madonna and Child hung on the wall.

“And when was the miracle wrought?” I asked.

“In 1336.”

The very year of the death of Cino, the poet of Pistoja and the friend of Dante, I remembered. And Dante and Cino had receded into the dim centuries while this bed with its prosaic quilt and pillows stood stolid, inscribed at head and foot with inscriptions dated 1336 and 1334, begging me to pray for the souls of Condoso Giovanni and Fra Ducchio.

“Here,” explained the sweet-faced sister, “the poor girl had lain many long years, incurable, when one day the Virgin appeared in dazzling beauty, holding the Child, and told two little boys who happened to be in the hospital to fetch brother Jacopo della Cappa. The venerable brother, being busy confessing, refused to be disturbed, whereupon the Virgin sent a second message bidding him come at once, for she desired him to predict a pestilence in Pistoja, of which he would die in a month. So he came forthwith, but he had scarcely entered the room when the dazzling apparition disappeared. But she left the invalid girl in perfect health, and her holy image on the wall.”

“And did Fra Jacopo duly die?”

“To the day. And so great was the plague that there was scarcely any one left to administer the last office.”

“As disproportionate as the bed to the church,” I thought, “to kill off all Pistoja and save one bedridden girl.” But how utter such a thought to this sweet-faced sister?

“Since then the bed and the image on the wall have wrought many miracles,” she said. “The blind have had their sight, the deaf their hearing, the paralysed their limbs. That was why the name was changed from Our Lady of the Bed to Our Lady of the Graces. And countless were the pilgrims that came. But in 1780 the wicked Scipione Ricci, who was a secret Jansenist, was made our bishop, and he tried to destroy the faith in our sanctuary and in the Girdle of Prato. But our neighbours of Prato rose against him, rushed into the cathedral, smashed his episcopal chair, and sacked his palace. He had to resign his bishopric, and so our faith was purged of the heretic, and Maria was avenged. Ah, that jubilee of her Immaculate Conception in 1904! It was a day of Paradise.”

* * * * *

Again a haze disturbs my vision. For a moment I see the little olive-eyed Jewess of Nazara, racked between husband and son, wringing her impotent hands; then my vision clears, and I am reading a printed Italian prayer before a chapel of the Madonna in a mighty fane.

“TO THE HOLY IMMACULATE VIRGIN OF HOPE VENERATED IN THE BASILICA OF S.
FREDIANO

“Kneeling before you, Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God, consoler
of the afflicted, refuge of sinners, we pray you to turn upon us
your looks full of goodness, compassion, and love. You see all
our spiritual and temporal needs. Obtain from your divine Son
sincere contrition for sin, light to know the truth, force to
conquer temptations, help to believe and act as true Christians,
patience in tribulations, peace of heart, holy perseverance to
the end. Obtain for us that there may remain far from us
disease, pestilence, hunger, war, earthquakes, fires, drought,
flood, sudden death. Take this City under your particular
protection, preserve it, defend it, cause ever to reign therein
the spirit of religion and of concord, and in private families
mutual charity, domestic content, and good morals. . . . Whoever
will devoutly recite this will acquire forty days’ Indulgence
already conceded by His Most Reverend Excellence Monsignore the
Archbishop Filippo Santi.

“_Lucca_, 1848.”

* * * * *

I seemed to be back in Asia on a burning June day fifteen hundred years before this prayer was written, much pushed about by the crowd that surged round a church.

“Is it the Whitsuntide service?” I asked a priest at last in the Greek I heard on all sides.

“Nay; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple of Diana that thou knowest not the Church of the Theotokos, and the great Imperial Council of Bishops that is sitting there to avenge the insults of Nestorius to the Virgin?”

“What insults?” I murmured.

“Surely thou hast snored in the cave in the Pion Hill with our Seven Sleepers! This blasphemous Patriarch of Constantinople denies our Lady the title _Theotokos_, would argue that she is not Mother of God, but that the Christ born through her was only the human part of Him, not the Eternal Logos.” His voice trembled, his beady eyes flamed with passion. “And he dares come defend his thesis here—in Ephesus, where the Holy Virgin lies buried! But our saintly Cyril of Alexandria hath drawn up twelve anathemas and will stamp him out as he stamped out that minx Hypatia.”

“Is Cyril here too, then?”

“Ay, and what an ambrosial homily he preached! ‘Hail, Mary, Mother of God, spotless dove! Hail, Mary, perpetual lamp at which was kindled the Sun of Justice! Hail, Mary! Thanks to Thee, the archangels rejoice and sing; thanks to Thee, the Magi followed the star; thanks to Thee the college of Apostles was established. . . .’” His voice died away in reminiscent ecstasy.

“Then Cyril and Nestorius are now in debate?”

“Nay, the heretic shrinks from appearing—he pretexts that all the bishops are not arrived, and he induced the Emperor’s commissioner to protest against the sitting. But as thou seest, the Council is going on—hath been going on from early morn—there are two hundred bishops.”

“There are only a hundred and fifty,” put in a voice. “It is scandalous.”

“Ay,” assented another voice. “Where is the Patriarch of Antioch?”

The priest turned on the Nestorians. “It is beasts like you with whom Paul fought here,” he said.

“Beast thyself,” retorted a physician in a long robe, “to suggest that God could be contained in the womb.” It was the beginning of a scuffle that grew to a bloody battle between the Nestorian minority and the orthodox. Daggers and scimitars gleamed in the air. I saw a group of Nestorians take refuge in a church, but fly from it again, leaving a trail of bleeding corpses along the aisle. The survivors made for the harbour, hoping doubtless for safety in the multitude of boats and ships.

And ever thicker grew the crowd surging round the Council-chamber, till at last as the long summer day closed, a rumbling as of distant thunder was heard from within—“Anathema! Anathema!” And the cry passed to the crowd—“Anathema! Anathema!”—till the whole firmament seemed to crash and rock with it and men cheered and danced and tossed their weapons in air. And as the venerable figures began to troop out and the word came that Nestorius was deposed, a thousand torches leapt as by magic into flame, and men escorted the Bishops to their lodgings, leaping and singing, and lo! round the whole city blazed illuminations and bonfires.

And my eyes, piercing through the future, beheld Italian _bottegas_ with immortal Masters and Pupils, turning out through the centuries portraits of the Madonna and Child, to be blazoned henceforward inseparable, a symbol of the true faith: delectable, innumerable, filling the whole earth with their glory.

* * * * *

The close smell of the studios gave way again to the odour of crowded humanity and I was in the arena of Seville. But never, not even at Easter, had I seen the populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such rich mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so gaily caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls maddened with so many banderillas or disembowelling so many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy of slaughter. And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes drowned even the roar of the ring. And at every thrilling stroke or perilous charge there came from parted lips, “_Ave Maria purissima_” or “_Viva nuestra Señora_,” and from all around rose the instinctive reply: “_Sin peccado concebida_.”

Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the intervals of the bull fights, I became aware of the sense of the _Fiesta_. All this overflow of religious rapture sprang not from the bulls but the Bull—_Regis Pacifici_—which after centuries of passionate controversy had at last been launched by Paul V in this sixteen hundred and seventeenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their doctrine in public. Maria had been conceived without sin. The last flaw had been removed from her perfection.

“Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,” cried a lovely Señora with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “And now that we have purged Spain and placed her and her mighty possessions under the protection of the Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more glorious than her past.”

But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as the dead bull was trailed off at a gallop.

“_Ave Maria purissima!_”

“_Sin peccado concebida!_”

* * * * *

I am still in Spain, watching Señor Bartholomé Estéban Murillo polish off his Madonnas for country fairs or South American convents. Presently under the guidance of Señor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he paints the popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing with clasped hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts to France where two centuries later the picture is purchased at a fabulous price by the Louvre, just before Pio Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull _Ineffabilis_, definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures of the “Immaculate Conception” multiply, and Bernadette, a pious young shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds in a grotto by a spring a White Lady, veiled from head to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a chaplet with golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who announces herself as “The Immaculate Conception” and demands a Procession to her shrine.

And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted in immortal colours by the epical brush of Zola: the mushroom Lourdes of hotels and holy shops replacing the rude village, the Hospital of our Lady of Sorrows, the crowned statue of our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers of the Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary, the Basilica swathed in splendid banners, glittering with golden hearts innumerable, and jewels and marbles and marvellous lamps; the unending masses and litanies, the three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train rolling through the night with its hideous agglomeration of human agonies, amid ecstatic canticles to the Madonna, the thirty thousand tapers winding round in leagues of flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the perpetual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the figure of the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto.

* * * * *

The thunder continued but it was again the roar of an arena, though by the towered old palaces round the great semi-circle of cobbled piazza and by the fountain with the bas-reliefs of Christian virtues I knew I was back in Italy, in my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame that shot skyward and what was this tree near the Christian fountain that they were breaking up to throw on the bonfire? What was this dreadful sport that had replaced the Palio?

In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures, whose shrieks were drowned by the fiendish roar of the drunken mob.

“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria!_”

And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated itself to the Holy Mother, was the _civitas Virginis_, and that the Madonna was its feudal suzerain, formally presented with the keys of its gates. Visions from the old chronicles floated before me—the dedication of 1260, the weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, prostrate with the Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or walking behind her as she was carried in the great barefoot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias; and the victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing her white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her faithful feudatories to slay ten thousand Florentines “as a butcher slays animals in a slaughter house,” so that the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the region, polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck in her honour; and the renewed dedications whenever the Commune was in peril, the gorgeous processions and “Te Deums,” the great silk standard showing the Madonna rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior, the Captain of the People, the Signoria in violet and cloaked as on Good Friday, the trumpeters trumpeting in the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver basin, the fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as the Virgin did her duty as suzerain——

But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the moment.

“Whom are they burning?” I cried in horror.

“Only Jews,” replied my neighbour reassuringly, and indeed, I could now distinguish the Hebrew death-cries of the victims.

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.”

“We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together!” my neighbour chuckled. “No godless French Republic for us!” A fierce yell from the crowd underlined his remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted.

“They have found another! O Blessed Virgin of Comfort, they have found another!”

And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her greying hair, a little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn face I seemed to recognise under her dishevelled head-shawl.

“_Viva Maria! Viva Maria! Viva la Madre di Dio!_”

* * * * *

The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive shudder I shook off these visions and rose, cramped, to my feet. The sun was dipping beyond the mountains of Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still tolling, the air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my climb to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And the loving epithets recommenced—“_Debellatrix Incredulorum_,” “_Janua Coeli_,” “_Turris Davidica_,” without pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her countless names began crowding upon me, from “Our Lady of Snows” to “Our Lady of Sorrows,” from “Our Lady of the Porringer” to “The Queen of the Angels,” and all the symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed Book, from the Dove to the Porta Clausa; and all the myriads of churches and altars that had been dedicated to her from Rome to Ecuador—from Milan Cathedral with its hundred spires to the humblest wayside shrine of Sicily or Mexico—and all the feasts, all the “Months of Maria,” all the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all the effigies in wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and mosaics, from the crude little black sacrosanct Byzantine figures to the exquisitely tender marble Pietà of Michelangelo, and all the convents and orders she had created, all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, antiphons, litanies, lections, carols, canticles. The air was full of organ sounds and the melody of soaring voices. “Ave Maris Stella” they sang, and “Salve Regina” and “Stabat Mater,” and then in an infinite incantation, sounding and resounding from all the spaces of the world: “_Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis! Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!_” And her figure floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as it has floated before millions of households for hundreds of years, consoling, blessing, vitalising.

And I thought of her long adventure to reach this marvellous apotheosis: in what a strange little source this mighty river had begun; how that looseness of the Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for “maiden” by “virgin” in an utterly irrelevant passage of Isaiah had led to Mary’s virginity; how she had remained a virgin through all the vicissitudes of her married life, Joseph turning into a man of eighty with children by his former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the brothers of Jesus changing into his cousins; how her son had been born as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance; how, with the growth of theology and Mariolatry and nunneries and monasteries, she had grown holier and holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the saints, giving four feast-days to the Church, entering into the liturgy, redeeming souls from purgatory on Assumption Day, and even sustaining the saintly with her milk; how her final purification from the taint of original sin had been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St. Bernard opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans denying the dogma against Duns Scotus and the Franciscans; but how the “intellectuals”—so serviceable to the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the popular faith—were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh definers of heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran counter to the popular emotion, the popular festivals, the popular instinct for an ideal of purity and perfection. What a curious play and interplay of schoolman-logic and living emotion, working ceaselessly through the centuries, combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the carpenter’s wife till she was wrought to the mould of the popular need, her very parents, unknown to the Gospels, becoming, as Joachim and Anna, the centre of a fresh cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And what uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune controversy, from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable Bede to the two thousand and twelve pages of Carlo Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan!

And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the poets and painters, to the _Vergine Bella e di sol vestita_—the beautiful Apocalyptic Virgin, clothed with the sun—of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of Tasso, and the _Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio_ of Dante, and the images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom the Madonna sufficed to open all the mansions of art; who could cluster all the poetry of the world round her glory or her grief, were it rural loveliness or the beauty of lilies, or lofty architecture, or space-rhythm, or begemmed and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude; who set her rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered ceilings or within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers of roses or under the shadow of lemon-trees; who even crowned her with the Papal tiara.

But none of these images would stay with me: for not even the triple crown, surmounted by the golden globe and cross, not even this symbol of temporal, spiritual, and purgatorial authority, could banish the worn face of the carpenter’s wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and resounded the terrible words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”

THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMY

From the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of Pisa Cathedral Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time by the pendulum; by the telescope he made at Padua he mapped Space. Within a decade of the burning of Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show the infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus was confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter’s satellites. What the _Sidereus Nuncius_ of Galileo announced was the end of an era. By this terrible book and his terrible telescope the poor little earth was pushed out of the centre of the stage. The moon—no longer _teres atque rotunda_—lost her beautiful spheric smoothness, her very light was a loan—unrepaid. Great _Sol_, himself, the old lord of creation, gradually sank to the obscure coryphæus of some choric dance veering towards and around some ineffable pivot in a measureless choragium. The ninefold vault engirdling Dante’s universe was shrivelled up. The cosy cosmos was replaced by a maze of solar systems, glory beyond glory, of milky ways that were but clouds of worlds, thick as a haze of summer insects or a whirl of sand in the Sahara. The poor human brain reeled in this simoom of stars, and to complete its confusion, the philosophers hastened to assure it that with the universe no longer geocentric, man could no longer flatter himself to be its central interest.

“So many nobler bodies to create,
Greater, so manifold, to this one use,”

appeared disproportionate to Milton’s Adam. _Homo_ could not be the Master-Builder’s main concern—the great human tragedy was a by-product. A sad conclusion, and possibly a true—but a conclusion utterly unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the beneficent and facile Raphael remind the doubting Adam,

“Whether heaven moves or earth
Imports not.”

The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of “Paradise Lost” testify to the ferment among the first inhabitants of the new cosmos—Milton was born in the same year as the telescope and met Galileo at Florence—but despite the poet’s half-hearted protests, man has swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not the centre of the universe. Pray do not confound me with those pious pundits whose proofs of the flatness of the earth are still the hope of a lingering sect, and a witness to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no Muggletonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no lance to tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes. But I fail to see how the mere broadening out of our universe can displace _Terra_ from the centre. Till we have the final and all-inclusive chart of the heavens—and worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds whose light speeding to us at eleven million miles or so a minute is still on its way—how can any one assert conclusively that our earth is not in the exact centre of all the systems? That it goes round the sun—instead of being the centre of the sun’s revolution—is nothing against its supremacy or central status. The fire exists for the meat, though the _spit_ revolves and not the fire.

And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it assuredly remains at the centre of Space. For by that old definition of Hermes Trismegistus to which Pascal gave currency, every point of an infinite area is really its centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in a psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the centre of the universe.

But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the systems! What then? How does it lose its lofty estate? Is London at the globe’s kernel? Did the axis pass through Rome? Kepler wasted much precious time under the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the planets must be circular—since any figure less perfect than a circle were incompatible with their dignity. Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to explain their apparent deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere girt

“With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er,
Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”

The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the notion that the earth is dethroned from its hegemony of the stellar system merely because the lines drawn to it from every _ultima Thule_ of the universe are unequal. ’Tis a confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It may be that just this asymmetric station was necessary for the evolution of the universe’s crowning race.

For if the Universe has not its aim and centre in man, pray to what other end all this planetary pother? If man is but a by-product of the cosmic laboratory, what is the staple? Till this question is answered, we may safely continue anthropocentric.

Man abased forsooth by this whirl of mammoth worlds! Nay, ’tis our grandeur that stands exalted, our modesty that stands corrected. We did not dream that our facture required such colossal machinery, that to engender us a billion billion planets must be in experimental effervescence. A fig upon their size! Do we rank Milton inferior to the megatherium? Can a man take thought by adding a cubit to his stature? The ant is wiser than the alligator, and the sprawling saurians of the primal slime may have their analogue in the huge weltering worlds that have never evolved a human brain. And had the earth swollen herself to the gross amplitude of the sun, her case were no better: she would still be—in the infinite wash of Space—a pebble, even as a pebble is a stellar system in miniature. There lies the paradox of infinity. Nothing in it is large enough to be important—if quantity is the criterion of importance. To be in one spot of Space is as dignified or undignified as to be in another. Why, I wonder, has position in Time escaped this invidious criticism. As well assert that nothing important can happen or nothing that happens can be important, because everything must happen at a mere point of Time, which is not even Time’s _central_ point. It was a truer sense of values that made Christendom and Islam boldly place their foundation at Time’s central point, up to which or back to which all the ages lead. The year One begins with Christ’s birth, with Mohammed’s Hegira. In the same spirit, though with a more literal belief, did the old cartographers draw their world round Jerusalem as a centre. Position in Time or Space is not the measure of importance, but importance is the measure of position in Time or Space. Where the highest life is being lived, there is the centre of the world, and unless a higher life is lived elsewhere, the centre of the universe. Not, where are we in Space, but are we on the central lines of cosmic evolution? That is the question.

Theology, then, stands where it did, wherever _Terra_ stands. Not the mythical theology of sacred books, but the scientific theology of sacred facts. The expansion of the universe from a mapped parish to a half-uncharted wilderness of worlds cannot shake religion—a Deity is more suitably lodged in infinity than on a roof-garden—but it did shake the Church, so recklessly committed to a disprovable cosmogony. And the Church burnt books and men with its habitual consuming zeal, denying the motion of the earth as it had denied the Antipodes, clinging to an earth surrounded by menial planets, as it had clung to the flat plane of “Christian Topography.”

But is there nothing to be said for the Churchmen? Were they mere venomous obscurantists? Nay, they were patriots fighting for their father-world, for the cosmos of their ancestors, _pro aris et focis_. They saw their little universe threatened by the rise of a great stellar empire. They saw themselves about to be swallowed up and lost in its measureless magnificence. And so in a frenzy of chauvinism they gagged Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno, those traitors in the camp, in league with Reason, emperor of the stars.

But despite the Church’s defeat, our little globe still maintains a sturdy independence. And until you bring me evidence of a superior genus, I shall continue to regard our good red earth as the centre of creation, and man as the focus of inter-celestial planetary forces.

Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth unseen, as Milton asserts, and millions more may be invisible in Mars and the remoter seats of the merry-go-round, but _de non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio_. It is William James who of all philosophers in the world would argue our fates regulated by superior beings with whom we co-exist as with us our cats and dogs. The analogy has not even one leg to stand on. The cat and the dog have solid proof of our existence, they see and hear us, and we share with them a large segment of existence. Our anatomy and theirs are much of a muchness. They divide with us our food and our drink and bask at the same fire, nay, it requires a vast conceit to look them in the face and deny our kinship. But who save Gulliver hath beheld a bodily Superman or partaken of his meals? Even with our spiritual superiors, with our Shakespeares and Beethovens, we have a substantial basis of identity. The range of thought which circumscribes ours must at the same time partially coincide with it, and though our thoughts be not wholly their thoughts, their thoughts must needs be partially ours.

God may be infinitely more than man, but He is not finitely less. Even a God without humour would be—to that extent—man’s inferior. Matthew Arnold’s gibe of the “magnified non-natural man” is groundless. I do not become a magnified non-natural dog because I have attributes in common with my terrier. The God of theology is already divested of man’s matter; deflate Him likewise of man’s spirit, and what remains? In robbing their Deity of all human traits the de-anthropomorphic philosophers have overshot the mark and reduced Him to a transcendental nullity who can neither be comprehended by His creatures nor comprehend them.

Or if they allow Him ideas and passions, they neutralise and sterilise them in a frenzy of scholastic paradox. “_Amas, nec æstuas_,” cries St. Augustine, “_zelas et securus es; pænitet te et non doles; irasceris et tranquillus es_.” God repents, but without regret; He is angry but perfectly tranquil. To evade the limitations of any attribute we endow Him at the same time with its opposite, as who should say a white negro. But such violent assaults upon the unthinkable yield no prize either of understanding or of satisfaction.

If “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” be not that same love which a noble man may feel for his fellow-creatures of every order of being, if it be a love that is at the same time indifference, or even hate, then it may equally be expressed as “the hate which moves the sun and the other stars” (and which is at the same time love). Or it may find far honester expression as the agnostic’s unknowable—the X that moves the sun and the other stars. If God’s justice be not man’s justice, then it is no justice. It _must_ be our justice—if it is justice at all—our justice, only occupied and obscured by innumerable pros and cons to us unknown, and extending over times and spaces beyond our ken, so that were we placed in possession of all the evidence we should applaud the verdict. The philosophers do but narrow their God under illusion of broadening Him—or rather they broaden Him so tenuously that He becomes an infinite impalpability, whose accidental evaporation would scarcely be noted. It was a more consistent mystic who said: “God may not improperly be styled nothing.”

So that our circumnavigation of the infinite brings us back to our noble selves and our own door-step. The sun is still there to give us light by day, and the moon and stars still shine to give us light by night. Nor is it less their function to nourish us with beauty and with mystery.

“When Science from Creation’s face
Enchantment’s veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws!”

Campbell, who thus complained, was no profound poet. The laws are neither cold nor material, nor do the lovely visions yield their place. Their loveliness is as abiding as the laws which produce them. ’Tis true that at first Galileo seemed to have profaned Cynthia, the “goddess excellently bright.” The moon, the beautiful moon of poets and lovers, lay betrayed—a dead planet, a scarred desolation, seamed with arid ravines and pitted with a pox of craters. Is then the moon of the poets a delusion which science bids us put away like a childish toy? No, by her own heavens, no. A more scientific science restores the glamour. The moon has all the beauty she appears to have. The loveliest woman’s face, viewed through a magnifying glass, appears equally scarred and seamed and pitted. But here ’tis the lens that is accused of falsification, ’tis the ugliness that is pronounced the delusion—a face was meant to be seen at a certain distance and with the natural eye. Even so—and the moon chose _her_ distance with admirable discretion.

The synthesis of everyday reality is always man’s central verity. The peering unnatural scientific vision of the moon has the lesser truth, is but a spectral rim of the whole-orbed reality. ’Tis the poet’s moon that is the full moon. But the poet were as foolish as the astronomer if he in his turn imagined himself dealing with absolutes, if he forgot that in logic as in landscape all views depend on the point at which you place yourself. It is only from the true point of view that the earth remains the centre of the universe.

OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONS

And what is the invasion of our consciousness by the extended stellar system to its invasion by the intensive infinities of our own globular parish? The endless galaxy of the centuries and the civilisations has opened out before our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre of our cosmos—we can no longer snuggle in a cosy conceptual world, Classical or Christian, nor can we make the best of both these worlds, like Raphael or Milton. The dim populations have become lurid. Japan pours her art upon us, and her equal claim to hold a chosen people—“pursuing,” as its Emperor’s oath declares, “a policy co-extensive with the heavens and the earth.” Egypt unrolls the teeming scroll of her immemorial dynasties. The four hundred millions of China lie on our imaginations like a nightmare in yellow, and we perceive that the maker of man hath a predilection for pigtails. India opens out her duskily magnificent infinities and we are grown familiar with Brahma and Vishnu, with Vedas and Buddha-Jâtakas. Persia reveals to us in the Zend Avesta of Zoroaster a strangely modern gospel, glimmering through grotesque images of space and time. Mohammed is no longer an Infidel, and we recognise the subtlety alike of the Motekallamin and the Arabic Aristotelians. We respect the Norse Gods and the great Tree Yggdrasil. The Teutonic divinities have reappeared in every part of the civilised earth and their operatic voice is heard with more reverence than any other god’s. Even the old Peruvian civilisation solicits us, that successful social order of the Incas. The stellar swirl of worlds is a crude puzzle in quantity beside these mental worlds which the peoples have spun for themselves like cocoons.

But not only the peoples. Each creature that has ever lived, from the spider to Shakespeare, has spun for itself its own cosmos. Microcosm we cannot call this cosmos, since that implies the macrocosm drawn to smaller scale, and this—like all creations—is a mere selection from the universe, excluding and including after its own idiosyncrasy. Autocosm is the word we need for it—a new word, but a phenomenon as old as the first created consciousness, and a phenomenon that has never perfectly repeated itself since that day. For no two autocosms have ever been precisely alike. In the lower orders of being the autocosm may be substantially identical throughout all the individuals of the species, but as we mount in the grade of organisation, the autocosm becomes more and more individual. And even the large generic autocosms, how variously compounded—the scent-world of dogs, the eye-world of birds, the uncanny touch-world of bats, the earth-world of worms, the water-world of fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing-mice, the flesh-world of parasites, the microscopic world of microbes. These worlds do not need untrammelled orbits, they intersect one another inextricably in an infinite interlacing. Yet each is a symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos. One creature’s poison is another creature’s meat, one creature’s offal is another creature’s paradise, and our cemetery is a nursery aswarm with creeping mites. If on the one hand Nature seems a wasteful housekeeper, scattering a thousand seeds that one may bear, on the other hand she appears ineffably ingenious in economising every ort and oddment, every cheese-paring and scum-drop as the seed-plot of new and joyous existence. Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in through every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing itself into every possible and improbable mould, and even filling a chink in an existing creature rather than remain outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that achieves material existence takes its cramped horizons for the boundaries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own boundaries, that can weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. This is what happens to your Shakespeares and your Schopenhauers; this is the “Everlasting Nay” of “Sartor Resartus.” Life is become

“A tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Such an autocosm is the shirt of Nessus. Hercules must tear it off or perish. And we are all the time changing our autocosms. That is the meaning of experience. Only the fool dies in the same cosmos in which he was born, and a great teacher or a great statesman changes the autocosm of his generation.

Here be the true weavings with which Time’s Shuttle is busy, these endless patternings and re-patternings of mental worlds, adjusted to ever-changing creatures, and ever-shifting circumstances. The birth and death of planets is stability compared with this mercurial flux, which in the human world is known as movements of thought and religion, growths and decays of language, periods of art and politics. History is the clash of autocosms, and every war is a war of the worlds.

As I walk into Milan Cathedral, the modern autocosm fades out with the buzz and tingle of the electric cars that engirdle the great old building, and the massive walls of the mediæval autocosm shut me into a glowing gloom of unearthly radiance, whose religious hush is accentuated by the sound of soft bells. Only the dominating figure on the cross seems out of tone; this blood is too violent for peace. What a paradox that the Christians are such dominant races—perhaps they needed this brake. But even without the blood, the cruciform dusk of the interior is in discord with the lace-work of the exterior, recalls the sombreness below the glittering Renaissance. All this multitudinous microscopic work is waste, all this wealth of fretwork and final, for it is only at a distance, when the details have faded into the mass, that this mass appears noble. And this, too, is like the Catholic autocosm, with its rococo detail and its massive magnificence.

And round the Cathedral, as I said, rages the modern order—is not Milan the metropolis of Italian science and do not all tram-roads lead to the Piazza del Duomo?—and a ballet I saw in La Scala danced the carmagnole of the new world. “Excelsior” was its jubilant motto, the ascent being from Cathedrals to Railway Bridges and Balloons. A Shining Spirit of Light (_Luce_) inspired Civiltà and baffled the priestly powers of darkness (_Tenebre_), while ineffably glittering coryphées proclaimed with their toes “Eureka!”

But ah! my dear Corybants of Reason, an autocosm may be habitable and even comfortable in despite of Science. Its working value is independent of its containing false materials, or true materials in false proportions. And yet, my dear devotees of Pragmatism—that parvenu among Philosophies—its utility does not establish its truth. A false coin will do all the work of a true coin so long as it is not found out. Nevertheless there exists a test of coins independent of their power of gulling the public. And there exists a name for those who continue to circulate a coin _after_ they know it to be false. The Pragmatist may apply his philosophy to justify past forms of belief and action, now outmoded, but he will do infinite mischief if he tries to juggle himself or the world into such forms of belief or action _because_ they lead to spiritual and practical satisfactions.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to _believe_!

Nay, it is doubtful whether satisfaction can come as the sequel of any but a genuine and involuntary belief. There is much significance in the story of the old Welsh lady who desired the removal of the mountain in front of her window and complained to her pastor that all her prayers had been unable to move it a single inch. “Because you have not _real_ faith,” was the glib clerical reply. Whereupon, resolved to have “_real_ faith,” the old lady spent a night of prayer on her knees opposite the mountain. When morning came, and she rolled up the blind, lo! the mountain stood as before. “There!” she exclaimed. “_Just as I expected!_”

This pseudo-faith is, I fear, all that the Pragmatist can beguile or batter himself into, for if he has real faith he needs no Pragmatism to justify it by.

I grant you—indeed I have always pointed out—that there is a large area of the autocosm given over to artistic, moral and spiritual truths which are their own justification. But it is only where there is no objective test of truth that Pontius Pilate’s question may be answered with the test of success and stimulation. Wherever it is possible to compare the autocosm with the macrocosm, contradiction must be taken as the mark of falsity, and either our notion of the macrocosm must be amended, or our autocosm. Of course in the last analysis the macrocosm is only the autocosm of its age, but it is the common segment of all the individual autocosms. And while they are liable to shrivel up like pricked bladders, the objective universe can only expand and expand.

Despite La Scala and its dædal Modernism, it was, I fear, the Catholic autocosm which fascinated me most in Italy, with its naïve poetry, its grossness, its sublimity, and its daring distortions of the macrocosm. The very clock-wheels in their courses fight against reality. Read in the great church of S. Petronio the directions on the two clocks of Fornasini, one giving the solar time in the antique Italian style—when the hour varied with the daylight—and the other the mean time of the meridian of Bologna. “Subtract the time on the Italian clock from 24 o’clock, add the remainder to the time indicated on the other clock, but counted from 1 to 24 o’clock. _The time thus obtained will be the hour of Ave Maria!_” The hour of Ave Maria! Not some crude arithmetical hour. Not the hour of repose from work, not the hour of impending sunset, but the hour of the vesper bell, the hour of Ave Maria! How it circumlaps, this atmosphere, how it weaves a veil of pity and love between man and the macrocosm.

It is nearly three and a half centuries since Italy helped to break the power of the Paynim at Lepanto, yet the belief that the Madonna (who could not free her own land from the Turk) was the _auxilium Christianorum_, is as lively as on the day when the bigoted Gregory XIII instituted the Feast of the Rosary to commemorate her victory. At Verona I read in a church a vast inscription set up at the tercentenary of the battle, still ascribing the victory not only to the “supreme valour of our arms steeled by the word of Pius V,” but also to “the great armipotent Virgin.” Saints that I had in my ignorance imagined remote from to-day, shelved in legend and picture, retired from practical life, are, I found, still in the full exercise of their professional activities as thaumaturgists; and scholastic philosophers whose systems I had skimmed in my youth as archaic lore, whom I had conceived as buried in encyclopædias and monastic libraries, blossom annually in new editions. There is the Angelic Doctor—Preceptor as he was styled on the title-pages—whom I had thought safely tucked away in the tenth canto of the “Paradiso.” In the Seminario Vescovile of Ferrara I beheld the bulky volumes of his “Summa Theologiæ” in the pious hands of the fledgeling priests, in a class-room whose ceiling bears the sombre frescoes with which Garofalo had enriched the building in its palmy days as a Palazzo. And the theology has decayed far less than the frescoes. Still, that which we look upon as the faded thought of the Middle Ages, serves as the fresh bread of life to these youthful souls. Little did I dream when I first saw Benozzo Gozzoli’s picture of _The Triumph of St. Thomas_, or Taddeo Gaddi’s portrayal of his celestial exaltation over the discomfited Arius, Sabellius, and Averroes, that I should see with my own eyes scholars still at the feet of the _Magister studentium_ of the thirteenth century. Well may the Pope undaunted launch his Encyclicals, and the _Osservatore Romano_ remark that “the evolution of dogma is a logical nonsense for philosophers and a heresy for theologians.”

Pascal summed it up long ago: “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, Falsehood beyond.” What is true in the Piazza of St. Peter grows false as you pass the Swiss Guards. Catholic truth, like the Vatican, is extra-territorial. Why should it concern itself with what is believed outside? Even the Averroist philosophers taught that their results were true only in philosophy, and that in the realm of Catholicism what the Church taught was true. And though “impugning the known truth” be one of the sins against the Holy Ghost, the known truth and the Church truth show scant promise of coinciding. And the triumph of St. Thomas continues, as saint no less than as teacher. “Divus Thomas Aquinas” I found him styled in Perugia. His _Festa_ is on March 7, as I read in a placard in the Church of S. Domenico in Ferrara.

“Festa dell’ Angelico Dottore
S. T. d’Aquinas
San Patrono delle Scuole Cattoliche.”

On the day of the Festa there is plenary indulgence for all the faithful. There was another indulgence “per gli ascritti alla Milizia Angelica.” But whether the Angelic Militia are the pupils of the Angelic Doctor I am not learned enough to say.

His even earlier saintship, St. Antony, not only continues to dominate Padua from his vast monumental Church, and enjoy his three June days of Festa in his nominal city, but his tutelary grace extends far beyond. In the Church of San Spirito in the Via Ariosto of Ferrara, the famous preacher to the fishes was—after the earthquake of 1908—the target of three days of prayer. The house Ariosto built himself in the fifteenth century stands in the same street, but Ariosto’s world of mediæval chivalry is shattered into atoms while St. Antony still saves Ferrara from earthquake.

Yes—allowing Messina and Reggio to be annihilated—the Saint in 1908 said to the seismic forces, “So far and no farther,” and ’tis not for me, whose umbrella he recovered on the very day I mocked at his pretensions, to resent his preferences. Three days of thanksgiving (mass in the morning at his altar and prayers and Benediction in the afternoon), “per lo scampato flagello del Terremoto,” rewarded his partiality for Ferrara. The town keeps doubtless a morbid memory of earthquakes, for from an old German book printed at Augsburg by Michael Manger, I learn that the terrible _Terremoto_ of 1570, “in Welschland am Po,” started in Ferrara on a 16th in the night and lasted till the 21st, during which time two hundred people perished, and many houses with a dozen churches, monasteries and nunneries were destroyed in Ferrara alone. Why St. Antony nodded on that occasion is not explained. Nor why he should have limited his protection to the Jews, not a man of whom was injured. Perhaps he had not yet recognised the claim of Ferrarese Christianity upon him. There is a wistful note in the prayer placarded in the Ferrarese church of San Francesco. “O great saint, commonly called the saint of Padua, but worthy to be called the saint of the world. . . . You who so often pressed in your arms the celestial Bambino!”

Happy Paduans, to whom this chronological prodigy is securely attached, who indeed hastened to build a Cathedral round him in the very year of his canonisation (1232). Here amid crudely worked flowers, crutches, photographs and other mementoes of his prowess, the faithful may find remission of their sins or expiation of the faults of their dead. For what limit is there to his intercessory power? Let me English the prayer hung up in his chapel. Every religion has its higher and more sophistic presentation, but it is well to turn from the pundits to the people.

“ORAZIONE A S. ANTONIO DI PADOVA.