Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
all notions in my head. I began to think for a moment that you doubted
my sincerity in the religion I profess; and that a man of your
admirable good sense, and at your advanced age, could reject that only
sustenance which supports us through the grave into eternal life.
_Lucian._ I am the most docile and practicable of men, and never
reject what people set before me: for if it is bread, it is good for
my own use; if bone or bran, it will do for my dog or mule. But,
although you know my weakness and facility, it is unfair to expect I
should have admitted at once what the followers and personal friends
of your Master for a long time hesitated to receive. I remember to
have read in one of the early commentators, that His disciples
themselves could not swallow the miracle of the loaves; and one who
wrote more recently says, that even His brethren did not believe in
Him.
_Timotheus._ Yet, finally, when they have looked over each other's
accounts, they cast them up, and make them all tally in the main sum;
and if one omits an article, the next supplies its place with a
commodity of the same value. What would you have? But it is of little
use to argue on religion with a man who, professing his readiness to
believe, and even his credulity, yet disbelieves in miracles.
_Lucian._ I should be obstinate and perverse if I disbelieved in the
existence of a thing for no better reason than because I never saw it,
and cannot understand its operations. Do you believe, O Timotheus,
that Perictione, the mother of Plato, became his mother by the sole
agency of Apollo's divine spirit, under the phantasm of that god?
_Timotheus._ I indeed believe such absurdities?
_Lucian._ You touch me on a vital part if you call an absurdity the
religion or philosophy in which I was educated. Anaxalides, and
Clearagus, and Speusippus, his own nephew, assert it. Who should know
better than they?
_Timotheus._ Where are their proofs?
_Lucian._ I would not be so indelicate as to require them on such an
occasion. A short time ago I conversed with an old centurion, who was
in service by the side of Vespasian, when Titus, and many officers and
soldiers of the army, and many captives, were present, and who saw one
Eleazar put a ring to the nostril of a demoniac (as the patient was
called) and draw the demon out of it.
_Timotheus._ And do you pretend to believe this nonsense?
_Lucian._ I only believe that Vespasian and Titus had nothing to gain
or accomplish by the miracle; and that Eleazar, if he had been
detected in a trick by two acute men and several thousand enemies, had
nothing to look forward to but a cross--the only piece of upholstery
for which Judea seems to have either wood or workmen, and which are
as common in that country as direction-posts are in any other.
_Timotheus._ The Jews are a stiff-necked people.
_Lucian._ On such occasions, no doubt.
_Timotheus._ Would you, O Lucian, be classed among the atheists, like
Epicurus?
_Lucian._ It lies not at my discretion what name shall be given me at
present or hereafter, any more than it did at my birth. But I wonder
at the ignorance and precipitancy of those who call Epicurus an
atheist. He saw on the same earth with himself a great variety of
inferior creatures, some possessing more sensibility and more
thoughtfulness than others. Analogy would lead so contemplative a
reasoner to the conclusion that if many were inferior and in sight,
others might be superior and out of sight. He never disbelieved in the
existence of the gods; he only disbelieved that they troubled their
heads with our concerns. Have they none of their own? If they are
happy, does their happiness depend on us, comparatively so imbecile
and vile? He believed, as nearly all nations do, in different ranks
and orders of superhuman beings; and perhaps he thought (but I never
was in his confidence or counsels) that the higher were rather in
communication with the next to them in intellectual faculties, than
with the most remote. To me the suggestion appears by no means
irrational, that if we are managed or cared for at all by beings wiser
than ourselves (which in truth would be no sign of any great wisdom in
them), it can only be by such as are very far from perfection, and who
indulge us in the commission of innumerable faults and follies, for
their own speculation or amusement.
_Timotheus._ There is only one such; and he is the devil.
_Lucian._ If he delights in our wickedness, which you believe, he must
be incomparably the happiest of beings, which you do not believe. No
god of Epicurus rests his elbow on his armchair with less energetic
exertion or discomposure.
_Timotheus._ We lead holier and purer lives than such ignorant mortals
as are not living under Grace.
_Lucian._ I also live under Grace, O Timotheus! and I venerate her for
the pleasures I have received at her hands. I do not believe she has
quite deserted me. If my grey hairs are unattractive to her, and if
the trace of her fingers is lost in the wrinkles of my forehead, still
I sometimes am told it is discernible even on the latest and coldest
of my writings.
_Timotheus._ You are wilful in misapprehension. The Grace of which I
speak is adverse to pleasure and impurity.
_Lucian._ Rightly do you separate impurity and pleasure, which indeed
soon fly asunder when the improvident would unite them. But never
believe that tenderness of heart signifies corruption of morals, if
you happen to find it (which indeed is unlikely) in the direction you
have taken; on the contrary, no two qualities are oftener found
together, on mind as on matter, than hardness and lubricity.
Believe me, Cousin Timotheus, when we come to eighty years of age we
are all Essenes. In our kingdom of heaven there is no marrying or
giving in marriage; and austerity in ourselves, when Nature holds over
us the sharp instrument with which Jupiter operated on Saturn, makes
us austere to others. But how happens it that you, both old and young,
break every bond which connected you anciently with the Essenes? Not
only do you marry (a height of wisdom to which I never have attained,
although in others I commend it), but you never share your substance
with the poorest of your community, as they did, nor live simply and
frugally, nor purchase nor employ slaves, nor refuse rank and offices
in the State, nor abstain from litigation, nor abominate and execrate
the wounds and cruelties of war. The Essenes did all this, and greatly
more, if Josephus and Philo, whose political and religious tenets are
opposite to theirs, are credible and trustworthy.
_Timotheus._ Doubtless you would also wish us to retire into the
desert, and eschew the conversation of mankind.
_Lucian._ No, indeed; but I would wish the greater part of your people
to eschew mine, for they bring all the worst of the desert with them
whenever they enter; its smothering heats, its blinding sands, its
sweeping suffocation. Return to the pure spirit of the Essenes,
without their asceticism; cease from controversy, and drop party
designations. If you will not do this, do less, and be merely what you
profess to be, which is quite enough for an honest, a virtuous, and a
religious man.
_Timotheus._ Cousin Lucian, I did not come hither to receive a lecture
from you.
_Lucian._ I have often given a dinner to a friend who did not come to
dine with me.
_Timotheus._ Then, I trust, you gave him something better for dinner
than bay-salt and dandelions. If you will not assist us in nettling
our enemies a little for their absurdities and impositions, let me
entreat you, however, to let us alone, and to make no remarks on us.
I myself run into no extravagances, like the Essenes, washing and
fasting, and retiring into solitude. I am not called to them; when I
am, I go.
_Lucian._ I am apprehensive the Lord may afflict you with deafness in
that ear.
_Timotheus._ Nevertheless, I am indifferent to the world, and all
things in it. This, I trust, you will acknowledge to be true religion
and true philosophy.
_Lucian._ That is not philosophy which betrays an indifference to
those for whose benefit philosophy was designed; and those are the
whole human race. But I hold it to be the most unphilosophical thing
in the world to call away men from useful occupations and mutual help,
to profitless speculations and acrid controversies. Censurable enough,
and contemptible, too, is that supercilious philosopher, sneeringly
sedate, who narrates in full and flowing periods the persecutions and
tortures of a fellow-man, led astray by his credulity, and ready to
die in the assertion of what in his soul he believes to be the truth.
But hardly less censurable, hardly less contemptible, is the
tranquilly arrogant sectarian, who denies that wisdom or honesty can
exist beyond the limits of his own ill-lighted chamber.
_Timotheus._ What! is he sanguinary?
_Lucian._ Whenever he can be, he is; and he always has it in his power
to be even worse than that, for he refuses his custom to the
industrious and honest shopkeeper who has been taught to think
differently from himself in matters which he has had no leisure to
study, and by which, if he had enjoyed that leisure, he would have
been a less industrious and a less expert artificer.
_Timotheus._ We cannot countenance those hard-hearted men who refuse
to hear the word of the Lord.
_Lucian._ The hard-hearted knowing this of the tender-hearted, and
receiving the declaration from their own lips, will refuse to hear the
word of the Lord all their lives.
_Timotheus._ Well, well; it cannot be helped. I see, cousin, my hopes
of obtaining a little of your assistance in your own pleasant way are
disappointed; but it is something to have conceived a better hope of
saving your soul, from your readiness to acknowledge your belief in
miracles.
_Lucian._ Miracles have existed in all ages and in all religions.
Witnesses to some of them have been numerous; to others of them fewer.
Occasionally, the witnesses have been disinterested in the result.
_Timotheus._ Now indeed you speak truly and wisely.
_Lucian._ But sometimes the most honest and the most quiescent have
either been unable or unwilling to push themselves so forward as to
see clearly and distinctly the whole of the operation; and have
listened to some knave who felt a pleasure in deluding their
credulity, or some other who himself was either an enthusiast or a
dupe. It also may have happened in the ancient religions, of Egypt for
instance, or of India, or even of Greece, that narratives have been
attributed to authors who never heard of them; and have been
circulated by honest men who firmly believed them; by half-honest, who
indulged their vanity in becoming members of a novel and bustling
society; and by utterly dishonest, who, having no other means of
rising above the shoulders of the vulgar, threw dust into their eyes
and made them stoop.
_Timotheus._ Ha! the rogues! It is nearly all over with them.
_Lucian._ Let us hope so. Parthenius and the Roman poet Ovidius Naso,
have related the transformations of sundry men, women, and gods.
_Timotheus._ Idleness! Idleness! I never read such lying authors.
_Lucian._ I myself have seen enough to incline me toward a belief in
them.
_Timotheus._ You? Why! you have always been thought an utter infidel;
and now you are running, hot and heedless as any mad dog, to the
opposite extreme!
_Lucian._ I have lived to see, not indeed one man, but certainly one
animal turned into another; nay, great numbers. I have seen sheep with
the most placid faces in the morning, one nibbling the tender herb
with all its dew upon it; another, negligent of its own sustenance,
and giving it copiously to the tottering lamb aside it.
_Timotheus._ How pretty! half poetical!