Ben Hur (15 page)

A little more light would have enabled him to see the pride that
diffused itself over her face.

"Let us imagine the Roman putting us to the challenge. I would
answer him, neither doubting nor boastful."

Her voice faltered; a tender thought changed the form of the argument.

"Your father, O my Judah, is at rest with his fathers; yet I
remember, as though it were this evening, the day he and I,
with many rejoicing friends, went up into the Temple to present
you to the Lord. We sacrificed the doves, and to the priest I gave
your name, which he wrote in my presence—'Judah, son of Ithamar,
of the House of Hur.' The name was then carried away, and written
in a book of the division of records devoted to the saintly family.

"I cannot tell you when the custom of registration in this mode
began. We know it prevailed before the flight from Egypt. I have
heard Hillel say Abraham caused the record to be first opened with
his own name, and the names of his sons, moved by the promises
of the Lord which separated him and them from all other races,
and made them the highest and noblest, the very chosen of the
earth. The covenant with Jacob was of like effect. 'In thy seed
shall all the nations of the earth be blessed'—so said the angel to
Abraham in the place Jehovah-jireh. 'And the land whereon thou liest,
to thee will I give it, and to thy seed'—so the Lord himself said
to Jacob asleep at Bethel on the way to Haran. Afterwards the wise
men looked forward to a just division of the land of promise; and,
that it might be known in the day of partition who were entitled
to portions, the Book of Generations was begun. But not for that
alone. The promise of a blessing to all the earth through the
patriarch reached far into the future. One name was mentioned in
connection with the blessing—the benefactor might be the humblest
of the chosen family, for the Lord our God knows no distinctions
of rank or riches. So, to make the performance clear to men of
the generation who were to witness it, and that they might give
the glory to whom it belonged, the record was required to be kept
with absolute certainty. Has it been so kept?"

The fan played to and fro, until, becoming impatient, he repeated
the question, "Is the record absolutely true?"

"Hillel said it was, and of all who have lived no one was so
well-informed upon the subject. Our people have at times been
heedless of some parts of the law, but never of this part. The good
rector himself has followed the Books of Generations through three
periods—from the promises to the opening of the Temple; thence to
the Captivity; thence, again, to the present. Once only were the
records disturbed, and that was at the end of the second period;
but when the nation returned from the long exile, as a first
duty to God, Zerubbabel restored the Books, enabling us once
more to carry the lines of Jewish descent back unbroken fully
two thousand years. And now—"

She paused as if to allow the hearer to measure the time comprehended
in the statement.

"And now," she continued, "what becomes of the Roman boast of
blood enriched by ages? By that test, the sons of Israel watching
the herds on old Rephaim yonder are nobler than the noblest of
the Marcii."

"And I, mother—by the Books, who am I?"

"What I have said thus far, my son, had reference to your question.
I will answer you. If Messala were here, he might say, as others have
said, that the exact trace of your lineage stopped when the Assyrian
took Jerusalem, and razed the Temple, with all its precious stores;
but you might plead the pious action of Zerubbabel, and retort that
all verity in Roman genealogy ended when the barbarians from the
West took Rome, and camped six months upon her desolated site.
Did the government keep family histories? If so, what became of
them in those dreadful days? No, no; there is verity in our Books
of Generations; and, following them back to the Captivity, back to
the foundation of the first Temple, back to the march from Egypt,
we have absolute assurance that you are lineally sprung from Hur,
the associate of Joshua. In the matter of descent sanctified by
time, is not the honor perfect? Do you care to pursue further?
if so, take the Torah, and search the Book of Numbers, and of
the seventy-two generations after Adam, you can find the very
progenitor of your house."

There was silence for a time in the chamber on the roof.

"I thank you, O my mother," Judah next said, clasping both her
hands in his; "I thank you with all my heart. I was right in not
having the good rector called in; he could not have satisfied me
more than you have. Yet to make a family truly noble, is time
alone sufficient?"

"Ah, you forget, you forget; our claim rests not merely upon time;
the Lord's preference is our especial glory."

"You are speaking of the race, and I, mother, of the family—our
family. In the years since Father Abraham, what have they achieved?
What have they done? What great things to lift them above the level
of their fellows?"

She hesitated, thinking she might all this time have mistaken his
object. The information he sought might have been for more than
satisfaction of wounded vanity. Youth is but the painted shell
within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the
spirit of man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some
than in others. She trembled under a perception that this might be
the supreme moment come to him; that as children at birth reach out
their untried hands grasping for shadows, and crying the while, so his
spirit might, in temporary blindness, be struggling to take hold of
its impalpable future. They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I,
and what am I to be? have need of ever so much care. Each word in
answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the
artist is to the clay he is modelling.

"I have a feeling, O my Judah," she said, patting his cheek with
the hand he had been caressing—"I have the feeling that all I
have said has been in strife with an antagonist more real than
imaginary. If Messala is the enemy, do not leave me to fight him
in the dark. Tell me all he said."

The young Israelite proceeded then, and rehearsed his conversation
with Messala, dwelling with particularity upon the latter's speeches
in contempt of the Jews, their customs, and much pent round of life.

Afraid to speak the while, the mother listened, discerning the
matter plainly. Judah had gone to the palace on the Market-place,
allured by love of a playmate whom he thought to find exactly as he
had been at the parting years before; a man met him, and, in place
of laughter and references to the sports of the past, the man had
been full of the future, and talked of glory to be won, and of
riches and power. Unconscious of the effect, the visitor had come
away hurt in pride, yet touched with a natural ambition; but she,
the jealous mother, saw it, and, not knowing the turn the aspiration
might take, became at once Jewish in her fear. What if it lured him
away from the patriarchal faith? In her view, that consequence was
more dreadful than any or all others. She could discover but one way
to avert it, and she set about the task, her native power reinforced
by love to such degree that her speech took a masculine strength and
at times a poet's fervor.

"There never has been a people," she began, "who did not think
themselves at least equal to any other; never a great nation,
my son, that did not believe itself the very superior. When the
Roman looks down upon Israel and laughs, he merely repeats the
folly of the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Macedonian; and as the
laugh is against God, the result will be the same."

Her voice became firmer.

"There is no law by which to determine the superiority of nations;
hence the vanity of the claim, and the idleness of disputes about
it. A people risen, run their race, and die either of themselves
or at the hands of another, who, succeeding to their power,
take possession of their place, and upon their monuments write
new names; such is history. If I were called upon to symbolize
God and man in the simplest form, I would draw a straight line
and a circle, and of the line I would say, 'This is God, for he alone
moves forever straightforward,' and of the circle, 'This is man—such
is his progress.' I do not mean that there is no difference between
the careers of nations; no two are alike. The difference, however,
is not, as some say, in the extent of the circle they describe or
the space of earth they cover, but in the sphere of their movement,
the highest being nearest God.

"To stop here, my son, would be to leave the subject where we began.
Let us go on. There are signs by which to measure the height of the
circle each nation runs while in its course. By them let us compare
the Hebrew and the Roman.

"The simplest of all the signs is the daily life of the people.
Of this I will only say, Israel has at times forgotten God,
while the Roman never knew him; consequently comparison is
not possible.

"Your friend—or your former friend—charged, if I understood you
rightly, that we have had no poets, artists, or warriors; by which
he meant, I suppose, to deny that we have had great men, the next most
certain of the signs. A just consideration of this charge requires a
definition at the commencement. A great man, O my boy, is one whose
life proves him to have been recognized, if not called, by God.
A Persian was used to punish our recreant fathers, and he carried
them into captivity; another Persian was selected to restore their
children to the Holy Land; greater than either of them, however,
was the Macedonian through whom the desolation of Judea and the
Temple was avenged. The special distinction of the men was that
they were chosen by the Lord, each for a divine purpose; and that
they were Gentiles does not lessen their glory. Do not lose sight
of this definition while I proceed.

"There is an idea that war is the most noble occupation of men,
and that the most exalted greatness is the growth of battle-fields.
Because the world has adopted the idea, be not you deceived. That we
must worship something is a law which will continue as long as there
is anything we cannot understand. The prayer of the barbarian is
a wail of fear addressed to Strength, the only divine quality he
can clearly conceive; hence his faith in heroes. What is Jove but
a Roman hero? The Greeks have their great glory because they were
the first to set Mind above Strength. In Athens the orator and
philosopher were more revered than the warrior. The charioteer
and the swiftest runner are still idols of the arena; yet the
immortelles are reserved for the sweetest singer. The birthplace
of one poet was contested by seven cities. But was the Hellene the
first to deny the old barbaric faith? No. My son, that glory is
ours; against brutalism our fathers erected God; in our worship,
the wail of fear gave place to the Hosanna and the Psalm. So the
Hebrew and the Greek would have carried all humanity forward and
upward. But, alas! the government of the world presumes war as an
eternal condition; wherefore, over Mind and above God, the Roman
has enthroned his Caesar, the absorbent of all attainable power,
the prohibition of any other greatness.

"The sway of the Greek was a flowering time for genius. In return
for the liberty it then enjoyed, what a company of thinkers the
Mind led forth? There was a glory for every excellence, and a
perfection so absolute that in everything but war even the Roman
has stooped to imitation. A Greek is now the model of the orators
in the Forum; listen, and in every Roman song you will hear the
rhythm of the Greek; if a Roman opens his mouth speaking wisely
of moralities, or abstractions, or of the mysteries of nature,
he is either a plagiarist or the disciple of some school which had
a Greek for its founder. In nothing but war, I say again, has Rome
a claim to originality. Her games and spectacles are Greek inventions,
dashed with blood to gratify the ferocity of her rabble; her religion,
if such it may be called, is made up of contributions from the
faiths of all other peoples; her most venerated gods are from
Olympus—even her Mars, and, for that matter, the Jove she much
magnifies. So it happens, O my son, that of the whole world our
Israel alone can dispute the superiority of the Greek, and with
him contest the palm of original genius.

"To the excellences of other peoples the egotism of a Roman is
a blindfold, impenetrable as his breastplate. Oh, the ruthless
robbers! Under their trampling the earth trembles like a floor
beaten with flails. Along with the rest we are fallen—alas that
I should say it to you, my son! They have our highest places, and
the holiest, and the end no man can tell; but this I know—they
may reduce Judea as an almond broken with hammers, and devour
Jerusalem, which is the oil and sweetness thereof; yet the glory
of the men of Israel will remain a light in the heavens overhead
out of reach: for their history is the history of God, who wrote
with their hands, spake with their tongues, and was himself in all
the good they did, even the least; who dwelt with them, a Lawgiver
on Sinai, a Guide in the wilderness, in war a Captain, in government
a King; who once and again pushed back the curtains of the
pavilion which is his resting-place, intolerably bright, and,
as a man speaking to men, showed them the right, and the way
to happiness, and how they should live, and made them promises
binding the strength of his Almightiness with covenants sworn to
everlastingly. O my son, could it be that they with whom Jehovah
thus dwelt, an awful familiar, derived nothing from him?—that
in their lives and deeds the common human qualities should not
in some degree have been mixed and colored with the divine? that
their genius should not have in it, even after the lapse of ages,
some little of heaven?"