in despite of God, who commandeth obedience, and in contempt of the king, whose laws do seek your wealth, and to overthrow the country, which naturally we should love, ye would proudly rise, and do ye wot not what, and amend things by rebellion to your utter undoing. What states leave ye us in now, besieged with enemies, divided at home, made poor with spoil and loss of our harvest, murdered and cast down with slaughter and hatred, hindered from amendments by our own devilish haste, endangered with sickness by reason of misorder, laid open to men's pleasures for breaking of the laws, and feebled to such faintness that scarcely it will be covered.

Wherefore, for God's sake, have pity on yourselves, consider how miserably ye have spoiled, destroyed, and wasted us all; and if for desperateness ye care not for yourselves, yet remember your wives, your children, your country, and forsake this rebellion. With humble submission acknowledge your faults, and tarry not the extremity of the king's sword; leave off with repentance, and turn to your duties, ask God forgiveness, submit ye to your king, be contented for a commonwealth one or two to die.

From a tract on "The Hurt of
Sedition," 1549.

V

VICTOR CHERBULIEZ

("G. VALBERT ")

(1829-)

ICTOR CHERBULIEZ, famous as a novelist and critic under his own name, earned a second reputation under the name of "G. Valbert.» He was born at Geneva, July 19th, 1829. After completing his studies at the universities of Geneva, Paris, Bonn, and Berlin, he began life as a teacher, but changed his profession to that of literature, and in 1864 became one of the editors of the Revue des Deux Mondes. He published a long list of novels in that magazine, many of them being translated into other languages and widely read in Europe and America. As a novelist he belongs to the school of Walter Scott. His best-known works are "The Romance of a Respectable Woman" and "Samuel Brohl & Co." Several of his works have been dramatized.

THE

THE MODERN SPHINX

HE sphinx of the fable lay in wait for people at the crossways. She propounded her riddles, and woe to those who did not guess them! The sphinx of ancient Egypt was a gentler and more beneficent being. A pacific creature, half human and half animal, she dwelt in the neighborhood of temples and royal tombs, and men saw in her the image of mysterious contemplation, self-involved and subsisting on the sacred presence of the divine majesty. The sphinx of the present day is an offshoot of the Greek imagination, and a different thing altogether. Ferocious, dangerous, of demoniac origin, begotten of Typhon and Echidna, she represents the barbaric Tartar spirit; and the mystery which involves her is not that of contemplative thought; it is the mystery of violence and destruction; the spirit of cavil, dispute, and revolt. Do not put the simple in the way of that ugly sphinx. She will devour those who stumble in their replies to her captious questions.

Leave the people their legends; and do not forbid them, in the name of historic truth, to believe in goodness and truth.

Their beliefs are incarnated in living images. Take away these images, and you impoverish their hearts, and sadden their lives. The favorite reading of the Russian people is the lives of the saints. These heroes of the spiritual war were men; they knew, like us, the weakness of the flesh, the fluctuations of thought, the uncertainty of the will, but they came out of the battle victorious; and if the imagination of their biographers has sometimes embellished their adventures, the tale is still true in the main. The application of analysis to sacred things is often malicious; always devastating. It is the evil-disposed who says to the simpleminded: "Why do you pray to St. Nicholas? Has St. Nicholas ever been known to answer prayer?" Respect pious legends and innocent superstitions. In attempting to remove them you risk pulling up the wheat along with the tares.

A celebrated poet has told us how Moses once found in the wilderness a shepherd engaged in fervent prayer. He was saying to God: "How shall I find thee? My heart so longs for thee! I would fain serve thee-bind thy sandals, wash thy garments, comb thy hair, kiss thy feet, and give thee the milk of my ewes!" Moses was highly scandalized, and exclaimed: "Shepherd, thou blasphemest, God is a spirit. He has no need of sandals and vestments and ewes' milk."

The poor man was stricken with despair. He could not imagine a being without a body, and so he ceased to serve God. Then God said to Moses: "Why hast thou so used my servant? Every man receives from me the form of his spirit and the fashion of his speech. What is evil for thee is good for another. What is poison for thee is honey for another." Let us leave the poor their honey. If we like our poisons, let us keep them to ourselves.

Our professors of pedagogy will read M. Pobédonostzeff's books with a mixture of amazement and contempt, and yet there is sound judgment in it, and lessons which they might profitably learn. I fear, however, that the Purveyor-General of the Holy Synod is himself, in his way, a bit of a Utopian. Is it possible to keep the people in a state of innocency when everything conspires to wean them from it—manners, institutions, ideas, the genius of the age, new industries, miraculous inventions, all helping to transform from day to day our habits, desires, and dreams, and the very world we live in? And when once their ingenuousness is lost, can it be restored to them? The virginity of the

mind is like the other virginity. "Thou art gone, thou art fled,” sang Sappho, "and never wilt thou return."

And is it, after all, absolutely certain that we are living at the most disastrous period of the world's history? Is innocency of mind a real guarantee for happiness? Must we admit that discontent is a malady peculiar to the nations who are ruled by abstractions? M. Pobédonostzeff talks complacently about that ancient Egypt, where the sphinxes were peaceable and friendly beings, and revealed to man those mysteries only upon which it is good and sweet to meditate. And there is no doubt that the Egypt of the Pharaohs was, of all human societies, the best ordered and regulated, the most unlike ours, the farthest removed from grand principles and abstract theories, destructive criticism and mischievous and indiscreet analysis, and that it was never, never accused of having invented universal suffrage or the separation of Church and State.

And yet, if we are to trust an ancient scribe who lived under the twelfth dynasty, the valley of the Nile was a valley of woe, resounding with sighs and groans, where the poor and ignorant had calamities and sinking of heart, for which even their sphinxes could not console them. "I have seen violence, violence! I have seen the fireman at the mouth of the furnace, with fingers rough as the skin of the crocodile. The cunning worker in metal gets no more rest than the day laborer. Night, they say, is free, but he must work all night long. The stone cutter crouches from sunrise to sunset, his knees and his back are broken. The barber breaks his arms to earn his wages. The boatman goes down to Natho for a pittance and has not a moment in which to visit his orchard. The mason is spent with toil. He munches his crust and goes home to beat his wife and child. The weaver is worse off than a woman, and his misery weighs him down. The dyer's fingers smell of rotting poisons, his eyes are extinguished with weariness. The shoemaker must suck the juices of his leather for nutriment."

It is true that the old scribe who traced these heart-breaking lines makes no complaint of his own calling, and exhorts his son to prefer it to all others. But the young man was apparently hard to persuade. He had seen his sire at work and had come to the conclusion that the scribes - that is to say the intellectual people of that day-were miserable wretches, that there was little marrow in the bones they gnawed, and that literature is, of

all avocations, the most hazardous and ungrateful. Scribe or dyer, this earth will always be full of malcontents, and, after all, it is well that it should be so. The majority are very uncomfortable, and give great and unnecessary annoyance to the few who are at peace. Some few fulfill their mission and render an essential service to humanity by imparting their own spirit of unrest. They prevent mankind from sleeping, and as a matter of fact, this world is not a tent, set up merely to sleep in. The great saints whose legends the Russian people so love to meditate were themselves of the race of the eternally discontented. They too were nourished on abstractions, and the world into which they were born pleased them so little that they burned with the desire to change it, and their vocation, as one of themselves has said, haunted them all day like a sin.

From an essay in the Revue des Deux Mondes on "Pobédonostzeff's Essays,» translated for the Living Age.