A few words remain to be said with regard to a cypher that played so important a part in ancient literature. It is not an arbitrary one: it has dialect and visual truth for the foundations. It is not a restricted one: its modus operandi can be applied to the letters and letter shapes of every written language. It is not complicated: transposition and metamorphosis are the only factors employed. It is no burden to the memory; transposition, allotropical and divisional changes appeal entirely to the eye; nothing is left for memory save the dialectical changes, and if those be familiar to the scholars of our day, how much more so must they have been to men whose natal tongue was Greek or Latin. It is easily acquired; and, once mastered, it is never forgotten and needs no transcription. In addition to its being legitimate and universal, simple in construction, light on the memory and quickly comprehended, it is also effective: it furnished the means of cherishing and spreading Christian knowledge for thousands of years preceding the Nativity; it satisfied the eyes of true believers who hungered for the written Name; it slaked their thirst for information regarding the advent, mission and death of the promised Redeemer; and all this it did under cover of a sop—the wrath of an Achilles, misfortunes of an Oedipus, wanderings of an Aeneas, or something else that pacified the pagan and inebriated the sceptic. And (if age adds to a thing's merits) it is the oldest of all known ciphers-the Adam of its fellows, so to speak. It is older than Vergil, than Sophocles, than Homer; and what it was in Homer's day, that same it was in Vergil's, for the cipher was golden currency that needed no re-minting. When, where and by whom was it first invented? Sophocles (no mean authority, and one who flourished four centuries and more before the coming of our Lord) says explicitly "No man knows," and suggestively adds that the cipher was never written, but was always communicated by word of mouth. This unwritten mode of transmission was, doubtless, for the purpose of insuring safety and secrecy; and it is more than probable that the written cipher has now for the first time seen the light of publication, since even the Scholiasts (who knew it well and interpreted the classic text by its means) seem never to have transcribed it in tabulated form. To write the Name, however, was one thing; to point it out and where it was written was another; and while this cryptic wizardry of letters was potent to frame and to conceal, its sorcery would have been futile were it not that the poetical magician drew with his wand a charmed circle within which he first placed the initiated and then began his incantations. How he did this-how he uttered the words of power that opened the gates of light to some readers, and left the profane ones grunting with satisfaction in their sty, will be shown in the next and following chapters. CHAPTER VII. KEEPING THE WORDS OF PROMISE TO THE EAR. Before citing examples from their works, it will be well to enumerate and classify their efforts at description. These may be arranged under two heads, (1) Religious, and (2) Personal. In the first are embraced invocations to and exaltations of the Godhead; repeated mention of the sacred names; allusions to the Promise and the Coming; details concerning the birth and birthplace, life and works, the death, resurrection and ascension of our Lord; incidents relative to the lives of Mary and Joseph; references to Abraham, Moses and other scriptural patriarchs; and the principal facts, as told in Genesis, regarding our first parents, the Fall and the Deluge. In the second may be placed their attestations of true religious faith; avowal of the concealed mode of writing; comments on the strict espionage with which they were hemmed around; contemptuous flings at the inability of those in power to detect the hidden meaning of their words; mocking remarks on the idolatrous deities and rulers of the people; and appeals to the posterity that would eventually triumph in the faith to interpret their speech correctly, and give them credit for laboring in the vineyard. Here was food enough, surely, and readily suited for Christian stomachs; but, fortunately or unfortunately, the speech employed in all those subdivisions had to be more or less flavored and seasoned to suit the Pagan maw. Outside of those tabooed topics what was left? Moral, social and didactic ones; bits of pure science appertaining to the story of our earth from primal matter to a solid, habitable and inhabited globe; and whatever other subjects the ostensible nature of discourse enabled the writer to employ. But all of those were to a great extent monopolized in the efforts of the poet to attract attention to the key-line, to fasten it on the word or words containing the Name, and to ring the changes on every letter of that name. What extraneous matter, then, remained? Very little, comparatively nothing. If the Iliad were sifted of what is written with a dual meaning and of what is employed to point out and impress the names, there would be left scarcely a dozen lines in each book, the second, possibly, excluded. What is true of the Iliad is equally so of the Odyssey, the Works and Days, the Tragedies, Aeneid, Metamorphoses and other Greek and Latin poems. Ovid gives (I. Amor. El. xv.) a partial list of those who wrote for religious truth, and mentions Homer, Hesiod, Callimachus, Sophocles, Aratus, Menander, Ennius, Varro, Lucretius, Vergil and Tibullus; Aeschylus, Plautus, Terence and Catullus are added by Horace; but the truth is, the difficulty does not lie so much in whom to include as it does in whom to exclude from "the polished band." All wrote in the same dual fashion and for a set purpose-to glorify God and the works of God, to keep the promise alive, to explain the original causes that necessitated the coming of a God-man, to hold up the Deluge as a warning against pride, strife, bloodshed and vice of every description, and to preach the observance of social and moral rights. The Bible is, confessedly, a religious work; faith, hope and charity permeate it, directly or indirectly, from cover to cover: it is even so with "the book" of each great classic mind; and it is safe to say that the proportion of religious to secular matter in the Jewish record does not exceed that in the ancient Gentile ones. "Is there a comparison," it may be asked, "suggested between the sacred and classic writings? What, then, of the filth, lewdness and immorality in certain well-known pastorals, elegies, odes and other effusions of Greek and Latin writers?" What, it may be answered, of the various errors, heterodoxies and heresies that have disturbed the Christian church? Their founders and promulgators may be supposed sincere, even though erroneous, in their opinions, and their dogmas were always based on an interpretation of the scriptures. But if their interpretations be wrong, and if the scriptures themselves be not culpable for their schisms, is it not equally probable that our interpretations of the classics are false and that the poets themselves are not to blame? There is nothing in the lives of those men, even of those who flourished in the loose Augustan age, to warrant the assumption that they were of unbalanced mind and led a profligate existence. Here and there, too, throughout their works are found passages explicitly denying all culpable intent, and strongly denunciatory of vice, lewdness and immoral practices. What does Ovid say in those portions of his writings that have been distinguished for expurgation in proportion to their misinterpretation? Nec mihi materia est numeris levioribus apta, I. Amor. El. I. 19. The lines suggest not merely his dislike of the task, but his very incapability through want of knowingness. How can I write of love, he exclaims, I who have nought to do with lascivious youngsters or seductive women! "Still," it may be objected, "he did write of love, andwe know the filthy consequences!" Yes; he wrote-in Latin; and too well we know the filthy consequences-in English.. He wrote of Love-of a God of love, and of the love of God; he wrote of Corinna, his "Domina" and our "Lady"-the "mater amorum," the mother of all love, the mother of God; but the unhealthy imagination of an arch-translator mistook religious fervor for the flesh, Love for love, and the mother of love for Well, we have eaten dirt-English, French, German, modern dirt of all kinds-eaten it, chewed it, swallowed the unsavory morsel, grown nauseated and, instead of heaping deserved maledictions on the translator's head, we censure the Latin poet! There is no impurity in the classic writers-there could not be, seeing that their works were actuated by the same motives that prompted the Jewish ones, namely, the love and fear of God, and the preservation and propagation of religious truth. There is not a single impure line in the "Amores" of Ovid when rendered with the same intent and sentiment with which he wrote; and this passage from the "Ars Amoris" tells a story of its own: Nos Venerem tutam concessaque furta canemus; The Love that's sure, and lawful thefts we'll sing; What that "sure Love" is, which he sings, has been already mentioned. The "lawful thefts" are the wiles and artifices employed to conceal thought, and consisted of appropriations from the diverse meanings and established use of ordinary words, of deceitful pauses and punctuation, of a judicious collocation of words and clauses, of the esoteric and religious application of certain terms (like "Love," for instance), and of other means which will be patent to the view from a reading of the excerpts |