Christian fiction; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600 -- Fiction
It began, as his postscript had ended, with a personal appeal, warning
me against a tendency to dreaming, “which,” said he, “I think you must
have inherited from my Etrurian grandmother, whose blood runs in your
veins—through your dear mother—as well as in mine. I myself, at times,
have to fight against it.” Then he cautioned me against the Jews. “They
are all of them,” he said, “dangerous people, though in different
ways. There are two sorts, plotters and dreamers; the plotters, all
for themselves; the dreamers, all for someone else, or something else
(the Gods know what!) outside themselves. Now a dreamer in the west,
mostly a Greek (for a Roman dreamer is a rare bird) is a harmless
creature—dreaming passively. But the Jewish dreamer dreams actively. He
is, to use the Greek adjective, _hypnotic_. If I might invent a Greek
verb, I would say that he ‘_hypnotizes_’ people. He makes others dream
what he dreams. And his dreams are not the dreams of Morpheus, ‘golden
slumbers’ on ‘heaped Elysian flowers.’ No, they are often dreams like
those of Hercules Furens—destroying himself and his friends while he
thinks he is destroying ‘powers of evil’! I have known several Jews, some
very good, more very bad; only one, perhaps, half-and-half. That was
Flavius Josephus, whose histories you have read. He could be all things
to all men in a very clever way, mostly for his people, sometimes for
himself.
“Paul was all things to all men in a very different way, and always the
same way. Paul, as you know, frankly warns his readers, ‘I am become all
things to all men that I may by all means save some,’ and ‘I became to
the Jews a Jew that I might gain the Jews’—not for himself, of course,
but for his Master, the King of the Jews. I have never told you, before,
something that I will tell you now—to warn you against these Jews,
especially the Christian Jews. I once saw this Paul, only once. I was but
a boy. He was standing, chained, in a corridor in the palace, waiting
to be heard. One of the Prætorian guard was talking to him and Paul was
replying, while my father and I were passing by; and my father, having
something to say to the guardsman, made some courteous remark to Paul
about interrupting their talk. Paul stood up. He was rather short, and
bent down besides with the weight of his chains; and the guardsman (quite
against regulations) had put a stool for him to rest on. He reached up
his face to my father’s as though he could not see very distinctly:
but it was not exactly the eyes, but the look in them, the unearthly
look, that I shall never forget. No doubt, he was thankful for the few
syllables of kindness. It seemed to me as if he wished to return the
kindness in kind. He said something. What it was I don’t know. Probably
bad Greek or worse Latin. Thanks of some sort, no doubt. But it was
the look—the look and the tone, that struck me. Struck! No, rather,
bewitched. For days and nights afterwards I saw that man’s face, and
heard his voice in my dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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