For an explanation of the action of those poor, irrational creatures
who are so accustomed to privation and prayer that when relief comes
they only continue to pray, failing to recognize that their prayers
are answered, we can only point to the last poor inmates of the French
bastile. The most prominent and intellectual citizens of France, they
had been torn from their homes without a trial, thrown into dungeons
containing not a single ray of light, fed there on bread and water from
year to year until lonely and in torture their hair turned prematurely
white and their bodies withered. When, at the first stroke of that
most glorious of revolutions, the bastile doors were opened, and the
soldiers of the people broke down the huge iron gates and doors, crying
aloud in the name of liberty, "You are free, you are free, come out
long imprisoned brothers," the populace were astounded to find that
many of the poor, white-haired, white-bearded, pale-faced prisoners,
instead of walking out into the long-wished for sunlight, clutched the
walls of their cells, clung to their prison floors and cried in fear.
They had to be torn from their gloomy haunts by main force by their
rescuers. Their years of trouble, of darkness and gloom had destroyed
their power to enjoy the light of freedom. Many of the brightest
intellects of France had thus been dimmed. Their souls, once afire for
freedom, had burned out in despair. They had become maniacs.
So now there are devotees of religion, so inured to the gloomy slavery
of poverty and injustice, so in the habit of praying for relief, that
when the bold servants of God strike down with their ready hammers
the prison walls, and freedom's air and sunlight stream in, these
poor souls are horrified, paralyzed by the very light and atmosphere
for which they have been praying. "Go away," they say, and, crying,
they clutch their cell walls refusing to be free. They, too, have
become maniacs. But the majority of the human race will not refuse
freedom's balmy breeze or the sunshine of liberty. At the call of the
New Democracy they will throw down their broken chains of poverty, leap
through their open prison doors, and cheer with might and main as the
majority of the prisoners of the bastile cheered a century ago when
they were given freedom's light.
THE COMMANDMENTS GROWN WITH THE WORLD.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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