"The experience of ages proves they do," said Colonna."As to the last virtue you have named, there sits a living proof.This Gerard - I beg pardon, Brother Thingemy - comes from the north, where men drink like fishes; yet was he ever most abstemious.And why?
Carried an amethyst, the clearest and fullest coloured e'er I saw on any but noble finger.Where, in Heaven's name, is thine amethyst? Show it this unbeliever!""And 'twas that amethyst made the boy temperate?" asked Jerome ironically.
"Certainly.Why, what is the derivation and meaning of amethyst?
<a> negative, and <methua> to tipple.Go to, names are but the signs of things.A stone is not called <amethustos> for two thousand years out of mere sport, and abuse of language."He then went through the prime jewels, illustrating their moral properties, especially of the ruby, the sapphire, the emerald, and the opal, by anecdotes out of grave historians.
"These be old wives' fables," said Jerome contemptuously."Was ever such credulity as thine?"Now credulity is a reproach sceptics have often the ill-luck to incur; but it mortifies them none the less for that.
The believer in stones writhed under it, and dropped the subject.
Then Jerome, mistaking his silence, exhorted him to go a step farther, and give up from this day his vain pagan lore, and study the lives of the saints."Blot out these heathen superstitions from thy mind, brother, as Christianity hath blotted them from the earth."And in this strain he proceeded, repeating, incautiously, some current but loose theological statements.Then the smarting Polifilo revenged himself.He flew out, and hurled a mountain of crude, miscellaneous lore upon Jerome, of which, partly for want of time, partly for lack of learning, I can reproduce but a few fragments.
"The heathen blotted out? Why, they hold four-fifths of the world.
And what have we Christians invented without their aid? painting?
sculpture? these are heathen arts, and we but pigmies at them.
What modern mind can conceive and grave so god-like forms as did the chief Athenian sculptors, and the Libyan Licas, and Dinocrates of Macedon, and Scopas, Timotheus, Leochares, and Briaxis; Chares, Lysippus, and the immortal three of Rhodes, that wrought Laocoon from a single block? What prince hath the genius to turn mountains into statues, as was done at Bagistan, and projected at Athos?
What town the soul to plant a colossus of brass in the sea, for the tallest ships to sail in and out between his legs? Is it architecture we have invented? Why, here too we are but children.
Can we match for pure design the Parthenon, with its clusters of double and single Doric columns? (I do adore the Doric when the scale is large), and for grandeur and finish, the theatres of Greece and Rome, or the prodigious temples of Egypt, up to whose portals men walked awe-struck through avenues a mile long of sphinxes, each as big as a Venetian palace.And all these prodigies of porphyry cut and polished like crystal, not rough hewn as in our puny structures.Even now their polished columns and pilasters lie o'erthrown and broken, o'ergrown with acanthus and myrtle, but sparkling still, and flouting the slovenly art of modem workmen.Is it sewers, aqueducts, viaducts?
"Why, we have lost the art of making a road - lost it with the world's greatest models under our very eye.Is it sepulchres of the dead? Why, no Christian nation has ever erected a tomb, the sight of which does not set a scholar laughing.Do but think of the Mausoleum, and the Pyramids, and the monstrous sepulchres of the Indus and Ganges, which outside are mountains, and within are mines of precious stones.Ah, you have not seen the East, Jerome, or you could not decry the heathen."Jerome observed that these were mere material things.True greatness was in the soul.
"Well then," replied Colonna, "in the world of mind, what have we discovered? Is it geometry? Is it logic? Nay, we are all pupils of Euclid and Aristotle.Is it written characters, an invention almost divine? We no more invented it than Cadmus did.Is it poetry? Homer hath never been approached by us, nor hath Virgil, nor Horace.Is it tragedy or comedy? Why, poets, actors, theatres, all fell to dust at our touch.Have we succeeded in reviving them?
Would you compare our little miserable mysteries and moralities, all frigid personification, and dog Latin, with the glories of a Greek play (on the decoration of which a hundred thousand crowns had been spent) performed inside a marble miracle, the audience a seated city, and the poet a Sophocles?
"What then have we invented? Is it monotheism? Why, the learned and philosophical among the Greeks and Romans held it; even their more enlightened poets were monotheists in their sleeves.
<Zeus estin ouranos, Zeus te gy Zeus toi panta>
saith the Greek, and Lucan echoes him:
'Jupiter est quod cunque vides quo cunque moveris.'
"Their vulgar were polytheists; and what are ours? We have not invented 'invocation of the saints.' Our sancti answers to their Daemones and Divi, and the heathen used to pray their Divi or deified mortal to intercede with the higher divinity; but the ruder minds among them, incapable of nice distinctions, worshipped those lesser gods they should have but invoked.And so do the mob of Christians in our day, following the heathen vulgar or by unbroken tradition.For in holy writ is no polytheism of any sort or kind.
"We have not invented so much as a form or variety of polytheism.