Villa Eden: The Country-House on the Rhine. Auerbach Berthold

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СКАЧАТЬ a great deal of money. You appear so true-hearted, that I must ask you directly, although I would much rather not, if it is true that you are a suitor of Fräulein Sonnenkamp?"

      "I?" Eric asked with vehement astonishment. "I?"

      "Yes, you."

      "I thank you," Eric said in a clear voice, recovering from his amazement, "I thank you, that you question me so directly. You know I am not of your church."

      "And Fräulein Sonnenkamp is of our church, and it would be hard – "

      "I was not thinking of that," Eric said, interrupting him. "Wonderful, through what tests I must pass! First a supercilious cavalier, then a nobleman, then a military officer, then a doctor, and now in the priestly sieve."

      "I do not understand you."

      "Ah, truly," began Eric, "and I tell you, I confess to your noble, mild countenance, and so I acknowledge to you, seeing you before me, that I admire the undisturbed unity of your being from which comes the Catholic law of celibacy as a dogma, and I allow myself to claim that we have reached the same ideal stand-point. Yes, honored sir, I say to myself, he who wishes to live for a great idea, whether he is artist, scholar, priest, he can need no family, he must renounce its joys, apart by himself without any hinderance, that he may fulfil his mission in the perpetual service of thought."

      "Divisus est! divisus est!" repeated the ecclesiastic. "The holy apostle says that he who has a wife is divided, and he will be yet more divided, whilst the lot of his children becomes his own. The ecclesiastic has no changes of lot."

      A smile passed over the countenance of the priest, as he continued: —

      "Only imagine a priest married to a quarrelsome wife – there are also peaceable women, gentle and self-sacrificing, and it is certain that there are quarrelsome ones too – and now the priest is to mount the pulpit in order to proclaim the word of peace and love, when an hour before in dispute and scolding – "

      The ecclesiastic suddenly ceased, placed the forefinger of his left hand on his lips, and bethought himself, that he was wandering from the real point. Did not Fräulein Perini inform him that Eric had visited the convent before he came to this place? He looked at Eric, who had led him from the direct inquiry, wondering whether he had done it from prudence, or whether it was really from excitement. He hoped, indeed, to attain his end in some different way; and, apparently in a very natural manner, but yet with a lurking circumspection, he now asked whether Eric really felt confident, from his position, of being able to train a boy like Roland.

      When Eric answered in the affirmative, the ecclesiastic further asked: —

      "And what do you mean to give him first, and in preference to everything else?"

      "To sum it up in few words," replied Eric, "I wish to give Roland joy in the world. If he has this, he will furnish joy to the world; that is to say, he will desire to benefit it; if I teach him to despise the world, to undervalue life, he will come to misuse the world and the powers entrusted to him in it."

      "I regret," said the priest in a gentle tone, "that you are not a believer; you are on the way to salvation, but you turn aside into a by-path. Do you know what riches are? I will tell you. Riches are a great temptation, yes, perhaps the greatest of our time; riches are a force in nature, perhaps the most lawless, most untamable, and the hardest to be governed. Riches are a brutal power, for which there is no ruler, except the Almighty Lord; riches are below the brute, for no brute has any more force than it embodies in itself. Man alone can be rich, can have what he is not himself, and what his children cannot consume. Here is the misery of it! Whoever gains so much of the world hurts his own soul. I have tried to bring this family and this boy to this, that they should at least make the acknowledgment, before every meal, that what they enjoy in such luxurious abundance is only a gift. Do you believe that this boy, conscious of his riches, and this whole family, can receive a moral culture except through religion? A prayer before one sits down to eat is a meditation, a recollection of the fact that thou hast some one to thank for what thou dost enjoy. This takes out the vainglorious pride, and gives humility instead, and makes one give, even as he himself has been given to. Only where the fear of God is, yes, fear, is there also the blissful feeling of His Almighty protection. On the table of this rich man there is placed, every day, a display of sweet-smelling, bright-colored flowers, – what does that matter? On the poorest table of the neediest cottager is placed a bouquet more beautiful and more fragrant, from the higher realm, through the utterances of prayer; and the soul is filled, and this first makes the filling of the body conduce to its health. But this is only one thing. Above there, on the Upper Rhine, they call personal property movables, and so it is! The riches of the present world are nothing but movables, moving possessions, and they will move away. Believe me," cried the ecclesiastic, laying his hand upon Eric's, "believe me, the public funds are the misfortune of the present age."

      "The public funds? I do not understand."

      "Yes, it is indeed not so easy to understand. Of whom can one borrow millions? of no one but the State. If there were no public funds, there would be no one to lend such great sums; that's the way it is. Formerly, a man could not acquire so many millions, because he could not lay out so many millions; but now there are the public funds, and everybody lives on interest-money, and interest is very properly forbidden by the canons. See, in old times the rich man had a great deal of real estate, many fields and forests, and he was first of all dependent upon God's blessed sun, and when everything in good time had ripened, and lay there in the sight of all, then he gave a tenth part to the church. But now the riches are tucked away in fire-proof, burglar-proof safes, not dependent on sun, not on wind and weather, are not visible to the world, and have no tenth of the profit to give, – at the most a trifling discount on the coupons to the banker; the harvest of the bond-holder is the cutting off of coupons; these are the sheaves of his harvest-home. If the Lord should come to-day, he would find no temple from which to drive out the money-changers and traders, they have erected for themselves their own temples. Yes, the stronghold of Zion, to-day, to which princes, as well as rich men, make their pilgrimage and commit themselves to its protection, – it is the Bank of England! Have you ever once thought of this, what is to become of humanity; what of States, if this increase of state-debts continues to go on in this way? of course not. The whole earth will be one tremendous mortgage, and mortgaged to whom? to him who lends on long credit, but who will, some time or other, demand payment. A universal conflagration will come, against which no fireproof vaults will avail, and a deluge, which will wipe out the millions and millions upon millions of State debts. I am not a man who delights in seeing mischief done, but this I would say, – I should like to live to see the Bank of England bankrupt. Only imagine it! At night the news comes. It is all gone. Then will thousands of small men and small women see, for the first time, how small they are, when they see themselves at once stripped of all their trappings, and set down upon the bare earth."

      Eric smiled. Every man placed in solitude, without an environment of equalizing conditions, entertains readily peculiar notions that dart through his mind; and he said that the earth would be burdened with greater debts than it could pay, if it could only find those who would advance the money. But the real possession of humanity was of more value than the whole earth could pay for, as its greatest possession was its ideal being, its power of working; and while, formerly, all property was in the soil, it was just the problem of the modern age to make available ideal and personal property. He wished further to add, that even among the Romans in the time of the Republic itself, the wealth of individuals was thus enormously excessive; but the ecclesiastic, in his great excitement, seemed scarcely listening to him, went to his book-case, took down a great Bible, and opening to a passage, handed the book to Eric.

      "There, just read; that is the only way that Roland can be educated. Read aloud."

      Eric complied, and read: —

      "And СКАЧАТЬ