spital _savants_ bending with endless scrupulousness over a little
pauper child, concentering upon its frailty the whole human skill and
wisdom of ages, so have not I. Here have you the full realisation of a
parable diviner than that of the man who went down from Jerusalem to
Jericho. Beautiful then; with at least surface beauty, like the serpent
_lachesis mutus_; but, like many beautiful things, deadly too,
_in_human. And, on the whole, an answer will have to be found. As for
me, it is a doubt which has often agitated me, whether the central
dogma of Judaism and Christianity alike can, after all, be really one
of the inner verities of this our earthly being--the dogma, that by the
shedding of the innocent blood, and by that alone, shall the race of
man find cleansing and salvation. Will no agony of reluctance overcome
the necessity that one man die, "so that the whole people perish not"?
Can it be true that by nothing less than the "three days of pestilence"
shall the land be purged of its stain, and is this old divine
alternative about to confront us in new, modern form? Does the
inscrutable Artemis indeed demand offerings of human blood to suage her
anger? Most sad that man should ever need, should ever have needed, to
foul his hand in the [Greek: musaron aima] of his own veins! But what
is, is. And can it be fated that the most advanced civilisation of the
future shall needs have in it, as the first and chief element of its
glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism--the
immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeed
part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day
bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run
not to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the _accoucheur,_ of
the time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod and
breast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to the
function of healer the function of Sacrificial Priest? These you say,
are wild, dark questions. Wild enough, dark enough. We know how
Sparta--the "man-taming Sparta" Simonides calls her--answered them.
Here was the complete subordination of all unit-life to the well-being
of the Whole. The child, immediately on his entry into the world, fell
under the control of the State: it was not left to the judgment of his
parents, as elsewhere, whether he should be brought up or not, but a
commission of the Phyle in which he was born