Historical Lectures and Essays

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Charles Kingsley. Historical Lectures and Essays

THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF-THE LORD4

ANCIENT CIVILISATION56

RONDELET,7 THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST8

VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST9

PARACELSUS13

GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR

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I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation.  Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay—as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what a superior people you are now—how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793.  Well, that would be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins, certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement, by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its evil.  I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the Lord.  For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons—First, because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved himself to be such by his actions and their consequences—at least in the eyes of those who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which all human history is

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Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their great prophet, Zoroaster—splendour of gold, as I am told his name signifies—who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him.  He, too, tried to solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who has succeeded yet?  Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman, Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned being.  He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd alike in nature and in man.  He was the cause of the fall of man, the tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as Ormuzd was.  But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older Zoroastrian creed.  With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not be eternal in the future.  Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the day when three prophets—the increasing light, the increasing truth, and the existing truth—should arise and give to mankind the last three books of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.

Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what might they not do when the hour and the man arrived?  They were not a big nation.  No; but they were a great nation, even while they were eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in the sterile valleys of Farsistan.

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