The Missionary: An Indian Tale; vol. I Read online

  CHAPTER II.

  There is a dear and precious period in the life of man, which, brief assweet, is best appreciated in recollection; when but to exist is toenjoy; when the rapid pulse throbs, wildly, with the vague delight whichfills the careless heart, and when it may be truly said, “that nothingis, but what is not.”

  While this rainbow hour lasted, the thorny wreath, which faith hadplaited round Hilarion’s brow, was worn as cheerily, as if the rose ofpleasure had glowed upon his temple. The vows he had made were everpresent to his mind. The ceremonies of his religion occupied hisimagination; and its forms, no less than its spirit, engaged his wholeexistence. He had taken holy orders, and was frequently engaged in theinteresting offices of the priesthood. He studied, with unweariedardour, the sacred legends and records of the convent library, and,during six years of monastic seclusion, his pure and sinless life hadbeen so distinguished by religious discipline and pious austerity; bydevotional zeal and fervid enthusiasm; by charitable exertion and rigidself-denial; and by an eloquence in the cause of religion, so profound,so brilliant, and so touching, that, even envy, which, in a cloister’sgloom, survives the death of better passions, flung not its venom onhis sacred character; and the celebrity of the _man without a fault_ hadextended far beyond the confines of his own secluded monastery.

  The monks conceived, that his illustrious birth, not less than hiseminent genius and unrivalled piety, threw a splendour on their order,and they daily looked forward to the hour when the Father Hilarionshould wave the banner of successful controversy over the prostratenecks of the fallen Jesuits. Yet the brotherhood had hitherto butremotely hinted their wishes, or suggested their expectations. Thefamiliar ease of the novice had faded away with the purple bloom of theyouth; and the reserved dignity of the man threw, at an hopelessdistance, those whom the monk, indeed, in the meekness of religiousphraseology, called his superiors; but whom the saint and the noblemanequally felt unworthy to be classed with him, as beings of the samespecies; he stood alone, lofty and aspiring, self-wrapt and dignified;and no external discipline, no internal humiliation, had so crucifiedthe human weakness in his bosom, as wholly to exclude the leaven ofmortality from the perfection of religious excellence.

  Hitherto the life of the young monk resembled the pure and holy dream ofsaintly slumbers, for it was still a dream; splendid indeed, butvisionary; pure, but useless; bright, but unsubstantial. Dead to allthose ties, which, at once, constitute the charm and the anxiety ofexistence, which agitate while they bless the life of man, the spring ofhuman affection lay untouched within his bosom, and the faculty of humanreason unused within his mind. Hitherto, his genius had alone betrayedits powers, in deceiving others, or himself, by those imposingcreations, by which faith was secured through the medium of imagination;and the ardour of his tender feelings wasted, in visions of holyillusion, or dreams of pious fraud. Yet these feelings, thoughunexercised, were not extinct; they betrayed their existence even in thetorpid life he had chosen; for the true source of his religion,enveloped as it was in mysteries and dogmas, was but a divine andtender impulse of gratitude towards the First Cause; and his benevolentcharity, which he coldly called his duty, but the extension of thatimpulse towards his fellow-creature! His habits, though they had tendedto calm the impetuosity of his complexional character, and to purify andstrengthen his moral principles, had added to his enthusiasm, what theyhad subtracted from his passions, and had given to his zeal, all thatthey had taken from his heart: but when the animated fervour ofadolescence subsided in the dignified tranquillity of manhood, when thereiteration of the same images denied the same vivacity of sensation ashad distinguished their original impression, then the visions, whichhad entranced his dreaming youth, ceased to people and to cheer hisunbroken solitude; then, even Religion, though she lost nothing of herinfluence, lost much of her charm. While the faith which occupied hissoul was not sufficient, in its pure but passive effects, to engage hislife; the active vital principle, which dictates to man, the sphere forwhich he was created, preyed on its own existence, and he turned uponhimself those exertions, which were intended to benefit the species towhich he belonged: his religious discipline became more severe; hismortifications more numerous; his prayers and penance more rigid andmore frequent; and that which was but the result of the weakness ofhuman nature, conscious of its frailty, added new lustre to thereputation of the saint, and excited a warmer reverence for the virtuesof the man. Accustomed to pursue the bold wanderings of the human mind,upon subjects whose awful mystery escapes all human research, intensestudy finally gave place to ceaseless meditation. Connecting, orendeavouring to connect, his incongruous ideas, by abstract principles,he lost sight of fact, in pursuit of inference; and, excluded from allsocial intercourse, from all active engagement, his ardent imaginationbecame his ruling faculty, while the wild magnificence of the scenes bywhich he was surrounded, threw its correspondent influence on hisdisordered mind; and all within, and all without his monastery,contributed to cherish and to perpetuate the religious melancholy andgloomy enthusiasm of his character. More zealous in his faith attwenty-six than he had been at eighteen, it yet no longer opened to hisview the heaven which smiled upon his head; but, beneath his feet, anabyss which seemed ready to ingulf him. He sometimes wildly talked ofevil deeds which crossed his brain; of evil passions which shook hisframe; and doubted if the mercy of his Redeemer extended to him, whosesinless life was not a sufficient propitiation for sinful thoughts: andthis sensitive delicacy of a morbid conscience plunged him into habitualsadness, while it added to his holy fame, and excited a still higherveneration for his character, in those who were the witnesses of itsperfection.

  He frequently spent days, devoted to religious exercises, in the gloomywoods of the monastery; and the monk, who, from kindness or fromcuriosity, pursued his wanderings, sometimes found him cradled on abeetling cliff, rocked by the rising storm; sometimes buried amidst theruins of the Moorish castle, the companion of the solitary bittern; andsometimes hanging over the lake, whose subterraneous thunder scared allears but his.

  The change which had gradually taken place in the character and mannersof the monk had long awakened the attention of the Prior and thebrotherhood of St. Francis; but such was the veneration he hadestablished for his character, by the austerity of his life, and thesuperiority of his genius, by the rank he had sacrificed, and thedignity he had retained, that his associates sought not in natural ormoral causes for the source of effects so striking and so extraordinary:they said, “It is the mysterious workings of divine grace; it is avocation from Heaven; a miracle is about to be wrought, and it isreserved for a member of the order of St. Francis to perform it.”

  These observations had reached the ears of the Father Hilarion, whenthose who pronounced them believed him lost in spiritual meditation;they became imprinted on his mind; they fastened on his imagination;they occupied his waking thought, and influenced his broken dream. Itwas in one of those suspensions of the senses, when a doubtful sleepunlinks the ideas, without wholly subduing the powers of the mind, thathe fancied a favourite dove had flown from his bosom, where it was wontto nestle, towards the east; that, suddenly endowed with the power offlight, he pursued the bird of peace through regions of air, till hebeheld its delicate form absorbed in the effulgence of the rising sun,whose splendour shone so intensely on him, that, even when he awoke, hestill felt its warmth, and shrank beneath its brightness. He perceived,also, that the dove, which had been the subject of his vision, and whichhad drooped and pined during the preceding day, lay dead upon his bosom.This dream made a strong impression on his mind. The effects of thatimpression were betrayed in a discourse which he delivered on the eve ofthe festival of St. Hilarion. He took for his subject the life of Paul,whom he called the first missionary. He spoke of the faith of theapostle, not as it touched himself only, but as to its beneficentrelations towards others.

  In the picture which he had drawn, the monks perceived the state of hisown mind. They said, “It is not of St. Paul alone
he speaks, but ofhimself; he is consumed with an insatiable thirst for the conversion ofsouls; for the dilatation and honour of the kingdom of Christ. It isthrough him that the heretical tenets of the Jesuits will be confoundedand exposed. Let us honour ourselves and our order, by promoting hisinspired views.” In a few days, therefore, his mission to India wasdetermined on. Arrangements for his departure were effected, permissionfrom the Governor of the order to leave the convent was obtained, and herepaired to Lisbon, to procure the necessary credentials for hisperilous enterprise.

  After a separation of fifteen years, the Father Hilarion appeared beforehis guardian uncle, and his brother, the Duke d’Acugna; and never did amortal form present a finer image of what man was, when God firstcreated him after his own likeness, and sin had not yet effaced theglorious impress of the Divinity. Nature stood honoured in this mostperfect model of her power; and the expression of the best and highestof the human passions would have marred that pure and splendid characterof look, which seemed to belong to something beyond the high perfectionof human power or of human genius. Lofty and dignified in his air, therewas an aspiring grandeur in the figure of the Monk, which resembled thetransfiguration of mortal into heavenly greatness: and, though hiseagle-eye, when raised from earth, flashed all the fire of inspiration;yet, when again it sunk in holy meekness, the softer excellence ofheavenly mercy hung its tender traits upon his pensive brow; hisup-turned glance beaming the heroic fortitude of the martyr; hisdown-cast look, the tender sympathies of the saint; each, respectively,marking the heroism of a great soul, prepared to suffer and to resist;the sensibility of a feeling heart, created to pity and to relieve;indicating a character, formed upon that bright model, which sointimately associated the attributes of the God with the feelings of theman.

  The Duke and the Archbishop stood awed in the presence of thisextraordinary being. They secretly smiled at what they deemed theromance of his intentions; but they had not the courage to oppose them:they were rich in worldly arguments, against an enterprise so full ofdanger, and so destitute of recompense; but how could they offer them toone, who breathed not of this world; to whom earthly passions, andearthly views, were alike unknown; who already seemed to belong to thatheaven, to which he was about to lead millions of erring creatures: all,therefore, that was reserved for them to effect, was, to throw asplendour over his mission, correspondent to his illustrious rank; and,in spite of the intrigues of the Jesuits, the reluctance of the Spanishvice-reine, and the wishes of the minister, Miguel Vasconcellas, theunited influence of the houses of Braganza and Acugna procured a brieffrom the Pope’s legate, then resident in Lisbon, constituting aFranciscan monk apostolic nuncio in India, and appointing Goa, thendeemed the bulwark of Christianity, in Hindostan, the centre of hismission.

  Followed to the shore by a multitude of persons, who beheld in theapostolic nuncio another Francis Xaverius, the Father Hilarion embarkedwith the Indian fleet, on board the admiral’s ship, which also carriedthe governor-general, recently appointed to the government of Goa. TheNuncio was accompanied by a coadjutor, a young man strongly recommendedby the Archbishop of Braga, a Jesuit, and the professed enemy of theFranciscans, who had obtained the appointment of his protegé by hisinfluence with the minister.

  During the voyage, the rank and character of the Missionary procured himthe particular attentions of the Viceroy; but the man of God was not tobe tempted to mingle with the profane crowd which surrounded the man ofthe world. Devoted to a higher communion, his soul only stooped fromheaven to earth, to relieve the sufferings he pitied, or to correct theerrors he condemned; to substitute peace for animosity; to restrain theblasphemies of the profane; to dispel the darkness of the ignorant; tosupport the sick; to solace the wretched; to strengthen the weak, and toencourage the timid; to watch, to pray, to fast, and to suffer for all.Such was the occupation of a life, active as it was sinless.

  Such was the tenour of a conduct, which raised him, in the estimation ofthose who witnessed its excellence, to the character of a saint; butendeared him still more to their hearts, as a man who mingled sympathywith relief, and who added to the awful sentiment of veneration heinspired, the tender feeling of gratitude his mild benevolence wascalculated to awaken.

  Yet, over this bright display of virtues, scarcely human, one trait ofconduct, something less than saintly, threw a transient shadow. He haddisgraced the coadjutor from his appointment, for an irregularity ofconduct almost venial from the circumstances connected with it. Withhim, virtue was not a relative, but an abstract quality, referable onlyto love of Deity, and independent of human temptation and mortal events;he, therefore, publicly rebuked the coadjutor as a person unworthy tobelong to the congregation of the mission. He said, “Let us be mercifulto all but to ourselves; it is not by our preaching alone we can promotethe sacred cause in which we have embarked--it is also by our example.”Even the mediation of the Viceroy was urged in vain. Firm of purpose,rigid, inflexible, he acted only from conviction, the purest and thestrongest; but once resolved, his decree was immutable as the law of theGod he served. His severe justice added to the veneration he inspired;but as he wept while he condemned, it detracted nothing from the generalsentiment of affection he excited.

  The voyage had been far from prosperous. The fleet had suffered muchfrom repeated storms; and danger the most imminent, accompanied by allthose awful appearances, with which conflicting elements strike terrorinto the boldest heart, had betrayed in the sufferers exposed to theirrage, all the symptoms of human weakness, reduced to a feeling sense ofits own insignificance, by impending destruction, under the mostterrific and awful forms of divine power. The Missionary, alone, seemeduninfluenced by the threatened approach of that dreadful and untimelydeath, to which he stood exposed, in common with others. Calm and firm,his counsel and exertions alike displayed the soul incapable of fear; towhom life was indifferent, and for whom death had no terrors; while hisframe, as if partaking the immortality of his soul, resisted theinfluence of fatigue, and the vicissitudes of the elements. He met,unappalled, the midnight storm; he beheld, unmoved, the tumultuousbillows, which rushed loudly on, pouring destruction in their course,and bore, with uncomplaining firmness, the chilling cold of Cape Verd,the burning heats of Guinea, and the pestilential vapours of the line.

  It was on the first day of the sixth month of the voyage, that the fleetsailed up the Indian seas, and, through the clear bright atmosphere, theshores and mighty regions of the East presented themselves to the view,while the imagination of the Missionary, escaping beyond the limits ofhuman vision, stretched over those various and wondrous tracts, sodiversified by clime and soil, by government and by religion, and whichpresent to the contemplation of philosophy a boundless variety in formand spirit. Towards the west, it rested on the Arochosian mountains,which divide the territories of Persia from those of India--primævalmountains! whose wondrous formation preceded that of all organic matter,coequal with the globe which bears them! and which still embosom, intheir stupendous shades, a nest of warlike states, rude as the aspectsof their native regions, and wild as the storms that visit them; thedescendants of those warrior hordes, which once spread desolation overthe eastern hemisphere, till the powerful genius of an individualtriumphed over the combined forces of nations, and the Affgans found,that the natural bulwark of their native mountains was alone asufficient barrier against the victorious arms of Tamerlane.

  From the recollection of the character and prowess of the Tartar hero,the mind of the Missionary turned towards the shores, which were ratherimagined than perceived in so great an interval of distance; and theImpostor of Mecca occurred to his recollection, with the scenes of hisnativity and success. Bold in error, dauntless in imposition, enslavingthe moral freedom while he subverted the natural liberty of mankind, andspreading, by the force of his single and singular genius, the wilddoctrines he had invented, over the greatest empires of the earth, fromthe shores of the Atlantic to the walls of China; his success appearedeven more wondrous, and his genius more powerful,
than that of theTartar conqueror. The soul of the Missionary swelled in thecontemplation of scenes so calculated to elevate the ideas, to inflamethe imagination, and to recall the memory to those æras in time, tothose events in human history, which stimulate, by their example, thepowers of latent genius, rouse the dormant passions into action, andexcite man to sow the seeds of great and distant events, to foundempires, or to destroy them.

  His spirit, awakening to a new impulse, partook, for a moment, thesublimity of the objects he contemplated, the force of the charactershe reflected on, and, expanding with its elevation, mingled with theuniverse. He remembered, that he, too, might have been an hero; he, too,might have founded states, and given birth to doctrines; for what hadTimur boasted, or Mahomet possessed, that nature had denied to him? Aframe of Herculean mould; a soul of fire; a mind of infinite resource;energy to impel; genius to execute; an arm to strike; a tongue topersuade; and a vital activity of spirit to give impulse and motion tothe whole:--such were the endowments, which, coming from God himself,give to man so dangerous an ascendant over his species; and such werehis. For the first time, his energy of feeling, his enthusiasm of fancy,received a new object for its exercise. He pursued, with an eagleglance, the sun’s majestic course: “To-day,” he said, “it rose upon thePagoda of Brahma; it hastens to gild, with equal rays, the temple oncededicated to its own divinity, in the deserts of Palmyra; to illuminethe Caaba of Mecca; and to shine upon the tabernacle of Jerusalem!” Hestarted at the climax. The empires of the earth, and the genius of man;suddenly faded from his mind; he thought of Him, in whose eye empire wasa speck, and man an atom; he stood self-accused, humbled, awed; andinvoked the protection of Him, who reigns only in perfect love in thatheart, where worldly ambition has ceased to linger, and from whencehuman passions have long been exterminated.

  The vessel in which he had embarked, was among the last to reach theport of Goa; and the reputation of his sanctity, and the history of hisrank, his genius, and his mission, had preceded his arrival. The placesunder the civil and ecclesiastical government of Goa, were filled bySpaniards, but the Portuguese constituted the mass of the people[2].They groaned under the tyranny of the Spanish Jesuits, and they heard,with a rapture which their policy should have taught them to conceal,that an apostolic nuncio, of the royal line of Portugal, and of theorder of St. Francis, was come to visit their settlements, to correctthe abuses of the church, and to pursue the task of conversion, by meansmore consonant to the evangelical principles of a mild and purereligion. An enthusiast multitude rushed to the shore, to hail hisarrival: the splendid train of the Viceroy was scarcely observed; andthe man of God, who disclaimed the pomp of all worldly glory,exclusively received it. He moved slowly on, in all the majesty ofreligious meekness: awful in his humility--commanding in his subjection:his finely formed head, unshaded, even by his cowl; his naked feetunshrinking from the sharpness of the stony pavement; the peace ofHeaven stamped on his countenance; and the cross he had taken up,pressed to his bosom. All that could touch in the saint, or impose inthe man, breathed around him: the sublimity of religion, and thesplendour of beauty, the purity of faith, and the dignity of manhood;grace and majesty, holiness and simplicity, diffusing their combinedinfluence over his form and motions, his look and air.

  He passed before the residence of the Grand Inquisitor, who stood,surrounded by his ecclesiastical court, at a balcony, and witnessed thissingular procession. At the moment when the Missionary reached theportals of a Carmelite monastery, where he was to take up his residence,the monks approached to receive him; the multitude called for hisbenediction: ere he retired from its view he bestowed it; and never hadthe sacred ceremony been performed with a zeal so touching, with anenthusiasm so devout, with a look, an attitude, an air so pure, sotender, so holy, and so inspired. The portals closed upon the saint; andthose who had touched the hem of his garment, believed themselvespeculiarly favoured by Heaven.

  The next day he received an audience from the Bishop and GrandInquisitor of Goa; marked by a distinction due to his rank; butcharacterized by a coldness, and by some invidious observations, littleconsonant to the enthusiasm of his own character, and unbefitting anenterprise so laudable and magnanimous as that in which he hadengaged.--The Missionary, disgusted with all he saw and all he heard,with the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical court, and with thechilling haughtiness and illiberal sentiments of those who presided overit, and who openly condemned the tenets of the order to which hebelonged[3]; quickly resolved on an immediate departure from Goa. A fewdays, however, were requisite to arrange the circumstances necessary forthe promotion of his mission. His vow of poverty related only tohimself; but his mission required worldly means, as well as divineinspiration, to effect its beneficent purpose; and the charity whichbecame a duty towards persons of his own order in Christendom, must, ina country where his religion was not known, depend upon the casualty ofnatural feeling: something, therefore, which belonged to earth, enteredinto an enterprise which referred ultimately to heaven; and the saintwas obliged to provide for the contingencies of the prelate and theman.

  The route which he laid out for his mission, was from Tatta to Lahore,by the course of the Indus, and from Lahore to the province of Cashmire.To fix upon this remote and little known province, as the peculiarobject of his mission, was an idea belonging to that higher order ofgenius, which grasps, by a single view, what mediocrity contemplates indetail, or considers impracticable in accomplishment. To penetrate intothose regions, which the spirit of invasion, or the enterprise ofcommerce, had never yet reached; to pass that boundary, which thehallowed footstep of Christianity had never yet consecrated; to preachthe doctrine of a self-denying faith, in the land of perpetualenjoyment; and, amidst the luxurious shades, which the Indian fancycontemplates as the model of its own heavenly Indra, to attack, in thebirth-place of Brahma, the vital soul of a religion, supposed to haveexisted by its enthusiast votary beyond all æra of human record, beyondall reach of human tradition, which had so long survived thevicissitudes of time, the shock of conquest, and the persecution ofintolerance: this was a view of a bold and an enthusiastic mind,confident in the powers of a genius which would rise with the occasion,and superior to all earthly obstacles, which might oppose its efforts;of a mind, to be incited, rather than to be repelled, by difficulties;to be animated, rather than subdued, by danger.

  The person, the character, the life, the eloquence of the Missionary,were all calculated to awaken a popular feeling in his favour; and,during the few weeks he remained at Goa, the confessional from which heabsolved, and the pulpit whence he preached, became the shrines ofpopular devotion.

  His eloquence was irresistible: it was the language of fearless genius,of enthusiastic zeal; vehement and impassioned, it ever aspired at thepathetic, or reached the sublime; and if it were, sometimes, moredazzling than judicious, more affecting than correct, still itpersuaded, when it failed to convince, still it was distinguished bythose touches of tenderness, by those visions of Enthusiasm, whichblend and assimilate, so intimately, with human feeling, which everaddress themselves, with such invariable success, to human passion!

  The departure of the Nuncio from Goa was attended by circumstances whichaccorded not with the character of the apostle of Him, who, inapproaching the spot whence he was to announce his divine mission to therulers of the people, “came riding on an ass;” for the departure of theMissionary was triumphant and splendid. The most illustrious of thePortuguese families in Goa attended in his train, and the homage of themultitude pursued him to the shore, whence he was to embark for Tatta.He moved meekly on in the midst of the crowd; but through the profoundhumility of his countenance shone such magnanimity of soul, such perfectconsciousness of a genius and a zeal equal to the sacred enterprise inwhich he had embarked, that the most favourable presages were formed ofthe success of a man, who seemed to blend, in his character, the pietyof the saint with the energy of the hero. He embarked:--the anchor wasraised; a favourable breeze swelled the sails. The Missionary st
ood onthe deck, dignified, but not unmoved: the triumph of religion, softenedby its meekness, sat on his brow! The happy auspices under which he hadleft the centre of his mission, promised him a return still moretriumphant: his soul swelled with emotions, which diffused themselvesover his countenance; and as the vessel receded from the shore, his earstill caught the murmured homage offered to his unrivalled excellence.The humility of the monk rejected the unmerited tribute; but the heartof the man throbbed with an ardour, not all saintly, as he received it;and the pious visionary, who attempted, by an abstraction of mind, tolove God, without enjoying the pleasure which accompanies that love,now, with a natural feeling, superior to the influence of a stoicalzeal, unconsciously rejoiced, even in the suffrages of man.