A Story of To-day

by
Howard Pyle

Proem

This is the story of the scribes, pharisees, priests, and Levites, and of certain Romans. It is intended as a phase of that divine history already told to the world, but now told from another stand-point and translated from the ancient Hebrew habits of life into modern American, so that the reader may more readily understand the circumstances that directed our actions. If it has been told aright, he may see why it was that we crucified the Truth.

We — scribes and pharisees — have been vilified and abused for nineteen hundred years because we acted as the circumstances of our lives compelled us. The fact seems to be overlooked that we were not born publicans and sinners, but upright and virtuous citizens, and that it was out of the question for us to desert our own class and to ally ourselves with those whose only recommendation appeared to lie in the fact that they were poor and lowly, or else that they were social outcasts and sinners.

We could hardly be held to have been more worthy of respect if we had violated our traditions of order and of virtue to accept an entirely new code of ethics supported by such advocates; which code, if carried out, meant the overthrow of all that we held most sacred and worthy of preservation.

The integrity of the very Church itself — the foundation of our entire system of social order — was threatened with destruction, and it was only in the extremity of our need and after all other courses of action were closed to us that we resorted to the last and sternest measure to save human society from destruction.

Surely the truth is so unanswerable as to be axiomatic, that it is better that one man should die rather than that the very laws that bind human society together should be annihilated.

Yet for nineteen hundred years we have borne the odium of having wantonly and callously performed a cruel and unjustifiable act.

Everything is in the view-point. The whole aspect of creation depends upon where the observer stands to look at it.

Heretofore these great events of sacred history have been looked upon from the point of view of that central and dominant Figure, and the great plain of the world of mankind has been seen revolving dimly and remotely around it. Our point of view — the point of view of the scribes and the pharisees, the priests and the Levites, and certain of the Romans — has never been considered and weighed in the balance.

This is intended as a history of those affairs as we saw them, and from that view-point the divine Figure that shaped a new system that was to dominate all other systems is beheld — when seen at all — not as the pivot upon which everything swings, but as a single integer of society at large — a centre of fermentation, very distant from us — disturbing and dangerous, but remote.

For while we now and then saw Him near by, for the more part He hardly entered our lives to disturb our daily affairs until towards the last of His career.

This story that follows is intended by way of a vindication, and we challenge all scribes and pharisees of this day who read it to say if they themselves would have acted differently under the same circumstances.

The world is the world and is a very mixed quantity, being composed of good and bad in such a manner as to maintain the perfect mundane balance that God has ordained. If Herod was an unscrupulous politician, Caiaphas was a good priest; if Pilate, sitting in a high place of authority, temporized to his own advantage, the young man of great possessions who sought salvation was an honest and sincere searcher for the truth — enthusiastic and impractical, perhaps, but sincere.

Such as these are a very few of the integers, good, bad, and indifferent, that go to make up the sum-total of earthly life. Such as that life is we do not make it — it is made for us; and we must obey its laws and fulfil the destiny that Providence has assigned to us. If we were made virtuous we must under normal conditions be virtuous; if we were made vicious we must be vicious; and there the matter ends.

The world looks very big to us, and any one who dares to interfere with the nice adjustment of its affairs him we always crucify, lest he bring destruction upon us by overturning the elaborate mechanism of our social order.

In this lies our exculpation. If we crucified the Truth, we did it to save the world in which we lived.

Bearing this in mind, the reader is invited to here follow our story, which has been translated into the conditions of modern American life, and then to decide how far he can blame us for fulfilling the destiny which God ordained for us.

Chapter I.
The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness

When John the Baptist began preaching none of us of the more intelligent classes believed him to be really a prophet forerunning the coming of the Messiah. Indeed, the better part of the world knew in the beginning nothing of his presence in its midst; nor until we began to be aware that great streams of ignorant people were pouring out of the cities and towns and descending to listen to his preaching and to receive his baptism, were we aware that such a man was in existence.

Then the public journals, those echoes of current thought and opinion, began to take the matter up, publishing longer and longer reports concerning him; commenting upon the growing excitement, the cause of which nobody seemed exactly to understand. People read what was printed and wondered what it all meant.

Just what those poor people who flocked to the baptism of John expected to see or to hear — just what they expected to gain through his ministrations, it was impossible to say. If they had any real thought in the matter they did not tell to the world what it was they thought.

For those of the lower class do not talk freely to those of the upper class about their ideas. With their intellectual superiors they are reserved, suspicious, and sometimes sullen. To the trained thinker the untrained mind appears remote, and its reasonings obscure.

When, for instance, Dr. Caiaphas’s assistant gardener came to that good clergyman in the middle of the week to ask him if he might be absent from work till the Monday following, and when the rector of the Church of the Advent asked the man if he were not going down to see the Baptist and why he went, he found his question confronted by just such logical obtuseness and inconsequence.

“Why, you see, sir,” said the man, “I did promise Molly I’d take her and her sister down to be baptized — that is, if you can spare me, sir — and there ain’t much doing just now.”

“But suppose I can’t spare you, Thomas?”

“Oh, well, sir, it doesn’t signify. I can stay, and Molly and her sister can go down theirselves.”

It was then that the rich, wise priest tried to get at the mind of the other man and failed.

“Why do you want to go down to the baptism, Thomas?” he said. “Don’t you get enough of God’s truth preached to you at home without having to go there to find it?”

“It’s Molly wants to go more than me, sir.”

“But I want you to tell me what you yourself think. Do you really believe that this man has any more power to forgive your sins than I have? Do you think that by baptizing you with a little water he can wash away in a few seconds all the sins you have committed for the thirty-six years of your life?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know? Then, if you don’t know, what is it you go for? I should think you would want to know all there is to know before you ran away from God’s truth preached from His own holy word to hear what a madman in the wilderness has to say.”

“It’s more on Molly’s account than mine, sir. The women do think a deal about them things, sir.”

“But, I say, I want to know what you yourself think. You ask for three or four days of time to go away from your work, to hear this man preach. You must have some reason for doing so. Do you really believe the blasphemous assertions of this mad preacher that Almighty God, the Creator of the universe, is actually going to send His Messiah down into the midst of such a rabble as is gathered there?”

“I don’t need to go if you can’t spare me, sir,” said the under-gardener.

Then Dr. Caiaphas gave up the unequal contest. There was no reasoning with such inconsequence. It was like fighting the wind, and he did not attempt it any further.

“You may go if you choose, Thomas,” said he.

“Thank you, sir,” said Thomas.

It is probable that few who went to the baptism of John could assign a better reason. Dr. Caiaphas appeared to be right, and his gardener appeared to be entirely wrong. Men of to-day know that the Truth of John was true, and that the truth of Dr. Caiaphas was a mistake; but, to us, illuminated with the light of our superior intelligence, it appeared to be otherwise.

One of the journals of the day published a number of sun-pictures of the Baptist and of his disciples. Among these the world looked upon a picture of a baptism — the crowd gathered in a dense, motley mass upon the shore, the Baptist standing knee-deep in the water surrounded by penitents, upon the head of one of whom he was in the act of pouring water.

Another such picture was a portrait of the Baptist himself. He was standing in full sunlight in front of a tent, and was surrounded by his immediate disciples. There was a background of the same motley crowd that characterized all the pictured groups. The central figure was the image of a singularly wild and curious figure — lean, haggard, unshaven.

He was clad in loose trousers and shirt, over which he wore a rough blouse of some coarse, hairy material, strapped about his waist with a broad leather belt. His lean legs were bare, and on his feet he wore coarse, heavy brogans. His pale eyes looked out directly at you from under brows contracted in the glare of the sunlight.

A tangled mop of hair was brushed back behind his ears, and a shaggy beard hung down upon his breast. One hand held a rough, crooked staff, and the other loosely grasped a shapeless hat. The pose, the expression of the face, the dress, all bespoke to the intelligent observer as clearly as the word itself could have done — madness — or else fanaticism.

The upper world looked upon this picture, commented upon it, even laughed at it; for there is something to the intelligent mind that is almost ludicrous in the irrational and superstitious religious rites of the ignorant and credulous lower world.

The printed words accompanying the group of pictures declared that you had only to look upon the portrait of John the Baptist to form your own conclusions as to what was the inspiration of all the excitement then fermenting among the lower masses. They said that the sun-picture spoke for itself without the need of comment, and that the Baptist either was insane and should be placed under restraint, or else that he was an incendiary of the most dangerous character, and should be imprisoned as such according to the law.

It gave the writer an excellent opportunity to deliver a blow at the political affairs of the day. “Herod,” he said, “was not our choice for subordinate governor, nor was he, we think, the choice of the better element of the community. He was placed in his position by a strange coalition of the classes and the masses, and he is now supported in power by just such a rabble as are at present gathered to hear this mad preacher’s eloquence. It is very possible that Governor Herod is afraid to enforce the law against this man, for fear he should lose the support of that ignorant and vicious class which itself is the mainstay of his political power. But it is a pity that all the more conservative part of the community should be endangered by the unlicensed preaching of this madman, simply because Herod desires to succeed himself in his present position.”

Such words as these voiced the entire thought of the law-abiding scribes and pharisees. The logic appeared to us to be very true and unanswerable. It is only now, in later days, that the world has come to know that we were wrong, and the motley multitudes that surrounded John the Baptist were right. But what thoughtful man can reasonably condemn us for holding a position so rational as that which we maintained?

Chapter II.
Herod the Tetrarch

It is one of the paradoxes of divine operation that dishonest and unworthy men should so often be set in the positions of rulers of other men. Yet it is so. Integrity and honesty are not necessarily a passport to political preferment.

Everybody knew Herod’s character. His moral delinquencies were public to the gaze of all men — the unsavory property of the entire community. The shame of his marriage with the divorced wife of his own brother stank in the nostrils of all the decent world. He was a man seemingly without any principle or aim in life except to gratify himself. Yet for years he had occupied high public position and was supported, not only by the small, dominant class who found him useful, but by the masses as well.

But, though the rulers and those in authority had set Herod up as their representative in power, they were not fond of him. So, when John the Baptist began to fulminate against him and his moral obliquities, and when the public journals began to publish these fulminations for general reading, Herod’s political friends rather enjoyed the situation.

They laughed at him, and even jested with him about it. They knew that he was powerless to punish the preacher, for he did not dare to alienate the lower class that so largely helped to uphold him in power. His political friends knew that he must submit to whatever attacks were made against him, and they enjoyed his helplessness and his probable sufferings.

When he would drop into his club on his way home, he would perhaps be hailed with an inquiry as to whether he had seen the evening paper, and that there was lively reading in it. Another advised him to take the sheet home with him to his wife, and that she would be interested to see what was being said of her.