Chapter 4

He was indeed a striking figure, tall, lean, lithe, bronzed. His heavy, tousled hair indicated an immense latent vitality. His massive head was held high above broad, bony shoulders. The craggy face was bearded, the forehead deep-lined, the dark eyes deep-set. He had the bearing of a man who had thought much and suffered. The crowd was very still. Stretching forth his long brown arms, the prophet began to speak in a tone and mood of quiet entreaty. Fara found herself yielding at once to the strange compulsion of his vibrant voice. It was as one speaking from a great distance; from another age; from another world.

God had been patient—long—long. Of old He had planted a garden of delicious fruits and scented flowers for the delight of the human creatures He had made. It was a spacious garden, watered by cool springs and graceful rivers, along whose green banks were to be found much gold and many precious stones. On the hillsides jutted various metals which man’s ingenuity might fashion into ploughs, pruning-hooks and other implements of husbandry. Great quarries bulged with enduring granite and delicately tinted marbles with which man might build temples and monuments. There were tall forests filled with all manner of trees from which might be hewn boats and shelters. Innumerable beasts pastured in the valleys, some to provide food, some to bear burdens. And had God’s fortunate children been content to preserve and bequeath their rich heritage, their posterity might still be living comfortably and at peace in a garden.

Here the voice of the prophet rose to a little higher pitch as he proceeded to relate how this paradise was permitted to grow rank with weeds and brambles.

For, from the very beginning, God’s children cared nothing about the garden. The first man flouted God’s instructions. The elder of his two sons slew his brother and fled to the jungle. Restless and dissatisfied, humanity abandoned their paradise and began to roam, everywhere, without food, clothing, shelter, or destination, hoping only to escape the reproving eyes of their disappointed Father.

Sometimes, after long and aimless wandering, a group or tribe would settle in a fertile valley and till the soil. Another nomadic tribe, jealous of their neighbours’ small prosperities, would come upon them with spears and swords and stones, killing the workers together with their old and helpless ones and their little children. Their Father had endowed them with inventive minds, so that they might make better and better tools, but their most ingenious inventions were not better tools but deadlier weapons. Stone was not quarried for the building of temples and monuments, but for great fortifications. Iron was not moulded into implements of husbandry but into instruments of war.

Everywhere there was fear, hardship, hunger. Pillage, rapine, and slaughter spread over the face of the world until there was no peace at all, anywhere at all, and a man was not safe even in the home of his brother.

But—John was continuing with mounting heat—throughout all these dreadful ages of hatred and oppression, God had waited, waited patiently, anxiously for the world’s great ones to become aware of the poverty of their ill-gained wealth, and the empty sham of their vaunted power, and the shabbiness of their royal raiment, and the stink of starvation in their pilfered food. Now and again some brave voice would be raised in warning, but it would soon be stilled. Many were the messengers, sent of God, who were beaten, imprisoned and slain; fed to wild beasts, sawn asunder.