Page:Oration Delivered on the Centennial Day of Washington's Initiation into Masonry (1852).djvu/9

Rh darkness and hell; and assailed too by deluded man, who has too often engaged in this unholy and unnatural warfare, against the promoter, defender, and preserver of his best, his highest, and his noblest interests, welfare and happiness. But truth is eternal, omnipotent, and last and best of all—being identified with the cause of God, which is also the cause of man—“it must and will prevail.”

Truth may be crushed, and by bleeding the while, under the heel of lawless and despotic power; it may be compelled for a season to fly to the deserts, and hide itself, in the dens and caves of the earth; it may have to wander in sheep-skins and goat-skins, and make its abode in the habitations of poverty and obscurity, as its great author and embodiment done, when he visited our world; it may, indeed, for a while, like him, disappear from the earth and Satan and all the foes of truth and liberty, rejoice together, and congratulate themselves, that from one provence, at least, of God’s empire, truth has been driven and liberty is fled. But, in the midst of their rejoicings and their fancied security, how often has truth in some of its many forms thrown them into consternation and alarm, as the shade of Samuel startled the rebellious king of Israel; and like the handwriting on the walls of the impious and licentious court of Belshaszar, frighten its enemies, in the plentitude of their power and pride, by the mystery of its unknown communications. Ever and anon, from out of the midst of that gross darkness, which envelopes the world, has broke, a lone, but brilliant and beaming star, whose twinkling light shone for a moment over the dark and dreary wastes below, revealing the horrors, which that darkness concealed, and then retired to its place among its sister stars. Ever and anon, has some ray of light, though few and far between, from the fountain of truth, swept across the great valley of the shadow of death, but soon retired, as if overwhelmed at the awful and hopeless scene, revealed to its light.

As amidst the gloom and desolation of winter, when snows and ice wrap and bind the earth, and dark clouds are driven by storms across the sky, there suddenly flashes, far and wide, over the wintry wastes, a stream of golden sunlight, shedding its mellow splendor, on hill and plain, mountain and valley, but revealing to the eye scenes and objects, cold and silent, ghastly and dead; forms, indeed, are there, grand, magnificent and beautiful, but it is grandeur in chains, magnificence, bereft of motion and power, and beauty, without life and grace.

In that most pleasing, exciting, and graphic, of all our modern fictions—“The Wandering Jew”—in that romantic and universal vagabond—the hero of the story—we have a true and faithful type of truth, under opposition, persecution and oppression. In that ubiquitous and unvulnerable individual, who is here and