Page:The centurion's story (IA centurionsstory00macf).pdf/14

 long-robed Pharisees at dinner, the entertainer of any wayside crowd with barbaric Hebrew syllogisms—a sort of religious Esculapius who healed the sick. Some aver, too, that even he raised the dead. If that be true, he has now a proper task to raise himself, for it is but a moment since I clamped him in a rock-hewn crypt, with the seal of Cæsar on the door.

The seal of Cæsar! I bow in reverence for our great Cæsar, our divine Tiberius. But, what folly! To put the seal of Cæsar on a tomb. I tell you I saw the blue seal of death clamp this one's lips, and do I not know that seal? Have I not seen it frame itself upon a hundred—upon a thousand—upon unnumbered men? Upon women that the sword of the ravisher cut down; upon children that starved when the invading armies had swept the country like a fire, and famine and fatigue had dried the mother's breasts? I have seen it in every stage of wasting back to nature that ensues until the separate grinning bones of hideous death are sport for dogs or habitats for worms, and I say again, what folly! What seal of Emperor or Gods is half so strong to keep a man entombed as that unturning process of the Universe that grinds life into being with pain and sorrow and grinds it out again at the last with sorrow and pain. Cæsar's seal to keep the dead dead!

But, even while I write these words and pause to scoff at man's mischance of nature, yet I tell you that if there be ever a time when Nature would rue her work upon the frame of a human being, when rocks and hills and trees and birds and glistening seas and whispering winds and booming thunders, and all the vast impeopled constitution of the universe would, with one voice, cry out