 Section 45 of the Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume 12. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Rita Boutros. The Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume 12 by William Cowper Bran. Section 45, Rainbow Chasers, Part 2. Despite the optimistic cackle, annant the march of science, industrial progress, and all that sort of thing, it appears to be the general consensus of opinion that there's something radically wrong. There's no lack of remedies. The political drugstore is full of panaceas, each with the trademark of some peculiar school of therapeutics blown in the bottle. Strange that all these catholicons for earthly ills propose to inaugurate the millennium by improving the pecuniary condition of the people, as though the want of money in this or the other pocket were the only evil. Certainly a better distribution of wealth were desirable, but a general dissemination of God's grace were far preferable. Given that, all worthy reforms will follow. Without it we will continue to chase foolish rainbows to our fall, divies becoming more insolent, Lazarus left more and more to the care of the dogs. I do not mean that by acquiring a case of the camp meeting jerks we will solve the riddle which the sphinx of time is propounding to this republic, that we will find the solution of all life's problems in the amen corner, not exactly. The average church is about the last place to which we need look for relief. It's too often a lying rainbow painted on the dark mist of ignorance by the devil's own artist. It promises more and performs less than a republican candidate for Congress. I've noticed that shouting Hosannas has little tendency to make one more truthful, that when a man professes himself the chief of sinners, he may feel obligated to substantiate his statement. I've never known a man to borrow any money of the bank on the unctuosity of his amen, but I have known people who could double discount Satan himself at dodging an honest debt, to weep real water because I declined to come into their sectarian penfold and be measured for a suit of angelic pin feathers. There are many church people who will slander you unmercifully for dissenting from their religious dogma, then seize the first opportunity to stick you with a plugged dime or steal your dog. There are worshipers who do not consider in outward rites and specious forms religion satisfied, but these never accumulate vast fortunes. The path to heaven is too steep to be scaled by a man weighted down with seven million dollars. He may be long on hope and faith, but he's short on charity, and without charity, religion is as big a fraud as McKinley's international bimetalism. Charity is a word that is awfully misunderstood. If a man's income be five thousand a year, and he gives half of it to the less fortunate, he's a pretty decent fellow. But if he reserves for himself half of a one hundred thousand income while people are going hungry to bed, he's simply a brute. With a world full of woe and want, what right has any professed follower of Jesus to shove fifty thousand dollars a year down his jeans? The true test of a man's charity is the sum which he reserves for himself. Hence, when John D. Rockefeller, my good Baptist brother, who's building collegiate monuments to his own memory with other people's money, reserves tens of millions in excess of his needs and imagines himself full to the muzzle with the grace of God, he's simply chasing a rainbow that may land him in male bowls with the dull sudden plunk of a Republican campaign promise hitting the tidal wave of prosperity. Imagine Jesus Christ with John D.'s money, loaning it at five percent a month. Why, if he'd have so much cash, he'd never have been crucified. Those who clamored for his death would have run him for mayor of Jerusalem on the reform ticket and tried to work him for his last dollar. If all who call themselves Christians were Christ-like, then indeed might there be hope for humanity. But what is there to inspire belief that the church will ever win the world from a foolish quest of rainbows? What hope entail Mej with his nightmare visions and stratorious dreams, his pilgrimings to Palestine and rummaging among the mummified cats and has been kings of ancient Egypt for scriptural evidence? What hope for a people so mentally emasculate that they can patiently listen to his Jejun wind-jamming can read and relish his irremediable tamirat? What hope in Sam Jones and other noisy ignorami of that ilk and their wild war on dancing and the Euker deck, the drama and decollet? Be these the strongholds of Abraman in his ceaseless war on Oromestes? Does the Prince of Darkness, who once did fill the wandering cosmos with the clanger of celestial steel now front the hosts of heaven, armed with a Euker deck? Is Tara Boumdier the battle-hem of the theatre hat, the blazing gonfalon of him who strove with omnipotence for universal empire? Does Lucifer expect to become Lord Paramount of all the gleaming worlds that hang like jewels pendant in heaven's imperial concave by persuading some miserable son of Adam to work his toes on Sunday, dance with the girls on Monday, or play seven up for the cigars? Oh, Jonesy, Jonesy, would to heaven that thou and all thy brother blabsters and bubbly jocks would go hang yourselves, for you know not of the war that rages ever like a sulfurous syrup in the human soul. Ye are but insects that infest great Yggdrasil, the ash tree that upholds the universe. One atheistical Stephen Girard playing Good Samaritan in a plague-swept city while the preachers hit the turnpike. One deistical Tom Payne braving the guillotine for the rights of man. One father Damien freely laying down his life for the miserable lepers of Molokai. One sweet-faced sister of charity bravely battling with the reeking slums of a great city, striving to drag souls from that seething maelstrom of sin, were worth legions of those sanctified lollipops who prayed of sacrificing all for their saviour, yet never risked life or gold in the service of their God. Work is worship, said the old monks, who carried the cross into the western wilds, despite all hardships, in defiance of all dangers, men for whom life was no mama's mask, but a battle and a march, men who sacrificed all for others' sake, accepting without a sigh disease and death as worldly reward. Those monks were real men, and real men are ever the world's heroes and its hope. The soul of a real man is never hidden behind the cowardly superficies of policy or expediency. His heart is an open book which he who runs may read. Deceive he cannot, for there lie blooms only on the lips of cowards. Public opinion he may treat with kingly contempt, but self-respect is dearer to him than life, though dowered with a monarch scepter and all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. There's something in the words of a woman, spoken during the Civil War, which indicates that, despite all artificiality and folly, beneath the cheap gilding and showy lacquer of life, the heart of the race still beats steady and strong, that above the infinitude of goose-speech and the trumpeting of tin horns on the housetops may still be heard the ever-appealing tones of old eternity. From out the mad hell of the fight a wounded hero was born to the hospital. Neither pain nor approaching death could break the courage of that heart of oak but a prurient little preacher, one of those busy smooth-bore bigots whose mission seems to be to cast a shadow on the very sun, convinced the stricken man that he was an awful sinner, whereupon he began crying out that he was doomed to be damned. The nurse, a muscular woman who believed with the old monks that work is worship, took the parson by the pendulous eight-by-ten ear, led him aside and sweetly said, Mr. Goody-two-shoes, if I catch you in this ward again, I'll throw you out of the window. The brimstone peddler felt that he had an urgent call to other fields. He stood not upon the order of his going but hit the dim and shadowy distance like Nancy Hanks. He couldn't even wait to pray for his persecutor or take up a collection. In vain, the nurse strove to soothe her patient by telling him that the man who gave his life for his native land cannot miss heaven's mercy. He but wailed the louder that he was lost. You came to me a hero, she cried, and you shall not leave me a coward. If you must go to hell, go like a man. If Romans nursed by a she-wolf became demigods, what might not Americans be sprung from the loins of such a lioness? Milton has almost made Satan respectable by endowing him with an infernal heroism, by making him altogether and irremediably bad, instead of a moral mumwump by giving him a heart for any fate instead of picturing him as willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. By God's grace, I mean not the kind you catch at camp meetings with sand fleas, wood ticks, and other gifts of the Holy Ghost, but rather an end everlasting to bromegem and make-believe, a return to the Ark of the Covenant, a recognition of that fact that the soul is not the stomach, that a man owes debts to his fellows which cannot be cast up at the end of the month and discharged with a given number of dollars. Man was not made for himself alone, but all were made for each and each for all. The doctrine which now prevails of every man for himself is the dogma of the devil. It means universal war, shameful wrong, and brutal outrage. The strong become intolerable tyrants, the weak go to the wall. It transforms this beautiful world into a basket of adders, each biting, hissing, striving to get its foolish head above its fellows. If the Christian religion contained not else of worth, its doctrine of self-sacrifice should earn for it the respect of every atheist in the universe. Through the fogs of ignorance and the clouds of superstition that enshrouded the biblical ages, that touch of the divine shines like a pilot star. That Persian poet who prayed it of the sorry scheme of things would deserve pity were he not beneath contempt. He imagined that there was a screw loose in the universe because his quest of pleasure slipped its trolley pole and could not make the bubble joy to dance in folly's cup. Millions make continual moan that they are not happy when they ought to be thankful that they are not hanged. They shake their puny hands at heaven because not provided with a terrestrial paradise when they ought to be giving thanks that I'm not the party who holds the sea in the hollow of his hand. I'd make good baptists of the whole caboodle would hold them underwater long enough to soak out the original sin. A man complains because fortune doesn't empty her cornucopia into the pockets of his pantalettes while he widdles a pine box and talks municipal politics instead of humping himself behind an enterprising mule in the cotton patch. If his sweetheart jilt him he's in despair and if she marries him he wishes he were dead. He has the mulligrubs because he cannot plant himself or because he finds his wife awake and denercing a curtain lecture to keep it warm while he falls through the front fence at five o'clock in the morning. It seems never to have occurred to these were terrian whalers that the happiest existence is that of the lower animals that the human being of fine brain and keen sensibilities cannot possibly be content. It is this very unrest this heart hunger that drives a man onto noble deeds that lifts him out of the gutter where wallow the dull dumb beast and places him among the gods. Of suffering and sorrow were born all life's beauty. The kiss of Pyramus and Thisby is an ecstasy of pain the hope of immortality sprang from breaking hearts. Nations rise through a mist of tears. Every great life work is an agony. Behind every song there lurks a sigh. There's an element of sadness in humor itself. The virgin mother is known as our lady of pain. The cult of Christ is hallowed by the blood of self-sacrifice and known as the religion of sorrow. The first breath of life and the last gasp are drawn in suffering and between the cradle and the grave there lies a monster-haunted Sahara. Yet men choose the ignis fatuus called happiness and mourn that they cannot cover it with a number six hat. They should pray the gods to transform them into contented goats and turn them out to grass. People who cannot find happiness here begin to look for it in heaven. Eternal beatitude is another ridiculous rainbow. Nirvana is nonsense. If there be a life beyond the grave it means continued endeavor and there can be no endeavor unless there's dissatisfaction. The creature cannot rise superior to its creator and the universe is the result of God's unrest. Had he been perfectly content he would not have made me. Carlisle, not Mogwump Carlisle of Kentucky but Thomas Carlisle of Great Britain the lord of modern literature says the hell most dreaded by the English is the hell of not making money. We have imported this English Gehenna duty free despite Mr. Dingley and now the man who doesn't succeed in accumulating dollars is socially damned. How many of this generation can understand the remark of a gases that he had no time to make money? Can realize that such occupation is not the soul and of man that time expended in the accumulation of wealth beyond the satisfaction of simple wants is worse than wasted. It is so because from our numbered days we have stolen years that should have been devoted to soul development filled with the sweets of knowledge hallowed by the perfume of love and gracious by noble deeds because we have blasted life's fair fruitage with the primeval eldest curse. Omar strikes one true chord when he doth sing a book of verses underneath the bow a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou singing beside me in the wilderness all wilderness were paradise in now. Diogenes was content with a tub while Alexander sat him down by the evermoaning sea and wept his red bandana full of brine because he didn't know that the empire of Tsar Reed yet remained unconquered. And now both Diogenes and Alexander have gone glimmering through the dream of things that were and little it matters to them or to us whether they fed on honey of Hymetis and wine of Felairness or ate boarding-house hash off a pewter plate and guzzled prohibition bust-head out of a gourd. The cynic who housed in a tub and clothed himself with a second-hand carpet is as rich today as he that reveled in the spoil of Persia's conquered king and kicked the bucket while enjoying a case of cats and jammer. King and cynic, tub and palace, lantern and scepter all have perished and he that butchered thousands to glut his greed for what fools call glory shines less brightly through the murky shadows of the century than he that made a nobler conquest of himself. The haughty empires, one did rear, have long since crumbled into dust. The wild goat browses in their deserted capitals. The lizard sleeps upon their broken thrones and the owl hoots from their forgotten altars and ruined fangs. But the philosophy of the other lives on from age to age to point the folly of such mad rainbow-chasing as that of him who thought to make the world his monument. Know ye not that the poorest beggar is an earth-passenger also that thy brother travelling his millions of miles per day wear, think you, among the stars. For him, as for thee, does Aurora gild the morning and Apollo hang the evening sky with banners of burnished gold. For him, as for thee, doth Selene draw the limpid waters behind her silver car around the rolling world and boots lead his hunting dogs afield in their leash of celestial fire. Ten centuries hence the dust of the millionaire will have mingled with that of the mendicant. Both long forgotten of men. Ten centuries hence the descendants of those now peddling hot wienerwurst may proudly wear the purple, while the posterity of present monarchs creep through life as poppers. A thousand years are but as one tick of the mighty horology of time and the allotted life of man, but three score years and ten. And this brief period we expend not in living, but in providing the means of life. Not as creations, lords, but as slaves to our own avarice, the most pitiful passion that ever cursed mankind. If there be a God, be thou his messenger unto men. If there be no God, then have thy unfortunate fellows the more need of thee. Wait not until a man is driven to crime by the iron law of necessity, a woman to dishonor, a child to beggary, then organize some fake relief society for thine own glory, but put forth a helping hand in time to avert the sin and shame. The most pitiful failure in all God's universe is the man who succeeds only in making money. A thieving fox will grow fat by predacity, while an honest dog starves in the path of duty. And we have too many sleek reynards prowling round the sheep pens and dove coats of this people, too few faithful Gillards doing stubborn battle with predacious beasts. There's one class of people whom we cannot brand as errand-naves and put in the pillory, yet who are a curse to any country. These are your Laodicians in religion and politics, your Luke Worms, your Namby Pamby Milken Ciders set, who are neither cold nor hot. These are your eminently proper people, your stereotyped respectables. They accept the gospel as true, not that they can comprehend it, but rather because they lack sufficient mental vigor to deny it. They join the church and align themselves with that political party to which the local Nabobs belong. What will people say is to them the all-important problem? They have followed some old bellwether or lead gander into the wiregrass pastor of respectabilia. They observe all the proprieties, at least in outward appearance. These are the animals whose vis inertia perpetrates all the abuses of wealth and power. Whoever has the approval of two or more generations of infamous rascals is so eminently respectable. These are the people who are so profoundly shocked by the alleged slang of Hugo and vulgarities of Goethe, while compelling their daughters to read the canticles. They have a conniption fit and fall in it because some shapely dances kicks up her rhythmic heels on the vaudeville stage, then organized Chilby's auctions, kissing bees, and garter raffles for the glory of God. Their ideal is expediency and their moral law, the eleventh commandment, don't get caught. These are the people who stone the prophets of progress. They are, to the social organism, what a pound of putty would be to the stomach of a dyspeptic. They are a millstone slung about the neck of the giant of civilization. What will people say? Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you are a demigod or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a populist. But when your new truth has been transformed by time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have absorbed it. It will have become respectable and you cannot purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus's auto-Syrian hellbore. They said of Galileo, imprison him because he denied the old falsehood that the world is flat, of Servitus, burn him because he descended from the ipsidix of another heretic, of Socrates, poison him because he laughed at the two amorous gods of Greece, of Robert Emmett, hang him because he wasn't a Cleveland Bayard anglomaniac. And they said of Jesus Christ, crucify him because he intimated the fashionable preachers of his time were a set of splenetic-hearted hypocrites. That's what people say. But occasionally there's one to answer that it is not in the power of all Xerxes' hosts to bend one thought of his proud heart. They may destroy the case of Anaxarchus. Himself they cannot reach. It is not what foolish sound is shaped by a deal of stinking breath and blown down the wind to be forgotten like the bray of an asthmatic burrow to perish like the snows of yesteryear. That should be our concern. Not what the idle gavel of Mrs. Grundy proclaims us, but what we actually are. Public opinion is an ever-shifting rainbow. The heretics of one age are the saints of the next. The cranks of our own time may be the philosophers of the future. The despised rebels of a century ago are the men whose graves we be decked with our garlands. Soon or late those who court the many-headed monster who flatter its rank breath and bow to its idolatries a patient knee are trampled beneath its iron heel. But those who take duty for guiding star and are strong enough to withstand the jibes of malice and the jeers of ignorance will find that the years are seldom unjust. It has been well said that one eternity waited for us to be born, that another waits to see what we will do now that we are here. Do what thou canst and do it with all thy might, remembering that every feist that doth bark at thee this day, every goose that stretches forth its rubber neck to express its disapproval, will be dead in hell a hundred years hence, its foolish yop gone silent forevermore, but that thy honest act affects in greater or less degree all God's universe. I am neither a Jeremiah with a lung full of lamentations, nor a Jonah rushing round like a middle of the rotor and proclaiming, yet forty days and the woods will be on fire. I do not believe that we can pick ourselves up by our own embroidered bootstraps and hop blithely astride a millennium built to order by McKinley, Brian or any other man, but I do believe that the human race is slowly but surely working this subsoil out of its system, is becoming ever less the beast and more the God. Nations grown corrupt with wealth and age may fall, but others strong in youth and innocence will arise. Old faiths may be forgotten, but from other and purer altars will ascend the smoke of sacrifice. Freedom may be wounded grievously in her very temple by anglomaniacs who needs must have a royal master, yet her banner torn but flying will stream triumphant over the grave of tyranny. The black night of barbarous ignorance may often engulf the world, but thou eternal providence wilt cause the day to dawn. The star of Bethlehem cannot go down in everlasting darkness. The bow of promise gleams softly luminous behind the thunderbolt. I care not whether the Noah-ean tale be true that never again will the shifting axis of the earth pour the sea upon the plain. The rainbow is nature's emblem of peace, her cestus of love, and in its splendor I read a promise that never again will this fair earth of ours be swept with sword and fire, deluged with blood and tears. Not to the past, but to the future, do I look for the Saturnian age when the demons of need and greed will be exercised, when love will be the universal law, the fatherhood of God, the only faith. Such, my friends, is the rainbow to which I have turned my feet. It lies afar across dismal swamps or whose icy summits only the condor's shadow sweeps. Across arctic, vast, and desert isles, beyond tempestuous ocean, rank with dead men's bones and the rotting hulls of ships. I shall not attain it, nor shall you, but he that strives, though vanquished, still is victor. A dreamer say you? Ah, yes, but all life is but a dream, mystic, wonderful, and we know not when we sleep nor when we wake. I love to dream so, when the storm beats upon the great oaks, hoary with their hundred years, and they put forth their gnarled arms and grapple with the blast when the lightning cleaves the inky sky with forked flame and the earth rocks neath the thunder's angry roar. When the dark clouds roll muttering unto the east, and the evening sun hangs every leaf and twig and blade of grass with jewels brighter than air gleamed in Golconda's mines, when the mockbirds renew their melody and every flower seems drunken with its own incense, I look upon the irresate glory that seems to belt the world with beauty, and my heart beats high with hope that in years to be, the storm clouds that o'ershadow the souls of men will recede also, that time shall come when the human race will be one universal brotherhood containing neither a millionaire nor a mendicant, neither a master nor a slave. End of Section 45 End of The Complete Works of Bran The Iconoclast, Vol. 12 by William Calper Bran Recorded by Rita Butros