SECTION III.. _conversation With a Chinese._

Conversation with a Chinese.

In 1723, there was in Holland a Chinese: this Chinese was a man of letters and a merchant; which two professions ought not to be incompatible, but which have become so amongst us, thanks to the extreme regard which is paid to money, and the little consideration which mankind have ever shown, and will ever show, for merit.

This Chinese, who spoke a little Dutch, was once in a bookseller's shop with some men of learning. He asked for a book, and "Bossuet's Universal History," badly translated, was proposed to him. "Ah!" said he, "how fortunate! I shall now see what is said of our great empire--of our nation, which has existed as a national body for more than fifty thousand years--of that succession of emperors who have governed us for so many ages. I shall now see what is thought of the religion of the men of letters--of that simple worship which we render to the Supreme Being. How pleasing to see what is said in Europe of our arts, many of which are more ancient amongst us than any European kingdom. I guess the author will have made many mistakes in the history of the war which we had twenty-two thousand five hundred and fifty-two years ago, with the warlike nations of Tonquin and Japan, and of that solemn embassy which the mighty emperor of the Moguls sent to ask laws from us, in the year of the world 500,000,000,000,079,123,450,000." "Alas!" said one of the learned men to him, "you are not even mentioned in that book; you are too inconsiderable; it is almost all about the first nation in the world--the only nation, the great Jewish people!"

"The Jewish people!" exclaimed the Chinese. "Are they, then, masters of at least three-quarters of the earth?" "They flatter themselves that they shall one day be so," was the answer; "until which time they have the honor of being our old-clothes-men, and, now and then, clippers of our coin."--"You jest," said the Chinese; "had these people ever a vast empire?" "They had as their own for some years," said I, "a small country; but it is not by the extent of their states that a people are to be judged; as it is not by his riches that we are to estimate a man."

"But is no other people spoken of in this book?" asked the man of letters. "Undoubtedly," returned a learned man who stood next me, and who instantly replied, "there is a deal said in it of a small country sixty leagues broad, called Egypt, where it is asserted that there was a lake a hundred and fifty leagues round, cut by the hands of men."--"Zounds!" said the Chinese; "a lake a hundred and fifty leagues round in a country only sixty broad! That is fine, indeed!"--"Everybody was wise in that country," added the doctor. "Oh! what fine times they must have been," said the Chinese. "But is that all?"--"No," replied the European; "he also treats of that celebrated people, the Greeks." "Who are these Greeks?" asked the man of letters. "Ah!" continued the other, "they inhabited a province about a two-hundredth part as large as China, but which has been famous throughout the world." "I have never heard speak of these people, neither in Mogul nor in Japan, nor in Great Tartary," said the Chinese, with an ingenuous look.

"Oh, ignorant, barbarous man!" politely exclaimed our scholar. "Know you not, then, the Theban Epaminondas; nor the harbor of Piraeus; nor the name of the two horses of Achilles; nor that of Silenus's ass? Have you not heard of Jupiter, nor of Diogenes, nor of Lais, nor of Cybele, nor--"

"I am much afraid," replied the man of letters, "that you know nothing at all of the ever memorable adventure of the celebrated Xixofou Concochigramki, nor of the mysteries of the great Fi Psi Hi Hi. But pray, what are the other unknown things of which this universal history treats?" The scholar then spoke for a quarter of an hour on the Roman commonwealth: but when he came to Julius Cæsar, the Chinese interrupted him, saying, "As for him, I think I know him: was he not a Turk?"

"What!" said the scholar, somewhat warm, "do you not at least know the difference between Pagans, Christians, and Mussulmans? Do you not know Constantine, and the history of the popes?" "We have indistinctly heard," answered the Asiatic, "of one Mahomet."

"It is impossible," returned the other, "that you should not, at least, be acquainted with Luther, Zuinglius, Bellarmin, Œcolampadius." "I shall never remember those names," said the Chinese. He then went away to sell a considerable parcel of tea and fine grogram, with which he bought two fine girls and a ship-boy, whom he took back to his own country, adoring Tien, and commending himself to Confucius.

For myself, who was present at this conversation, I clearly saw what glory is; and I said: Since Cæsar and Jupiter are unknown in the finest, the most ancient, the most extensive, the most populous and well-regulated kingdom upon earth; it beseems you, ye governors of some little country, ye preachers in some little parish, or some little town--ye doctors of Salamanca and of Bourges, ye flimsy authors, and ye ponderous commentators--it beseems you to make pretensions to renown!

GOAT--SORCERY.

The honors of every kind which antiquity paid to goats would be very astonishing, if anything could astonish those who have grown a little familiar with the world, ancient and modern. The Egyptians and the Jews often designated the kings and the chiefs of the people by the word "goat." We find in Zachariah:

"Mine anger was kindled against the shepherds, and I punished the goats; for the Lord of Hosts hath visited his flock, the house of Judah, and hath made them as his goodly horse in the battle."

"Remove out of the midst of Babylon," says Jeremiah to the chiefs of the people; "go forth out of the land of the Chaldæans, and be as the he-goats before the flocks."

Isaiah, in chapters x. and xiv., uses the term "goat," which has been translated "prince." The Egyptians went much farther than calling their kings goats; they consecrated a goat in Mendes, and it is even said that they adored him. The truth very likely was, that the people took an emblem for a divinity, as is but too often the case.

It is not likely that the Egyptian shoën or shotim, i.e., priests, immolated goats and worshipped them at the same time. We know that they had their goat Hazazel, which they adorned and crowned with flowers, and threw down headlong, as an expiation for the people; and that the Jews took from them, not only this ceremony, but even the very name of Hazazel, as they adopted many other rites from Egypt.

But goats received another, and yet more singular honor. It is beyond a doubt that in Egypt many women set the same example with goats, as Pasiphae did with her bull.

The Jews but too faithfully imitated these abominations. Jeroboam instituted priests for the service of his calves and his goats.

The worship of the goat was established in Egypt, and in the lands of a part of Palestine. Enchantments were believed to be operated by means of goats, and other monsters, which were always represented with a goat's head.

Magic, sorcery, soon passed from the East into the West, and extended itself throughout the earth. The sort of sorcery that came from the Jews was called Sabbatum by the Romans, who thus confounded their sacred day with their secret abominations. Thence it was, that in the neighboring nations, to be a sorcerer and to go to the sabbath, meant the same thing.

Wretched village women, deceived by knaves, and still more by the weakness of their own imaginations, believed that after pronouncing the word "abraxa", and rubbing themselves with an ointment mixed with cow-dung and goat's hair, they went to the sabbath on a broom-stick in their sleep, that there they adored a goat, and that he enjoyed them.

This opinion was universal. All the doctors asserted that it was the devil, who metamorphosed himself into a goat. This may be seen in Del Rio's "Disquisitions," and in a hundred other authors. The theologian Grillandus, a great promoter of the Inquisition, quoted by Del Rio, says that sorcerers call the goat Martinet. He assures us that a woman who was attached to Martinet, mounted on his back, and was carried in an instant through the air to a place called the Nut of Benevento.

There were books in which the mysteries of the sorcerers were written. I have seen one of them, at the head of which was a figure of a goat very badly drawn, with a woman on her knees behind him. In France, these books were called "grimoires"; and in other countries "the devil's alphabet." That which I saw contained only four leaves, in almost illegible characters, much like those of the "Shepherd's Almanac."

Reasoning and better education would have sufficed in Europe for the extirpation of such an extravagance; but executions were employed instead of reasoning. The pretended sorcerers had their "grimoire" and the judges had their sorcerer's code. In 1599, the Jesuit Del Rio, a doctor of Louvain, published his "Magical Disquisitions." He affirms that all heretics are magicians, and frequently recommends that they be put to the torture. He has no doubt that the devil transforms himself into a goat and grants his favors to all women presented to him. He quotes various jurisconsults, called demonographers, who assert that Luther was the son of a woman and a goat. He assures us that at Brussels, in 1595, a woman was brought to bed of a child, of which the devil, disguised as a goat, was father, and that she was punished, but he does not inform us in what manner.

But the jurisprudence of witchcraft has been the most profoundly treated by one Boguet, "grand juge en dernier ressort" of an abbey of St. Claude in Franche-Comté. He gives an account of all the executions to which he condemned wizards and witches, and the number is very considerable. Nearly all the witches are supposed to have had commerce with the goat.

It has already been said that more than a hundred thousand sorcerers have been executed in Europe. Philosophy alone has at length cured men of this abominable delusion, and has taught judges that they should not burn the insane.

GOD--GODS.