Exili

“ Exili, whose real name was Eggidi or Gilles, was an Italian gentleman attached to the service of Queen Christina of Sweden. It is true that he was confined in the Bastille at the same period as Sainte-Croix. He remained there from February 2 to June 27, 1663; Sainte-Croix was there from March 19 to May 2. A captain of police named Desgrez—who will play an important part in the sequel—met Exili on leaving prison with an order to conduct him to Calais and embark him for England ”

“ Sainte Croix, who had been in Italy, was a dabbler in poisons. He knew something of the secrets of the detestable La Spara, and improved himself in them from the instructions of Exili, with whom he speedily contracted a sort of friendship. By him he was shown how to prepare, not only the liquid poisons employed in Italy, but that known as succession powder, which afterwards became so celebrated in France. Like his mistress, he appeared amiable, witty, and intelligent, and showed no signs to the world of the two fierce passions, revenge and avarice, which were gnawing at his heart. ”

“ Croix was placed in the same cell as Exili, and the latter soon instructed him how he might easily revenge himself. The marquise, who found means of visiting her lover, was informed how to obtain the poison, and at once commenced operations on those members of her family who were most incensed against her, with the result, that first her father, then her brothers and sister fell victims to her revenge. Suspicion resting on her, she fled into Belgium, and was arrested at Liège. A full confession of her crimes, written by her own hand, was found upon her. ”

“ It is piteous to see the cowardly stampede of these bold warriors. The slaves know the meaning of the flight; it is their carnival; they are untouched by the plague; they can move with impunity amongst the rotting dead bodies or the putrid mud.
“It is a strange example of the revenge that a law of nature takes upon those who outrage it. Long ages ago the war-loving exiles, who were landed upon Broolyi, subdued its gentle inhabitants, but so wore them down by driving them as slaves that they almost died out. ”

“ In the Exile especially, the wonderful survival of the nation, with the subservience of all history to that end, is made to turn on this,—that Israel has a unique purpose to serve. When Jeremiah and Ezekiel seek to assure the captives of their return to the land and of the restoration of the people, they commend so unlikely a promise by reminding them that the nation is the Servant of God. This name, applied by them for the first time to the nation as a whole, they bind up with the national existence. ”

“ The air was filled with a continuous hum of voices as the exiles talked eagerly with one another, and occasionally we could hear the wail of a sick child from one of the telégas, or a faint jingle of chains as some of the men, tired of standing, changed their positions or threw themselves on the ground. The officer in charge of the party, a heavily built man with yellowish side-whiskers, light-blue eyes, and a hard, unsympathetic face, stood near the telégas, surrounded by women and children, who were begging him to let them ride. ”

“ Now Aziel was about to answer her when the Shadid broke in hurriedly, “So be it,” he said. “Lady, we hear your choice, and we accept it as we must, but not yet, prince Aziel, can you take your wife and with her my place and power. Your life is safe indeed, for since the Baaltis, being unwed, names you as her mate, you have done no sin. Yet she has sinned and doom awaits her, for against the law she has chosen as husband one who worships a strange god, and of all crimes that is the greatest. ”

“ I had been there peaceably for a month, when a female, of that description which is so numerous, endeavouring to make herself of consequence at the expense of another female, more distinguished than herself, went and told the first consul that the roads were covered with people going to visit me. Nothing certainly could be more false. The exiles whom the world went to see, were those who in the eighteenth century were almost as powerful as the monarchs who banished them; but when power is resisted, it is because it is not tyrannical ”

“ I know but one fate more dreadful: it is the fate reserved for those men who shall have one day to exile themselves from their country because they have attempted her ruin, and shall have at the same time to see the prosperity and honor to which she rises when she has rid herself of them and their iniquities. The wish of poor Nolan, as we all learned to call him, not because his punishment was too great, but because his repentance was so clear, was precisely the wish of every Bragg and Beauregard who broke a soldier's oath two years ago, and of every Maury and Barron who broke a sailor's. ”

“ It is commonly said that the great visitation of the Captivity finally destroyed in the Hebrew mind the tendency to [pg vi] idolatry. But the denunciations of Ezekiel prove to us that the exiles carried into the land of their captivity the evil which they had cherished in the land of their birth, and it is no less certain that they brought it back with them on their return. It grew to its height in the early part of the Second Century B.C., along with the increasing influence of Greek civilization in Western Asia. ”

“ The exiles rarely left the deck, but would pace to and fro for hours, so anxious and fearful were they of recapture. All day long they would scan the horizon, their lips muttering the thoughts that would not be kept back, thoughts of home and loved ones. Surely fate would not be so hard as to let them be captured again, and be taken back to that living death. No, they would never be captured alive, no never again. ”

“ The jingling of chains and the wailing voices of the exiles grew gradually fainter and fainter as the party passed up the street, and when the sounds finally died away in the distance, and we turned to reënter the post-station, I felt a strange sense of dejection, as if the day had suddenly grown colder, darker, and more dreary, and the cares and sorrows of life more burdensome and oppressive. ”

“ I have come to the conclusion that all government is but giving the monopoly of opportunity to one set of robbers in order to save the nation from the ravages of most others. It is worse for the higher natures of the governing than for those of the governed; and I have recanted my heresies.
“How weary I grew of the pomp and show of the court, of the dreary round of war and dissipation! I would have given the world for exile into solitude; and yet I dared not secede from the monarch and his following. I had shown myself too resourceful to be allowed to go free in the island. ”

“ Not to be named, the god of life and yearning,
Osiris of the mysteries,
Who springs from the waters ever returning.
At the gate of the Lord's house,
Ezekiel, the prophet, beheld the abomination of Babylon:
Women with sorrow on their brows
In lamentation, weeping
For the bereavement of Ishtar and for Tammuz sleeping,
And for the summer gone. ”

“ Don Manuel de Lara: And so it is of roses and nightingales that you ask tidings, and not of mother and father or brothers! Well, it is always thus with exiles. When I have lain fevered with my wounds very far from Old Castille, it has been for the river that flows at the foot of our orchard I have yearned, or for the green Vega dotted with brown villages and stretching away towards the Sierra.
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Sister Pilar: I am not an exile.
Don Manuel de Lara: An exile is one who is far from home.
Sister Pilar: This is my home.
Don Manuel de Lara: And do you never yearn for your other one? ”

“ Remember, prince Aziel, that being what you are, a Jew, this act of offering, however small it seems, is yet the greatest of sins, and one with which you should not dare to stain your soul for the sake of a woman, who has chanced to love you to your sorrow. Be guided, therefore, by the true wisdom of Issachar and by my humble prayer. Make an end of your doubts and let me die, knowing that we do but part a while, since in the Gate of Death I shall wait for you, prince Aziel. ”

“ Ezekiel's prophecies of hope.—Away off in Babylonia itself Ezekiel helped to keep alive the hopes of the exiles. Even though the nation is dead, he told them, Jehovah can bring it to life. It will be as though the dry and bleaching bones in some valley where a battle was long ago fought should suddenly come together as human skeletons, and warm living flesh should grow upon them once more. Ezekiel worked out a kind of constitution for the new nation and the temple when these should be restored. ”

“ The leaders found it expedient to declare that no attack on the King or the King’s property was intended, and that although in this destruction of the white men they would be disobeying the King’s orders, they would really be carrying out his secret wishes, and would readily be forgiven. The feeling against the men of the Exiles’ Club was immensely strong, and so far the leaders felt confident. ”

“ When Egypt is described as having been an occasion of sin to the people of God, what is meant is that she had drawn Israel into the net of her ambitious foreign policy, and led her away from the path of safety pointed out by Jehovah's will through the prophets. Ezekiel pays a tribute to the grandeur of their position by the care he bestows on the description of their fate. The smaller nations embodying nothing of permanent value for the advancement of humanity, he dismisses each with a short and pregnant oracle announcing its doom. ”

“ Even to the people pining in exile He had not only renewed the ancient promises through the prophet Ezekiel, after the dissolution of the kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, viz., that He would restore the nation to favour again, when it should come to the knowledge of its grievous sins, and turn to Him with penitence, and that He would redeem it from exile, lead it back to its own land, and exalt it to great glory ”

“ The greater part of the exiles have not even means to pay for an identification-paper, and they roam about the town and the district, begging, thieving, robbing, and trying to excite sympathy or inspire terror by calling themselves brodyágs. The wickedness of these exile inhabitants of Ishím is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb; and travelers, while they are yet hundreds of versts away, are warned to be particularly cautious and watchful while passing through our town. ”

“ You must prepare for the inevitable. Go quickly to work, for time presses. Time is approaching, time is passing away, and you must remember that you will only find at the place of exile the treasures you will be able to send there during the remaining few days of your reign."
The King thanked his minister, and resolved to follow the wise man's advice. Workmen of experience were despatched to the Island of Exile, and it was not long before a vast palace was built. The King conveyed an abundance of treasure there, and a thousand men were sent to render the island more inhabitable. ”

“ After many days' wandering and much fatigue, the exiles arrived at last on the border of a dark forest held sacred to the Furies,—the goddesses whose duty it was to punish all criminals by tormenting them as long as they lived, and even after they had died. ”

“ The order in which they are arranged is not that which might seem most natural. We should have expected the prophet to deal first with the revival of the nation, then with its settlement on the soil of Palestine, and last of all with its political organisation under a Davidic king. Ezekiel follows the reverse order. He begins with the kingdom, as the most complete embodiment of the Messianic salvation, and then falls back on its two presuppositions—the recovery and purification of the land on the one hand, and the restitution of the nation on the other. ”

“ A new white man, speaking to him in an unknown tongue, seems to lift him for the time out of their lives. The stranger jars on the natives, who are the exile's people, and he, looking through the native eyes which are no longer strange to him, sees where his race-mate offends, and in his turn is jarred, until he begins to hate his own countrymen. Coming out of the groove hurts badly, and going back into it is almost worse, but when a man is once well set in the rut of native life, these do not disturb him, for he is happy, and has no need of other and higher things. This is the exile's Heaven. ”

“ In order to understand the place which the sixteenth chapter occupies in this section41 of the book, we must remember that a chief source of the antagonism between Ezekiel and his hearers was the proud national consciousness which sustained the courage of the people through all their humiliations. There were, perhaps, few nations of antiquity in which the flame of patriotic feeling burned more brightly than in Israel. No people with a past such as theirs could be indifferent to the many elements of greatness embalmed in their history. ”

“ Nebuchadnezzar and his army took almost all of the people of the kingdom of Judah to Babylon, leaving only the poorest people behind to plant the fields. This period of time when God’s people were forced to leave the Promised Land is called the Exile. ”

“ Every year, towards the middle of June, Isis, mourning for Osiris, let fall into it one of the tears which she shed over her brother, and thereupon the river swelled and descended upon earth. Isis has had no devotees for centuries, and her very name is unknown to the descendants of her worshippers; but the tradition of her fertilizing tears has survived her memory. Even to this day, every one in Egypt, Mussulman or Christian, knows that a divine drop falls from heaven during the night between the 17th and 18th of June, and forthwith brings about the rise of the Nile. ”

“ The exile had apparently long resigned all hope of restoration to his native town, when the victory of Arcesilas suddenly opened to him a possibility—a bare possibility, it was true, but still a possibility—of a change in his fortunes. ”

“ The grave receives the bodies; but the immaterial part of man, that which has endless being, goes to Sheol, a word which expresses the unseen and unknown. To sheol the wicked and the nations who forget God have been turned (Psalm ix:17) to await their final doom as revealed in Rev. xx:11-15. The fate of Assyria as well as of Egypt inspired the surrounding nations with fear; these nations are mentioned under the figure of trees, "and all the trees of the field mourned for him." The nations shook with terror when the powerful world-power was stripped of all its greatness and passed away. ”