Trnova pot do slave

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Trnova pot do slave

There is an old tale: “The Thorny Path of Honour of a Marksman Named Bryde, Who Attained Great Honour and Dignity, Though Only After Long and Much Adversity and Peril to His Life.” Many of us must have heard it as children, perhaps read it in later years and thought of our own unnoticed thorny path and “much adversity.” Fairy tale and reality lie so close together; but the fairy tale finds its harmonious resolution here on earth, while reality most often places it beyond earthly life, in time and eternity.

World history is a magic lantern, showing us in luminous pictures against the dark background of their age how the benefactors of mankind, the martyrs of genius, walk the thorny path of honour.

From every age, from every land, these radiant pictures emerge, each a single moment, yet a whole life, a lifetime with its struggle and victory. Let us look, here and there, at a few among that host of martyrs whose ranks will not be complete until the earth has crumbled away.

We see a crowded amphitheatre; Aristophanes’ Clouds pour streams of mockery and merriment upon the throng. From the stage, in mind and body alike, Athens’ most remarkable man is held up to ridicule, the man who shielded the people against the Thirty Tyrants: Socrates, who saved Alcibiades and Xenophon amid the turmoil of battle, whose spirit soared above the gods of antiquity. He himself is present here; he has risen from his seat among the spectators and stepped forward so that the laughing Athenians may see whether he and his caricature upon the stage truly resemble one another. There he stands upright before them, exalted far above them all.

You lush, green, poisonous hemlock, not the olive tree, should be the emblem of Athens here. Seven cities disputed the honour of being Homer’s birthplace—that is to say, once he was dead! Look at him in his lifetime! There he goes through those cities, reciting his verses to earn his bread; the thought of tomorrow turns his hair grey. He, the mightiest seer, is blind and lonely; sharp thorns tear the poet-king’s cloak to rags. His songs live on, and through them alone the gods and heroes of antiquity live.

Picture after picture comes sweeping forth from East and West, so far apart in place and time, yet showing the same stretch of the thorny path of honour, where the thistle does not flower until there is a grave to adorn.

Beneath the palms come camels, richly laden with indigo and other precious treasures. They are sent by the ruler of the land to the man whose songs are his people’s joy, his country’s glory; the man whom envy and falsehood drove into exile has been found. The caravan approaches the little town where he has taken refuge; a pauper’s body is being carried out through the gate, and it brings the caravan to a halt. The dead man is the very one they seek: Firdusi—the thorny path of honour has reached its end!

The African with the coarse features, the thick lips, the black woolly hair sits begging on the marble steps of the palace in Portugal’s capital. He is Camoens’ faithful slave; without him and the copper coins thrown to him, his master, “the singer of the Lusiad,” would starve to death.

Now a costly monument stands upon Camoens’ grave. Another picture! Behind iron bars appears a man, deathly pale, with a long, matted beard. “I have made an invention, the greatest in centuries!” he cries, “and they have kept me shut up here for more than twenty years!” “Who is he?” “A madman!” says the asylum keeper. “What notions people do get into their heads! He believes one can propel oneself by steam!” It is Salomon de Caus, the discoverer of steam power, whose vague words of intuition could not be understood by a Richelieu, and who dies shut away in a madhouse.

Here stands Columbus, whom street boys once pursued and mocked because he wished to discover a new world. He has discovered it: bells of rejoicing ring out at his triumphant homecoming, but soon the bells of envy sound louder. The discoverer of a world, the man who raised America’s land of gold above the sea and gave it to his king, is rewarded with iron chains. He asks that they be laid in his coffin; they bear witness to the world and to the judgement of his age.

Picture crowds upon picture; rich indeed is the thorny path of honour! Here, in gloom and darkness, sits the man who measured the height of the mountains on the moon, who ventured into space among planets and stars, the mighty man who heard and saw the spirit in nature and felt the earth turning beneath him: Galileo. Blind and deaf he sits in his old age, impaled upon the thorn of suffering, in the anguish of recantation, scarcely strong enough to lift the foot with which he once stamped upon the earth in agony of soul, when the words of truth were blotted out, and exclaimed: “And yet it moves!”

Here stands a woman with a childlike heart, with fervour and faith. She carries the banner before the embattled army and brings her country victory and deliverance. The cheers ring out—and the pyre is lit: Jeanne d’Arc, the witch, is burned. Yes, the coming century spits upon the white lily: Voltaire, the satyr of wit, sings of “La Pucelle.”

At the assembly in Viborg, the Danish nobility burn the king’s laws. They blaze in the flames, illuminating the age and the lawgiver, casting a halo into the dark prison tower where he sits, grey-haired and bent, wearing a groove in the stone table with his finger: he who once ruled three kingdoms, the people’s king, the friend of burgher and peasant, Christian the Second. A man of stern spirit in a stern age. His enemies wrote his history. Let us remember his twenty-seven years in prison when we recall his guilt for bloodshed.

A ship sails away from Denmark; a man stands beside its tall mast, looking towards Hven for the last time: Tycho Brahe, who raised Denmark’s name to the stars and was rewarded with insult and injury. He is departing for a foreign land. “The heavens are everywhere; what more do I need!” are his words. There he sails away, our most renowned man, honoured and free in a foreign land!

“Ah, free! If only I were free of this body’s unbearable pain!” The sigh reaches us across the ages. What picture is this? Griffenfeldt, a Danish Prometheus, chained to the rocky island of Munkholm.

We are in America, beside one of the great rivers. A crowd has gathered; a ship is to sail against wind and weather, to prove a power against the elements. Robert Fulton is the name of the man who believes it can be done. The ship begins to move; suddenly it stops. The crowd laughs, whistles and jeers; his own father joins in the jeering. “Arrogance! Madness! His just deserts! That madman should be put under lock and key!” Then a little nail, which for a moment has stopped the engine, breaks; the wheels turn, the paddles thrust aside the resisting water, the ship sails on! The weaver’s shuttle of steam turns hours into minutes between the countries of the world.

Mankind! Can you comprehend the bliss of such a moment of awareness, this understanding by the spirit of its mission, the instant in which every wound suffered on the thorny path of honour—even those of one’s own making—is transformed into healing, health, strength and clarity, discord becomes harmony, and humanity beholds the revelation of God’s grace, bestowed upon one person and through him brought to all?

The thorny path of honour then appears as a halo around the earth; blessed is he who is chosen to walk it and, without merit of his own, to be placed among the builders of the bridge between mankind and God.

On mighty wings the spirit of history soars through the ages and shows us—to give us courage and trust, to awaken thoughtful compassion—in radiant pictures against a background black as night, the thorny path of honour, which does not, as in the fairy tale, end in splendour and joy here on earth, but points beyond it into time and eternity.