You mustn't expect anything very pleasant from me. You want the truth and you'll have it. It's well that the world should know the truth and not only its rosy side.
Franchezzo follows a spirit into the streets of a city that seems to him like one of the old Spanish cities of the West Indies or South America. He passes Indians along its streets mingling with Spaniards and men of several other nations.
Following a spirit through several streets, he comes to a large building which seems to be a monastery of the order of the Jesuits – who have helped to colonise the country and force on the unhappy natives the Roman Catholic religion, in the days when religious persecution was thought by most creeds to be a proof of religious zeal. While Franchezzo stands watching this spirit, he sees pass before him a panorama of the spirit's life.
Franchezzo sees him first chief of his order, sitting as a judge before whom are brought many poor Indians and heretics. He sees him condemning them by hundreds to torture and flames because they will not convert to his teachings. Franchezzo sees him oppressing all who are not powerful enough to resist him and extorting jewels and gold in enormous quantities as tribute to him and his order. If any seek to resist him and his demands he has them arrested and thrown into dungeons and tortured and burned. Franchezzo reads in his heart a perfect thirst for wealth and power. Franchezzo knows (reading as he seems to do this spirit's innermost soul) that his religion is a cloak, a convenient name, under which to extort the gold he loves and gratify his love of power.
Again Franchezzo sees the great square or market place of this city with hundreds of great fires blazing all round it until it is like a furnace. A whole helpless crowd of natives are bound hand and foot and thrown into the flames. Their cries of agony go up to heaven as this man and his accomplices chant their false prayers and hold aloft the sacred cross which is desecrated by their unholy hands, their lives of cruelty and vice and their greed for gold. He sees that this horror is perpetrated in the name of the Church of Christ – of him whose teachings are of love and charity, who came to teach that God is perfect Love. And he sees this man who calls himself Christ's minister and yet has no thought of pity for one of these unhappy victims; he thinks alone of how the spectacle will strike terror to the hearts of other Indian tribes and make them bring him more gold to satisfy his greed. Then Franchezzo sees this man returned to his own land and revelling in his ill-gotten wealth, a powerful wealthy prince of the church, venerated by the poor ignorant populace as a holy man who has gone forth into that Western World beyond the seas to plant the banner of his church and preach the blessed gospel of love and peace, while, instead, his path has been marked in fire and blood.
Franchezzo sees him on his deathbed and he sees monks and priests chanting mass for his soul that it might go to Heaven. Instead he sees it drawn down to Hell by the chains woven in his life. He sees the great hordes of his former victims awaiting him there, drawn down in their turn by their thirst for revenge, their hunger for power to avenge their sufferings and the sufferings of those most dear to them.
Franchezzo sees him in Hell surrounded by those he has wronged and haunted by the empty wraiths of such as were too good and pure to come to this place of horror or to wish for vengeance on their murderer.
The demons* whom Franchezzo had seen earlier were the last and fiercest of this man's victims – in whom the desire for revenge was even then not fully satisfied, while those he had seen crouching in the corner were some who, no longer desirous of tormenting him themselves, had yet been unable to withdraw themselves from seeing his sufferings and those of his accomplices.
* See Post of Saturday, 8 June – The Fires of Hell
And now Franchezzo sees that spirit with the newly awakened thought of repentance, returning to the city to warn others of his Jesuit fraternity and to try to turn them from the path of his own errors. He does not yet realise the length of time that has elapsed since he left the earth life, nor that this city is the spiritual counterpart of the one he had lived in on earth. In time this spirit will be sent back to earth to work as a spirit and strive to release the souls of those whom his crimes have dragged down with him.
The Hell of it! We are helping to drag down others all the while. You are such fools! Do you suppose you can give rein to evil and not suffer?
Like the Roman city this one is disfigured and its beauties blotted out by the crimes of which it has been the silent witness and to Franchezzo the air seems full of dark phantom forms wailing and weeping and dragging after them their heavy chains. The whole place seems built on living graves and shrouded in a dark red mist of blood and tears. It is like one vast prison house whose walls are built of deeds of violence and robbery and oppression.
And as Franchezzo wanders on he has a waking dream and sees the city as it had been on earth before the white man had set foot on its soil. He sees a peaceful primitive people living on fruits and grains and leading their simple lives in an innocence akin to that of childhood, worshiping the Great Supreme under a name of their own, yet none the less worshiping Him in spirit and in Truth – their simple faith and their patient virtues the outcome of the inspiration given them from that Great Spirit who is universal and belongs to no creeds, no churches.
He sees white men come thirsting for gold and greedy to grasp the goods of others. These simple people welcome them like brothers and, in their innocence, show them the treasures they have gathered from the earth – gold and silver and jewels. Franchezzo sees the treachery which marked the path of the white man; how they plundered and killed the simple natives; how they tortured and made them slaves, forcing them to labour in the mines until they died by thousands; how all faith, all promises were broken by the white man until the peaceful happy country was filled with tears and blood.
Franchezzo sees afar, away in Spain, a few good, true, kindly men whose souls are pure and who believe that they alone have the true faith by which only man can be saved and live eternally, who think that God has given this light to one small spot of his earth and has left all the rest in darkness and error – has left countless thousands to perish because this light has been denied to them but given exclusively to that one small spot of earth, that small section of his people.
These good and pure men are so sorry for those who, they think, are in the darkness and error of a false religion that they set forth and cross that unknown ocean to that strange far-away land to carry with them their system of religion and to give it to those simple people whose lives have been so good and gentle and spiritual under their own faith, their own beliefs.
Franchezzo sees these good but ignorant priests land on this strange shore and sees them working everywhere amongst the natives, spreading their own belief and crushing out and destroying all traces of a primitive faith as worthy of respect as their own. These priests are kind good men who seek to alleviate the physical lot of the poor oppressed natives even while they labour for their spiritual welfare also and on every side there springs up missions, churches and schools.
Again he sees great numbers of men, priests as well as many others, come over from Spain, eager, not for the good of the church nor to spread the truths of their religion, but only greedy for the gold of this new land and for all that can minister to their own gratification; men whose lives have disgraced them in their own country until they are obliged to fly to this strange one to escape the consequences of their misdeeds. Franchezzo sees these men arrive in hordes and mingle with those whose motives are pure and good, until they outnumber them and thrust the good aside everywhere and make of themselves tyrannical masters over the unhappy natives, in the name of the Holy Church of Christ.
He sees the Inquisition brought to the unhappy land and established as the last link in the chain of slavery and oppression thus riveted round this unhappy people until it sweeps them all from earth's face and everywhere he sees a wild thirst, the greed for gold that consumes them as with a fire of hell all who seek that land. Most are blind to its beauties but its gold, deaf to all thought but how they might enrich themselves with it and in the madness of that time and that awful craving for wealth is this city of Hell, this spiritual counterpart of the earthly city built, stone on stone, particle by particle, forming between it and the city of earth chains of attraction which should draw down one by one each of its inhabitants, for truly we are building in our earthly lives our future spiritual habitations. Thus all these monks and priests, all these fine ladies, all these soldiers and merchants and even these unhappy natives have been drawn down to Hell by the deeds of their earthly lives, by the passions and hatreds, the greed of gold, the bitter sense of wrongs unrequited and the thirst for revenge which those deeds have created.
The personality made evil by an evil life remains evil after death
and the more probably it will go to the logical conclusion which its
evil deeds naturally set up.