, the presiding idol of that Gothic pile, the hallowed
Lady, the goddess-queen of Marrick! Stop--can he do nothing for her, can
he venture nothing in her service? Other shrines are rich, other images
decked in gold and jewels; there is yet an object for his useless life,
there are yet ends to be attained, ends--that can justify the means. He
longs for wealth, he plots for it, he dares for it: he plans lying
miracles, and thousands flock to the shrine; he waylays dying men, and,
by threatened dread of torments of the damned, extortionizes conscience
into unjust riches for himself; he accuses the innocent, and reaps the
fine; he connives at the guilty, and fingers the bribe. So wealth flows
in, and the altar of his idol is hung with cloth of gold, her diadem is
alight with gems, costly offerings deck her temple, bending crowds kneel
to her divinity. Is he not happy? Is he not content? Oh, no: an
insatiate demon has possessed him; with more than Pygmalion's insanity,
he loves that image; he dreams, he thinks of that one unchanging form.
The marvelling brotherhood, credulous witnesses of such deep devotion,
hold him for a saint; and Rome, at the wish of the world, sends him, as
to a living St. Eustatius, the patent of canonization: they praise him,
honour him, pray to him; but he contemptuously (and they take it for
humility) spurns a gift which speaks of any other heaven than the
presence of that one fair, beautiful, beloved statue. A thought fills
him, and that with joy: he has heard of sacrifices in old time,
immolations, offerings up of self, as the highest act of a devout
worshipper; he cares not for earth nor for heaven; and one night, in his
enthusiastic vigils, the phrensy of idolatry arms that old man's own
weak hand against himself, and he falls at the statue's feet,
self-murdered, _its_ martyr.

Here were scope for psychology; here were subtle unwindings of motive,
trackings of reason, intricate anatomizations of the heart. All ages,
before these last in which we live, have been worshippers, even to
excess, of "unknown gods," "too superstitious:" we, upon whom the ends
of the world are fallen, may be thought to be beyond a danger into which
the wisest of old time were entrapped: we scarcely allow that the
Brahmin may, notwithstanding, be a learned man and a shrewd, when we see
him fall before his monster; we have not wits to understand how the
Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman dynasties could be so besotted.