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Updated: June 26, 2025
The price was exorbitant; but I felt the force of his argument, that no Christian could set bounds to the value of such a symbol. Moreover, the trade attracted me. To walk the world as a pedlar of crucifixes could one conceive a nobler employment? I, at least, could not.
But, worse than that, he saw a thousand desecrated forms before him who ought to be living crucifixes, for were they not told to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts, to remain upon their voluntary crosses till Christ said, "Come down. Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of the Lord"? And were they doing this?
I was astounded at the opulence of the treasure; there were gorgeous altars of precious metal, great saints of silver, caskets of gold, monstrances studded with rare stones, crosses and crucifixes.
Wherever they appeared they pulled down the images and broke the crucifixes. Many nobles, some through fear and others from ambition, joined them. In vain Luther wrote to them, "Rebellion never produces the amelioration we desire, and God condemns it. What is it to rebel if it be not to avenge one's self?
And she wept and sobbed, and wrung her hands in such grief and terror, that Adelaide grew absolutely frightened. "They will not dare to hurt you, Elsie," she hastened to say. "Oh, they will! they will! they will try to make me go to mass, and pray to the Virgin, and bow to the crucifixes; and when I refuse, they will put me in a dungeon and torture me."
His frescoes and altarpieces and crucifixes, the work he had been so long accustomed to, and which he could execute pleasantly in his own workshop or on the cool new walls of church or convent, with his trained school of younger artists round to aid him, were as different as possible from the elaborate calculations and measurements by which alone the lofty tower, straight, and lightsome as a lily, could have sprung so high and stood so lightly against that Italian sky.
His spirit, well-disposed toward everything that looks good to him, was then transformed, at the pleasure of the nation that forced upon him its God and its laws, and as the trader with whom he dealt did not bring a cargo of useful implements of iron, hoes to till the fields, but stamped papers, crucifixes, bulls and prayer-books; as he did not have for ideal and prototype the tanned and vigorous laborer, but the aristocratic lord, carried in a luxurious litter, the result was that the imitative people became bookish, devout, prayerful; it acquired ideas of luxury and ostentation, without thereby improving the means of its subsistence to a corresponding degree.
The women came out in groups; the elder ones dressed in black, emitting a stale odor from their innumerable skirts and petticoats; the young ones erect in rigid corsets which crushed their breasts and obliterated the prominent curves of their hips, displaying with stately pride, above the motley hued handkerchiefs, gold chains and enormous crucifixes.
On wet days, such was the power of habit over him, he rose from his chair at the same hour, and paced his study for the same length of time, pausing now and then to straighten some book in the bookcase, or alter the position of the two brass crucifixes standing upon cairns of serpentine stone upon the mantelpiece.
At once I had the feeling of a marauder. Here slept the guardian of the treasure and yet in defiance of him I meant to have it. So, too, had Peter and I didn't know yet what he had managed to do to Peter but I guessed from his journal that Peter had been a slightly morbid person. He had let the wild solitude of the island frighten him. He had indulged foolish fancies about crucifixes.
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