Along with pride and greed and their worthy retinue of minor vices, gluttony and drunkenness, whoring and buggery were daily practices among those of position and wealth. What shocked me most of all, however, was the fact that some, especially soldiers, whose vices are generally not very severely punished, made a joke both of their own godlessness and of God’s holy will. For example I once heard an adulterer, who even expected praise for his shameful deed, speak these godless words, ‘It serves the spineless cuckold right that I’ve given him a pair of horns. To tell the truth, I did it less to please the woman than to spite the man and through it take my revenge on him.’
‘What empty vengeance’, answered one right-thinking person who was present, ‘if it means sullying your own conscience and bringing on yourself the shame of the adulterer!’
‘What do you mean adulterer?’ he replied with a scornful laugh. ‘I follow the commandment which says thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. Did you not hear when I told you I did it not out of desire for her but to revenge myself on her husband? The Lord says, Thou shalt not steal. Have I stolen? No, I just borrowed the fool’s wife for a while. God joined them together and it is not I but God who will put them asunder through death.’ He continued with his Devil’s catechism, and I sighed to myself and thought what a blasphemous sinner he was, until I could stand it no longer and said to him, even though he was an officer, ‘Do you not think these godless words are a worse sin than your adultery?’ He merely replied, ‘Do you want a box on the ear, you insolent young puppy?’ And I think he would have given me a good thrashing, too, if he had not been afraid of my master. But I held my peace, and afterwards I saw that it was not uncommon for an unmarried person to make eyes at someone who was married and vice versa.
While I was still studying the path to eternal life with the hermit I wondered why God had so strictly forbidden idolatry to His chosen people. I imagined that anyone who had come to know the true, eternal God would never honour or worship any other, and therefore in my simple mind I concluded that the commandment was unnecessary. Ah, foolishness bred of ignorance! No sooner had I entered the world than I realised that despite this commandment almost every man had his own particular idol, some even had more than the heathens, both past and present. Some kept theirs in their strong-box, in which they placed all their hope and trust; there were those who had their idol at court and put all their confidence in him, even though he was only a sycophantic courtier and often a more idle wretch that the worshipper himself, since his frail divinity was based on nothing but the April showers of a prince’s favour; for others their idol was their good name, if they only had that they imagined they were demigods; yet others, namely those whom the true God had given a sound brain so that they were skilled in some of the arts and sciences, had theirs in their head; these forgot the divine Giver and concentrated on the gift, in the hope it would bring them prosperity; there were also many whose god was their own belly, to whom they daily made the kind of sacrifices the heathens of antiquity made to Bacchus and Ceres; and if their belly rebelled, or other infirmities appeared, then they would make a god of their doctor and seek their refuge in the pharmacy, which would often as not speed them on their way to death.
Many fools made for themselves goddesses out of scheming tarts whom they called by many different names, worshipping them night and day with a thousand sighs and singing hymns to them containing nothing but their praises, together with a humble request for the young lady in question to take pity on their folly and become as foolish as their suitors. On the other hand there were women who had set up their own beauty as their god which, they imagined, would find them a husband, let the true God in Heaven say what He will; instead of other sacrifices, this idol was daily anointed and kept alive with all kinds of paints and powders, creams, salves and other lotions.
I saw people who considered a well-situated house their god, for they said that as long as they lived in it they enjoyed good fortune, the money seeming to pour in through the windows. I was particularly astonished at this foolishness, for I saw the reason why the occupants prospered in this way. I knew a man who for several years could not sleep properly because of his tobacco shop, to which he had devoted his heart, mind and all his thoughts, which ought to be dedicated to God. Day and night he sighed over it a thousand times, for it brought him his prosperity. But what happened? The misguided fellow died, vanishing as completely as the smoke from his own tobacco. I thought, ‘O wretched man! If only you had valued your soul’s eternal bliss and the glory of the one true God as highly as you valued your idol, which appeared on your shop-sign in the form of a Brazilian Indian with a roll of tobacco under his arm and a pipe in his mouth, I would have no doubt at all that you had won yourself a crown to wear in the next world.’
I met another ass who had even more miserable gods. At a gathering where everyone was telling how he had managed to feed himself and keep alive during the terrible famine this man said, in plain German, that the snails and frogs had been his lord god, for if it had not been for them he would have starved to death. I asked him what God himself had been to him, who had provided such insects to sustain him, but the poor simpleton had no answer. What surprised me even more was that I had never heard of anyone, neither the old, idol-worshipping Egyptians, nor the modern American savages, proclaiming such vermin their god as this empty-headed prattler did.
A noble gentleman was once showing me round his art collection, which contained many fine and rare works. Among his pictures there was none I liked better than an
Ecce Homo
because it was painted in such a way as to arouse the compassion of those who looked at it. Next to it hung a Chinese picture, done on paper, showing the Chinese idols, some of which looked like demons, sitting in majesty. The owner asked me which piece in his collection I liked best. When I pointed to the
Ecce Homo
, he said I was mistaken, for the Chinese picture was rarer and therefore more valuable. He would not be without it, even for ten like the
Ecce Homo
, he said. ‘Sir’, I asked, ‘is what you say with your lips the same as what you feel in your heart?’
‘Certainly it is’, he answered.
‘Why then, the god of your heart is the one whose portrait your lips confess is of greatest value.’
‘What bizarre reasoning’, said the owner. ‘It is its rarity I value.’
‘What can be rarer or more wonderful’, I replied, ‘than that the Son of God should suffer for our sakes, as is portrayed in this picture?’
Just as these and an even greater number of false idols were honoured, so the true divine majesty was despised. I saw none who desired to keep His word and commandments, on the contrary, I saw many who resisted Him in everything, even outdoing the publicans in evil, who were open sinners at the time when Christ walked on earth. Christ said, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans do the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye do more than others? Do not even the publicans do so?’ But not only could I find no one who desired to obey this command of Christ, everyone did exactly the opposite. There is a saying, ‘The bigger the family, the more enemies you have’, and nowhere was more envy to be found, more hatred, malice, strife and discord than between brothers, sisters and other relations, especially when there was an inheritance to be shared. And everywhere the craftsmen hated each other, so that I was compelled to conclude that, compared to them, the tax-gatherers, publicans and open sinners, who were hated by many for their wickedness and godlessness, must have been far better than we Christians of today in the exercise of brotherly love, since we have Christ’s testimony that they loved each other. And I reflected that if we earn no reward unless we love our enemies, what severe punishment must we expect for hating our friends! Where love and loyalty should be greatest I found the worst treachery and strongest hatred. Some lords worked their loyal servants and retainers into the ground, while some servants swindled their honest lords. I saw too that there was constant squabbling between man and wife. Many a tyrant treated his faithful wife worse than a dog, while many a loose trollop made a fool and an ass of her honest husband. Many despicable lords and masters cheated their honest servants out of their rightful wages and kept them on short commons in both food and drink. On the other hand I saw many unfaithful servants who ruined their honest masters by theft or negligence. Merchants and craftsmen each charged more extortionate prices than the other and used all kinds of chicanery to deprive the farmer of the fruits of his honest toil. On the other hand there were peasants so godless that, if they were not blessed with sufficient craftiness, they would put on a show of simple-mindedness to accuse other people, even their lords.
I once saw a soldier slap another hard on the face and imagined, at that point not having seen a brawl, the latter would turn the other cheek. I was wrong. The injured party drew his weapon and struck his assailant on the head. I cried out to him at the top of my voice, ‘What are you doing, friend?’ ‘Devil take it’, he replied, ‘I would be a coward and rather die if I did not have my revenge. Only a knave would let himself be bullied like that.’ The noise of the dispute between the two grew louder and louder as their supporters, bystanders and others who came running set about each other. I heard men swear by God and their souls in such devil-may-care fashion that I could not believe they thought their souls were their most precious jewel. But that was mere childish chatter compared with the cursing that followed, ‘A plague, a pox on it! Devil take me, and not just one! May a hundred thousand come and carry me off!’ Seven blessed sacraments were not enough for them, they conjured them by the hundred thousand, by the barrel-load, the ship-load, the moat-full, making my hair stand on end with horror. Again one of Christ’s commands came to mind, where he said, ‘Swear not at all; neither by heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.’ Thinking about all this and what I had heard and seen, I came to the conclusion that these brawlers were no Christians and so I sought other company.
What I found most horrifying was to hear some braggarts boasting of their wickedness, sin, shame and vice. Every day I kept hearing such people say, ‘By Christ, we had a skinful yesterday! I must have got blind drunk three times and spewed up the lot just as often. Christ, didn’t we give those rascally peasants a thrashing! Christ, didn’t we take some booty! Christ, didn’t we have a good time with those women and girls!’ Or, ‘I cut him down as if he’d been struck by lightning. I shot him and you could see nothing but the whites of his eyes. I tricked him so neatly and left him for the Devil to fetch. I tripped him up so he broke his neck.’
Every day my ears were filled with this kind of unchristian talk, and even worse than that, I saw sins committed in God’s name, which filled me with sorrow. It was the soldiers who most often did this, saying for example, ‘In God’s name let us go out on a raid and plunder, steal, shoot, cut down, assault, capture, burn’, and whatever other atrocities they perpetrated. The war-profiteers dared to sell their goods, ‘In God’s name’, so they could fleece people and bleed them white to satisfy their fiendish greed. I once saw two rogues hanged who went to burgle a house at night. They placed a ladder against the wall, but when one of them was about to climb in the window ‘in God’s name’, the vigilant householder appeared and threw him down ‘in the Devil’s name’ so that he broke his leg, was caught and strung up with his accomplice a few days later.
Whenever I heard or saw this kind of thing, I had to say my piece, and when, as usual, I came out with a quotation from the Bible or some other well-meant reproach, people took me for a fool. I was so often ridiculed for my good intentions that eventually I lost patience and determined to keep silent. However, such was my Christian love of mankind, that I could not. I wished everyone had been brought up by the hermit, assuming that then many would see the ways of the world as I saw them, with the eyes of Simplicius. I was not clever enough to realise that if the world were full of Simpliciuses there would not be as many vices for their eyes to see. But still it is true that a worldly man, being accustomed to all vices and follies and sharing in them, does not in the least realise what a dangerous path he and his companions are on.
Thinking now there was some doubt as to whether I was among Christians or not, I went to the pastor and told him everything I had heard and seen and how I had concluded that the people could not be Christians since all they did was to mock Christ and His commandments. I asked him to clear up this confusion so that I would know what to think of my fellow men. ‘Of course they are Christians’, the pastor replied, ‘and I would advise you not to call them anything else.’
‘My God!’ I replied, ‘How can that be? Whenever I point out to someone the sin they are committing against God I am mocked and ridiculed.’
‘That does not surprise me’, answered the pastor. ‘I believe that if the first Christians, who lived at the time of Christ, if even the Apostles themselves were to rise from the dead and return to the world today, they would ask the same question as you have and be thought fools by everyone, just as you were. What you have seen so far is quite normal and mere child’s play compared with other acts of violence, both open and secret, against God and man, there are in the world. But you must learn to accept it. You will meet very few Christians like Samuel, your hermit.’