that; she hardly felt as if the tall, strong girl, attractive with
health and hope, could be the same soul as the woman who now sat in
utter despair listening to the heavy breathing of the happy cows,
grateful for the relief from their burden of milk.
She contrasted her lot with that of two or three women that she knew,
not a very high standard, who "kept hired help," and who had "fine
houses of four or five rooms." Even the neighbors were better off than
she, for they didn't have such quarrels. But she wasn't to blame--Sim
didn't--then her mind changed to a vague resentment against "things;"
everything seemed against her.
She rose at last and carried her second load of milk to the well,
strained it, washed out the pails, and after bathing her tired feet in
a tub that stood there, she put on a pair of horrible shoes without
stockings, and crept stealthily into the house. Sim did not hear her
as she slipped up the stairs to the little low, unfinished chamber
beside her oldest children,--she could not bear to sleep near _him_
that night,--she wanted a chance to sob herself to quiet.
As for Sim, he was a little disturbed but would as soon have cut off
his head as acknowledge himself in the wrong, but he yelled as he went
to bed, and found her still away:--
"Say, ol' woman, aint ye comin' to bed?" and upon receiving no answer
he rolled his aching body into the creaking bed. "Do as ye damn please
about it. If ye wan' to sulk y' can." And in such wise the family grew
quiet in sleep, while the moist, warm air pulsed with the ceaseless
chime of the crickets.
II.
When Sim Burns woke the next morning he felt a sharper twinge of
remorse. It was not a broad or well-defined feeling, just a sense that
he'd been unduly irritable, not that on the whole he was not in the
right. Little Pet lay with the warm June sunshine filling his baby
eyes, curiously content in striking at flies that buzzed around his
little mouth.
The man thrust his dirty naked feet into his huge boots, and, without
washing his face or combing his hair, went out to the barn to do his
chores.
He was a type of the prairie farmer and his whole surrounding was
typical. He had a quarter-section of fine level land, mortgaged, of
course, but his house was a little box-like structure, costing,
perhaps, five hundred dollars. It had three rooms and the ever-present
"summer kitchen" attached to the back. It was unpainted and had no
touch of beauty, a mere box.
His stable was built of slabs and banked and covered with straw. It
looked like a den, was low and long, and had but one door in the end.
The cow-yard held ten or fifteen cattle of various kinds, while a few
calves were bawling from a pen near by. Behind the barn on the west
and north was a fringe of willows forming a "wind-break." A few broken
and discouraged fruit trees standing here and there among the weeds
formed the garden. In short, he was spoken of by his neighbors as "a
hard-working cuss, and tollably well fixed."
No grace had come or ever _could_ come into his life. Back of him were
generations of men like himself, whose main' business had been to work
hard, live miserably, and beget children to take their places after
they died. He was a product.
His courtship had been delayed so long on account of poverty that it
brought little of humanizing emotion into his life. He never
mentioned it now, or if he did, it was only to sneer obscenely at it.
He had long since ceased to kiss his wife or even speak kindly to her.
There was no longer any sanctity to life or love. He chewed tobacco
and toiled on from year to year without any very clearly defined idea
of the future.
He was tall, dark, and strong, in a flat-chested, slouching sort of
way, and had grown neglectful of even decency in his dress. He wore
the American farmer's customary outfit of rough brown pants, hickory
shirt, and greasy white hat. It differed from his neighbors, mainly in
being a little dirtier and more ragged. His grimy hands were broad and
strong as the clutch of a bear, and he "was a turrible feller to turn
off work," as Council said. "I druther have Sim Burns work for me one
day than some men three. He's a linger." He worked with unusual speed
this morning, and ended by milking all the cows himself as a sort of
savage penance for his misdeeds the previous evening, muttering in
self-defence:--
"Seems 's if ever' cussid thing piles on to me at once. That corn, the
road-tax, and hayin' comin' on, and now _she_ gits her back up--"
When he went back to the well he sloshed himself thoroughly in the
horse-trough and went to the house. He found breakfast ready but his
wife was not in sight. The older children were clamoring around the
uninviting breakfast table, spread with cheap plates and with boiled
potatoes and fried salt pork as the principal dish.
"Where's y'r ma?" he asked, with a threatening note in his voice, as
he sat down by the table.
"She's in the bedroom."
He rose and pushed open the door. The mother sat with the babe in her
lap, looking out of the window down across the superb field of
timothy, moving like a lake. She did not look round. She only grew
rigid. Her thin neck throbbed with the pulsing of blood to her head.
"What's got into you, _now_?" he said brutally; "don't be a fool. Come
out and eat breakfast with me, an' take care o' y'r young ones."
She neither moved nor made a sound. With an oath he turned on his heel
and went out to the table. Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish
fashion, he went out into the hot sun with his team and ridding
plow, not a little disturbed by this new phase of his wife's
"cantankerousness." He plowed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon,
in the terrific heat and dust. The air was full of tempestuous
threats, still and sultry, one of those days when work is a
punishment. When he came in at noon he found things the same,--dinner
on the table, but his wife out in the garden with the youngest child.
"I c'n stand it as long as _she_ can," he said to himself, in the
hearing of the children. When he finished the field of corn it was
after sundown, and he came up to the house, hot, dusty, his shirt
wringing wet with sweat, and his neck aching with the work of looking
down all day at the cornrows. His mood was still stern. The
multitudinous lift, and stir, and sheen of the wide green field had
been lost upon him.
"I wonder if she's milked them cows," he muttered to himself. He gave
a sigh of relief to find she had. But she had done so not for his
sake, but for the sake of the poor, patient, dumb brutes.
When he went to the bedroom after supper, he found that the cradle and
his wife's few little boxes and parcels--poor pathetic properties--had
been removed to the garret which they called a chamber, and he knew he
was to sleep alone again.
"She'll git over it, I guess." He was very tired but he didn't feel
quite comfortable enough to sleep. The air was oppressive. His shirt
wet in places, and stiff with dust in other places, oppressed him more
than usual, so he rose and removed it, getting a clean one out of a
drawer. This was an unusual thing for him, for he usually slept in the
same shirt which he wore in his day's work, but it was Saturday night,
and he felt justified in the extravagance.
In the meanwhile poor Lucretia was brooding over her life in a most
dangerous fashion. All she had done and suffered for Simeon Burns came
back to her till she wondered how she had endured it all. All day long
in the midst of the glorious summer landscape she brooded.
"I hate him," she thought with a fierce blazing up through the murk of
her musing, "I hate t' live. But they aint no hope. I'm tied down. I
can't leave the children, and I aint got no money. I couldn't make a
living out in the world. I aint never seen anything an' don't know
anything."
She was too simple and too unknowing to speculate on the loss of her
beauty, which would have brought her competency once,--if sold in the
right market. As she lay in her little attic bed, she was still
sullenly thinking, wearily thinking of her life. She thought of a poor
old horse which Sim had bought once, years before, and put to the
plough when it was too old and weak to work. She could see her again
as in a vision, that poor old mare, with sad head drooping, toiling,
toiling, till at last she could no longer move, and lying down under
the harness in the furrow, groaned under the whip--and died.
Then she wondered if her own numbness and despair meant death, and she
held her breath to think harder upon it. She concluded at last,
grimly, that she didn't care--only for the children.
The air was frightfully close in the little attic, and she heard the
low mutter of the rising storm in the west. She forgot her troubles a
little, listening to the far-off gigantic footsteps of the tempest.
_Boom, boom, boom_, it broke nearer and nearer as if a vast cordon of
cannon was being drawn around the horizon. Yet she was conscious only
of pleasure. She had no fear. At last came the sweep of cool, fragrant
storm-wind, a short and sudden dash of rain, and then in the cool,
sweet hush which followed, the worn and weary woman fell into a deep
sleep.
When she woke the younger children were playing about on the floor in
their night-clothes, and little Pet was sitting in a square of
sunshine intent on one of his shoes. He was too young to know how poor
and squalid his surroundings were, the patch of sunshine flung on the
floor glorified it all. He (little animal) was happy.
The poor of the western prairies lie almost as unhealthily close
together as do the poor of the city tenements. In the small hut of the
peasant there is as little chance to escape close and tainting contact
as in the coops and dens of the North End of proud Boston. In the
midst of oceans of land, floods of sunshine and gulfs of verdure, the
farmer lives in two or three small rooms. Poverty's eternal cordon is
ever round the poor.
"Ma, why didn't you sleep with pap last night?" asked Bob, the
seven-year old, when he saw she was awake at last. She flushed a dull
red.
"Sh! Because--I--it was too warm--and there was a storm comin'. You
never mind askin' such questions. Is he gone out?"
"Yup. I heerd him callin' the pigs. It's Sunday, aint it, ma?"
"Why, yes, so it is! Wal! Now Sadie, you jump up an' dress quick's y'
can, an' Bob an' Sile, you run down an' bring s'm water," she
commanded, in nervous haste beginning to dress. In the middle of the
room there was scarce space to stand beneath the rafters.
When Sim came in for his breakfast he found it on the table but his
wife was absent.
"Where's y'r ma?" he asked with a little less of the growl in his
voice.
"She's upstairs with Pet."
The man ate his breakfast in dead silence, till at last Bob ventured
to say,
"What makes ma ac' so?"
"Shut up!" was the brutal reply. The children began to take sides with
the mother--all but the oldest girl who was ten years old. To her the
father turned now for certain things to be done, treating her in his
rough fashion as a housekeeper, and the girl felt flattered and docile
accordingly.
They were pitiably clad; like most farm-children, indeed, they could
hardly be said to be clad at all. Sadie had on but two garments, a
sort of undershirt of cotton and a faded calico dress, out of which
her bare, yellow little legs protruded, lamentably dirty and covered
with scratches.
The boys also had two garments, a hickory shirt and a pair of pants
like their father's, made out of brown denims by the mother's
never-resting hands,--hands that in sleep still sewed, and skimmed,
and baked, and churned. The boys had gone to bed without washing their
feet, which now looked like toads, calloused, brown, and chapped.
Part of this the mother saw with her dull eyes as she came down, after
seeing the departure of Sim up the road with the cows. It was a
beautiful Sunday morning, and the woman might have sung like a bird if
men were only as kind to her as Nature. But she looked dully on the
seas of ripe grasses, tangled and flashing with dew, out of which the
bobolinks and larks sprang. The glorious winds brought her no melody,
no perfume, no respite from toil and care.
She thought of the children she saw in the town. Children of the
merchant and banker, clean as little dolls, the boys in knickerbocker
suits, the girls in dainty white dresses, and a bitterness sprang into
her heart. She soon put the dishes away, but felt too tired and
listless to do more.
"Taw-bay-wies! Pet want ta-aw-bay-wies!" cried the little one, tugging
at her dress.
Listlessly, mechanically she took him in her arms, and went out into
the garden which was fragrant and sweet with dew and sun. After
picking some berries for him, she sat down on the grass under the row
of cotton-woods, and sank into a kind of lethargy. A kingbird
chattered and shrieked overhead, the grasshoppers buzzed in the
grasses, strange insects with ventriloquistic voices sang all about
her,--she could not tell where.
"Ma, can't I put on my clean dress?" insisted Sadie.
"I don't care," said the brooding woman darkly. "Leave me alone."
Oh, if she could only lie here forever, escaping all pain and
weariness! The wind sang in her ears, the great clouds, beautiful as
heavenly ships, floated far above in the vast dazzling deeps of blue
sky, the birds rustled and chirped around her, leaping-insects buzzed
and clattered in the grass and in the vines and bushes. The goodness
and glory of God was in the very air, the bitterness and oppression of
man in every line of her face.
But her quiet was broken by Sadie who came leaping like a fawn down
through the grass.
"O ma, Aunt Maria and Uncle William are coming. They've jest turned
in."
"I don't care if they be!" she answered in the same dully-irritated
way. "What're they comin' here to-day for, I wan' to know." She stayed
there immovably, till Mrs. Council came down to see her, piloted by
two or three of the children. Mrs. Council, a jolly, large-framed
woman, smiled brightly, and greeted her in a loud, jovial voice. She
made the mistake of taking the whole matter lightly; her tone amounted
to ridicule.
"Sim says you've been having a tantrum, Creeshy. Don't know what for,
he says."
"He don't," said the wife with a sullen flash in the eyes. "_He_
don't know why! Well, then, you just tell him what I say. I've lived
in hell long enough. I'm done. I've slaved here day in and day out f'r
twelve years without pay--not even a decent word. I've worked like no
nigger ever worked 'r could work and live. I've given him all I had,
'r ever expect to have. I'm wore out. My strength is gone, my patience
is gone. I'm done with it--that's a _part_ of what's the matter."
"My sakes, Lucreeshy! You mustn't talk that way."
"But I _will_," said the woman, as she supported herself on one palm
and raised the other. "I've _got_ to talk that way." She was ripe for
an explosion like this. She seized upon it with eagerness. "They aint
no use o' livin' this way, anyway. I'd take poison if it want f'r the
young ones."
"Lucreeshy Burns!"
"Oh, I mean it."
"Land sakes alive, I b'leeve you're goin' crazy!"
"I shouldn't wonder if I was. I've had enough t' drive an Indian
crazy. Now you jest go off an' leave me 'lone. I aint in mind to
visit--they aint no way out of it, an' I'm tired o' tryin' to _find_ a
way. Go off an' let me be."
Her tone was so bitterly hopeless that the great jolly face of Mrs.
Council stiffened into a look of horror such as she had not worn for
years. The children, in two separate groups, could be heard rioting.
Bees were humming around the clover in the grass, and the kingbird
chattered ceaselessly from the Lombardy poplar-tip. Both women felt
all this peace and beauty of the morning, dimly, and it disturbed Mrs.
Council because the other was so impassive under it all. At last,
after a long and thoughtful pause, Mrs. Council asked a question whose
answer she knew would decide it all,--asked it very kindly and
softly,--
"Creeshy, are you comin' in?"
"No," was the short and sullenly decisive answer. Mrs. Council knew
that was the end, and so rose with a sigh and went away.
"Wal, good by," she said simply.
Looking back she saw Lucretia lying at length with closed eyes and
hollow cheeks. She seemed to be sleeping, half-buried in the grass.
She did not look up nor reply to her sister-in-law. Her life also was
one of toil and trouble, but not so hard and hapless as Lucretia's.
By contrast with most of her neighbors she seemed comfortable.
"Sim Burns, what you ben doin' to that woman?" she burst out as she
waddled up to where the two men were sitting under a cotton-wood tree,
talking and whittling after the manner of farmers.
"Nawthin' 's fur 's I know," answered Burns, not quite honestly, and
looking uneasy.
"You needn't try t' git out of it like that, Sim Burns," replied his
sister. "That woman never got into that fit f'r _nawthin'_."
"Wal, if you know more about it than I do, whadgy ask _me_ fur," he
replied angrily.
"Tut, tut!" put in Council, always a peacemaker, "hold y'r horses!
Don't git on y'r ear, childern! Keep cool, and don't spile y'r shirts.
Most likely yer all t' blame. Keep cool an' swear less."
"Wal, I'll bet Sim's more to blame than she is. Why they aint a
harder-workin' woman in the hull State of Ioway than she is--"
"Except Marm Council."
"Except nobody. Look at her, jest skin and bones."
Council chuckled in his vast way. "That's so, mother, measured in that
way she leads over you. You git fat on it."
She smiled a little, her indignation oozing away; she never "_could_
stay mad," her children were accustomed to tell her. Burns refused to
talk any more about the matter, and the visitors gave it up, and got
out their team and started for home, Mrs. Council firing this parting
shot:--
"The best thing you can do to-day is t' let her alone. Mebbe the
childern 'll bring her round again. If she does come round, you see 't
you treat her a little more 's y' did when you was a-courtin' her."
"This way," roared Council, putting his arm around his wife's waist.
She boxed his ears while he guffawed and clucked at his team.
Burns took a measure of salt and went out into the pasture to salt the
cows. On the sunlit slope of the field, where the cattle came running
and bawling to meet him, he threw down the salt in handfuls, and then
lay down to watch them as they eagerly licked it up, even gnawing a
bare spot in the sod in their eagerness to get it all.
Burns was not a drinking man; was hard-working, frugal, in fact, he
had no extravagances except his tobacco. His clothes he wore until
they all but dropped from him; and he worked in rain and mud, as well
as dust and sun. It was this suffering and toiling all to no purpose
that made him sour and irritable. He didn't see why he should have so
little after so much hard work.
He was puzzled to account for it all. His mind (the average mind) was
weary with trying to solve an insoluble problem. His neighbors, who
had got along a little better than himself, were free with advice and
suggestion as to the cause of his persistent poverty.
Old man Bacon, the hardest-working man in the county, laid it to
Burns' lack of management. Jim Butler, who owned a dozen farms (which
he had taken on mortgages), and who had got rich by buying land at
government price and holding for a rise, laid all such cases as Burns
to "lack of enterprise, foresight."
But the larger number feeling themselves "in the same boat" with
Burns, said:--
"I'd know. Seems as if things got worse an' worse. Corn an' wheat
gittin' cheaper 'n' cheaper. Machinery eatin' up profits--got to
_have_ machinery to harvest the cheap grain, an' then the machinery
eats up profits. Taxes goin' up. Devil to pay all round; I'd know what
'n thunder _is_ the matter."
The democrats said protection was killing the farmers, the republicans
said no. The grangers growled about the middle-men, the green-backers
said there wasn't circulating medium enough, and in the midst of it
all, hard-working discouraged farmers, like Simeon Burns, worked on,
unable to find out what really was the matter.
And there on this beautiful Sabbath morning, Sim sat and thought and
thought, till he rose with an oath, and gave it up.
III.
It was hot and brilliant again the next morning as Douglass Radbourn
drove up the road with Lily Graham, the teacher of the school in the
little white schoolhouse. It was blazing hot, even though not yet nine
o'clock, and the young farmers plowing beside the fence looked
longingly and somewhat bitterly at Radbourn seated in a fine
top-buggy beside a beautiful creature in lace and cambric.
Very beautiful the town-bred "schoolma'am" looked to those grimy,
sweaty fellows, superb fellows physically, too, with bare red arms and
leather-colored faces. She was as if builded of the pink and white
clouds soaring far up there in the morning sky. So cool, and sweet,
and dainty.
As she came in sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the
poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt
grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown,
chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote
possibility of some time in the far future "standing a chance" of
having an introduction to her, caused them to wipe them on their
trousers' leg stealthily.
Lycurgus Banks, "Ly" Banks, swore when he saw Radbourn. "That cuss
thinks he's ol' hell this morning. He don't earn his living. But he's
jest the kind of cuss to get holt of all the purty girls."
Others gazed with simple, sad wistfulness upon the slender figure,
pale, sweet face, and dark eyes of the young girl, feeling that to
have talk with such a fairy-like creature was a happiness too great to
ever be their lot. And when she had passed they went back to work with
a sigh and feeling of loss.
As for Lily, she felt a pang of pity for these people. She looked at
this peculiar form of poverty and hardship much as the fragile, tender
girl of the city looks upon the men laying a gas-main in the streets.
She felt (sympathetically) the heat and grime, and though but the
faintest idea of what it meant to wear such clothing came to her, she
shuddered. Her eyes had been opened to these things by Radbourn, who
was a well-known radical,--a law student in Rock River.
"Poor fellows!" sighed Lily, almost unconsciously. "I hate to see them
working there in the dirt and hot sun. It seems a hopeless sort of
life, doesn't it?"
"Oh, but this is the most beautiful part of the year," said Radbourn.
"Think of them in the mud, in the sleet; think of them husking corn in
the snow, a bitter wind blowing; think of them a month later in the
harvest; think of them imprisoned here in winter!"
"Yes, it's dreadful! But I never felt it so keenly before. You have
opened my eyes to it."
"Writers and orators have lied so long about 'the idyllic' in farm
life, and said so much about the 'independent American farmer' that he
himself has remained blind to the fact that he's one of the
hardest-working and poorest-paid men in America. See the houses they
live in,--hovels."
"Yes, yes, I know," said Lily; a look of deeper pain swept over her
face. "And the fate of the poor women, oh, the fate of the women!"
"Yes, it's a matter of statistics," went on Radbourn, pitilessly,
"that the wives of the American farmers fill our insane asylums. See
what a life they lead, most of them; no music, no books. Seventeen
hours a day in a couple of small rooms--dens. Now there's Sim Burns!
what a travesty of a home! Yet there are a dozen just as bad in sight.
He works like a fiend,--so does his wife,--and what is their reward?
Simply a hole to hibernate in and to sleep and eat in in summer. A
dreary present and a well-nigh hopeless future. No, they have a
future, if they knew it, and we must tell them."
"I know Mrs. Burns; she sends several children to my school. Poor,
pathetic little things, half-clad and wistful-eyed. They make my heart
ache; they are so hungry for love, and so quick to learn."
As they passed the Burns farm, they looked for the wife but she was
not to be seen. The children had evidently gone up to the little white
schoolhouse at the head of the lane. Radbourn let the reins fall slack
as he talked on. He did not look at the girl, his eyebrows were drawn
into a look of gloomy pain.
"It aint so much the grime that I abhor, nor the labor that crooks
their backs and makes their hands bludgeons. It's the horrible waste
of life involved in it all. I don't believe God intended a man to be
bent to plow-handles like that, but that aint the worst of it. The
worst of it is, these people live lives approaching automata. They
become machines to serve others more lucky or more unscrupulous than
themselves. What is the world of art, of music, of literature, to
these poor devils--to Sim Burns and his wife there, for example? Or
even to the best of these farmers?"
The girl looked away over the shimmering lake of yellow-green corn, a
choking came into her throat. Her gloved hand trembled.
"What is such a life worth? It's all very comfortable for us to say,
'they don't feel it.' How do we know what they feel? What do we know
of their capacity for enjoyment of art and music? They never have
leisure or opportunity. The master is very glad to be taught by
preacher, and lawyer, and novelist, that his slaves are contented and
never feel any longings for a higher life. These people live lives but
little higher than their cattle,--are _forced_ to live so. Their hopes
and aspirations are crushed out, their souls are twisted and deformed
just as toil twists and deforms their bodies. They are on the same
level as the city laborer. It makes me wild to think of it. The very
religion they hear is a soporific. They are taught to be content here
that they may be happy hereafter. Suppose there isn't any hereafter?"
"Oh, don't say that, please!" Lily cried.
"But I don't _know_ that there is," looking up at her pitilessly, "and
I do know that these people are being robbed of something more than
money, of all that makes life worth living. The promise of milk and
honey in Canaan is all very well, but I prefer to have mine here, then
I'm sure of it."
"What can we do?" murmured the girl.
"Do? Rouse these people for one thing; preach _discontent_, a noble
discontent."
"It will only make them unhappy."
"No, it won't, not if you show them the way out. If it does, it's
better to be unhappy striving for higher things, like a man, than to
be content in a wallow like swine."
"But what _is_ the way out?"
This was sufficient to set Radbourn upon his hobby-horse. He outlined
his plan of action, the abolition of all indirect taxes. The State
control of all privileges, the private ownership of which interfered
with the equal rights of all. He would utterly destroy speculative
holdings of the earth. He would have land everywhere brought to its
best use, by appropriating all ground rents to the use of the State,
etc., etc., to which the girl listened with eager interest but with
only partial comprehension.
As they neared the little schoolhouse, a swarm of midgets in pink
dresses, pink sun-bonnets, and brown legs, came rushing to meet their
teacher, with that peculiar devotion the children in the country
develop for a refined teacher.
Radbourn helped Lily out into the midst of the eager little scholars,
who swarmed upon her like bees on a lump of sugar, till even
Radbourn's gravity gave way, and he smiled into her lifted eyes--an
unusual smile, that strangely enough stopped the smile on her own
lips, filling her face with a wistful shadow, and her breath came hard
for a moment and she trembled.
She loved that cold, stern face, oh, so much! and to have him smile
was a pleasure that made her heart leap till she suffered a smothering
pain. She turned to him to say:--
"I am very thankful, Mr. Radbourn, for another pleasant ride," adding
in a lower tone, "It was a very great pleasure; you always give me so
much. I feel stronger and more hopeful."
"I'm glad you feel so. I was afraid I was prosy with my
land-doctrine."
"Oh no! Indeed no! You have given me a new hope; I am exalted with the
thought; I shall try to think it all out and apply it."
And so they parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among
themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive
had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone
and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in the blazing sun.
"America's pitiful boast!" said the young radical looking back at it.
"Only a miserable hint of what it might be."
All that forenoon as Lily faced her little group of barefoot children,
she was thinking of Radbourn, of his almost fierce sympathy for these
poor supine farmers, hopeless, and in some cases content in their
narrow lives. The children almost worshipped the beautiful girl who
came to them as a revelation of exquisite neatness and taste,--whose
very voice and intonation awed them.
They noted (unconsciously, of course,) every detail. Snowy linen,
touches of soft color, graceful lines of bust and side--the slender
fingers that could almost speak, so beautifully flexile were they.
Lily herself sometimes, when she shook the calloused, knotted,
stiffened hands of the women, shuddered with sympathetic pain, to
think that the crowning wonder and beauty of God's world should be so
maimed and distorted from its true purpose.
Even in the children before her she could see the inherited results
of fruitless labor--and more pitiful yet in the bent shoulders of the
older ones she could see the beginnings of deformity that would soon
be permanent. And as these things came to her, she clasped the poor
wondering things to her side with a convulsive wish to make life a
little brighter for them.
"How is your mother, Sadie?" she asked of Sadie Burns, as she was
eating her luncheon on the drab-colored table near the open window.
"Purty well," said Sadie in a hesitating way.
Lily was looking out, and listening to the gophers whistling as they
raced to and fro. She could see Bob Burns lying at length on the grass
in the pasture over the fence, his heels waving in the air, his hands
holding a string which formed a snare. Bob was "death on gophers." It
was like fishing to young Izaak Walton.
It was very still and hot and the cheep and trill of the gophers, and
the chatter of the kingbirds alone broke the silence. A cloud of
butterflies were fluttering about a pool near, a couple of big flies
buzzed and mumbled on the pane.
"What ails your mother?" Lily asked, recovering herself and looking at
Sadie who was distinctly ill at ease.
"Oh, I dunno," Sadie replied, putting one bare foot across the other.
Lily insisted.
"She 'n' pa's had an awful row--"
"Sadie!" said the teacher warningly, "what language!"
"I mean they quarrelled, an' she don't speak to him any more."
"Why, how dreadful!"
"An' pa he's awful cross,--and she won't eat when he does, an' I haf
to wait on table."
"I believe I'll go down and see her this noon," said Lily to herself,
as she divined a little of the state of affairs in the Burns family.
Sim was mending the pasture fence as Lily came down the road toward
him. He had delayed going to dinner to finish his task and was just
about ready to go when Lily spoke to him.
"Good-morning, Mr. Burns. I am just going down to see Mrs. Burns. It
must be time to go to dinner--aren't you ready to go? I want to talk
with you."
Ordinarily he would have been delighted with the idea of walking down
the road with the schoolma'am, but there was something in her look
which seemed to tell him that she knew all about his trouble, and
beside he was not in good humor.
"Yes, in a minnit,--soon's I fix up this hole. Them shoats, I b'leeve,
would go through a keyhole, if they could once git their snoots in."
He expanded on this idea as he nailed away, anxious to gain time. He
foresaw trouble for himself. He couldn't be rude to this sweet and
fragile girl. If a _man_ had dared to attack him on his domestic
shortcomings, he could have fought. The girl stood waiting for him,
her large, steady eyes full of thought, gazing down at him from the
shadow of her broad-brimmed hat.
"The world is so full of misery anyway, that we ought to do the best
we can to make it less," she said at last in a musing tone, as if her
thoughts had unconsciously taken on speech. She had always appealed to
him strongly, and never more so than in this softly uttered
abstraction,--that it was an abstraction added to its power with him.
He could find no words for reply, but picked up his hammer and
nail-box, and slouched along the road by her side, listening without a
word to her talk.
"Christ was patient, and bore with his enemies, surely we ought to
bear with our--friends." She went on adapting her steps to his. He
took off his torn straw hat and wiped his face on his sleeve, being
much embarrassed and ashamed. Not knowing how to meet such argument,
he kept silent.
"How _is_ Mrs. Burns?" said Lily at length, determined to make him
speak. The delicate meaning in the emphasis laid on _is_ did not
escape him.
"Oh, she's all right,--I mean she's done her work jest the same as
ever. I don't see her much--"
"I didn't know--I was afraid she was sick. Sadie said she was acting
strangely."
"No, she's well enough--but,--"
"But what is the trouble? Won't you let me help you, _won't_ you?"
"Can't anybody help us. We've got 'o fight it out, I s'pose," he
replied, a gloomy note of resentment creeping into his voice. "She's
ben in a devil of a temper f'r a week."
"Haven't you been in the same kind of a temper too?" demanded Lily,
firmly, but kindly. "I think most troubles of this kind come from bad
temper on both sides. Don't you? Have you done your share at being
kind and patient?"
They had reached the gate now, and she laid her hand on his arm to
stop him. He looked down at the slender gloved hand on his arm feeling
as if a giant had grasped him, then he raised his eyes to her face,
flushing a purplish red as he remembered his grossness. It seemed
monstrous in the presence of this girl-advocate. Her face was like
silver, her eyes seemed pools of tears.
"I don't s'pose I have," he said at last pushing by her. He couldn't
have stood her glance another moment. His whole air conveyed the
impression of destructive admission. Lily did not comprehend the
extent of her advantage or she would have pursued it further. As it
was she felt a little hurt as she entered the house. The table was
set, but Mrs. Burns was nowhere to be seen. Calling her softly, the
young girl passed through the shabby little living room to the
oven-like bedroom which opened off it, but no one was about. She stood
for a moment shuddering at the wretchedness of the room.
Going back to the kitchen she found Sim about beginning on his dinner;
little Pet was with him, the rest of the children were at the
schoolhouse.
"Where is she?"
"I d' know. Out in the garden I expect. She don't eat with me now. I
never see her. She don't come near _me_. I aint seen her since
Saturday."
Lily was shocked inexpressibly and began to see clearer the magnitude
of the task she had set herself to do. But it must be done; she felt
that a tragedy was not far off. It must be averted.
"Mr. Burns, what have you done? What _have_ you done?" she asked in
terror and horror.
"Don't lay it all to _me_! She hain't done nawthin' but complain f'r
ten years. I couldn't do nothin' to suit her. She was always naggin'
me."
"I don't think Lucretia Burns would nag anybody. I don't say you're
_all_ to blame, but I'm afraid you haven't acknowledged you were any
to blame. I'm afraid you've not been patient with her. I'm going out
to bring her in. If she comes will you say you were _part_ to blame?
You needn't beg her pardon, just say you'll try to be better. Will you
do it? Think how much she has done for you! Will you?"
He remained silent, and looked discouragingly rude. His sweaty, dirty
shirt was open at the neck, his arms were bare, his scraggly teeth
were yellow with tobacco, and his uncombed hair lay tumbled about on
his high, narrow head. His clumsy, unsteady hands played with the
dishes on the table. His pride was struggling with his sense of
justice; he knew he ought to consent, and yet it was so hard to
acknowledge himself to blame. The girl went on in a voice piercingly
sweet, trembling with pity and pleading.
"What word can I carry to her from you? I'm going to go and see her.
If I could take a word from _you_, I know she would come back to the
table. Shall I tell her you feel to blame?"
The answer was a long time coming; at last the man nodded an assent,
the sweat pouring from his purple face. She had set him thinking, her
victory was sure.
Lily almost ran out into the garden and to the strawberry patch, where
she found Lucretia in her familiar, colorless, shapeless dress,
picking berries in the hot sun, the mosquitoes biting her neck and
hands.
"Poor, pathetic, dumb sufferer," the girl thought as she ran up to
her.
She dropped her dish as she heard Lily coming, and gazed up into the
tender, pitying face. Not a word was spoken, but something she saw
there made her eyes fill with tears, and her throat swell. It was pure
sympathy. She put her arms around the girl's neck and sobbed for the
first time since Friday night. Then they sat down on the grass under
the hedge and she told her story, interspersed with Lily's horrified
comments.
When it was all told the girl still sat listening. She heard
Radbourn's calm, slow voice again. It helped her not to hate Burns; it
helped her to pity and understand him.
"You must remember that such toil brutalizes a man; it makes him
callous, selfish, unfeeling necessarily. A fine nature must either
adapt itself to its hard surroundings or die. Men who toil terribly in
filthy garments day after day and year after year cannot easily keep
gentle; the frost and grime, the heat and cold will sooner or later
enter into their souls. The case is not all in favor of the suffering
wives, and against the brutal husbands. If the farmer's wife is dulled
and crazed by her routine, the farmer himself is degraded and
brutalized. They are both products of a social system, victims of a
land system, which produces tenement houses in the city, and pushes
the farmer into a semi-solitude--victims of land laws that are relics
of feudalism, made in the interest of the man who holds a special
privilege in the earth. Free America has set up on its soil the
systems of land-owning which produces the lord and the tenant; that
glorifies speculation in the earth, and gives the priceless riches of
the hills and forests into a few hands. But this will not continue--it
can't continue. The awakening understanding of America cries out
against it."
As well as she could Lily explained all this to the woman who lay with
her face buried in the girl's lap. Lily's arms were about her thin
shoulders in an agony of pity.
"It's hard, Lucretia, I know, more than you can bear, but you mustn't
forget what Sim endures, too. He goes out in the storms and in the
heat and dust. His boots are hard, and see how his hands are all
bruised and broken by his work! He was tired and hungry when he said
that--he didn't really mean it."
The wife remained silent.
"Mr. Radbourn says work as things go now _does_ degrade a man in spite
of himself. He says men get coarse and violent in spite of themselves
just as women do when everything goes wrong in the house,--when the
flies are thick, and the fire won't burn, and the irons stick to the
clothes. You see, you both suffer. Don't lay up this fit of temper
against Sim--will you?"
The wife lifted her head and looked away. Her face was full of
hopeless weariness.
"It aint this once. It aint that 't all. It's having no let up. Just
goin' the same thing right over 'n' over--no hope of anything better."
"If you had a hope of another world--"
"Don't talk that--that's rich man's doctrine. I don't want that kind
o' comfert. I want a decent chance here. I want 'o rest an' be happy
_now_--then I'm sure of it."
Lily's big eyes were streaming with tears. What should she say to the
desperate woman?
"What's the use? We might jest as well die--all of us."
The woman's livid face appalled the beautiful girl. She was gaunt,
heavy-eyed, nerveless. Her faded dress settled down over her limbs
showing the swollen knees and thin calves, her hands with distorted
joints protruded painfully from her sleeves. And all about was the
ever-recurring wealth and cheer of nature that knows no fear or favor.
The bees and flies buzzing in the sun, the jay and kingbird in the
poplars, the smell of strawberries, the motion of lush grass, the
shimmer of corn blades tossed gayly as banners in a conquering army.
Like a flash of keener light a sentence shot across the girl's mind.
"Nature knows no title-deed. The bounty of her mighty hands falls as
the sunlight falls, copious, impartial; her seas carry all ships, her
air is for all lips, her lands for all feet."
"Poverty and suffering such as yours will not last." There was
something in the girl's voice that roused the woman. She turned her
dull eyes upon her face.
Lily took her hand in both hers as if by a caress she could impart her
own faith.
"Look up, dear. When Nature is so good and generous, man must come to
be better, surely. Come, go in the house again. Sim is there, he
expects you, he told me to tell you he was sorry." Lucretia's face
twitched a little at that, but her head was bent. "Come, you can't
live this way. There isn't any other place to go to."
No, that was the bitterest truth. Where on this wide earth with its
forth-shooting fruits and grains, its fragrant lands and shining seas,
could this dwarfed, bent, broken, middle-aged woman go? Nobody wanted
her, nobody cared for her. But the wind kissed her drawn lips as
readily as those of the girl, and the blooms of clover nodded to her
as if to a queen.
Lily had said all she could. Her heart ached with unspeakable pity and
a sort of terror.
"Don't give up, Lucretia. This may be the worst hour of your life.
Live and bear with it all for Christ's sake--for your children's
sake. Sim told me to tell you he was to blame. If you will only see
that you are both to blame and yet neither to blame, then you can rise
above it. Try, dear!"
The wife pulled herself together, rose silently, and started toward
the house. Her face was rigid but no longer sullen. Lily followed her
slowly, wonderingly.
As she neared the kitchen door, she saw Sim still sitting at the
table; his face was unusually grave and soft. She saw him start and
shove back his chair,--saw Lucretia go to the stove and lift the
tea-pot, and heard her say, as she took her seat beside the baby,--
"Want some more tea?"
She had become a wife and mother again, but in what spirit the puzzled
girl could not say.
EDITORIAL NOTES.
AN EPOCH-MARKING DRAMA.
A movement destined, I think, to be in a degree epoch-marking in the
dramatic annals of the American stage, was inaugurated by Mr. James A.
Herne, on the fourth of May, in Boston, in the production of his
remarkable realistic drama, "Margaret Fleming," at Chickering Hall.
The play is a bold innovation, so much so that no theatre in the city
would produce it, although the various managers who examined it
declared it to be as strong as and no less powerful than any American
drama yet written. The character of the audience was as striking as
the play was brave and original. It was, indeed, a strange sight to
see such well-known and thoughtful men and women as Mr. William Dean
Howells, Rev. Minot J. Savage, Rabbi Solomon Schindler, Rev. Edward A.
Horton, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, Hamlin Garland, and a score or
more of persons almost as well known in literary, religious, and
thoughtful circles, assembled on the first night of a dramatic
production. Nor was the character of the audience less remarkable
during the fortnight it was played. Men and women who are rarely seen
at theatres attended two, three, and even four performances. The
superb acting of Mr. and Mrs. Herne contributed much to the success of
the play; curiosity also doubtless attracted many, yet beyond and
above this was the deep appreciation of a thoughtful and intelligent
constituency, who saw in this drama the marvellous possibilities of
the stage for improvement as well as entertainment. They also saw real
life depicted. The absence of empty lines and stilted phrases so
common in conventional drama was refreshing and interesting to those
who believe that the drama has a mission other than merely to amuse.
"Margaret Fleming" is nothing if not artistic from the standpoint of
the realist. Its fidelity to life as we find it--to existing
conditions and types of society,--is wonderful. Its dramatic strength
is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it
has a far greater merit--utility. I have no sympathy with the
flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is
the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in
their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure;
of a popular conscience anæsthetized; the cry of sensualism and
selfishness popular with shallow minds and bloodless hearts; the
incarnation of that fatal effeminacy that springs from a union of
wealth and superficial intellectuality; the voice of a human automaton
without a soul. Victor Hugo has made no utterances more grandly true
than when he pleads for the beautiful being made the servant of
progress as voiced in the following sentiment:
"Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when so much
depends upon being efficient and good. Art for art's sake
may be very fine, but art for _progress_ is finer still.
Ah! you must think? Then think of making man better.
Courage! Let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote
ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just; it is well
for us to do so. Some pure lovers of art, moved by a
solicitude which is not without its dignity, discard the
formula, 'Art for Progress,' the Beautiful Useful, fearing
lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble to
see the drudge's hand attached to the muse's arm. According
to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact
with _reality_. They are solicitous for the sublime, if it
descends as far as to humanity. They are in error. The
useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, enlarges it.
But critics protest: To undertake the cure of social evils;
to amend the codes; to impeach law in the court of right to
utter those hideous words, 'penitentiary,' 'convict-keeper,'
'galley-slave,' 'girl of the town'; to inspect the police
registers; to contract the business of dispensaries; to
study the questions of wages and want of work; to taste the
black bread of the poor; to seek labor for the
working-woman; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged
sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open
schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack
shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to
preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to improve the
food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and drink; to
demand solutions for problems and shoes for naked
feet,--these things they declare are not the business of the
azure. Art is the azure. Yes, art is the azure; but the
azure from above, whence falls the ray which swells the
wheat, yellows the maize, rounds the apple, gilds the
orange, sweetens the grape. Again I say, a further service
is an added beauty. At all events, where is the diminution?
To ripen the beet-root, to water the potato, to increase the
yield of lucern, of clover, or of hay; to be a
fellow-workman with the ploughman, the vinedresser, and the
gardener,--this does not deprive the heavens of one star.
_Immensity does not despise utility_,--and what does it lose
by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or
electric flash through the cloud-masses with less splendor
because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a
bark, and to keep constant to the north the little needle
intrusted to it, the gigantic guide? Yet the critics insist
that to compose social poetry, human poetry, popular poetry;
to grumble against the evil and laud the good, to be the
spokesman of public wrath, to insult despots, to make knaves
despair, to emancipate man before he is of age, to push
souls forward and darkness backward, to know that there are
thieves and tyrants, to clean penal cells, to flush the
sewer of public uncleanness,--is not the function of art!
Why not? Homer was the geographer and historian of his time,
Moses the legislator of his, Juvenal the judge of his, Dante
the theologian of his, Shakespeare the moralist of his,
Voltaire the philosopher of his. No region, in speculation
or in fact, is shut to the mind. Here a horizon, there
wings; freedom for all to soar. To sing the ideal, to love
humanity, to believe in progress, to pray toward the
infinite. To be the servant of God in the task of progress,
and the apostle of God to the people,--such is the law which
regulates growth. All power is duty. Should this power enter
into repose in our age? Should duty shut its eyes? And is
the moment come for art to disarm? Less than ever. Thanks to
1789, the human caravan has reached a high plateau; and, the
horizon being vaster, art has more to do. This is all. To
every widening of the horizon, an enlargement of conscience
corresponds. We have not reached the goal. Concord condensed
into felicity, civilization summed up in harmony,--that is
yet far off. The theatre is a crucible of civilization. It
is a place of human communion. All its phases need to be
studied. It is in the theatre that the public soul is
formed."
The theatre may be made the most potent engine for progress and
reform. We are living in the midst of the most splendid age which has
dawned since humanity first fronted the morning, dimly conscious of
its innate power and the possibilities that lay imbedded in its being;
an era of life, growth, warfare. On the one hand are ancient thought
and prejudice, on the other the inspiration of greater liberty and a
nobler manhood. On the one hand selfishness, sensuality, vulgar
ostentation, avarice, luxury, and moral effeminacy crying, "Art for
art's sake," demanding amusements that will aid in dissipating any
moral strength or deep thought that still lingers in the mind, and
literature that shall enable one to kill time without the slightest
suspicion of intellectual exertion; physical, mental, and moral ennui,
with an assumed lofty contempt for utility. On the other hand we have
the gathering forces of the dawn, demanding "art for progress,"
declaring that beauty must be the handmaid of duty; that art must wait
on justice, liberty, fraternity, nobility, morality, and intellectual
honesty,--in a word the forces in league with light must compel the
beautiful to make radiant the pathway of the future. In the union of
art and utility lies the supreme excellence of "Margaret Fleming," it
deals with one of the most pressing problems of our present
civilization; it is the most powerful plea for an equal standard of
morals for men and women that I have ever heard. This thought, it is
true, like the entire drama, is anything but conventional; it breathes
the spirit of the coming day. The subtile bondage and servility of
woman, a vestige of the barbarous past, still taints our civilization.
Far more is demanded by society of her than of man, and when
heretofore she has raised her voice against this inequity she has been
silenced by unworthy imputations. It is the shame of our age that
woman is not accorded a higher meed of justice. She has a right to
demand that the man who marries her be every whit as pure and moral as
herself, and until she makes this demand, and holds herself from the
contamination of moral lepers, no substantial progress for higher
morals and purer life will be made. Unless woman checks the increasing
degradation of manhood, man will sooner or later drag her to his
deplorable level. "Margaret Fleming" shows this truth and points to
the woman of to-day her stern and inexorable duty.
Unless woman assumes an aggressive stand and ostracizes the libertine,
refusing his society, his attention, and most of all the proffer of
his leprous love, the moral outlook for society will soon be as gloomy
as was Rome's future when Epictetus was banished from her streets
because he mercilessly assailed the moral degradation of his day.
THE PRESENT REVOLUTION IN THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT.
The rapid spread of heresy throughout the churches is creating genuine
dismay in many quarters. When such ripe scholars and representative
thinkers as Rev. Heber Newton, Dr. C. A. Briggs, and Rev. Dr.
Bridgman, representing three of the most powerful Protestant
communions, freely preach doctrines at variance with conventional
orthodox views, and express a grander hope and broader faith than that
cherished by conservative theologians, it is by no means strange that
the current of old-time thought should be stirred. If, however, these
scholarly minds stood alone in their convictions, there would be no
warrant for such widespread apprehension as is manifest. The serious
character of the present theological revolution, however, lies in the
fact that the pulpit and the people are honey-combed with the peculiar
heresy which rejects the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the dogma
of eternal damnation.[9] The general uneasiness occasioned by the
present epidemic of heresy, and the bitter strictures which it has
called forth, are perfectly natural, while it is equally true that the
present liberal attitude of so many of the foremost thinkers in the
various orthodox churches is the legitimate outcome of numerous
agencies which have been silently working for generations.
[9] The _United Presbyterian_ in a recent issue says,
"It appears that Dr. Briggs does not stand alone in the
theological seminaries of the Presbyterian Church as a
teacher of dangerous views of inspiration. Four of the
professors of Lane Seminary have declared themselves as
equally radical." The _Interior_ says, "The paper of
Prof. Smith, of Lane, published in a pamphlet with that
of Prof. Evans, goes much beyond anything that has
appeared on the subject from Presbyterian authorship in
this country."
At the meeting of the Alumni of the Union Theological
Seminary, on the eighteenth of May, the newly elected
professor of systematic theology, the brilliant Rev.
Henry J. Van Dyke, D. D. (since deceased) made the
following bold remark while defending Dr. Briggs: "_If
we cannot have orthodoxy and liberty, let orthodoxy go
and let us have liberty. Liberty has always produced
progress._"
In his sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one
of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The
heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of
savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance,
and superstition of barbaric times. It smells of
roasting flesh.
On the same Sunday the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst,
of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of New York,
quoted the ringing words given above by Dr. Van Dyke,
with his cordial indorsement. He continued to thus
severely arraign the Orthodox brethren in the
Presbyterian Church:
"This question of inerrancy is not new. Calvin, Luther,
and many others did not believe in the Bible's
inerrancy. If this is not according to the confession
of faith--I don't know whether it is or not--we had
better square the confession with the truth rather than
the truth with the confession. Let those who would
prove that there are no mistakes in the Bible produce a
cud-chewing coney, and then we will consider the
question of inerrancy.
If the Church is to go on in the way that some are
trying to persuade us it ought to go, the sooner it
gives up the ghost the better, to save the medical
expense."
At various era-marking periods in the annals of history, the
multitudes have been thus disturbed. They have felt that the old-time
beliefs of their fathers, the tradition of ages, the oracles, which
from early infancy they have learned to revere and hold most sacred,
were being demolished. This naturally aroused bitter antagonism in
their souls. They believed they were carrying out God's wishes when
like Saul of Tarsus, they aided in slaying heretics. Thus when the
great Nazarene taught a higher, sweeter, and nobler code of ethics
than the ancient Jewish law-givers and teachers, he was persecuted and
slain because the Jews believed he sought to overthrow their revered
and sacred truths. In a like manner Paul and the early advocates of
Christianity, when they proclaimed their religion in Gentile lands
frequently aroused the bitterest antagonism. At a later date Galileo's
demonstrations and Sir Isaac Newton's discovery occasioned precisely
the game dismay, and called forth bitter and pronounced opposition,
because it was felt that in one case the authority of the Bible was
impeached, and in the other that God was to be taken out of the
universe. When Luther and the Reformation broke the dead calm of
centuries of growing corruption and externalization in the religious
life of Europe, Christendom felt a thrill of dismay. New disturbing
elements had entered the fields. The general uneasiness on the part of
tens of thousands of people who believed they were sincere worshippers
of God, was succeeded by an intense desire to crush out this dangerous
heresy with fire and torture, if necessary. The terrible days, months,
and years that followed the dawn of the Reformation, bear melancholy
testimony to the innate ferocity of man's nature, and the relentless
character of religious warfare. Nevertheless, in spite of persecution,
the new truth spread. A broader horizon opened to man's view. That
conflict marked the birth of one of the grandest epochs in humanity's
onward march. Thus has it ever been. To-day stones the prophet,
to-morrow tearfully rears a monument and treasures his lofty
utterances.
Yet with every transition period comes the old-time struggle, the
apprehension and anguish of spirit, _the night of doubt_. It is,
therefore, not surprising that the oppression of fear weighs on the
minds of all those who believe that God has spoken His last word; that
in the twilight of the past alone lies the hope of humanity.
On the other hand, the theological revolt now manifest is a legitimate
result of multitudinous agencies, which have for generations been
silently and subtly influencing the mind of man, among which may be
mentioned the spread of popular education, and the growth of the
newspaper. As long as people knew not how to read or were unable to
procure any medium of information which brought them in rapport with
the vast growing world of thought and action, they naturally turned to
their priest or clergyman for intellectual as well as religious food,
and from him as a rule received instruction with the docility and
confidence exhibited by little children seeking for truth. With the
appearance of schoolhouses in every hamlet, and the establishment of
cheap and popular newspapers, however, came a change as marked as it
was wonderful. People began to reason and think for themselves. They
demanded credentials for the various dogmas and ideas discussed in
every department of thought. It is true, that religion was approached
much more reluctantly and reverently than other subjects, but the
growth of knowledge, the opportunity to hear all sides of problems
discussed, and the broader conception of life which a world knowledge
gave, exerted a positive and ever-increasing influence on their minds
in this department of thought. The great inventions of the past
hundred years, which have bound together as one family almost the
whole world, have also brought to light the great religions of other
races and ages. Gradually it dawned on the public mind that almost
every people had a clearly defined system of theology; containing much
that was beautiful, elevating, and inspiring, more or less hidden
among superstitious traditions natural to childhood and credulous
ages. This led many to ask whether Jesus might not have had a larger
thought in his mind than mankind had dreamed when he said, "Other
sheep have I which are not of this fold"; and whether there might not
be a wider significance than had been given to the idea, that God had
in sundry times and in divers ways spoken to His children on earth.
Another lever of progressive thought was the marvellous strides taken
in physical science, which followed the Reformation. Discoveries in
astronomy, in geology and biology have completely overthrown many
time-honored and revered traditions and fables regarded for ages as
divine truth. The critical spirit of the age, the inquiring condition
of human thought, which instead of being discouraging is distinctly a
mark of human growth, stands in bold antithesis to the dark ages, when
speculation and progress were outlawed in many fields of research, and
spirituality suffered an eclipse behind the pomp, form, and show of
theology, when to a great degree mental stagnation prevailed. Yet this
critical spirit has been one of the most potent factors in
liberalizing thought. Another cause for the radical change of views
among Bible scholars is found in the rich results of archæological
research during the past generation. This with a critical, or
scientific study of the Bible, the early church, and profane history,
contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity, has led thousands of
the most profound and sincere religious thinkers into broader fields,
giving to them a loftier view of life, eternity and God than was
possible under the old conceptions. What diligent research on the part
of scholarship has effected among critical students, the recent
revision of the Bible has accomplished among the people. The old-time
reverence for the letter of the law, or what is commonly known as
verbal inspiration, is disappearing as mist before the sunshine,
owing, in this latter case, to the people becoming acquainted for the
first time with the fact that there are passages in the Bible
confessed by the most orthodox scholars to be spurious. They found in
the revised scriptures passages in some instances containing many
consecutive verses enclosed in brackets, as, for example, the story of
the woman taken in sin in the Gospel of John from vii. 53 to viii. 11
inclusive. Consulting the foot-note they found that these passages
were spurious or added by a later hand. I well remember the
explanation made by a scholarly and devout professor in theology,
while at the Kentucky University, regarding the passage referred to
above. "The incident doubtless occurred much as it appears," asserted
the professor, "but while omitted from the earlier copies, was handed
down by tradition, and at a later day incorporated into the text."
Such explanations in the very nature of things, however, were by no
means calculated to satisfy the doubts which had been raised in the
minds of those who had from infancy been taught to believe in the
verbal inspiration of the Bible. Naturally the question arose in the
minds of the thinking masses, if one _passage_ is proved to be
spurious, and the world possesses no original manuscripts, what
guarantee that anything approaching the original teachings of Jesus is
preserved. If the stream of inspiration is proved to be muddy in some
places, is it not possible that what at first was pure as the melting
snow on the mountain tops, after passing through the hands of various
human authors and copyists, may have become as turbid with the cast of
human thought as the mountain stream which, pure at the source, is
heavy with mud at the base? It is impossible to estimate how much
influence this discovery on the part of the people has exerted in
behalf of a broader and more liberal interpretation of the Bible.
Another factor which is usually overlooked, but which has had a marked
effect on the thought which to-day is in open rebellion against the
old standards, is found in the influence exerted by a galaxy of great
and godly lives, which came on the stage of existence early in the
present century, and whose thoughts have unconsciously broadened the
minds, refined the sentiment, and ennobled the lives of every one who
has read their works. In this country Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier,
Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson, Channing, Parker, Clarke, and other
illuminated souls, gave all who came under the magic of their words a
broader view of life, a truer conception of the universe, and a
loftier inspiration than aught that had touched them before. It is
doubtful if the great thinkers dreamed that on the current of their
thoughts tens of thousands of earnest lives were to be carried into a
larger hope, a more intelligent, humane appreciation of the mysteries
of creation, and a grander idea of God. Thus we see in the present
religious revolution nothing strange in the bitter opposition of
conservative thought, nothing remarkable in the persistent and earnest
attitude of those who stand for the higher criticism. It is the old
feud; the past struggling with the future; departing night battling
with the dawn. Of the issue none who have faith in the ultimate
triumph of truth, wisdom, and progress can doubt.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ANCIENT AND MODERN THOUGHT IN THE PRESBYTERIAN
CHURCH.
The vote of the New York Presbytery on the twelfth of May, to present
the case of Prof. Charles A. Briggs[10] before the synod will probably
prove one of the most momentous moves made in recent years in the
theological world. It is a positive challenge thrown before
Presbyterians who hold views popularly termed "Higher Criticism." It
is a declaration of war to the knife on the part of those who oppose
the revision of the Westminster Confession, and who cherish ancient
thought. Nor is the opposition led by Dr. Briggs disposed to yield
what is believed to be the only truth consistent with an intelligent
conception of a just, loving, and wise God. The immediate cause of
this determined conflict is found in Professor Briggs' recent address
on the authority of the Holy Scriptures, delivered at his inaugural as
Professor of Biblical Theology in the Union Theological Seminary of
New York. In this notable address he maintained that there were three
great fountains of divine authority, the Bible, the Church, and
Reason, any one of which was capable of leading persons to God. He
instanced the following cases: Cardinal Newman was led to God through
the Church of Rome; Spurgeon, through the Bible, and the philosopher
Martineau through Reason. He further asserted "that no one could get
at the Bible unless he forced his way through human obstacles, which
he tabulated as follows: (1) Superstitious reverence for the book
itself. (2) The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. (3) The
authenticity of the Scriptures. Traditions from the dead church assign
authors to all the books of the Bible, but higher criticism pronounces
these traditions fallacies and follies. (4) The doctrine of the
inerrancy of the Bible. Historical criticism again pronounces that
there are errors in the Bible, but they are in circumstantials, not in
essentials. (5) The miracles are in violation of the laws of nature,
and keep men away from the Bible. (6) The failure of minute prophecy."
Dr. Briggs further expressed belief in the ultimate salvation of
mankind, declaring that redemption was not limited to this world, but
continued through the vast period of time preceding the resurrection.
[10] Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or
more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in
a recent paper in the New York _Herald_ defended Dr.
Briggs. That journal aptly says: In his paper, he
defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent
inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically
avowing, eighteen months ago, the same principle for
which Dr. Briggs, it declares, must now stand trial. He
declares that the American Presbyterian Church has
herself materially changed the Westminster Confession
of a hundred years ago, and that this spirit of
revision pervades the whole Christian world. Finally,
he asserts that, as the theory of verbal inspiration of
the Scriptures is not in the Westminster Confession of
Faith, it cannot be demanded from any Presbyterian
minister or professor, and warns churchmen that any
attempt by the General Assembly to enforce an extra
Scriptural and extra Confessional theory upon the
Church will create a split worse than that of 1837. The
_Herald_ observes that:--
"Dr. Schaff's international fame as a church historian
and theologian will compel the greatest respect from
not alone the ministers of the Presbyterian church, but
also from the clergy of all Christian churches.
As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this
country, and acquitted. In 1854, he represented the
American German churches at the Ecclesiastical Diet at
Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D. from the
University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of
sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of
this city. He is a member of the Leipsic Historical,
the Netherland, and other historical and literary
societies in this country and in Europe, and is one of
the founders and honorary secretary of the American
Branch of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one
of the Alliance delegates to the Emperor of Russia to
plead for the religious liberty of his subjects in the
Baltic Provinces.
He was president of the American Bible Revision
Committee, which was appointed in 1871 at the request
of the English committee, and in 1875 was sent to
England to arrange for the co-operation and publication
of the Anglo-American edition. The same year he
attended officially the conferences of the Old
Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to promote
Christian unity.
Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society
of Church History, and is the author of a great number
of historical and exegetical works, both in English and
German, the latter having been translated into
English."
On page 55 of his revised address, he observes:
The Biblical redemption is a redemption of our race and of
universal nature. As the ancient Jews limited redemption to
Israel and overlooked the nations, so the Church limited
redemption to those who were baptized, and excluded the
heathen and unbaptized. The Presbyterians have too often
limited redemption by their doctrine of election; the Bible
knows no such limitation. The Bible teaches election, but an
election of love. Loving only the elect, is earthly, human
teaching. Electing men to salvation by the touch of Divine
love--that is heavenly doctrine. The salvation of the world
can only mean the world as a whole, compared with which the
unredeemed will be so few and insignificant and evidently
beyond the reach of redemption by their own act of rejecting
it and hardening themselves against it, and by descending
into such depths of demoniacal depravity that they will
vanish from sight.
In the appendix to his address, published about the middle of May, in
speaking of _inerrancy_, Dr. Briggs further observes:--
It is agreed that there are a large number of errors in the
best MSS. of the Bible; it is the theory of modern
dogmaticians, that they were not in the original MSS. We can
never have them, and it is idle to speculate as to their
contents. When the Lower or Textual Criticism has done its
best, and secured the best possible text, dogmaticians
discredit the best text when they speculate as to what was
in the original text. If the reactionary dogmaticians may
speculate to remove errors from the text, the rationalistic
critics may also speculate with regard to the original text
in a way that would make havoc with scholastic theology.
Even Mohammed was willing to accept the original text of the
Law and the Gospel, which he claimed had been falsified by
Jews and Christians.
I said, "It is not a pleasant task to point out errors in
the Sacred Scriptures." In "Biblical Study," and "Whither?"
I limited myself to two errors of citation. I have not taken
a brief to prove the errancy of Scripture. _Conservative men
should hesitate before they force the critics in
self-defence to make a catalogue of errors in the Bible._
The errors are in the only texts we have, and every one is
forced to recognize them.
It is well known that the great reformers, Calvin and
Luther, recognized errors in the Scriptures, that Baxter and
Rutherford of the second Reformation were not disturbed by
them, and that the choicest spirits of modern times--such as
Van Oosterzee, Tholuck, Neander, Stier, Lange, and
Dorner--have not hesitated to point out numerous errors in
Holy Scripture. This view is maintained by Sanday, Driver,
Cheyne, Davidson, Bruce, Gore, Marcus Dods, Blaikie, and
numerous others in Great Britain; by Fisher, Thayer, Smythe,
Evans, H. B. Smith, W. R. Harper, and hosts of others in
this country."
One can easily see how dangerously heretical such bold declarations
would sound to patriarchs of conservatism like Rev. Dr. Shedd, the
well-known author of Dogmatic Theology, which embraces thirteen
hundred pages, but in the index of which one looks in vain for
"forgiveness of sin" or "pardon of sin." A work which devotes
eighty-six pages to hell and only four to heaven. Dr. Briggs, however,
claims that theologians like Dr. Shedd, whose teachings have been
chiefly on the damnation of men not competent to judge him, and gauged
by our present civilization he is doubtless correct, but by the
standard of the theologians who framed the Westminster Confession, I
have less confidence in his accuracy. It must be remembered, however,
that Professor Briggs has exhaustively studied the lives and
teachings of the framers of the Confession, and he may have been able
at times to catch them at their best, when in moments of spiritual
exaltation they have uttered grand prophetic and divinely loving
utterances which were foreign to their usual habits of thought or the
religious conviction of the age in which they lived. And in that event
he may be able to maintain his position when his case is called before
the synod, even against the popular impression as to the real meaning
of the Confession. Failing in this, the only alternative will be
recantation or withdrawal from the Presbyterian Communion. From the
stand already taken it is impossible to imagine the professor
stultifying himself and teaching what he does not believe; while his
withdrawal will unquestionably mean the greatest schism that
Presbyterianism has yet suffered. I think it highly probable that the
majority of his brother ministers to-day will condemn[11] the bold,
brave man whom his communion in the near future will revere as a man
who, prophet-like, saw beyond the sect to which he belonged; whose
noble, loving, and holy nature drew him into intimate relationship
with the Divine life, which is the essence of Love.
[11] Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has
voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440
against 59; thus, from a numerical point of view, Dr.
Briggs is in the minority. This is by no means
surprising, and I regard it greatly to the credit of
the Assembly that, while they hold to the severe
doctrines popularly known as Calvinism, they repudiate
all the great liberal scholars who refuse to believe
and teach conceptions of God which were unquestioningly
accepted in a former age, but which the enlightenment
of the present century shrinks from with unutterable
horror. Unless Dr. Briggs proves a dishonest man and
recants he must leave Union Theological Seminary, if
that institution remains in the Presbyterian
fellowship.
[Transcriber's Note: A macron diacritical mark, a straight line above
a letter, is found on several words in the original text. These letters
are indicated here by the coding [=x] for a macron above any letter x.
For example, the word "aionios" with a macron above the first letter
"o" will appear as "ai[=o]nios" in the text.]