A War Episode—I Meet my Fater—I Marry and Make a Home—The Ups and Downs
of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
I
In bringing these desultory—perhaps too fragmentary—recollections to a
close the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither
be self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith
somewhat in rejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both
his experience has been ample if not exhaustive. During the period of
their serial publication he has received many letters—suggestive,
informatory and critical—now and again querulous—which he has not
failed to consider, and, where occasion seemed to require, to pursue to
original sources in quest of accuracy. In no instance has he found any
essential error in his narrative. Sometimes he has been charged with
omissions—as if he were writing a history of his own times—whereas he
has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relating his immediate
personal experience.
I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman Catholic
Church, educated in the Church of England in America and married into
the Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in
this way: It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the
household of a devout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond,
affectionate Irish Catholic; the little life was almost despaired of,
so one sunny day, to rescue me from that form of theologic controversy
known as infant damnation, the baby carriage was trundled round the
corner to Saint Matthew’s Church—it was in the national capital—and the
baby brow was touched with holy water out of a font blessed of the
Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been the worse for it.
Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashioned
baptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character
in the neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than
reverent, standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, “There
go his sins, men and brethren, there go his sins”; and having but poor
eyesight I thought I saw them passing down the stream never to trouble
him, or anybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the
stream, out and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a
Baptist, I wonder?
I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the
impression that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have
never believed in what is called close communion. I have not hated and
am unable to hate any man because either in political or in religious
opinion he differs from me and insists upon voting his party ticket and
worshiping his Creator according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of
conscience and thought has been my lifelong contention.
I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of
the dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of
refusing to bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the
Protestant or the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my
heart, but the cry of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a
saint whether he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets
his baptism silently out of a font of consecrated water or comes
dripping from the depths of the nearest brook, shouting, “Glory
hallelujah!” From my boyhood the persecution of man for opinion’s
sake—and no matter for what opinion’s sake—has roused within me the
only devil I have ever personally known.
My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to
deal with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them
leaves a mystery still. For all their learning and research—their
positivity and contradiction—none of the writers know more than I think
I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to
the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence
we came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the
eternal in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to
himself.
_The night has a thousand eyes, The day but one; Yet the light of the
bright world dies With the dying sun._
_The mind has a thousand eyes, The heart but one; Yet the light of a
whole life dies When love is done._
All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in
politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon
men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to
theology—the pride of opinion—or yields itself to the celebration of
the mammon of unrighteousness.
I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was
Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha,
teaching the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the
blessing of eternal life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly,
surely, the influence of the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha
until that portion of the world which has advanced most by process of
evolution from the primal state of man now worships at the shrine of
Christ and him risen from the dead, not at the sign of Buddha and total
oblivion.
The blessed birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching and
example of the Prince of Peace—have been engulfed beneath oceans of
ignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embittered
controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the
very light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of
men. The blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was
the seed of the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of
man—weak, cruel, fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from
the Tiber or the Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did
equally the devil’s work in God’s name. None of the viceregents of
heaven, as they claimed to be, knew much or seemed to care much about
the word of the Gentle One of Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their
titular divinity much as men in commerce adopt a trade-mark.