I
The other day a clergyman who described himself as a preacher of the
gospel of Christ wrote, asking me to come and talk to his people on
the gospel of Nature. The request set me to thinking whether or not
Nature has any gospel in the sense the clergyman had in mind, any
message that is likely to be specially comforting to the average
orthodox religious person. I suppose the parson wished me to tell
his flock what I had found in Nature that was a strength or a solace
to myself.
What had all my many years of journeyings to Nature yielded me that
would supplement or reinforce the gospel he was preaching? Had the
birds taught me any valuable lessons? Had the four-footed beasts?
Had the insects? Had the flowers, the trees, the soil, the coming
and the going of the seasons? Had I really found sermons in stones,
books in running brooks and good in everything? Had the lilies of
the field, that neither toil nor spin, and yet are more royally clad
than Solomon in all his glory, helped me in any way to clothe myself
with humility, with justice, with truthfulness?
It is not easy for one to say just what he owes to all these things.
Natural influences work indirectly as well as directly; they work
upon the subconscious, as well as upon the conscious, self. That I
am a saner, healthier, more contented man, with truer standards of
life, for all my loiterings in the fields and woods, I am fully
convinced.
That I am less social, less interested in my neighbors and in the
body politic, more inclined to shirk civic and social
responsibilities and to stop my ears against the brawling of the
reformers, is perhaps equally true.
One thing is certain, in a hygienic way I owe much to my excursions
to Nature. They have helped to clothe me with health, if not with
humility; they have helped sharpen and attune all my senses; they
have kept my eyes in such good trim that they have not failed me for
one moment during all the seventy-five years I have had them; they
have made my sense of smell so keen that I have much pleasure in the
wild, open-air perfumes, especially in the spring--the delicate
breath of the blooming elms and maples and willows, the breath of
the woods, of the pastures, of the shore. This keen, healthy sense
of smell has made me abhor tobacco and flee from close rooms, and
put the stench of cities behind me. I fancy that this whole world of
wild, natural perfumes is lost to the tobacco-user and to the city-
dweller. Senses trained in the open air are in tune with open-air
objects; they are quick, delicate, and discriminating. When I go to
town, my ear suffers as well as my nose: the impact of the city upon
my senses is hard and dissonant; the ear is stunned, the nose is
outraged, and the eye is confused. When I come back, I go to Nature
to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once
more. I know that, as a rule, country or farming folk are not
remarkable for the delicacy of their senses, but this is owing
mainly to the benumbing and brutalizing effect of continued hard
labor. It is their minds more than their bodies that suffer.
When I have dwelt in cities the country was always near by, and I
used to get a bite of country soil at least once a week to keep my
system normal.
Emerson says that "the day does not seem wholly profane in which we
have given heed to some natural object." If Emerson had stopped to
qualify his remark, he would have added, if we give heed to it in
the right spirit, if we give heed to it as a nature-lover and
truth-seeker. Nature love as Emerson knew it, and as Wordsworth knew
it, and as any of the choicer spirits of our time have known it, has
distinctly a religious value. It does not come to a man or a woman
who is wholly absorbed in selfish or worldly or material ends.
Except ye become in a measure as little children, ye cannot enter
the kingdom of Nature--as Audubon entered it, as Thoreau entered it,
as Bryant and Amiel entered it, and as all those enter it who make
it a resource in their lives and an instrument of their culture. The
forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of
religion--the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence
of the inscrutable universe--persists. Indeed, these seem to be
renewing their life to-day in this growing love for all natural
objects and in this increasing tenderness toward all forms of life.
If we do not go to church so much as did our fathers, we go to the
woods much more, and are much more inclined to make a temple of them
than they were.
We now use the word Nature very much as our fathers used the word
God, and, I suppose, back of it all we mean the power that is
everywhere present and active, and in whose lap the visible universe
is held and nourished. It is a power that we can see and touch and
hear, and realize every moment of our lives how absolutely we are
dependent upon it. There are no atheists or skeptics in regard to
this power. All men see how literally we are its children, and all
men learn how swift and sure is the penalty of disobedience to its
commands.
Our associations with Nature vulgarize it and rob it of its
divinity. When we come to see that the celestial and the terrestrial
are one, that time and eternity are one, that mind and matter are
one, that death and life are one, that there is and can be nothing
not inherent in Nature, then we no longer look for or expect a
far-off, unknown God.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in
stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
Even when it contains a fossil, it teaches history rather than
morals. It comes down from the fore-world an undigested bit that has
resisted the tooth and maw of time, and can tell you many things if
you have the eye to read them. The soil upon which it lies or in
which it is imbedded was rock, too, back in geologic time, but the
mill that ground it up passed the fragment of stone through without
entirely reducing it. Very likely it is made up of the minute
remains of innumerable tiny creatures that lived and died in the
ancient seas. Very likely it was torn from its parent rock and
brought to the place where it now lies by the great ice-flood that
many tens of thousands of years ago crept slowly but irresistibly
down out of the North over the greater part of all the northern
continents.
But all this appeals to the intellect, and contains no lesson for
the moral nature. If we are to find sermons in stones, we are to
look for them in the relations of the stones to other things--when
they are out of place, when they press down the grass or the
flowers, or impede the plow, or dull the scythe, or usurp the soil,
or shelter vermin, as do old institutions and old usages that have
had their day. A stone that is much knocked about gets its sharp
angles worn off, as do men. "A rolling stone gathers no moss," which
is not bad for the stone, as moss hastens decay. "Killing two birds
with one stone" is a bad saying, because it reminds boys to stone
the birds, which is bad for both boys and birds. But "People who
live in glass houses should not throw stones" is on the right side
of the account, as it discourages stone-throwing and reminds us that
we are no better than our neighbors.
The lesson in running brooks is that motion is a great purifier and
health-producer. When the brook ceases to run, it soon stagnates. It
keeps in touch with the great vital currents when it is in motion,
and unites with other brooks to help make the river. In motion it
soon leaves all mud and sediment behind. Do not proper work and the
exercise of will power have the same effect upon our lives?
The other day in my walk I came upon a sap-bucket that had been
left standing by the maple tree all the spring and summer. What a
bucketful of corruption was that, a mixture of sap and rainwater
that had rotted, and smelled to heaven. Mice and birds and insects
had been drowned in it, and added to its unsavory character. It was
a bit of Nature cut off from the vitalizing and purifying chem-
istry of the whole. With what satisfaction I emptied it upon the
ground while I held my nose and saw it filter into the turf, where I
knew it was dying to go and where I knew every particle of the
reeking, fetid fluid would soon be made sweet and wholesome again by
the chemistry of the soil!