AN OUTLOOK INTO LIFE.
My coming back to my native town was an event of public notoriety. I had
won laurels, and as I was the village property, my laurels were duly
commented on and properly appreciated. Highland was one of those thrifty
Yankee settlements where every house seems to speak the people so
well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive in all the means of material
comfort. There was not a house in it that was not in a sort of healthy,
growing state, receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed
that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging. This had
a new bay-window, and that had a new veranda; the other, new, tight,
white picket fences all round the yard. Others rejoiced in a fresh coat
of paint. But all were alive, and apparently self-repairing. There was
to every house the thrifty wood-pile, seasoning for winter; the clean
garden, with its wealth of fruit and its gay borders of flowers; and
every new kind of flower, and every choice new fruit, found somewhere a
patron who was trying a hand at it.
Highland was a place worth living in just for its scenery. It was at
that precise point of the country where the hills are inspiriting,
vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm,--"The little hills rejoice on
every side!" Mountains are grand, but they also are dreary. For a near
prospect they overpower too much, they shut out the sun, they have
savage propensities, untamable by man, shown once in a while in
land-slides and freshets; but these half-grown hills uplift one like
waves of the sea. In summer they are wonderful in all possible shades
of greenness; in autumn they are like a mystical rainbow--an ocean of
waves, flamboyant with every wonderful device of color; and even when
the leaves are gone, in November, and nothing left but the bristling
steel-blue outlines of trees, there is a wonderful purple haze, a veil
of dreamy softness, around them, that makes you think you never saw them
so beautiful.
So I said to myself, as I came rambling over hill and dale back to the
old homestead, and met my mother's bright face of welcome at the door. I
was the hero of the hour at home, and everything had been prepared to
make me welcome. My brother, who kept the homestead, had relinquished
the prospect of a college life, and devoted himself to farming, but
looked on me as the most favored of mortals in the attainments I had
made. His young wife and growing family of children clustered around my
mother and leaned on her experience; and as every one in the little
village knew and loved her, there was a general felicitation and
congratulation on the event of my return and my honors.
"See him in his father's pulpit afore long," said Deacon Manning, who
called the first evening to pay his respects; "better try his hand at
the weekly prayer meeting, and stir us up a bit."
"I think, Deacon," said I, "I shall have to be one of those that learn
in silence, awhile longer. I may come to be taught, but I certainly
cannot teach."
"Well, now, that's modest for a young fellow that's just been through
college! They commonly are as feathery and highflying as a this year's
rooster, and ready to crow whether their voice breaks or not," said the
deacon. "'Learn in silence!' Well, that 'ere beats all for a young man!"
I thought to myself that the good deacon little knew the lack of faith
that was covered by my humility.
Since my father's death, my mother had made her home with my Uncle
Jacob, her health was delicate, and she preferred to enjoy the honors
of a grandmother at a little distance. My Uncle Jacob had no children.
Aunt Polly, his wife, was just the softest, sleekest, most domestic dove
of a woman whose wings were ever covered with silver. I always think of
her in some soft, pearly silk, with a filmy cap, and a half-handkerchief
crossed over a gentle, motherly bosom, soft moving, soft speaking, but
with a pair of bright, hazel eyes, keen as arrows to send their glances
into every place in her dominions. Let anybody try sending in a false
account to Aunt Polly, and they will see that the brightness of her eyes
was not merely for ornament. Yet everything she put her hand to went so
exactly, so easily, you would have said those eyes were made for nothing
but reading, for which Aunt Polly had a great taste, and for which she
found abundance of leisure.
My mother and she were enjoying together a long and quiet Saturday
afternoon of life, reading to each other, and quietly and leisurely
discussing all that they read,--not merely the last novel, as the
fashion of women in towns and cities is apt to be, but all the solid
works of philosophy and literature that marked the times. My uncle's
house was like a bookseller's stall,--it was overrunning with books. The
cases covered the walls; they crowded the corners and angles; and still
every noteworthy book was ordered, to swell the stock.
My mother and aunt had read together Lecky, and Buckle, and Herbert
Spencer, with the keen critical interest of fresh minds. Had it troubled
their faith? Not in the least; no more than it would that of Mary on the
morning after the resurrection! There is a certain moral altitude where
faith becomes knowledge, and the bat-wings of doubt cannot fly so high.
My mother was dwelling in that land of Beulah, where the sun always
shineth, and the bells of the heavenly city are heard, and the shining
ones walk. All was clear to her, all bright, all real, in "the beyond;"
but that kind of evidence is above the realm of heavy-footed reason.
The "joy unspeakable," the "peace that passeth understanding," are
things that cannot be passed from hand to hand. Else I am quite sure my
mother would have taken the crown of joy from her head and the peace
from her bosom, and given them to me. But the "white stone with the new
name" is Christ's gift to each for himself, and "no man knoweth it save
he that receiveth it."
But these witnesses who stand gazing into heaven are not without their
power on us who stand lower. It steadied my moral nerves, so to speak,
that my mother had read and weighed the words that were making so much
doubt and shaking; that she fully comprehended them, and that she smiled
without fear.
She listened without distress, without anxiety, to all my doubts and
falterings. "You must pass through this; you will be led; it will all
come right," she said; "and then perhaps you will be the guide of
others."
I had feared to tell her that I had abandoned the purpose of the
ministry, but I found it easy.
"I would not have you embrace the ministry for anything but a true
love," she said, "any more than I would that you should marry a wife for
any other reason. If ever the time comes that you feel you _must_ be
that, it will be your call; but you can be God's minister otherwise than
through the pulpit."
"Talk over your plans with your uncle," she said; "he is in your
father's place now."
In fact, my uncle, having no children of his own, had set his heart on
me, and was disposed to make me heir, not only to his very modest
personal estate, but also to his harvest of ideas and opinions,--all
that backwater of thoughts and ideas that accumulate on the mind of a
man who thinks and reads a great deal in a lonely neighborhood. So he
took me up as a companion in his daily rides over the country.
"Well, Harry, where next?" he said to me the day after my return, as we
were driving together. "What are you about? Going to try the ministry?"
"I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and prayed for it,
and nothing would be such a joy to mother, but----"
My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me.
"I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education gives them a
general shaking up, and all their beliefs break from their lashings and
go rolling and tumbling about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on
ship-board."
"I can't say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great many things
that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I have too many doubts for
a teacher."
"Who hasn't? I don't know anything in heaven or earth that forty
unanswerable questions can't be asked about."
"You know," answered I, "Tennyson says,
'There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.'"
"H'm! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of constitutional
crisis in the beginning of one's life; but if it runs on and gets to be
chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and makes him morally spindling and
sickly. Men that _do_ anything in the world must be men of strong
convictions; it won't do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and
lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down next."
"But," said I, "while I am passing through the constitutional crisis, as
you call it, is the very time I must make up my mind to teach others on
the most awful of all subjects. I cannot and dare not. I must be a
learner for some years to come, and I must be a learner without any
pledges, expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that."
"Well," said my uncle; "I'm not so greatly concerned about that--the
Lord needs other ministers besides those in the pulpit. Why, man, the
sermons on the evidences of Christianity that have come home to me most
have been preached by lay preachers in poor houses and lonely churches,
by ignorant men and women, and little children." "There's old Aunt Sarah
there," he said, pointing with his whip to a brown house in the
distance, "that woman is dying of a cancer, that slowly eats away her
life in lingering agony, and all her dependence is the work of a sickly,
consumptive daughter, and yet she is more than resigned to her lot, she
is so cheerful, so thankful, so hopeful, there is such a blessed calm
peace, and rest, and sweetness in that house, that I love to go there.
The influence of that woman is felt all through the village--_she_
preaches to some purpose."
"Because she _knows_ what she believes," I said.
"It was the same with your father, Harry. Now my boy," he added, turning
to me with the old controversial twinkle in his eye, and speaking in a
confidential tone--"The fact is, I never agreed with your father
doctrinally, there were weak spots in his system all along, and I always
told him so. I could trip him and floor him in an argument, and have
done it a hundred times," he said, giving a touch to his horse.
I thought to myself that it was well enough that my father wasn't there
to hear that statement, otherwise there would have been an immediate
tilting match, and the whole ground to be gone over.
"Yes," he said; "it wasn't mainly in your father's theology that his
strength lay--it was the Christ in him--the great warm heart--his
crystal purity and simplicity--his unworldly earnestness and honesty. He
was a godly man and a manly man both, and he sowed seed all over this
State that came up good men and good women. Yes, there are hundreds and
hundreds in this State to-day that are good men and good women, mainly
because he lived. _That's_ what I call success in life, Harry, when a
man carries himself so that he turns into seed-corn and makes a harvest
of good people. You may upset a man's reasonings, and his theology may
go to the dogs, but a brave Christian life you can't upset, it will
tell. Now, Harry, are you going to try for that?"
"God helping me, I will," I said.
"You see, as to the theologies," he added, "I think it has been well
said that the Christian world just now is like a ship that's tacking, it
has lost the wind on one side and not quite got it on the other. The
growth of society, the development of new physical laws, and this modern
scientific rush of the human mind is going to modify the man-made
theologies and creeds; some of them will drop away just as the blossom
does when the fruit forms, but Christ's religion will be just the same
as ever--his words will not pass away."
"But then," I said "there are a whole labyrinth of perplexing questions
about this Bible. What is inspiration? What ground does it cover? How
much of all these books is inspired? What is their history? How came we
by them? What evidence have we that the record gives us Christ's words
uncorrupted?"
"If you had been brought up in Justin Martyr's time or the days of the
primitive Christians you would have been put to study all these things
first and foremost in your education, but we modern Christians, teach
young men everything else except what we profess to think the most
important; and so you come out of college ignorant, just where knowledge
is most vital."
"Well, that is past praying for now," said I.
"Yes; but even now there is a way out--just as going through a bog you
plant your foot hard on what land there is, and then take your
bearings--so you must do here. The way to get rid of doubts in religion,
is to go to work with all our might and _practice_ what we _don't_
doubt, and that you can do whatever your calling or profession."
"I shall certainly try," said I.
"For example," said my uncle, "There's the Sermon on the Mount. Nobody
has any doubt about that, there it lies--plain enough, and enough of
it--not a bit of what's called theology in it. Not a word of
information to settle the mooted questions men wrangle over, but with a
direct answer to just the questions any thoughtful man must want to have
answered when he looks at life. Is there a Father in the heavens? Will
he help us if we ask? May the troubles of life be our discipline? Is
there a better life beyond? And how are we to get that? There is
Christ's philosophy of life in that sermon, and Christ's mode of dealing
with actual existing society; and he who undertakes in good faith to
square his heart and life by it will have his hands full. The world has
been traveling eighteen hundred years and not come fully into the light
of its meaning. There has never been a Christian state or a Christian
nation, according to that. That document is in modern society just like
a lump of soda in a tumbler of vinegar, it keeps up a constant
commotion, and will do so till every particle of life is adjusted on its
principles. The man who works out Christ's teachings into a palpable
life-form, preaches Christianity, no matter what his trade or calling.
He may be a coal heaver or he may be a merchant, or a lawyer, or an
editor--he preaches all the same. Men always know it when they meet a
bit of Christ's sermons walking out bodily in good deeds; they're not
like worldly wisdom, and have a smack of something a good deal higher
than common sense, but when people see it they say, "Yes--that's the
true thing." Now one of our Presidents, General Harrison, found out on a
certain day that through a flaw in the title deeds he was owner to half
the city of Cincinnati. What does he do? Why, simply he says to himself,
'These people have paid their money in good faith, and I'll do by them
as I'd be done by,' and he goes to a lawyer and has fresh deeds drawn
out for the whole of 'em, and lived and died a poor, honest man. That
action was a preaching of Christ's doctrine as I take it, and if you'll
do as much whenever you get a chance, its no matter what calling you
take for a pulpit. So now tell me what are you thinking of setting
yourself about?"
"I intend to devote myself to literature," said I. "I always had a
facility for writing, while I never felt the call or impulse toward
public speaking; and I think the field of current literature opens a
wide scope. I have had already some success in having articles accepted
and well spoken of, and have now some promising offers. I have an
opportunity to travel in Europe as correspondent of two papers, and I
shall study to improve myself. In time I may become an editor, and then
perhaps at last proprietor of a paper. So runs my scheme of life, and I
hope I shall be true to myself and my religion in it. I shall certainly
try to. Current literature--the literature of newspapers and magazines,
is certainly a power."
"A very great power, Harry," said my uncle; "and getting to be in our
day a tremendous power, a power far outgoing that of the pulpit, and
that of books. This constant daily self-asserting literature of
newspapers and periodicals is acting on us tremendously for good or for
ill. It has access to us at all hours and gets itself heard as a
preacher cannot, and gets itself read as scarcely any book does. It
ought to be entered into as solemnly as the pulpit, for it is using a
great power. Yet just now it is power without responsibility. It is in
the hands of men who come under no pledge, pass no examination, give no
vouchers, though they hold a power more than that of all other
professions or books united. One cannot be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a
minister, unless some body of his fellows looks into his fitness to
serve society in these ways; but one may be turned loose to talk in
every family twice a day, on every subject, sacred and profane, and say
anything he chooses without even the safeguard of a personal
responsibility. He shall speak from behind a screen and not be known.
Now you know old Dante says that the souls in the other world were
divided into three classes, those who were for God and those who were
for the Devil, and those who were for neither, but for themselves. It
seems to me that there's a vast many of these latter at work in our
press--smart literary adventurers, who don't care a copper what they
write up or what they write down, wholly indifferent which side of a
question they sustain, so they do it smartly, and ready to sell their
wit, their genius and their rhetoric to the highest bidder. Now, Harry,
I'd rather see you a poor, threadbare, hard-worked, country minister
than the smartest and brightest fellow that ever kept his talents on
sale in Vanity Fair."
"Well," said I, "isn't it just here that your principle of living out a
Gospel should come? Must there not be writers for the press who believe
in the Sermon on the Mount, and who are pledged to get its principles
into life-forms as fast as they can?"
"Yea, verily," said my uncle; "but do you mean to keep faithful to that?
You have, say, a good knack at English; you can write stories, and
poems, and essays; you have a turn for humor; and now comes the Devil to
you and says, Show me up the weak points of those reformers; raise a
laugh at those temperance men,--those religionists, who, like all us
poor human trash, are running religion, and morals, and progress into
the ground.' You can succeed; you can carry your world with you. You
see, if Virtue came straight down from Heaven with her white wings and
glistening robes, and always conducted herself just like an angel, our
trial in life wouldn't be so great as it is. But she doesn't. Human
virtue is more apt to appear like a bewildered, unprotected female,
encumbered with all sorts of irregular bandboxes, dusty, disheveled, out
of fashion, and elbowing her way with ungainly haste and ungraceful
postures. You know there are stories of powerful fairies who have
appeared in this way among men, to try their hearts; and those who
protect them when they are feeble and dishonored, they reward when they
are glorious. Now, your smart, flippant, second-rate wits never have the
grace to honor Truth when she loses her way, and gets bewildered and
dusty, and they drive a flourishing business in laughing down the
world's poor efforts to grow better."
"I think," said I, "that we Americans have one brilliant example of a
man who had keen humor, and used it on the Christian side. The animus of
the "Biglow Papers" is the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount translated
into the language of Yankee life, and defended with wit and drollery."
"You say truth, Harry, and it was no small thing to do it; for the
Anti-Slavery cause then was just in that chaotic state in which every
strange bird and beast, every shaggy, irregular, unkempt reformer, male
and female, were flocking to it, and there was capital scope for
caricature and ridicule; and all the fastidious, and conservative, and
soft-handed, and even-stepping people were measureless in their contempt
for this shocking rabble. Lowell stood between them and the world, and
fought the battle with weapons that the world could understand. There
was a Gospel truth in
'John P. Robinson, he,'
and it did what no sermon could; this is the more remarkable because he
used for the purpose a harlequin faculty, that has so often been read
out of meeting and excommunicated that the world had come to look at it
as ex-officio of the Devil. Whittier and Longfellow made valiant music
of the solemn sort, but Lowell evangelized wit."
"The fortunate man," said I, "to have used a great opportunity!"
"Harry, the only way to be a real man, is to have a cause you care for
more than yourself. That made your father--that made your New England
Fathers--that raises literature above some child's play, and makes it
manly--but if you would do it you must count on one thing--that the
devil will tempt you in the outset with the bread question as he did the
Lord.
"Command that these stones be made bread;"
is the first onset--you'll want money, and money will be offered for
what you ought not to write. There's the sensational novel, the blood
and murder and adultery story, of which modern literature is full--you
can produce it--do it perhaps as well as anybody--it will sell. Will
you be barkeeper to the public, and when the public call for hot brandy
sling give it to them, and help them make brutes of themselves? Will you
help to vulgarize and demoralize literature if it will pay?"
"No;" said I, "not if I know myself."
"Then you've got to begin life with some motive higher than to make
money, or get a living, and you'll have sometimes to choose between
poisonous nonsense that brings pay, and honest truth that nobody wants."
"And I must tell the Devil that there is a higher life than the
bread-life?" said I.
"Yes; get above that, to begin with. Remember the story of General
Marion, who invited some British officers to dine with him and gave them
nothing but roasted potatoes. They went away and said it was in vain to
try to conquer a people when their officers would live on such fare
rather than give up the cause. Do you know, Harry, what is my greatest
hope for this State? It's this: Two or three years ago there was urgent
need to carry this State in an election, and there was no end of hard
money sent up to buy votes among our poor farmers: but they couldn't be
bought. They had learned, 'Man shall not live by bread alone,' to some
purpose. The State went all straight for liberty. What I ask of any man
who wants to do a life-work is ability to be happy on a little."
"Well," said I, "I have been brought up to that. I have no expensive
habits. I neither drink nor smoke. I am used to thinking definitely as
to figures, and I am willing to work hard, and begin at the bottom of
the ladder, but I mean to keep my conscience and my religion, and lend a
helping hand to the good cause wherever I can."
"Well, now, my boy, there're only two aids that you need for this--one
is God, and the other is a true, good woman. God you will have, but the
woman--she must be found."
I felt the touch on a sore spot, and so answered, purposely
misunderstanding his meaning. "Yes, I have not to go far for her--my
mother."
"Oh yes, my boy--thank God for her; but Harry, you can't take her away
from this place; her roots have spread here; they are matted and twined
with the very soil; they run under every homestead and embrace every
grave. She is so interwoven with this village that she could not take
root elsewhere, beside that, Harry, look at the clock of life--count the
years, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, and the clock never stops!
Her hair is all white now, and that snow will melt by and by, and she
will be gone upward. God grant I may go first, Harry."
"And I, too," said I, fervently. "I could not live without her."
"You must find one like her, Harry. It is not good for man to be alone;
we all need the motherly, and we must find it in a wife. Do you know
what I think the prettiest story of courtship I ever read? Its the
account of Jacob's marriage with Rebecca, away back in the simple old
times. You remember the ending of it,--'And Isaac brought her into her
mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebecca and she became his wife, and Isaac
was comforted for his mother's death.' There's the philosophy of it," he
added; "it's the mother living again in the wife. The motherly instinct
is in the hearts of all true women, and sooner or later the true wife
becomes a mother to her husband; she guides him, cares for him, teaches
him, and catechises him all in the nicest way possible. Why I'm sure I
never should know how to get along a day without Polly to teach me the
requirings and forbiddens of the commandments; to lecture me for going
out without my muffler, and see that I put on my flannels in the right
time; to insist that I shall take something for my cough, and raise a
rebellion to my going out when there's a north-easter. So much for the
body, and as for the soul-life, I believe it is woman who holds faith in
the world--it is woman behind the wall, casting oil on the fire that
burns brighter and brighter, while the Devil pours on water; and you'll
never get Christianity out of the earth while there's a woman in it. I'd
rather have my wife's and your mother's opinion on the meaning of a text
of Scripture than all the doctors of divinity, and their faith is an
anchor that always holds. Some jackanapes or other I read once, said
every woman wanted a master, and was as forlorn without a husband as a
masterless dog. Its a great, deal truer that every man wants a mother;
men are more forlorn than masterless dogs, a great deal, when no woman
cares for them. Look at the homes single women make for themselves; how
neat, how cosy, how bright with the oil of gladness, and then look at
old bachelor dens! The fact is, women are born comfort-makers, and can
get along by themselves a great deal better than we can."
"Well," said I, "I don't think I shall ever marry. Of course if I could
find a woman like my mother, it would be another thing. But times are
altered--the women of this day are all for flash and ambition, and
money. There are no more such as you used to find in the old days."
"Oh, nonsense, Harry; don't come to me with that sort of talk. Bad sort
for a young man--very. What I want to see in a young fellow is a
resolution to have a good wife and a home of his own as quick as he can
find it. The Roman Catholics weren't so far out of the way when they
said marriage was a sacrament. It is the greatest sacrament of life, and
that old church does yeoman service to humanity in the stand she takes
for Christian marriage. I should call that the most prosperous state
when all the young men and women were well mated and helping one another
according to God's ordinances. You may be sure, Harry, that you can
never be a whole man without a wife."
"Well," I said; "there's time enough for that by and by; if I'm
predestinated I suppose it'll come along when I have my fortune made."
"Don't wait to be rich, Harry. Find a faithful, heroic friend that will
strike hands with you, poor, and begin to build up your nest
together,--that's the way your father and mother did, and who enjoyed
more? That's the way your Aunt Polly and I did, and a good time we have
had of it. There has always been the handful of meal in the barrel and
the little oil in the cruse, and if the way we have always lived is
poverty, all I have to say is, poverty is a pretty nice thing."
"But," said I, bitterly, "you talk of golden ages. There are no such
women now as you found, the women now are mere effeminate dolls of
fashion--all they want is ease and show, and luxury, and they care
nothing who gives it--one man is as good as another if he is only rich."
"Tut, tut, boy! Don't you read your Bible? Away back in Solomon's time,
it's written, 'Who can find a virtuous woman? Her price is above
rubies.' Are rubies found without looking for them, and do diamonds lie
about the street? Now, just attend to my words--brave men make noble
women, and noble women make brave men. Be a true man first, and some day
a true woman will be given you. Yes, a woman whose opinion of you will
hold you up if all the world were against you, and whose 'Well done!'
will be a better thing to come home to, than the senseless shouting of
the world who scream for this thing to-day and that to-morrow."
By this time the horse had turned up the lane, and my mother stood
smiling in the door. I marked the soft white hair that shone like a
moonlight glory round her head, and prayed inwardly that the heavens
would spare her yet a little longer.