FAITH IS THE BASIS OF ALL PROGRESS
Early in June, Dr. Earl received a letter which puzzled him not a
little. It was complimentary in the extreme, and yet something back of
it made him say, "'For it is not an open enemy that hath done this.'"
The letter asked him to speak on "Mental Therapeutics" before a meeting
of one of the great medical societies of the city of New York; stated
that there would be no other speaker, but there would be an open
discussion after his address, and hoped he would find time to comply
with the request. Once he started to write his acceptance; twice he
actually wrote, declining, and then tore up both letters. It was true
that he was crowded for time, but he could make time, and in his heart
he knew perfectly well that he would have done so without a thought, but
for the unexpected complications which had occurred with Alice Bell.
Already he had heard one or two thinly veiled sneers at the result of
this much-lauded case. He had met Towers and Hershell, both of them
eminent in the profession, but the day before, and their greetings had
been singularly cool; once or twice at the club they both frequented
Morris had been little short of insulting, but his well-known
infatuation for Silvia Holland would account for that. A reporter from
one of the less reputable dailies had asked for an interview, and had
written an article which barely escaped being libelous. There were not
wanting those in the profession who openly denounced him as a "fakir."
The longer he thought about it, the more unwilling he was to act upon
his own judgment alone, and so he turned to the one unfailing counsellor
of his life, his sister Hilda. With him, to will was to do, so within an
hour he was in his sister's drawing-room, and not five minutes later
Silvia Holland entered and was warmly greeted by Mrs. Ramsey. The day
was dismal and the rain was descending in a steady downpour that gave no
promise of ever ceasing; it was late afternoon, and Mrs. Ramsey said
cordially, "Let us have tea in my sitting-room; nobody else will come
such a day as this, and it will be so much more cosy. I distrust from
his air of supernatural gravity that my brother has something on his
mind----"
"Then I will be _de trop_" said Miss Holland. "I will amuse myself in
the library until you are at liberty. I was awfully glad to get your
'phone message to come over, for it's a wretched day, and I was
wondering where I should go for tea as I came up town from my office.
Have your conference and never mind about me."
"Indeed," said Jack eagerly, "if you would be so kind as to give me your
opinion also on the matter I have called to consult my sister about, you
would confer a great favor," and even as he spoke he knew it was for her
quick comprehension he had been unconsciously wishing all the time.
She laughed and assented graciously, and they followed Mrs. Ramsey to
her own charming little room, as dainty and distinctive as its owner.
Upon the tea-tray there were cigarettes, and Dr. Earl rather wondered
whether Silvia would accept, but she shook her head. "No," she said
lightly, "I emulate men's virtues, not their vices; maybe my nerves may
need alternate sedatives and stimulants some day, but as yet I hardly
know that I have any."
Hilda lit one rather languidly. "My doctor says it isn't so much nerves
as lack of nerve with me; I don't know what you call it, but I confess I
find the smoke-wreaths pleasant; you won't join me either, Jack? Well,
let us have the story in all its native simplicity and be sure you
nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice."
"I am told," he said, "that no well-bred New Yorker makes literary
allusions, and that to quote Shakespeare is to relegate oneself to his
century; however, this is the problem," and then he read them the
letter.
Hilda was openly pleased. "Why not?" she said. "It seems to me a very
courteous and appreciative note, and I should think you would enjoy
speaking before that kind of an audience, all of them picked men,
trained and scientific and able to take in shades of meaning and
distinctions that are wasted on the laity. Unless you are keeping
something back, I should say, accept by all means. But are you?"
He paused. "In just a moment, Hilda. How does it strike you, Miss
Holland?"
She held out her hand for the note, and read and then reread it, and her
forehead contracted. "I wonder," she said to herself, "whether this is
what Orrin meant when he said the profession would furnish Dr. Earl
enough rope--I meant to ask him what he did mean, but I forgot it."
Aloud she said, "Isn't Dr. Morris one of the directors of this society?
He's a fellow alumnus of yours; it doesn't seem as if he would be likely
to show you an affront, does it?"
"That's just the point," answered Dr. Earl. "Is it a case of 'mine own
familiar friend'?"
His sister looked at him quizzically. "When it comes to literary
allusion, Jack," she said, "New York might permit Shakespeare, but I
assure you it wouldn't stand for the psalmist. Do you really think it is
a plan to get you into some false position or to embarrass you with
criticisms or queries not made in good faith?"
"That is exactly what I want to know," he said.
"And what if it is?" asked Silvia.
He colored. "You mean I ought to be willing to bear testimony to my
beliefs whether they meet with acceptance or not?"
Hilda blew a ring of smoke ceilingwards. "That's the trouble with these
suffragettes," she said reminiscently. "They never question the
advisability of 'casting pearls before swine.'"
Jack laughed and Silvia turned on her reproachfully. "Hilda! That isn't
fair; haven't you just said yourself that this would be a picked
audience? Suppose a little clique of them have arranged the meeting with
the intention of heckling the speaker? The bulk of them will be there in
good faith, anxious to learn, willing to listen to your brother's
account of his experiences, and profit by them. If he can't gain a
respectful hearing there, where will he gain it?"
"Forgive me for being biblical to-night," Hilda answered. "I can't seem
to get away from the suggestion; you know it was the high priests and
the rulers of the synagogue that stirred up their followers to cry,
'Crucify Him, crucify Him!' And times have changed more than people. The
poor will hear gladly enough of healing that is to be had without money
and without price, and operations that may be avoided by simply keeping
well, but my experience is that the fetish of the professional man is a
jealous god, given to heresy hunting, and bowing down and worshiping at
the shrine of 'regularity.' They want to preserve the _status quo_ at
any cost."
"Yes," said Silvia bluntly, "even after it has long been lost. They are
like people who might discover an ostrich egg-shell after the bird was
half grown, and go chasing after it, trying to put it back inside the
shell. I think it is Emerson who says that there are quantities of
people who are always trying to become settled, whereas our only
salvation consists in being constantly unsettled. I think the English
women are infinitely braver and finer in their attitude on the suffrage
question than we are. What I feel, Dr. Earl, is this: we have come to a
time when nothing is really worth while unless it is worth fighting for.
There are other worth while things, of course, for the laboratory man or
woman, but for those of us who are in the thick of the fight, who want
to do things _now_, it is necessary that we should be willing to do
battle for our beliefs."
"But is that the way to win?" asked the doctor. "We've all heard about
catching flies with molasses, to use a homely simile."
"Yes," responded Silvia; "the more molasses the more flies. No, the old
methods are gone or are going. Do you suppose anything would do the
suffrage cause as much good in this country as clubbing a few old women
who want respectfully to present a petition to the other old women in
Congress? A few years ago a petition was presented, signed by a million
women, and a jocose member rolled it down the aisle with his foot,
saying it might as well be signed by mice! But just let them try the
English methods and every State in the Union would enfranchise its women
just as soon as they could get a popular vote on it." She stopped short.
"Oh, I beg your pardon, doctor, I didn't mean to give you a suffrage
lecture."
"You are not," he said. "At least, what I understand is that you are
trying to make me see that, the spirit of the age is the militant
spirit, that does not wait to have its own presented to it, but takes it
wherever it finds it." She nodded and he went on: "I think that is true,
but with this difference between the illustration you cite and the case
in point. You women must be passionate enthusiasts to win, because the
thing you want is concrete and imminent and personal. I have no
intention of setting up as a _vade mecum_, founding a new cult,
proselyting or even preaching my own doctrines; in the first place I
shall change them as I discover better ones, or when they fail to bring
results, and in the second I shall be too busy practicing my theories to
find time to exploit them."
"There you are wrong," said his sister. "When a man like Jenner comes
along that is the time for practicing, but when smallpox has been rooted
out and tuberculosis forgotten, men will still read what Socrates had to
say of immortality and the sermon on the mount. When you hear people
belittle the written and the spoken Word, it becomes us to remember that
'In the beginning the Word was God,' and all that we know of past
civilizations is the word they have left behind, painted on their stony
walls or burned in a brick to say, 'After me cometh a builder. Tell him
I too have known.'"
"But, my dear sister," Jack answered, "don't you think assuming the role
of the teacher may be just a trifle, only a trifle, presumptuous on my
part?"
"I don't quite know what your new views are," she answered.
"They are not new," he said. "In fact they are most of them of such
hoary antiquity that they are lost in the mists that brooded over the
face of the deep. It is only the application that is new. Even that has
always been understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to
have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of
making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers
they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a
glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the basis of all the
great world religions, whether it be Buddha's 'Who hurteth another
hurteth himself,' or Christ's commandment, 'Love one another'; the Yogi
looking first at the prince and then at the pauper and saying, 'I am
that,' or Father Damien going into voluntary exile for the sake of the
souls of the wretched lepers. The Prince of Peace preached the doctrine
of spiritual inspiration, and the King of Conquerors said 'Imagination
rules the world.' Jesus or Napoleon--both knew that back of the visible
man himself is the thought of the man, which controls him, and other men
through him, if it possesses power and vitality and truth."
"Then it is a kind of new thought?" asked Hilda.
"Rather a renaissance of old thought. The modern quest of the Grail is
not for the crystal cup that held the holy elements, but for the divine
life itself, the principle that inspires men to action. The philosopher
of our day is not a hermit, theorizing about vague abstractions, but
vitally alive to the problems that confront this day and generation, and
modern psychology is changing all the methods of the great processes of
existence. Education, medicine, law, are all in process of
transformation. Grandsons of the men who denounced Mesmer as a charlatan
thronged the clinics of Charcot."
"Yes," said Silvia, "and within the next decade Muensterberg will have
compelled a complete remodeling of our forms of legal procedure. No
attorney worth his salt would undertake to ignore the apparatus devised
by the psychologist, and the time is nearly gone by when, as he says,
courts will prefer to listen to the 'science' of the handwriting
experts, rather than permit the examination of a witness by methods in
accord with the exact work of the psychologist."
"That is true," assented Jack, "and not the least gratifying part of the
whole matter is that it isn't the unimportant who are the ones to speak
respectfully of the changing ideal; in fact, the smaller a man's
calibre the more sure you can be that he will cling to the established
order. It is only very great men who have the courage of their
intuitions long enough to prove them. Muensterberg can afford to say what
he thinks. Now if I go to this meeting and tell these men that 'there
are cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith
exists in its coming,' what do you think they will say?"
Hilda smiled. "Most of them will suspect you of quoting 'Science and
Health.' If they accuse you of it, read them the rest of the paragraph."
"What is it?" asked Silvia eagerly.
"I can find it in a moment," said Hilda, going to the bookshelves, and
taking down a modest olive-colored volume. "Here it is. 'And where faith
in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which
should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the lowest
kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the
logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our
lives.' That is from the late Professor James, who is said to have been
the profoundest thinker this country has ever produced, and he has said
much more equally startling to those little minds that, like full
bottles, have no room for more."
Dr. Earl threw back his head and laughed; his quandary was over, his
course settled. He turned to Silvia with a genial smile. "Score one more
victory for the Feminists," he said. "I wonder if there ever has been a
time, anywhere on earth, where women were actually and aggressively
noncombatants. The Spartan woman handing over her husband's shield is
typical. Whenever and wherever there has been a cause worth fighting
for, worth dying for--always and forever we can see the figure of the
woman, shield on arm and javelin in hand, standing at the door of the
slothful warrior's tent, calling him to action. Sometimes the eternal
feminine leads on, but very frequently, I regret to say, it has to get
back and drive, and sometimes if it did not kneel and push I fear the
wheels of progress would not revolve at all; that we do go on, slowly
and uncertainly, it is true, but that we go on at all, is due to the
woman soul that will not let us waste our years in the wilderness when
the land of promise is so near at hand. Ladies, I go!"
He rose as if to make good his words, but Hilda entered a peremptory
negative, and it ended by his staying to dinner and spending a long and
utterly delightful evening, which became in a sense the beginning of
what he felt was a new epoch in his life. This was the understanding,
the fellowship, the _bon camaraderie_ that gives existence its zest and
permits one to dream of life eternal without a horror of impending
weariness and boredom.