THE DOCTOR.
IT is seldom that man and woman come together in intimate association,
unless influences are at work more subtle and mysterious than the
subjects of them dream. Even in cases where the strongest ruling force
of the two sexes seems out of the question, there is still something
peculiar and insidious in their relationship. A fatherly old gentleman,
who undertakes the care of a sprightly young girl, finds, to his
astonishment, that little Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him.
Grave professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their female
pupils just as they give them to the coarser sex; and more than once
has the fable of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ been acted over by the most
unlikely performers.
The Doctor was a philosopher, a metaphysician, a philanthropist, and
in the highest and most earnest sense a minister of good on earth. The
New England clergy had no sentimental affectation of sanctity that
segregated them from wholesome human relations; and, consequently, our
good Doctor had always resolved, in a grave and thoughtful spirit,
at a suitable time in his worldly affairs, to choose unto himself a
helpmeet. Love, as treated of in romances, he held to be a foolish and
profane matter, unworthy the attention of a serious and reasonable
creature. All the language of poetry on this subject was to him an
unknown tongue. He contemplated the entrance on married life somewhat
in this wise:—That at a time and place suiting, he should look out
unto himself a woman of a pleasant countenance and of good repute, a
zealous, earnest Christian, and well skilled in the items of household
management, whom, accosting as a stranger and pilgrim to a better life,
he should loyally and lovingly entreat, as Isaac did Rebekah, to come
under the shadow of his tent and be a helpmeet unto him in what yet
remained of this mortal journey. But straitened circumstances, and the
unsettled times of the Revolution, in which he had taken an earnest and
zealous part, had delayed to a late bachelorhood the fulfilment of this
resolution.
When once received under the shadow of Mrs. Scudder’s roof, and within
the provident sphere of her unfailing housekeeping, all material
necessity for an immediate choice was taken away; for he was in exactly
that situation dearest to every scholarly and thoughtful man, in which
all that pertained to the outward life appeared to rise under his hand
at the moment he wished for it, without his knowing how or why.
He was not at the head of a prosperous church and society, rich and
well-to-do in the world,—but, as the pioneer leader of a new theology,
in a country where theology was the all-absorbing interest, he had to
breast the reaction that ever attends the advent of new ideas. His
pulpit talents, too, were unattractive. His early training had been
all logical, not in the least æsthetic; for, like the ministry of his
country generally, he had been trained always to think more of what
he should say than of how he should say it. Consequently, his style,
though not without a certain massive greatness, which always comes from
largeness of nature, had none of those attractions by which the common
masses are beguiled into thinking. He gave only the results of thought,
not its incipient processes; and the consequence was, that few could
follow him. In like manner, his religious teachings were characterized
by an ideality so high as quite to discourage ordinary virtue.
There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human
affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love,
through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes,
till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image
of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of
Paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where
the soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience
of devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and
Beauty of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type,
the distant shadow. This highest step, this saintly elevation, which
but few selectest spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to
which the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence
and strung every chord of human love, for which this world is one long
discipline, for which the soul’s human education is constantly varied,
for which it is now torn by sorrow, now flooded by joy, to which all
its multiplied powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant
aspiration,—this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by our
sage as the _all_ of religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder
but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendour, said to
the world, ‘Go up thither and be saved!’
Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional surrender
to the Infinite, there was nothing meritorious,—because, if _that_
were commanded, every moment of refusal was rebellion. Every prayer,
not based on such consecration, he held to be an insult to the Divine
Majesty;—the reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of life,
the performance of the duties of man to man, being, without this, the
deeds of a creature in conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign,
were all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be preached to the
sinner, but his ability and obligation to rise immediately to this
height.
It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort should seem to many
unendurable, and that the multitude should desert the preacher with
the cry, ‘This is an hard saying; who can hear it?’ The young and
gay were wearied by the dryness of metaphysical discussions which to
them were as unintelligible as a statement of the last results of the
mathematician to the child commencing the multiplication-table. There
remained around him only a select circle,—shrewd, hard thinkers, who
delighted in metaphysical subtleties,—deep-hearted, devoted natures,
who sympathized with the unworldly purity of his life, his active
philanthropy and untiring benevolence,—courageous men, who admired his
independence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinions,—and
those unperceiving, dull, good people who are content to go to church
anywhere as convenience and circumstances may drift them,—people who
serve, among the keen-feeling and thinking portion of the world, much
the same purpose as adipose matter in the human system, as a soft
cushion between the nerves of feeling and the muscles of activity.
There was something affecting in the pertinacity with which the good
Doctor persevered in saying his say to his discouraging minority of
hearers. His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged during the
Revolutionary struggle, was dilapidated and forlorn,—fireless in
winter, and in summer admitting a flood of sun and dust through those
great windows which formed so principal a feature in those first
efforts of Puritan architecture.
Still, grand in his humility, he preached on,—and as a soldier never
asks why, but stands at apparently the most useless post, so he went
on from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with the reflection
that no one could think more meanly of his ministrations than he did
himself. ‘I am like Moses only in not being eloquent,’ he said in his
simplicity. ‘My preaching is barren and dull, my voice is hard and
harsh; but then the Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me. He
fed Elijah once through a raven, and he may feed some poor wandering
soul through me.’
The only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that the
elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was
preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living, by his visitations
to homes of poverty and sorrow, by his searching out of the lowly
African slaves, his teaching of those whom no one else in those days
had thought of teaching, and by the grand humanity, outrunning his age,
in which he protested against the then admitted system of slavery and
the slave-trade. But when, rising in the pulpit, he followed trains of
thought suited only to the desk of the theological lecture-room, he did
it blindly, following that law of self-development by which minds of
a certain amount of fervour _must_ utter what is in them, whether men
will hear or whether they will forbear.
But the place where our Doctor was happiest was his study. There he
explored, and wandered, and read, and thought, and lived a life as
wholly ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.
And could _Love_ enter a reverend doctor’s study, and find his way into
a heart empty and swept of all those shreds of poetry and romance in
which he usually finds the material of his incantations? Even so;—but
he came so thoughtfully, so reverently, with so wise and cautious a
footfall, that the good Doctor never even raised his spectacles to
see who was there. The first that he knew, poor man, he was breathing
an air of strange and subtile sweetness,—from what Paradise he never
stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great, rugged elm, with
all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which has stood
cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful
of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its naked
strength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April there
is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,—a whispering of
knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from bough to bough
with a warm and gentle life; and though the old elm knows it not, a new
creation is at hand. Just so, ever since the good man had lived at Mrs.
Scudder’s, and had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a richer life
seemed to have coloured his thoughts,—his mind seemed to work with a
pleasure never felt before.
Whoever looked on the forehead of the good Doctor must have seen the
squareness of ideality giving marked effect to its outline. As yet
ideality had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible, leading to
subtile refinements of argument and exalted ideas of morals. But there
was lying in him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those artistic
feelings and perceptions which are awakened and developed only by the
touch of beauty. Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great Duomo
of Florence, where Giotto’s Campanile rises like the slender stalk of
a celestial lily, where varied marbles and rainbow glass and gorgeous
paintings and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood, the
soul’s reminiscences of the bygone glories of its pristine state, his
would have been a soul as rounded and full in its sphere of faculties
as that of Da Vinci or Michael Angelo. But of all that he was as
ignorant as a child; and the first revelation of his dormant nature
was to come to him through the face of woman,—that work of the Mighty
Master which is to be found in all lands and ages.
What makes the love of a great mind something fearful in its inception
is, that it is often the unsealing of a hitherto undeveloped portion of
a large and powerful being: the woman may or may not seem to other eyes
adequate to the effect produced, but the man cannot forget her, because
with her came a change which makes him for ever a different being. So
it was with our friend. A woman it was that was destined to awaken in
him all that consciousness which music, painting, poetry awaken in more
evenly-developed minds; and it is the silent breathing of her creative
presence that is even now creating him anew, while as yet he knows it
not.
He never thought, this good old soul, whether Mary were beautiful or
not; he never even knew that he looked at her; nor did he know why it
was that the truths of his theology, when uttered by her tongue, had
such a wondrous beauty as he never felt before. He did not know why it
was, that, when she silently sat by him, copying tangled manuscript for
the press, as she sometimes did, his whole study seemed so full of some
divine influence, as if, like St. Dorothea, she had worn in her bosom,
invisibly, the celestial roses of Paradise. He recorded honestly in his
diary what marvellous freshness of spirit the Lord had given him, and
how he seemed to be uplifted in his communings with heaven, without
once thinking from the robes of what angel this sweetness had exhaled.
On Sundays, when he saw good Mrs. Jones asleep, and Simon Brown’s hard,
sharp eyes, and Deacon Twitchel mournfully rocking to and fro, and his
wife handing fennel to keep the children awake, his eye glanced across
to the front gallery, where one earnest young face, ever kindling
with feeling and bright with intellect, followed on his way, and he
felt uplifted and comforted. On Sunday mornings, when Mary came out
of her little room, in clean white dress, with her singing-book and
psalm-book in her hands, her deep eyes solemn from recent prayer, he
thought of that fair and mystical bride, the Lamb’s wife, whose union
with her Divine Redeemer in a future millenial age was a frequent and
favourite subject of his musings; yet he knew not that this celestial
bride, clothed in fine linen, clean and white, veiled in humility and
meekness, bore in his mind those earthly features. No, he never had
dreamed of that! But only after she had passed by, that mystical vision
seemed to him more radiant, more easy to be conceived.
It is said that, if a grape-vine be planted in the neighbourhood of
a well, its roots, running silently under ground, wreathe themselves
in a network around the cold clear waters, and the vine’s putting on
outward greenness and unwonted clusters and fruit is all that tells
where every root and fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So
those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in which, with unheeded
quietness, every thought and fibre of our life twines gradually around
some human soul, to us the unsuspected well-spring of our being.
Fearful it is, because so often the vine must be uprooted, and all its
fibres wrenched away; but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it
transfigured by a new and beautiful life!
There is nothing in life more beautiful than that trancelike quiet
dawn which precedes the rising of love in the soul. When the whole
being is pervaded imperceptibly and tranquilly by another being, and
we are happy, we know not and ask not why, the soul is then receiving
all and asking nothing. At a later day she becomes self-conscious, and
then come craving exactions, endless questions,—the whole world of the
material comes in with its hard counsels and consultations, and the
beautiful trance fades for ever.
Of course all this is not so to _you_, my good friends, who read it
without the most distant idea what it can mean; but there are people in
the world to whom it has meant and will mean much, and who will see in
the present happiness of our respectable friend something even ominous
and sorrowful.
It had not escaped the keen eye of the mother how quickly and
innocently the good Doctor was absorbed by her daughter, and thereupon
had come long trains of practical reflections.
The Doctor, though not popular indeed as a preacher, was a noted man in
his age. Her deceased husband had regarded him with something of the
same veneration which might have been accorded to a divine messenger,
and Mrs. Scudder had received and kept this veneration as a precious
legacy. Then, although not handsome, the Doctor had decidedly a grand
and imposing appearance. There was nothing common or insignificant
about him. Indeed, it had been said, that, when, just after the
declaration of peace, he walked through the town in the commemorative
procession side by side with General Washington, the minister, in the
majesty of his gown, bands, cocked hat, and full flowing wig, was
thought by many to be the more majestic and personable figure of the
two.
In those days, the minister united in himself all those ideas of
superior position and cultivation with which the theocratic system of
the New England community had invested him. Mrs. Scudder’s notions of
social rank could reach no higher than to place her daughter on the
throne of such pre-eminence.
Her Mary, she pondered, was no common girl. In those days it was a
rare thing for young persons to devote themselves to religion or make
any professions of devout life. The church, or that body of people who
professed to have passed through a divine regeneration, was almost
entirely confined to middle-aged and elderly people, and it was looked
upon as a singular and unwonted call of divine grace when young persons
came forward to attach themselves to it. When Mary, therefore, at quite
an early age, in all the bloom of her youthful beauty, arose, according
to the simple and impressive New England rite, to consecrate herself
publicly to a religious life, and to join the company of professing
Christians, she was regarded with a species of deference amounting
even to awe. Had it not been for the childlike, unconscious simplicity
of her manners, the young people of her age would have shrunk away
from her, as from one entirely out of their line of thought and
feeling; but a certain natural and innocent playfulness and amiable
self-forgetfulness made her a general favourite.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Scudder knew no young man whom she deemed worthy to
have and hold a heart which she prized so highly. As to James, he stood
at double disadvantage, because, as her cousin’s son, he had grown up
from childhood under her eye, and all those sins and iniquities into
which gay and adventurous youngsters will be falling had come to her
knowledge. She felt kindly to the youth; she wished him well; but as
to giving him her Mary!—the very suggestion made her dislike him. She
was quite sure he must have tried to beguile her—he must have tampered
with her feelings to arouse in her pure and well-ordered mind so much
emotion and devotedness as she had witnessed.
How encouraging a Providence, then, was it that he was gone to sea for
three years!—how fortunate that Mary had been prevented in any way
from committing herself with him!—how encouraging that the only man in
those parts, in the least fitted to appreciate her, seemed so greatly
pleased and absorbed in her society!—how easily might Mary’s dutiful
reverence be changed to a warmer sentiment, when she should find that
so great a man could descend from his lofty thoughts to think of her!
In fact, before Mrs. Scudder had gone to sleep the first night after
James’s departure, she had settled upon the house where the minister
and his young wife were to live, had reviewed the window-curtains and
bed-quilts for each room, and glanced complacently at an improved
receipt for wedding-cake, which might be brought out to glorify a
certain occasion!