The session reached its close. The students were scattered far among
the villages, farms, cities of many states. Some never to return,
having passed from the life of a school into the school of life; some,
before vacation ended, gone with their laughter and vigor into the
silence of the better Teacher.
Over at the dormitory the annual breaking-up of the little band of
Bible students had, as always, been affecting. Calm, cool, bright day
of June! when the entire poor tenement house was fragrant with flowers
brought from commencement; when a south wind sent ripples over the
campus grass; and outside the campus, across the street, the yards were
glowing with roses. Oh, the roses of those young days, how sweet, how
sweet they were! How much sweeter now after the long, cruel, evil
suffering years which have passed and gone since they faded!
The students were dispersed, and David sat at his table by his open
window, writing to his father and mother.
After telling them he had stood well in his classes, and giving some
descriptions of the closing days and ceremonies of the college, for he
knew how interested they would be in reading about these things, he
announced that he was not coming home. He enclosed a part of the funds
still on hand, and requested his father to hire a man in his place to
work on the farm during the summer. He said nothing of his doubts and
troubles, but gave as the reason of his remaining away what indeed the
reason was: that he wished to study during the vacation; it was the
best chance he had ever had, perhaps would ever have; and it was of the
utmost importance to him to settle a great many questions before the
next session of the Bible College opened. His expenses would be small.
He had made arrangements with the wife of the janitor to take charge of
his room and his washing and to give him his meals: his room itself
would not cost him anything, and he did not need any more clothes.
It was hard to stay away from them. Not until separated, had he
realized how dear they were to him. He could not bear even to write
about all that. And he was homesick for the sight of the farm,--the
horses and cows and sheep,--for the sight of Captain. But he must
remain where he was; what he had to do must be done quickly--a great
duty was involved. And they must write to him oftener because he would
need their letters, their love, more than ever now. And so God keep
them in health and bless them. And he was their grateful son, who too
often had been a care to them, who could never forget the sacrifices
they had made to send him to college, and whose only wish was that he
might not cause them any disappointment in the future.
This letter drew a quick reply from his father. He returned the money,
saying that he had done better on the farm than he had expected and did
not need it, and that he had a man employed, his former slave. Sorry as
they were not to see him that summer, still they were glad of his
desire to study through vacation. His own life had not been very
successful; he had tried hard, but had failed. For a longtime now he
had been accepting the failure as best he could. But compensation for
all this were the new interests, hopes, ambitions, which centred in the
life of his son. To see him a minister, a religious leader among
men--that would be happiness enough for him. His family had always been
a religious people. One thing he was already looking forward to: he
wanted his son to preach his first sermon in the neighborhood church
founded by the lad's great-grandfather--that would be the proudest hour
of his life and in the lad's mother's. There were times in the past
when perhaps he had been hard on him, not understanding him; this only
made his wish the greater to aid him now in every way, at any cost.
When they were not talking of him at home, they were thinking of him.
And they blessed God that He had given them such a son. Let him not be
troubled about the future; they knew that he would never disappoint
them.
David sat long immovable before that letter.
One other Bible student remained. On the campus, not far from the
dormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In one
of these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt, shaggy,
middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars, without any
cravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the morning of his
entering college. He, too, was to spend the summer there, having no
means of getting away with his wife and children. Though he sometimes
went off himself, to hold meetings where he could and for what might be
paid him; now preaching and baptizing in the mountains; now back again,
laboring in his shirt-sleeves at the Pentateuch and the elementary
structure of the English language. Such troubles as David's were not
for him; nor science nor doubt. His own age contained him as a green
field might hold a rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul was
a lifeless stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements of
his time as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his own
sublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living book
alone--the Bible.
This middle-aged, childlike man, settled near David as his neighbor,
was forever a reminder to him of the faith he once had had--the faith
of his earliest youth, the faith of his father and mother. Sometimes
when the day's work was done and the sober, still twilights came on,
this reverent soul, sitting with his family gathered about him near the
threshold of his single homeless room,--his oldest boy standing beside
his chair, his wife holding in her lap the sleeping babe she had just
nursed,--would begin to sing. The son's voice joined the father's; the
wife's followed the son's, in their usual hymn:--
"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent word."
Up in his room, a few hundred yards away, the lad that moment might be
trimming his lamp for a little more reading. More than once he waited,
listening in the darkness, to the reliant music of the stalwart, stern
old poem. How devotedly he too had been used to sing it!
That summer through, then, he kept on at the work of trying to settle
things before college reopened--things which involved a great duty.
Where the new thought of the age attacked dogma, Revelation,
Christianity most, there most he read. He was not the only reader. He
was one of a multitude which no man could know or number; for many read
in secret. Ministers of the Gospel read in secret in their libraries,
and locked the books away when their church officers called
unexpectedly. On Sunday, mounting their pulpits, they preached
impassioned sermons concerning faith--addressed to the doubts, ravaging
their own convictions and consciences.
Elders and deacons read and kept the matter hid from their pastors.
Physicians and lawyers read and spoke not a word to their wives and
children. In the church, from highest ecclesiastic and layman, wherever
in the professions a religious, scientific, scholarly mind, there was
felt the central intellectual commotion of those years--the Battle of
the Great Three.
And now summer was gone, the students flocking in, the session
beginning. David reentered his classes. Inwardly he drew back from this
step; yet take any other, throw up the whole matter,--that he could not
do. With all his lifelong religious sense he held on to the former
realities, even while his grasp was loosening.
But this could not endure. University life as a Bible student and
candidate for the ministry, every day and many times every day,
required of him duties which he could not longer conscientiously
discharge; they forced from him expressions regarding his faith which
made it only too plain both to himself and to others how much out of
place he now was.
So the crisis came, as come it must.
Autumn had given place to winter, to the first snows, thawing during
the day, freezing at night. The roofs of the town were partly brown,
partly white; icicles hung lengthening from the eaves. It was the date
on which the university closed for the Christmas holidays--Friday
afternoon preceding. All day through the college corridors, or along
the snow-paths leading to the town, there had been the glad noises of
that wild riotous time: whistle and song and shout and hurrying feet,
gripping hands, good wishes, and good-bys. One by one the sounds had
grown fewer, fainter, and had ceased; the college was left in emptiness
and silence, except in a single lecture room in one corner of the
building, from the windows of which you looked out across the town and
toward the west; there the scene took place.
It was at the door of this room that the lad, having paused a moment
outside to draw a deep, quivering breath, knocked, and being told to
come in, entered, closed the door behind him, and sat down white and
trembling in the nearest chair. About the middle of the room were
seated the professors of the Bible College and his pastor. They rose,
and calling him forward shook hands with him kindly, sorrowfully, and
pointed to a seat before them, resuming their own.
Before them, then, sat the lad, facing the wintry light; and there was
a long silence. Every one knew beforehand what the result would be. It
was the best part of a year since that first interview in the pastor's
study; there had been other interviews--with the pastor, with the
professors. They had done what they could to check him, to bring him
back. They had long been counsellors; now in duty they were
authorities, sitting to hear him finally to the end, that they might
pronounce sentence: that would be the severance of his connection with
the university and his expulsion from the church.
Old, old scene in the history of Man--the trial of his Doubt by his
Faith: strange day of judgment, when one half of the human spirit
arraigns and condemns the other half. Only five persons sat in that
room--four men and a boy. The room was of four bare walls and a
blackboard, with perhaps a map or two of Palestine, Egypt, and the
Roman Empire in the time of Paul. The era was the winter of the year
1868, the place was an old town of the Anglo-Saxon backwoodsmen, on the
blue-grass highlands of Kentucky. But in how many other places has that
scene been enacted, before what other audiences of the accusing and the
accused, under what laws of trial, with what degrees and rigors of
judgment! Behind David, sitting solitary there in the flesh, the
imagination beheld a throng so countless as to have been summoned and
controlled by the deep arraigning eye of Dante alone. Unawares, he
stood at the head of an invisible host, which stretched backward
through time till it could be traced no farther. Witnesses all to that
sublime, indispensable part of man which is his Doubt--Doubt respecting
his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual
half-night of his planet-mind--that shadowed side of his
orbit-life--forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity,
but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak
side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of
the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what
strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra!
Sacred, sacred Doubt of Man. His agony, his searching! which has led
him always onward from more ignorance to less ignorance, from less
truth to more truth; which is the inspiration of his mind, the sorrow
of his heart; which has spoken everywhere in his science, philosophy,
literature, art--in his religion itself; which keeps him humble not
vain, changing not immutable, charitable not bigoted; which attempts to
solve the universe and knows that it does not solve it, but ever seeks
to trace law, to clarify reason, and so to find whatever truth it can.
As David sat before his professors and his pastor, it was one of the
moments that sum up civilization.
Across the room, behind them also, what a throng! Over on that side was
Faith, that radiant part of the soul which directly basks in the light
of God, the sun. There, visible to the eye of imagination, were those
of all times, places, and races, who have sat in judgment on doubters,
actual or suspected. In whatsoever else differing, united in this: that
they have always held themselves to be divinely appointed agents of the
Judge of all the earth: His creatures chosen to punish His creatures.
And so behind those professors, away back in history, were ranged
Catholic popes and Protestant archbishops, and kings and queens,
Protestant and Catholic, and great mediaeval jurists, and mailed
knights and palm-bearing soldiers of the cross, and holy inquisitors
drowning poor old bewildered women, tearing living flesh from flesh as
paper, crushing bones like glass, burning the shrieking human body to
cinders: this in the name of a Christ whose Gospel was mercy, and by
the authority of a God whose law was love. They were all there, tier
after tier, row above row, a vast shadowy colosseum of intent judicial
faces--Defenders of the Faith.
But no inquisitor was in this room now, nor punitive intention, nor
unkind thought. Slowly throughout the emerging life of man this
identical trial has gained steadily in charity and mildness. Looking
backward over his long pathway through bordering mysteries, man himself
has been brought to see, time and again, that what was his doubt was
his ignorance; what was his faith was his error; that things rejected
have become believed, and that things believed have become rejected;
that both his doubt and his faith are the temporary condition of his
knowledge, which is ever growing; and that rend him faith and doubt
ever will, but destroy him, never.
No Smithfield fire, then, no Jesuitical rack, no cup of hemlock, no
thumb-screw, no torture of any kind for David. Still, here was a duty
to be done, an awful responsibility to be discharged in sorrow and with
prayer; and grave good men they were. Blameless was this lad in all
their eyes save in his doubt. But to doubt--was not that the greatest
of sins?
The lad soon grew composed. These judges were still his friends, not
his masters. His masters were the writers of the books in which he
believed, and he spoke for them, for what he believed to be the truth,
so far as man had learned it. The conference lasted through that short
winter afternoon. In all that he said the lad showed that he was full
of many confusing voices: the voices of the new science, the voices of
the new doubt. One voice only had fallen silent in him: the voice of
the old faith.
It had grown late. Twilight was descending on the white campus, on the
snow-capped town. Away in the west, beyond the clustered house-tops,
there had formed itself the solemn picture of a red winter sunset. The
light entered the windows and fell on the lad's face. One last question
had just been asked him by the most venerable and beloved of his
professors--in tones awe-stricken, and tremulous with his own humility,
and with compassion for the erring boy before him,--
"Do you not even believe in God?"
Ah, that question! which shuts the gates of consciousness upon us when
we enter sleep, and sits close outside our eyelids as we waken; which
was framed in us ere we were born, which comes fullest to life in us as
life itself ebbs fastest. That question which exacts of the finite to
affirm whether it apprehends the Infinite, that prodding of the evening
midge for its opinion of the polar star.
"Do you not even believe in God?"
The lad stood up, he whose life until these months had been a prayer,
whose very slumbers had been worship. He stood up, from some
impulse--perhaps the respectful habit of rising when addressed in class
by this professor. At first he made no reply, but remained looking over
the still heads of his elders into that low red sunset sky. How often
had he beheld it, when feeding the stock at frozen twilights. One
vision rose before him now of his boyhood life at home--his hopes of
the ministry--the hemp fields where he had toiled--his father and
mother waiting before the embers this moment, mindful of him. He
recalled how often, in the last year, he had sat upon his bedside at
midnight when all were asleep, asking himself that question:--
"Do I believe in God?"
And now he was required to lay bare what his young soul had been able
to do with that eternal mystery.
He thrust his big coarse hand into his breast-pocket and drew out a
little red morocco Testament which had been given him when he was
received into the congregation. He opened it at a place where it seemed
used to lie apart. He held it before his face, but could not read. At
last, controlling himself, he said to them with dignity, and with the
common honesty which was the life of him:--
"I read you a line which is the best answer I can give just now to your
last question."