comet’s tail of public opinion attached to us. We leave ridiculous
caricatures of ourselves along the way, which illustrated tragedies in
our lives at the time. Later we come upon these records and pictures
and are rarely ever pleased. But somebody has kept them for you, and
somebody will remind you of them one day when you are sitting on your
pinnacle.
I have been painfully reminded of such things, such as the time in
my early school days when I wore the wrong little girl’s bonnet and
came home with boogers in my hair, the frightful ordeal my head passed
through, and mother’s tears. She was a woman who made mountains of her
mole-hills and then climbed them, dragging me, miserable, after her.
I lived a very sensational life with her morally on this account. I
remember the almost fainting state of humiliation I fell in on this
occasion, because it seemed I was the only child in the whole history
of her family that had ever contracted these disgraceful insects. I
have also been obliged to recall how I learned to play cards under the
schoolhouse, never having seen such things before, nor dreaming that
they were the devil’s own deck of sins. This business lasted a week,
and I cleaned up all the available property of my companions, chiefly
slate pencils. Then one of the heaviest losers virtuously betrayed me
to my grandfather, a stern old man who knew more than I did about the
iniquitous gift of gambling in my immediate family.
There was a terrible scene, and I was obliged to stand beside the
marble-top center table in the parlor, lay my hand on the Bible and
swear solemnly never to play cards again. I have kept this vow. The
little girl who betrayed me is a grandmother now, an exemplary woman
who indulges in nothing worse than a social game of bridge.
I might easily have forgotten these and many other diminishing
incidents of my childhood but for the fact that they are treasured
in the archives of the family with parsimonious care. If you wish
to collect complimentary material for a record of yourself, never
appeal to your relations. They may be proud of you as an asset to the
family name, but they have a gift for remembering your gawky period
privately, the follies and faults you committed and have forgotten.
You may have come up in the world with a laurel on your brow, but if
you go back home forty years later wearing two laurels on your brow,
and a noble expression, they will miss the point. What you are only
serves to remind them of the little snub-nosed girl you used to be.
They are determined to remember that you are dust. No matter how well
you conduct yourself, you cannot fix their attention on your virtues or
your fame, but they remember how you looked in a long-tailed ruffled
basque and full skirt when you were eight years old. Or how you grew up
to be very sarcastic, and the impudent thing you said to the Baptist
preacher who wanted to proselyte you just after you were converted,
meaning that the sting of my tongue had not been changed by conversion.
I do not think they mean any harm. They are simply keeping you where
you belong in the family no matter where you belong in literature.
Still, I would have preferred not to have become such a surprise to
these people who knew me in the beginning. It does seem queer that none
of them suspected the kind of youngster I really was. I could write a
very serviceable anthology on family relations; but it is wiser not to
do so, because some of them are bound to survive me and have the last
word. It would be truthful but misleading.
XVI
‘BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS’
The older I grow the more beautiful and precious life seems to me.
The time will come, I know, when there will be nothing else to pray
for except life and everlasting life. Give me that and an even break
between joys and vicissitudes, the same right I have here to choose
goodness, and I would cheerfully risk existence longer than a pious
saint could stand with folded wings singing in heaven. But I know very
little about this. Maybe I shall be changed when my corruption puts
on incorruption, acclimated to all this music and brightness and the
high level of perfect goodness. In the meantime, surely the Lord will
respect my honesty in clinging to my human feelings, since I am subject
to them according to His will.
I do not know how it is, but there is a doctrine which teaches
damnation like consequences in all the churches with which I
am familiar, either by election or predestination--terms which
distinctly imply the exclusion from salvation of those not elected or
predestined. I can find no Scripture in the Bible that justifies these
interpretations without giving the passage a theological twist. The
Methodist church, which makes such generous provision for salvaging
and saving those who fall from grace, is not without blame in this
matter. It covers the whole ground for the doctrines of election and
predestined damnation, or salvation as the case may be, with the
doctrine of apostasy. The only difference is that an apostate chooses
his own fate and is not predestined to it from the foundation of the
world. This is only apparently putting the blame where it belongs. The
threat hidden beneath is that the Lord will stand just so much, then
His spirit ceases to strive with a man. When you think about it, this
is the worst fate of all. What is to defend a person highly sensitized
spiritually from the perpetual fear of being forsaken in his sins?
I had my first lesson in theology very early--religion is something
else. If you have the mind to believe, the Scriptures are singularly
clear; but only a student and a scholar can make heads and tails of
theology. It is a sort of puzzle the wavering minds of men have made
from the Word of God, to the end that sinners have been exalted by
a creed, saints burned at the stake for the sake of a doctrine, and
thousands obliged to flee from one country to another to save their
necks and their liberty of conscience.
Maybe all that was for the best. Certainly, if you give it time, the
worst turns out for the best.
Mother was the kind of Methodist who could afford to believe without
much personal anxiety in this doctrine. She was a truly good woman,
with an Old Testament mind. Somewhere along the way she warned me
of the danger. She impressed me with the fact that if I hardened my
heart the spirit would cease to strive with me. The time came when God
abandoned the willful sinner and left him to his fate. I went around
with this red-hot coal of fire on my spiritual back for a long time.
I acquired habits of thought then that worked havoc with my peace
for half a lifetime. I have never entirely escaped the fear that I
may turn out to be an apostate after all. It seizes upon me like a
malady. I am troubled by the realization that the spirit does not seem
to strive with me as it did when I was younger. This is a fearfully
lonely feeling, and not rational. But sanity, in my opinion, is an
achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who
were not dunces.
I was finally soundly converted and joined the church. At the time
that experience seemed more miraculous than it does now; I have been
born again so many times since. First I had to adjust myself to the
heavenly mind. Then I must adjust myself to the ministry of my husband.
Finally, after his death, I had to be born again to the world, capable
of dealing with it sensibly and honorably. My experience is that this
last requires more divine inspiration than being a private Christian
protected by all the defenses that marriage and religion raise about a
woman’s life.
XVII
THE WORKING OF LOVE
When I was nine years old I remember a certain thing that happened. I
was sitting somewhere behind the old field schoolhouse with three other
little girls. We were making wishes and telling our fortunes by pulling
the petals from daisies. I made a wish and tried it out by the daisy
petals. But I would not tell what it was.
‘I know,’ said one little girl.
‘You never could guess,’ I retorted.
She bent over and whispered, ‘You wished for a husband!’
It turned out that we had all wished for husbands. We were the
simplest, most innocent of little creatures, at the doll-mothering,
playhouse stage of development, totally ignorant of love and lovers.
But we felt the need of husbands, as, I suppose, the Eastern Hemisphere
might have longed for the Western Hemisphere to make the world
complete. We felt incomplete.
The florescence of nature came to me as it does to all youth,
unbeknowingly. What I remember about that is the quantities of romantic
poetry I consumed, practicing at the same time a very strong virginal
antagonism toward young men.
At last love and the lover did come to me. I have written all the
experience out in another place, and of my marriage at the age of
seventeen.
Love does something to the mind. But it is something that you cannot
use so long as it lasts as a vital part of your experience. During the
first ten years of my married life it seemed to close the intellectual
pores of my mind. I lived according to that definition of faith which
says it is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen.’ I passed through many joys, poverty, fear, and great
tribulations according to that ritual of one sentence. I did not think
in the terms of ideas, but only in the terms of love. I was guided
entirely by my husband’s mind, which was one you may say literally
stricken by the Holy Spirit. He was a preacher and made only one use of
his mind, that of finding God and teaching sinners the way of salvation.
This was not as you may suppose a drab and monotonous existence, but
one filled with strange and lofty experiences.
I was destined to discover that mother’s ideas of religion were coldly
platonic as compared with the passionate fervor of my circuit rider in
his devotion to God. Mother believed in behaving yourself and keeping
the Commandments and walking according to the ordinances of the church
to which she belonged. He believed in literally living the life of
Jesus Christ--and could not do it. This brought on the struggle that
lasted for him more than twenty years. I tried to keep up with him. The
first time he fasted and prayed all day after we were married, I fasted
also, but could not pray that long. Protracted prayers are a mystery
to me. I can simply fall upon my knees and let that be a prayer any
time. What is the good of words to God? They are symbols we use to one
another because we neither know nor are known to one another as He
knows us.
This was the last time I ever fasted, because at the end of the day I
was exhausted, nervous and in no Christian mood.
I cannot tell in years how long it took me to do it, but I finally
adjusted myself about my husband like a small protesting world and so
stood the siege. Love held us as close together as if we had one heart
in common. But I do not remember that we ever had the same mind about
anything. The point at last with me was to get mine disentangled from
the bondage of his brave, beautiful, but impractical religious beliefs.
I never succeeded. All these years after his death I am still more
conscious of the truth that led him than of my own right mind. I am
still beholden to his God; I have never got round to serving my own God
with a free mind and a comfortable, cheerful spirit. I must fall into a
state of anguish once in so often, make sacrifices that do not ease the
pain, and go about wondering where the witness of my spirit is. I have
the feeling sometimes that at last I may be dragged through the gates
of heaven, spent, woeful, and humble, by the very power of his spirit;
that I shall not stride in with my hat on and my head up, bearing a
good conscience with me in token of a well-spent life.
If you have been born in the twentieth century and have a good deal
of human dust sticking to your soul, if you really love the world,
remembering that God made it and blessed it, as others think they love
only Heaven; if you like human beings, good and bad, better than you do
saints--it is a queer feeling to know that you are forever involved in
a mediæval religion of asceticism, sacrifice, and sufferings.
By this time it is my very nature to work up hardships and great
spiritual struggles for myself which only involve me deeper and higher
in the will of my husband’s God--all the time remembering the child I
used to be, so sure of a kinder God, so peacefully at home beneath His
kind heavens. It is a queer situation which will end very creditably, I
suppose, with my funeral.
XVIII
VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES
I was eleven years younger than my husband, being really in the
plastic period of adolescence. He was the gentlest of men, but he
had a brilliant and mature mind, a queer temple of intellectual
loveliness with pure classical lines. He did his thinking as a master
architect does his drawing, with delicacy and precision. He was never
overbearing, but the elegance, sweetness, and sincerity of his mind
confounded my younger wits. I supposed that a man who could think like
that must be correct in his conclusions, and for something like ten
years I surrendered my own mind and left him to do our thinking. Most
of it was pious, but always informed with that effulgence of the spirit
peculiar to the rarer saints. My impression now is that I became a
very good young person, by ear, so to speak, and that I was strangely
stupid. The mental background I had acquired from much ravenous
reading before my marriage faded. I forgot Tasso’s great poetry and
settled down on the hillside of a mountain circuit with Lundy and
the beatitudes. Maybe this was good for me spiritually, but it was
diminishing mentally, which, in my opinion, was never meant to be the
effect of any Scriptures upon the mind.
Lundy was not a practical man spiritually. I remember distinctly how
determined he was to remain poor in spirit that he might become one
of those legitimate heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. I imitated his
poverty here with the same artless sincerity a child imitates an older
person, though I could never put much feeling into the idea of being
poor in spirit. The effect upon him was that with his nature elegant to
the point of fastidiousness, and his scholarly mind, he walked humbly
hand in hand with the meanest of his flock, making himself literally
one of the least of them.
It was all wrong. I call your attention to the fact that Jesus went up
into a mountain and set Him above the multitude before He began that
great Sermon on the Mount. And when He finished it and came down the
great multitude followed Him. I do not suppose He was jostled by that
crowd. He was apart and far beyond them, and so held Himself there and
everywhere else. It will not do to be intimately poor in spirit with
people who have no sense of your meaning. If you do they will keep you
poorer than the Scriptures require both in spirit and fact.
Lundy was the same way about that beatitude which recommends those
that mourn for they shall be comforted. We were rich in love and peace
and were being as good as it is possible for human beings to live,
but he would mourn in spite of everything for his transgressions, any
transgression he could remember. He was the most unforgiving man of
himself I ever knew.
In this connection I remember the first theological ruction we had
after our marriage. He had harked up one of his former sins and was
making himself miserable about it. I tried every way to smooth over
his transgression--in vain. Finally I lost patience and called his
attention to the generous forgiving Gospel he preached to other
sinners. Did he believe he preached the truth? Certainly he did, was
his reply.
‘Well then,’ I retorted, ‘why should you malign the goodness of God by
imagining you yourself are not forgiven according to the same Gospel?’
This was one of the many clinches we had over these beatitudes. He said
that a man’s conscience must be his guide in such matters. He reserved
the right to repent of his own sins! He went on to imply that I might
be morally obtuse. This was the straw that broke my camel’s back. I
retorted that I was tired, and I supposed the Lord was tired of the
vain repetition of his repentance over some little dead and forgotten
transgression. I thought such conduct was morally debilitating. From
this we had hot words and I flung myself upon the bed and wept bitterly.
My belief is that I had some glimmerings even as far back as that
of the true meaning of these particular Scriptures. I know now that
they are emergency remedies for the soul and not designed to create a
perpetual state of mind. The effort to practice them all the time will
victimize any man in his relations to his fellow men. I feel better
most of the time, but now and then I have known what it is to be poor
in spirit before the Lord on the occasion of some defalcation in virtue
or patience or courage; but it is not my idea to tell any one else
about it. I do my mourning and hurry on as quickly as possible to
the more cheerful part of this beatitude which says ‘for they shall
be comforted,’ feeling that I do myself credit by taking the Lord at
His word as soon as possible. I have practiced swiftness in acts of
faith and found it profitable. If the Bible means anything at all,
you have a right to believe it. That is the test of the truth of the
Scriptures--believe them, and if they do not come true you have the
right to deny them. I have never had the chance to deny a single one,
though of course I have lacked the spiritual capacity to try out the
whole thing.
But there is that one which says, ‘Blessed are the meek’--meaning
teachable--‘for they shall inherit the earth.’ It is not my nature to
be teachable, but I have been in such tight quarters all my life that
I have been obliged to learn a great deal with meekness. And it is a
fact, I have inherited more of the earth than I deserve. To be strictly
honest, I have never hungered and thirsted after righteousness to the
point of egotism characteristic of some saints. I always had a feeling
of modest limitations along this line; but now that I think back to
those first years of my married life, it seems to be anguishing and
pitiful the way I strove to be good. It was so terribly necessary if I
was to keep up with Lundy.
The motive was a trifle crooked, as you will see; but the Lord honored
it as He did that woman’s faith who had the issue of blood, which was
an unintelligent faith. For as I look back now it seems to me that I
was pretty well filled with righteousness then according to the other
end of that beatitude. With me, being merciful is not a virtue. It
comes too easy for me to have deserved much in return, like some kind
of happy weakness of character. Still, I have finally been overwhelmed
with mercies. I feel sometimes that I might have used them to a better
advantage further back in the years when my needs were very great. But
the point I make is that this Scripture was fulfilled. I have even been
pure enough in heart at rare intervals to see God. But not often when
I was up and shining. Usually it would be when I was passing through
some valley of the shadow of great grief. After the pain is over I
have always been able to look back and know that sorrows are much more
purifying and elevating to the mind than joys.
But when it comes to that verse which says ‘Blessed are the
peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God,’ it has
depended upon the circumstances whether I came out of the scrimmage
like such a child. I have known myself to forgo the blessing and refuse
to make a peace that left me in the lurch. In that case I hunted up
some such Scripture as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and
took what satisfaction I could get from that. Never yet have I parted
with an eye or a tooth, or turned the other cheek except to my Lord,
who is the only one who has the right to smite me.
These, of course, are my favorable experiences with the truth of the
Bible. I have suffered a-plenty from the unfavorable passages, such as,
‘Judge not.... For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.’
I have had this experience a thousand times. Some one who knows me,
or a stranger of whom I have never heard, rises up and passes judgment
upon me as if it was a harsh and sacred duty he performed--without
ever suspecting, I suppose, that he is measuring to me again unfair
and superficial criticisms I have passed on other people. They do have
somewhat the advantage in this business, because there are so many more
of them than there is of me, and one person cannot spare the time to
pass as many adverse judgments as one author endures. Even at that, I
fare very well on account of getting so many more favorable judgments
than I deserve from the same sources.
I was so much involved in the purely spiritual struggle of trying to
live above and without the world until I was thirty years old that I
became a sort of ignoramus. I cannot now recall what were the social
and intellectual conditions of this period. I remember who the great
preachers were, but not the name of a single statesman or public
servant except one old congressman who used to do his electioneering at
Sunday-school picnics. Readers of the circuit-rider stories must have
observed that these are records in religious living to the exclusion of
all earthly interests.
I suppose this is the reason why even ‘My Book and Heart’ produces
the impression upon some readers of being the chronicle of a narrow
and dreary life. I do not think it is, you understand. It seems to me
that almost any person with a provincial mind might fail to appreciate
the literature of a foreign country with which they were totally
unfamiliar. The spiritual world which I inhabited at that time is
not known now by a great many people otherwise very well informed.
They are unable therefore to appreciate the vividness and romance of
such an existence. It seems drab to them because they live in sums and
dividends and secular realities and the same kind of diversions, not in
sublime illusions.
But try chasing an impractical saint up one Jacob’s ladder after
another for twelve years and find out for yourself what a varied and
stimulating experience it is. Hunting big game in a jungle is nothing
to the risks you take and the rarefied hardships you endure and the
keen relief you feel now and then between adventures. I cannot claim
that it was mentally exhilarating, but I developed considerable wing
power of the spirit very helpful to me when I finally did go back, pick
up my mind, shake some of the star dust off, and begin to use it with a
good conscience for my own benefit in this present world.
But never so long as I live can I escape the tragic effects upon my
life of these early years. My mind is free now, and I can reason as
clearly as the next one about what a dear and blessed gift from God
the world has been to me; but in my heart I seem still to belong back
there in the years upon the lower rungs of that ever-upward-stretching
ladder I used to climb toward Lundy’s God. I cannot get over feeling
hard pressed spiritually sometimes, as if I was in dangerous need of
chastening--I suppose the steel bridge never forgets the furnace in
which its girders were melted and forged; I would give anything now
and then to rest from this smelting sense of God and be comfortable in
my carnal mind, but I never can be.
XIX
THE WISDOM OF THE WORD
What I have tried to prove is this: The Word of God is a prophecy of
us in all of our manifestations and it records the laws of life and
conduct from which no man can escape. Whether he is a good one or a
bad one, he will find his portrait drawn there and a complete prophecy
of what his fate will be. It never fails; it always comes true, for
the atheist, agnostic, or spiritualistic sorcerer no less than for the
saint.
Just look yourself up in that Book, and if you know how, you will
find yourself predicted and recorded in it down to the very nose of
your nature. Set down a list of your virtues and look up the rewards
promised in return for these virtues, and you will know for certain
what your dividends in living will be if you hold onto your assets.
Make a list of your vices and weaknesses. Then, if you have the
courage, look up the consequences which follow them as recorded in this
Book and you will know long before judgment day what will happen to you
even in this present world. ‘He that liveth by the sword shall perish
by the sword.’