I have chosen from it what I need, but I cannot even claim to have
read it through consecutively. Many enlightening passages may have
escaped me, but I do not recall the portrait of a single saint with
wings in the Scriptures. Elijah disappeared in a chariot of fire. Moses
died like a disappointed man. When they reappeared in that cloud of
witnesses, it was a cloud; nothing recorded of their wings. After Jesus
was transfigured, He ascended into heaven. No need of wings.
I think it is probably the mortal imaginations of our preachers and
artists have added this doctrine of wings to saints, because they
felt obliged to illustrate by the familiar symbol of feathers the
_modus vivendi_ of immortality to mortal minds. On the contrary, the
one authoritative description of how we rise from the dust discreetly
records that our corruption puts on incorruption and this body shall
be raised a spiritual body. Only angels, those earlier messengers sent
to men, are recorded as having wings. I do not suppose these beings
ever were in the flesh. I doubt if they are of the same stuff we shall
be. It would not surprise me if they turned out to be the mere birds
of heaven, and that the saints will be stepping around as usual, very
light on their feet, maybe, but wingless.
I do not recommend this idea to others, but to me it is comforting. I
have always felt the need of having something firm to rest upon, even
when I tuck the head of my spirit beneath the wings of my imagination
and pass into a heavenly reverie. I am psychologically opposed to being
up in the mere air, here or hereafter.
The minds we have make slaves of us. We build a city or take one.
We make laws, establish our institutions and our covetousness in
commerce. We call this a civilization; but it is nothing, no more than
the dream of a transient world that never stands the tests of the great
realities which remain unshaken in us beyond all our knowledge and
powers assumed. It is invariably destroyed, blown away before the wind
of some change in our minds. And we lie at last buried deep in the dust
of our endeavors. But nothing sleeps in the dust. It must rise and live
again. So do we come up from the dark wilderness of these disorders and
start all over again after the pattern of our own minds. Another dream,
in which men walk like somnambulists for centuries to the same doom
of death and dust regardless of God, even when we call it a Christian
civilization, missing the way, the truth, and the life as we did before.
The importance we attach to the workings of the merely mortal mind
seems to me to approach madness. If for one moment we could escape
from the illusion created by our own faculties, we should perceive
that we make of ourselves the fools of all creation. The sense to live
is the only wit that really counts, and we have less of that than any
other creature. We have only the sense to overcome, achieve, and to
destroy. A flea knows where to hop, but we do not know. A dog knows the
way home, but the smarter a man is the more likely he is to lose his
way home. He can only think, believe, hope; but he does not know the
simplest things that the beasts of the field never have to learn. He
will drink from a pool that a thirsty ass will pass by because the ass
knows the water is polluted.
The very earth has more sense than we ever show. It is not inanimate,
but contains and uses all the elements we call brains without having
them incased as ours are in a small bone shell. The life that springs
green and silent from its breast is more obedient to law than we are,
and survives us. It knows a joy and peace in living that we never
learn. We are foolish to think the trees are not wise because they do
not speak.
I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all,
but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the
truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and
can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows
that it will rise from the dead in the next season’s sun, breathe,
feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such
tragedy as we do of death. Their knowledge is better than our faith
in immortality. We make a religion and an anguish of doubts about an
incident which all Nature, every Scripture, and our own instincts prove
is a senseless anxiety. We do live again in the spirit if the very dust
rises again in myriad forms of beauty and strength.
But no scientist would offer such evidence. He must think it out,
when this is something which cannot be thought, but must be accepted
as we take our breath from the air without arguing about it. And the
very theologians will throw up their hands in pious horror at such an
idea, give it a bad name like pantheism, as if this was the name of a
peculiarly damnable heresy.
My notion is that it is not our heresies but our sins that damn us, and
no Christian name we apply to them will save us. I am no pantheist;
I am one of those humbler, more transient manifestations of the will
of God. The grass outlives me, the rose outblooms in blossoms that
praise Him better than mortal deeds, and I know the stars outshine me,
no matter how immortal I am. As a spirit clothed in celestial light,
I doubt if I should amount to more than one short beam in a universe
filled with the brilliance of His glory.
To me, it appears sillily egotistical to give ourselves such airs
about being immortal. Everything else is. The very stones are fertile
and furnish elements indispensable to life. We, indeed, are the only
created forms of life that entertain trembling, despairing doubts about
that. We are even stupid and narrow-minded when our lid comes off
and we go insane. We stick to the beaten tracks of the mortal mind,
no real imagination in our delusions. The asylums are filled with
men and women who believe themselves to be kings and queens or some
other great mortals. I have never heard of one who imagined himself a
disembodied spirit. The nearest they ever come to that is by claiming
to be disastrous prophets. I have never heard of one who had the glory
of madness to believe himself a majestic oak or even a blade of grass.
The nearest approach I recall was the poor young lunatic who thought he
was a grain of corn and invariably took to his heels at the sight of a
chicken. We show too many evidences of ignominy to give ourselves airs,
sane or insane.
If I should take leave of my senses while I am still in the flesh--for
I do not expect to need such senses when I am finally in the spirit,
any more than flowers take thought to bloom--I hope I shall swing out
into a more becoming conceit than the notion that I am an article of
diet suitable for a hen, or even the Queen of Sheba. I have my doubts
about whether she was all she should have been, or she could not
have been traipsing after a man with Solomon’s notorious reputation.
My vanity would be better served with the delusion of being an
ever-blooming rose. As it is, I suffer sometimes from the vague regret
that I missed blooming at the right time, the weather of my years being
inclement then and unsuited to mere happiness.
But this record will prove that I had my delusions along with the rest
of my kind, and that though time and experience destroy the dearest
illusions, we do cling to the last to whatever delusion we adopt. It
is a bondage of the mind which we work up and strengthen year by year
until nothing remains but a terrible obedience.
What amazes me now is the shrewdness with which I avoided various forms
of bondage by which women are so frequently defeated in their pursuit
of happiness.
XXXII
THE LADY POLITICIAN
Without taking thought I have avoided the conscience of the modern
woman, which is a very sensitive, diligent, and unhappy conscience. I
seem to have lost step with my sex. No one honors more than I do the
sincerity of their purpose to reform, improve, and save the world.
But I mistrust their judgment. I particularly mistrust their power to
achieve their own wills. We have always been dominated in mind and
conduct by men. We have never been free moral agents, nor even immoral
ones. Cast your eye about and you will always see the string some man
pulls to move the puppet we are.
However it may appear to others I do not know, but to me women seem
to be more completely under the dominion of men than ever before.
The difference is that formerly we were managed or mismanaged by our
husbands and fathers; now it takes a whole political party to turn us
about and use us for their honor and glory; but they do it. If any one
calls attention to the amendments and laws we have been instrumental in
getting on the statute books, I call your attention to the fact that
the state of the individual woman is not changed. The wife signs away
her property as usual if the husband needs it. The mothers have less
influence than ever before upon the character and conduct of their
sons. The only political influence they have is by adding themselves
obediently in subordinate positions to the great political parties.
Never were there so many handmaidens to politicians in this world. It
is a less elevating service than being a down-trodden ‘widow indeed’
who was required to wash the feet of saints--presumably male saints.
They are now atoms of public life, but men control public opinion. So
watch the atoms spin.
The trouble is we can pass no amendment to the Constitution that will
change our own nature.
How well I understand the predicament of that young woman delegate to
the Democratic convention recently held in New York!
No one will deny the frequent assertion made through the press that
the women delegates in this convention were an admirable body of
women, but those who are most familiar with the attributes of what men
call admirable women will have their very grave doubts about whether
they had any more to do than they were told with the final choice and
nomination of John W. Davis as our presidential candidate, which was
the very creditable performance of what appeared at one time to be a
convention decidedly discreditable to the great party it represented.
If the women in it had been equal to the emergency, they might at
least have insisted upon a physical examination of the contending
candidates. This would have eliminated some of the contestants quietly
and decently, as we bury the dead, without so much scandal and with
less than half the expense incurred in getting rid of them. Right now
we do not know whether the livers and kidneys of Coolidge and Davis are
sound. But when we consider the casualties in the White House due to
electing men depleted in health and vitality, this is as important an
issue before a nominating convention as any plank in their respective
platforms. More than half these give way anyhow later on under
pressure. But when the man himself is sickly the chances are ten to one
he will not survive the intolerable burdens he has assumed, and this is
always a national tragedy.
The ineffective person is always the shrewdest critic of those who
strive, however blindly, to achieve. I seem to belong to that class,
but I am so located for the sake of discretion, not for purpose
of criticism. I do a bit of haphazard voting now and then for the
purifying of my purely conventional conscience, much as one recites a
prayer without believing the Lord hears his petition. I know the cards
have been stacked and the successful candidate for that office has
been predestined. So I never fash myself into a state of enthusiasm or
animosity over an election.
The most significant evidence I have of the political importance of
women is the change in the character of my own mail. Formerly it
consisted entirely of letters from admiring readers or indignant
readers of my books, or from those kind private folk who are one’s
dearest friends, even if one never beholds their faces. They write by
way of clasping hands with you or exchanging confidences with you. But
now if a political campaign opens, I suppose every woman receives as
many letters as if she had written a particularly appealing book. Every
candidate from the coroner type to the more iridescent eloquent type
who wants to be a congressman or senator writes to solicit our votes.
These are remarkably dull letters, couched in the embarrassed
language of an awkward man writing to a respectable woman, whom he
really does not like, inviting her to vote for him. To me it seems a
frightful waste of postage, especially when the thing bears a picture
of the aspiring author. Yesterday I had such a letter, ornamented
with the printed likeness of one who is running for the office of
health commissioner in this State, a man so grossly fat that he has
practically no lines in his face by which a thought might be expressed.
My idea of a health commissioner would be a lean man with a vital
athletic expression.
But my political psychology may be wrong. It is possible that an obese
commissioner might be moved to preach a healthful gospel of abstinence
and a balanced ration. My impression is that they are all glittering
generalities so far as the health of the people is concerned, and that
the lady demonstrators who travel like missionaries through all the
counties teaching girls to can and cook hold the health of the next
generation in their frail but diligent hands. Nobody elects them. They
get appointed by hook or crook and do valiant service.
In short, I have reached the eye-opening age when a personal letter
from the noblest statesman of them could not move me to any real
interest in his fate.
Why should one vote? At the present moment the highest official in
this state is candidate for reëlection without opposition. Personally,
he bears a faintly pathetic resemblance to Lord Byron. And quite the
contrary is true of him. He is not a poet. He is totally lacking in
that quality which inspired Byron, banished, to lead an insurrection in
a foreign country against despotism. And we cannot banish him! I have
understood that he is an eminently respectable family man, which really
contributes little to his eminence as a public servant. He can lead a
prayer meeting accompanied by the amen chorus of the best brethren, but
he cannot lead a people.
The instinct for personal liberty mentioned a while ago has also led
me to avoid participating in the activities so popular and so ably
conducted by the various women’s organizations. Place yourself within
reach of the executive committee of any up-and-doing group of women,
and find out how much time or strength you have left to spend upon
your own affairs! If you are a social climber, they will give you
prominence in exchange for as much faithful service as you are capable
of rendering. If you desire recognition, which is the complimentary
name of publicity, you may have it as a reward for devoting yourself to
some department of public service for the benefit of mankind, or for
children, or for charity.
If by some fluke of circumstance you have earned distinction, they can
use you for the good of half a dozen causes so completely that you will
never have another half hour to devote to your own cause. Henceforth
you will be identified with their achievements. You will not have
one laurel left on your brow which does not belong to womanhood at
large. If you belong to that ever-increasing volume of women who crave
self-expression, they can provide more ways for you to express yourself
than if you were a mere Christian wife and the mother of ten children.
They are using up more wasted feminine energy than any other power
company known to civilization.
XXXIII
LIVING IN A BOOK
If you have lived in one house all your life, it becomes so familiar
to you that you do not think of its corners and angles, how the light
comes and the shadows fall through the windows. You do not remember its
upper chamber, because you are living in that chamber, nor that quiet
inner room where you sometimes go to pray, because you are still going
in there, closing the door and falling upon your knees when times are
hard in your spirit, and asking for a little comfort. But some day when
the door is shut and you are left outside, carried away by some wind
of destiny, bereaved of these intimate associations with it, then you
remember all the inside of that house, every board in the walls, where
you slept and where you worked, the place you used to sit with folded
hands when the day’s work was done.
So it has been with me about the Bible. As long as Lundy lived we were
in it. It seems to me I was always traveling its pages back and forth
from the old dispensation to the new dispensation, from one Gospel to
another Gospel, wandering around in Revelation as one walks upon the
shores of a strange land, mystified.
In those days it never occurred to me to quote the Scriptures. I left
Lundy to do that. I was not even aware of being word-perfect in them.
But after his death they came back to me, and I had the use of them as
if they belonged to me at last according to my own mind. I recall them
by my association with him. I use them right and left as he never would
have dared to use them. The little kind ones are like bright footpaths
that lead now more particularly to my own God, which I used to travel
with him in the shadows. The great ones stretch away before and after
me beyond the limits of time and sense. I do not try to reduce them to
the dimensions of my own thoughts; I simply spread myself in them and
feel immortality eased in all this space.
When you have only one book you use it a great deal. I have read
many books, but I never had my own personal rights to but one, the
Bible. The others belong to the authors who wrote them. They have been
created, but, broadly speaking, they are not creative. The Bible is. I
may be pardoned then for referring to it frequently as the source from
which I have received most of my inspiration in living and thinking.
Now it is a mistake to fit your life to one or two Scriptures
when there is such a wide choice of them. So when these moods of
godly depression fall upon me and I am feeling like a poor old
How-Firm-a-Foundation, or like a spiritual leaf that has been used a
long time for the fattening or healing of the ungodly, I stir about in
the Gospels for a better prophecy of myself. Something like this, for
example: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not
wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.’
Nothing is changed, you understand; the same law of the spiritual
world is demanding the laying down of my life for His sake; but I get
an extension of that law for my own mortal sake. Somewhere, sometime
I shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, and whatsoever
I do shall prosper! I am not above making a literal interpretation
of such a promise in the fairing weather of my mind. I begin to feel
greener, fresher in my boughs. Suddenly I am conscious of many rivers
of kind water that have flowed close to the roots of my life. I have
sinned quite a good deal and come short of my own glories, much less
the Lord’s glory. Still I have not lost much, only a few of my dearer
treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. I am very
well off here. After all, for a bush of my size I have brought forth
considerable fruit. I am not old; I feel everlasting. Therefore let the
years come; time cannot defeat or harm me.
In such a mood I can swing paragraphs by the hour from the tip of my
pen, or I can go forth and plant a field, strutting in the conviction
that whatsoever I do shall prosper. It is a grand feeling, kin to
that liberty the old-fashioned preachers used to claim when they made
sure the Holy Ghost had descended upon them and they fell upon their
congregations with power.
It all comes to this again and again when you get the chance to see
through your glass clearly for a moment: The Scriptures were made for
us. They are the literature of what we are, the great reference book
of man. We are not created like victims to fulfill them. By living
we do fulfill them, no matter how we live, in the flesh or in the
spirit, or, like the mortal hyphens we really are, halfway between.
I use my Scriptures this way, regardless of what may happen to the
favorite creeds and doctrines of other people. The idea of a church
God or a national God is too diffused to meet my personal needs and
peculiarities.
I believe this is true of every man.
I cannot tell now how I missed even the faintest association with the
Scriptures in the minds of the people who knew me best. Maybe it was
because I was never prominent in church work; maybe it was because
after the shadows fell upon me and I had premonitions of Lundy’s fate
I did not ask the prayers of all Christian people, nor take even one
saint into my confidence lest he should suffer by this betrayal. In any
case, after he was gone, and I stepped forth in my own written word
caparisoned in so many of his favorite passages from the Bible, some
of these people were scandalized as if a light and humorous person
masqueraded in sacred garments. My own church regarded me askance for a
long time. I was never offended. On the contrary, I comprehended their
anxiety with a sort of sympathy.
Comparatively few people inherit the Scriptures; they get them as
we Protestants accuse the Catholics of getting theirs--predigested,
interpreted, laid down for them in creeds and doctrines. My poor
brethren could not be sure that I would not presently rise up in
the insolence of my own mortal mind and deny the divinity of Jesus
Christ or commit some other damnable heresy. This is frequently the
way with those who interpret the word for themselves. They want to
square it with some half-developed science which will be changed or
refuted to-morrow, or they go off on a purely intellectual tangent.
As a spiritually endowed person I have always had the sense to look
down upon our finite reasoning powers and to despise my intellectual
tangents.
I have discovered, however, that in dealing with Christians of whatever
denomination it is discreet and valorous to use my mortal wits as
shrewdly as if I dealt with the impious. They may not be subject to
the same vices, but they have a record as long as the history of man
for persecution. That is still an active principle of the religious
conscience. I had my doubts about whether a mere woman would be
considered eligible to a church trial for heresy, not having heard
of one in my times who had suffered this distinction. Still, it was
just as well to settle down somewhere beyond the reach of this honor.
So, long since, I have allowed my membership to lapse. Not even a
presiding elder can summon me before a quarterly conference to be
tried either for my sins or my views concerning this or that doctrine.
I am a Methodist unconfined, outside in the Lord’s pasture at large.
If my church puts on a million-dollar drive for funds, I dutifully
give my widow’s mite and spend my real Christian charity on a family
of Hardshell Baptists who are in graver need of help than a rich and
prosperous church.
When the Southern Methodist Church unites with the Northern branch of
this same denomination, as now seems imminent, I contemplate reducing
the widow’s mite of my contribution. As the devoted bystander of the
Southern Methodist Church, I am opposed to this Union; not on account
of prejudices connected with the reconstruction period, when we escaped
their maudlin sentimentality concerning the negroes by withdrawing from
them. I merely remember that as a warning, but my real objection is
that we can be better brethren in Christ further apart.
XXXIV
HAPPINESS
The trouble is that we can use the Scriptures only as far as they will
go, and those we have do not seem to be complete. I have a vague hungry
feeling that we have not discovered all of them. There must be a few
tablets still buried somewhere thousands of years deep in brighter dust
which record a little happiness, something to ease the strain of so
many sacrifices and holy joys. I have had such joys. It is like coming
up through great tribulations and sitting for a moment beneath your
halo with tears on your cheeks. I am not complaining, you understand;
it is a grand feeling, but too poignant to be really restful, as if you
had been exalted by a deed or a sacrifice and must choose just holiness
when you are still in the flesh and feel the mortal need of relaxing
some.