NOT EXACTLY A CHAPTER BUT RATHER A Q E D OR A HIC FABULA DOCET
"And the fool said in his heart, there is no God!" And this fable
teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do
not think that his folly lay chiefly in glutting his life with drab
material things, with wives and concubines, with worldly power and
glory. That was but a small part of his folly. For that concerned
himself. That turned upon his own little destiny. The vast folly of the
fool came with his blindness. He could not see the beautiful miracle of
progress that God has been working in this America of ours during these
splendid fifty years that have closed a great epoch.
And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent--rich, crass, material,
beckoning humanity to fall down and worship the god of gross and
palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American
spirit--the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the
seas, had bid them fight kings and principalities and powers, had forced
them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it "the
homestead of the free"; the spirit that had called them by the millions
to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.
This spirit met the god of things as they are, and for a generation
grappled in a mighty struggle.
And men said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is
a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the
earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only
their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was
taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And
because it was strong, the world said it was not of the old America, but
of a new, soft, wicked order, which wist not that God had departed from
it.
Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans
to go forth and fight in the Great War--not for themselves, not for
their own glory, nor their own safety, but for the soul of the world.
And the old spirit of America rose and responded. The long inward
struggle, seen only by the wise, only by those who knew how God's truth
conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart
of things, the long inward struggle of the spirit of America for its own
was won.
So it came to pass that the richness of the continent was poured out for
an ideal, that the genius of those who had seemed to be serving only
Mammon was devoted passionately to a principle, and that the blood of
those who came in seeming greed to America was shed gloriously in the
high emprise which called America to this new world crusade. Moses in
the burning bush speaking with God, Saul on the road to Damascus, never
came closer to the force outside ourselves which makes for
righteousness,--the force that has guided humanity upward through the
ages,--than America has come in this hour of her high resolve. And yet
for fifty years she has come into this holy ground steadily, and
unswervingly; indeed, for a hundred years, for three hundred years from
Plymouth Rock to the red fields of France, America has come a long and
perilous way--yet always sure, and never faltering.
To have lived in the generation now passing, to have seen the glory of
the coming of the Lord in the hearts of the people, to have watched the
steady triumph in our American life of the spirit of justice, of
fellowship over the spirit of greed, to have seen the Holy Ghost rise in
the life of a whole nation, was a blessed privilege. And if this tale
has reflected from the shallow paper hearts of those phantoms flitting
through its pages some glimpse of their joy in their pilgrimage, the
story has played its part. If the fable of Grant Adams's triumphant
failure does not dramatize in some way the victory of the American
spirit--the Puritan conscience--in our generation, then, alas, this
parable has fallen short of its aim. But most of all, if the story has
not shown how sad a thing it is to sit in the seat of the scornful, and
to deny the reality of God's purpose in this world, even though it is
denied in pomp and power and pride, then indeed this narrative has
failed. For in all this world one finds no other place so dreary and so
desolate as it is in the heart of a fool.
THE END
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End of Project Gutenberg's In the Heart of a Fool, by William Allen White