Here I am, then, since it must be.
Every one has heard the story of the Frenchman who, after a tour through
America (or was it England?), had but this to say of us: that we were a
people with thirty religions and but a single sauce. I hardly think that
we in Virginia, at least at the period of this story, were quite so rich
in religions as this. Very likely, some of the sects discovered by our
observant Gaul had no representatives in the Old Dominion. At any rate,
I, after diligent inquiry in many quarters, have not been able to
unearth more than fifteen distinct varieties. I did not count, I admit,
a certain flock of migratory Mormons that I once encountered on the
wing; just as, I presume, a naturalist would hardly class the Canada
goose among Virginia birds, from the mere fact that they refresh
themselves, in the spring of the year, in our wheat-fields. Nor did I
think that a man and his wife and a boy whom I once knew, could fairly
claim to be numbered as a sect merely because, as their fellow-villagers
asserted, they professed to believe something that nobody could
understand. Then I am afraid that even the very sects themselves would
insist on my leaving out the Bushwhackers,—slack-twisted Christians
like myself, that is, who can’t abide uniforms, and find it hot marching
in ranks, and irksome to keep step; though we do cover the flanks of the
main column, and, while we don’t attack in line, yet keep up a rattling
fire upon such stray sinners as we find prowling about.
And so forth, and so forth.
Still (for I would not incur the suspicion of niggardliness), it is very
possible that, had I searched with greater diligence, I should have
found more than fifteen. We will allow, then, that, at the period which
we are sketching, there were, say, a dozen and a half religions in
Virginia.
And when I say religions, I have not in my mind a milk-and-water,
namby-pamby, good-enough-for-me kind creed, but one of your up-and-down,
robustious, straight-from-the-shoulder dogmas, that could ship off
entire churchfuls of heterodoxers to—(but since the Revised Edition the
word is scarcely parliamentary) without a wry face. Thither our Virginia
Catholics used to despatch all our Protestants, to a man; but, inasmuch
as their numbers were few (and, strictly speaking, the thing was,
perhaps, contrary to the Constitution of the United States), they did it
all very decently and quietly; sending them off by night-train, as it
were, and making no loud mention of the fact.
Not so their opponents. Greatly outnumbering the followers of the
scarlet woman of Babylon, they rattled them off in broad daylight, by
the through mail, making no bones of naming the terminus of the road.
Ah, but it was thorough work on both sides!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
But there was one awkward thing about the business: if they kept this
thing up, not a solitary Virginian would ever reach heaven. That thought
gave me pause, one day; and ever since I have hoped that somebody had
made a mistake, somehow. At any rate, said I to myself, in my
slack-twisted, Bushwhackerish way, the Jews will get away; and that will
be a comfort, considering what an Unrevised Edition of a time they have
had for these two thousand years.
But as a guerilla, as a free lance, unattached and un-uniformed, and
falling in, as occasion served, now with one regiment and now with
another, I found that things were even worse than I have represented
them. You see they didn’t mind me, and so talked very freely in my
presence; and I was shocked to find that these various companies and
battalions privately nourished a keener animosity one against the other
than towards the common enemy, Ah Sin. If each could have heard what the
others said of them (as I did), and where they sent them! I came to the
conclusion, at last, that there was not the shadow of a chance for any
Virginia Protestant. There were not enough Catholics to keep them busy;
they fell upon one another, and so many cars did they couple on to the
through mail (ole Virginny nebber tire!) that it became a most Unlimited
Express, choke-full of Virginia gentlemen,—Virginia gentlemen who had
erred in the interpretation of a phrase or so, or, it may be, of a word
merely, of Holy Writ.
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
I say Virginia gentlemen advisedly.
Environments may have their environments (just as fleas have other fleas
to bite ’em, and so we go _ad infinitum_), and, thorough-going as was
our theology, it had to succumb in the presence of our chivalry towards
the sex; for throughout all our borders there lived not a man, lay or
clerical, who would not have scorned to send a woman to the bottomless
pit.
But as for the Virginia gentlemen, we shovelled them all in with an
industry (ole Virginny nebber tire!) and an undoubting zeal that were
above all praise.
That’s the reason I always did love a Virginian; he won’t stand any
nonsense. “Do you believe that a prodigious majority of mankind were
elected unto damnation, ages before they were born? No?” Swish! and that
is the end of you! Another: “And so you say that _baptizo_ means
baptize, do you?”—“Why, don’t the dictionaries and all the Greek
profess—” budjum! and where are you now?
For, in matters of this kind, we Virginians of that day, if you would
agree with us, would agree with you; but—if not—you might go—your
way,—for the King James version obtained in those times.
Ah, but we were out-and-outers in those good old days!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
Strange! for time was when things were very different in the Old
Dominion. Our ancestors had brought over with them the spirit of the
merrie old England of hundreds of years ago; and merry men were they,
too, for a long time after they landed on these fair shores.
And, after all, what was the harm? for do not philosophers tell us that
a people’s conception of the Deity is but the reflex of the powers of
nature (be they kindly or hostile) by which they are surrounded? And was
not this a fair land? and if their sun was bright, but not too fierce,
and their wheat-fields nodded to soft breezes, but knew not the
hurricane, and if their snows were a fairy mantle for mother-earth,
rather than a shroud, and Jack Frost spread, over pond and creek, ice
just thick enough to store against what time the mint—the jolly jolly
mint—should sprout,—if all nature smiled, why should these merry
Norman-English pull long faces? Nor did they, but laughed and danced,
bless their jovial souls!
But a time came when merrie England was merry no longer.
Somebody had invented a new religion.
It floated down upon her, a dense fog, impenetrable to the mild radiance
of the star of Bethlehem. Floated across the Atlantic, and darkened our
life, too. With us, as well, laughter became frivolity, and dancing
blasphemous. There are rifts in the fog now, and here and there the sun
is bursting through; but at the period of our story the shadow was
unbroken. There was laughter, it is true. Do not the condemned often
make merry in their cells? and young people will dance,—just as lambs
frisk, even upon a bed of mint—heedless,—for ’tis their nature to. But
they laughed and danced under a shadow,—the shadow of the next world.
That world, alone, was real,—so we thought,—while this, from
Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, was (though it seemed
so solid) but a fleeting show, for man’s illusion given.
And of this theology, which spread, like a black pall, over the land,
this was the central conception; and I give it for the reason that you
will not find it laid down in the books, or in any single discourse. It
is the epitome of the thousands upon thousands of sermons which I (not
that I would boast) have heard in my day. Listen; for this was the
atmosphere that our Mary breathed:
The world is the battle-ground of two mighty beings, the Spirit of Good
and the Spirit of Evil. These two, from the first appearance of man on
earth, have unceasingly battled together, the one to save him, the other
to destroy. To save mankind—to destroy mankind—that has been the sole
contention these thousands of years. Incidentally, of course (for such
is war), the Evil Spirit has, beyond the harm done the human family,
wrought immense damage to earth’s fauna and flora (as the innumerable
imperfections of nature testify), but man, alone, has been the objective
point of all his strategy; and with every new soul that comes into the
world the conflict is renewed.
And perhaps I am wrong,—for there are those who maintain that I have a
bee in my theological bonnet,—but, were I a preacher, I should stand up
for my side. I should not go about proclaiming it from the house-tops
that in the vast majority of these struggles the good spirit is worsted;
nor glory in announcing to the world that Satan held the field, and that
the only hope was that a few of us poor captives might elude his
vigilance and escape. Captives! They told us that we were his when we
were born!
Is there any harm in saying that to a mere Bushwhacker (who has not had
the privilege of passing through a theological seminary) it seems that
we have hardly a fair chance? It were better we were born orphans!
Better that than to be the children of sin and Satan, as those who know
tell me we are,—though I will say that I cannot help hoping that there
is some mistake about it.
But if it be, indeed, too true,—if it be a fact that all the poor souls
that flit darkly, for a season, about this little ball of earth, are, in
very deed, condemned before they are born, may we not hope that it is
otherwise in Venus, for example, or Mars? I, at least, sometimes,
overborne by the immense tragedy of human life, steal forth alone into
the night; and lifting my weary eyes to the blue spangled dome above,
try to drown the darkness here in the light I see shining there; and
ofttimes I find myself wondering whether they be indeed as bright as
they seem,—find myself praying, even, that it may be so.
For indeed it were pitiful, were all those worlds such as ours!
And sometimes I have felt, as I swept, with brimming eyes, constellation
after constellation, and galaxy after galaxy, that I could bear up with
a braver heart could I but know that there was, wandering somewhere in
the immensity of space, one little planet, at least, upon which the
prince of darkness had not set his foot,—one little world in which
poverty and hunger and thirst, and toil and failure, and blood and
tears, and disease and eternal farewells were unknown,—one world where
a mother could smile back upon her babe, as it lay kicking and crowing
in her lap, and laughing in her face, and not feel that the Grip of Hell
was upon its throat.
Alice buried her face in her hands; but Charley sat bolt upright in his
seat.
For such was our creed in those days. If any one shall say that
Virginians do not believe that now, I shall not argue the point. It was
notoriously orthodox _then_ to hold that every infant came into the
world under sentence. Not under sentence to be hanged by the neck, as
murderers are—
Alice shivered. Charley lifted his hand. I ceased reading.
[Illustration: SYMPHONY OF LIFE. MOVEMENT III.
_Allegro molto._ L. van Beethoven, _“Eroica” Symphony_.
{The first page of the score of the third movement, Allegro molto, of
Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is shown.}]
SYMPHONY OF LIFE.
MOVEMENT III.