A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and
Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
I
In bringing these desultory--perhaps too fragmentary--recollections to a
close the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither be
self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith somewhat in
rejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both his experience has
been ample if not exhaustive. During the period of their serial publication
he has received many letters--suggestive, informatory and critical--now and
again querulous--which he has not failed to consider, and, where occasion
seemed to require, to pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. In
no instance has he found any essential error in his narrative. Sometimes he
has been charged with omissions--as if he were writing a history of his own
times--whereas he has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relating
his immediate personal experience.
I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman Catholic
Church, educated in the Church of England in America and married into the
Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in this way:
It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the household of a
devout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond, affectionate Irish Catholic;
the little life was almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue me
from that form of theologic controversy known as infant damnation, the baby
carriage was trundled round the corner to Saint Matthew's Church--it was in
the national capital--and the baby brow was touched with holy water out of
a font blessed of the Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been the
worse for it.
Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashioned
baptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character in
the neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than reverent,
standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, "There go his sins,
men and brethren, there go his sins"; and having but poor eyesight I
thought I saw them passing down the stream never to trouble him, or
anybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the stream, out
and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?
I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impression
that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed in
what is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate any
man because either in political or in religious opinion he differs from
me and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creator
according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought has
been my lifelong contention.
I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the
dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to
bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or
the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry
of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears
wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out
of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of
the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood the
persecution of man for opinion's sake--and no matter for what opinion's
sake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known.
My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal
with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a
mystery still. For all their learning and research--their positivity and
contradiction--none of the writers know more than I think I know myself,
and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript,
I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go;
the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the
soul of man inscrutable even to himself.
_The night has a thousand eyes,
The day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun._
_The mind has a thousand eyes,
The heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done._
All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in
politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon
men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology--the
pride of opinion--or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon of
unrighteousness.
I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was
Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teaching
the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternal
life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of
the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the world
which has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state of
man now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, not
at the sign of Buddha and total oblivion.
The blessed birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching and
example of the Prince of Peace--have been engulfed beneath oceans of
ignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embittered
controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very
light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The
blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was the seed of
the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man--weak, cruel,
fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or the
Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil's
work in God's name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to
be, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One of
Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their titular divinity much as men in
commerce adopt a trade-mark.