The books of Scripture only suffer from being subjected to
requirements which we have ceased to apply to the books of common
literature.—DEAN STANLEY, _History of the Jewish Church_.
The Protestant Reformation shows how men tried to lodge infallibility
in the Bible.... The great point of our present belief is that there
is no such infallible record anywhere in church or council or
book.—PHILLIPS BROOKS, _Harvard Divinity Address, 1884_.
BOSTON, _Jan. 6._ 25 Louisburg Square.
JESSIE DEAR,—I have been sitting for the last half hour in the broad,
cushioned window-seat of my cosy attic room, looking far out over the
mass of chimney-tops to the towers and spires beyond the hill and the
Public Garden.
I love to sit here quietly on Sunday afternoons, and when the sunset
comes I throw aside my books and watch the shifting, brilliant colors
turning the blue Charles into a sheet of glimmering gold and dyeing with
rosy hues the snowy slopes of Corey Hill beyond.
Have you been away so long as to have forgotten these dear old sights?
And do you recall that on this western slope of Beacon Hill from which I
write to you lived the hermit Blackstone of Shawmut, before Winthrop or
any Puritan had thought of settling Boston town?
I like old places. I like to be on the oldest spot in this old, historic
town, as you may easily imagine, remembering all my antiquarian
enthusiasm when we were at school. Well, I have not outgrown it in the
least, in spite of all my modern radicalism about many things.
I wonder, dear, what all these ten years have brought to you. I have
been sitting and thinking, as the sunset glow has faded in the western
sky, all its glory turning so soon to dull, cold gray, how in these few
minutes the past years seem typified. What glorious visions, what
radiant achievements illumined the heavens when we looked at them with
the eyes of eighteen! What would we not, what could we not, dream of
doing then? I remember how you vowed that I was a genius, and were sure
that ten years would not pass before I should win renown. And now,
to-night, on my twenty-eighth birthday, I sit here as dull and prosy and
commonplace a spinster as one can well find in this city of spinsters.
After one is twenty-five and the birthdays begin to be a little
unwelcome, I suppose one is apt to be made a little morbid by them,
though I solace myself by thinking that since college girls in these
days rarely finish their studies before twenty-two, twenty-eight does
not seem so ancient as it was once thought to be.
How strange that we should have known so little of each other, we who
vowed that “ocean-sundered continents” should never make our girlhood’s
love less warm! But after your change of name and transfer to the China
Mission, while I was at Smith College, I lost sight of you, and, missing
your letters, knew not where to write. So you will understand my long
silence and know that the Mildred of ten years ago is the same Mildred
to-day, only no longer a girl, but a woman.
A woman, with many ambitions unsatisfied, with many heroes dethroned,
but with the same loves and hopes and fears, and with the same ideals,
although their attainment seems farther off with the growing years.
I have slowly come to recognize and be reconciled to my mediocrity; to
know that I have not had a thought but has been common to humanity; that
I am no whit wiser or better than all my fellows; and that what you in
girlish enthusiasm flattered me into believing was creative power was
simply a capacity to appreciate and be moved by what was great.
I have longed for power, but, believe me, not for name or fame. Simply
to have had the consciousness in myself that the world was better and
wiser for my having lived would have made all drudgery and toil a joy
and privilege. But the blessedness of giving and doing in a large
measure has not been granted to me. Not that I blame fate or
circumstance or environment. I have had health and freedom and friends;
no hindrances and no great sorrows since mother left me alone five years
ago.
The failure lies with myself alone. Sometimes there has been an
unutterable loneliness and a longing for something, I know not what; but
I suppose it must be for the love which has not yet come to me, and
which now may never come.
But I do not let that burden me overmuch. I have my daily task. I love
my work; and here, among my books, I thankfully count myself rich indeed
in the society of all the great and wise and good of whose treasures I
am the happy heir. I have traveled, too, and seen the Old World cities
and the castles, palaces, and ruins of which we used to dream. It was
not exactly the blissful experience I had fancied, for I was doomed to
be the companion of a stupid old dowager whose money bought my time and
service, and to whom I was useful as an interpreter of the arts and
languages with which she was unfamiliar.
I saw a great deal and learned some things. It helped me a little
towards reaching that goal of culture at which I aim, whence I can truly
say that “I count nothing human foreign to me.” It helped to free me
somewhat from the narrowness of my age and environment. I have become a
little more of a Greek, a little less of a rugged Goth. Not that mere
travel did this; if my eyes had not begun to be opened before, I should
have seen nothing. I have verified nothing more thoroughly than
Emerson’s saying, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful
we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
I miss the picturesqueness and the charm of the Old World life. I am
surprised to find how shocked and annoyed I am at the crudities and
Philistinism of which I was once oblivious. But, after all, I am glad to
be back; glad to be in the current of real life again, and to take my
share in it. It is worth something to live in a land where one does not
have to despise the men or pity the women; where a man is not ashamed to
be seen carrying his own baby; where a girl can walk the streets alone
and unmolested, and where a lady can earn her daily bread and be thought
a lady still.
I have a quiet home with my mother’s cousin—“auntie,” I call her; and I
have settled down to steady work with a concert or play or toboggan
party to give it a little zest now and then. My classes take me to
Dorchester and Cambridge and Longwood. Once a week I meet a score or so
of our Boston society women in a Commonwealth Avenue drawing-room, who
manage, among their thousand and one lectures, lessons, and engagements
of every sort, to squeeze in an hour to hear me discourse on the topics
of the day, when I try to teach them about some phases of our nineteenth
century life of which they, like most women, know but little. As these
ladies include all shades of religious and political belief and
non-belief, I have to choose my words, as you may imagine.
I write a little occasionally for the “Transcript” or “Woman’s Journal,”
or some other equally inoffensive and unremunerative sheet. I visit my
North Enders, and think I am doing God more service in trying to keep
some of my small Hibernians from being sent to the Reform School than I
ever used to accomplish in teaching Jewish history at the Mission.
I have given up Sunday-school work. Not that I disbelieve in it, but I
find myself less and less able to adapt myself to the requirements of
superintendents and “lesson helps,” and my conscience now forbids me to
teach what I could once repeat so glibly and confidently.
Yes, let me say it frankly,—though I fear it will greatly shock you, you
dear, pious soul,—I have gone over to the “New Theology,” and I have
gone so far and so irrevocably that but few of those churches where my
childhood’s faith is still believed dare open their doors to me.
I wonder if you can conceive how painful it has been to me to find the
friends for whom I care most condemning as irreligious every thoughtful
man or woman who ventures to treat the Hebrew scriptures in a reasonable
way.
My last Sunday-school class was in the home school, where I had bright
girls of sixteen. I did my best to make the Bible a living book to them,
to make them study the history of the Jews in the same natural and
enthusiastic way that they studied their Greek history at school, but I
soon found that they considered this sacrilegious. They looked at me
with cold, critical glances when I tried to spiritualize their “Gates
Ajar” idea of heaven. I found that they had gone home and told their
mothers that I did not believe in God or heaven or hell, and, to my
bitter mortification and dismay, they left me one by one until I was
alone.
Doubtless I had little wisdom. I was trying to teach them in a few
months what it had taken me years of growth to reach. In trying to
disabuse them of their anthropomorphic notions of God, I had succeeded
in making Him only a nonentity to them. In taking away a literal Garden
of Eden and the serpent, and substituting a theory of evolution, I had,
in their imaginations, abolished all inspiration and moral
responsibility. Not that they were girls who troubled themselves very
much about such things; they could dance and flirt as well as the best;
but as for really daring to face the evidence on such matters, that was
wicked and dangerous, in their opinion.
Nor was this all. One good old clergyman, to whose church I brought a
letter of recommendation, and who after my candid talk felt obliged to
deny me a welcome, said, with tears in his eyes, that he hoped my
mother’s prayers would save me.
It made me feel forlorn and homesick for a while. I like the strength,
sincerity, and earnestness which the old faith gave, and I cannot
lightly break away from it. I hate the lukewarmness and apathy of many
of the more radical faith, and I cannot make up my mind to cast my lot
with them. Besides, I have a half fear that, after all, they have not
begun, even intellectually, to probe to the bottom these great historic
beliefs on which the church has stood for ages. I fear that they treat
them too cavalierly, too superficially. I find about as much intolerance
among the so-called liberals as among the conservatives.
To me sin is not an ailment to be cured with sugared plums. The
Puritanism in me rebels at the weakness and flabbiness of many who have
left the old faith for a broader one. However much my mind is forced to
accept their doctrine, my sympathies abide with the men of moral
earnestness who still think it their business to be “saving souls.”
To me the doctrine of the Trinity is something more than a mathematical
absurdity, as the men of one party say; and, on the other hand,
something more than an inscrutable mystery to be accepted without deep
philosophic study, as the men of the other party hold.
I pity and long to help the poor souls groping for some solution of the
religious problems peculiar to our day. There are thousands of them—more
than any one knows—inside the fold of the church itself, fed, but not
nourished, and famishing for the kind of food which their good pastors
know not how to give.
How many times I have gone to church bewildered, utterly wretched, my
soul crying out for the living God, and listened to a cheap, well-meant
discourse against “Ingersoll, Emerson, and all other unbelievers in the
inspired Word of God,” with an earnest exhortation to refrain at our
peril from “searching into what are the hidden mysteries.”
I understood the preacher’s standpoint, poor soul! I respected him and
his effort, but oh, how helpless he was to do anything for me who could
detect the sophistry and lack of discrimination in all this talk!
Oh, if I could help those who have been driven to question the whole of
truth, when they thus find out a part of it to have been crude or false!
And I pity almost as much the many timid ones who, like myself, are
longing to stay in the mother church, to that end being sorely tempted
to quibble with creeds, but who find no place either in or out of the
church which would exactly express their true religious attitude.
How strange all this must seem to you, who used to feel that heaven and
earth might fall, but that I should never give up my faith.
No, please God, I shall never give up faith, nor hold less faithfully to
the eternal verities which alone make life worth living. Never have I
felt more deeply than to-day the truth of the old words of the
catechism, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
But I do not hold that keeping the faith is an adherence to any creed or
an absolute acceptance of any book, even if it be the Book of books.
I have come to feel that the teaching of my childhood which made
historic facts, or what were assumed to be historic facts, of equal
importance with the eternal and immutable laws of moral and spiritual
growth,—I have come, I say, to feel that his was false. Ah me, the pity
of it!
I write you all this because I want you to know the strongest reason
that has prevented me from following in your footsteps and, as I once
dreamed of doing, giving myself up either at home or abroad to the grand
missionary work which still seems to me the most satisfying kind of work
in the world. No, I cannot be a missionary; I think I shall never dare
to teach any one; I don’t know how; but, thank God, I have come to see a
little more clearly some truths to which I think it is possible for the
human mind to attain. The vision thus gained, though still at times a
fleeting one, has, I firmly believe, placed me forever beyond the reach
of the nightmare of doubts and mortal terrors which first assailed me
after I dared trust myself to think and question.
No one, not bred in a New England home with all the Puritan traditions
imbibed with every breath, can realize the fever and despair that I have
felt more than once after I dared to think and face the result of my
thought. But that torture can never come again. Not that I have relapsed
into indifference or have heeded the pleadings of my devout friends to
“only believe,” that so I might dread my doubts as impious and accept
without question the creed of my fathers. No! Kant, Hegel, and Fichte,
Carlyle and Emerson, Robertson, Stanley, Phillips Brooks, and, more than
all, the unprejudiced study of the Bible itself, have kept me from that.
I no longer tremble at the question whether the record of the miracles
be fact or no; it touches not my spiritual life. The baby born next door
yesterday is a greater miracle to me than Lazarus raised from the dead;
the morning’s breakfast turned into vital force that guides this hand as
marvelous as water changed to wine. Whether the resurrection of Jesus be
literal fact or not, it in no wise affects my immortality. My faith
rests on something surer than the accuracy of any historic fact.
Are you shocked? Yes, doubtless, for so should I have been once. I do
not expect you to understand me yet, unless you too have been climbing
up to the light by the same path in which I have been led. You will
think that I have been venturing on dangerous ground, but I could not
write to you without granting your request to tell you how it was with
me in my inmost self.
You ask whether I am married or am going to be. The first question I
have answered; as to the second, the most that I can say is that when a
woman has lived a dozen years beyond sweet sixteen and has never been
very deeply in love, it argues either that she has lived like a nun, or
something rather uncomplimentary to her heart, and that there is
precious little prospect of her ever finding the right one after that.
They say no woman ever fails of some time having at least one suitor.
Well, I have had my one. A burly, broad-chested business man he was,
with very decided ideas about protection and mining stock, with a good
deal of amused wonder at my independence of thought and action, and a
chivalrous old-fashioned pity for gentlewomen who had to earn their
living. He felt pretty desperately when I said “no,” and I had to say it
three or four times before he could believe it, for he had been so sure
that a poor young creature like me must long for his strong arm and good
bank account to shield her from the “world’s cold blasts.” I did like
him, I confess, but not enough; not as I must love the one to whom I
would gladly, heartily, pledge my whole self for life.
So, one bright spring day he sailed away for South America and never
returned. He married a Spanish wife, I hear, who will inherit his
millions, for he made shrewd investments and became enormously wealthy.
The “Herald” had a dispatch yesterday morning announcing his death from
sunstroke. It gave me a shock. Yes, he was a good man, and I did like
him; but I am glad I am not his widow in spite of his millions.
We were talking at lunch to-day about wealth, and when I answered the
question “How much money would you wish for if you could have your
wish?” by saying “Twenty-five millions,” every one looked aghast.
“What, _you_, Mildred, of all persons! Why, you never cared for diamonds
or horses or yachts or anything grand,” exclaimed one.
“What in the world would you do with it?” asked another. “You couldn’t
spend half a million with your modest tastes, and the rest would be
simply a dead weight. You would be bored to death with lawyers and
beggars, and have brain fever in six weeks.”
“Oh no,” interposed a third; “she would buy shoes for all the barefoot
children, and build colleges from Alaska to Key West.”
“If you were like most people you would find it the hardest thing in the
world to spend your money wisely,” said auntie, sagely.
So I kept my counsel and said nothing. I can’t help wishing, though, to
know what will become of these millions which I might have had by saying
that one little word five years ago. It seems to me I should not be
utterly at a loss to find some wise uses for them, and it would not be
by building colleges which are not needed, or by encouraging
pauperism....