How great the soul is! Do not you all wonder and admire to see and
behold and hear? Can you all believe half the truth, and admire to hear
the wonders how great the soul is--only behold--past finding out! Only
see how large the soul is! that if a man is drowned in the sea what a
great bubble comes up out of the top of the water... The bubble is the
soul.
I confess that I am not in sympathy with some of the movements
that accompany the manifestations of American social and literary
independence. I do not like the assumption of titles of Lords
and Knights by plain citizens of a country which prides itself on
recognizing simple manhood and womanhood as sufficiently entitled to
respect without these unnecessary additions. I do not like any better
the familiar, and as it seems to me rude, way of speaking of our
fellow-citizens who are entitled to the common courtesies of civilized
society. I never thought it dignified or even proper for a President of
the United States to call himself, or to be called by others, “Frank”
Pierce. In the first place I had to look in a biographical dictionary to
find out whether his baptismal name was Franklin, or Francis, or
simply Frank, for I think children are sometimes christened with this
abbreviated name. But it is too much in the style of Cowper's unpleasant
acquaintance:
“The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumping on your back
How he esteems your merit.”
I should not like to hear our past chief magistrates spoken of as
Jack Adams or Jim Madison, and it would have been only as a political
partisan that I should have reconciled myself to “Tom” Jefferson. So,
in spite of “Ben” Jonson, “Tom” Moore, and “Jack” Sheppard, I prefer to
speak of a fellow-citizen already venerable by his years, entitled to
respect by useful services to his country, and recognized by many as
the prophet of a new poetical dispensation, with the customary title
of adults rather than by the free and easy school-boy abbreviation with
which he introduced himself many years ago to the public. As for his
rhapsodies, Number Seven, our “cracked Teacup,” says they sound to him
like “fugues played on a big organ which has been struck by lightning.”
So far as concerns literary independence, if we understand by that term
the getting rid of our subjection to British criticism, such as it was
in the days when the question was asked, “Who reads an American book?”
we may consider it pretty well established. If it means dispensing with
punctuation, coining words at will, self-revelation unrestrained by a
sense of what is decorous, declamations in which everything is glorified
without being idealized, “poetry” in which the reader must make the
rhythms which the poet has not made for him, then I think we had better
continue literary colonists. I shrink from a lawless independence to
which all the virile energy and trampling audacity of Mr. Whitman fail
to reconcile me. But there is room for everybody and everything in our
huge hemisphere. Young America is like a three-year-old colt with his
saddle and bridle just taken off. The first thing he wants to do is to
roll. He is a droll object, sprawling in the grass with his four hoofs
in the air; but he likes it, and it won't harm us. So let him roll,--let
him roll.
Of all The Teacups around our table, Number Five is the one who is the
object of the greatest interest. Everybody wants to be her friend, and
she has room enough in her hospitable nature to find a place for every
one who is worthy of the privilege. The difficulty is that it is so hard
to be her friend without becoming her lover. I have said before that she
turns the subjects of her Circe-like enchantment, not into swine, but
into lambs. The Professor and I move round among her lambs, the docile
and amiable flock that come and go at her bidding, that follow her
footsteps, and are content to live in the sunshine of her smile and
within reach of the music of her voice. I like to get her away from
their amiable bleatings; I love to talk with her about life, of which
she has seen a great deal, for she knows what it is to be an idol in
society and the centre of her social circle. It might be a question
whether women or men most admire and love her. With her own sex she is
always helpful, sympathizing, tender, charitable, sharing their griefs
as well as taking part in their pleasures. With men it has seemed to
make little difference whether they were young or old: all have found
her the same sweet, generous, unaffected companion; fresh enough in
feeling for the youngest, deep enough in the wisdom of the heart for
the oldest. She does not pretend to be youthful, nor does she trouble
herself that she has seen the roses of more Junes than many of--the
younger women who gather round her. She has not had to say,
Comme je regrette
Mon bras si dodu,
for her arm has never lost its roundness, and her face is one of those
that cannot be cheated of their charm even if they live long enough to
look upon the grown up grandchildren of their coevals.
It is a wonder how Number Five can find the time to be so much to so
many friends of both sexes, in spite of the fact that she is one of the
most insatiable of readers. She not only reads, but she remembers; she
not only remembers, but she records, for her own use and pleasure, and
for the delight and profit of those who are privileged to look over
her note-books. Number Five, as I think I have said before, has not the
ambition to figure as an authoress. That she could write most agreeably
is certain. I have seen letters of hers to friends which prove that
clearly enough. Whether she would find prose or verse the most natural
mode of expression I cannot say, but I know she is passionately fond of
poetry, and I should not be surprised if, laid away among the pressed
pansies and roses of past summers, there were poems, songs, perhaps, of
her own, which she sings to herself with her fingers touching the piano;
for to that she tells her secrets in tones sweet as the ring-dove's call
to her mate.
I am afraid it may be suggested that I am drawing Number Five's portrait
too nearly after some model who is unconsciously sitting for it;
but have n't I told you that you must not look for flesh and blood
personalities behind or beneath my Teacups? I am not going to make
these so lifelike that you will be saying, This is Mr. or Miss, or Mrs.
So-and-So. My readers must remember that there are very many pretty,
sweet, amiable girls and women sitting at their pianos, and finding
chords to the music of their heart-strings. If I have pictured Number
Five as one of her lambs might do it, I have succeeded in what I wanted
to accomplish. Why don't I describe her person? If I do, some gossip
or other will be sure to say, “Oh, he means her, of course,” and find a
name to match the pronoun.
It is strange to see how we are all coming to depend upon the friendly
aid of Number Five in our various perplexities. The Counsellor asked her
opinion in one of those cases where a divorce was too probable, but a
reconciliation was possible. It takes a woman to sound a woman's heart,
and she found there was still love enough under the ruffled waters to
warrant the hope of peace and tranquillity. The young Doctor went to her
for counsel in the case of a hysteric girl possessed with the idea
that she was a born poetess, and covering whole pages of foolscap with
senseless outbursts, which she wrote in paroxysms of wild excitement,
and read with a rapture of self-admiration which there was nothing in
her verses to justify or account for. How sweetly Number Five dealt with
that poor deluded sister in her talk with the Doctor! “Yes,” she said to
him, “nothing can be fuller of vanity, self-worship, and self-deception.
But we must be very gentle with her. I knew a young girl tormented with
aspirations, and possessed by a belief that she was meant for a higher
place than that which fate had assigned her, who needed wholesome
advice, just as this poor young thing does. She did not ask for it, and
it was not offered. Alas, alas! 'no man cared for her soul,'--no man nor
woman either. She was in her early teens, and the thought of her earthly
future, as it stretched out before her, was more than she could bear,
and she sought the presence of her Maker to ask the meaning of her
abortive existence.--We will talk it over. I will help you take care of
this child.”
The Doctor was thankful to have her assistance in a case with which
he would have found it difficult to deal if he had been left to, his
unaided judgment, and between them the young girl was safely piloted
through the perilous straits in which she came near shipwreck.
I know that it is commonly said of her that every male friend of hers
must become her lover unless he is already lassoed by another. Il fait
passer par l'a. The young Doctor is, I think, safe, for I am convinced
that he is bewitched with Delilah. Since she has left us, he has seemed
rather dejected; I feel sure that he misses her. We all do, but he more
seriously than the rest of us. I have said that I cannot tell whether
the Counsellor is to be counted as one of Number Five's lambs or not,
but he evidently admires her, and if he is not fascinated, looks as if
he were very near that condition.
It was a more delicate matter about which the Tutor talked with her.
Something which she had pleasantly said to him about the two Annexes led
him to ask her, more or less seriously, it may be remembered, about the
fitness of either of them to be the wife of a young man in his position.
She talked so sensibly, as it seemed to him, about it that he continued
the conversation, and, shy as he was, became quite easy and confidential
in her company. The Tutor is not only a poet, but is a great reader
of the poetry of many languages. It so happened that Number Five was
puzzled, one day, in reading a sonnet of Petrarch, and had recourse to
the Tutor to explain the difficult passage. She found him so thoroughly
instructed, so clear, so much interested, so ready to impart knowledge,
and so happy in his way of doing it, that she asked him if he would not
allow her the privilege of reading an Italian author under his guidance,
now and then.
The Tutor found Number Five an apt scholar, and something more than
that; for while, as a linguist, he was, of course, her master, her
intelligent comments brought out the beauties of an author in a way to
make the text seem like a different version. They did not always confine
themselves to the book they were reading. Number Five showed some
curiosity about the Tutor's relations with the two Annexes. She
suggested whether it would not be well to ask one or both of them in to
take part in their readings. The Tutor blushed and hesitated. “Perhaps
you would like to ask one of them,” said Number Five. “Which one shall
it be?” “It makes no difference to me which,” he answered, “but I do not
see that we need either.” Number Five did not press the matter further.
So the young Tutor and Number Five read together pretty regularly, and
came to depend upon their meeting over a book as one of their stated
seasons of enjoyment. He is so many years younger than she is that I
do not suppose he will have to pass par la, as most of her male friends
have done. I tell her sometimes that she reminds me of my Alma Mater,
always young, always fresh in her attractions, with her scholars all
round her, many of them graduates, or to graduate sooner or later.
What do I mean by graduates? Why, that they have made love to her, and
would be entitled to her diploma, if she gave a parchment to each one
of them who had had the courage to face the inevitable. About the
Counsellor I am, as I have said, in doubt. Who wrote that “I Like You
and I Love You,” which we found in the sugar-bowl the other day? Was
it a graduate who had felt the “icy dagger,” or only a candidate for
graduation who was afraid of it? So completely does she subjugate those
who come under her influence that I believe she looks upon it as a
matter of course that the fateful question will certainly come, often
after a brief acquaintance. She confessed as much to me, who am in her
confidence, and not a candidate for graduation from her academy. Her
graduates--her lambs I called them--are commonly faithful to her, and
though now and then one may have gone off and sulked in solitude, most
of them feel kindly to her, and to those who have shared the common fate
of her suitors. I do really believe that some of them would be glad to
see her captured by any one, if such there can be, who is worthy of her.
She is the best of friends, they say, but can she love anybody, as so
many other women do, or seem to? Why shouldn't our Musician, who is
evidently fond of her company, and sings and plays duets with her, steal
her heart as Piozzi stole that of the pretty and bright Mrs. Thrale,
as so many music-teachers have run away with their pupils' hearts? At
present she seems to be getting along very placidly and contentedly with
her young friend the Tutor. There is something quite charming in their
relations with each other. He knows many things she does not, for he is
reckoned one of the most learned in his literary specialty of all the
young men of his time; and it can be a question of only a few years when
some first-class professorship will be offered him. She, on the other
hand, has so much more experience, so much more practical wisdom, than
he has that he consults her on many every-day questions, as he did, or
made believe do, about that of making love to one of the two Annexes.
I had thought, when we first sat round the tea-table, that she was good
for the bit of romance I wanted; but since she has undertaken to be a
kind of half-maternal friend to the young Tutor, I am afraid I shall
have to give her up as the heroine of a romantic episode. It would be a
pity if there were nothing to commend these papers to those who take up
this periodical but essays, more or less significant, on subjects more
or less interesting to the jaded and impatient readers of the numberless
stories and entertaining articles which crowd the magazines of this
prolific period. A whole year of a tea-table as large as ours without a
single love passage in it would be discreditable to the company. We
must find one, or make one, before the tea-things are taken away and the
table is no longer spread.
The Dictator turns preacher.
We have so many light and playful talks over the teacups that some
readers may be surprised to find us taking up the most serious and
solemn subject which can occupy a human intelligence. The sudden
appearance among our New England Protestants of the doctrine of
purgatory as a possibility, or even probability, has startled the
descendants of the Puritans. It has naturally led to a reconsideration
of the doctrine of eternal punishment. It is on that subject that Number
Five and I have talked together. I love to listen to her, for she talks
from the promptings of a true woman's heart. I love to talk to her, for
I learn my own thoughts better in that way than in any other “L'appetit
vient en mangeant,” the French saying has it. “L'esprit vient en
causant;” that is, if one can find the right persons to talk with.
The subject which has specially interested Number Five and myself, of
late, was suggested to me in the following way.
Some two years ago I received a letter from a clergyman who bears by
inheritance one of the most distinguished names which has done honor
to the American “Orthodox” pulpit. This letter requested of me “a
contribution to a proposed work which was to present in their own
language the views of 'many men of many minds' on the subject of future
punishment. It was in my mind to let the public hear not only from
professional theologians, but from other professions, as from jurists
on the alleged but disputed value of the hangman's whip overhanging the
witness-box, and from physicians on the working of beliefs about the
future life in the minds of the dangerously sick. And I could not help
thinking what a good thing it would be to draw out the present writer
upon his favorite borderland between the spiritual and the material.”
The communication came to me, as the writer reminds me in a recent
letter, at a “painfully inopportune time,” and though it was courteously
answered, was not made the subject of a special reply.
This request confers upon me a certain right to express my opinion on
this weighty subject without fear and without reproach even from those
who might be ready to take offence at one of the laity for meddling with
pulpit questions. It shows also that this is not a dead issue in our
community, as some of the younger generation seem to think. There are
some, there may be many, who would like to hear what impressions one has
received on the subject referred to, after a long life in which he has
heard and read a great deal about the matter. There is a certain gravity
in the position of one who is, in the order of nature very near the
undiscovered country. A man who has passed his eighth decade feels as
if he were already in the antechamber of the apartments which he may
be called to occupy in the house of many mansions. His convictions
regarding the future of our race are likely to be serious, and his
expressions not lightly uttered. The question my correspondent suggests
is a tremendous one. No other interest compares for one moment with that
belonging to it. It is not only ourselves that it concerns, but all whom
we love or ever have loved, all our human brotherhood, as well as our
whole idea of the Being who made us and the relation in which He stands
to his creatures. In attempting to answer my correspondent's question, I
shall no doubt repeat many things I have said before in different
forms, on different occasions. This is no more than every clergyman does
habitually, and it would be hard if I could not have the same license
which the professional preacher enjoys so fully.
Number Five and I have occasionally talked on religious questions, and
discovered many points of agreement in our views. Both of us grew up
under the old “Orthodox” or Calvinistic system of belief. Both of
us accepted it in our early years as a part of our education. Our
experience is a common one. William Cullen Bryant says of himself, “The
Calvinistic system of divinity I adopted of course, as I heard nothing
else taught from the pulpit, and supposed it to be the accepted belief
of the religious world.” But it was not the “five points” which remained
in the young poet's memory and shaped his higher life. It was the
influence of his mother that left its permanent impression after the
questions and answers of the Assembly's Catechism had faded out,
or remained in memory only as fossil survivors of an extinct or
fast-disappearing theological formation. The important point for him,
as for so many other children of Puritan descent, was not his father's
creed, but his mother's character, precepts, and example. “She was
a person,” he says, “of excellent practical sense, of a quick and
sensitive moral judgment, and had no patience with any form of deceit or
duplicity. Her prompt condemnation of injustice, even in those instances
in which it is tolerated by the world, made a strong impression upon me
in early life; and if, in the discussion of public questions, I have in
my riper age endeavored to keep in view the great rule of right without
much regard to persons, it has been owing in a great degree to the force
of her example, which taught me never to countenance a wrong because
others did.”
I have quoted this passage because it was an experience not wholly
unlike my own, and in certain respects like that of Number Five. To
grow up in a narrow creed and to grow out of it is a tremendous trial
of one's nature. There is always a bond of fellowship between those who
have been through such an ordeal.
The experiences we have had in common naturally lead us to talk over
the theological questions which at this time are constantly presenting
themselves to the public, not only in the books and papers expressly
devoted to that class of subjects, but in many of the newspapers and
popular periodicals, from the weeklies to the quarterlies. The pulpit
used to lay down the law to the pews; at the present time, it is of more
consequence what the pews think than what the minister does, for the
obvious reason that the pews can change their minister, and often do,
whereas the minister cannot change the pews, or can do so only to a very
limited extent. The preacher's garment is cut according to the pattern
of that of the hearers, for the most part. Thirty years ago, when I was
writing on theological subjects, I came in for a very pretty share
of abuse, such as it was the fashion of that day, at least in certain
quarters, to bestow upon those who were outside of the high-walled
enclosures in which many persons; not naturally unamiable or exclusive,
found themselves imprisoned. Since that time what changes have taken
place! Who will believe that a well-behaved and reputable citizen could
have been denounced as a “moral parricide,” because he attacked some of
the doctrines in which he was supposed to have been brought up? A single
thought should have prevented the masked theologian who abused his
incognito from using such libellous language.
Much, and in many families most, of the religious teaching of children
is committed to the mother. The experience of William Cullen Bryant,
which I have related in his own words, is that of many New England
children. Now, the sternest dogmas that ever came from a soul cramped
or palsied by an obsolete creed become wonderfully softened in passing
between the lips of a mother. The cruel doctrine at which all but
case-hardened “professionals” shudder cones out, as she teaches and
illustrates it, as unlike its original as the milk which a peasant
mother gives her babe is unlike the coarse food which furnishes her
nourishment. The virus of a cursing creed is rendered comparatively
harmless by the time it reaches the young sinner in the nursery. Its
effects fall as far short of what might have been expected from its
virulence as the pearly vaccine vesicle falls short of the terrors of
the confluent small-pox. Controversialists should therefore be careful
(for their own sakes, for they hurt nobody so much as themselves) how
they use such terms as “parricide” as characterizing those who do not
agree in all points with the fathers whom or whose memory they honor
and venerate. They might with as much propriety call them matricides,
if they did not agree with the milder teachings of their mothers. I can
imagine Jonathan Edwards in the nursery with his three-year-old child
upon his knee. The child looks up to his face and says to him,--“Papa,
nurse tells me that you say God hates me worse than He hates one of
those horrid ugly snakes that crawl all round. Does God hate me so?”
“Alas! my child, it is but too true. So long as you are out of Christ
you are as a viper, and worse than a viper, in his sight.”
By and by, Mrs. Edwards, one of the loveliest of women and sweetest of
mothers, comes into the nursery. The child is crying.
“What is the matter, my darling?”
“Papa has been telling me that God hates me worse than a snake.”
Poor, gentle, poetical, sensitive, spiritual, almost celestial Mrs.
Jonathan Edwards! On the one hand the terrible sentence conceived,
written down, given to the press, by the child's father; on the other
side the trusting child looking up at her, and all the mother pleading
in her heart against the frightful dogma of her revered husband. Do
you suppose she left that poison to rankle in the tender soul of her
darling? Would it have been moral parricide for a son of the great
divine to have repudiated the doctrine which degraded his blameless
infancy to the condition and below the condition of the reptile? Was it
parricide in the second or third degree when his descendant struck out
that venomous sentence from the page in which it stood as a monument
to what depth Christian heathenism could sink under the teaching of the
great master of logic and spiritual inhumanity? It is too late to be
angry about the abuse a well--meaning writer received thirty years ago.
The whole atmosphere has changed since then. It is mere childishness to
expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any
minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than
when the father was of his son's age.
So far as I have observed persons nearing the end of life, the Roman
Catholics understand the business of dying better than Protestants. They
have an expert by them, armed with spiritual specifics, in which they
both, patient and priestly ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession,
the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,--these all inspire a confidence which
without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive
natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres
of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and
smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends,
and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no
wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence.
To exorcise them, the old Church of Christendom has her mystic formulae,
of which no rationalistic prescription can take the place. If Cowper had
been a good Roman Catholic, instead of having his conscience handled
by a Protestant like John Newton, he would not have died despairing,
looking upon himself as a castaway. I have seen a good many Roman
Catholics on their dying beds, and it always appeared to me that they
accepted the inevitable with a composure which showed that their belief,
whether or not the best to live by, was a better one to die by than most
of the harder creeds which have replaced it.
In the more intelligent circles of American society one may question
anything and everything, if he will only do it civilly. We may talk
about eschatology, the science of last things,--or, if you will, the
natural history of the undiscovered country, without offence before
anybody except young children and very old women of both sexes. In our
New England the great Andover discussion and the heretical missionary
question have benumbed all sensibility on this subject as entirely,
as completely, as the new local anaesthetic, cocaine, deadens the
sensibility of the part to which it is applied, so that the eye may have
its mote or beam plucked out without feeling it,--as the novels of Zola
and Maupassant have hardened the delicate nerve-centres of the women who
have fed their imaginations on the food they have furnished.
The generally professed belief of the Protestant world as embodied in
their published creeds is that the great mass of mankind are destined
to an eternity of suffering. That this eternity is to be one of bodily
pain--of “torment “--is the literal teaching of Scripture, which has
been literally interpreted by the theologians, the poets, and the
artists of many long ages which followed the acceptance of the recorded
legends of the church as infallible. The doctrine has always been
recognized, as it is now, as a very terrible one. It has found a support
in the story of the fall of man, and the view taken of the relation
of man to his Maker since that event. The hatred of God to mankind in
virtue of their “first disobedience” and inherited depravity is at the
bottom of it. The extent to which that idea was carried is well shown in
the expressions I have borrowed from Jonathan Edwards. According to his
teaching,--and he was a reasoner who knew what he was talking about,
what was involved in the premises of the faith he accepted,--man
inherits the curse of God as his principal birthright.
What shall we say to the doctrine of the fall of man as the ground of
inflicting endless misery on the human race? A man to be punished for
what he could not help! He was expected to be called to account for
Adam's sin. It is singular to notice that the reasoning of the wolf with
the lamb should be transferred to the dealings of the Creator with his
creatures. “You stirred the brook up and made my drinking-place muddy.”
“But, please your wolfship, I couldn't do that, for I stirred the water
far down the stream,--below your drinking-place.” “Well, anyhow, your
father troubled it a year or two ago, and that is the same thing.”
So the wolf falls upon the lamb and makes a meal of him. That is wolf
logic,--and theological reasoning.
How shall we characterize the doctrine of endless torture as the destiny
of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this planet? I
prefer to let another writer speak of it. Mr. John Morley uses the
following words: “The horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful
idea that has ever corroded human character,--the idea of eternal
punishment.” Sismondi, the great historian, heard a sermon on eternal
punishment, and vowed never again to enter another church holding the
same creed. Romanism he considered a religion of mercy and peace by the
side of what the English call the Reformation.--I mention these protests
because I happen to find them among my notes, but it would be easy to
accumulate examples of the same kind. When Cowper, at about the end of
the last century, said satirically of the minister he was attacking,
“He never mentioned hell to ears polite,”
he was giving unconscious evidence that the sense of the barbarism of
the idea was finding its way into the pulpit. When Burns, in the midst
of the sulphurous orthodoxy of Scotland, dared to say,
“The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip
To haud the wretch in order,”
he was only appealing to the common sense and common humanity of his
fellow-countrymen.
All the reasoning in the world, all the proof-texts in old manuscripts,
cannot reconcile this supposition of a world of sleepless and endless
torment with the declaration that “God is love.”
Where did this “frightful idea” come from? We are surprised, as we grow
older, to find that the legendary hell of the church is nothing more nor
less than the Tartarus of the old heathen world. It has every mark of
coming from the cruel heart of a barbarous despot. Some malignant and
vindictive Sheik, some brutal Mezentius, must have sat for many pictures
of the Divinity. It was not enough to kill his captive enemy, after
torturing him as much as ingenuity could contrive to do it. He escaped
at last by death, but his conqueror could not give him up so easily, and
so his vengeance followed him into the unseen and unknown world. How the
doctrine got in among the legends of the church we are no more bound
to show than we are to account for the intercalation of the “three
witnesses” text, or the false insertion, or false omission, whichever
it may be, of the last twelve verses of the Gospel of St Mark. We do not
hang our grandmothers now, as our ancestors did theirs, on the strength
of the positive command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
The simple truth is that civilization has outgrown witchcraft, and is
outgrowing the Christian Tartarus. The pulpit no longer troubles itself
about witches and their evil doings. All the legends in the world could
not arrest the decay of that superstition and all the edicts that grew
out of it. All the stories that can be found in old manuscripts will
never prevent the going out of the fires of the legendary Inferno. It is
not much talked about nowadays to ears polite or impolite. Humanity
is shocked and repelled by it. The heart of woman is in unconquerable
rebellion against it. The more humane sects tear it from their “Bodies
of Divinity” as if it were the flaming shirt of Nessus. A few doctrines
with which it was bound up have dropped or are dropping away from it:
the primal curse; consequential damages to give infinite extension to
every transgression of the law of God; inverting the natural order of
relative obligations; stretching the smallest of finite offenses to the
proportions of the infinite; making the babe in arms the responsible
being, and not the parent who gave it birth and determined its
conditions of existence.
After a doctrine like “the hangman's whip” has served its purpose,--if
it ever had any useful purpose,--after a doctrine like that of
witchcraft has hanged old women enough, civilization contrives to
get rid of it. When we say that civilization crowds out the old
superstitious legends, we recognize two chief causes. The first is the
naked individual protest; the voice of the inspiration which giveth
man understanding. This shows itself conspicuously in the modern poets.
Burns in Scotland, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, in America, preached
a new gospel to the successors of men like Thomas Boston and Jonathan
Edwards. In due season, the growth of knowledge, chiefly under the form
of that part of knowledge called science, so changes the views of the
universe that many of its long-unchallenged legends become no more than
nursery tales. The text-books of astronomy and geology work their way
in between the questions and answers of the time-honored catechisms.
The doctrine of evolution, so far as it is accepted, changes the whole
relations of man to the creative power. It substitutes infinite hope in
the place of infinite despair for the vast majority of mankind. Instead
of a shipwreck, from which a few cabin passengers and others are to be
saved in the long-boat, it gives mankind a vessel built to endure the
tempests, and at last to reach a port where at the worst the passengers
can find rest, and where they may hope for a home better than any which
they ever had in their old country. It is all very well to say that men
and women had their choice whether they would reach the safe harbor or
not.
“Go to it grandam, child;
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry and a fig.”
We know what the child will take. So which course we shall take depends
very much on the way the choice is presented to us, and on what the
chooser is by nature. What he is by nature is not determined by himself,
but by his parentage. “They know not what they do.” In one sense this is
true of every human being. The agent does not know, never can know, what
makes him that which he is. What we most want to ask of our Maker is an
unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions
in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong. We want an
advocate of helpless humanity whose task it shall be, in the words of
Milton,
“To justify the ways of God to man.”
We have heard Milton's argument, but for the realization of his vision
of the time
“When Hell itself shall pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day,”
our suffering race must wait in patience.
The greater part of the discourse the reader has had before him was
delivered over the teacups one Sunday afternoon. The Mistress looked
rather grave, as if doubtful whether she ought not to signify her
disapprobation of what seemed to her dangerous doctrine.
However, as she knew that I was a good church-goer and was on the best
terms with her minister, she said nothing to show that she had taken the
alarm. Number Five listened approvingly. We had talked the question
over well, and were perfectly agreed on the main point. How could it be
otherwise? Do you suppose that any intellectual, spiritual woman, with
a heart under her bodice, can for a moment seriously believe that the
greater number of the high-minded men, the noble and lovely women, the
ingenuous and affectionate children, whom she knows and honors or loves,
are to be handed over to the experts in a great torture-chamber, in
company with the vilest creatures that have once worn human shape?
“If there is such a world as used to be talked about from the pulpit,
you may depend upon it,” she said to me once, “there will soon be
organized a Humane Society in heaven, and a mission established among
'the spirits in prison.'”
Number Five is a regular church-goer, as I am. I do not believe either
of us would darken the doors of a church if we were likely to hear any
of the “old-fashioned” sermons, such as I used to listen to in former
years from a noted clergyman, whose specialty was the doctrine of
eternal punishment. But you may go to the churches of almost any of
our Protestant denominations, and hear sermons by which you can profit,
because the ministers are generally good men, whose moral and spiritual
natures are above the average, and who know that the harsh preaching of
two or three generations ago would offend and alienate a large part of
their audience. So neither Number Five nor I are hypocrites in attending
church or “going to meeting.” I am afraid it does not make a great deal
of difference to either of us what may be the established creed of the
worshipping assembly. That is a matter of great interest, perhaps of
great importance, to them, but of much less, comparatively, to us.
Companionship in worship, and sitting quiet for an hour while a trained
speaker, presumably somewhat better than we are, stirs up our spiritual
nature,--these are reasons enough to Number Five, as to me, for regular
attendance on divine worship.
Number Seven is of a different way of thinking and feeling. He insists
upon it that the churches keep in their confessions of faith statements
which they do not believe, and that it is notorious that they are
afraid to meddle with them. The Anglo-American church has dropped the
Athanasian Creed from its service; the English mother church is afraid
to. There are plenty of Universalists, Number Seven says, in the
Episcopalian and other Protestant churches, but they do not avow their
belief in any frank and candid fashion. The churches know very well, he
maintains, that the fear of everlasting punishment more than any or
all other motives is the source of their power and the support of their
organizations. Not only are the fears of mankind the whip to scourge
and the bridle to restrain them, but they are the basis of an almost
incalculable material interest. “Talk about giving up the doctrine of
endless punishment by fire!” exclaimed Number Seven; “there is more
capital embarked in the subterranean fire-chambers than in all the
iron-furnaces on the face of the earth. To think what an army of
clerical beggars would be turned loose on the world, if once those
raging flames were allowed to go out or to calm down! Who can wonder
that the old conservatives draw back startled and almost frightened at
the thought that there may be a possible escape for some victims whom
the Devil was thought to have secured? How many more generations will
pass before Milton's alarming prophecy will find itself realized in the
belief of civilized mankind?”
Remember that Number Seven is called a “crank” by many persons, and take
his remarks for just what they are worth, and no more.
Out of the preceding conversation must have originated the following
poem, which was found in the common receptacle of these versified
contributions: