University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
AN OUTLOOK INTO LIFE.

MY coming back to my native town was an event of
public notoriety. I had won laurels, and as I was
the village property, my laurels were duly commented
on and properly appreciated. Highland was one of
those thrifty Yankee settlements where every house seems to
speak the people so well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive
in all the means of material comfort. There was not a
house in it that was not in a sort of healthy, growing state,
receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed
that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging.
This had a new bay-window, and that had a new
veranda; the other, new, tight, white picket fences all round
the yard. Others rejoiced in a fresh coat of paint. But all
were alive, and apparently self-repairing. There was to
every house the thrifty wood-pile, seasoning for winter;
the clean garden, with its wealth of fruit and its gay borders
of flowers; and every new kind of flower, and every
choice new fruit, found somewhere a patron who was trying
a hand at it.

Highland was a place worth living in just for its scenery.
It was at that precise point of the country where the hills
are inspiriting, vivacious, reminding one of the Psalm,—
“The little hills rejoice on every side!” Mountains are
grand, but they also are dreary. For a near prospect they
overpower too much, they shut out the sun, they have savage
propensities, untamable by man, shown once in a while
in land-slides and freshets; but these half-grown hills uplift
one like waves of the sea. In summer they are wonderful

in all possible shades of greenness; in autumn they are like
a mystical rainbow—an ocean of waves, flamboyant with
every wonderful device of color; and even when the leaves
are gone, in November, and nothing left but the bristling
steel-blue outlines of trees, there is a wonderful purple
haze, a veil of dreamy softness, around them, that makes
you think you never saw them so beautiful.

So I said to myself, as I came rambling over hill and dale
back to the old homestead, and met my mother's bright
face of welcome at the door. I was the hero of the hour
at home, and everything had been prepared to make me
welcome. My brother, who kept the homestead, had relinquished
the prospect of a college life, and devoted himself
to farming, but looked on me as the most favored of mortals
in the attainments I had made. His young wife and
growing family of children clustered around my mother
and leaned on her experience; and as every one in the little
village knew and loved her, there was a general felicitation
and congratulation on the event of my return and my
honors.

“See him in his father's pulpit afore long,” said Deacon
Manning, who called the first evening to pay his respects;
“better try his hand at the weekly prayer meeting, and stir
us up a bit.”

“I think, Deacon,” said I, “I shall have to be one of
those that learn in silence, awhile longer. I may come to
be taught, but I certainly cannot teach.”

“Well, now, that's modest for a young fellow that's just
been through college! They commonly are as feathery and
highflying as a this year's rooster, and ready to crow
whether their voice breaks or not,” said the deacon.
`Learn in silence!' Well, that 'ere beats all for a young
man!”

I thought to myself that the good deacon little knew the
lack of faith that was covered by my humility.

Since my father's death, my mother had made her home
with my Uncle Jacob. Her health was delicate, and she

preferred to enjoy the honors of a grandmother at a little
distance. My Uncle Jacob had no children. Aunt Polly,
his wife, was just the softest, sleekest, most domestic dove
of a woman whose wings were ever covered with silver. I
always think of her in some soft, pearly silk, with a filmy
cap, and a half-handkerchief crossed over a gentle, motherly
bosom, soft moving, soft speaking, but with a pair of
bright, hazel eyes, keen as arrows to send their glances into
every place in her dominions. Let anybody try sending in
a false account to Aunt Polly, and they will see that the
brightness of her eyes was not merely for ornament. Yet
everything she put her hand to went so exactly, so easily,
you would have said those eyes were made for nothing but
reading, for which Aunt Polly had a great taste, and for
which she found abundance of leisure.

My mother and she were enjoying together a long and
quiet Saturday afternoon of life, reading to each other, and
quietly and leisurely discussing all that they read,—not
merely the last novel, as the fashion of women in towns
and cities is apt to be, but all the solid works of philosophy
and literature that marked the times. My uncle's house was
like a bookseller's stall,—it was overrunning with books.
The cases covered the walls; they crowded the corners
and angles; and still every noteworthy book was ordered,
to swell the stock.

My mother and aunt had read together Lecky, and
Buckle, and Herbert Spencer, with the keen critical interest
of fresh minds. Had it troubled their faith? Not
in the least; no more than it would that of Mary on the
morning after the resurrection! There is a certain moral
altitude where faith becomes knowledge, and the batwings
of doubt cannot fly so high. My mother was
dwelling in that land of Beulah, where the sun always
shineth, and the bells of the heavenly city are heard, and
the shining ones walk. All was clear to her, all bright,
all real, in “the beyond;” but that kind of evidence

is above the realm of heavy-footed reason. The “joy unspeakable,”
the “peace that passeth understanding,” are
things that cannot be passed from hand to hand. Else I
am quite sure my mother would have taken the crown of
joy from her head and the peace from her bosom, and
given them to me. But the “white stone with the new
name” is Christ's gift to each for himself, and “no man
knoweth it save he that receiveth it.”

But these witnesses who stand gazing into heaven are
not without their power on us who stand lower. It steadied
my moral nerves, so to speak, that my mother had read
and weighed the words that were making so much doubt
and shaking; that she fully comprehended them, and that
she smiled without fear.

She listened without distress, without anxiety, to all my
doubts and falterings. “You must pass through this; you
will be led; it will all come right,” she said; “and then
perhaps you will be the guide of others.”

I had feared to tell her that I had abandoned the purpose
of the ministry, but I found it easy.

“I would not have you embrace the ministry for anything
but a true love,” she said, “any more than I would that
you should marry a wife for any other reason. If ever
the time comes that you feel you must be that, it will be
your call; but you can be God's minister otherwise than
through the pulpit.”

“Talk over your plans with your uncle,” she said; “he
is in your father's place now.”

In fact, my uncle, having no children of his own, had
set his heart on me, and was disposed to make me heir, not
only to his very modest personal estate, but also to his
harvest of ideas and opinions,—all that backwater of
thoughts and ideas that accumulate on the mind of a man
who thinks and reads a great deal in a lonely neighborhood.
So he took me up as a companion in his daily rides
over the country.

“Well, Harry, where next?” he said to me the day after

my return, as we were driving together. “What are you
about? Going to try the ministry?”

“I dare not; I am not fit. I know father wanted it, and
prayed for it, and nothing would be such a joy to mother,
but—”

My uncle gave a shrewd, sidelong glance on me.

“I suppose you are like a good many fellows; an education
gives them a general shaking up, and all their beliefs
break from their lashings and go rolling and tumbling
about like spars and oil-casks in a storm on ship-board.”

“I can't say that is true of all my beliefs; but yet a great
many things that I tried to regard as certain are untied. I
have too many doubts for a teacher.”

“Who hasn't? I don't know anything in heaven or
earth that forty unanswerable questions can't be asked
about.”

“You know,” answered I, “Tennyson says,

“H'm! that depends. Doubt is very well as a sort of
constitutional crisis in the beginning of one's life; but if
it runs on and gets to be chronic, it breaks a fellow up, and
makes him morally spindling and sickly. Men that do anything
in the world must be men of strong convictions; it
won't do to go through life like a hen, craw-crawing and
lifting up one foot, and not knowing where to set it down
next.”

“But,” said I, “while I am passing through the constitutional
crisis, as you call it, is the very time I must make up
my mind to teach others on the most awful of all subjects.
I cannot and dare not. I must be a learner for some years
to come, and I must be a learner without any pledges,
expressed or implied, to find the truth this way or that.”

“Well,” said my uncle; “I'm not so greatly concerned
about that—the Lord needs other ministers besides those in
the pulpit. Why, man, the sermons on the evidences of
Christianity that have come home to me most have been

preached by lay preachers in poor houses and lonely
churches, by ignorant men and women, and little children.”
“There's old Aunt Sarah there,” he said, pointing with his
whip to a brown house in the distance, “that woman is
dying of a cancer, that slowly eats away her life in lingering
agony, and all her dependence is the work of a sickly,
consumptive daughter, and yet she is more than resigned to
her lot, she is so cheerful, so thankful, so hopeful, there is
such a blessed calm peace, and rest, and sweetness in that
house, that I love to go there. The influence of that
woman is felt all through the village—she preaches to some
purpose.”

“Because she knows what she believes,” I said.

“It was the same with your father, Harry. Now my
boy,” he added, turning to me with the old controversial
twinkle in his eye, and speaking in a confidential tone—
“The fact is, I never agreed with your father doctrinally,
there were weak spots in his system all along, and I always
told him so. I could trip him and floor him in an argument,
and have done it a hundred times,” he said, giving a touch
to his horse.

I thought to myself that it was well enough that my
father wasn't there to hear that statement, otherwise there
would have been an immediate tilting match, and the
whole ground to be gone over.

“Yes,” he said; “it wasn't mainly in your father's
theology that his strength lay—it was the Christ in him—
the great warm heart—his crystal purity and simplicity—
his unworldly earnestness and honesty. He was a godly
man and a manly man both, and he sowed seed all over
this State that came up good men and good women. Yes,
there are hundreds and hundreds in this State to-day that
are good men and good women, mainly because he lived.
That's what I call success in life, Harry, when a man carries
himself so that he turns into seed-corn and makes a harvest
of good people. You may upset a man's reasonings, and
his theology may go to the dogs, but a brave Christian

life you can't upset, it will tell. Now, Harry, are you going
to try for that?”

“God helping me, I will,” I said.

“You see, as to the theologies,” he added, “I think it has
been well said that the Christian world just now is like
a ship that's tacking, it has lost the wind on one side and
not quite got it on the other. The growth of society, the
development of new physical laws, and this modern scientific
rush of the human mind is going to modify the man-made
theologies and creeds; some of them will drop away
just as the blossom does when the fruit forms, but Christ's
religion will be just the same as ever—his words will not
pass away.”

“But then,” I said “there are a whole labyrinth of perplexing
questions about this Bible. What is inspiration?
What ground does it cover? How much of all these books
is inspired? What is their history? How came we by them?
What evidence have we that the record gives us Christ's
words uncorrupted?”

“If you had been brought up in Justin Martyr's time or
the days of the primitive Christians you would have been
put to study all these things first and foremost in your
education, but we modern Christians, teach young men
everything else except what we profess to think the most
important; and so you come out of college ignorant, just
where knowledge is most vital.”

“Well, that is past praying for now,” said I.

“Yes; but even now there is a way out—just as going
through a bog you plant your foot hard on what land there
is, and then take your bearings—so you must do here. The
way to get rid of doubts in religion, is to go to work with all
our might and practice what we don't doubt, and that you
can do whatever your calling or profession.”

“I shall certainly try,” said I.

“For example,” said my uncle, “There's the Sermon on
the Mount. Nobody has any doubt about that, there it lies
—plain enough, and enough of it—not a bit of what's called

theology in it. Not a word of information to settle the
mooted questions men wrangle over, but with a direct answer
to just the questions any thoughtful man must want
to have answered when he looks at life. Is there a Father
in the heavens? Will he help us if we ask? May the
troubles of life be our discipline? Is there a better life
beyond? And how are we to get that? There is Christ's
philosophy of life in that sermon, and Christ's mode of dealing
with actual existing society; and he who undertakes
in good faith to square his heart and life by it will have his
hands full. The world has been traveling eighteen hundred
years and not come fully into the light of its meaning.
There has never been a Christian state or a Christian
nation, according to that. That document is in modern
society just like a lump of soda in a tumbler of vinegar,
it keeps up a constant commotion, and will do so till every
particle of life is adjusted on its principles. The man who
works out Christ's teachings into a palpable life-form,
preaches Christianity, no matter what his trade or calling.
He may be a coal heaver or he may be a merchant, or a
lawyer, or an editor—he preaches all the same. Men always
know it when they meet a bit of Christ's sermons walking
out bodily in good deeds; they're not like worldly wisdom,
and have a smack of something a good deal higher than
common sense, but when people see it they say, “Yes—
that's the true thing.” Now one of our Presidents, General
Harrison, found out on a certain day that through a flaw in
the title deeds he was owner to half the city of Cincinnati.
What does he do? Why, simply he says to himself, `These
people have paid their money in good faith, and I'll do by
them as I'd be done by,' and he goes to a lawyer and has
fresh deeds drawn out for the whole of 'em, and lived and
died a poor, honest man. That action was a preaching of
Christ's doctrine as I take it, and if you'll do as much
whenever you get a chance, its no matter what calling you
take for a pulpit. So now tell me what are you thinking of
setting yourself about?”

“I intend to devote myself to literature,” said I. “I
always had a facility for writing, while I never felt the call
or impulse toward public speaking; and I think the field of
current literature opens a wide scope. I have had already
some success in having articles accepted and well spoken
of, and have now some promising offers. I have an opportunity
to travel in Europe as correspondent of two papers, and
I shall study to improve myself. In time I may become an
editor, and then perhaps at last proprietor of a paper. So
runs my scheme of life, and I hope I shall be true to myself
and my religion in it. I shall certainly try to. Current
literature—the literature of newspapers and magazines, is
certainly a power.”

“A very great power, Harry,” said my uncle; “and getting
to be in our day a tremendous power, a power far outgoing
that of the pulpit, and that of books. This constant daily
self-asserting literature of newspapers and periodicals is acting
on us tremendously for good or for ill. It has access to
us at all hours and gets itself heard as a preacher cannot,
and gets itself read as scarcely any book does. It ought to
be entered into as solemnly as the pulpit, for it is using a
great power. Yet just now it is power without responsibility.
It is in the hands of men who come under no pledge,
pass no examination, give no vouchers, though they hold a
power more than that of all other professions or books
united. One cannot be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a minister,
unless some body of his fellows looks into his fitness to
serve society in these ways; but one may be turned loose to
talk in every family twice a day, on every subject, sacred
and profane, and say anything he chooses without even the
safeguard of a personal responsibility. He shall speak from
behind a screen and not be known. Now you know old
Dante says that the souls in the other world were divided
into three classes, those who were for God and those who
were for the Devil, and those who were for neither, but for
themselves. It seems to me that there's a vast many of
these latter at work in our press—smart literary adventurers,

who don't care a copper what they write up or what
they write down, wholly indifferent which side of a question
they sustain, so they do it smartly, and ready to sell their
wit, their genius and their rhetoric to the highest bidder.
Now, Harry, I'd rather see you a poor, threadbare, hard-worked,
country minister than the smartest and brightest
fellow that ever kept his talents on sale in Vanity Fair.”

“Well,” said I, “isn't it just here that your principle of
living out a Gospel should come? Must there not be writers
for the press who believe in the Sermon on the Mount, and
who are pledged to get its principles into life-forms as fast
as they can?”

“Yea, verily,” said my uncle; “but do you mean to keep
faithful to that? You have, say, a good knack at English;
you can write stories, and poems, and essays; you have a
turn for humor; and now comes the Devil to you and says,
`Show me up the weak points of those reformers; raise a
laugh at those temperance men,—those religionists, who,
like all us poor human trash, are running religion, and
morals, and progress into the ground.' You can succeed;
you can carry your world with you. You see, if Virtue
came straight down from Heaven with her white wings and
glistening robes, and always conducted herself just like an
angel, our trial in life wouldn't be so great as it is. But
she doesn't. Human virtue is more apt to appear like a
bewildered, unprotected female, encumbered with all sorts
of irregular bandboxes, dusty, disheveled, out of fashion,
and elbowing her way with ungainly haste and ungraceful
postures. You know there are stories of powerful fairies
who have appeared in this way among men, to try their
hearts; and those who protect them when they are feeble
and dishonored, they reward when they are glorious. Now,
your smart, flippant, second-rate wits never have the grace
to honor Truth when she loses her way, and gets bewildered
and dusty, and they drive a flourishing business in laughing
down the world's poor efforts to grow better.”

“I think,” said I, “that we Americans have one brilliant

example of a man who had keen humor, and used it on the
Christian side. The animus of the “Biglow Papers” is the
spirit of the Sermon on the Mount translated into the language
of Yankee life, and defended with wit and drollery.”

“You say truth, Harry, and it was no small thing to
do it; for the Anti-Slavery cause then was just in that
chaotic state in which every strange bird and beast, every
shaggy, irregular, unkempt reformer, male and female,
were flocking to it, and there was capital scope for caricature
and ridicule; and all the fastidious, and conservative,
and soft-handed, and even-stepping people were
measureless in their contempt for this shocking rabble.
Lowell stood between them and the world, and fought the
battle with weapons that the world could understand.
There was a Gospel truth in

and it did what no sermon could; this is the more remarkable
because he used for the purpose a harlequin faculty,
that has so often been read out of meeting and excommunicated
that the world had come to look at it as ex-officio
of the Devil. Whittier and Longfellow made valiant music
of the solemn sort, but Lowell evangelized wit.”

“The fortunate man,” said I, “to have used a great
opportunity!”

“Harry, the only way to be a real man, is to have a cause
you care for more than yourself. That made your father—
that made your New England Fathers—that raises literature
above some child's play, and makes it manly—but if you
would do it you must count on one thing—that the devil
will tempt you in the outset with the bread question as he
did the Lord.

is the first onset—you'll want money, and money will be
offered for what you ought not to write. There's the sensational
novel, the blood and murder and adultery story, of
which modern literature is full—you can produce it—do it
perhaps as well as anybody—it will sell. Will you be barkeeper
to the public, and when the public call for hot
brandy sling give it to them, and help them make brutes of
themselves? Will you help to vulgarize and demoralize
literature if it will pay?”

“No;” said I, “not if I know myself.”

“Then you've got to begin life with some motive higher
than to make money, or get a living, and you'll have sometimes
to choose between poisonous nonsense that brings pay,
and honest truth that nobody wants.”

“And I must tell the Devil that there is a higher life than
the bread-life?” said I.

“Yes; get above that, to begin with. Remember the
story of General Marion, who invited some British officers to
dine with him and gave them nothing but roasted potatoes.
They went away and said it was in vain to try to conquer a
people when their officers would live on such fare rather
than give up the cause. Do you know, Harry, what is
my greatest hope for this State? It's this: Two or three
years ago there was urgent need to carry this State in an
election, and there was no end of hard money sent up to buy
votes among our poor farmers: but they couldn't be bought.
They had learned, `Man shall not live by bread alone,' to
some purpose. The State went all straight for liberty.
What I ask of any man who wants to do a life-work is ability
to be happy on a little.”

“Well,” said I, “I have been brought up to that. I have
no expensive habits. I neither drink nor smoke. I am
used to thinking definitely as to figures, and I am willing to
work hard, and begin at the bottom of the ladder, but I
mean to keep my conscience and my religion, and lend a
helping hand to the good cause wherever I can.”

“Well, now, my boy, there're only two aids that you need
for this—one is God, and the other is a true, good woman.
God you will have, but the woman—she must be found.”

“I felt the touch on a sore spot, and so answered, purposely

misunderstanding his meaning. “Yes, I have not to go far
for her—my mother.”

“Oh yes, my boy—thank God for her; but Harry, you can't
take her away from this place; her roots have spread here;
they are matted and twined with the very soil; they run
under every homestead and embrace every grave. She is
so interwoven with this village that she could not take
root elsewhere, beside that, Harry, look at the clock of
life—count the years, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, and
the clock never stops! Her hair is all white now, and that
snow will melt by and by, and she will be gone upward.
God grant I may go first, Harry.”

“And I, too,” said I, fervently. “I could not live without
her.”

“You must find one like her, Harry. It is not good for
man to be alone; we all need the motherly, and we must find
it in a wife. Do you know what I think the prettiest story
of courtship I ever read? Its the account of Jacob's marriage
with Rebecca, away back in the simple old times. You
remember the ending of it,—“And Isaac brought her into
her mother Sarah's tent, and took Rebecca and she became
his wife, and Isaac was comforted for his mother's death.'
There's the philosophy of it,” he added; “it's the mother
living again in the wife. The motherly instinct is in the
hearts of all true women, and sooner or later the true wife
becomes a mother to her husband; she guides him, cares
for him, teaches him, and catechises him all in the nicest
way possible. Why I'm sure I never should know how to
get along a day without Polly to teach me the requirings
and forbiddens of the commandments; to lecture me for
going out without my muffler, and see that I put on my
flannels in the right time; to insist that I shall take something
for my cough, and raise a rebellion to my going out
when there's a north easter. So much for the body, and as
for the soul-life, I believe it is woman who holds faith in
the world—it is woman behind the wall, casting oil on the
fire that burns brighter and brighter, while the Devil pours

on water; and you'll never get Christianity out of the earth
while there's a woman in it. I'd rather have my wife's and
your mother's opinion on the meaning of a text of Scripture
than all the doctors of divinity, and their faith is an anchor
that always holds. Some jackanapes or other I read once,
said every woman wanted a master, and was as forlorn
without a husband as a masterless dog. Its a great deal
truer that every man wants a mother; men are more forlorn
than masterless dogs, a great deal, when no woman cares
for them. Look at the homes single women make for
themselves; how neat, how cosy, how bright with the oil
of gladness, and then look at old bachelor dens! The fact
is, women are born comfort-makers, and can get along by
themselves a great deal better than we can.”

“Well,” said I, “I don't think I shall ever marry. Of
course if I could find a woman like my mother, it would be
another thing. But times are altered—the women of this
day are all for flash and ambition, and money. There are
no more such as you used to find in the old days.”

“Oh, nonsense, Harry; don't come to me with that sort
of talk. Bad sort for a young man—very. What I want to
see in a young fellow is a resolution to have a good wife
and a home of his own as quick as he can find it. The
Roman Catholics weren't so far out of the way when they
said marriage was a sacrament. It is the greatest sacrament
of life, and that old church does yeoman service to
humanity in the stand she takes for Christian marriage. I
should call that the most prosperous state when all the
young men and women were well mated and helping one
another according to God's ordinances. You may be sure,
Harry, that you can never be a whole man without a wife.”

“Well,” I said; “there's time enough for that by and by:
if I'm predestinated I suppose it'll come along when I have
my fortune made.”

“Don't wait to be rich, Harry. Find a faithful, heroic
friend that will strike hands with you, poor, and begin to
build up your nest together,—that's the way your father and

mother did, and who enjoyed more? That's the way your
Aunt Polly and I did, and a good time we have had of it.
There has always been the handful of meal in the barrel and
the little oil in the cruse, and if the way we have always
lived is poverty, all I have to say is, poverty is a pretty nice
thing.”

“But,” said I, bitterly, “you talk of golden ages. There
are no such women now as you found, the women now are
mere effeminate dolls of fashion—all they want is ease and
show, and luxury, and they care nothing who gives it—one
man is as good as another if he is only rich.”

“Tut, tut, boy! Don't you read your Bible? Away back
in Solomon's time, it's written, `Who can find a virtuous
woman? Her price is above rubies.' Are rubies found
without looking for them, and do diamonds lie about the
street? Now, just attend to my words—brave men make
noble women, and noble women make brave men. Be a true
man first, and some day a true woman will be given you.
Yes, a woman whose opinion of you will hold you up if all
the world were against you, and whose `Well done!' will be
a better thing to come home to, than the senseless shouting
of the world who scream for this thing to-day and that
to-morrow.”

By this time the horse had turned up the lane, and my
mother stood smiling in the door. I marked the soft
white hair that shone like a moonlight glory round her
head, and prayed inwardly that the heavens would spare
her yet a little longer.