University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
THE DOCTOR.

It is seldom that man and woman come together
in intimate association, unless influences are
at work more subtile and mysterious than the subjects
of them dream. Even in cases where the
strongest ruling force of the two sexes seems out
of the question, there is still something peculiar
and insidious in their relationship. A fatherly old
gentleman, who undertakes the care of a sprightly
young girl, finds, to his astonishment, that little
Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him. Grave
professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their
female pupils just as they give them to the coarser
sex, and more than once has the fable of “Cadenus
and Vanessa” been acted over by the most
unlikely performers.

The Doctor was a philosopher, a metaphysician,
a philanthropist, and in the highest and most earnest
sense a minister of good on earth. The New
England clergy had no sentimental affectation of
sanctity that segregated them from wholesome human

relations; and consequently our good Doctor
had always resolved, in a grave and thoughtful
spirit, at a suitable time in his worldly affairs, to
choose unto himself a helpmeet. Love, as treated
of in romances, he held to be a foolish and profane
matter, unworthy the attention of a serious
and reasonable creature. All the language of poetry
on this subject was to him an unknown tongue.
He contemplated the entrance on married life somewhat
in this wise: — That at a time and place
suiting, he should look out unto himself a woman
of a pleasant countenance and of good repute, a
zealous, earnest Christian, and well skilled in the
items of household management, whom, accosting
as a stranger and pilgrim to a better life, he should
loyally and lovingly entreat, as Isaac did Rebekah,
to come under the shadow of his tent and be a
helpmeet unto him in what yet remained of this
mortal journey. But straitened circumstances, and
the unsettled times of the Revolution, in which he
had taken an earnest and zealous part, had delayed
to a late bachelorhood the fulfilment of this resolution.

When once received under the shadow of Mrs.
Scudder's roof, and within the provident sphere of
her unfailing housekeeping, all material necessity
for an immediate choice was taken away; for he
was exactly in that situation dearest to every scholarly
and thoughtful man, in which all that pertained

to the outward life appeared to rise under
his hand at the moment he wished for it, without
his knowing how or why.

He was not at the head of a prosperous church
and society, rich and well-to-do in the world, — but,
as the pioneer leader of a new theology, in a country
where theology was the all-absorbing interest,
he had to breast the reaction that ever attends the
advent of new ideas. His pulpit talents, too, were
unattractive. His early training had been all logical,
not in the least æsthetic; for, like the ministry
of his country generally, he had been trained
always to think more of what he should say than
of how he should say it. Consequently, his style,
though not without a certain massive greatness,
which always comes from largeness of nature, had
none of those attractions by which the common
masses are beguiled into thinking. He gave only
the results of thought, not its incipient processes;
and the consequence was, that few could follow
him. In like manner, his religious teachings were
characterized by an ideality so high as quite to
discourage ordinary virtue.

There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God
has placed in human affections, tender instincts,
symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which
the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she
goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes,
as she rises, into the image of the divine. At the

very top of this ladder, at the threshold of paradise,
blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade
where the soul knows self no more, having learned,
through a long experience of devotion, how blest it
is to lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty
of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but
the dim type, the distant shadow. This highest
step, this saintly elevation, which but few selectest
spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to
which the Eternal Father organized every relation
of human existence and strung every cord of human
love, for which this world is one long discipline,
for which the soul's human education is constantly
varied, for which it is now torn by sorrow,
now flooded by joy, to which all its multiplied
powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant
aspiration, — this Ultima Thule of virtue
had been seized upon by our sage as the all of
religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder
but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless
splendor, said to the world, “Go up thither
and be saved!”

Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional
surrender to the Infinite, there was
nothing meritorious, — because, if that were commanded,
every moment of refusal was rebellion.
Every prayer, not based on such consecration, he
held to be an insult to the Divine Majesty; — the
reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of

life, the performance of the duties of man to man,
being, without this, the deeds of a creature in
conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign, were
all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be
preached to the sinner, but his ability and obligation
to rise immediately to this height.

It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort
should seem to many unendurable, and that the
multitude should desert the preacher with the cry,
“This is an hard saying; who can hear it?” The
young and gay were wearied by the dryness of
metaphysical discussions which to them were as
unintelligible as a statement of the last results of
the mathematician to the child commencing the
multiplication table. There remained around him
only a select circle, — shrewd, hard thinkers, who
delighted in metaphysical subtilties, — deep-hearted,
devoted natures, who sympathized with the unwordly
purity of his life, his active philanthropy
and untiring benevolence, — courageous men, who
admired his independence of thought and freedom
in breasting received opinion, — and those unperceiving,
dull, good people who are content to go
to church anywhere as convenience and circumstance
may drift them, — people who serve, among
the keen feeling and thinking portion of the world,
much the same purpose as adipose matter in the
human system, as a soft cushion between the nerves
of feeling and the muscles of activity.

There was something affecting in the pertinacity
with which the good Doctor persevered in saying
his say to his discouraging minority of hearers.
His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged
during the Revolutionary struggle, was dilapidated
and forlorn, — fireless in winter, and in summer
admitting a flood of sun and dust through those
great windows which formed so principal a feature
in those first efforts of Puritan architecture.

Still, grand in his humility, he preached on, —
and as a soldier never asks why, but stands at
apparently the most useless post, so he went on
from Sunday to Sunday, comforting himself with
the reflection that no one could think more meanly
of his ministrations than he did himself. “I am
like Moses only in not being eloquent,” he said,
in his simplicity. “My preaching is barren and
dull, my voice is hard and harsh; but then the
Lord is a Sovereign, and may work through me.
He fed Elijah once through a raven, and he may
feed some poor wandering soul through me.”

The only mistake made by the good man was
that of supposing that the elaboration of theology
was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was
preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living,
by his visitations to homes of poverty and sorrow,
by his searching out of the lowly African slaves,
his teaching of those whom no one else in those
days had thought of teaching, and by the grand

humanity, outrunning his age, in which he protested
against the then admitted system of slavery
and the slave-trade. But when, rising in the pulpit,
he followed trains of thought suited only to
the desk of the theological lecture-room, he did it
blindly, following that law of self-development by
which minds of a certain amount of fervor must
utter what is in them, whether men will hear or
whether they will forbear.

But the place where our Doctor was happiest
was his study. There he explored, and wandered,
and read, and thought, and lived a life as wholly
ideal and intellectual as heart could conceive.

And could Love enter a reverend doctor's study,
and find his way into a heart empty and swept
of all those shreds of poetry and romance in which
he usually finds the material of his incantations?
Even so; — but he came so thoughtfully, so reverently,
with so wise and cautious a footfall, that
the good Doctor never even raised his spectacles
to see who was there. The first that he knew,
poor man, he was breathing an air of strange and
subtile sweetness, — from what paradise he never
stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a
great, rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings
of boughs and twigs, which has stood cold and
frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful
of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly
content in its naked strength and crystalline definiteness

of outline. But in April there is a rising
and stirring within the grand old monster, — a whispering
of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing
ethereally from bough to bough with a warm and
gentle life; and though the old elm knows it not,
a new creation is at hand. Just so, ever since
the good man had lived at Mrs. Scudder's, and
had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a richer
life seemed to have colored his thoughts, — his
mind seemed to work with a pleasure as never
before.

Whoever looked on the forehead of the good
Doctor must have seen the squareness of ideality
giving marked effect to its outline. As yet ideality
had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible,
leading to subtile refinements of argument and
exalted ideas of morals. But there was lying in
him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those
artistic feelings and perceptions which are awakened
and developed only by the touch of beauty.
Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great
Duomo of Florence, where Giotto's Campanile rises
like the slender stalk of a celestial lily, where varied
marbles and rainbow-glass and gorgeous paintings
and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood,
the soul's reminiscences of the bygone glories of
its pristine state, his would have been a soul as
rounded and full in its sphere of faculties as that
of Da Vinci or Michel Angelo. But of all that

he was as ignorant as a child; and the first revelation
of his dormant nature was to come to him
through the face of woman, — that work of the
Mighty Master which is to be found in all lands
and ages.

What makes the love of a great mind something
fearful in its inception is, that it is often the unsealing
of a hitherto undeveloped portion of a large
and powerful being; the woman may or may not
seem to other eyes adequate to the effect produced,
but the man cannot forget her, because with her
came a change which makes him forever a different
being. So it was with our friend. A woman
it was that was destined to awaken in him all
that consciousness which music, painting, poetry
awaken in more evenly developed minds; and it
is the silent breathing of her creative presence that
is even now creating him anew, while as yet he
knows it not.

He never thought, this good old soul, whether
Mary were beautiful or not; he never even knew
that he looked at her; nor did he know why it
was that the truths of his theology, when uttered
by her tongue, had such a wondrous beauty as
he never felt before. He did not know why it
was, that, when she silently sat by him, copying
tangled manuscript for the press, as she sometimes
did, his whole study seemed so full of some divine
influence, as if, like St. Dorothea, she had worn

in her bosom, invisibly, the celestial roses of paradise.
He recorded honestly in his diary what marvellous
freshness of spirit the Lord had given him,
and how he seemed to be uplifted in his communings
with heaven, without once thinking from the
robes of what angel this sweetness had exhaled.

On Sundays, when he saw good Mrs. Jones
asleep, and Simeon Brown's hard, sharp eyes, and
Deacon Twitchel mournfully rocking to and fro,
and his wife handing fennel to keep the children
awake, his eye glanced across to the front gallery,
where one earnest young face, ever kindling with
feeling and bright with intellect, followed on his
way, and he felt uplifted and comforted. On Sunday
mornings, when Mary came out of her little
room, in clean white dress, with her singing-book
and psalm-book in her hands, her deep eyes solemn
from recent prayer, he thought of that fair and
mystical bride, the Lamb's wife, whose union with
her Divine Redeemer in a future millennial age
was a frequent and favorite subject of his musings;
yet he knew not that this celestial bride, clothed
in fine linen, clean and white, veiled in humility
and meekness, bore in his mind those earthly features.
No, he never had dreamed of that! But
only after she had passed by, that mystical vision
seemed to him more radiant, more easy to be conceived.

It is said, that, if a grape-vine be planted in the

neighborhood of a well, its roots, running silently
underground, wreathe themselves in a network
around the cold, clear waters, and the vine's putting
on outward greenness and unwonted clusters
and fruit is all that tells where every root and
fibre of its being has been silently stealing. So
those loves are most fatal, most absorbing, in
which, with unheeded quietness, every thought and
fibre of our life twines gradually around some
human soul, to us the unsuspected wellspring of
our being. Fearful it is, because so often the vine
must be uprooted, and all its fibres wrenched away;
but till the hour of discovery comes, how is it
transfigured by a new and beautiful life!

There is nothing in life more beautiful than that
trance-like quiet dawn which precedes the rising
of love in the soul. When the whole being is
pervaded imperceptibly and tranquilly by another
being, and we are happy, we know not and ask
not why, the soul is then receiving all and asking
nothing. At a later day she becomes self-conscious,
and then come craving exactions, endless
questions, — the whole world of the material comes
in with its hard counsels and consultations, and
the beautiful trance fades forever.

Of course, all this is not so to you, my good
friends, who read it without the most distant idea
what it can mean; but there are people in the
world to whom it has meant and will mean much,

and who will see in the present happiness of our
respectable friend something even omnious and
sorrowful.

It had not escaped the keen eye of the mother
how quickly and innocently the good Doctor was
absorbed by her daughter, and thereupon had come
long trains of practical reflections.

The Doctor, though not popular indeed as a
preacher, was a noted man in his age. Her deceased
husband had regarded him with something
of the same veneration which might have been
accorded to a divine messenger, and Mrs. Scudder
had received and kept this veneration as a precious
legacy. Then, although not handsome, the Doctor
had decidedly a grand and imposing appearance.
There was nothing common or insignificant about
him. Indeed, it had been said, that, when, just
after the declaration of peace, he walked through
the town in the commemorative procession side
by side with General Washington, the minister,
in the majesty of his gown, bands, cocked hat,
and full flowing wig, was thought by many to be
the more majestic and personable figure of the
two.

In those days, the minister united in himself all
those ideas of superior position and cultivation
with which the theocratic system of the New England
community had invested him. Mrs. Scudder's
notions of social rank could reach no higher than

to place her daughter on the throne of such preeminence.

Her Mary, she pondered, was no common girl.
In those days, it was a rare thing for young persons
to devote themselves to religion or make any
professions of devout life. The church, or that
body of people who professed to have passed
through a divine regeneration, was almost entirely
confined to middle-aged and elderly people, and
it was looked upon as a singular and unwonted
call of divine grace when young persons came forward
to attach themselves to it. When Mary,
therefore, at quite an early age, in all the bloom
of her youthful beauty, arose, according to the
simple and impressive New England rite, to consecrate
herself publicly to a religious life, and to
join the company of professing Christians, she
was regarded with a species of deference amounting
even to awe. Had it not been for the childlike,
unconscious simplicity of her manners, the
young people of her age would have shrunk away
from her, as from one entirely out of their line of
thought and feeling; but a certain natural and
innocent playfulness and amiable self-forgetfulness
made her a general favorite.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Scudder knew no young man
whom she deemed worthy to have and hold a heart
which she prized so highly. As to James, he stood
at double disadvantage, because, as her cousin's

son, he had grown up from childhood under her
eye, and all those sins and iniquities into which
gay and adventurous youngsters will be falling had
come to her knowledge. She felt kindly to the
youth; she wished him well; but as to giving him
her Mary! — the very suggestion made her dislike
him. She was quite sure he must have tried to
beguile her, — he must have tampered with her
feelings, to arouse in her pure and well-ordered
mind so much emotion and devotedness as she
had witnessed.

How encouraging a Providence, then, was it that
he was gone to sea for three years! — how fortunate
that Mary had been prevented in any way
from committing herself with him! — how encourageing
that the only man in those parts, in the least
fitted to appreciate her, seemed so greatly pleased
and absorbed in her society! — how easily might
Mary's dutiful reverence be changed to a warmer
sentiment, when she should find that so great a
man could descend from his lofty thoughts to think
of her!

In fact, before Mrs. Scudder had gone to sleep
the first night after James's departure, she had settled
upon the house where the minister and his
young wife were to live, had reviewed the window-curtains
and bed-quilts for each room, and glanced
complacently at an improved receipt for wedding-cake
which might be brought out to glorify a certain
occasion!