Chapter III: Part 3

We make reputations long before we suspect that we have any such comet’s tail of public opinion attached to us. We leave ridiculous caricatures of ourselves along the way, which illustrated tragedies in our lives at the time. Later we come upon these records and pictures and are rarely ever pleased. But somebody has kept them for you, and somebody will remind you of them one day when you are sitting on your pinnacle.

I have been painfully reminded of such things, such as the time in my early school days when I wore the wrong little girl’s bonnet and came home with boogers in my hair, the frightful ordeal my head passed through, and mother’s tears. She was a woman who made mountains of her mole-hills and then climbed them, dragging me, miserable, after her. I lived a very sensational life with her morally on this account. I remember the almost fainting state of humiliation I fell in on this occasion, because it seemed I was the only child in the whole history of her family that had ever contracted these disgraceful insects. I have also been obliged to recall how I learned to play cards under the schoolhouse, never having seen such things before, nor dreaming that they were the devil’s own deck of sins. This business lasted a week, and I cleaned up all the available property of my companions, chiefly slate pencils. Then one of the heaviest losers virtuously betrayed me to my grandfather, a stern old man who knew more than I did about the iniquitous gift of gambling in my immediate family.

There was a terrible scene, and I was obliged to stand beside the marble-top center table in the parlor, lay my hand on the Bible and swear solemnly never to play cards again. I have kept this vow. The little girl who betrayed me is a grandmother now, an exemplary woman who indulges in nothing worse than a social game of bridge.

I might easily have forgotten these and many other diminishing incidents of my childhood but for the fact that they are treasured in the archives of the family with parsimonious care. If you wish to collect complimentary material for a record of yourself, never appeal to your relations. They may be proud of you as an asset to the family name, but they have a gift for remembering your gawky period privately, the follies and faults you committed and have forgotten. You may have come up in the world with a laurel on your brow, but if you go back home forty years later wearing two laurels on your brow, and a noble expression, they will miss the point. What you are only serves to remind them of the little snub-nosed girl you used to be. They are determined to remember that you are dust. No matter how well you conduct yourself, you cannot fix their attention on your virtues or your fame, but they remember how you looked in a long-tailed ruffled basque and full skirt when you were eight years old. Or how you grew up to be very sarcastic, and the impudent thing you said to the Baptist preacher who wanted to proselyte you just after you were converted, meaning that the sting of my tongue had not been changed by conversion.

I do not think they mean any harm. They are simply keeping you where you belong in the family no matter where you belong in literature. Still, I would have preferred not to have become such a surprise to these people who knew me in the beginning. It does seem queer that none of them suspected the kind of youngster I really was. I could write a very serviceable anthology on family relations; but it is wiser not to do so, because some of them are bound to survive me and have the last word. It would be truthful but misleading.

XVI

‘BEAUTIFUL AND PRECIOUS’

The older I grow the more beautiful and precious life seems to me. The time will come, I know, when there will be nothing else to pray for except life and everlasting life. Give me that and an even break between joys and vicissitudes, the same right I have here to choose goodness, and I would cheerfully risk existence longer than a pious saint could stand with folded wings singing in heaven. But I know very little about this. Maybe I shall be changed when my corruption puts on incorruption, acclimated to all this music and brightness and the high level of perfect goodness. In the meantime, surely the Lord will respect my honesty in clinging to my human feelings, since I am subject to them according to His will.

I do not know how it is, but there is a doctrine which teaches damnation like consequences in all the churches with which I am familiar, either by election or predestination--terms which distinctly imply the exclusion from salvation of those not elected or predestined. I can find no Scripture in the Bible that justifies these interpretations without giving the passage a theological twist. The Methodist church, which makes such generous provision for salvaging and saving those who fall from grace, is not without blame in this matter. It covers the whole ground for the doctrines of election and predestined damnation, or salvation as the case may be, with the doctrine of apostasy. The only difference is that an apostate chooses his own fate and is not predestined to it from the foundation of the world. This is only apparently putting the blame where it belongs. The threat hidden beneath is that the Lord will stand just so much, then His spirit ceases to strive with a man. When you think about it, this is the worst fate of all. What is to defend a person highly sensitized spiritually from the perpetual fear of being forsaken in his sins?

I had my first lesson in theology very early--religion is something else. If you have the mind to believe, the Scriptures are singularly clear; but only a student and a scholar can make heads and tails of theology. It is a sort of puzzle the wavering minds of men have made from the Word of God, to the end that sinners have been exalted by a creed, saints burned at the stake for the sake of a doctrine, and thousands obliged to flee from one country to another to save their necks and their liberty of conscience.

Maybe all that was for the best. Certainly, if you give it time, the worst turns out for the best.

Mother was the kind of Methodist who could afford to believe without much personal anxiety in this doctrine. She was a truly good woman, with an Old Testament mind. Somewhere along the way she warned me of the danger. She impressed me with the fact that if I hardened my heart the spirit would cease to strive with me. The time came when God abandoned the willful sinner and left him to his fate. I went around with this red-hot coal of fire on my spiritual back for a long time. I acquired habits of thought then that worked havoc with my peace for half a lifetime. I have never entirely escaped the fear that I may turn out to be an apostate after all. It seizes upon me like a malady. I am troubled by the realization that the spirit does not seem to strive with me as it did when I was younger. This is a fearfully lonely feeling, and not rational. But sanity, in my opinion, is an achievement. I have seen very few well-balanced people in my life who were not dunces.

I was finally soundly converted and joined the church. At the time that experience seemed more miraculous than it does now; I have been born again so many times since. First I had to adjust myself to the heavenly mind. Then I must adjust myself to the ministry of my husband. Finally, after his death, I had to be born again to the world, capable of dealing with it sensibly and honorably. My experience is that this last requires more divine inspiration than being a private Christian protected by all the defenses that marriage and religion raise about a woman’s life.

XVII

THE WORKING OF LOVE

When I was nine years old I remember a certain thing that happened. I was sitting somewhere behind the old field schoolhouse with three other little girls. We were making wishes and telling our fortunes by pulling the petals from daisies. I made a wish and tried it out by the daisy petals. But I would not tell what it was.

‘I know,’ said one little girl.

‘You never could guess,’ I retorted.

She bent over and whispered, ‘You wished for a husband!’

It turned out that we had all wished for husbands. We were the simplest, most innocent of little creatures, at the doll-mothering, playhouse stage of development, totally ignorant of love and lovers. But we felt the need of husbands, as, I suppose, the Eastern Hemisphere might have longed for the Western Hemisphere to make the world complete. We felt incomplete.

The florescence of nature came to me as it does to all youth, unbeknowingly. What I remember about that is the quantities of romantic poetry I consumed, practicing at the same time a very strong virginal antagonism toward young men.

At last love and the lover did come to me. I have written all the experience out in another place, and of my marriage at the age of seventeen.

Love does something to the mind. But it is something that you cannot use so long as it lasts as a vital part of your experience. During the first ten years of my married life it seemed to close the intellectual pores of my mind. I lived according to that definition of faith which says it is ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ I passed through many joys, poverty, fear, and great tribulations according to that ritual of one sentence. I did not think in the terms of ideas, but only in the terms of love. I was guided entirely by my husband’s mind, which was one you may say literally stricken by the Holy Spirit. He was a preacher and made only one use of his mind, that of finding God and teaching sinners the way of salvation.

This was not as you may suppose a drab and monotonous existence, but one filled with strange and lofty experiences.

I was destined to discover that mother’s ideas of religion were coldly platonic as compared with the passionate fervor of my circuit rider in his devotion to God. Mother believed in behaving yourself and keeping the Commandments and walking according to the ordinances of the church to which she belonged. He believed in literally living the life of Jesus Christ--and could not do it. This brought on the struggle that lasted for him more than twenty years. I tried to keep up with him. The first time he fasted and prayed all day after we were married, I fasted also, but could not pray that long. Protracted prayers are a mystery to me. I can simply fall upon my knees and let that be a prayer any time. What is the good of words to God? They are symbols we use to one another because we neither know nor are known to one another as He knows us.

This was the last time I ever fasted, because at the end of the day I was exhausted, nervous and in no Christian mood.

I cannot tell in years how long it took me to do it, but I finally adjusted myself about my husband like a small protesting world and so stood the siege. Love held us as close together as if we had one heart in common. But I do not remember that we ever had the same mind about anything. The point at last with me was to get mine disentangled from the bondage of his brave, beautiful, but impractical religious beliefs. I never succeeded. All these years after his death I am still more conscious of the truth that led him than of my own right mind. I am still beholden to his God; I have never got round to serving my own God with a free mind and a comfortable, cheerful spirit. I must fall into a state of anguish once in so often, make sacrifices that do not ease the pain, and go about wondering where the witness of my spirit is. I have the feeling sometimes that at last I may be dragged through the gates of heaven, spent, woeful, and humble, by the very power of his spirit; that I shall not stride in with my hat on and my head up, bearing a good conscience with me in token of a well-spent life.

If you have been born in the twentieth century and have a good deal of human dust sticking to your soul, if you really love the world, remembering that God made it and blessed it, as others think they love only Heaven; if you like human beings, good and bad, better than you do saints--it is a queer feeling to know that you are forever involved in a mediæval religion of asceticism, sacrifice, and sufferings.

By this time it is my very nature to work up hardships and great spiritual struggles for myself which only involve me deeper and higher in the will of my husband’s God--all the time remembering the child I used to be, so sure of a kinder God, so peacefully at home beneath His kind heavens. It is a queer situation which will end very creditably, I suppose, with my funeral.

XVIII

VENTURES IN SCRIPTURES

I was eleven years younger than my husband, being really in the plastic period of adolescence. He was the gentlest of men, but he had a brilliant and mature mind, a queer temple of intellectual loveliness with pure classical lines. He did his thinking as a master architect does his drawing, with delicacy and precision. He was never overbearing, but the elegance, sweetness, and sincerity of his mind confounded my younger wits. I supposed that a man who could think like that must be correct in his conclusions, and for something like ten years I surrendered my own mind and left him to do our thinking. Most of it was pious, but always informed with that effulgence of the spirit peculiar to the rarer saints. My impression now is that I became a very good young person, by ear, so to speak, and that I was strangely stupid. The mental background I had acquired from much ravenous reading before my marriage faded. I forgot Tasso’s great poetry and settled down on the hillside of a mountain circuit with Lundy and the beatitudes. Maybe this was good for me spiritually, but it was diminishing mentally, which, in my opinion, was never meant to be the effect of any Scriptures upon the mind.

Lundy was not a practical man spiritually. I remember distinctly how determined he was to remain poor in spirit that he might become one of those legitimate heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. I imitated his poverty here with the same artless sincerity a child imitates an older person, though I could never put much feeling into the idea of being poor in spirit. The effect upon him was that with his nature elegant to the point of fastidiousness, and his scholarly mind, he walked humbly hand in hand with the meanest of his flock, making himself literally one of the least of them.

It was all wrong. I call your attention to the fact that Jesus went up into a mountain and set Him above the multitude before He began that great Sermon on the Mount. And when He finished it and came down the great multitude followed Him. I do not suppose He was jostled by that crowd. He was apart and far beyond them, and so held Himself there and everywhere else. It will not do to be intimately poor in spirit with people who have no sense of your meaning. If you do they will keep you poorer than the Scriptures require both in spirit and fact.

Lundy was the same way about that beatitude which recommends those that mourn for they shall be comforted. We were rich in love and peace and were being as good as it is possible for human beings to live, but he would mourn in spite of everything for his transgressions, any transgression he could remember. He was the most unforgiving man of himself I ever knew.

In this connection I remember the first theological ruction we had after our marriage. He had harked up one of his former sins and was making himself miserable about it. I tried every way to smooth over his transgression--in vain. Finally I lost patience and called his attention to the generous forgiving Gospel he preached to other sinners. Did he believe he preached the truth? Certainly he did, was his reply.

‘Well then,’ I retorted, ‘why should you malign the goodness of God by imagining you yourself are not forgiven according to the same Gospel?’

This was one of the many clinches we had over these beatitudes. He said that a man’s conscience must be his guide in such matters. He reserved the right to repent of his own sins! He went on to imply that I might be morally obtuse. This was the straw that broke my camel’s back. I retorted that I was tired, and I supposed the Lord was tired of the vain repetition of his repentance over some little dead and forgotten transgression. I thought such conduct was morally debilitating. From this we had hot words and I flung myself upon the bed and wept bitterly.

My belief is that I had some glimmerings even as far back as that of the true meaning of these particular Scriptures. I know now that they are emergency remedies for the soul and not designed to create a perpetual state of mind. The effort to practice them all the time will victimize any man in his relations to his fellow men. I feel better most of the time, but now and then I have known what it is to be poor in spirit before the Lord on the occasion of some defalcation in virtue or patience or courage; but it is not my idea to tell any one else about it. I do my mourning and hurry on as quickly as possible to the more cheerful part of this beatitude which says ‘for they shall be comforted,’ feeling that I do myself credit by taking the Lord at His word as soon as possible. I have practiced swiftness in acts of faith and found it profitable. If the Bible means anything at all, you have a right to believe it. That is the test of the truth of the Scriptures--believe them, and if they do not come true you have the right to deny them. I have never had the chance to deny a single one, though of course I have lacked the spiritual capacity to try out the whole thing.

But there is that one which says, ‘Blessed are the meek’--meaning teachable--‘for they shall inherit the earth.’ It is not my nature to be teachable, but I have been in such tight quarters all my life that I have been obliged to learn a great deal with meekness. And it is a fact, I have inherited more of the earth than I deserve. To be strictly honest, I have never hungered and thirsted after righteousness to the point of egotism characteristic of some saints. I always had a feeling of modest limitations along this line; but now that I think back to those first years of my married life, it seems to be anguishing and pitiful the way I strove to be good. It was so terribly necessary if I was to keep up with Lundy.

The motive was a trifle crooked, as you will see; but the Lord honored it as He did that woman’s faith who had the issue of blood, which was an unintelligent faith. For as I look back now it seems to me that I was pretty well filled with righteousness then according to the other end of that beatitude. With me, being merciful is not a virtue. It comes too easy for me to have deserved much in return, like some kind of happy weakness of character. Still, I have finally been overwhelmed with mercies. I feel sometimes that I might have used them to a better advantage further back in the years when my needs were very great. But the point I make is that this Scripture was fulfilled. I have even been pure enough in heart at rare intervals to see God. But not often when I was up and shining. Usually it would be when I was passing through some valley of the shadow of great grief. After the pain is over I have always been able to look back and know that sorrows are much more purifying and elevating to the mind than joys.

But when it comes to that verse which says ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God,’ it has depended upon the circumstances whether I came out of the scrimmage like such a child. I have known myself to forgo the blessing and refuse to make a peace that left me in the lurch. In that case I hunted up some such Scripture as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and took what satisfaction I could get from that. Never yet have I parted with an eye or a tooth, or turned the other cheek except to my Lord, who is the only one who has the right to smite me.

These, of course, are my favorable experiences with the truth of the Bible. I have suffered a-plenty from the unfavorable passages, such as, ‘Judge not.... For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.’ I have had this experience a thousand times. Some one who knows me, or a stranger of whom I have never heard, rises up and passes judgment upon me as if it was a harsh and sacred duty he performed--without ever suspecting, I suppose, that he is measuring to me again unfair and superficial criticisms I have passed on other people. They do have somewhat the advantage in this business, because there are so many more of them than there is of me, and one person cannot spare the time to pass as many adverse judgments as one author endures. Even at that, I fare very well on account of getting so many more favorable judgments than I deserve from the same sources.

I was so much involved in the purely spiritual struggle of trying to live above and without the world until I was thirty years old that I became a sort of ignoramus. I cannot now recall what were the social and intellectual conditions of this period. I remember who the great preachers were, but not the name of a single statesman or public servant except one old congressman who used to do his electioneering at Sunday-school picnics. Readers of the circuit-rider stories must have observed that these are records in religious living to the exclusion of all earthly interests.

I suppose this is the reason why even ‘My Book and Heart’ produces the impression upon some readers of being the chronicle of a narrow and dreary life. I do not think it is, you understand. It seems to me that almost any person with a provincial mind might fail to appreciate the literature of a foreign country with which they were totally unfamiliar. The spiritual world which I inhabited at that time is not known now by a great many people otherwise very well informed. They are unable therefore to appreciate the vividness and romance of such an existence. It seems drab to them because they live in sums and dividends and secular realities and the same kind of diversions, not in sublime illusions.

But try chasing an impractical saint up one Jacob’s ladder after another for twelve years and find out for yourself what a varied and stimulating experience it is. Hunting big game in a jungle is nothing to the risks you take and the rarefied hardships you endure and the keen relief you feel now and then between adventures. I cannot claim that it was mentally exhilarating, but I developed considerable wing power of the spirit very helpful to me when I finally did go back, pick up my mind, shake some of the star dust off, and begin to use it with a good conscience for my own benefit in this present world.

But never so long as I live can I escape the tragic effects upon my life of these early years. My mind is free now, and I can reason as clearly as the next one about what a dear and blessed gift from God the world has been to me; but in my heart I seem still to belong back there in the years upon the lower rungs of that ever-upward-stretching ladder I used to climb toward Lundy’s God. I cannot get over feeling hard pressed spiritually sometimes, as if I was in dangerous need of chastening--I suppose the steel bridge never forgets the furnace in which its girders were melted and forged; I would give anything now and then to rest from this smelting sense of God and be comfortable in my carnal mind, but I never can be.

XIX

THE WISDOM OF THE WORD

What I have tried to prove is this: The Word of God is a prophecy of us in all of our manifestations and it records the laws of life and conduct from which no man can escape. Whether he is a good one or a bad one, he will find his portrait drawn there and a complete prophecy of what his fate will be. It never fails; it always comes true, for the atheist, agnostic, or spiritualistic sorcerer no less than for the saint.

Just look yourself up in that Book, and if you know how, you will find yourself predicted and recorded in it down to the very nose of your nature. Set down a list of your virtues and look up the rewards promised in return for these virtues, and you will know for certain what your dividends in living will be if you hold onto your assets. Make a list of your vices and weaknesses. Then, if you have the courage, look up the consequences which follow them as recorded in this Book and you will know long before judgment day what will happen to you even in this present world. ‘He that liveth by the sword shall perish by the sword.’

Even if one does not feel the keen edge of the blade in his breast, he is cut down one way or the other, and knows it whether any one else suspects it or not. He may be a rich man and a philanthropist, and he may get a great send-off, with a splendid funeral and a mausoleum set over his grave; but if his fortune was built upon widows’ mites and the bread taken from the poor, if he swindled and cheated, if he practiced usury, he went down to his dust a very poor man and knows it. Because the Word is written in him and only copied in the Bible.

The Baptists are not so far wrong about their notions of predestination and election, though far be it from me to travel my days encompassed about by their doctrines. That would be too nerve-racking to the mortal mind. Give me a creed with more elbow room in it for my transient transgressions and more encouragement for believing I have a chance to save my own soul by growing my own virtues according to the Word, which I could not have if I got the notion that I was damned or elected from the foundation of the world.

The place where the makers of these sterner creeds miss their cue, in my opinion, is when they fail to realize that the Scriptures are a sort of key to which we may refer and find the answer to the equation we are. They contain the history of all dead men and the prophecies of all living men and men to come. The smallest little squinched-up fraction of a saint can look in that Book and find out exactly what he is equal to and even how to become the whole unit of one. But we turn the trick. We do make ourselves according to the mind we use in the business. I do not know any more terrifyingly liberal provision made by Providence in our behalf. I have often wondered why the preachers do not say more about it, for it is far more convincing than the damnation gospel with which they used to set us afire.

I had no such wisdom of the Word as this, however, in the days of which I am now writing. I was a sort of Protestant Catholic, if you know what I mean. I accepted Lundy’s interpretations of the Gospels as a devout Catholic gets his from the priest. And I was not very much worried about not being able to live up to his ideals in the Christian life. Who has ever kept pace with the piety of a good priest? I did not feel obliged to do so. I existed in a state of mental obedience to certain religious convictions which were not my own. This was bad for me mentally and morally. I had considerable natural ability, but I remember distinctly being afraid to cut loose and think thoughts kin to my kind of mind lest I should sin against my husband’s faith. The virtues that one gets under such conditions do not really belong to her, but to the church or priest who imposes them. You are trained to them as a leopard is trained to jump through fiery hoops in a circus without singeing his tail. Without suspecting such a thing, I was that artificial in my Christian life during this period, a pathetically accomplished trick saint.

I have sometimes wondered if the stampede of human souls from the tyranny of creeds accounts for the strange mental and moral disorders of our times, and that presently, being as we are, forever immortal and close kin to God, we shall discover righteousness for ourselves and choose goodness as the great vocation of man, as it surely is. One thing is certain--in every age when the people have not been permitted to study the Scriptures, but have been obliged to accept a church’s interpretation of the Word, there followed a period of animal simplicity of mind in the masses, ignorance, loss of ambition, initiative, and all the poverty, follies, and meanness of mind which issue from such conditions.

Without every kind of liberty, men must perish, and they do. The only knowledge that really counts in character is the knowledge we get for ourselves tested by experience. This is the reason why some very cultured people remain so ignorant and ineffective. The only law that ever will actually control men is the will to obey their own conscience. Therefore the primary object of every preacher and teacher should be to set up the ideal of courage and an honest mind. Such people are safe citizens in this world and the next one. But they are not safe under doctrines, creeds, and laws arbitrarily imposed, whether they get them from the Bible or the Bolsheviks.

Consider the condition of our own country now. The democratic form of government is the best form for patriots. We were patriots when we signed the Declaration of Independence. Now we are not in principle or conduct. We are getting a commercialized conscience and covering the snare of it with philanthropy. So it turns out that the Constitution we made back there in the days when we were plain Christian patriots does not control the mind or illustrate the character of this nation now.

A monarchal form of government would be no better. Mankind seems to be outgrowing kings, not by growing better but less good. We are turning our back upon conscience and the Ten Commandments. No system of laws will govern such a people. I do not know what the political economists think of this situation, but as an old woman who looks at it through the passages of many Scriptures, I see the shadows of terrible events lengthening across the world. It is coming, that fearful punishment men inflict upon men for their sins. It is coming because it is not in us to endure too long our own unrighteousness. This is the law of moral economy written in us which we cannot escape.

The big knot in this whole problem is human nature. But once in so often we do untie it and straighten things out, not so much by the grace of God, but by the perverted righteousness of ferocity. Then we react and turn out once more to be the children of God--not lost after all, only chastened.

The secret of all things is as far from us as the East is from the West and as His ways are from our ways. Therefore, the higher standard we reach in pure romance the nearer we are to truth. I prefer Milton’s poetry, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, my choice of the Psalms, and a few of the elder hymns to anything Mr. H. G. Wells can think or write about the beginnings of life or the history of Christianity. It is interesting copy and contains much entrancing information, but Mr. Wells has too much sense and too little faith in the right direction to be the medium of the Lord’s divine illusion, which clothes us like a garment and is the only protection we have against the destructive rationalism of the mortal mind.

We have daily examples now of an educational system which encourages license in thinking along these lines. Two youths who graduated with distinction from two leading universities developed such unscrupulous intellects that they planned a monstrous crime. They had an ambition to commit a ‘perfect crime,’ as formerly Christian education inspired men to achieve honor. They executed a murder and proceeded with their plans for blackmail, ransom, and the scientific torture of their victims. They were not originally perverts. Now they must be regarded as criminally insane. They are the products of the rational system in education and of the ever-increasing intellectual slums produced by the license of this system.

I think Mr. William Jennings Bryan has the wrong bull by the horns when he assails the theory of evolution. It is not a theory, but a fact distinctly recorded in Genesis and proved by the whole history of creation down to the present time. But he might become a benefactor of youth if he would exercise the same energy in getting an interstate alienist commission appointed to test the moral sanity of many learned professors in our schools and universities. The findings of such a commission would go far toward revealing the sources of the wave of criminal insanity that is showing its crest in every court in this country. Too many learned doctors without any faith in the law which God is, are teaching young people how to think. They become criminals mentally whether they ever commit a crime or not.

XX

CONFESSION AND THE CHURCH

But what about the Church in all this moral confusion? More and more active, more and more prosperous, without having much effect upon the situation! What has become of that note of authority with which it formerly controlled in so great a measure the conduct of men? Well, it turns out to be a sort of spiritual bluff the Church put up, now no longer effective because men have learned how to think.

This is a dangerous discovery in view of the fact that we do not know enough or fear enough to think righteously. But less than at any time for the last two thousand years are we listening to the voice of the preachers. It is they who have their ear to the ground listening to the rumbling demands of the world. They are cats fighting over modernism.

I do not know what a modernist is, but my impression is that it is an element in the ministry of some churches anxious to accommodate its members and keep them cordial by yielding to their demands for less piety and more diversion. One pastor has introduced the ‘sacred dance’ about his church altar and quotes David’s example as his justification. David was a great singer, but not a good man. This preacher might take another man’s wife as David took Uriah’s and be quite as plausible in his contention.

The Methodist Church has just lifted the ban on worldly amusements for its members. And we are just now getting the news of a fine old bishop about to be tried for heresy who strode into the court of bishops accompanied by his radical lawyer. He looks as queer and out of drawing as Socrates must have appeared going off with that young rascal Alcibiades to make a night of it!

What I mean is that the Church is losing its dignity and authority as a holy institution. The debacle was inevitable, because its oppressive methods over the minds and imaginations of men were at variance with the wisdom of God. His Word was split into doctrines and creeds. No one denomination of us could use the whole of it. The plan of salvation varied according to the Church to which you belonged, and the doctrines by which we were to be damned varied even more. A good deal was taught concerning deliverance from sin, and nothing much was proved concerning freedom in Christ, which is the whole thing.

Jesus was of all men the mildest and tenderest in his relation to men, but the prelates, dignitaries, and princes of all the churches with which I am familiar have been overbearing either in their own personal character or in their interpretation of the will of God. This was their method during the Church’s period of power to frighten men into the Kingdom of Heaven, as now during its decline we find the disposition to coax people into the Church by offering indulgences.

There is no warrant in the Scriptures for such practices. They contain the laws of righteousness, the rules of living set down plain enough for a wayfaring man to understand. We are left free to enjoy the rewards of our virtues and to suffer the consequences of our transgression. The rest is silence. This is where the Church made its mistake--too much preaching and terrorizing, not enough teaching of just the Word. Now we have the reaction.

XXI

LUNDY AND I WALK AND TALK

It is queer how thoughts you had long ago and the very scene of these thoughts come back to you after you have lived a dozen later lives. I recall something now that indicates how narrow the margin was then between me and one of the threadbare fallacies of my sex:

Lundy and I were walking late in the afternoon through the college campus. I remember the deepening twilight beneath the trees. I wore a dark dress. I was young, slender, pale, homely--what I mean is that I remember feeling this way, sad and put upon. Lundy was stepping along innocently beside me, gracefully silent, no doubt enjoying this silence, for he was one who never practiced speech as a relief for intellectual hysteria. He could retain his thoughts like a gentleman. Suddenly I let out what I was thinking about the world’s injustice to women. We were the victims of the whole social and domestic order of mankind. We were the bond servants of a civilization which we had no part in making. We had no rights, only duties to perform, and so on and so forth. I cannot think now how I came by such thoughts. I must have read something along this line, and, like D---- was suffering from, mental regurgitation.

What brought me to my own personal senses was the look Lundy gave me, not reproachful, but startled, as if he had received a thrust and wondered if he deserved it.

We walked on, staring straight ahead; but I could feel my husband searching himself, looking for his sins against me, and his harshness. This was unendurable. I sat down beside the road and made haste to renege. All at once it was clear how good this man had been to me, how hard he worked that I might be a little more comfortable, how patient he was with my ruffian mind, and how he had given me all the love he could spare from his jealous God. And now--appalling thought--what if he went off on one of his remorseful tangents, his ever uncertain peace destroyed by my complaint?

Never did a woman praise her husband more fervently than I did for the next few minutes. I laughed and stroked his legs. He would not sit down! He had the rigid air of a man who preferred to take his punishment standing up. I vowed I was only teasing him. As a matter of fact, I was not thinking of my own husband at all when I began to drool about the wrongs of women. I must have been seeking martyrdom at large.

This was one of those little epochs we make in living. I passed as quick as a flash through an enlightening mental process. From that moment I escaped the idea of grievances from which many women suffer too much in their imaginations. I have been a sluggard ever since about correcting the abuses from which women suffer. I have never been able to cast myself or my pen whole-heartedly into a campaign to clean up the men and bring them to repentance for their trespasses against us. Let somebody else do it! Because, of course, it must be done before we repent of the wrongs we practice against them, such as headaches, indifference, inefficiency, and extravagance. Upon those occasions when I have been even slightly moved to do my duty toward chastening them, I always think of Lundy, the astonished blue look he gave me that time on the campus in Oxford, as if this was the first he knew of his unkindness and injustice to the woman rib in his side. I remember him, the whole mind the man of him had at that moment, and I cannot believe in the light of his kind heart that men really mean to be unfair to women, any more than we mean to be as exasperating as we are to them sometimes.

We are both the victims of some secret plan of Nature in this business. Men are overbearing on account of the kind of gender they are, and women have nervous squalls on account of the kind of gender they are. If they were entirely compatible, the one to the other, their children might be poor, spiritless creatures. For love certainly is a fearfully eager, exacting, and destructive influence upon the dead level of peace. Therefore incompatibility never seemed to me reasonable grounds for divorce. On the contrary, it must be in Nature the best of all genealogical grounds for those two afflicted people to continue to live together.

The success of marriage does not depend upon how well it is financed with money or social position, but almost entirely upon how much love and wit you can put into it. Maybe there is some grave inequality of mind or spirit or quality between you in the beginning, but go on living together and presently there will be six of one and half a dozen of the other. You will develop practically the same horse power of perversity, even if the man becomes ferociously impatient and the wife sinks away into cowardly patience.

There is nothing known to man as exasperating as an infernally patient woman. She is either mean or lacking in wit. She never seems to realize that domestic temper in a man is a form of hysteria and should be treated accordingly with a dash of cold water, figuratively speaking, or some sort of shock, which is not meant to be a suggestion of license in conduct. He would ask no better excuse for a tantrum or a tyranny than for his wife to commit a fault. But there are a thousand ways of twisting the tail of a perverse man’s temper without ceasing to be an artless lady. All you have to do is to put your mind on it. The Lord has endowed every woman with special talents for this emergency.

I know one charming little gentlewoman who married a very ordinary man who never had the opportunity to control anything or anybody until he achieved this lovely wife. Then he set in to exercise his powers along this line. If he had been the warden of a penitentiary he could not have been more exacting than he was as the master of his own house and the husband of this woman. The marvel was the sweet way she went on showing her admiration and affection for him. Some of us were disposed to pity her as a poor creature without spirit. Then I caught on to her game.

When her husband was present she never ceased to augment him by telling what he would permit her to do, or more particularly what he would not allow her to do, say or think. Each revelation was, of course, accompanied by an exchange of eye-flashing intelligence between those present and frequently by an embarrassed flush on the husband’s face. Nothing could stop her from making these revelations of his meanness and tyranny, always as if she approved of him to the point of boasting. We heard that when he reprimanded her for exposing his private authority she remained artless and too simple to be managed.

‘But you know, dear, you did say I should not go to that meeting, and I wanted them to understand why I would not accept their invitation,’ and so on and so forth. In the course of two years she let in the light of so much public opinion on this man and his methods as an overbearing husband that now he practically runs to open the door to her every wish. He is tremendously concerned that his neighbors shall know his wife may do as she almighty pleases. And so she does. It was one of the most diverting and enlightening dramas of married life I have seen in years, played without a single mis-said line, and ended, you may say, with much secret applause.

If it appears that I have turned my light too far forward through the years in the immediately preceding pages, I can only say that we must follow the beam while it shines when one is trailing the mind, even if it is your own mind. This was as good a place as any to set down the effects of that first and last interview with my husband concerning the grievances of women. The reader will recognize it as the veracious record of a strictly feminine mind whatever else he may think.

If I may be permitted to comment upon my own copy in thinking, I should say that once a woman’s mind is divorced from her affections it is a trifle unbalanced and untrustworthy no matter how brilliantly and broadly she uses it. It ricochets like a ball fired at a low angle of elevation which is apt to fall back upon her own destiny disastrously. A good many of these duds are already dropping behind the Nineteenth Amendment. I cannot see much improvement in the character of women, though they are more alert mentally and less satisfied. They have gained something they wanted and they have lost something they needed personally and privately. I have felt obliged for conscience’ sake to believe in equal rights for women, but the best success I ever had along this line has been to go out and win by my own works and wits the rights I preferred and that would be the most becoming to me in the end.

XXII

WE CONSIDER GREEK CULTURE

My husband was not only a distinguished scholar and a great preacher but he had a brilliant, gallant mind of his own. Let him have it, and God be thanked, was my attitude. Whenever he flared intellectually, I turned out my light and watched with admiration such an aurora borealis of fine, cold, clear thinking as I have never seen in any book or heard from another man. Some radiance of his mind will remain upon the horizon of mine as long as I live. I can never tell how much of it has brightened the edges of the copy I have produced since those days. For I have been a cheerful plagiarist of light whenever I found it.

But if we came to loggerheads in an argument, as frequently happened, on any subject, whether it was religion, philosophy, poetry, or the fatalistic mind of the ancient Greeks, I stepped out with gaffs on the legs of my native wit and met him as an unscrupulous wrestler meets an honest big man. I had all the advantages, because I was never constrained in the exercise of my mind by much real knowledge of the subject or by those precedents which govern a scrupulously trained intellect. I left him to furnish the information. My business was to digest it quick as a flash and use it, then to prove my contention or to reject it for the same reason. I do not know what a casuist is, but he frequently accused me of being one, as if this was a fault of which I should be ashamed. But I never was. This grieved him. I am sure he felt that I would not overcome a certain vulgar insolence of ignorance, because I had no native reverence for learning.

Once when I was belaying the ancient Greeks like a ruffian he assumed the dignified manner of a gentleman and a scholar who must be patient with a Smart Aleck. As near as I can recall, this is the gist of that altercation:

‘You do yourself discredit when you speak disparagingly of an illustrious people,’ he said.

I knew nothing of their civilization, art, or literature. Then he went on to pay a tribute to the Greek intellect. It was symmetrical, dignified, and beautiful as their architecture. Had I ever studied the glory and simplicity of the Parthenon? I admitted that I had not, but I was willing to concede that they had highly developed artistic instincts. Which, I had to infer, was the wrong phrase to use.

‘They had brains, brains!’ he retorted hotly.

‘I would no more revere a man for his brains than for the hair on his head,’ I shot back; ‘the quality and quantity of both are determined by purely physical conditions, the climate, the food they eat, their habits as human beings. I judge the Greeks by what they have produced.’

‘That is precisely what you cannot do intelligently, because you do not know what they produced.’

‘Yes, I know the effects--’

‘You are profoundly ignorant of the effects of Greek culture upon the world,’ he interrupted.

‘Culture’ was one of Lundy’s words, never a favorite with me. I am not denying there is such a thing, but whether it is beneficent depends in my opinion upon the moderation with which you absorb it and balance it with better, sturdier elements of character, like honest bigotry and hard-headed convictions. It is a boastful word with a bad reputation in advanced stages of civilization. It too frequently became the elegance by which the distance between morality and immorality is shortened.

Lundy, however, loved it, with no such barbaric instincts as I had to warn him against it. And I suffered much from the personal uses he made of it during what may be called the Hellenic period of our married life.

This time I made a clean sweep and cut Greek culture to the bone.

‘There was something wrong with their culture,’ I returned, ‘because they did not survive it as a nation. Men are destroyed by their own minds, their systems of thought. What the ancient Greeks produced with all their art and learning and culture are these modern Greeks. I do not think much of them. Neither do you. They have the same hair, the same brains. They are out of the same stock, but virtue has gone out of them. They are no longer sculptors and philosophers. Nobody quotes them or imitates them. The fatalistic mind back of all their culture made slaves and little men of their descendants.’

Lundy regarded me for a moment in regretful silence, as we sometimes measure some one who is dear to us who is determined not to be like us.

‘Corra,’ he said reproachfully, ‘you have an underhanded mind. You deliberately missed my point.’