The storm approaching David was vaster and came faster.
Several days had passed since his anxious and abruptly terminated interview with his pastor. During the interval he had addressed no further inquiries to any man touching his religious doubts. A serious sign: for when we cease to carry such burdens to those who wait near by as our recognized counsellors and appointed guides, the inference is that succor for our peculiar need has there been sought in vain. This succor, if existent at all, will be found elsewhere in one of two places: either farther away from home in greater minds whose teaching has not yet reached us; or still nearer home in what remains as the last court of inquiry and decision: in the mind itself. With greater intellects more remote the lad had not yet been put in touch; he had therefore grown reflective, and for nearly a week had been spending the best powers of his unaided thought in self-examination.
He was sitting one morning at his student's table with his Bible and note-book opened before him, wrestling with his problems still. The dormitory was very quiet. A few students remained indoors at work, but most were absent: some gone into the country to preach trial sermons to trying congregations; some down in the town; some at the college, practising hymns, or rehearsing for society exhibitions; some scattered over the campus, preparing Monday lessons on a spring morning when animal sap stirs intelligently at its sources and sends up its mingled currents of new energy and new lassitude.
David had thrown his window wide open, to let in the fine air; his eyes strayed outward. A few yards away stood a stunted transplanted locust—one of those uncomplaining asses of the vegetable kingdom whose mission in life is to carry whatever man imposes. Year after year this particular tree had remained patiently backed up behind the dormitory, for the bearing of garments to be dusted or dried. More than once during the winter, the lad had gazed out of his snow-crusted panes at this dwarfed donkey of the woods, its feet buried deep in ashes, its body covered with kitchen wash-rags and Bible students' frozen underwear. He had reasoned that such soil and such servitude had killed it.
But as he looked out of his window now, his eyes caught sight of the early faltering green in which this exile of the forest was still struggling to clothe itself—its own life vestments. Its enforced and artificial function as a human clothes-horse had indeed nearly destroyed it; but wherever a bud survived, there its true office in nature was asserted, its ancient kind declared, its growth stubbornly resumed.
The moment for the lad may have been one of those in the development of the young when they suddenly behold familiar objects as with eyes more clearly opened; when the neutral becomes the decisive; when the sermon is found in the stone. As he now took curious cognizance of the budding wood which he, seeing it only in winter, had supposed could not bud again, he fell to marvelling how constant each separate thing in nature is to its own life and how sole is its obligation to live that life only. All that a locust had to do in the world was to be a locust; and be a locust it would though it perished in the attempt. It drew back with no hesitation, was racked with no doubt, puzzled with no necessity of preference. It knew absolutely the law of its own being and knew absolutely nothing else; found under that law its liberty, found under that liberty its life.
"But I," he reflected, "am that which was never sown and never grown before. All the ages of time, all the generations of men, have not fixed any type of life for me. What I am to become I must myself each instant choose; and having chosen, I can never know that I have chosen best. Often I do know that what I have selected I must discard. And yet no one choice can ever be replaced by its rejected fellow; the better chance lost once, is lost eternally. Within the limits of a locust, how little may the individual wander; within the limits of the wide and erring human, what may not a man become! What now am I becoming? What shall I now choose—as my second choice?"
A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to shape itself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far away—had, in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up—and been transplanted in the college campus; how, ever since being placed there, the different sectarian churches of the town had, without exception, begun to pin on the branches of his mind the many-shaped garments of their dogmas, until by this time he appeared to himself as completely draped as the little locust after a heavy dormitory washing. There was this terrible difference, however: that the garments hung on the tree were anon removed; but these doctrines and dogmas were fastened to his mind to stay—as the very foliage of his thought—as the living leaves of Divine Truth. He was forbidden to strip off one of those sacred leaves. He was told to live and to breathe his religious life through them, and to grow only where they hung.
The lad declared finally to himself this morning, that realize his religious life through those dogmas he never could; that it was useless any longer to try. Little by little they would as certainly kill him in growth and spirit as the rags had killed the locust in sap and bud. Whatever they might be to others—and he judged no man—for him with his peculiar nature they could never be life-vestments; they would become his spiritual grave-clothes.
The parallel went a little way further: that scant faltering green! that unconquerable effort of the tree to assert despite all deadening experiences its old wildwood state! Could he do the like, could he go back to his? Yearning, sad, immeasurable filled him as he now recalled the simple faith of what had already seemed to him his childhood. Through the mist blinding his vision, through the doubts blinding his brain, still could he see it lying there clear in the near distance! "No," he cried, "into whatsoever future I may be driven to enter, closed against me is the peace of my past. Return thither my eyes ever will, my feet never!"
"But as I was true to myself then, let me be true now. If I cannot believe what I formerly believed, let me determine quickly what I CAN believe. The Truth, the Law—I must find these and quickly!"
From all of which, though thus obscurely set forth, it will be divined that the lad had now reached, indeed for some days had stood halting, at one of the great partings of the ways: when the whole of Life's road can be walked in by us no longer; when we must elect the half we shall henceforth follow, and having taken it, ever afterward perhaps look yearningly back upon the other as a lost trail of the mind.
The parting of the ways where he had thus faltered, summing up his bewilderment, and crying aloud for fresh directions, was one immemorially old in the history of man: the splitting of Life's single road into the by-paths of Doubt and Faith. Until within less than a year, his entire youth had been passed in the possession of what he esteemed true religion. Brought from the country into the town, where each of the many churches was proclaiming itself the sole incarnation of this and all others the embodiment of something false, he had, after months of distracted wandering among their contradictory clamors, passed as so many have passed before him into that state of mind which rejects them all and asks whether such a thing as true religion anywhere exists.
The parting of Life's road at Doubt and Faith! How many pilgrim feet throughout the ages, toiling devoutly thus far, have shrunk back before that unexpected and appalling sign! Disciples of the living Lord, saints, philosophers, scholars, priests, knights, statesmen—what a throng! What thoughts there born, prayers there ended, vows there broken, light there breaking, hearts there torn in twain! Mighty mountain rock! rising full in the road of journeying humanity. Around its base the tides of the generations dividing as part the long racing billows of the sea about some awful cliff.
The lad closed his note-book, and taking his chair to the window, folded his arms on the sill and looked out. Soon he noticed what had escaped him before. Beyond the tree, at the foot of the ash-heap, a single dandelion had opened. It burned like a steadfast yellow lamp, low in the edge of the young grass. These two simple things—the locust leaves, touched by the sun, shaken by the south wind; the dandelion shining in the grass—awoke in him the whole vision of the spring now rising anew out of the Earth, all over the land: great Nature! And the vision of this caused him to think of something else.
On the Sunday following his talk with the lad, the pastor had preached the most arousing sermon that the lad had heard: it had grown out of that interview: it was on modern infidelity—the new infidelity as contrasted with the old.
In this sermon he had arraigned certain books as largely responsible. He called them by their titles. He warned his people against them. Here recommenced the old story: the lad was at once seized with a desire to read those books, thus exhibiting again the identical trait that had already caused him so much trouble. But this trait was perhaps himself—his core; the demand of his nature to hear both sides, to judge evidence, test things by his own reason, get at the deepest root of a matter: to see Truth, and to see Truth whole.
Curiously enough, these books, and some others, had been much heard of by the lad since coming to college: once; then several times; then apparently everywhere and all the time. For, intellectually, they had become atmospheric: they had to be breathed, as a newly introduced vital element of the air, whether liked or not liked by the breathers. They were the early works of the great Darwin, together with some of that related illustrious group of scientific investigators and thinkers, who, emerging like promontories, islands, entire new countries, above the level of the world's knowledge, sent their waves of influence rushing away to every shore. It was in those years that they were flowing over the United States, over Kentucky. And as some volcanic upheaval under mid-ocean will in time rock the tiny boat of a sailor boy in some little sheltered bay on the other side of the planet, so the sublime disturbance in the thought of the civilized world in the second half of the nineteenth century had reached David.
Sitting at his window, looking out blindly for help and helpers amid his doubts, seeing the young green of the locust, the yellow of the dandelion, he recalled the names of those anathematized books, which were described as dealing so strangely with nature and with man's place in it. The idea dominated him at last to go immediately and get those books.
A little later he might have been seen quitting the dormitory and taking his way with a dubious step across the campus into the town.
Saturday forenoons of spring were busy times for the town in those days. Farmers were in, streets were crowded with their horses and buggies and rockaways, with live stock, with wagons hauling cord-wood, oats, hay, and hemp. Once, at a crossing, David waited while a wagon loaded with soft, creamy, gray hemp creaked past toward a factory. He sniffed with relish the tar of the mud-packed wheels; he put out a hand and stroked the heads drawn close in familiar bales.
Crowded, too, of Saturdays was the book-shop to which the students usually resorted for their supplies. Besides town customers and country customers, the pastor of the church often dropped in and sat near the stove, discoursing, perhaps, to some of his elders, or to reverent Bible students, or old acquaintances. A small, tight, hot, metal-smelling stove—why is it so enjoyable by a dogmatist?
As David made his way to the rear of the long bookshelves, which extended back toward the stove, the pastor rose and held out his hand with hearty warmth—and a glance of secret solicitude. The lad looked sheepish with embarrassment; not until accosted had he himself realized what a stray he had become from his pastor's flock and fold. And he felt that he ought instantly to tell the pastor this was the case. But the pastor had reseated himself and regripped his masterful monologue. The lad was more than embarrassed; he felt conscious of a new remorseful tenderness for this grim, righteous man, now that he had emancipated mind and conscience from his teaching: so true it often is that affection is possible only where obedience is not demanded. He turned off sorrowfully to the counter, and a few moments later, getting the attention of the clerk, asked in a low conscience-stricken tone for "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man"; conscience-stricken at the sight of the money in his palm to pay for them.
"What are you going to do with these?" inquired a Bible student who had joined him at the counter and fingered the books.
"Read them," said the lad, joyously, "and understand them if I can."
He pinned them against his heart with his elbow and all but ran back to the dormitory. Having reached there, he altered his purpose and instead of mounting to his room, went away off to a quiet spot on the campus and, lying down in the grass under the wide open sky, opened his wide Darwin.
It was the first time in his life that he had ever encountered outside of the Bible a mind of the highest order, or listened to it, as it delivered over to mankind the astounding treasures of its knowledge and wisdom in accents of appealing, almost plaintive modesty.
That day the lad changed his teachers.
Of the session more than two months yet remained. Every few days he might have been seen at the store, examining books, drawing money reluctantly from his pocket, hurrying away with another volume. Sometimes he would deliver to the clerk the title of a work written on a slip of paper: an unheard-of book; to be ordered—perhaps from the Old World. For one great book inevitably leads to another. They have their parentage, kinship, generations. They are watch-towers in sight of each other on the same human highway. They are strands in a single cable belting the globe. Link by link David's investigating hands were slipping eagerly along a mighty chain of truths, forged separately by the giants of his time and now welded together in the glowing thought of the world.
Not all of these were scientific works. Some were works which followed in the wake of the new science, with rapid applications of its methods and results to other subjects, scarce conterminous or not even germane. For in the light of the great central idea of Evolution, all departments of human knowledge had to be reviewed, reconsidered, reconceived, rearranged, rewritten. Every foremost scholar of the world, kindling his own personal lamp at that central sunlike radiance, retired straightway into his laboratory of whatsoever kind and found it truly illuminated for the first time. His lamp seemed to be of two flames enwrapped as one; a baleful and a benign. Whenever it shone upon anything that was true, it made this stand out the more clear, valuable, resplendent. But wherever it uncovered the false, it darted thereat a swift tongue of flame, consuming without mercy the ancient rubbish of the mind. Vast purification of the world by the fire of truth! There have been such purifications before; but never perhaps in the history of the race was so much burned out of the intellectual path of man as during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
There is a sort of land which receives in autumn, year by year, the deposit of its own dead leaves and weeds and grasses without either the winds and waters to clear these away or the soil to reabsorb and reconvert them into the materials of reproduction. Thus year by year the land tends farther toward sterility by the very accumulation of what was once its life. But send a forest fire across those smothering strata of vegetable decay; give once more a chance for every root below to meet the sun above; for every seed above to reach the ground below; soon again the barren will be the fertile, the desert blossom as the rose. It is so with the human mind. It is ever putting forth a thousand things which are the expression of its life for a brief season. These myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of history.
The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growth of new ideas, it must go deeper. Not enough that rubbish should be burned: old structures of knowledge and faith, dangerous, tottering, unfit to be inhabited longer, must be shaken to their foundations. It brought on therefore a period of intellectual upheaval and of drift, such as was once passed through by the planet itself. What had long stood locked and immovable began to move; what had been high sank out of sight; what had been low was lifted. The mental hearing, listening as an ear placed amid still mountains, could gather into itself from afar the slip and fall of avalanches. Whole systems of belief which had chilled the soul for centuries, dropped off like icebergs into the warming sea and drifted away, melting into nothingness.
The minds of many men, witnessing this double ruin by flame and earthquake, are at such times filled with consternation: to them it seems that nothing will survive, that beyond these cataclysms there will never again be stability and peace—a new and better age, safer footing, wider horizons, clearer skies.
It was so now. The literature of the New Science was followed by a literature of new Doubt and Despair. But both of these were followed by yet another literature which rejected alike the New Science and the New Doubt, and stood by all that was included under the old beliefs. The voices of these three literatures filled the world: they were the characteristic notes of that half-century, heard sounding together: the Old Faith, the New Science, the New Doubt. And they met at a single point; they met at man's place in Nature, at the idea of God, and in that system of thought and creed which is Christianity.
It was at this sublime meeting-place of the Great Three that this untrained and simple lad soon arrived—searching for the truth. Here he began to listen to them, one after another: reading a little in science (he was not prepared for that), a little in the old faith, but most in the new doubt. For this he was ready; toward this he had been driven.
Its earliest effects were soon exhibited in him as a student. He performed all required work, slighted no class, shirked no rule, transgressed no restriction. But he asked no questions of any man now, no longer roved distractedly among the sects, took no share in the discussions rife in his own church. There were changes more significant: he ceased to attend the Bible students' prayer-meeting at the college or the prayer-meeting of the congregation in the town; he would not say grace at those evening suppers of the Disciples; he declined the Lord's Supper; his voice was not heard in the choir. He was, singularly enough, in regular attendance at morning and night services of the church; but he entered timidly, apologetically, sat as near as possible to the door, and slipped out a little before the people were dismissed: his eyes had been fixed respectfully on his pastor throughout the sermon, but his thoughts were in other temples.
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