For months little Rose lay sleeping for the greatest part of the time, folded up in the finest wool, waking into good nature for an hour and then gently sinking back into the land of sleep and dreams. The doctor came often to the unconscious little creature, as she lay upon Mother Taft’s lap, and gazed upon her in silence and deep thought, as if he expected some revelation from her face.
“She is a rose indeed, Doctor,” said Mother Taft—“is she not?”
“A moss-rose, if you call thеse blankets the moss, and its facе like the tiny bud in which no color yet begins to appear.”
“Ah, well, children don’t come up blossom first like hyacinths, and that great red amaryllis. They are like laylocks and honeysuckles, that grow a year or two before they get a place for blossoms to stand on.”
And with that the good dame brought up the blanket about the baby’s face like a hood, kissing the little red lips, which, by the way, she did with every operation, as if kisses were pins, to hold fast each plait and fold and tuck.
As the child began to dawn into consciousness more and more, the father’s spirit seemed to hover about her, waiting, like one before a door, for some one to come forth. As the summer warmed, she was often carried by him upon short rides.
“I am expecting, my dear,” said his wife, “that one of these days you will prescribe that child to some patient, instead of medicine.”
“She is food and medicine to me, at any rate. I have two lives now.”
“Ah, and then you do not count me?”
“Certainly—you and I count one, and Rose makes two.”
A vast elm grew upon the eastern side of his dwelling, not far from a clear brook, which made its way from the hills down through the meadows to the Connecticut river. On this rich soil, and near a copious supply of water, which the elm so much loves, it had become one of those immense domes of which almost every New-England village has one at least, but in which Norwood was peculiarly rich. The huge trunk rose some fifteen feet before dividing, and then sent off a number of separate stems, each one of which might, if alone, constitute a large tree. These, still subdividing, at last spread out into a vast concave, and the pendulous branches, with graceful curves, returning on every side, like a network of cords wound around with green leaves, almost swept the ground. Under this vast cope, whose top was full of sunlight, while cool shadows lay upon the ground, the doctor loved to sit, when days of leisure gave him rest, and especially upon summer Sunday afternoons, with Rose lying upon his lap—or both of them upon the ground, she on a blanket and he upon the grass.
It was there, on a bright Wednesday in July, when Rose was now more than a year old, that Parson Buell found him in the garden watching the child. Birds overhead were flying from branch to branch, or conferring in a familiar way about household matters, coquetting or whirling forth in love wrangles, while a vireo in the topmost tuft, quite hidden, sat singing by the half-hour its perpetual melody, whistled in phrases and recurring bits like short sentences in a music lesson.
They fell into discourse about the child; then about the origin of the soul, the minister affirming that nothing definite could be found in the Bible respecting it, and that learned divines had been exercised in mind and divided in opinions about it. The doctor said that no light had been thrown upon it in the researches of physiologists. For himself, he had a constitutional horror of the notion that the mind was material, came with the body, as a rose with the bush, and died with the body, as a flower with its stem. In the long gradations of creation matter grew to finer and finer organization and subtler uses, but there came a point at which it touched something higher than itself, spiritual existence, not to be known by the senses—which can only act in their own province of matter—but to be discerned by the soul, which could recognize its own existence, and had intuition of the spiritual element in creation.
“It is remarkable, Doctor, that you, a physiologist, should incline to the spiritual faith, while Judge Bacon, of sound education, and not given to the physical sciences, should hold, as I suspect he does, the physical theory of the mind.”
“Judge Bacon has no ideality. Imagination is the very marrow of faith.”
“But you have often told me that I had no ideality—whatever that may mean. How is it that the deficiency does not work in the same direction in both cases?”
“It does. You may differ in regard to facts and convictions, but both of you insist upon reducing all truth to some material equivalent before you are subject to conviction. A truth which does not admit of a logical statement seems to you a phantasy. You believe not upon any evidence in your spirit, but upon the semi-material form which language and philosophical statements give to thought. The further you can bring a truth from its spiritual condition, and the more nearly it is incarnated, the more satisfactory is to you the evidence of its existence. But, with me, I accept facts which appeal to my senses as the lowest possible truth, and as appealing to the lowest avenue of my mind. Nature is more than a vast congeries of physical facts, related to each other as cause and effect, and signifying nothing else.”
“What is signified, then, in your theory?”
“I have no theory. I have an irregular and fitful conviction that there are great truths of the affections seeking an inlet upon men, which flow from God, and which reach men, rightly sensitive, through the doings and appearances of what we call Nature.”
“Pray give me an inkling, Doctor; for if you can get more from nature than I do, perhaps you can teach me how to help myself in the same way.”
“Look at Rose, Dr. Buell, with her hand full of dandelions. Don’t you see that a beam of sunlight has struck through the leaves, and is pouring gold on the child’s head? See her wink, and puzzle, the darling!”
“What does that sunlight mean to her?”
“Nothing, except to her skin; and there it means trouble and annoyance. But to you and to me, it means beauty. It lies speckling all the ground around her. It moves with the leaves as if it had a life of its own. It kindles beauty out of homeliness itself if it but touches it.”
“What then?”
“There is more meaning in sunlight than a child knows, or can know.”
“More meaning? That is, I suppose, there are effects which the child does not notice or appreciate.”
“Do you believe that the sunlight can produce any effect not provided for in its original constitution? You believe that God created it. Did he not know and design every element, and every effect?”
“Surely: surely I believe it.”
“Of course you believe it, in a general and abstract manner. Look through these evergreens! See that clump of hollyhocks, white on yellow, and rose on crimson, so they stand, and the light falls on them alone, through that opening among the trees. They are transfigured! The light seems to palpitate upon them, and on the crimson blossom it fairly trembles! Is that all mere materiality? Is there no moral around them?”
“You don’t mean that a hollyhock is a moral and accountable being? It is an unreasoning and unconscious thing, acted upon, but not acting.”
“Hold! Does it not act? Does it not send sheets of light to my eyes? Does not that raise up a thousand fancies and yearnings? Do I not, in its exquisite effects, almost see through matter, and into the other life? And is not that clump, with its atmosphere of light, the instrument producing such effects? And when God created light and flowers, did he not know what power it was possible that they could exert upon human souls, and design that they should do it? They have a moral function, even if they have no moral nature! ”
“I understand you, doctor. You hold that there are two kinds of moral agents—one conscious and voluntary, and the other unconscious and involuntary. But how many do you suppose in this town, besides yourself, ever saw or thought of such things in a hollyhock bush? It is mere fancy. It is not sober fact.”
“Fancy is itself a fact, just as much as an argument, a leaf or a stone. God made the soul to be played upon by its fellows, by the whole round of visible nature, by invisible things, and more than all, by Himself. If shaking leaves stir up the soul, there was a power in them to do it, as much as in the soul to be agitated. I insist on a living, divine power in physical things. Why should men be so anxious to degrade nature? Is it unsafe to believe that God’s eye follows every sparrow, and that his taste unrolls every flower, and that his feelings have an alphabetic expression in all natural forms, harmonies, colors, contrasts and affinities?”
“But if this were so, would there be so few even of educated men who derive any influence from those things?”
“I will answer you by asking: If the Bible is God’s word, declaring his counsel, as we both believe, would there, out of ten hundred million people on the globe, be less probably than a hundred million that derive a single influence from it? In both cases, eyes have they, but they see not.”
For a long time, Dr. Buell sat silent and thoughtful. Had it been a logical statement or the true meaning of a line of Scriptural texts, he would have been full of resources of argument. But, deficient in imagination, and trained to reject it in all investigations as an element of error, he yet could not but perceive that Dr. Wentworth, by its ministration, found in Nature a ground for religious faith which he did not, while at the same time he reverently accepted and eminently exemplified the teachings of the New Testament.
He rose and walked for a few moments along the edges of the shadow, where the gold sunlight and the leaf-shadows played a game of reprisals, back and forth, taking and retaking the ground from each other with noiseless conflict, until he had compassed the circuit of the great elm.
“Doctor, there may be something in your views. When you state them they strike me as having substance; but when I attempt of myself to think of them, they melt in my hands. When you say that natural objects have moral ends, you do not mean that they constitute a part of the commands, motives, and intelligent duties included in moral government?”
“I surely believe that they supplement these things. Physical laws are divine commands, and so far they are a part of moral government. Whatever affects a man’s soul is, for the time being, a moral influence. The advent of Christ may be a more august and immensely more fruitful influence than the breaking forth of a lily from the ground; but when our Saviour said, ‘Behold, the lilies! lilies were ordained to act a part in morals.”
“Do you think that a flower, in and of itself, has any moral meaning?”
“Do you think that words, in and of themselves, have any signification? Words mean whatever they have the power to make us think of when we look on them. Flowers mean what sentiment they have the power to produce in us. The image which a flower casts upon a sensitive plate is simply its own self-form; but, cast upon a more sensitive human soul, it leaves there not mere form, but feeling, excitement, suggestion. God gave it power to do that, or it would not have done it.”
“Is not this mysticism, Doctor, rather than common sense? I confess that I perceive in plants a relation to matter, to my senses, and to practical uses; but when you make them preach or teach, or do duty as moralists, unless you mean it in a metaphorical way, I am puzzled.”
“Yonder is my bed of hyacinths, now out of blossom, and filled up between their rows are my tiger flowers, yellow and red, every day and all summer blossoming, or they would blossom if the moles did not eat up the bulbs at such a fearful rate! These underground radicals! you can hardly rid a garden of them, when once they become numerous and neighborly. No matter about that. What I was going to say was, that I consider a mole’s opinion of the structures and uses of my hyacinths to be very much like—well, excuse me,—like most folks’ notions of moral truth! The moles see the bottom and nothing else. Imagine a mole forming a philosophical theory of my bulbs. In mole’s language, whatever that is, he would say: ‘a hyacinth is a vegetable creation put underground for the benefit of moles. It is round, of a sweetish taste, quite juicy, and wholesome for moles. It has been held by some moles that a hyacinth has an existence above ground, and speculatists have gone so far as to say that this root is only a kind of starting point, while the best part of the plant is above ground. But there is no evidence of that, and it is doubtless a vagary of the imagination.”
The minister could not help laughing at this fable.
“I admit so much of this,” said he, “that truths may have only their bulbs in this world, and their stems and blossoms higher up: but, even so, how are we to know anything about these fragrant blossoms if they are in another medium, and above our reach or investigation?”
“The first step toward knowing is to be conscious of not knowing. If truth can be sufficiently learned through our senses, we shall take no further pains, and be content with a little, as if it were the whole.”
“But admit, Doctor, that nature is full of some hidden meanings, as you call them, how will you detect them? How will you distinguish between a mere fancy and a substantial reality?”
“Is a thought necessarily any truer than an imagination? Is a thought anything but the impression produced upon a faculty by a certain kind of truth? Is not an imagination the impression produced upon another faculty by another kind of truth? Is not sight as much a sensation as hearing? And is not the report of one faculty to be taken for truth, each in its kind, as much as that of another?
“It takes five senses to report to us all the qualities of matter. It takes twice as many mental faculties to determine all the properties and relations of a truth. Knowledge is (like white light) that condition of mind which is produced at the point where all the faculties on which a truth falls join their reports.”
“And so you would regard the imagination as needful to a scientific investigation?”
“No man without imagination can by any possibility be an acute observer, nor a sound reasoner even upon physical facts, still less upon truths which involve some mental qualities.”
“Do you think, then, that poets are our best philosophers, theologians, legists, and savans ?”
“There is scarcely a great poet who would not have been eminent as philosopher or theologian. There is not one theologian or philosopher in history who had not in him the elements of a poet. And he is indebted for fame to those very elements of poetry. His special dogmas may have perished from out of men’s belief. But the great truths of emotion, expressed with poetic feeling, live on. This is the universal and immortal part. No man can express the great truths of human life without employing all his moral and æsthetic nature. No man ever delivers great truths worthily without rising into eloquence and even into poetry.”
“What do you understand to be the difference between prose, eloquence and poetry?”
“Prose is the work-day dress in which truths do secular duty. Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin. Prose is truth looking on the ground: eloquence is truth looking up to heaven. Poetry is truth flying upward toward God!”
“Your version is itself poetic, but not philosophical. You give me a picture, not a discrimination and definition.”
“Well, common prose is the language of the intellectual faculties, acting without ideality. When you add the fir and figures which the imagination inspires, it is eloquence. If now you give it musical qualities, in time, flow, and rhyme, it is poetry. Or, again, when human truths are spoken as they exist in their physical relations, that is prose, science, or whatever you choose to call it. Add now the element of inspiration, raise the same truths into the light of those faculties which are distinctively spiritual and divine, and you have poetry, and this is the highest form of good sense, or reason in its nobler sphere.”
“Apply this criticism, Doctor, to your notions of flowers and scenery.”
“It scarcely needs it. It is not poetry to say that that part of universal life which belongs in the vegetable kingdom has a moral relation to human beings, proved by the effects which it has shown itself capable of producing on fine natures, and for which, it is strictly philosophical to infer, they were adapted. That so few perceive it, or experience it consciously, is no more a presumption against its nature and proper uses than the indifference of mankind to the movements of the planets is evidence that our seasons do not arise from stellar revolutions.”
“Doctor, I cannot fairly say that I believe your notions, or even understand them. They give you great comfort. You are far happier than I am. I do not know as that is, however, any presumption in your favor.”
“I am happy—exceedingly happy. One condition of it is, of course, perfect physical health. The body is like a piano, and happiness is like music. It is needful to have the instrument in good order. But that is but a beginning. Something must play upon the instrument. And who performs, and from what musical score, will determine the character of the concert. Chickering’s grandest grand piano, with a fool playing jigs on it, is not so good as an old harpsichord with Beethoven at the keys.”
“Go on—make your application.”
“Well, to be plain, I do not think that you are happy, because it does not seem to me that you hold converse with those truths which insure happiness. Your God is historic—mine is living. Your god is in a temple—mine every where. You have excogitated and built up, element by element, attribute by attribute, a conception of God, to which by resolute concentration you direct your thoughts, without help in symbol, natural object, or any instrument whatever, but wholly by will-force. Now and then there will arise out of this stretching void some dim image or sense of Divinity. But even at that your conscience, not love, clothes Him. You have little help from your affections; less from ideality; none from taste and beauty; and, really, you worship an abstract thought—a mere projection of an idea—not a whole Mind, a Living Being! You and I worship the same Being, and agree in the main as to the moral elements which glow in His nature; but we differ practically in our way of reaching Him.”
“I find God in Christ the Saviour. I seek Him in prayer, in meditation, and in His Word.”
“Thus do I also. But not so only. By the light of His Word I seek Him, in a living form, outside of His Word. God is revealed in Christ as a man. Now, whatever in man or child, in their noblest moments, when their fervent affection upon some unselfish inspiration breaks forth into unusual and ethereal forms, seems to me more than a suggestion of divinity. I see flashing from these experiences the very feeling of God. Thus I can interpret Scripture with vivid insight. There is a perpetual commentary upon the New Testament running through human life, and you are afraid to read it!
“But besides the endless interpretations which the human soul is unfolding, the whole natural world is full of those very truths and meanings of which I was speaking a little while ago. Sounds and silences, color, forms, the life of insect and animal, and the endless play of cause and effect, I accept first, as scientific facts, with certain scientific relations. Or to speak exactly, I accept the report which they make to my perceptive reason. But they create in my breast, besides all that, such heights and depths of sensibility that I know that they have a moral relation to my moral sentiments, and that while science, like the mole, knows the root and bulb, faith alone, acting in a spiritual sphere, recognizes the developed stem and blossoms.”
Although Dr. Wentworth’s manner was usually quiet, almost producing an impression of indifference and impassiveness, he had, during this conversation, grown very earnest. Every lineament of his large, pale face glowed, and his eyes exchanged their dreamy look for one that almost flashed visible light, as he rose and stood before his minister, straightening up his body to its full height and said:
“Dr. Buell, do you believe the Scriptures? Do you believe that those very heavens above your head declare the glory of God; or only that they did, four thousand years ago? ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein!’—now, to-day, here in this field—yonder, over that meadow, just as much as in Palestine. ‘Thou crownest the year—Thou visitest the earth—Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice. The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth king forevermore!’
“Do you think that I can believe this universal presence of god—in the sun, in the seasons, in the sea and on the mountains, in tree and herb, in clouds and storm, in summer and harvest, in the city among men and in the wilderness,—and yet suppose that Nature has nothing more for the soul than the catalogue of scientific names and a recitation of the order in which phenomena happen? Is there nothing of God in flowers, in forests, in birds, in insects, in my poor garden, in yonder valley, along the mountain-flank, in those thunder-heads looming up white over the horizon yonder or is all this only meaningless matter? When my wife speaks to me, is it only sound—wind? or is it a movement of air upon my ear, that conveys to my heart deep meanings? And is Nature mere phenomena? or is it God’s phenomena, meant to convey something deeper than the body catches—something for the soul? Why, then, should you, a minister of God, hunt through books for God, and stand in pity of me, who use the Bible as I would a Botany—which does not contain living plants, but only word-descriptions of them. If I would see the plant itself, I must go out of the book to nature. And the Bible cannot contain the truth itself, only the word-forms, the lettered symbols of truth God does not live in a book. Man does not live in a book. Love, Faith, Joy, Hope, do not, cannot live in a book. For the living truth we must go outside of the Bible which is but to religion what a Botany is to gardens, meadows, and all their flowers! I am not ashamed to own that I feel as if some sort of positive relationship existed between me and every living thing. A spice bush, a clump of wild azaleas, a bed of trailing arbutus, a patch of eye-brights, a log covered with green moss,—these all seem to be of my family kin. The spiders, too, the crickets, the field-mice, and all the swarms of birds; the worm—that as a child I was taught to abhor—are of God’s family and mine. Since I accepted the New Testament, all the world has become my Bible. My Saviour is everywhere—in the book and out of the book. I see Him in Nature, in human life, in my own experience as well as in the recorded fragments of His own history. I live in a Bible. But it is an unbound book! It is wider than that I can reach its bounds. It is enough for me that I believe when it is said, ‘All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.’ ”
Dr. Buell walked slowly homeward, as one who saw nothing but his own thoughts. To all who found fault with the rigor of his teachings, and the remorseless logic with which he pushed “the doctrines” that, to him, were the very soul and marrow of life, it might be replied—the children and the poor loved him! What says such a fact? This: that he had a deep and tender heart; that while his head was like the granite rocks that crop out of the sides of the hill, his heart was like the nooks and hollows between, in which soil deep and rich had collected. The figure might be further pressed; for, as berry-bearing vines, growing in the rich mould, climb up over the rock, and cover its grim face with a veil of comeliness, so out of the heart, full often, grow forth affections and sympathies that go far to hide the severe beliefs of the head. In his pulpit, Dr. Buell, a man of earnest conscience, clear logical intellect, narrow in his range of thought, but intense along those lines,—was jealous of the Faith. He would not accommodate it. He would not make it soft or beautiful. “The truth should be as a drawn sword. Men are in danger every hour and moment! How dare I spend my time in etching pleasing pictures on the blade, when God sends me to swing it over their heads as a flashing threat?”
But, when he came among the sick and the poor, when consolation was the duty, his soul seemed to seek relief and compensation for the stern fulfillment of his intellectual duties. Children, too, found his smile sweet, and his ways most companionable. To be sure, he thought, they were involved in a common ruin; but the evil, though in the germ, had not yet greatly developed itself. He used to say: “There is no moral virtue in children’s innocence and simplicity, but they are pleasing to our natural susceptibilities, and may be enjoyed as we relish food, or odors.”
On this homeward walk, however, the good man was shut up in himself. Cherub—the blackest of all black boys—threw a cart-wheel two [sic] several times, in his most accomplished manner, without attracting the slightest attention. A little girl, five years old, stood in the crack of Judge Mason’s gate, and held out her little hands full of dog-fennel to him, as if it had been a flower of far more attractive fragrance, and wondered at him that he passed without a word or gesture. Not till a curly-haired boy bounced out of the door yard of his own home, glad to get into the street, on the plea of seeing papa, did he wake to external things.
