The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 19, May, 1859

I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir. He comes along with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his hidden knife with that unsuspected left hand of his,—(the little gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on the ring-finger,)—and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach! Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir. They are read mostly by persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much. Let 'em alone. A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath contempt.

I hope so,—I said.—I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former years. When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,—for doing which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though nothing else good should ever come of my life,—I had to bear the sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe, have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women stir among the ruins.—What would you do, if the folks without names kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that would fit you?—Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give a kick now and then?

Let 'em bite!—said Little Boston;—let 'em bite! It makes 'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names, as you call 'em, is like?—It is like riding at the quintain. You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck. "Ananias," for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper taken by the people in your kitchen. Your servants get saucy and negligent. If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes. So you lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies. Now you think you've got him! Not so fast. "Ananias" keeps still and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow. If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears "Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."—No, no,—keep your temper.—So saying, the little gentleman doubled his left fist and looked at it, as if he should like to hit something or somebody a most pernicious punch with it.

Good!—said I.—Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at, after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.

–—Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to deal and to live with.

–—There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among the men, in every denomination.

–—The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:—

1. The comfortably rich.

2. The decently comfortable.

3. The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.

4. The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.

–—The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't clinch.

–—The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.

–—Humility is the first of the virtues—for other people.

–—Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief, of a large one.

The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth while all this was going on. She broke out in speech at this point.

I hate to hear folks talk so. I don't see that you are any better than a heathen.

I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,—I said.—Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than scolding for it; and, the history of heathen races is full of instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity. What would not such beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of larger light? Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?

I don't believe he said any such thing,—replied the Poor Relation.

It is hard to believe,—said I,—but it is true for all that. In another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we sometimes hear them now.

Cor facit theologum. The heart makes the theologian. Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its own or a new interpretation of an old one. Democratic America has a different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new divinity. See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our faiths. The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so still in the hands of some of the vulgar. The Puritans went to the Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their patriarchal institution. Every generation dissolves something new and precipitates something once held in solution from that great storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.

You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formulae that belong to their organizations. So true is this, that I have doubts whether a large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than offended, if they could have overheard our talk. For, look you, I think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which sometimes get a hearing.

I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he muddles his brains. But for the good and true and intelligent men whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful, helpful,—men who know that the active mind of the century is tending more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way between these two points, he must look one way or the other,—I don't believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our late conversation.

But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not agree with most of these things that were said amongst us. If he agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious. I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I please,—unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied contract to keep clear of doubtful matters. You didn't think a man could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state during every hour that he sits talking and laughing! Of course, the one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to become of them and of him. And the plain truth is, that a good many people are saying one thing about it and believing another.

–—How do I know that? Why, I have known and loved to talk with good people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can remember. Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men,—from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. It is in their hearts that the "sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its source. The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the other,—these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and withered in their delusion.

I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond all praise. When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,—and, far worse than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,—and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors,—and again recollect how thousands of women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but their holy duties,—while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,—I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!

* * * * *

–—I should be sorry,—I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the divinity-student,—if anything I said tended in any way to foster any jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our moments of trial. But we are false to our new conditions of life, if we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain men will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views: first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and, secondly, that we are not so good as they are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left to make a bonfire for all the heretics.

As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of managing it, if you like. I don't believe it will hurt you or anybody. Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of attacks from Messrs. Ananias, Shimei, and Rab-sha-keh.

[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for the rights of the laity,—and to those blessed souls, the good women, to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]

A MOTHER'S SECRET

How sweet the sacred legend—if unblamedIn my slight verse such holy things are named—Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!Ave, Maria! Pardon, if I wrongThose heavenly words that shame my earthly song!The choral host had closed the angel's strainSung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled o'er,—They saw afar the ruined threshing-floorWhere Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;And some remembered how the holy scribe,Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal sonTo that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.So fared they on to seek the promised signThat marked the anointed heir of David's line.At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.No pomp was there, no glory shone aroundOn the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,—In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!The wondering shepherds told their breathless taleOf the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;Told how the shining multitude proclaimed,"Joy, joy to earth! Behold the hallowed morn!In David's city Christ the Lord is born!'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,—'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,—One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,But kept their words to ponder in her heart.Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fillTheir balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,—The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.No voice had reached the Galilean valeOf star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;In the meek, studious child they only sawThe future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,When at the holy place the tribes appear.Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seenBeyond the hills that girt the village-green,Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.Then Joseph spake: "Thy boy hath largely grown;Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest:Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light;The thread was twined; its parting meshes throughFrom hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,Till the full web was wound upon the beam,—Love's curious toil,—a vest without a seam!They reach the holy place, fulfil the daysTo solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.At last they turn, and far Moriah's heightMelts in the southern sky and fades from sight.All day the dusky caravan has flowedIn devious trails along the winding road(For many a step their homeward path attends,—And all the sons of Abraham are as friends).Evening has come,—the hour of rest and joy;—Hush! hush!—that whisper,—"Where is Mary's boy?"O weary hour! O aching days that passedFilled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:The soldier's lance,—the fierce centurion's sword,—The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,—The midnight crypt that sucks the captive's breath,—The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.At last, in desperate mood, they sought once moreThe Temple's porches, searched in vain before;They found him seated with the ancient men,—The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,—Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near,Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,Lost in half-envious wonder and surpriseThat lips so fresh should utter words so wise.And Mary said,—as one who, tried too long,Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,—"What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!"Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,—Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;Then turned with them and left the holy hill,To all their mild commands obedient still.The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;The maids re-told it at the fountain's side;The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;It passed around among the listening friends,With all that fancy adds and fiction lends,Till newer marvels dimmed the young renownOf Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall:A mother's secret hope outlives them all.

* * * * *

THE MINISTER'S WOOING

[Continued.]

CHAPTER XII

MISS PRISSY.

Will our little Mary really fall in love with the Doctor?—The question reaches us in anxious tones from all the circle of our readers; and what especially shocks us is, that grave doctors of divinity, and serious, stocking-knitting matrons, seem to be the class who are particularly set against the success of our excellent orthodox hero, and bent on reminding us of the claims of that unregenerate James, whom we have sent to sea on purpose that our heroine may recover herself of that foolish partiality for him which all the Christian world seems bent on perpetuating.

"Now, really," says the Rev. Mrs. Q., looking up from her bundle of Sewing-Society work, "you are not going to let Mary marry the Doctor?"

My dear Madam, is not that just what you did, yourself, after having turned off three or four fascinating young sinners as good as James any day? Don't make us believe that you are sorry for it now!

"Is it possible," says Dr. Theophrastus, who is himself a stanch Hopkinsian divine, and who is at present recovering from his last grand effort on Natural and Moral Ability,—"is it possible that you are going to let Mary forget that poor young man and marry Dr. H.? That will never do in the world!"

Dear Doctor, consider what would have become of you, if some lady at a certain time had not had the sense and discernment to fall in love with the man who came to her disguised as a theologian.

"But he's so old!" says Aunt Maria.

Not at all. Old? What do you mean? Forty is the very season of ripeness,—the very meridian of manly lustre and splendor.

"But he wears a wig."

My dear Madam, so did Sir Charles Grandison, and Lovelace, and all the other fine fellows of those days; the wig was the distinguishing mark of a gentleman.

No,—spite of all you may say and declare, we do insist that our Doctor is a very proper and probable subject for a young lady to fall in love with.

If women have one weakness more marked than another, it is towards veneration. They are born worshippers,—makers of silver shrines for some divinity or other, which, of course, they always think fell straight down from heaven.

The first step towards their falling in love with an ordinary mortal is generally to dress him out with all manner of real or fancied superiority; and having made him up, they worship him.

Now a truly great man, a man really grand and noble in heart and intellect, has this advantage with women, that he is an idol ready-made to hand; and so that very painstaking and ingenious sex have less labor in getting him up, and can be ready to worship him on shorter notice.

In particular is this the case where a sacred profession and a moral supremacy are added to the intellectual. Just think of the career of celebrated preachers and divines in all ages. Have they not stood like the image that "Nebuchadnezzar the king set up," and all womankind, coquettes and flirts not excepted, been ready to fall down and worship, even before the sound of cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, and so forth? Is not the faithful Paula, with her beautiful face, prostrate in reverence before poor, old, lean, haggard, dying St. Jerome, in the most splendid painting of the world, an emblem and sign of woman's eternal power of self-sacrifice to what she deems noblest in man? Does not old Richard Baxter tell us, with delightful single-heartedness, how his wife fell in love with him first, spite of his long, pale face,—and how she confessed, dear soul, after many years of married life, that she had found him less sour and bitter than she had expected?

The fact is, women are burdened with fealty, faith, reverence, more than they know what to do with; they stand like a hedge of sweet-peas, throwing out fluttering tendrils everywhere for something high and strong to climb by,—and when they find it, be it ever so rough in the bark, they catch upon it. And instances are not wanting of those who have turned away from the flattery of admirers to prostrate themselves at the feet of a genuine hero who never wooed them, except by heroic deeds and the rhetoric of a noble life.

Never was there a distinguished man whose greatness could sustain the test of minute domestic inspection better than our Doctor. Strong in a single-hearted humility, a perfect unconsciousness of self, an honest and sincere absorption in high and holy themes and objects, there was in him what we so seldom see,—a perfect logic of life; his minutest deeds were the true results of his sublimest principles. His whole nature, moral, physical, and intellectual, was simple, pure, and cleanly. He was temperate as an anchorite in all matters of living,—avoiding, from a healthy instinct, all those intoxicating stimuli then common among the clergy. In his early youth, indeed, he had formed an attachment to the almost universal clerical pipe,—but, observing a delicate woman once nauseated by coming into the atmosphere which he and his brethren had polluted, he set himself gravely to reflect that that which could so offend a woman must needs be uncomely and unworthy a Christian man; wherefore he laid his pipe on the mantelpiece, and never afterwards resumed the indulgence.

In all his relations with womanhood he was delicate and reverential, forming his manners by that old precept, "The elder women entreat as mothers, the younger as sisters,"—which rule, short and simple as it is, is nevertheless the most perfect résumé, of all true gentlemanliness. Then, as for person, the Doctor was not handsome, to be sure; but he was what sometimes serves with woman better,—majestic and manly, and, when animated by thought and feeling, having even a commanding grandeur of mien. Add to all this, that our valiant hero is now on the straight road to bring him into that situation most likely to engage the warm partisanship of a true woman,—namely, that of a man unjustly abused for right-doing,—and one may see that it is ten to one our Mary may fall in love with him yet, before she knows it.

If it were not for this mysterious selfness-and-sameness which makes this wild, wandering, uncanonical sailor, James Marvyn, so intimate and internal,—if his thread were not knit up with the thread of her life,—were it not for the old habit of feeling for him, thinking for him, praying for him, hoping for him, fearing for him, which—woe is us!—is the unfortunate habit of womankind,—if it were not for that fatal something which neither judgment, nor wishes, nor reason, nor common sense shows any great skill in unravelling,—we are quite sure that Mary would be in love with the Doctor within the next six months; as it is, we leave you all to infer from your own heart and consciousness what his chances are.