第96章

--Yes, but look out for the fellows that send you a copy of their book to trap you into writing a bookseller's advertisement for it.Igot caught so once, and never heard the end of it and never shall hear it.---He took down an elegantly bound volume, on opening which appeared a flourishing and eminently flattering dedication to himself.---There,--said he, what could I do less than acknowledge such a compliment in polite terms, and hope and expect the book would prove successful, and so forth and so forth? Well, I get a letter every few months from some new locality where the man that made that book is covering the fences with his placards, asking me whether Iwrote that letter which he keeps in stereotype and has kept so any time these dozen or fifteen years.Animus tuus oculus, as the freshmen used to say.If her Majesty, the Queen of England, sends you a copy of her "Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands," be sure you mark your letter of thanks for it Private!

We had got comfortably seated in his library in the mean time, and the Master had taken up his book.I noticed that every other page was left blank, and that he had written in a good deal of new matter.

--I tell you what,--he said,--there 's so much intelligence about nowadays in books and newspapers and talk that it's mighty hard to write without getting something or other worth listening to into your essay or your volume.The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow.Every now and then I find something in my book that seems so good to me, Ican't help thinking it must have leaked in.I suppose other people discover that it came through a leak, full as soon as I do.You must write a book or two to find out how much and how little you know and have to say.Then you must read some notices of it by somebody that loves you and one or two by somebody that hates you.You 'll find yourself a very odd piece of property after you 've been through these experiences.They 're trying to the constitution; I'm always glad to hear that a friend is as well as can be expected after he 's had a book.

You must n't think there are no better things in these pages of mine than the ones I'm going to read you, but you may come across something here that I forgot to say when we were talking over these matters.

He began, reading from the manuscript portion of his book:

--We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought.

Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.[He looked up from his book just here and said, "Don't be afraid, I am not going to quote Pereant."] One of our old boarders--the one that called himself "The Professor" I think it was--said some pretty audacious things about what he called "pathological piety," as I remember, in one of his papers.And here comes along Mr.Galton, and shows in detail from religious biographies that "there is a frequent correlation between an unusually devout disposition and a weak constitution." Neither of them appeared to know that John Bunyan had got at the same fact long before them.He tells us, "The more healthy the lusty man is, the more prone he is unto evil." If the converse is true, no wonder that good people, according to Bunyan, are always in trouble and terror, for he says, "A Christian man is never long at ease;When one fright is gone, another doth him seize."If invalidism and the nervous timidity which is apt to go with it are elements of spiritual superiority, it follows that pathology and toxicology should form a most important part of a theological education, so that a divine might know how to keep a parish in a state of chronic bad health in order that it might be virtuous.

It is a great mistake to think that a man's religion is going to rid him of his natural qualities."Bishop Hall" (as you may remember to have seen quoted elsewhere) "prefers Nature before Grace in the Election of a wife, because, saith he, it will be a hard Task, where the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire conquest while Life lasteth.""Nature" and "Grace" have been contrasted with each other in a way not very respectful to the Divine omnipotence.Kings and queens reign "by the Grace of God," but a sweet, docile, pious disposition, such as is born in some children and grows up with them,--that congenital gift which good Bishop Hall would look for in a wife,--is attributed to "Nature." In fact "Nature" and "Grace," as handled by the scholastics, are nothing more nor less than two hostile Divinities in the Pantheon of post-classical polytheism.

What is the secret of the profound interest which "Darwinism " has excited in the minds and hearts of more persons than dare to confess their doubts and hopes? It is because it restores "Nature" to its place as a true divine manifestation.It is that it removes the traditional curse from that helpless infant lying in its mother's arms.It is that it lifts from the shoulders of man the responsibility for the fact of death.It is that, if it is true, woman can no longer be taunted with having brought down on herself the pangs which make her sex a martyrdom.If development upward is the general law of the race; if we have grown by natural evolution out of the cave-man, and even less human forms of life, we have everything to hope from the future.That the question can be discussed without offence shows that we are entering on a new era, a Revival greater than that of Letters, the Revival of Humanity.