Let 'em bite! --said the Little Gentleman,--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 quintaan.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.
Pectus est quod 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 formula 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, Ithink 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 as 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.
