As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led to something.But since we have done with those tools, we had better give up those words.I should like to see a Yankee advertisement like this! --(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as he uttered the words,--)--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves unsatisfactory.
I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir! Now, what's the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the things themselves, Sir? What's the use of painting the fire round a poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
--What story is that?--I said.
Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.They could n't quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a hogshead painted all over with flames!
No, Sir! when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born, Sir! It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"! --None of my words, Sir! none of my words!
--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look like when one sees it? She follows him with her eyes, she leans over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with Christabel,--That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind.
But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.But in all common aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all, from their pure affections.
Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her childhood.Especially she had been told that she hated all good things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true of a great many children, to say the least.I have sometimes questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was enforced for so long a period.
The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.If all she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or "wrong"? No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child with its logic.Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out of books has never been able to raise again.If a child does not assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image.--How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a part of my inheritance, to my own.A good deal older than Plato, you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of the world's teachers.--Old books, as you well know, are books of the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.How many of all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels! The gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of the dross with which it was mingled.
And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer, who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself, in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.
The child must have some place of worship.What would a young girl be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose all around her with every returning day of rest? And Iris was free to choose.Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.It was a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in doctrine as could well be divided her affections.
