A War Episode—I Meet my Fater—I Marry and Make a Home—The Ups and Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age

I

In bringing these desultory—perhaps too fragmentary—recollections to a close the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither be self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith somewhat in rejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both his experience has been ample if not exhaustive. During the period of their serial publication he has received many letters—suggestive, informatory and critical—now and again querulous—which he has not failed to consider, and, where occasion seemed to require, to pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. In no instance has he found any essential error in his narrative. Sometimes he has been charged with omissions—as if he were writing a history of his own times—whereas he has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relating his immediate personal experience.

I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, educated in the Church of England in America and married into the Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in this way: It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the household of a devout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond, affectionate Irish Catholic; the little life was almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue me from that form of theologic controversy known as infant damnation, the baby carriage was trundled round the corner to Saint Matthew’s Church—it was in the national capital—and the baby brow was touched with holy water out of a font blessed of the Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been the worse for it.

Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashioned baptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character in the neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than reverent, standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, “There go his sins, men and brethren, there go his sins”; and having but poor eyesight I thought I saw them passing down the stream never to trouble him, or anybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the stream, out and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?

I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impression that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed in what is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate any man because either in political or in religious opinion he differs from me and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creator according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought has been my lifelong contention.

I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of the nearest brook, shouting, “Glory hallelujah!” From my boyhood the persecution of man for opinion’s sake—and no matter for what opinion’s sake—has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known.

My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a mystery still. For all their learning and research—their positivity and contradiction—none of the writers know more than I think I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to himself.

The night has a thousand eyes,
The day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
The heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology—the pride of opinion—or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon of unrighteousness.

I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teaching the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternal life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the world which has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state of man now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, not at the sign of Buddha and total oblivion.

The blessed birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching and example of the Prince of Peace—have been engulfed beneath oceans of ignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embittered controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was the seed of the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man—weak, cruel, fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or the Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil’s work in God’s name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to be, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One of Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their titular divinity much as men in commerce adopt a trade-mark.

II

It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of organized churchism—the rank materialism of things temporal—not the teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion—which so long filled the world with blood and tears.

I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they should stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them: “What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage—a human being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew, done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?”

Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism—churchism—will ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches—or, shall I say, church fabrics—breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn. Before the world-war England and Germany—each claiming to be Protestant—were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might be right and which wrong, but on which side “is my bread to be buttered?” In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! “O Liberty,” cried Madame Roland, “how many crimes are committed in thy name!” “O Churchism,” may I not say, “how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!”

I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men—never any Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention—with absolute power. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, what they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals. En masse extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.

III

Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love—love through grace of God—truth where we can find it—which shall irradiate the life that is. If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be wanting, nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man for woman, but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the divine fraternity taught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of giving, not of getting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the joy of others.

Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three—
Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me.

For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: “I believe in God the Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell, the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?

As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of purgatory: “You may go further and fare worse, my lord,” so may I say to my Jewish friends—“Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men of the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promise of a Messiah—and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves God’s people to pause and ask, ‘Has He not arisen already?’”

I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of God and not the winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.

It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.

I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too few to remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not take to ourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the virtues of that village preacher of whom it was written that:

Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway,
And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray.

A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.

His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain;
The long-remembered beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sate by the fire, and talked the night away;
Wept o’er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,
Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe;
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began.

IV

I have lived a long life—rather a happy and a busy than a merry one—enjoying where I might, but, let me hope I may fairly claim, shirking no needful labor or duty. The result is some accretions to my credit. It were, however, ingratitude and vanity in me to set up exclusive ownership of these. They are the joint products and property of my dear wife and myself.

I do not know just what had befallen if love had failed me, for as far back as I can remember love has been to me the bedrock of all that is worth living for, striving for or possessing in this cross-patch of a world of ours.

I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful concert of affection between my father and mother, who lived to celebrate their golden wedding. My wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal felicity fifty-four—counted to include two years of betrothal, fifty-six years. Never was a young fellow more in love than I—never has love been more richly rewarded—yet not without some heartbreaking bereavements.

I met the woman who was to become my wife during the War of Sections—amid its turmoil and peril—and when at its close we were married, at Nashville, Tennessee, all about us was in mourning, the future an adventure. It was at Chattanooga, the winter of 1862-63, that fate brought us together and riveted our destinies. She had a fine contralto voice and led the church choir. Doctor Palmer, of New Orleans, was on a certain Sunday well into the long prayer of the Presbyterian service. Bragg’s army was still in middle Tennessee. There was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! Then the bursting of a shell too close for comfort. Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shell fragments on the roof. On the other side of the river the Yankees were upon us.

The man of God gave no sign that anything unusual was happening. He did not hurry. He did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on praying. Nor was there panic in the congregation, which did not budge.

That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. When it was finally ended, and still without changing a note the preacher delivered the benediction, the crowded church in the most orderly manner moved to the several doorways.

I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we reached the street the firing had become general. We had to traverse quite half a mile of it before attaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we were separated for nearly two years, when, the war over, we found ourselves at home again.

In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, and in the far South I had buried him. He was one of the most eminent and distinguished and altogether the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of his day, Andrew Ewing, who, though a Democrat, had in high party times represented the Whig Nashville district in Congress and in the face of assured election declined the Democratic nomination for governor of the state. A foremost Union leader in the antecedent debate, upon the advent of actual war he had reluctantly but resolutely gone with his state and section.

V

The intractable Abolitionists of the North and the radical Secessionists of the South have much historically to answer for. The racial warp and woof in the United States were at the outset of our national being substantially homogeneous. That the country should have been geographically divided and sectionally set by the ears over the institution of African slavery was the work of agitation that might have attained its ends by less costly agencies.

How often human nature seeking its bent prefers the crooked to the straight way ahead! The North, having in its ships brought the negroes from Africa and sold them to the planters of the South, putting the money it got for them in its pocket, turned philanthropist. The South, having bought its slaves from the slave traders of the North under the belief that slave labor was requisite to the profitable production of sugar, rice and cotton, stood by property-rights lawfully acquired, recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution. Thence arose an irrepressible conflict of economic forces and moral ideas whose doubtful adjustment was scarcely worth what it cost the two sections in treasure and blood.

On the Northern side the issue was made to read freedom, on the Southern side, self-defense. Neither side had any sure law to coerce the other. Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was able to establish a case convincing to itself. Thus the War of Sections, fought to a finish so gallantly by the soldiers of both sides, was in its origination largely a game of party politics.

The extremists and doctrinaires who started the agitation that brought it about were relatively few in number. The South was at least defending its own. That what it considered its rights in the Union and the Territories being assailed it should fight for aggressively lay in the nature of the situation and the character of the people. Aggression begot aggression, the unoffending negro, the provoking cause, a passive agent. Slavery is gone. The negro we still have with us. To what end?

Life indeed is a mystery—a hopelessly unsolved problem. Could there be a stronger argument in favor of a world to come than may be found in the brevity and incertitude of the world that is? Where this side of heaven shall we look for the court of last resort? Who this side of the grave shall be sure of anything?

At this moment the world having reached what seems the apex of human achievement is topsy-turvy and all agog. Yet have we the record of any moment when it was not so? That to keep what we call the middle of the road is safest most of us believe. But which among us keeps or has ever kept the middle of the road? What else and what next? It is with nations as with men. Are we on the way to another terrestrial collapse, and so on ad infinitum to the end of time?

VI

The home which I pictured in my dreams and projected in my hopes came to me at last. It arrived with my marriage. Then children to bless it. But it was not made complete and final—a veritable Kentucky home—until the all-round, all-night work which had kept my nose to the grindstone had been shifted to younger shoulders I was able to buy a few acres of arable land far out in the county—the County of Jefferson!—and some ancient brick walls, which the feminine genius to which I owe so much could convert to itself and tear apart and make over again. Here “the sun shines bright” as in the song, and—

The corn tops ripe and the meadows in the bloom
The birds make music all the day.

They waken with the dawn—a feathered orchestra—incessant, fearless—for each of its pieces—from the sweet trombone of the dove to the shrill clarionet of the jay—knows that it is safe. There are no guns about. We have with us, and have had for five and twenty years, a family of colored people who know our ways and meet them intelligently and faithfully. When we go away—as we do each winter and sometimes during the other seasons—and come again—dinner is on the table, and everybody—even to Tigue and Bijou, the dogs—is glad to see us. Could mortal ask for more? And so let me close with the wish of my father’s old song come true—the words sufficiently descriptive of the reality:

In the downhill of life when I find I’m declining,
May my fate no less fortunate be
Than a snug elbow chair can afford for reclining
And a cot that o’erlooks the wide sea—
A cow for my dairy, a dog for my game.
And a purse when my friend needs to borrow;
I’ll envy no nabob his riches, nor fame,
Nor the honors that wait him to-morrow.

And when at the close I throw off this frail cov’ring
Which I’ve worn for three-score years and ten—
On the brink of the grave I’ll not seek to keep hov’ring
Nor my thread wish to spin o’er again.
But my face in the glass I’ll serenely survey,
And with smiles count each wrinkle and furrow—
That this worn-out old stuff which is thread-bare to-day
Shall become everlasting to-morrow.