Part 11 (1/2)
”Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano,” answered Robin, promptly. ”I can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer to _the_ needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to compa.s.s a needle.” She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said quickly, ”Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help it. What were you thinking of, Adam?”
He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went on speaking to her. ”I was thinking,” he said, ”of what Mill said about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race to find an electric light plant alongside their other plants, or whether they would better work out their own salvation, a little at a time, by main strength and awkwardness. I was thinking how strange our books would seem to men and women who knew nothing of the--the late earth.” He held out to her what looked something like a needle threaded with coa.r.s.e white linen thread. ”Will your Majesty deign to look at this?”
She took it, and looked at it wonderingly, and then ran in and brought back a torn towel, and began mending it. ”Why, it sews very well,” she said; ”who taught you that?”
”The mother of inventions generally,” he answered. ”If you ever had gone on the round-up, you might have had occasion for a needle and thread when there wasn't any nearer than a hundred miles. But you haven't answered my question.”
”About inventions and so on? It seems to me you have to consider the _raison d'etre_ of a people before you can tell the answer. What is the use of labor-saving inventions, if the time saved isn't of some great value? What is to be the chief end of man in a dispensation that has no catechism as a guide-post?”
”A very different end from the old one,” answered Adam, half sternly.
”Work should not come to him as a curse, nor as his greatest boon; at least, not hard, manual labor. There should be work enough to insure ease and comfort, and every one should work freely and gladly. I should educate the individual; he should be strong of body and keen of mind, and should feel that his talents were given him for use, not for concealment; he should use his hands, both of them, and find delight in their work. It is a beautiful world, it always was, but I don't know that the steam-engine brought men's souls closer together, or that the electric light let in any more radiance upon our minds, or that the great telescopes made heaven any nearer. It should be a happier and a healthier world, if it was no more.”
”Adam,” she said abruptly, ”if we had children, in what religious faith would you bring them up?”
”I don't know; I never thought about it very much,” he answered honestly. ”I have an ideal in my mind, but I can't explain it. I believe in one source of life, and therefore a common divinity.”
Robin laughed quietly. ”That is like the Hindoo proverb, 'That which exists is one; sages call it variously.' That has been called pantheism, and for that belief the Jews expelled Baruch Benedict Spinoza from their synagogue. In our time there was a very learned magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world has ever known.”
”I don't care what you call it,” said Adam, stoutly. ”I am not afraid of names, and I don't know anything about any of those religions, pantheism, Spinozaism, or monism; but I do know I would rather a child of mine saw G.o.d in everything than that he saw G.o.d in nothing save his own narrow creed. I would rather he was a pantheist than a Calvinist.
Spinoza never burned any one, did he, nor preached that h.e.l.l was paved with infants' skulls?”
Robin clapped her hands and laughed again. ”I beg your pardon for laughing,” she said, ”but the idea of Spinoza, the 'G.o.d-intoxicated man,' presiding over an auto-da-fe is too absurd. If you only remembered anything about his gentle, retiring spirit and melancholy life; I think he was better known in our time than in his own, but his philosophy does not satisfy me. I am willing to grant the ident.i.ty of life, and its divine possibilities, but I cannot wors.h.i.+p it as life itself, a mere manifestation of nature. I know that there is such a thing as living rock, and that it may be killed by a bolt of lightning as readily as a tree; but this does not make it any more worthy of wors.h.i.+p than I am, and that is terribly unworthy. The rock and I are types of life, stages in the development of life, but for my child there must be something better. For the child I must lay hold on the everlasting life; I must find the rock that is higher than I. I do not know of any manifestation of that life so great, so G.o.dlike, and so lovable as His who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.'”
”But surely you do not believe in the Immaculate Conception?” asked Adam, incredulously.
”I don't care anything about it, one way or the other. It's the immaculate life that concerns me. As you said yourself a few minutes ago, words cannot frighten me. Am I going to stand carping, 'Can any good come out of Nazareth?' What do I care if it comes out of Sodom and Gomorrah, if it is good?”
”But you surely don't believe in the miracles?” he asked.
”Surely I do, in some of them at least. I have seen a miracle or so myself. Besides, if you remember the greatest proof He gave was that the gospel was preached to the poor. Buddha was a prince; he whom the Jews expected was to reign as a king. What a fall was there! the gospel of hope and joy was brought to the children of Gibeon, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The love of Christ has wrought greater miracles than He did. Look at the arena in Rome. Look at the whole countless army of martyrs. When Mrs. Booth died, the eighty thousand women that nightly walked the streets of London rebelled, and for once the long aisles of brick and stone were swept clean of that awful arraignment of civilization. That was more of a miracle than satisfying three thousand souls with food. At least, it's enough of a miracle for me.”
The tears came into her eyes, and she gathered up her pans and went into the house.
XVIII
Are G.o.d and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life:
So careful of the type? but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, ”A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.”
TENNYSON.
They were sitting in the doorway together. Robin rested her chin in her hands and looked down the valley, the lines of perplexity deepening in her forehead.
”If only we had an angel with a sword, or without one, to tell us what to do,” she said. ”If only we were deeply religious with the old-fas.h.i.+oned orthodox religion, that would enable us to believe we were predestined not to be drowned--”