CHAPTER LVII.
Here I am, then, since it must be.
Every one has heard the story of the Frenchman who, after a tour through America (or was it England?), had but this to say of us: that we were a people with thirty religions and but a single sauce. I hardly think that we in Virginia, at least at the period of this story, were quite so rich in religions as this. Very likely, some of the sects discovered by our observant Gaul had no representatives in the Old Dominion. At any rate, I, after diligent inquiry in many quarters, have not been able to unearth more than fifteen distinct varieties. I did not count, I admit, a certain flock of migratory Mormons that I once encountered on the wing; just as, I presume, a naturalist would hardly class the Canada goose among Virginia birds, from the mere fact that they refresh themselves, in the spring of the year, in our wheat-fields. Nor did I think that a man and his wife and a boy whom I once knew, could fairly claim to be numbered as a sect merely because, as their fellow-villagers asserted, they professed to believe something that nobody could understand. Then I am afraid that even the very sects themselves would insist on my leaving out the Bushwhackers,—slack-twisted Christians like myself, that is, who can’t abide uniforms, and find it hot marching in ranks, and irksome to keep step; though we do cover the flanks of the main column, and, while we don’t attack in line, yet keep up a rattling fire upon such stray sinners as we find prowling about.
And so forth, and so forth.
Still (for I would not incur the suspicion of niggardliness), it is very possible that, had I searched with greater diligence, I should have found more than fifteen. We will allow, then, that, at the period which we are sketching, there were, say, a dozen and a half religions in Virginia.
And when I say religions, I have not in my mind a milk-and-water, namby-pamby, good-enough-for-me kind creed, but one of your up-and-down, robustious, straight-from-the-shoulder dogmas, that could ship off entire churchfuls of heterodoxers to—(but since the Revised Edition the word is scarcely parliamentary) without a wry face. Thither our Virginia Catholics used to despatch all our Protestants, to a man; but, inasmuch as their numbers were few (and, strictly speaking, the thing was, perhaps, contrary to the Constitution of the United States), they did it all very decently and quietly; sending them off by night-train, as it were, and making no loud mention of the fact.
Not so their opponents. Greatly outnumbering the followers of the scarlet woman of Babylon, they rattled them off in broad daylight, by the through mail, making no bones of naming the terminus of the road. Ah, but it was thorough work on both sides!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
But there was one awkward thing about the business: if they kept this thing up, not a solitary Virginian would ever reach heaven. That thought gave me pause, one day; and ever since I have hoped that somebody had made a mistake, somehow. At any rate, said I to myself, in my slack-twisted, Bushwhackerish way, the Jews will get away; and that will be a comfort, considering what an Unrevised Edition of a time they have had for these two thousand years.
But as a guerilla, as a free lance, unattached and un-uniformed, and falling in, as occasion served, now with one regiment and now with another, I found that things were even worse than I have represented them. You see they didn’t mind me, and so talked very freely in my presence; and I was shocked to find that these various companies and battalions privately nourished a keener animosity one against the other than towards the common enemy, Ah Sin. If each could have heard what the others said of them (as I did), and where they sent them! I came to the conclusion, at last, that there was not the shadow of a chance for any Virginia Protestant. There were not enough Catholics to keep them busy; they fell upon one another, and so many cars did they couple on to the through mail (ole Virginny nebber tire!) that it became a most Unlimited Express, choke-full of Virginia gentlemen,—Virginia gentlemen who had erred in the interpretation of a phrase or so, or, it may be, of a word merely, of Holy Writ.
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
I say Virginia gentlemen advisedly.
Environments may have their environments (just as fleas have other fleas to bite ’em, and so we go ad infinitum), and, thorough-going as was our theology, it had to succumb in the presence of our chivalry towards the sex; for throughout all our borders there lived not a man, lay or clerical, who would not have scorned to send a woman to the bottomless pit.
But as for the Virginia gentlemen, we shovelled them all in with an industry (ole Virginny nebber tire!) and an undoubting zeal that were above all praise.
That’s the reason I always did love a Virginian; he won’t stand any nonsense. “Do you believe that a prodigious majority of mankind were elected unto damnation, ages before they were born? No?” Swish! and that is the end of you! Another: “And so you say that baptizo means baptize, do you?”—“Why, don’t the dictionaries and all the Greek profess—” budjum! and where are you now?
For, in matters of this kind, we Virginians of that day, if you would agree with us, would agree with you; but—if not—you might go—your way,—for the King James version obtained in those times.
Ah, but we were out-and-outers in those good old days!
Ole Virginny nebber tire!
Strange! for time was when things were very different in the Old Dominion. Our ancestors had brought over with them the spirit of the merrie old England of hundreds of years ago; and merry men were they, too, for a long time after they landed on these fair shores.
And, after all, what was the harm? for do not philosophers tell us that a people’s conception of the Deity is but the reflex of the powers of nature (be they kindly or hostile) by which they are surrounded? And was not this a fair land? and if their sun was bright, but not too fierce, and their wheat-fields nodded to soft breezes, but knew not the hurricane, and if their snows were a fairy mantle for mother-earth, rather than a shroud, and Jack Frost spread, over pond and creek, ice just thick enough to store against what time the mint—the jolly jolly mint—should sprout,—if all nature smiled, why should these merry Norman-English pull long faces? Nor did they, but laughed and danced, bless their jovial souls!
But a time came when merrie England was merry no longer.
Somebody had invented a new religion.
It floated down upon her, a dense fog, impenetrable to the mild radiance of the star of Bethlehem. Floated across the Atlantic, and darkened our life, too. With us, as well, laughter became frivolity, and dancing blasphemous. There are rifts in the fog now, and here and there the sun is bursting through; but at the period of our story the shadow was unbroken. There was laughter, it is true. Do not the condemned often make merry in their cells? and young people will dance,—just as lambs frisk, even upon a bed of mint—heedless,—for ’tis their nature to. But they laughed and danced under a shadow,—the shadow of the next world. That world, alone, was real,—so we thought,—while this, from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand, was (though it seemed so solid) but a fleeting show, for man’s illusion given.
And of this theology, which spread, like a black pall, over the land, this was the central conception; and I give it for the reason that you will not find it laid down in the books, or in any single discourse. It is the epitome of the thousands upon thousands of sermons which I (not that I would boast) have heard in my day. Listen; for this was the atmosphere that our Mary breathed:
The world is the battle-ground of two mighty beings, the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil. These two, from the first appearance of man on earth, have unceasingly battled together, the one to save him, the other to destroy. To save mankind—to destroy mankind—that has been the sole contention these thousands of years. Incidentally, of course (for such is war), the Evil Spirit has, beyond the harm done the human family, wrought immense damage to earth’s fauna and flora (as the innumerable imperfections of nature testify), but man, alone, has been the objective point of all his strategy; and with every new soul that comes into the world the conflict is renewed.
And perhaps I am wrong,—for there are those who maintain that I have a bee in my theological bonnet,—but, were I a preacher, I should stand up for my side. I should not go about proclaiming it from the house-tops that in the vast majority of these struggles the good spirit is worsted; nor glory in announcing to the world that Satan held the field, and that the only hope was that a few of us poor captives might elude his vigilance and escape. Captives! They told us that we were his when we were born!
Is there any harm in saying that to a mere Bushwhacker (who has not had the privilege of passing through a theological seminary) it seems that we have hardly a fair chance? It were better we were born orphans! Better that than to be the children of sin and Satan, as those who know tell me we are,—though I will say that I cannot help hoping that there is some mistake about it.
But if it be, indeed, too true,—if it be a fact that all the poor souls that flit darkly, for a season, about this little ball of earth, are, in very deed, condemned before they are born, may we not hope that it is otherwise in Venus, for example, or Mars? I, at least, sometimes, overborne by the immense tragedy of human life, steal forth alone into the night; and lifting my weary eyes to the blue spangled dome above, try to drown the darkness here in the light I see shining there; and ofttimes I find myself wondering whether they be indeed as bright as they seem,—find myself praying, even, that it may be so.
For indeed it were pitiful, were all those worlds such as ours!
And sometimes I have felt, as I swept, with brimming eyes, constellation after constellation, and galaxy after galaxy, that I could bear up with a braver heart could I but know that there was, wandering somewhere in the immensity of space, one little planet, at least, upon which the prince of darkness had not set his foot,—one little world in which poverty and hunger and thirst, and toil and failure, and blood and tears, and disease and eternal farewells were unknown,—one world where a mother could smile back upon her babe, as it lay kicking and crowing in her lap, and laughing in her face, and not feel that the Grip of Hell was upon its throat.
Alice buried her face in her hands; but Charley sat bolt upright in his seat.
For such was our creed in those days. If any one shall say that Virginians do not believe that now, I shall not argue the point. It was notoriously orthodox then to hold that every infant came into the world under sentence. Not under sentence to be hanged by the neck, as murderers are—
Alice shivered. Charley lifted his hand. I ceased reading.
