Harbor Jim of Newfoundland

by Alden Eugene Bartlett

"It is now proved that all is mental or mind. Your thoughts are the opposites of mind. They do not exist. They are even as all other things, non-existent, non-real. God is the only reality. There is no thing outside of God. You are not separated from Him."

"Then," interrupted Jim, "how about the Prodigal Son? Didn't he get separated from his Father?"

"That is speaking in terms of no-mind. You have not yet grasped the thought. Nothing can exist but good. God never saw the Prodigal Son until he came back, because he never has or can see anything evil."

"Your God may not see or know evil, sickness or suffering or anything that makes a man miserable. I say, your God mayn't, but mine does. It's his knowledge that makes Him compassionate. If He didn't know what was happening to His own children, that He had created and planned for, then I'd rather pray to Bob McCartney. Think, sir, what kind of a mother would your mother a-been, if she hadn't known when you cried, and you hadn't a-been able to climb up and lay in her arms and be comforted and forgiven? She wouldn't a-been a mother and God wouldn't be a God unless He knew what was a-happening to His own children! Why man alive didn't He make the world; aren't they His, the cattle on a thousand hills, the lightenin' and the thunder, the sweet grass and the flowers and all things in and on and under the earth? If He has gone off and forgotten it all and don't know good and evil, if He don't know when we're tired and failin' and tryin' again, why what would be the use o' prayer or, for that matter, for livin' at all?"

The queer man, at this point, removed his rubbers, but made no comment upon Jim's questions. Perhaps his feet were so warm it was hard for him to keep his head cool.

"You are utterly deceived," he continued. "You are confusing the real and the non-real. You are following after shadows that do not exist at all. You do not know the truth. You are bound. You are looking at the mist of matter that will disappear as the knowledge of truth develops within you. If you will begin to deny the existence of evil, you will begin to banish disease and ultimately you will understand that all things are but illusions."

"Pears to me," Jim said, as the queer man paused for breath, before launching more sentences about the truth. "Pears to me, you're sailin' round in a circle, and havin' a hard time dodging the winds o' logic. Call the flower, the mountain, and the man, shadows and illusions; if you will. I don't object to that, only I want you to agree with me that they are beautiful. The only thing I am afeared of is that you'll make some folks think this is not His world at all; and I want them to know that this is His world and that He planned these things you have re-named shadows and illusions. I callate there's danger in your statements when you come to follow them out. Then, too, these shadows have been actin' about uniform for as long ago as the book o' Genesis and afore that, and I don't propose to try to get much farther back, for it makes my eyes ache to see back o' that.

"When you tell me this body o' mine is an illusion, it kinder riles me, for I believe the Good Father planned this body as much as He planned a soul for me. It's a house for my soul as long as I'm in this earth and I callate it's to be treated holy while it houses my soul. I know it will get kinder old and dingy bye and bye and I'll be quitting it, but that ain't no good reason for neglectin' it now.

"Of course if what you say was true and there was no material and it was all in thinking, then we wouldn't have to wear clothes, nor eat food and you wouldn't have to wear your specs, nor your goloshes, because it's a little damp under feet this morning. You may be different, Mr. Jewett, with your one, only, real, true religion, but we Landers up here all get a little older as days go by; we all like to be cheered by food and fuel, and we all feel the difference between winter and summer, and we all travel sooner or later to the better land. Seems to be His plan."

The queer man was gathering words for new statements; but while he was listening to the last of Jim's replies, he was looking intently at his hands. If it may be permitted to speak in ordinary fashion of a man of his philosophy, his hands were dirty and he had become painfully aware of it. Jim noticed his concern and remarked with a certain acerbity of tone: