Perhaps our machines are taking us—we wish to believe so—to some new Arden, some far-off Avalon, where we shall heal us of our motor-minds, our movie-nerves, our corner-light religion; where “Safety First” shall give place to “Derring-Do” as a national motto; where we shall ascend the empty peaks, and out of the thunder and smoke of shaking Sinai bring down some daring commandment, done by the finger of God on new tables of stone.
We are not lacking courage. It is imagination that we lack. We dare. But we do not think it worth while. We are shallow, skeptical, conventional, out of tune with the Infinite, and out of touch with spiritual things. If we do not try the unattempted, it is because we believe it has already been tried. It is because Homer has preëmpted Helicon that we tunnel it. Only Milton, among us moderns (and how ancient Milton seems!), only Milton in his blindness has seen that there is room and verge enough on Helicon, and deeps within the abyss of Hades where Dante would be lost. No, Milton is not the only modern to leave the plains, and, like a star, to dwell apart. Thoreau did it at Walden; Lanier did it on the marshes of Glynn; Burroughs did it at Woodchuck Lodge; and Hudson did it on the plains of Patagonia—proof enough that ponds and plains and the low-lying marsh may be as high as Helicon for poetry, if only the poet have the vision to see that
“Like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.”
But here we fail. We no longer see the greatness of God in things. We have covered God with an atom. We ask for bread, and Science gives us a stone; for God, and Science gives us an electron. It was a super-electron that created the heavens and the earth when it saw that all of the other electrons were without form and void. Atomism has taken the place of theism in our religion, if it is religion. Man is only a bunch of willful atoms, or parts of atoms, not any longer the crowning work of Creation, its center and circumference, its dominion and destiny and glory, its divine expression, interpretation, and immortal soul. Are we to be robbed of God? Inhibited forever from faith by the lensed eyes of Science?
“What is man?” I ask, and Science laughs and answers, “Electrons.” That is its latest guess. But does man look like them? Does he feel like them? Does he behave like them? Does he believe like them? In the laboratory he may. But out here in the hills of Hingham, where I am returned to the earth and the sky and to my own soul, I know that I AM, and that I still hold to all of those first things which Science would shame me out of, offering me electrons instead!
I accept the electrons. Capering little deities, they are the sons of God. But so are you and I the sons of God—and we are electrons, trillions of electrons, if you like.
Gods and atoms, we can dwell and think and feel as either, the two realms distinct and far apart, the roads between in a continual state of construction, dangerous but passable. The anatomist, laying down his scalpel, cries, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. I am fearfully and wonderfully made!”—his science passing into poetry, and from poetry to religion, but not easily in our present frame and mood.
Science clears the sight and widens its range; but Science can never clear up the shadows at the bottom of a woodchuck. Only vision can do that, and Science lacks vision, using a microtome instead, paring its woodchuck till he is thinner than sliced sunlight before it can see through so much as a single stained cell of him. Science turns aside from shadows, walking by sight or else standing still. It deals with the flesh, not the spirit; and is as impotent in literature and art as in life and society. The potent thing among men and nations is love. Love never faileth. Yet never were we so afraid of love as we are to-day; and never did art and literature seem so fearful of the imagination, of vision, of the eternal, the divine.
“Go get me a bird,” the old scientist said to me; “I will give you a lesson in skinning and mounting.” I was a young boy. Hurrying out to the woods, I was soon back with a cuckoo. The face of the old scientist darkened. “You should not have killed this bird, it is the friend of man. See when I open this gizzard.” And with a dexterous twist of his fingers turned inside out the gizzard, and showed it, like a piece of plush, its fleshy walls penetrated with millions of caterpillar hairs.