We had been more than three hours getting the pelt off that woodchuck and all of the poetry out of him. As I sat by, I saw what I had hardly realized before: that the hand with the knife must often rest, though the eager mind seemed almost incapable of resting.
The national elections were approaching, and from poetry we plunged into politics, where I feared we were bound to disagree, but where, to my surprise, I found we were standing together on the League of Nations, Burroughs having forsaken his party on that issue.
“It’s the only thing!” he cried. “That’s what we fought for. Rob us of that, and the whole terrible sacrifice is futile—criminal!”
And later, after my return home, he wrote me:
“Well, the elections did not go as both of us had hoped. DeLoach was on the winning side, as I suppose all the great moneyed interests were. But thank heaven I am not in that crowd. If it means an utter repudiation of the League of Nations, then for the first time I am ashamed that I am an American. If I were in Europe I could not hold up my head and say, ‘I am from the United States!’ If we have failed to see ourselves as a member of the great family of nations, with solemn duties toward the rest of the world, to perform as such a member, then we have slumped morally as badly as did the Germans when they set out to enslave the rest of the world!”
But to return to Woodchuck Lodge, to the old man with the boy’s jack-knife in his hand, and the boy’s heart in his breast—and so, the poet’s outlook in his eyes. For he was more poet than scientist, more poet than theologian, though every poet, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts, and these—science, music, and theology—are the parts.
The theologian is the ultimate thinker. His chief attribute is consistency—even unto death. Nothing will shatter a system of theology as will a trifling inconsistency. Burroughs was a bad theologian, the worst I know by the test of consistency. Yet who among the theologians is more religious? Or leaves us with a realer consciousness of the presence of God in nature?
“You and I approach this thing from different angles,” he said to me. “We come to God down different roads. Our terms differ. You say ‘Father.’ I say ‘Nature.’ But whatever we call Him, He is the same, and the same for each of us. Our divergent paths at the start, come out together at the end. We worship the same God.”
We did differ radically in our approach, in our terminology, and as I had always thought, must of necessity differ as radically in our faiths and works. That was a foolish, vainglorious conceit. I wish every disconcerted reader of “The Light of Day” and “Accepting the Universe” had heard the old author interpret himself that day. That reader would have understood, as he sat there watching the light of a real day breaking in over the rainy autumn landscape, what Carruth meant by,