"He hath made everything beautiful in his time," murmured Grande, partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the slough into which we had fallen.
"I have heard," said Halicarnassus, who is always lugging in little scraps of information apropos to everything,—"I have been told that Dr. Alexander was so great an admirer of the Proverbs of Solomon, that he used to read them over every three months."
"I beg your pardon," I interposed, glad of the opportunity to correct and humiliate him, "but that was not one of the Proverbs of Solomon."
"Who said it was?" asked the Grand Mogul, savagely.
"Nobody; but you thought it was when she said it," answered his antagonist, coolly.
"And whose proverb is it, my Lady Superior?"
"It is in Ecclesiastes," I said.
"Well, Ecclesiastes is next door to Solomon. It's all one." Halicarnassus can creep through the smallest knot-hole of any man of his size it has ever been my lot to meet, provided there is anything on the other side he wishes to get at. If there is not, and especially if anything is there which he wishes to shun, a four hundred and fifty pounder cannot crash a hole large enough for you to push him through. By such a pitiful chink as that did his Infallible Highness wriggle himself out of the range of my guns, and pursue his line of remark.
"But I really cannot say that I have been able to detect the excessive superiority of Solomon's proverbs. If it were not for the name of it, I think Sancho Panza's much better."
"Taisez-vous. Hold your tongue," I said, without mitigation. If there is anything I cannot away with, it is trivial apostasy. I tolerate latitudinarianism when it is hereditary. Where people's fathers and mothers before them have been Pagans, and Catholics, and Mohammedans, you don't blame THEM for being so. You regret their error, and strive to lead them back into the right path; only they are not inflammatory. But to have people go out from the faith of their fathers with malice aforethought and their eyes open—well, that is not exactly what I mean either. That is a sorrowful, but not necessarily an exasperating thing. What I mean is this: I see people Orthodox from their cradles, (and probably only from their cradles, certainly not from their brains,) who think it is something pretty to become Unitarianistic. They don't become Unitarians, as they never were Orthodox, because they have not thought enough or sense enough to become or to be anything; but they like to make a stir and attract attention. They seem to think it indicates great liberality of character, and great breadth of view, to be continually flinging out against their own faith, ridiculing this, that, and the other point held by their Church, and shocking devout and simple-minded Orthodox by their quasi-profanity. Now for good Orthodox Christians I have a great respect; and for good Unitarian Christians I have a great respect; and for sincere, sad seekers, who can find no rest for the sole of their foot, I have a great respect; but for these Border State men, who are neither here nor there, on whom you never can lay your hand, because they are twittering everywhere, I have a profound contempt. I wish people to be either one thing or another. I desire them to believe something, and know what it is, and stick to it. I have no patience with this modern outcry against creeds. You hear people inveigh against them, without for a moment thinking what they are. They talk as if creeds were the head and front of human offending, the infallible sign of bigotry and hypocrisy, incompatible alike with piety and wisdom. Do not these wise men know that the thinkers and doers of the earth, in overwhelming majority, have been creed men? Creeds may exist without religion, but neither religion, nor philosophy, nor politics, nor society, can exist without creeds. There must be a creed in the head, or there cannot be religion in the heart. You must believe that Deity exists, before you can reverence Deity. You must believe in the fact of humanity, or you cannot love your fellows. A creed is but the concentration, the crystallization, of belief. Truth is of but little worth till it is so crystallized. Truth lying dissolved in oceans of error and nonsense and ignorance makes but a feeble diluent. It swashes everywhere, but to deluge, not to benefit. Precipitate it, and you have the salt of the earth. Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous, awkward, inefficient thing; but construct a platform, and immediately it becomes lithe, efficient, powerful. Even before they set foot on these rude shores, our forefathers made a compact, and a nation was born in that day. It is on creeds that strong men are nourished, and that which nourishes the leaders into eminence is necessary to keep the masses from sinking. A man who really thinks, will think his way into light. He may turn many a somersault, but he will come right side up at last. But people in general do not think, and if they refuse to be walled in by other people's thoughts, they inevitably flop and flounder into pitiable prostration. So important is it, that a poor creed is better than none at all. Truth, even adulterated as we get it, is a tonic. Bring forward something tangible, something positive, something that means something, and it will do. But this flowery, misty, dreamy humanitarianism,—I say humanitarianism, because I don't know what that is, and I don't know what the thing I am driving at is, so I put the two unknown quantities together in a mathematical hope that minus into minus may give plus,—this milk-and-watery muddle of dreary negations, that remits the world to its original fluidic state of chaos, I spew it out of my mouth. It was not on such pap our Caesars fed that made them grow so great. I believe that the common people of early New England were such lusty men, because they strengthened themselves by gnawing at their tough old creeds. Give one something to believe, and he can get at it and believe it; but set out butting your head against nothing, and the chances are that you will break your neck. Take a good stout Christian, or a good sturdy Pagan, and you find something to bring up against; but with nebulous vapidists you are always slumping through and sprawling everywhere.