The sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. It was a humble dwelling—almost the humblest—partly built of sod, with a barn near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, "Post Office," which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if "the blank miles round about" could be so called. We were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. It was a rude table and a lowly roof; but, when I arose, I was glad to have been at such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but not like a stranger. It was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness of life in it. Going out, I lay down on the ground and talked with the little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an event of importance; and I remember asking him if he ever saw a city. He had been once, he said, to—the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had just left—with his father in the farm-wagon. That was his idea of the magnificence of cities. I could not but look at him curiously. Here was the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man's world than any one I had ever encountered. To him this overstretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of life. What a waif of existence!—but the ponies being ready, we said our good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. We talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere—the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had described, and knowing that I had told but half my story and that my friend would like the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious things, saying—and there was nothing surprising in such a change with us—"After all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by ourselves. How to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the child of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is more of it, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they had not been lived a thousand years before,—listened like a child to a story, grave as the matter was, which I read again from the memoranda I had made, after that April morning, year by year.
"Respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men a sentiment of the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos of human fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. It is the sense of our mortality that thus exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates our faculties. Rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the substance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writing beyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock a monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies I have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the land.
"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below thought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost relics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, when the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in some solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown eyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, why lingerest thou in this broken tomb,' I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of time; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom, they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims to the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that even the sea has long abandoned.
"The Mother-Church?—is then this personal religious life only a state of orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independent self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in common which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? Why should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other parts of life? It is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more efficient will enacting our own choice. To obey by force is a childish or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of intellectual majority. Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right of private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. The treasure doors of our fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold piece with balance and scale. All that libraries contain, all that institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what results? What do the best become? Incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What is truth?' ends all.
"This is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like Descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. They find that to use authority is the better part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft; and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority in life. They accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters of fact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity in its own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions, especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they put them to the test. This is our habit in all parts of secular life—in scholarship and in practical affairs. 'If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God,' is only a special instance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable command. The confusion of human opinion largely arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in opposition. The event would dispense with the argument; but in common life, which knows far more of the world than it has in its own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. It is the distinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all.
"Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, or commerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human life in these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yield also in religion. The lives of the saints and all those who in history have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the religious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for, as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well established results of life already lived. Though the religious life be personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and in it we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other parts of life. We begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, of many methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth; and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with the respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, their convictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness as enforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as he would have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship.
"The question of authority in the religious life, however, is more specific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the general respect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and our dependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses, direction, and the confirmation of our experience. It is organized religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty, organized justice do, in man's communal life. There is a joint and general consent in the masses of men with similar experience united into the Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar to that of such masses united into a government with respect to secular things. The history of the Church with its embodied dogmas—the past of Christendom—contains that consent; and the Church founds its claim to veneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered from all ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces of individuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no free constitution and no legal code can claim. To substitute the simple faith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoary and commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arrogance and folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught within the free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary, for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Church definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in a diffused state like philosophy, but as an institution like the Throne or the Parliament.
"But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personal life may seem, yet if it be true, the Church must include this in its own mighty sum; and that what the Church adds to define, expand, and elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things, not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? And in defence of a private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized social life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past of Christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritual insight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society, and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is its historic life, with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not a process of Christianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birth of the world? In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and forms of emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in the history of the Church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work and aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. Such are no longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belonging to that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that is forever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in imperfection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to be accounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in the whole of man's historic life. In view of these obvious facts, and also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are here spoken of in their total mass as the Church, and of their emphasis upon such particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in a young and conscientious heart? It may seem to be partial scepticism, especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of this embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind's information and the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence. But if much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. Let us own, then, and reverence the great tradition of the Church; but he has feebly grasped the idea of Christ leavening the world, and has read little in the records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in the Church it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from living truth.
"If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan thought to God only,—then does it not usurp the function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove God to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for the vital faith? If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echo in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its authority is external wholly and has nothing in common with that authority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselves embodied in an outward principle. If personality has any place in the soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits that reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowed radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available test of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God's presence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the whole matter.