"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the value of the personal soul in all men,—what to us is the office of the Church? In theology it defines a philosophy which, though an interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value, differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most mysterious known to thought. In its specific rites it dignifies the great moments of life—birth, marriage, and death—with its solemn sanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in which religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially it enables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with the impressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make that act, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole in manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its least groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the life of entire Christendom by its general feasts of Christmas and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, by its seasons of fasting and prayer. In its administration it facilitates its daily work among men. The Church is thus a mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical action in its executive. Its doctrines, however conflicting in various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound, conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods, which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and whose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their own speculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thought age after age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of human nature. Its joys and consolations are the most precious inheritance of the heart of man. Its saints open our pathways, and go before, following in the ways of the spirit. Its doors concentrate within their shelter the general faith, and give it there a home. Its table is spread for all men. I do not speak of the Church Invisible, but mean to embrace with this catholicity of statement all organizations, howsoever divided, which own Christ as their Head. Temple, cathedral, and chapel have each their daily use to those who gather there with Christian hearts; each is a living fountain to its own fold. The village spire, wherever it rises on American or English ground, bespeaks an association of families who find in this bond an inward companionship and outward expression of it in a public habit continuing from the fathers down, sanctified by the memories of generations gone, and tender with the hope of the generation to come; and this is of measureless good within such families for young and old alike. It bespeaks also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, friendly, and searching, and growing more and more unconfined; it bespeaks a rock of public morality deep-set in the foundations of the state.
"It is true that in uniting with such a Church, under the specific conditions natural to both temperament and residence, a man yields something of private right, and sacrifices in a greater or less degree his personality; but this is the common condition of all social cooperation, whether in party action or any union to a common end. The compromise, involved in any platform of principles, tolerates essential differences in important matters, but matters not then important in view of what is to be gained in the main. The advantages of an organized religious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable to go to the very verge in order to avail of them, both for a man's self and for his efficiency in society, just as it is to unite with a general party in the state, and serve it in local primaries, for the ends of citizenship; such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment are not to be lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened at the font, naturally accepts the duties devolved upon him, and stands in his parents' place; and fortunate I count the youth who, without stress and trouble, undertakes in his turn his father's part. But some there are, born of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is finer than tempered steel, and of the conscience of the mothers which is more sensitive than the bare nerve,—the very flower of the Puritan tradition, and my heart goes out to them. And if there be a youth in our days who feels hesitancy in such an early surrender into the bosom of a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm consciences, strong heads, and free hearts; if primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and blood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural to the American heart; if the spirit is so living in him that he dispenses with the form, which to those of less strenuous strain is rather a support; if truth is so precious to him that he will not subscribe to more or less than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative and uncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejected doctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowly uprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this most private part of life as to make it here something between God and him only; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out his fellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them, or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common in American youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the responsibility before God and man which he incurs, to think himself worthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties,—if in any way, being of noble nature, he keeps by himself,—let him not think he thereby withdraws from the life of Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he may not still take some portion of its great good. So far as its authority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religious life itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual, historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary at most, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however much he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains a Christian."
There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soil had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the ponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there was in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there! Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind,—and no life but ours shut in among the group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of Childe Roland's Tower,—
"those two hills on the right
Couched,"—
and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me. That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end.
The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to which we drove,—a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone on that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and hardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of the abandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be, by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and she shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. I have often thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some image of other solitudes—and men and women in them—as expansive, as alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows dehumanized, and dies.
We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,—a splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the first farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. It was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moon was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth—not earth as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, the element, the globe.
This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since morning. "I can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to us." I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as much as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we fight your cause,"—not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the lowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I expected it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remember, began with that." "There is a sonnet of Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells another tale. But I did not learn it from him. And, besides, what else he has to say is not cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, "that is not cheerful."
But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful tones,—and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,—I told him, as we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of physics. "I convinced myself," I said, "that the soul is not a term in the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for immortality, whether immortality come or not. And I have sometimes thought," I continued, "that on the spiritual side an explanation of the inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one pagan civilization. Material success, fame, wealth, and power—birth even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate—are insignificant, if the soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thought clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid forms. This, however, is a wandering thought. The great reversal of the law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a code is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of the secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature was constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And if the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the least in the hope of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are willing that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization of a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the winds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and more populous life. Such has been the history of our civilization, and still is, and must be till the whole earth's surface be conquered for mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social. This is not nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is man's laurel upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physical sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature's will. This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.'"