Past farms of happy husbands and wives and children! Past fences on which, a bareheaded boy, he had once liked to come out and sit and watch people pass; or to meet his uncle as he returned home. Past the little roadside church, its doors and windows so tightly shut now during the week, where years before he had sat one morning and had shot the arrow of a boy's satire at the Commandment for men only.
Two voices for him that day—the same two that are in every man, the only two in any man: the cry of the jungle—I will—and the voice of the mountain-top—
Thou Shalt Not.
V
EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE
Four months had elapsed since that August afternoon of summer heat and passion—not a lengthy period as reckoned on the mere unemotional calendar. But changes in our lives are not measurable by days: we may spend eventless years with no inner or outer sign of growth, and then some hour may bring a readjustment, an advancement, of our whole being. The oriental story of Saul of Tarsus, made a changed man by a voice or a vision of heavenly things, is human and natural, and for this reason if for no other has been credible to thousands of men—this reversal of direction on life's road.
As Dr. Birney now on the morning of this twenty-fourth of December sat in his library, trying to make out the bills of the year, and there lay disclosed before him the book of the years—the story of his life from boyhood up—he by and by abandoned the filling out of blanks against his professional neighbors and began to cast up as at the end of no previous year his own human debt to the better ideals of his fellow-beings—and to himself. And Nature, who was grievously in his debt but had no notion of paying, Nature stood at his shoulder and pressed him for settlement in that old formula of hers: you need not have opened this account with Nature, but since it has been opened, there is no closing it. It runs until you are declared bankrupt; and you are not bankrupt until you are dead. Then of course as a business firm I shall lose what I have not already collected from you; but there are enough others to keep the concern prosperous and going. Meantime—make a partial payment now: payment in suffering, payment in expiation, payment in self-repudiation. If you have any funds invested in a habit of inferiority, they are acceptable: I levy on them.
One particular fact this morning had riveted Dr. Birney's attention upon the slow inexorable grinding of these mills of life.