A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to shape itself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far away—had, in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up—and been transplanted in the college campus; how, ever since being placed there, the different sectarian churches of the town had, without exception, begun to pin on the branches of his mind the many-shaped garments of their dogmas, until by this time he appeared to himself as completely draped as the little locust after a heavy dormitory washing. There was this terrible difference, however: that the garments hung on the tree were anon removed; but these doctrines and dogmas were fastened to his mind to stay—as the very foliage of his thought—as the living leaves of Divine Truth. He was forbidden to strip off one of those sacred leaves. He was told to live and to breathe his religious life through them, and to grow only where they hung.
The lad declared finally to himself this morning, that realize his religious life through those dogmas he never could; that it was useless any longer to try. Little by little they would as certainly kill him in growth and spirit as the rags had killed the locust in sap and bud. Whatever they might be to others—and he judged no man—for him with his peculiar nature they could never be life-vestments; they would become his spiritual grave-clothes.
The parallel went a little way further: that scant faltering green! that unconquerable effort of the tree to assert despite all deadening experiences its old wildwood state! Could he do the like, could he go back to his? Yearning, sad, immeasurable filled him as he now recalled the simple faith of what had already seemed to him his childhood. Through the mist blinding his vision, through the doubts blinding his brain, still could he see it lying there clear in the near distance! "No," he cried, "into whatsoever future I may be driven to enter, closed against me is the peace of my past. Return thither my eyes ever will, my feet never!"
"But as I was true to myself then, let me be true now. If I cannot believe what I formerly believed, let me determine quickly what I CAN believe. The Truth, the Law—I must find these and quickly!"
From all of which, though thus obscurely set forth, it will be divined that the lad had now reached, indeed for some days had stood halting, at one of the great partings of the ways: when the whole of Life's road can be walked in by us no longer; when we must elect the half we shall henceforth follow, and having taken it, ever afterward perhaps look yearningly back upon the other as a lost trail of the mind.
The parting of the ways where he had thus faltered, summing up his bewilderment, and crying aloud for fresh directions, was one immemorially old in the history of man: the splitting of Life's single road into the by-paths of Doubt and Faith. Until within less than a year, his entire youth had been passed in the possession of what he esteemed true religion. Brought from the country into the town, where each of the many churches was proclaiming itself the sole incarnation of this and all others the embodiment of something false, he had, after months of distracted wandering among their contradictory clamors, passed as so many have passed before him into that state of mind which rejects them all and asks whether such a thing as true religion anywhere exists.
The parting of Life's road at Doubt and Faith! How many pilgrim feet throughout the ages, toiling devoutly thus far, have shrunk back before that unexpected and appalling sign! Disciples of the living Lord, saints, philosophers, scholars, priests, knights, statesmen—what a throng! What thoughts there born, prayers there ended, vows there broken, light there breaking, hearts there torn in twain! Mighty mountain rock! rising full in the road of journeying humanity. Around its base the tides of the generations dividing as part the long racing billows of the sea about some awful cliff.
The lad closed his note-book, and taking his chair to the window, folded his arms on the sill and looked out. Soon he noticed what had escaped him before. Beyond the tree, at the foot of the ash-heap, a single dandelion had opened. It burned like a steadfast yellow lamp, low in the edge of the young grass. These two simple things—the locust leaves, touched by the sun, shaken by the south wind; the dandelion shining in the grass—awoke in him the whole vision of the spring now rising anew out of the Earth, all over the land: great Nature! And the vision of this caused him to think of something else.
On the Sunday following his talk with the lad, the pastor had preached the most arousing sermon that the lad had heard: it had grown out of that interview: it was on modern infidelity—the new infidelity as contrasted with the old.
In this sermon he had arraigned certain books as largely responsible. He called them by their titles. He warned his people against them. Here recommenced the old story: the lad was at once seized with a desire to read those books, thus exhibiting again the identical trait that had already caused him so much trouble. But this trait was perhaps himself—his core; the demand of his nature to hear both sides, to judge evidence, test things by his own reason, get at the deepest root of a matter: to see Truth, and to see Truth whole.