A few nights later, beside a small fire we had built in the cool of evening, I tried to tell old Donald something about the Transfiguration, how Christ had gone up on the mount with Peter and John and James, and what had happened there.
“It wasn’t that Christ himself was actually changed as he prayed on the mountain-top,” I said to Donald. “The change was in Peter and John and James, who in these moments saw Christ with a new vision and a new understanding. The Transfiguration was simply a mental process of their own; they saw clearly now where before they had been half blind. And I am wondering if this old world of ours wouldn’t change for us in the same way if we saw it with understanding, and looked at it with clean eyes?”
So, on this other Sunday, as the evening draws on, I look back through the years between me and that day on the mountain-top, and the memory of Thor fills a warm corner of my heart. Through him I have the happy thought that I was given birth into a new world, and all things now hold a new significance for me. I have discovered for myself, in a small way, the wonderful secret of the instinctive processes of nature, and in a thousand ways I have found this instinct, coming directly from the fount of supreme direction, far more amazing than reasoning itself. I understand more clearly, I think, why all humanity loves a baby, no matter how ugly it may be. It is because it is so utterly dependent upon instinct alone, so completely helpless, so absolutely without reason or protection of its own. We like to believe that a baby is very close to God, simply because it has no reasoning and because it is as yet purely a creature of instinctive processes. And yet, as we lay down our lives for its protection, we forget that adult man, with all his reasoning and his power, was originally a creature of instinct himself. We forget that it took millions of years to give him a language, and that possession of language alone has made him a super-creature. For it is language that gives birth to reason, allows of communication of thought, and should man be suddenly bereft of all language and thought-communication he would, in the course of ages, revert again into a creature guided solely by instinct. In that event he would be nothing more or less than a brother to all other creatures of instinct. He would again become an ordinary member of the Ancient Brotherhood of Common Heritage, and could no longer call himself the Chosen One and the Ordained of God. But good luck came to him, perhaps even in the days when he may have swung from the trees by his tail—good luck in the discovery of a crude method of thought-communication, a discovery that developed through the ages, until now his head is turned, so to speak, and for tens of thousands of years he has looked down more and more upon his poor relations who have not had his own good fortune.
But I am learning that time has not freed him, and never will free him, from his blood relationship. And creed may follow creed, and religion may follow religion, but never will he find that full peace and contentment which might be his lot until he recognizes and admits into his comradeship again the soul of that nature which is his own mother, and forgets his monumental egoism in a new understanding of those instinctive processes of nature through which he, himself, passed in the kindergarten of his own existence.
This is my faith, my religion. Close to where I am sitting is an old stub, clothed in a mass of wood-vine, warm and vivid in the golden glow of the setting sun. The wood-vine has climbed, instinctively, to the top of the stub, and now, finding their support gone, half a dozen long tendrils are reaching out toward a tall young birch six or eight feet away. One tendril, stronger and older than the others, has reached and clasped the nearest branch. The others are following unerringly. Yet they have no eyes to see. No voice calls back to them to point out the way. It is the instinct of life itself that is guiding them, the same instinct, in a smaller way, that dragged man up bit by bit from out of the black chaos of the past. In a thousand other ways, if one will take the blindfold from his eyes and try to understand, he may see this mightiest of all the forces of the earth—instinct—a vibrant, breathing, struggling thing about him, a force so much more powerful than his own, so all-consuming and indestructible that it stands out as a giant mountain compared with the mole-hill of his own littleness. In my own faith, I see it as a vast and inexhaustible reservoir of life, of strength, of “upward climb,” of inspiration. I see it as the one great, all-necessary force of creation—a force more precious to man than all the mines of the earth, more precious than all the treasure of the mints, if he would forget his greatness and reach out his hands to it in the gladness of a new brotherhood.
Dusk is falling. And, as I stop my work, here in the heart of a forest, I seem to see the smiles of many who will read this, and I seem to hear the low and unbelieving laughter of those who think themselves of the flesh and blood of God. And I seem to hear their voices saying:
“He is wrong. Nature is beautiful—sometimes. Also, it is crude. It is rough. It is destructive. It is, half the time, a pest. While we—we—have we not performed wonders? Have we not proved ourselves the chosen of God? Have we not created nations? Have we not built up great cities? Have we not accumulated vast riches? Have we not invented the Dollar? Are we not, in a hundred ways, shackling nature as a man harnesses a horse, proving ourselves its masters, and it our slave?”
I hear—and then I hear another voice, and softly, distantly, it says:
“Yea! you are great—in your own eyes. You have made nations and cities and great tabernacles—and you have created the Dollar. But, when, for a moment, you cease the mad struggle you are making, you are afraid. Yes; you cry out loudly then in your fear. You fight to bring ghosts back, that they may tell you what happens when you lie down and die. You cry out for a religion which will give you absolute faith and comfort and cannot find it. You think you are great because you have built skyscrapers and ride close to the clouds and have made it possible to rush swiftly through a country choked with dust. But you forget quickly. You forget how little you were—yesterday. You do not tell yourself that you are a pest, perhaps the greatest of all. Yea; you are great, and in your greatness you are wise, but all that which you have achieved cannot give you that which you so vainly seek—the contentment of a deep and abiding faith.”