The Fourth Trail
THE ROAD TO FAITH
The Fourth Trail
THE ROAD TO FAITH
It has been some time since I sat down to work at my table under the tall spruce trees. I have had an experience during the past five or six days which is one of my rewards for letting nature live, and, for a space, it quite completely upset me, so far as work was concerned.
In other words, I have been having an experience with a species of vermin which I love. The baby vermin of this particular species are, to me, almost as lovable and quite as cute in their ways as human babies; and for the adult vermin, the mothers and fathers of the babies, I have a far greater love and respect than I have for many males and females of my own breed. And, taking it all round, they are a cleaner, handsomer, and more wholesome-looking lot than the average crowd of humans, though they are—because of the mightiness of man’s edict—nothing more than vermin.
I am speaking of bears. A few years ago, one of my most thrilling sports was to hunt them—blacks, grizzlies, and polars. Now I consider them, in a way, my brothers, and I am having a lot of fun in the comradeship. I am filled with resentment when I consider that in all the states of this country, with the exception of two or three, the law says these friends of mine are “vermin,” along with lice and fleas and maggots, and that they may be killed on sight, babies and all, because,—perhaps once in his lifetime,—a bear living very close to civilization may make a meal of pig or lamb. If every human mother in the land could hold a baby cub in her arms for five minutes, there would be such an uprising of feminine sympathy that the laws would be repealed.
In thinking again of our mothers, I would give a good year of my life if a million of them could have seen what I have seen during the past few days. For, after all, I believe that nearly all great movements toward better and bigger and more beautiful things must and will begin with women. No amount of “equality” will ever take that blessed superiority to men away from them. To-day, even religion, shameful to men as the fact may be, rests on a pillar of women’s white shoulders, and all the faith that the world possesses first finds its resting-place in their soft breasts. And I look ahead to the day, with unbounded faith of my own, when women will see, and understand, and begin the great fight toward comradeship with all that other life which is so utterly dependent about them now—life which throbs and urges in every living thing from the grass-blade and the oak to the “instinct” creatures of flesh and blood. Then shall we have a “religion of nature,” with a force and a might behind it which will glorify the earth, and man will come to realize that he is not God, but only an insignificantly small part of God’s handiwork. And when man comes to that point, where he casts off his arrogance and his ego, then will the time have come for the birth of a satisfying and universal faith in that great and all-embracing Power which we know and speak of in our own language as God.