Once a beautiful young matron said to me, “There is much in your creed that is inspiring and beautiful, but it reaches a point where it is inconceivable, for you must concede that a human being is the most perfect of all created things.”
I gave her an exquisite rose which I had plucked from my garden only a few minutes before.
“There are, outside of men and women and children, innumerable things more perfectly created than this flower,” I said. “Are you, in your youth and beauty, as perfect as that rose?”
And yet I know that such arguments as these, innumerable though they might be, cannot prevail until men and women bring themselves face to face with nature itself, filled with a willingness and a yearning to understand. They point out the pests of life—the serpent, the deadly insects, the plants that scar and poison; yet they cannot see themselves as perhaps the deadliest and the most relentless of all pests. For it is one of the mysterious laws of Creation that every living thing—flower, and tree, and beast, and man—has a pest born unto it; and unto these pests other pests are born, until at last,—when the thing is analyzed,—a pest is a pest only in so far as its enemy, and not its friends, judge it to be a pest. If the world to-day were eliminated of human pests as each individual in the world might judge for himself, how many of us would be left alive to-morrow?
And always, when I have listened to the age-old arguments prompted by man’s egoism and self-glorification, I love to return to the peace and the comfort of nature, whether that nature be in the form of a deep forest, a clover field, an orchard, or the little back plot of a crowded city home. And if I am where there is no cool earth to stand my feet upon, I find my peace and rest in the printed pages which describe that nature-world of mine. From the most beautifully written volumes to the honest pages and unembellished fact of farm-journals, I have, times without number, found enthralling interest, consolation, and the strength and courage of the cool and glorious earth itself. Nature’s Bible is not hard to find. It is everywhere, living, breathing, printed—the one universal and ever-present Book of Life.
Whenever I think of the commonest of human arguments: “But this other life you speak of has only instinct. It cannot talk; it cannot reason, and therefore it is impossible for it to have a soul,” my mind always travels back to a certain incident in my experience as a refutation. I could, had I the space, answer that argument with a hundred compelling facts; I might answer it from the point of the flower, the vine, the tree, the grass that carpets the earth, but I always think first of the particular tragedy I am going to describe, because of the chief human actor in it, and because this actor was, in my humble estimation, one of the most physically perfect of her species.
I will not give her name. She is the daughter of one of the best known men in the nation, and one of the foremost scientists of the world; and should she happen to read these lines, I hope that she will see, with a new vision and a new understanding, that “triumph” of years ago.
I think she was about twenty when my outfit happened to join trails with her father’s in the far north. She will remember that early afternoon when we camped together close to the Cochrane, in the Reindeer Lake country.