The Pardoner's Wallet

by Samuel McChord Crothers

But when we once accept poor roads as the equivalent of the passage of time, putting people at the other end into another generation, there is no knowing what we may come to in our charitable interpretations. For there are other equally effective non-conductors of thought. By the simple device of not knowing how to read, a man cuts off some thousands of culture years and saves himself from no end of intellectual distractions. He becomes the contemporary of “earth’s vigorous, primitive sons.” If to his illiteracy he adds native talent and imagination, there is a chance for him to make for himself some of those fine old discoveries which we lose because we got the answer from some blabbing book before we had come to the point of asking the question. Of course the danger is that if he has native talent and imagination he will learn to read, and it must be confessed that for this reason we do not get such a high order of illiterates as formerly.

I once made the acquaintance of an ancient Philosopher. His talents were for cosmogony, and his equipment would have been deemed ample in the days when cosmogony was the fashion. He had meditated much on the genesis of things and had read nothing, so that his speculations were uncontaminated by the investigations of others. He was just the man to construct a perfectly simple and logical theory of the universe, and he did it. His universe was not like that of which our sciences give us imperfect glimpses, but it was very satisfactory to him. He was very fair in dealing with facts; he explained all that could be explained by his system. As the only criterion of a fact which he recognized was that it agreed with his system, there was none left over to trouble him. His manner of thought was so foreign to that of our time that his intellectual ability was not widely appreciated; yet had his birth not been so long delayed, he might have been the founder of a school and have had books written about him. For so far as I could learn, his views of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, were very much like those of the early Greek physicists. Had I taken him as a fellow American, I should have dismissed him as not up to date; but considering him in the light of an ancient sage, I found much in him to admire.

Once upon the coast of Maine I came upon a huge wooden cylinder. Within it was a smaller one, and in the centre, seated upon a swinging platform, was the owner of the curious contrivance. He was a mild-eyed, pleasant-spoken man, whom it was a pleasure to meet. He explained that this was “The Amphibious Vehicle,” and that it would move equally well on land or sea.

“You know,” said he, “what the prophet Ezekiel said about the ‘wheel in the middle of a wheel’?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well, this is it.”

There was something convincing in this matter-of-fact statement. The “wheel within a wheel” had been to me little more than a figure of speech, but here it was made out of good pine lumber, with a plank in the middle for the living creature to sit on. It was as if I had fallen through a trap door into another age. Here was a literal-minded contemporary of Ezekiel, who, having heard of the wheel within a wheel, had proceeded at once to make one. I ascended into the precarious seat, and we conversed upon the spiritual and temporal possibilities of the vehicle. I found that on the scriptural argument he was clearly ahead of me, being able to quote chapter and verse with precision, while my references were rather vague. In the field of mechanics he was also my superior. I could not have made the vehicle, having not yet emerged beyond the stone age. As we talked I forgot that we were at the mouth of the Penobscot. We were on the “river of Chebar,” and there was no knowing what might happen.

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The belated philosophers and inventors, who think the thoughts of the ancient worthies after them, live peaceful lives. What matters it that they are separated by a millennium or two from the society in which they were fitted to shine? They are self-sufficing, and there are few who care to contradict them. It is not so with one who is morally belated. There is something pathetic in the condition of one who cherishes the ambition of being a good man, but who has not informed himself of the present “state of the art.”

Now and then an ethical revolution takes place. New ideals are proclaimed, and in their light all things are judged. The public conscience becomes sensitive in regard to courses of conduct which heretofore had been unchallenged. Every such advance involves a waste in established reputations. There are always excellent men who are not aware of what has been going on. They keep on conforming scrupulously to the old standards, being good in the familiar ways that were commended in their youth. After a time they find themselves in an alien world, and in that world they are no longer counted among the best people. The tides of moral enthusiasm are all against them. The good man feels his solid ground of goodness slipping away from under him. Time has played false with his moral conventionalities. He is like a polar bear on a fast-diminishing iceberg, growling at the Gulf Stream.